Well repair of small electronics has been dying for 30 years, Apple isn't helping but the overall trend is much broader. But as long as Apple is making manuals and parts for themselves I have no problem with them being forced to offer it to the public. They can reject warranty cases they believe are due to botched repairs, make the phones less repairable if they want but not monopolize after-market services. If it was up to me monopolizing after-market accessories would be outlawed too, if you want to hook something up to lightning port the interface should be documented and free. Proprietary formats, protocols and interfaces are a pox on society.
I think this is mostly a Catch 22, it's not worth putting up a delivery box until most services work with it and it's not worth offering until most houses have one. Refrigerated/unrefrigerated, electronic lock, tiny surveillance camera on the outside triggered when door is open, local+smartphone notification, but the service would also have to know to use it, accept that as an alternative to signed delivery. The handover point would be the closed door, which should solve the problem of the door left open. The liability if there are other items in there might be an issue though. For apartment buildings some sort of shared facility would probably be more efficient, but then you'd need some kind of rent/reservation system, deal with say leaky packaging, rotting food nobody picked up etc. and so on. It could work but I fear the main problem is whether it'll work with your random Internet order. If you got a partnership with USPS, DHL, UPS etc. to use the box at all addresses that have one. Then I think the refrigerated version would come as an extension to that.
Just a month ago the encryption key for the Secure Enclave firmware on the iPhone 5S's was found. While it doesn't mean someone can remote access the data from it, it does mean someone could load their own firmware on to an iPhone 5S's Secure Enclave.
Hell no, lies and FUD. It just means someone has found the decryption key embedded in every copy of the Secure Enclave that Apple has used to obfuscate the code in transit. The updates are still signed, the signature check can't be disabled and the signing key only exists in Apple HQ, hackers can now begin to analyze the binary but there's no way for anyone else to alter it.
DRM is not open. You can't have an 'interoperable' DRM standard, because its entire purpose is to stop things from being interoperable.
Those things aren't mutually exclusive like applications can be both proprietary and cross-platform, it's a standard way to ask browsers for the non-standard DRM modules the platform offers and how to pass data to them. So for example on Windows 10 you have PlayReady 3.0 which is Microsoft's latest DRM. With EME you'll talk to it the same way using Edge, Chrome, Firefox or any other browser that talks EME. Just like you can talk proprietary protocols over standard TCP/IP or SSL. But if your platform like Linux doesn't offer any DRM modules, no content for you.
You might be pissed that the browsers agree to be the conduit for this, but the browser is also trying to stay relevant in an app world. How many people would subscribe to Netflix and refuse to install a Netflix app if that's what it takes? It's one thing if you don't want to use it at all... but if you want to use Facebook, but not the Facebook app because you don't trust apps only the browser then you're choosing an odd place to draw the line in the sand. To use Spotify I've installed Spotify. To use Steam I've installed Steam. I wouldn't install any random potential malware, but I'm not allergic to installing things.
Not really... regular people make $100k working, they spend $90k and put $10k into stocks. Rich people make $10M owning stock, spend $1M and put $9M into more stocks. You can play their game, but you can't win. Granted, there are always a few rags to riches stories but most of the lesser known rich people never "got" rich. They were born rich and unless they either go total playboy or speculate wildly their kids will be even richer. I was in the same class as the son of someone with a $200 million dollar net worth. I've been in a meeting with someone with a $900 million dollar net worth, he started with less but their family always had money.
Even if I lived on Ramen noodles in a shack and wore rags putting every dollar I've ever made and presumably ever will make into stocks it'd change exactly nothing. It's like pretending a guy in the poorest parts in Africa could put his savings into stocks and end up with my net worth. Maybe if you put like a life-long effort into it making $100k and pretending to make $30k your kids or grand-kids might become capitalists instead of workers. But if you start at zero, you'd better ride a Bill Gates or Zuckerberg-class rocket to the top or win the lottery. It doesn't happen by working at any regularly paid job.
Not that it's a bad idea, of course. Spend some money now, get a good return on it later but for most all their savings and more are blown away if they want to buy a house. You simply don't have the surplus for the money to become its own exponentially increasing horn of plenty where you just skim off the top. Our oil fund here in Norway estimates that long-term, without crazy speculation we'll on average get 3% real return on investment. So if you want to make $60k a year, you need a net worth of $60k/0.03 = $2M net worth but realistically you'd probably still upgrade your lifestyle. If you want $100k/year + $20k to go into 1% real growth you'd need $4M. That's when you become a capitalist.
It's been dead for some time. (...) 6.5 years and only 2x the oomph on the desktop in the midrange price bracket. I used to see that sort of improvement (and upgrade accordingly) every 2 years, but no longer.
It's getting very near the end, 10nm is already shipping but not on desktop chips, 7nm gets exotic with EUV but is probably doable but 5nm is a "maybe, if we get all the crazy quantum effects worked out". Even if they pull another rabbit out of the hat the silicon lattice constant is 0.543 nm which is a lot more fundamental problem than all the other issues they've found workarounds for. You're literally down to counting atoms, my guess is that by 2025 they've reached the end of the line. Not just a speed bump but like permanently. At least for anything remotely resembling the processors we have today.
