I think the same problems occur with the concept of Apple building its own self-driving car, except that car manufacturing is far more complex, capital-intensive, and labor-intensive than building TV sets, while still being just as cutthroat (note that US car mfgrs are dealing with slowing sales and mounting inventory). So, Apple's move is, generally speaking, a sane one.
So? Self-driving cars would be a totally disruptive shift in what people care about in a car. Kinda like the iPhone made people care about entirely other things than what they wanted from a phone before. You're not driving. You're don't care about any of the performance or functionality or experience related to driving, even though those in the passenger seat and back seat got heard I'd say the vast majority of purchases are currently decided by the person in the driver's seat. If Apple could give you a car you'd rather be a passenger in than the "traditional" car companies, that would be a winner.
Of course, the technology for a self-driving car has to exist first. I don't see Apple developing that, but I could see them licensing it and building an iCar that's all about the "travel experience". At least that's what I feel they did with the iPod, iPhone and iPad.... the products more or less already existed but Steve Jobs made people want to use them. I suspect that a generic consumer car that actually works on most roads in most conditions is quite far off though, the first ones will probably be taxis operating in a well mapped and marked downtown area or long-haul goods traffic on fixed routes. It seems getting all the edge cases worked out is pretty hard...
If a 5.5% fee can't get a transaction complete in 2 days, how much does it cost?
It's not related to the amount, but to getting your transaction included in a transaction block. Since they all take up the same space those who verify take the transactions with the biggest fee regardless of size. The idea was simply that you'd pay for faster processing though, not that it'd become a blocker to getting processed. But since Bitcoin has gone up more in value and is used for more transactions than designed, if you don't pay a big fee your turn never comes at all. I hear it's around $3 now, but it should be $3 on $1000 too but the fee is a killer for small purchases.
Problem is this will never make it into the Mainstream kernel. The Linux Kernel devs have opposed a stable driver ABI for decades now. The chipset manufacturers have happily setteled in and provide only binary blobs with ABI adaptions for a certain timeframe, and everybody is happy except for the screwed customers.
Considering there is more than two billion active Android devices I doubt Google cares much, when you take away all the desktop device drivers, architectures and other bits of Linux that aren't that relevant for Android how many core changes are there? And if they dedicate one cent per device to maintaining a fork, that's $20 million.
So... do you have any non-evil suggestions or is that a "the only way to win is not to play" game? Because the only phones I can find for sale new here in Norway now is running:
1) Android 2) iOS 3) Windows Phone (dying...) 4) Blackberry (almost dead...) 5) Nokia OS/Symbian (feature phones)
Unless Apple or Microsoft is now the good guys, there doesn't seem to be any options left. Unless it's some odd foreign import, Kickstarter project or whatever...
I would bet people who (willingly) change jobs every so often are lot happier,
Not so sure about this, because even if you're changing jobs you're probably doing roughly the same things for a different company. Simply because if you have 10+ years experience you're not very likely to start over in a junior position doing something completely different. As long as it's not becoming a lock-in where that employer and that job is the only one you'll get I don't see a problem staying if you have no major complaints. Though I know one COBOL programmer who now issues parking tickets, having only obsolete skills is not the best way to finish your career.
You don't think that it's common to make a Facebook post to let everyone who cares about you know that you're alright if you've been in the vicinity of some sort of disaster? You might call your partner & close relatives, but Facebook has replaced email lists and such. Of course by disaster I mean more like the 2004 Indonesian earthquake (280,000 dead) than ten people dead in a million plus city. That's really the crazy part here, it puts Facebook in charge of what's a disaster.
And it creates a form of expectation that if Facebook wants to know if you're safe, you should respond because otherwise your friends will start to worry. When it's potentially just the phone/internet service that is down or your phone got lost or broken or some other trivial reason you haven't responded. Even if the Barcelona attack was a pretty big deal, you really want 1,599,900 people to report in that they're fine so you can worry about the 100 that haven't? That is just nuts.
1 - Consolidation of services from standard capitalism. (I'm not arguing against capitalism.) As far as I can tell in my reading of history and experiences in life, all economies eventually end up as monopolies because users prefer simplicity.
Hardly. But there are strong incentives for profit-seeking companies to corner markets and extract profit. Capitalism loves competition, the companies in a capitalistic society hate it. And because consumers are individuals we tend to grab our personal short term gain to the deteriment of the long term market.
2 - You don't own your products.
No, but most people figure that if something turns to shit they can find something else. They can't control what Microsoft is doing with Windows but they can get a Mac. Sure in a perfect world but...
3 - What happens when the company goes out of business?
Big companies very rarely shut down overnight, look at how long for example AMD has been bouncing on the ropes. And the assets are usually bought by somebody else. Yes, eventually online things shut down. But I think most else will show up on gog.com or whatever.
Does it suck when things just disappear from the Netflix/Spotify catalog? Yes. Is it "Doctor Who episodes"-lost? Nah. Maybe you don't like that people don't care enough, but I think they'll continue to not care much. Didn't we already have a pretty damn big recession after the dotcom boom where nothing like this happened?
Practically nobody says "can you pass me a kleenex from that box of puffs facial tissues" unless they are making a joke too. They just say 'pass me a kleenex'. But they'll point at the puffs box while asking without awareness or irony.
