Exactly. Brexiteers either haven't figured this out or are in denials. Want to go to Spain? You'll need a visa. France? Visa. Ireland? Well, if you are travelling overland a visa and an amoured car.
In theory they don't need to issue visas at all and the English channel is a better wall than Trump could ever make. In practice this is just the kind of scare-mongering that led to the Brexit vote, trying to act like the UK has no choice in the matter or that all hell would rain down on them if they did. I just checked here in Norway and I can go to 127 countries around the world without a visa, at least for vacations shorter than a month. It's a standard courtesy offered by most friendly nations and all that want to encourage tourism.
If the EU refused this to the UK, their neighbor and former union member it would have all the telltale marks of a vindictive divorce that would cast a very long and dark shadow over the EU. While it is the UK that wanted to part ways it's not like they started a war or anything, despite the political positioning I doubt the EU will act like the psycho ex. Obviously the UK won't get to pick and choose the parts of the EU agreement they liked, but to think that the EU wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire is nonsense.
- DNS needs a redo, that's for sure. Whom am I paying 2 Euros a month just for an entry anyway? Namecoin uses the blockchain for naming, and that is the way to go. A state-of-the-art DNS replacement would use that and some central registration authority where you can get a batch of tokens to register/claim the domains of your choosing and be done with it once and for all.
So when someone steals the keys for google.com then...?
- E-Mail. Well, being just about the oldest service ever and still in existance. It shows at every corner. Replacement desperately needed. Default built-in hard crypto signing
With what keys? And what happens when they lose the key?
- Web needs a redo.
Actually I want more web, less apps. The pendulum is swinging towards only certain platforms being usable again, only this time it's iOS and Android instead of Windows and Mac.
- Offline. (...) Ok, we have (had) Usenet and E-Mail, but Web? Not really.
Local applications is what we had before the web. The lack of local code is why we migrated to the web. You want to redo the web to not be a web.
Half of the trouble we face today with the internet doesn't require a new *physical* network. We need instead to prefer standard protocols, and stop centralizing information with big companies. That means run your email address from your own domain instead of using gmail for everything. Don't use Facebook to login to everything. Share pictures with friends over email. Put your public thoughts on your own blog instead of tweeting them. If people are interested in following you, they will use your RSS or Atom feed. Everything these big companies are doing to mine your data and overwhelm you with useless information are inferior (but more convenient!) replacements for the standard decentralized protocols we already had.
So by inferior you mean superior (but more centralized)? I've used email, IRC, newsgroups etc. and one of the problems is that because it was a standard protocol it's usually stuck at the state of the art from when it was created and can barely move because an ungodly number of clients and users will never support anything but the 1.0 features. There will be someone doing plain-text email because HTML is the work of the devil. One of the biggest advantages of Facebook is that there are no versions of Facebook, they upgrade and for better or worse everyone's got it. The second most powerful ability they have is that when someone is trying to overrun it with spam and bots and flooding attacks there's someone in power to stop the barrage and clean up the mess. I can't count the number of places that used to be good and then got trashed.
Perhaps the third most important thing is that most people still don't have a 24x7 redundant system with backups and enough bandwidth to deal with everything and they're not willing to pay for hosting nor do they want the administration, many people want a "free" ad supported service and it has to integrate well with people who'd like to self-host everything and loathe ads with a passion. Particularly this is true so you can have a single login to view/comment/like/vote on your friends/family/coworkers' posts, otherwise you'll be back to why a lot of people quit their public blog to use Facebook. It's a convenient way to share things with a lot of people but not the world. The last really sticky point is loss of passwords and loss of control, honestly most people shouldn't be entrusted with the root keys to anything.
I think the first one is mostly solvable by using modern web app technology, you can have new features without the client being upgraded specifically to support it. The spam maybe, if you carefully design it so that you have a plug-in structure to support different CAPTCHAs, invite links, answering user-supplied questions etc. The third one is tough, I don't think you can convert the world. There has to be an easier way and then you're like a Facebook wannabe without users and with very little revenue to support it, dealing with all the bots, DMCA takedowns, police requests, fake profiles, COPPA and whatnot. It's probably going to burn money. And the last one is hell, people will get hacked. People will lose their user credentials, admin credentials, root keys, have their accounts hacked, identities stolen etc. and you will end up dealing with it somehow.
However, at base, the government shouldn't have an interest in providing internet access to citizens. It's not a fundamental need (despite what city folk think would happen to their lives if they were without net access for more than an hour).