Probably just buying the technology to produce newer Nexus phones and keep their partners on their toes. What Google doesn't really want is anyone else doing AOSP-based spins without Google services, their counter-threat is to go down the Apple road and make first party phones, go proprietary or otherwise make the open code less usable. Of course that would piss off many partners and others so Google doesn't want to do that, but having the threat is a good way to maintain status quo. Same way nVidia has "founders edition", Microsoft has the Surface line etc. even if they're not the mass volume they're an implicit threat that yeah, we could.
Not only is privacy itself dead, but the demand for privacy is as well. Manufacturers need to wake up to this reality.
Behind 80% of all smartphones is now made by the biggest data mining company of them all, and most on/. seem to think Apple's walled garden is the greater enemy. To use an old saying, with friends like these who needs enemies...
Even if we ignore all that and assume we got computers handling all the flying relative both to the environment and other flying cars and making sure it always in range it's a no-go because of:
1) Safety zones and noise 2) Catastrophic failure modes 3) Energy consumption
It should tell you exactly what data it collects, what kind of privacy you have, and how to switch it off. That information should be listed in a short, concise manner
All your base are belong to us. How much shorter can it get?
So if almost 60% approve, isn't that about as much consensus as you ever get on a standard?
From what I understand, no. As far as I can tell W3C standards are reviewed, tweaked through an informal process until the director on behalf of the committee either thinks there's a consensus and approves it or no consensus can be reached and it's rejected so usually there is no vote at all. In this case it seems the W3C wanted to move it forward despite no consensus being reached, the EFF appealed that decision and called for a vote that the EFF lost. So the decision stands, but this breach with the W3C's consensus process made the EFF withdraw.
Though looking at wikipedia it says "As of 2016, the Encrypted Media Extensions interface has been implemented in the Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge browsers." which must be like 98% of the browsers out there. So I guess whether or not W3C made it a standard or not wouldn't matter, if not even Firefox is a hold-out it has already happened and the W3C would just be sticking their heads in the sand.
The Right Thing!(tm) differs from person to person, and may even change for a single person as circumstances change.
Agree, most complex tools have lots of paths and it's entirely unclear where to begin but then again the application has no clue what you're trying to accomplish. I'm thinking of applications like Photoshop, Visual Studio, Excel, Notepad++, Resolve and a whole lot of others. Many, many layers of menus, toolbars, dialogs, tabs, window areas, settings, options and so on. I think that past a certain complexity there's no such thing as a particularly great one-fits-all design. So my pet wishes:
1. Let me easily move things around. Like if I want to re-dock the windows, resize them etc. I can do that. 2. Let me easily collapse/remove things I don't need. Or better yet, hide the less used options with an expander/under an advanced button. 3. Give me a usable way to search for functionality instead of digging through menus and reading tooltips 4. Offer some kind of preview/sample functionality where relevant. I'm not always sure exactly what to do. 5. Proper undo/redo history or at least be explicitly clear on what can't be undone. 6. Auto-complete/suggestions from past entry where possible/relevant, but please no assistants. 7. Control over what changes/defaults are saved, like do I want the file dialog to start in the most recently used directory or the one configured. 8. Try being consistent about how things work, avoid unexpected side effects, be clear in naming. 9. If it's in the nature to be scripted, I love GUIs that build a command line I can copy and save. 10. Don't make change for change's sake. At the very least offer a "classic" interface, don't force people.
Most blowhards who claim to have a crystal ball turn out wrong. While I don't doubt AI may pose a threat to humanity in the distant future, our current AI completely lacks everyday common sense. It's great at pattern matching now that we have fat hardware to throw at matching, but pattern matching alone can't cover for common sense. Hopping the common-sense hurdle could be centuries or millennia away. Stupid humans with war machines are a far more immediate threat.
Meh, we're far away from the Cuban missile crisis, even with NK making a lot of noise. The real threat is that most of the world is making zero progress on democracy and freedom. In 2006 the Democracy Index was at 5.52, in 2016 it's still at 5.52. The "Freedom in the World" index has been pretty much flat since 2000. Authoritarian regimes like China and Russia sit solid as rock, with dissidents and malcontent quickly suppressed and propaganda filling both regular media and social media. The Arab spring has pretty much failed except for Tunisia and Turkey is well on the way back to the dark ages under Erdogan. So far the free nations have mostly stayed free, but I fear the trend will reverse as civil liberties are handed over in the name of protection from terrorism, anti-crime, anti-corruption and so on.
All it takes is one populist or "strong leader" and the right circumstances like McCarthyism and they'll get their clammy hands on power and not let go. That pattern matching will gobble up your Facebook data, private and public and probably figure you out better than yourself. Look at that recent "gaydar" story where the computer can spot it better than humans. And you don't have to be taken by the secret police and thrown in a cell, all it takes is to tilt the board a little. Most people will scramble to appear to be loyal subjects, even if it's just for show. But that's kinda the point, if you think everyone is watched and everyone else is resigned and it is hopeless then it'll fail. Maintaining an authoritarian regime is about snuffing out the fires while they're tiny or even before they start, so the masses never join them. And Big Data is much worse than Orwell could imagine.
It's easy to do one good password. But when you have one for your email, your bank, your home machine, your work machine, facebook, linkedin, slashdot and so on you either:
a) Use the same good password with or without a trivial modifier (hint: if your password is 4s!fFNkC_gmail, it doesn't take a genius to figure out every other password) b) Use a password manager (which means you're always carrying all your keys, you're lost without it etc.) c) Got an absurdly good memory wasted remembering tons of gibberish. d) Divide it into tiers and use the same not-so-important password for all the not-so-important accounts.