I think that's the test, if you ask someone to xerox something and they give you a non-xerox photocopy do you care? No. Same with kleenex. But if you order coke and get anything other than Coca-Cola you're probably talking to your dealer. If you talk to one of those personal assistant thingies and say "google X" I don't think you'd expect to get results from Bing. Sure as a suggestion you might say "google X" to mean "search the Internet for X using Google or whatever search engine you like best" but as a command or request I'd say you expect results from Google and nobody else. Imagine if say searching AltaVista had been a verb and "visting it" had stuck as a term even as most people switched to other search engines. Then it could have become a generic term for searching a class of AltaVista-like search engines. As it stands though, I'm pretty sure Google's trademark is good.
Musk never said that the system in place on that vehicle needed a few more tweaks to achieve self driving, he said that the system on that car was never meant for self driving, and never advertised as such. He also said that future models of the car would include self driving by using different hardware and software.
All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.
They promise that buying a Tesla will get you a self-driving car with nothing more than a software upgrade.
Full Self-Driving Capability Build upon Enhanced Autopilot and order Full Self-Driving Capability on your Tesla. This doubles the number of active cameras from four to eight, enabling full self-driving in almost all circumstances
...with a bit of small print:
Please note that Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by jurisdiction. It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval.
Translation: Development is done, it's already here but due to the red tape we can't say it is.
But the industry is trying to ride the planned obsolescence wagon as long as possible. In addition to the lack of software updates, we have a rarity of removable storage and greater rarity of removable batteries.
And yet the worst offender there is best in class when it comes to OS support. I had the iPhone 4, it had 51 months of support (and they have in the past issued at least one security patch for EOL devices). It looks like 4 years is the main standard, you start with one iOS version and get four updates. Three if it's a late cycle product. From iOS 11 onwards it's all 64 bit / ARMv8 processors though, the iPhone 5s is already 4 years old next month and it's supported in iOS 11 that's still in beta so at least 5 years and possibly longer. These super short support times are pretty much an Android problem, not a smartphone problem.
I don't think you understand how massive the Windows API is. Their stats page lists 114312 functions, granted 18k of those are forwards but that's still 96k real functions and 28k of them are just stubs in the WINE project. Of the 68k functions that do have a real implementation it's near impossible to say how many of them are completely and correctly implemented, since they don't actually conform to a specification only "whatever Windows does". And it's not like they're simple formulas, they're interfaces to huge state engines like DirectX. They could concentrate on one version all they want and probably still never finish the first one to perfection.
Fortunately for us there's a long tail of rarely used functions and dependencies on obscure bugs and behaviors. Implementing the mostly used functionality of the mostly used APIs does make the most common application work and then there's a never ending TODO list of bugs you could investigate. WINE is always going to be a band aid, they do more good staying current and relevant than trying to solve every corner case. And I think the argument really works just as well in reverse, by spending some effort on the small deltas they get a lot of software working and find bugs that benefit older software too. It's happened to me many times that old software works better with newer wine versions, even though they haven't had any patches directed at them.
Of course it also happens that they break things, regressions happen. But they're pretty good at fixing those if you can point to a working version (or better yet, bisect to find the offending patch). Overall I'd say the progress is positive, but it's no substitute for native applications.
Would of course be nice, but I'd rather take a Linux port of the entire Creative Cloud as it stands. It would bring a lot of professionals over and give Linux a much higher standing as a workstation OS. If I were to spend money on getting the source code for a blob it would probably be for compatibility, like say the source code for MS Office or DirectX or nVidia's graphics driver. Then again, not very likely they'll sell it for any reasonable amount.
Looks like there's some progress though, you can now play Overwatch and GTA V is up to Bronze and Witcher 3 is now up to Silver. Still tough to be a gamer on Linux though, now my friends are talking about maybe trying Forza Horizon 3... looks like I'll need a Wintendo (Win10) box in the near future. Not letting that spyware near anything of importance, that's for sure. Bah, was hoping to avoid that a while longer...
Why is it a virtue to force everyone to bend over backwards for someone who can't survive in the outside world? especially if doing so exacerbates the problem?
Lack of malice? Special snowflakes that can't take a mean word without throwing a fit and retreating to their safe space is one thing, but there genuinely are people whose immune system will go loco over something innocent. They didn't ask for it. They have no choice in the matter. That ought to be enough, really.
I think you might find that modern cars have massive complexity to present the driver with as simple an interface as possible. With electronic stabilization control, traction control systems, anti-lock braking systems etc. the wheels and pedals are now functions to say "I want to go faster/slower/left/right" with only moderate relation to what will physically happen. Not to mention all the other features like adaptive cruise control, lane assistance, red light stop assistance, collision detection, parking assistance and so on trying to take that away too. I doubt most young people would recognize a car in full mechanical mode, in fact I doubt a modern car wouldn't even run without the engine's electronic control systems.
Now we're talking about introducing a helluva lot more complexity to present an even simpler interface, you tell it where you want to go with an emergency stop button. How is that not the ultimate culmination of what we've been trying to do? Will it be perfect? Probably not. But we don't need to suggest silly things like the GPS trying to send you on a road that doesn't exist, that happens today because the car has no sensors and doesn't know anything but what the map says. If that happens with an autonomous car it should recognize that there's no road markings, no road signs, simply no road at all. It shouldn't just drive off a cliff just because the GPS tells it to.