Where my mother grew up doesn't have running water, much less hot and cold water nor a phone line. It has electricity but I'm sure if you could ask her parents or grandparents they'd say electricity wasn't a fundamental need either. The concept evolves, I'd say any place without internet access lacks fundamental needs in the 21st century. Fortunately there's very few places you got absolutely no mobile/radio/satellite link. Is broadband a fundamental need? Eh, I think that's a much more questionable concept to sell.
It also depends on how much other services are shut down, like when we bought our cabin a few decades ago there was a payphone. There were many thousands of them, because cabins and such rarely had phones and cell phones were in their infancy. Today you only find a few at the airport and big transport hubs, for 99.99% of the use cases you're expected to have a cell phone and the payphones are in museums. If you don't have one, you're actually more crippled now than in the 80s. So if society starts to assume you have broadband, then it might become a fundamental need.
Of course I don't think it's necessary to be a need, which means everyone should get it is required for the government to say it would be preferable and have some sort of fund for that.
Everything you said made sense. And yet I fear the world where any company will roll over and submit the moment the government wants something. A lot of modern rule of law is based on the assumption that a private entity like say your phone company has records and the government needs a warrant to see it. Whether that system is officially broken like in China or unofficially broken like with the NSA in the US, it's getting to the point where you should just assume any information given to any organization for any reason whatsoever is stored and passed to the government willingly or unwillingly. And since most of us have embraced civilization and is dependent on trade to survive it's pretty hard to avoid. It's depressing.
Even in a modestly large group somebody will always be unhappy, but since opinions are like assholes meaning everybody's got one I'll share mine - the opinion that is, the rest I leave for the goatse.cx guy. The articles here have always sucked donkey balls, they're an untimely mess from an odd selection of subjects and done better by many other sites. The value has always been the discussion, which means the valuable articles have been those who create an interesting discussion. Sometimes there's been very nerdy articles that just doesn't leave much to discuss. Other times it's been soap opera drama that - if you take one step back - is like who gives a shit.
The best articles IMHO are those about some sort of tech/sci advance that sets off a discussion about the subject/implications. Like, SpaceX can land a rocket but I can read that in a thousand places. What will that mean for the future of space travel? That's what is interesting to discuss. Probably second most interesting are the legal subjects, usually because we have a good understanding of the practical feasibility or consequences of implementing the law. Or sometimes how the absence of law lets technology accumulate information and erode their privacy. Of course that could get very narrow and repetitive, like the 1000th time refueling the BSD vs GPL flame war.
I remember us talking about Bush in 2001, so there's politics, so Trump is not new to the mix. There was point releases of the Linux kernel, though of course they usually turned into YotLD discussions. I remember/.'s best headline as "Lance Bass to Continue to Plague Earth's Surface" which ultimately is about a boy band artist's ego trip and not really "news for nerds" at all. It was always kinda CmdrTaco's random blog with comments, it's hard to pin it down. But it was mostly nerdy things that even if they weren't your kind of nerd it felt like they could have been. If anything I'd say it lost that randomness and got too driven by certain submitters' repetitive agendas, like this is the 10th Bitcoin or SJW propaganda this week. Shit got old, discussions were rehashed, many people left.
And call me when I can't get the product I want cheaper off one of the owners on eBay. Seriously, this reminds me of someone trying to make the business case that I should buy a gym at home. I don't have the space and it would be idle 99.9% of the time. Seriously, some of these machines I spend like 5 minutes exercising (1m series-1m break-1m series-1m break-1m series-done) that I might do once a week. I'd rather just pay for a gym membership. Even if I have a custom design job unless I need it very often and/or very quickly - though 3D printers are far from instant - I'd just upload the blueprint.
I see this a lot on/. like trying to push ideas that I think if it made sense someone would do it on an industrial scale. Like for example solar power and energy storage, if solar panels and batteries "makes sense" then why not a huge array of them. Not 5 sqm on my roof and a battery in my basement. If that makes sense there must be some pretty fucked up incentives to do it that'll probably go away. Heck, I can't even print an A3 picture at home even though it's obviously available at home. It's just cheaper to go to a print shop when I have the need and they can do A2/A1/A0 too.