My email password is unique, because it's the reset for so much else. My online bank password is unique, because it's actual money. The rest goes into buckets like "Wow, you can troll as me on forums... whatever." while LinkedIn go one tier higher like "Can drag my name through the shitter" and above that is "Can run off with my Steam, Spotify account etc." which is not directly cash but valuable none the less. There's just too many passwords to care about all of them.
It's the "shelfless" generation... we had bookshelfs, LP shelfs, CD shelfs, DVD shelfs and having it has a physical object mattered. Then it was digital pack rats with MP3s and DivX;-) movies. The current generation don't care as long as it plays right now on Spotify, Netflix and Steam. I'm not sure if they're right and we're wrong though, it's entertainment and it's not the size of your collection that matters. And they don't need us as a cultural archive, you might tell yourself that but almost anything of significance since the missing Doctor Who episodes is preserved. Remember that store that had rare, out of print stuff... yeah, that's not really how it works anymore unless it's an antique or artificially limited numbered edition.
I still think copyright is way too long, but I think I've become more nuanced on the "universe" and characters in it. Like if you make a movie it should go into the national archives and 20-30 years later that particular instance should be made free. But if George Lucas wants to make new Star Wars prequel/sequels then maybe he should have the exclusive right to that. What I don't like is when they try to use DRM to push some totalitarian agenda, but they haven't really tried lately. Haven't heard of any mass lawsuits, no saber rattling to outlaw torrents or private communication or three/six strike Internet death penalties without a trial lately. They're still taking down a few torrent sites but that's mostly for show, The Pirate Bay is still ranked at #87 on Alexa.
Oh and even UHD BluRays are getting hacked, Netflix 4K series/movies are also getting ripped. Pretty much everything is available if you got MadVR and don't want to play the DRM game. I doubt they really believe it themselves anymore, but admitting it's not going to work is admitting the emperor is naked. Not that the music industry collapsed after they started selling unencumbered MP3s, it's mostly a pet rock that keeps tigers away.
You can't just open the hatch, you've 14.7 lbs of pressure per square inch trying to keep that door closed, assuming it swings out. Now you've got to pressurize either the entire system (so largely shutting it down), or the particular leg you are on. How long does this take? Now how long does it take to undo these steps?
Airlocks? If you need to pressurize a section, close the nearest section before and after. How small you'd make the sections would depend on the cost, but I'm thinking your basic airtight steel door shouldn't cost that much. And once you've resolved the problem and the section is re-sealed you can let the air flow back in the tube and have vacuum pumps all along the line work together to restore operational pressure. Here's an estimate using 200 vacuum pumps for $15 million to depressurize 600km, initially it's 3-5 days. If we say one door every 6 km it should then take about an hour to re-pressurize one section. And if you work the other pumps up front so you have a stronger vacuum than needed then even less.
However, an alternative might be to have an actual airlock to let it run in degraded mode until you got a maintenance window, basically two doors the size of a pod apart. The pod comes to a halt, one door closes and the other goes up. It would incur roughly the same penalty as a station stop plus a little more to traverse the defective segment, but you're not dead in the water. To be honest as long as I'm getting an end-to-end ride I'd probably be happy, the worst if you say planned to take the train but end up doing part train, part bus, part train to get past a broken segment.
A blockchain doesn't know what digital signatures go with what legal person or who was in control of the signing keys or if they've been duped into signing false information. All that security comes from digital certificates. The only thing a blockchain prevents is rewriting history, like a running checksum that depends on all the previous entries. So the government can't go back and say "no, we never said Bill was now Bob", but if anyone else kept a digitally signed copy of that it'd be proof enough. It's just not proof it's a complete chain, maybe Bob is now Bertrand.
That's not typing by brain. That's typing by muscles. It won't work for paralyzed people like Stephen Hawking.
Why not? I would think that even if my hand was paralyzed or amputated I could imagine typing and the brain would send the signals, it just wouldn't arrive at the muscles. I suppose if you've been that way since birth it might be different, but I'm not so certain. I mean even if it's not working you'd think the brain is still wired to try. Don't some advanced prosthetics work like that, they're not just mechanical but they actually read the nerve impulses to recognize what you're trying to do. If you could pair this up with a VR/AR headset maybe you could learn to use virtual hands.
The downside is of course that there's no physical truth to compare to, but if I could see the computer's interpretation of it we could work on that, like this is me counting on my fingers one-two-three-four-five, this is me bending my index finger forward, this is me curling my index finger, this is me bending it sideways, this me doing V for victory, a fist, giving you the finger, the horns, the Spock greeting, the okay sign etc. and then I could virtually type on a virtual keyboard. It could go a helluva lot faster than eye tracking.
Maybe (personal opinion) the best business model for open source software is "service support" for whatever software he develops. But it depends a lot of what kind of software you are developing. If it is a Game it will be hard to try to get funds for support, but if it a software that can be used on the enterprise it may be interesting to offer professional serious support for the one paying a subscription. If your software if targeted to the enterprise it can be interesting to review Redhat's business model.