Personally I think this patent is way premature though, which is why I'm glad it's filed now. Even if the first occasionally autonomous cars should show up on the road in a few years, having a car that'll deal with all road and weather conditions is many, many years away. That you'll have to tow it if a faulty sensor causes the autonomy to fail also seems like a terrible inconvenience. My guess is this patent will expire before such a thing is street legal, then we can all point to this as prior art.
Microsoft doesn't make the hardware, just the software. It's up to the PC manufacturers and the ISPs to get the updates out. Do you see how fucking retarded that is?
Red Hat doesn't make the kernel, just distribute it with a few tweaks. It's up to kernel.org to get the updates out. Do you see how fucking retarded that is? Either you're a vendor and sell a product or you're a manufacturer and make a product. If you make a product, you're inherently responsible for that product in every way no matter how much of it is assembled from components and parts you've bought or licensed from others. If you buy a PC from Dell, it is Dell you should hold primarily responsible. If they choose to "pass-through" the OS support to Microsoft that's up to Dell.
If Dell is not happy with the way they're treated by Microsoft or Microsoft is not happy with the way they're treated by Dell, that's for them to sort out in the back room. I mean there has to be some reciprocity here, Dell can't just leave updates to Microsoft and next week Microsoft pushes an update that bricks everything. Microsoft can license their OS if they want, but they probably don't want their name on a product they can't update that will get 0wned by every script kiddie out there. Those are the terms between Microsoft and Dell though, the sale is between Dell and you.
Google has licensed Android as a component, an OS the manufacturers can tweak as they please and they have the responsibility for. It's worked wonders for capturing market share, so I think they're pretty happy with the way things are. It would be nice if they could push their own un-customized version as a required alternative though, say for example re-invent Android Nexus as a software option. No custom applications, branding or OS tweaks (though possibly custom drivers for the hardware) and updates direct from Google. Not sure the OEMs would go for making Google the new Apple though.
They're unable to launch humans given their own red tape and far-beyond-Shuttle safety requirements which again were far beyond Apollo. If Bruce Willis had to go up there to save us from Armageddon I bet within three weeks you'd have something ready to launch on top of an Atlas, Delta and Falcon 9 rocket. Most of the active space probes are NASAs, there's some from Japan, China, India and ESA but the list would have been much shorter. Don't forget that the ISS supply missions to SpaceX and the Commercial Crew program are also part of the NASA budget.
The SLS and the proposed missions are pork, but they do a lot of non-pork science too. If the Falcon Heavy (finally) successfully launches in November with the new LEO fully expendable payload of 63,8 tons vs the SLS's 70 tons (in its Block 1 configuration) the SLS is pretty much a non-starter. I suspect to keep the pork barrel rolling they'll go directly for the Block 1B/2 configurations even though they're currently planned for 2022+ but at least they'd still have an unique launch capability. They certainly don't got much else going for them.
Remember that NASA is far from being just a rocket company, even if Musk takes the whole Earth-surface-to-Mars-surface transport you're not going to see SpaceX develop space telescopes, deep space probes, Mars habitats etc. any time soon. It's not that NASA needs less money, it's that they need less money for pork so they got more money for their actual mission. They'll have plenty to do designing missions that sit on top of rockets, once they get out of the launch business.
It should come as a no surprise that the stuff that comes out of tailpipes is not good for you to breathe. It can and does kill people. People who want to kill themselves quickly, breathe a lot of it in a short amount of time. The rest of us are doing it over a longer period of time.
You can kill yourself by drinking lots of water in a short time, so drinking less over longer periods of time is clearly unhealthy. Your conclusion might be right, but your argumentation is sadly lacking.
Peanut allergies are a first world problem. They are rare in developing countries, where kids grow up around chickens, pigs, and goats, so they develop strong immune systems that don't overreact.
Part of why it seems like such a huge first world problem is the gross over-reaction to "casual" allergy to protect a few hyper-allergics. I'm allergic to peanuts. I don't care if you eat a peanut bar in the adjacent seat or if the kitchen used the same spoon. Hell, I could eat that peanut bar and though it might cause me a bit of discomfort it wouldn't actually be dangerous. But if I tell anyone I have peanut allergy that tends to invoke "faint traces of nuts = lethal danger" levels of paranoia. Don't get me wrong, they exist and it's nice that we accomodate them so they don't die or anything but you sometimes feel those with a common cold and ebola are put in the same box labeled "sick".
If the phone is powered off for too long or powered but the user doesn't enter the passkey for a day or two it wipes itself.
And when you end up in the emergency room because you were in a traffic accident you'll find that everything you had on your phone is gone forever. For the vast majority the problem is they lose information because they don't have backups and forget keys. The second biggest problem is that the user is hacked, tricked or forced so the attacker has the user's credentials, doesn't matter how good the lock is if the attacker has the key. If you're trying to hack a locked iPhone you're a little bit past script kiddies trying to steal celeb nudes, I'm think law enforcement, military intelligence and industrial espionage.