Well if it has a FLOPS rating I'm guessing my microwave, dishwasher, washing machine, TV, car and well.... pretty much any other part of modern equipment I own is a computer. You might say general purpose computer but then you'd probably argue when or if they've crossed that line. If you don't got root, is it just a very flexible appliance? You probably have to nail down the definition first and when you've done that you'll probably figure out it's changed because language isn't static. I'd wager that 99% of the time if I said "I'll check that on my computer" the reply would be "Don't you have your phone on you?", as in the phone is not recognized as such. Laptop is a type of computer, desktop is a type of computer, workstation is a type of computer, server is a type of computer... phone? Not in ordinary English.
Now Intel and what we call the PC isn't going to die, but be used more towards workstation and server jobs. There is plenty of business opportunity and long term growth in these markets. As long as Microsoft and Intel don't try to bring back the good old days of dominance again.
WinTel hasn't exactly given up the business desktop or the gaming desktop just yet. I think it'll be a long while before they retreat into the workstation/server market.
drop out to land a regular job -> that says "I can't be bothered to finish my formal education (the reason itself is unimportant, though some people have legitimately good reasons for dropping out) and now I want to come work for you" (most sensible hiring managers would look at that and ask "well, what else are you going to leave only half done?")
Depends on the type of job... a lot of hiring managers are trying to avoid people with too much education / experience / ambitions who'll jump ship as soon as the opportunity arises. If you've kinda hit your ceiling already I think you can convince a manager you want a decent job and steady paycheck that's not rocket science and usually they have some work like that. But then you're not really the kind of person you'd see in start-ups or high-end positions, more the kind of guy who knows how to make the TPS reports at a major company. There's a procedure, you learn it, you follow it and that's your job.
Well, if it was exactly like home, why would you go there?
Well, good point. But you're in an airtight suit so you can't really feel it and you can't go hiking very far, surviving even a single night outside would be very complicated in terms of oxygen and temperature. Mars is barren, there's no vegetation or animals so apart from the sunlight there are no seasons just dust and rocks that look just the same day in and day out. There's no precipitation of any kind, no running water. There's not even any wind, at least not any stronger than that it barely wipes dust off the solar panels. No, that was just a movie. It's alien, but it also looks incredibly dull if you're going to look at it every day for years. Even in Sahara or Antarctica there's more action than on Mars.
But once they can relyably reuse their rockets on a regular basis, price to orbit will drop by orders of magnitude and change humanities entire perspective on space travel, Neuromancer style. SpaceX could easily become the most valuable company ever on an entirely new scale.
Orders of magnitude? No. Musk said fuel is currently about 3% of total launch cost. One order of magnitude would make that 30%, two orders would be 300%. Unless you can work magic in fuel efficiency and do the rest for free, not happening. Even with Musk's most generous long time full reuse scenario (where a booster has 1000 launches, tanker 100 and the spaceship 12 and the refurb costs are minimal like <0.1% on the booster and <1% on the tanker) he's estimating $140/kg to Mars surface. Until you got a working fuel production plant on Mars so the spaceship can return - a highly theoretical idea at the moment - then $520/kg. And I'm pretty sure that doesn't include development costs, this is purely marginal costs but let's ignore those.
So for a person ~$50k minimum ticket price, of course that doesn't include air, water, food, heating, shielding or anything else you'd need on a months-long trip through space. Or anything you'd need to survive on Mars a couple years, if not you personally then all the people working there maintaining the base and supporting you. I'm thinking $200k at least. So after being stuck in a tin can for months you're stuck in a slightly bigger dome for 2.5 years and even though you can go outside it's not exactly like home. Then some more months in a tin can before you land back on earth and discover your muscles haven't tried 1G for almost three years. And unlike a submarine that can actually abort and surface if they have to, that's not an option here.
I think the novelty of it will wear off real quick and after three years you'll feel more like a supermax prisoner that's finally out of jail than anyone who has had the experience of a lifetime. That is unless there's any system failure of any kind along the way where you'll most likely end up dead. Don't get me wrong, the first to go will be super-celebrities and all that so that will be cool. But when you're like the 834th person on Mars, eh... and it's not like you're climbing Mount Everest or something, you're probably doing routine maintenance most the time. I should probably also remind you that nobody has come up with any commercially viable business on Mars - at best it's reducing the costs so Earth won't have to pay as much to support a Mars outpost. It still takes political will to fund it, cost-plus or fixed price.
Or maybe I should put this in a TL;DR form: Even if Musk achieves everything he wants to do, most space sci-fi will remain fiction.
Gattaca predicted that we'd be able to read more in to the results of a genetic test than we currently can, but it may still happen. It also predicted that genetic testing would be cheap and easy for corporations to do.