No, don't go comparing yourself to a billion dollar company. How much they're willing to pay is directly related to how critical the system is. They can charge the prices they do because if shit really hits the fan and your business is crippled they can throw a 24x7 team of engineers at it. I've been through one such incident in my career (not related to Red Hat) when the end of month financial processing would fail and we had support teams in California, India and France working around the clock to find the cause and give us an emergency hotfix. That's enterprise-grade support.
What they're paying a single developer or small company for is the continued development of a tool, like bugs getting fixed, enhancements made, documentation improved, questions answered and so on. The problem when you make it open source is that very often it'll be okay as-is. And it's not that important or that urgent to get it fixed / improved / tweaked, or they have someone in-house who can do it in a pinch. Basically it's pretty hard to get people to pay for support up front, rather than handling it if the need arises. A lot of people are happy running CentOS...
Now that you know it's addictive, you can simply not use what they are offering. Of course if you are already hooked then you should leave them behind. If that means quitting social media completely, you quit that shit. If that means not using Android or iOS then get a smartphone that lets you choose a libre mobile OS or *gasp* don't use a smartphone.
Or don't have friends, then you won't have this problem at all. Seriously though, maybe/.'ers are so socially inept they haven't registered but social media has fundamentally altered the expected social interaction. People don't send mails, texts, write on their blog or call/meet to say it in person, they make a Facebook post and expect the people who are interested enough to care to read it. I refuse to use Facebook, though I got badgered into having an account to answer invitations and I've noticed I'm almost totally oblivious to what's happening in my social circle.
And I mean even important life events I'd like to know, but nobody told me not out of malice but simply because they don't think about it. Occasionally I might get a "oh right you don't read Facebook, I mean even my 100 year old great-grandmother reads Facebook, but hey... a bunch of us are going to do [something], you interested?" or "oh, I forget you're out of touch with civilization we're expecting a new baby next month". And it's not better the other way around, people don't really ask anymore and pushing it on anything other than close friends is also unfashionable. Basically, they'd like me to post it on Facebook.
It's not a battle I'm going to win. In fact, I'm pretty sure that for the most part I'm the one getting screwed by it and Zuckerberg certainly isn't missing my $0.02 worth of ad revenue. It's tempting to just say fuck it, I give up... you want us to socialize via Facebook, let's socialize via Facebook. That they have a profile on you that would give STASI orgasms is the price of a social life in 2017. I'm still a hold-out, but it's a very lonely hold-out. The latest stats here in Norway is that 67% of the population is using social media daily. Maybe I should just jump off the bridge with them and hope the pile is big enough to catch my fall...
Yeah, the threat to Microsoft is not that Linux is taking over the desktop, it's that the desktop is in considerable decline from 365 million to 270 million units/year. And it's in absolute decline in a booming market where at the same time you've gone from selling 472 million to 1.5 billion smartphones a year. The same trend is confirmed by browsing statistics. It's not dying, but it's not the future. And I don't understand how you can say their server platform is not threatened and at the same time say 1/3rd of the Azure instances run Linux, yes if you got Windows desktops you'll probably have a AD/Exchange/Sharepoint server but my guess is they're an ever smaller corner of a virtualized server, just like any PC can manage to run MS Office.
It's clear that Microsoft's big plan for the future is to get businesses hooked on Azure services and consumers to give a 30% cut at the store, the product is just a means to an end like how Google delivers you Android so you'll talk to all the Google services and buy from the Play store. Everything else is a hook to get you to use it, if you have to make the tools free and open source that's what they'll do. As in, I think Microsoft is going to a place where releasing a "Windows Open Source Project" wouldn't hurt them more than Google's "Android Open Source Project", because that's not really the moneymaker. If Microsoft can make money selling ice skates, don't be surprised if hell freezes over...
Indeed, almost every over-consumption of calories can be offset by enough exercise. Athletes in Tour de France, Michael Phelps etc. can consume 12k calories a day where a normal adult male's consumption is 2.5k. Here is a guy eating a full pizza a day for a year and still being very fit. However for these people it's a job or a life style, like Micheal Phelps spent like six hours a day, six days a week exercising in the pool and not at the leisurely rate you and I might swim. For most of us you can "waste" a lot of exercise real quick by eating too much or eating unhealthy. I'm not a total blob but not super fit and I can consume 6-700 kcal/hour exercising, even a pretty modest 500 kcal/day over-consumption is 5-6 hours of exercise per week. It's too much for people with a normal life and an office job, yes if I was an actor or model and my "day job" was to look buff or pretty then maybe but the rest of us got to eat healthy.
Therein lies the rub. Cord-cutting is not really as a substantial savings as many claim it is. All the discounts for bundles are out the door and there is currently no service that provides broadcast content at a lower price compared to cable companies.
Well, what do you expect when it's cable companies offering it... here in Norway it's a mix of former cable, telco and power companies doing fiber roll-out, no surprise who is most willing to give you just Internet. After all TV is just an IPTV server with no external bandwidth costs, the cost is licensing the content as the delivery is probably only a few bucks on top of the fiber optic cable they're maintaining anyway.