If you really care about all the exotic ways to preserve the information and the possibility that someone will eventually break down the locks I'd suggest to move the problem outside the phone, crypto-virus style. Basically, you upload the decryption key to a remote server via TOR. That server will wipe the key after a given period of time. The FBI/CIA/NSA can store the phone all they like, unless they can find the remote server and stop it from deleting the key before it expires, the key is permanently gone. Of course you could XOR it with a local self-destructing key, if either half is lost/unavailable it's gone.
It's almost like women don't like to hunt or gather, but rather nurture, heal, and educate. Must be something wrong with these numbers though, that can't be right.
Or "hunt or gather" was men's business, "nurture, heal and educate" was women's business. You're assuming they had a choice and would be measured on equal merit and get equal recognition, but simply preferred those tasks. That's a pretty bold assumption when we know that for the vast majority of recorded history that is false. I remember reading a short while ago about a soccer school here in Norway, which is as egalitarian as countries go. Initially there was a skills test, then they made teams of skills-matched players. Yet the young boys would noticeably more often pass to other boys, presumably not out of malice or sexism but they were already conditioned to not give the girls a fair chance. We're very good at turning a small bias into a self-fulfilling prophecy, without trying to be bigots.
The right stems from the very notion of "no taxation without representation". Even the Founding Fathers understood a government needs taxes. The right is inherent in the very nature of society. Libertarian fantasies about taxation as "theft" is just that, fantastical thinking that has absolutely no relation to how a real society could ever function.
It's quite a jump from "society needs taxes" to "any and all taxes are okay, even those where two poor people and a rich guy decides where to eat and how to split the bill". I mean if the government was more of a service provider that gave you an itemized bill like "Rule of law (police, courts, public defenders etc.) $1537/person", "Defense of the nation (army, navy, air force etc.) $876/person", "Public education $763/person" and so on I think a lot of the critics would have no problem with taxes. But that's not how taxes work, it's more like how deep are your pockets because the more you have the more the government will take.
That is not a "we" where you pay your share of a common society. Not even those things that are insurance-like, if you had been born mentally or physically handicapped or was the victim of an accident or crime you'd be taken care of. That's de facto socialism where you take money from some people and give it to other people through benefits and services. Would you think it was okay if I walked up to Bill Gates and said "You have lots of money. I have much less money. So, give me some of your money or else..."? Probably not, particularly not the "or else" bit. But that's essentially what we're doing through taxes, the iron first is just wrapped in a velvet glove. It's okay to steal from the rich because... they're rich. They can afford it.
I know this post is borderline trolling, but I feel like I'm on both sides of the fence depending on the situation. Sometimes I'm like "you're skimming tons of money off our well-functioning society, you should pay more" and other times I'm like "seriously, you're going to take my tax money to use it on that?" which I'm about 99% sure only happens because they're using other people's money, nobody in their right mind would spend their own hard earned cash on it. Not that I'd have anything against anyone who did, as long as it's their own money. But when they take mine to do it, it sure feels like legalized theft. There's not much left of freedom if you don't have any right to keep your earnings.
So the next time you are pumping your own gas in the rain, do not just think about the teenager who could have been pumping it for you, think about the auto mechanic he could have become - had the minimum wage not denied him a job. Many auto mechanics used to learn their trade while working as pump jockeys. Between fill-ups, checking tire pressure, and washing windows, they would spend a lot of time helping - and learning from - the mechanics.
Sounds like you're thinking of a different era, I only know gas stations as gas pumps + basics like windshield wiper fluid + overpriced kiosk wares + hot dogs/burgers and maybe a car wash. At best maybe they have a spare windshield wiper and an emergency tire. Cars don't break down as often as they used to and you need so much special tools, equipment and parts to repair them there's maybe one auto repair shop for every 50th gas station. And either you go there with an appointment or you get transported there by road assistance, it doesn't have any synergy with a gas station. Even if you can find an exception I'd say in 99% of the cases you'll learn just as much about repairing cars at Starbucks/McDonald's, which is to say nothing at all.
It's even funnier that they're trying to focus on things past their own next-future product which isn't even out either. Can you imagine Toyota telling us about their new 2019 cars in mid-2017?
Well the devil's advocate could say that you want them to only focus on next quarter's profits. Intel has always talked to investors and technology analysts about their road map, their code names and process architecture has never been directed at consumers. Let's compare them to the competition, how long before the release of an actual Zen processor did AMD start to hype it up? Announced in May 2015, released in March 2017. Or if you want to do the car analogy, how long from Musk announced the Model 3 until the first one rolled off the assembly line? July 2014 to July 2017.
The reason we are discussing Intel's road map now is that we don't quite believe them anymore. They used to have a tick-tock, now it's like 2014 14nm, 2015 14nm, 2016 14nm+, 2017 14nm++. Those two years that were supposed to become three (process-architecture-enhancement) is now four, sure it's damage control. But it's not really damage control directed at consumers, this is talking to the stock market saying we've been enhancing the product we have and we got a plan. Nothing particularly unexpected here, but exclude the 10nm and redraw the progress lines and they're slipping...
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I think the same problems occur with the concept of Apple building its own self-driving car, except that car manufacturing is far more complex, capital-intensive, and labor-intensive than building TV sets, while still being just as cutthroat (note that US car mfgrs are dealing with slowing sales and mounting inventory). So, Apple's move is, generally speaking, a sane one.