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Well repair of small electronics has been dying for 30 years, Apple isn't helping but the overall trend is much broader. But as long as Apple is making manuals and parts for themselves I have no problem with them being forced to offer it to the public. They can reject warranty cases they believe are due to botched repairs, make the phones less repairable if they want but not monopolize after-market services. If it was up to me monopolizing after-market accessories would be outlawed too, if you want to hook something up to lightning port the interface should be documented and free. Proprietary formats, protocols and interfaces are a pox on society.
I think this is mostly a Catch 22, it's not worth putting up a delivery box until most services work with it and it's not worth offering until most houses have one. Refrigerated/unrefrigerated, electronic lock, tiny surveillance camera on the outside triggered when door is open, local+smartphone notification, but the service would also have to know to use it, accept that as an alternative to signed delivery. The handover point would be the closed door, which should solve the problem of the door left open. The liability if there are other items in there might be an issue though. For apartment buildings some sort of shared facility would probably be more efficient, but then you'd need some kind of rent/reservation system, deal with say leaky packaging, rotting food nobody picked up etc. and so on. It could work but I fear the main problem is whether it'll work with your random Internet order. If you got a partnership with USPS, DHL, UPS etc. to use the box at all addresses that have one. Then I think the refrigerated version would come as an extension to that.
Just a month ago the encryption key for the Secure Enclave firmware on the iPhone 5S's was found. While it doesn't mean someone can remote access the data from it, it does mean someone could load their own firmware on to an iPhone 5S's Secure Enclave.
Hell no, lies and FUD. It just means someone has found the decryption key embedded in every copy of the Secure Enclave that Apple has used to obfuscate the code in transit. The updates are still signed, the signature check can't be disabled and the signing key only exists in Apple HQ, hackers can now begin to analyze the binary but there's no way for anyone else to alter it.
DRM is not open. You can't have an 'interoperable' DRM standard, because its entire purpose is to stop things from being interoperable.
Those things aren't mutually exclusive like applications can be both proprietary and cross-platform, it's a standard way to ask browsers for the non-standard DRM modules the platform offers and how to pass data to them. So for example on Windows 10 you have PlayReady 3.0 which is Microsoft's latest DRM. With EME you'll talk to it the same way using Edge, Chrome, Firefox or any other browser that talks EME. Just like you can talk proprietary protocols over standard TCP/IP or SSL. But if your platform like Linux doesn't offer any DRM modules, no content for you.
You might be pissed that the browsers agree to be the conduit for this, but the browser is also trying to stay relevant in an app world. How many people would subscribe to Netflix and refuse to install a Netflix app if that's what it takes? It's one thing if you don't want to use it at all... but if you want to use Facebook, but not the Facebook app because you don't trust apps only the browser then you're choosing an odd place to draw the line in the sand. To use Spotify I've installed Spotify. To use Steam I've installed Steam. I wouldn't install any random potential malware, but I'm not allergic to installing things.
Your choice.
Not really... regular people make $100k working, they spend $90k and put $10k into stocks. Rich people make $10M owning stock, spend $1M and put $9M into more stocks. You can play their game, but you can't win. Granted, there are always a few rags to riches stories but most of the lesser known rich people never "got" rich. They were born rich and unless they either go total playboy or speculate wildly their kids will be even richer. I was in the same class as the son of someone with a $200 million dollar net worth. I've been in a meeting with someone with a $900 million dollar net worth, he started with less but their family always had money.
Even if I lived on Ramen noodles in a shack and wore rags putting every dollar I've ever made and presumably ever will make into stocks it'd change exactly nothing. It's like pretending a guy in the poorest parts in Africa could put his savings into stocks and end up with my net worth. Maybe if you put like a life-long effort into it making $100k and pretending to make $30k your kids or grand-kids might become capitalists instead of workers. But if you start at zero, you'd better ride a Bill Gates or Zuckerberg-class rocket to the top or win the lottery. It doesn't happen by working at any regularly paid job.
Not that it's a bad idea, of course. Spend some money now, get a good return on it later but for most all their savings and more are blown away if they want to buy a house. You simply don't have the surplus for the money to become its own exponentially increasing horn of plenty where you just skim off the top. Our oil fund here in Norway estimates that long-term, without crazy speculation we'll on average get 3% real return on investment. So if you want to make $60k a year, you need a net worth of $60k/0.03 = $2M net worth but realistically you'd probably still upgrade your lifestyle. If you want $100k/year + $20k to go into 1% real growth you'd need $4M. That's when you become a capitalist.
It's been dead for some time. (...) 6.5 years and only 2x the oomph on the desktop in the midrange price bracket. I used to see that sort of improvement (and upgrade accordingly) every 2 years, but no longer.
It's getting very near the end, 10nm is already shipping but not on desktop chips, 7nm gets exotic with EUV but is probably doable but 5nm is a "maybe, if we get all the crazy quantum effects worked out". Even if they pull another rabbit out of the hat the silicon lattice constant is 0.543 nm which is a lot more fundamental problem than all the other issues they've found workarounds for. You're literally down to counting atoms, my guess is that by 2025 they've reached the end of the line. Not just a speed bump but like permanently. At least for anything remotely resembling the processors we have today.
Probably just buying the technology to produce newer Nexus phones and keep their partners on their toes. What Google doesn't really want is anyone else doing AOSP-based spins without Google services, their counter-threat is to go down the Apple road and make first party phones, go proprietary or otherwise make the open code less usable. Of course that would piss off many partners and others so Google doesn't want to do that, but having the threat is a good way to maintain status quo. Same way nVidia has "founders edition", Microsoft has the Surface line etc. even if they're not the mass volume they're an implicit threat that yeah, we could.
Not only is privacy itself dead, but the demand for privacy is as well. Manufacturers need to wake up to this reality.
Behind 80% of all smartphones is now made by the biggest data mining company of them all, and most on /. seem to think Apple's walled garden is the greater enemy. To use an old saying, with friends like these who needs enemies...
Energy consumption per person isn't totally awful if you pack a lot of people in one vehicle and fly at 35000 feet.
So like a bus, in the air? We could call that... *drumroll* Airbus.
Even if we ignore all that and assume we got computers handling all the flying relative both to the environment and other flying cars and making sure it always in range it's a no-go because of:
1) Safety zones and noise
2) Catastrophic failure modes
3) Energy consumption
It should tell you exactly what data it collects, what kind of privacy you have, and how to switch it off. That information should be listed in a short, concise manner
All your base are belong to us. How much shorter can it get?
So if almost 60% approve, isn't that about as much consensus as you ever get on a standard?
From what I understand, no. As far as I can tell W3C standards are reviewed, tweaked through an informal process until the director on behalf of the committee either thinks there's a consensus and approves it or no consensus can be reached and it's rejected so usually there is no vote at all. In this case it seems the W3C wanted to move it forward despite no consensus being reached, the EFF appealed that decision and called for a vote that the EFF lost. So the decision stands, but this breach with the W3C's consensus process made the EFF withdraw.
Though looking at wikipedia it says "As of 2016, the Encrypted Media Extensions interface has been implemented in the Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge browsers." which must be like 98% of the browsers out there. So I guess whether or not W3C made it a standard or not wouldn't matter, if not even Firefox is a hold-out it has already happened and the W3C would just be sticking their heads in the sand.
The Right Thing!(tm) differs from person to person, and may even change for a single person as circumstances change.
Agree, most complex tools have lots of paths and it's entirely unclear where to begin but then again the application has no clue what you're trying to accomplish. I'm thinking of applications like Photoshop, Visual Studio, Excel, Notepad++, Resolve and a whole lot of others. Many, many layers of menus, toolbars, dialogs, tabs, window areas, settings, options and so on. I think that past a certain complexity there's no such thing as a particularly great one-fits-all design. So my pet wishes:
1. Let me easily move things around. Like if I want to re-dock the windows, resize them etc. I can do that.
2. Let me easily collapse/remove things I don't need. Or better yet, hide the less used options with an expander/under an advanced button.
3. Give me a usable way to search for functionality instead of digging through menus and reading tooltips
4. Offer some kind of preview/sample functionality where relevant. I'm not always sure exactly what to do.
5. Proper undo/redo history or at least be explicitly clear on what can't be undone.
6. Auto-complete/suggestions from past entry where possible/relevant, but please no assistants.
7. Control over what changes/defaults are saved, like do I want the file dialog to start in the most recently used directory or the one configured.
8. Try being consistent about how things work, avoid unexpected side effects, be clear in naming.
9. If it's in the nature to be scripted, I love GUIs that build a command line I can copy and save.
10. Don't make change for change's sake. At the very least offer a "classic" interface, don't force people.
That would be a good start.
Most blowhards who claim to have a crystal ball turn out wrong. While I don't doubt AI may pose a threat to humanity in the distant future, our current AI completely lacks everyday common sense. It's great at pattern matching now that we have fat hardware to throw at matching, but pattern matching alone can't cover for common sense. Hopping the common-sense hurdle could be centuries or millennia away. Stupid humans with war machines are a far more immediate threat.
Meh, we're far away from the Cuban missile crisis, even with NK making a lot of noise. The real threat is that most of the world is making zero progress on democracy and freedom. In 2006 the Democracy Index was at 5.52, in 2016 it's still at 5.52. The "Freedom in the World" index has been pretty much flat since 2000. Authoritarian regimes like China and Russia sit solid as rock, with dissidents and malcontent quickly suppressed and propaganda filling both regular media and social media. The Arab spring has pretty much failed except for Tunisia and Turkey is well on the way back to the dark ages under Erdogan. So far the free nations have mostly stayed free, but I fear the trend will reverse as civil liberties are handed over in the name of protection from terrorism, anti-crime, anti-corruption and so on.
All it takes is one populist or "strong leader" and the right circumstances like McCarthyism and they'll get their clammy hands on power and not let go. That pattern matching will gobble up your Facebook data, private and public and probably figure you out better than yourself. Look at that recent "gaydar" story where the computer can spot it better than humans. And you don't have to be taken by the secret police and thrown in a cell, all it takes is to tilt the board a little. Most people will scramble to appear to be loyal subjects, even if it's just for show. But that's kinda the point, if you think everyone is watched and everyone else is resigned and it is hopeless then it'll fail. Maintaining an authoritarian regime is about snuffing out the fires while they're tiny or even before they start, so the masses never join them. And Big Data is much worse than Orwell could imagine.
It's easy to do one good password. But when you have one for your email, your bank, your home machine, your work machine, facebook, linkedin, slashdot and so on you either:
a) Use the same good password with or without a trivial modifier (hint: if your password is 4s!fFNkC_gmail, it doesn't take a genius to figure out every other password)
b) Use a password manager (which means you're always carrying all your keys, you're lost without it etc.)
c) Got an absurdly good memory wasted remembering tons of gibberish.
d) Divide it into tiers and use the same not-so-important password for all the not-so-important accounts.