So? Self-driving cars would be a totally disruptive shift in what people care about in a car. Kinda like the iPhone made people care about entirely other things than what they wanted from a phone before. You're not driving. You're don't care about any of the performance or functionality or experience related to driving, even though those in the passenger seat and back seat got heard I'd say the vast majority of purchases are currently decided by the person in the driver's seat. If Apple could give you a car you'd rather be a passenger in than the "traditional" car companies, that would be a winner.
Of course, the technology for a self-driving car has to exist first. I don't see Apple developing that, but I could see them licensing it and building an iCar that's all about the "travel experience". At least that's what I feel they did with the iPod, iPhone and iPad.... the products more or less already existed but Steve Jobs made people want to use them. I suspect that a generic consumer car that actually works on most roads in most conditions is quite far off though, the first ones will probably be taxis operating in a well mapped and marked downtown area or long-haul goods traffic on fixed routes. It seems getting all the edge cases worked out is pretty hard...
If a 5.5% fee can't get a transaction complete in 2 days, how much does it cost?
It's not related to the amount, but to getting your transaction included in a transaction block. Since they all take up the same space those who verify take the transactions with the biggest fee regardless of size. The idea was simply that you'd pay for faster processing though, not that it'd become a blocker to getting processed. But since Bitcoin has gone up more in value and is used for more transactions than designed, if you don't pay a big fee your turn never comes at all. I hear it's around $3 now, but it should be $3 on $1000 too but the fee is a killer for small purchases.
Problem is this will never make it into the Mainstream kernel. The Linux Kernel devs have opposed a stable driver ABI for decades now. The chipset manufacturers have happily setteled in and provide only binary blobs with ABI adaptions for a certain timeframe, and everybody is happy except for the screwed customers.
Considering there is more than two billion active Android devices I doubt Google cares much, when you take away all the desktop device drivers, architectures and other bits of Linux that aren't that relevant for Android how many core changes are there? And if they dedicate one cent per device to maintaining a fork, that's $20 million.
And hence, evil. Therefore, I won't be using it.
So... do you have any non-evil suggestions or is that a "the only way to win is not to play" game? Because the only phones I can find for sale new here in Norway now is running:
1) Android
2) iOS
3) Windows Phone (dying...)
4) Blackberry (almost dead...)
5) Nokia OS/Symbian (feature phones)
Unless Apple or Microsoft is now the good guys, there doesn't seem to be any options left. Unless it's some odd foreign import, Kickstarter project or whatever...
I would bet people who (willingly) change jobs every so often are lot happier,
Not so sure about this, because even if you're changing jobs you're probably doing roughly the same things for a different company. Simply because if you have 10+ years experience you're not very likely to start over in a junior position doing something completely different. As long as it's not becoming a lock-in where that employer and that job is the only one you'll get I don't see a problem staying if you have no major complaints. Though I know one COBOL programmer who now issues parking tickets, having only obsolete skills is not the best way to finish your career.
You don't think that it's common to make a Facebook post to let everyone who cares about you know that you're alright if you've been in the vicinity of some sort of disaster? You might call your partner & close relatives, but Facebook has replaced email lists and such. Of course by disaster I mean more like the 2004 Indonesian earthquake (280,000 dead) than ten people dead in a million plus city. That's really the crazy part here, it puts Facebook in charge of what's a disaster.
And it creates a form of expectation that if Facebook wants to know if you're safe, you should respond because otherwise your friends will start to worry. When it's potentially just the phone/internet service that is down or your phone got lost or broken or some other trivial reason you haven't responded. Even if the Barcelona attack was a pretty big deal, you really want 1,599,900 people to report in that they're fine so you can worry about the 100 that haven't? That is just nuts.
1 - Consolidation of services from standard capitalism. (I'm not arguing against capitalism.) As far as I can tell in my reading of history and experiences in life, all economies eventually end up as monopolies because users prefer simplicity.
Hardly. But there are strong incentives for profit-seeking companies to corner markets and extract profit. Capitalism loves competition, the companies in a capitalistic society hate it. And because consumers are individuals we tend to grab our personal short term gain to the deteriment of the long term market.
2 - You don't own your products.
No, but most people figure that if something turns to shit they can find something else. They can't control what Microsoft is doing with Windows but they can get a Mac. Sure in a perfect world but...
3 - What happens when the company goes out of business?
Big companies very rarely shut down overnight, look at how long for example AMD has been bouncing on the ropes. And the assets are usually bought by somebody else. Yes, eventually online things shut down. But I think most else will show up on gog.com or whatever.
Does it suck when things just disappear from the Netflix/Spotify catalog? Yes. Is it "Doctor Who episodes"-lost? Nah. Maybe you don't like that people don't care enough, but I think they'll continue to not care much. Didn't we already have a pretty damn big recession after the dotcom boom where nothing like this happened?
Practically nobody says "can you pass me a kleenex from that box of puffs facial tissues" unless they are making a joke too. They just say 'pass me a kleenex'. But they'll point at the puffs box while asking without awareness or irony.