My email password is unique, because it's the reset for so much else. My online bank password is unique, because it's actual money. The rest goes into buckets like "Wow, you can troll as me on forums... whatever." while LinkedIn go one tier higher like "Can drag my name through the shitter" and above that is "Can run off with my Steam, Spotify account etc." which is not directly cash but valuable none the less. There's just too many passwords to care about all of them.
It's the "shelfless" generation... we had bookshelfs, LP shelfs, CD shelfs, DVD shelfs and having it has a physical object mattered. Then it was digital pack rats with MP3s and DivX ;-) movies. The current generation don't care as long as it plays right now on Spotify, Netflix and Steam. I'm not sure if they're right and we're wrong though, it's entertainment and it's not the size of your collection that matters. And they don't need us as a cultural archive, you might tell yourself that but almost anything of significance since the missing Doctor Who episodes is preserved. Remember that store that had rare, out of print stuff... yeah, that's not really how it works anymore unless it's an antique or artificially limited numbered edition.
I still think copyright is way too long, but I think I've become more nuanced on the "universe" and characters in it. Like if you make a movie it should go into the national archives and 20-30 years later that particular instance should be made free. But if George Lucas wants to make new Star Wars prequel/sequels then maybe he should have the exclusive right to that. What I don't like is when they try to use DRM to push some totalitarian agenda, but they haven't really tried lately. Haven't heard of any mass lawsuits, no saber rattling to outlaw torrents or private communication or three/six strike Internet death penalties without a trial lately. They're still taking down a few torrent sites but that's mostly for show, The Pirate Bay is still ranked at #87 on Alexa.
Oh and even UHD BluRays are getting hacked, Netflix 4K series/movies are also getting ripped. Pretty much everything is available if you got MadVR and don't want to play the DRM game. I doubt they really believe it themselves anymore, but admitting it's not going to work is admitting the emperor is naked. Not that the music industry collapsed after they started selling unencumbered MP3s, it's mostly a pet rock that keeps tigers away.
You can't just open the hatch, you've 14.7 lbs of pressure per square inch trying to keep that door closed, assuming it swings out. Now you've got to pressurize either the entire system (so largely shutting it down), or the particular leg you are on. How long does this take? Now how long does it take to undo these steps?
Airlocks? If you need to pressurize a section, close the nearest section before and after. How small you'd make the sections would depend on the cost, but I'm thinking your basic airtight steel door shouldn't cost that much. And once you've resolved the problem and the section is re-sealed you can let the air flow back in the tube and have vacuum pumps all along the line work together to restore operational pressure. Here's an estimate using 200 vacuum pumps for $15 million to depressurize 600km, initially it's 3-5 days. If we say one door every 6 km it should then take about an hour to re-pressurize one section. And if you work the other pumps up front so you have a stronger vacuum than needed then even less.
However, an alternative might be to have an actual airlock to let it run in degraded mode until you got a maintenance window, basically two doors the size of a pod apart. The pod comes to a halt, one door closes and the other goes up. It would incur roughly the same penalty as a station stop plus a little more to traverse the defective segment, but you're not dead in the water. To be honest as long as I'm getting an end-to-end ride I'd probably be happy, the worst if you say planned to take the train but end up doing part train, part bus, part train to get past a broken segment.
A blockchain doesn't know what digital signatures go with what legal person or who was in control of the signing keys or if they've been duped into signing false information. All that security comes from digital certificates. The only thing a blockchain prevents is rewriting history, like a running checksum that depends on all the previous entries. So the government can't go back and say "no, we never said Bill was now Bob", but if anyone else kept a digitally signed copy of that it'd be proof enough. It's just not proof it's a complete chain, maybe Bob is now Bertrand.
That's not typing by brain. That's typing by muscles. It won't work for paralyzed people like Stephen Hawking.
Why not? I would think that even if my hand was paralyzed or amputated I could imagine typing and the brain would send the signals, it just wouldn't arrive at the muscles. I suppose if you've been that way since birth it might be different, but I'm not so certain. I mean even if it's not working you'd think the brain is still wired to try. Don't some advanced prosthetics work like that, they're not just mechanical but they actually read the nerve impulses to recognize what you're trying to do. If you could pair this up with a VR/AR headset maybe you could learn to use virtual hands.
The downside is of course that there's no physical truth to compare to, but if I could see the computer's interpretation of it we could work on that, like this is me counting on my fingers one-two-three-four-five, this is me bending my index finger forward, this is me curling my index finger, this is me bending it sideways, this me doing V for victory, a fist, giving you the finger, the horns, the Spock greeting, the okay sign etc. and then I could virtually type on a virtual keyboard. It could go a helluva lot faster than eye tracking.
Maybe (personal opinion) the best business model for open source software is "service support" for whatever software he develops. But it depends a lot of what kind of software you are developing. If it is a Game it will be hard to try to get funds for support, but if it a software that can be used on the enterprise it may be interesting to offer professional serious support for the one paying a subscription. If your software if targeted to the enterprise it can be interesting to review Redhat's business model.
No, don't go comparing yourself to a billion dollar company. How much they're willing to pay is directly related to how critical the system is. They can charge the prices they do because if shit really hits the fan and your business is crippled they can throw a 24x7 team of engineers at it. I've been through one such incident in my career (not related to Red Hat) when the end of month financial processing would fail and we had support teams in California, India and France working around the clock to find the cause and give us an emergency hotfix. That's enterprise-grade support.
What they're paying a single developer or small company for is the continued development of a tool, like bugs getting fixed, enhancements made, documentation improved, questions answered and so on. The problem when you make it open source is that very often it'll be okay as-is. And it's not that important or that urgent to get it fixed / improved / tweaked, or they have someone in-house who can do it in a pinch. Basically it's pretty hard to get people to pay for support up front, rather than handling it if the need arises. A lot of people are happy running CentOS...
Now that you know it's addictive, you can simply not use what they are offering. Of course if you are already hooked then you should leave them behind. If that means quitting social media completely, you quit that shit. If that means not using Android or iOS then get a smartphone that lets you choose a libre mobile OS or *gasp* don't use a smartphone.
Or don't have friends, then you won't have this problem at all. Seriously though, maybe /.'ers are so socially inept they haven't registered but social media has fundamentally altered the expected social interaction. People don't send mails, texts, write on their blog or call/meet to say it in person, they make a Facebook post and expect the people who are interested enough to care to read it. I refuse to use Facebook, though I got badgered into having an account to answer invitations and I've noticed I'm almost totally oblivious to what's happening in my social circle.
And I mean even important life events I'd like to know, but nobody told me not out of malice but simply because they don't think about it. Occasionally I might get a "oh right you don't read Facebook, I mean even my 100 year old great-grandmother reads Facebook, but hey... a bunch of us are going to do [something], you interested?" or "oh, I forget you're out of touch with civilization we're expecting a new baby next month". And it's not better the other way around, people don't really ask anymore and pushing it on anything other than close friends is also unfashionable. Basically, they'd like me to post it on Facebook.
It's not a battle I'm going to win. In fact, I'm pretty sure that for the most part I'm the one getting screwed by it and Zuckerberg certainly isn't missing my $0.02 worth of ad revenue. It's tempting to just say fuck it, I give up... you want us to socialize via Facebook, let's socialize via Facebook. That they have a profile on you that would give STASI orgasms is the price of a social life in 2017. I'm still a hold-out, but it's a very lonely hold-out. The latest stats here in Norway is that 67% of the population is using social media daily. Maybe I should just jump off the bridge with them and hope the pile is big enough to catch my fall...
Yeah, the threat to Microsoft is not that Linux is taking over the desktop, it's that the desktop is in considerable decline from 365 million to 270 million units/year. And it's in absolute decline in a booming market where at the same time you've gone from selling 472 million to 1.5 billion smartphones a year. The same trend is confirmed by browsing statistics. It's not dying, but it's not the future. And I don't understand how you can say their server platform is not threatened and at the same time say 1/3rd of the Azure instances run Linux, yes if you got Windows desktops you'll probably have a AD/Exchange/Sharepoint server but my guess is they're an ever smaller corner of a virtualized server, just like any PC can manage to run MS Office.
It's clear that Microsoft's big plan for the future is to get businesses hooked on Azure services and consumers to give a 30% cut at the store, the product is just a means to an end like how Google delivers you Android so you'll talk to all the Google services and buy from the Play store. Everything else is a hook to get you to use it, if you have to make the tools free and open source that's what they'll do. As in, I think Microsoft is going to a place where releasing a "Windows Open Source Project" wouldn't hurt them more than Google's "Android Open Source Project", because that's not really the moneymaker. If Microsoft can make money selling ice skates, don't be surprised if hell freezes over...
Indeed, almost every over-consumption of calories can be offset by enough exercise. Athletes in Tour de France, Michael Phelps etc. can consume 12k calories a day where a normal adult male's consumption is 2.5k. Here is a guy eating a full pizza a day for a year and still being very fit. However for these people it's a job or a life style, like Micheal Phelps spent like six hours a day, six days a week exercising in the pool and not at the leisurely rate you and I might swim. For most of us you can "waste" a lot of exercise real quick by eating too much or eating unhealthy. I'm not a total blob but not super fit and I can consume 6-700 kcal/hour exercising, even a pretty modest 500 kcal/day over-consumption is 5-6 hours of exercise per week. It's too much for people with a normal life and an office job, yes if I was an actor or model and my "day job" was to look buff or pretty then maybe but the rest of us got to eat healthy.
Like they, or any website, are going to say, "Hey, this is enough money per month. Let's just stop here". Yeah, right.
Are you trying to be dense? As opposed to not making enough money and shutting down, this is a perfectly cromulent use of English.
Therein lies the rub. Cord-cutting is not really as a substantial savings as many claim it is. All the discounts for bundles are out the door and there is currently no service that provides broadcast content at a lower price compared to cable companies.
Well, what do you expect when it's cable companies offering it... here in Norway it's a mix of former cable, telco and power companies doing fiber roll-out, no surprise who is most willing to give you just Internet. After all TV is just an IPTV server with no external bandwidth costs, the cost is licensing the content as the delivery is probably only a few bucks on top of the fiber optic cable they're maintaining anyway.