I think that's the test, if you ask someone to xerox something and they give you a non-xerox photocopy do you care? No. Same with kleenex. But if you order coke and get anything other than Coca-Cola you're probably talking to your dealer. If you talk to one of those personal assistant thingies and say "google X" I don't think you'd expect to get results from Bing. Sure as a suggestion you might say "google X" to mean "search the Internet for X using Google or whatever search engine you like best" but as a command or request I'd say you expect results from Google and nobody else. Imagine if say searching AltaVista had been a verb and "visting it" had stuck as a term even as most people switched to other search engines. Then it could have become a generic term for searching a class of AltaVista-like search engines. As it stands though, I'm pretty sure Google's trademark is good.
Musk never said that the system in place on that vehicle needed a few more tweaks to achieve self driving, he said that the system on that car was never meant for self driving, and never advertised as such. He also said that future models of the car would include self driving by using different hardware and software.
Why don't you read their claims yourself?
Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars
All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.
They promise that buying a Tesla will get you a self-driving car with nothing more than a software upgrade.
Full Self-Driving Capability
Build upon Enhanced Autopilot and order Full Self-Driving Capability on your Tesla. This doubles the number of active cameras from four to eight, enabling full self-driving in almost all circumstances
...with a bit of small print:
Please note that Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by jurisdiction. It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval.
Translation: Development is done, it's already here but due to the red tape we can't say it is.
But the industry is trying to ride the planned obsolescence wagon as long as possible. In addition to the lack of software updates, we have a rarity of removable storage and greater rarity of removable batteries.
And yet the worst offender there is best in class when it comes to OS support. I had the iPhone 4, it had 51 months of support (and they have in the past issued at least one security patch for EOL devices). It looks like 4 years is the main standard, you start with one iOS version and get four updates. Three if it's a late cycle product. From iOS 11 onwards it's all 64 bit / ARMv8 processors though, the iPhone 5s is already 4 years old next month and it's supported in iOS 11 that's still in beta so at least 5 years and possibly longer. These super short support times are pretty much an Android problem, not a smartphone problem.
I don't think you understand how massive the Windows API is. Their stats page lists 114312 functions, granted 18k of those are forwards but that's still 96k real functions and 28k of them are just stubs in the WINE project. Of the 68k functions that do have a real implementation it's near impossible to say how many of them are completely and correctly implemented, since they don't actually conform to a specification only "whatever Windows does". And it's not like they're simple formulas, they're interfaces to huge state engines like DirectX. They could concentrate on one version all they want and probably still never finish the first one to perfection.
Fortunately for us there's a long tail of rarely used functions and dependencies on obscure bugs and behaviors. Implementing the mostly used functionality of the mostly used APIs does make the most common application work and then there's a never ending TODO list of bugs you could investigate. WINE is always going to be a band aid, they do more good staying current and relevant than trying to solve every corner case. And I think the argument really works just as well in reverse, by spending some effort on the small deltas they get a lot of software working and find bugs that benefit older software too. It's happened to me many times that old software works better with newer wine versions, even though they haven't had any patches directed at them.
Of course it also happens that they break things, regressions happen. But they're pretty good at fixing those if you can point to a working version (or better yet, bisect to find the offending patch). Overall I'd say the progress is positive, but it's no substitute for native applications.
Would of course be nice, but I'd rather take a Linux port of the entire Creative Cloud as it stands. It would bring a lot of professionals over and give Linux a much higher standing as a workstation OS. If I were to spend money on getting the source code for a blob it would probably be for compatibility, like say the source code for MS Office or DirectX or nVidia's graphics driver. Then again, not very likely they'll sell it for any reasonable amount.
Looks like there's some progress though, you can now play Overwatch and GTA V is up to Bronze and Witcher 3 is now up to Silver. Still tough to be a gamer on Linux though, now my friends are talking about maybe trying Forza Horizon 3... looks like I'll need a Wintendo (Win10) box in the near future. Not letting that spyware near anything of importance, that's for sure. Bah, was hoping to avoid that a while longer...
Maybe the question to ask Kaspersky is what exactly would an inappropriate relationship with the FSB look like according to them?
NSL.
Why is it a virtue to force everyone to bend over backwards for someone who can't survive in the outside world? especially if doing so exacerbates the problem?
Lack of malice? Special snowflakes that can't take a mean word without throwing a fit and retreating to their safe space is one thing, but there genuinely are people whose immune system will go loco over something innocent. They didn't ask for it. They have no choice in the matter. That ought to be enough, really.
I think you might find that modern cars have massive complexity to present the driver with as simple an interface as possible. With electronic stabilization control, traction control systems, anti-lock braking systems etc. the wheels and pedals are now functions to say "I want to go faster/slower/left/right" with only moderate relation to what will physically happen. Not to mention all the other features like adaptive cruise control, lane assistance, red light stop assistance, collision detection, parking assistance and so on trying to take that away too. I doubt most young people would recognize a car in full mechanical mode, in fact I doubt a modern car wouldn't even run without the engine's electronic control systems.
Now we're talking about introducing a helluva lot more complexity to present an even simpler interface, you tell it where you want to go with an emergency stop button. How is that not the ultimate culmination of what we've been trying to do? Will it be perfect? Probably not. But we don't need to suggest silly things like the GPS trying to send you on a road that doesn't exist, that happens today because the car has no sensors and doesn't know anything but what the map says. If that happens with an autonomous car it should recognize that there's no road markings, no road signs, simply no road at all. It shouldn't just drive off a cliff just because the GPS tells it to.
Personally I think this patent is way premature though, which is why I'm glad it's filed now. Even if the first occasionally autonomous cars should show up on the road in a few years, having a car that'll deal with all road and weather conditions is many, many years away. That you'll have to tow it if a faulty sensor causes the autonomy to fail also seems like a terrible inconvenience. My guess is this patent will expire before such a thing is street legal, then we can all point to this as prior art.
Microsoft doesn't make the hardware, just the software. It's up to the PC manufacturers and the ISPs to get the updates out. Do you see how fucking retarded that is?
Red Hat doesn't make the kernel, just distribute it with a few tweaks. It's up to kernel.org to get the updates out. Do you see how fucking retarded that is? Either you're a vendor and sell a product or you're a manufacturer and make a product. If you make a product, you're inherently responsible for that product in every way no matter how much of it is assembled from components and parts you've bought or licensed from others. If you buy a PC from Dell, it is Dell you should hold primarily responsible. If they choose to "pass-through" the OS support to Microsoft that's up to Dell.
If Dell is not happy with the way they're treated by Microsoft or Microsoft is not happy with the way they're treated by Dell, that's for them to sort out in the back room. I mean there has to be some reciprocity here, Dell can't just leave updates to Microsoft and next week Microsoft pushes an update that bricks everything. Microsoft can license their OS if they want, but they probably don't want their name on a product they can't update that will get 0wned by every script kiddie out there. Those are the terms between Microsoft and Dell though, the sale is between Dell and you.
Google has licensed Android as a component, an OS the manufacturers can tweak as they please and they have the responsibility for. It's worked wonders for capturing market share, so I think they're pretty happy with the way things are. It would be nice if they could push their own un-customized version as a required alternative though, say for example re-invent Android Nexus as a software option. No custom applications, branding or OS tweaks (though possibly custom drivers for the hardware) and updates direct from Google. Not sure the OEMs would go for making Google the new Apple though.
They're unable to launch humans given their own red tape and far-beyond-Shuttle safety requirements which again were far beyond Apollo. If Bruce Willis had to go up there to save us from Armageddon I bet within three weeks you'd have something ready to launch on top of an Atlas, Delta and Falcon 9 rocket. Most of the active space probes are NASAs, there's some from Japan, China, India and ESA but the list would have been much shorter. Don't forget that the ISS supply missions to SpaceX and the Commercial Crew program are also part of the NASA budget.
The SLS and the proposed missions are pork, but they do a lot of non-pork science too. If the Falcon Heavy (finally) successfully launches in November with the new LEO fully expendable payload of 63,8 tons vs the SLS's 70 tons (in its Block 1 configuration) the SLS is pretty much a non-starter. I suspect to keep the pork barrel rolling they'll go directly for the Block 1B/2 configurations even though they're currently planned for 2022+ but at least they'd still have an unique launch capability. They certainly don't got much else going for them.
Remember that NASA is far from being just a rocket company, even if Musk takes the whole Earth-surface-to-Mars-surface transport you're not going to see SpaceX develop space telescopes, deep space probes, Mars habitats etc. any time soon. It's not that NASA needs less money, it's that they need less money for pork so they got more money for their actual mission. They'll have plenty to do designing missions that sit on top of rockets, once they get out of the launch business.
It should come as a no surprise that the stuff that comes out of tailpipes is not good for you to breathe. It can and does kill people. People who want to kill themselves quickly, breathe a lot of it in a short amount of time. The rest of us are doing it over a longer period of time.
You can kill yourself by drinking lots of water in a short time, so drinking less over longer periods of time is clearly unhealthy. Your conclusion might be right, but your argumentation is sadly lacking.
Peanut allergies are a first world problem. They are rare in developing countries, where kids grow up around chickens, pigs, and goats, so they develop strong immune systems that don't overreact.
Part of why it seems like such a huge first world problem is the gross over-reaction to "casual" allergy to protect a few hyper-allergics. I'm allergic to peanuts. I don't care if you eat a peanut bar in the adjacent seat or if the kitchen used the same spoon. Hell, I could eat that peanut bar and though it might cause me a bit of discomfort it wouldn't actually be dangerous. But if I tell anyone I have peanut allergy that tends to invoke "faint traces of nuts = lethal danger" levels of paranoia. Don't get me wrong, they exist and it's nice that we accomodate them so they don't die or anything but you sometimes feel those with a common cold and ebola are put in the same box labeled "sick".
If the phone is powered off for too long or powered but the user doesn't enter the passkey for a day or two it wipes itself.
And when you end up in the emergency room because you were in a traffic accident you'll find that everything you had on your phone is gone forever. For the vast majority the problem is they lose information because they don't have backups and forget keys. The second biggest problem is that the user is hacked, tricked or forced so the attacker has the user's credentials, doesn't matter how good the lock is if the attacker has the key. If you're trying to hack a locked iPhone you're a little bit past script kiddies trying to steal celeb nudes, I'm think law enforcement, military intelligence and industrial espionage.
If you really care about all the exotic ways to preserve the information and the possibility that someone will eventually break down the locks I'd suggest to move the problem outside the phone, crypto-virus style. Basically, you upload the decryption key to a remote server via TOR. That server will wipe the key after a given period of time. The FBI/CIA/NSA can store the phone all they like, unless they can find the remote server and stop it from deleting the key before it expires, the key is permanently gone. Of course you could XOR it with a local self-destructing key, if either half is lost/unavailable it's gone.
This is designed to start a flame war please don't continue the discussion they just want to stir up trouble.
You know, we have a moderation system here. I don't see the trolls at -1, but I do see lots of posts from the idiot at +2.
It's almost like women don't like to hunt or gather, but rather nurture, heal, and educate. Must be something wrong with these numbers though, that can't be right.
Or "hunt or gather" was men's business, "nurture, heal and educate" was women's business. You're assuming they had a choice and would be measured on equal merit and get equal recognition, but simply preferred those tasks. That's a pretty bold assumption when we know that for the vast majority of recorded history that is false. I remember reading a short while ago about a soccer school here in Norway, which is as egalitarian as countries go. Initially there was a skills test, then they made teams of skills-matched players. Yet the young boys would noticeably more often pass to other boys, presumably not out of malice or sexism but they were already conditioned to not give the girls a fair chance. We're very good at turning a small bias into a self-fulfilling prophecy, without trying to be bigots.
The right stems from the very notion of "no taxation without representation". Even the Founding Fathers understood a government needs taxes. The right is inherent in the very nature of society. Libertarian fantasies about taxation as "theft" is just that, fantastical thinking that has absolutely no relation to how a real society could ever function.
It's quite a jump from "society needs taxes" to "any and all taxes are okay, even those where two poor people and a rich guy decides where to eat and how to split the bill". I mean if the government was more of a service provider that gave you an itemized bill like "Rule of law (police, courts, public defenders etc.) $1537/person", "Defense of the nation (army, navy, air force etc.) $876/person", "Public education $763/person" and so on I think a lot of the critics would have no problem with taxes. But that's not how taxes work, it's more like how deep are your pockets because the more you have the more the government will take.
That is not a "we" where you pay your share of a common society. Not even those things that are insurance-like, if you had been born mentally or physically handicapped or was the victim of an accident or crime you'd be taken care of. That's de facto socialism where you take money from some people and give it to other people through benefits and services. Would you think it was okay if I walked up to Bill Gates and said "You have lots of money. I have much less money. So, give me some of your money or else..."? Probably not, particularly not the "or else" bit. But that's essentially what we're doing through taxes, the iron first is just wrapped in a velvet glove. It's okay to steal from the rich because... they're rich. They can afford it.
I know this post is borderline trolling, but I feel like I'm on both sides of the fence depending on the situation. Sometimes I'm like "you're skimming tons of money off our well-functioning society, you should pay more" and other times I'm like "seriously, you're going to take my tax money to use it on that?" which I'm about 99% sure only happens because they're using other people's money, nobody in their right mind would spend their own hard earned cash on it. Not that I'd have anything against anyone who did, as long as it's their own money. But when they take mine to do it, it sure feels like legalized theft. There's not much left of freedom if you don't have any right to keep your earnings.
So the next time you are pumping your own gas in the rain, do not just think about the teenager who could have been pumping it for you, think about the auto mechanic he could have become - had the minimum wage not denied him a job. Many auto mechanics used to learn their trade while working as pump jockeys. Between fill-ups, checking tire pressure, and washing windows, they would spend a lot of time helping - and learning from - the mechanics.
Sounds like you're thinking of a different era, I only know gas stations as gas pumps + basics like windshield wiper fluid + overpriced kiosk wares + hot dogs/burgers and maybe a car wash. At best maybe they have a spare windshield wiper and an emergency tire. Cars don't break down as often as they used to and you need so much special tools, equipment and parts to repair them there's maybe one auto repair shop for every 50th gas station. And either you go there with an appointment or you get transported there by road assistance, it doesn't have any synergy with a gas station. Even if you can find an exception I'd say in 99% of the cases you'll learn just as much about repairing cars at Starbucks/McDonald's, which is to say nothing at all.
It's even funnier that they're trying to focus on things past their own next-future product which isn't even out either. Can you imagine Toyota telling us about their new 2019 cars in mid-2017?
Well the devil's advocate could say that you want them to only focus on next quarter's profits. Intel has always talked to investors and technology analysts about their road map, their code names and process architecture has never been directed at consumers. Let's compare them to the competition, how long before the release of an actual Zen processor did AMD start to hype it up? Announced in May 2015, released in March 2017. Or if you want to do the car analogy, how long from Musk announced the Model 3 until the first one rolled off the assembly line? July 2014 to July 2017.
The reason we are discussing Intel's road map now is that we don't quite believe them anymore. They used to have a tick-tock, now it's like 2014 14nm, 2015 14nm, 2016 14nm+, 2017 14nm++. Those two years that were supposed to become three (process-architecture-enhancement) is now four, sure it's damage control. But it's not really damage control directed at consumers, this is talking to the stock market saying we've been enhancing the product we have and we got a plan. Nothing particularly unexpected here, but exclude the 10nm and redraw the progress lines and they're slipping...