Well I don't know about corporations, but I think we're nearing the point where it ought to be a no-brainer for medicine. Your DNA doesn't change, that means if we sequence a newborn today it's good for ~80 years of treatments and 80 years of accumulating knowledge and the cost is now around $1000. So like $12.50 a year to know your current and future risk factors, even if it's almost useless the amortized cost is trivial. Of course that's assuming we stick this result in a database somewhere... a lot of people aren't not going to be happy about that. There's got to be a lot of info in there though on what nature has given us...
Your memory is short, Athlon 64 was released in 2004 and really put Intel's feet to the flame for several years.
Intel had been losing ever since the original Athlon (mid-99) vs the Pentium IV (nov 2000) and Athlon 64 (sept 2003) was really killing it, but only until Intel Core (jan 2006). So who was killing who is almost split 50-50, first half AMD was killing Intel and last half Intel was killing AMD. Though in retrospect AMD pretty much killed themselves by buying ATI, if they had another $5.4 billion in their war chest they'd have pulled off a better response than Bulldozer. And if Intel had bought ATI which was the rumor then they'd make partners with nVidia, instead they forced it to a showdown of AMD/ATI vs Intel/nVidia.
On the bright side, despite 11 years of losses and selling off pretty much everything that isn't nailed down and low-balling the offer to get the console volume to stay afloat it looks like with Intel is finally running into the brick wall on 10nm so that AMD can make a comeback. Despite many parts of the enterprise market being conservative I think there are also many that need cheap nodes who don't mind if some go out of service aching for AMD to create better bang for the buck.
They had a partially working prototype, but an inability to push it into a final product. There was also a bunch of managerial incompetence. It's interesting that the prototype that worked best was loaded with Open Source software to do the major work. It was only when the lead software "engineer" scapped it all to rewrite it himself that the product really started falling apart.
That's a very generous reading of the facts. The early prototypes crashed and veered off course and the most positive thing said was "Finally, it hovered anxiously and, according to the review, took a handful of photographs." and also "He emphasized that the initial Lily drone models were built with ready-made parts that weren't customized for the special features the team had envisioned." As for the quality "Mostly, the source said, the color was off and some shots were blurry." and "In terms of the final edit, I'm not sure there's any Lily footage,".
I doubt there's a ready made open source product to operate a flying drone, they hobbled together something was maybe 1% of what they'd promised. That was the concept, use off-the-shelf hardware/software to get the prototype and hype going, then create custom hardware/software to actually deliver. It takes a very special reading to believe that abandoning open source was their downfall. To me this sounds like a basic case of promising the moon and finding out that actually making it works is 10x as much effort and costs 10x as much as you thought it would be.
That's pretty jerkish to all the victims who lost money to those thieves.
Well, these people aren't straight up scammers. It sounds like they actually thought that they were going to deliver and that the money they got from preorders were actually blown trying to create what they had sold. What they were short on is the appropriate legal disclaimers saying this is a product under development, it's a concept video that may not reflect the final product's features or quality and whatnot, all product specifications subject to change. I'm sure they'd get 90% of the suckers even with the small print, but pushed it a little too far and went from shady to shyster.
Where they are starting to mess this up is with four, FOUR, different video modes.
Not really. Thunderbolt is external PCIe with DisplayPort as an alternate video mode, it's an alternative to USB data signaling not video. MHL is essentially HDMI squished to use fewer connectors + power supply, if you got USB-C out you have enough connectors for full HDMI and all MHL receptors are also HDMI ports. The problem is that if you use HDMI mode you don't get the power supply, the only way to get that from a USB-C device connected to a MHL-enabled TV is to fake MHL. That problem goes away if you got a USB-C receptor that can talk USBs power delivery standard.
So really you have: USB data - suitable for "devices" like printers, scanners, headsets, keyboard, mouse etc. PCIe data - suitable for "extensions" like external GPUs, storage arrays etc. that could have been on the inside. DisplayPort video HDMI video Bi-directional power delivery with negotiation of capabilities
Thunderbolt = PCIe data + DisplayPort MHL = HDMI(-ish) + power
The only real redundancy there that is not there for compatibility reasons is DisplayPort and HDMI. As long as TVs mainly come with HDMI and monitors mainly with DisplayPort with no clear winner in sight that's probably not too stupid. In fact PCIe, DP and HDMI are now bundled in TB3 so in practice you have only two ports:
TB3: All of the above USB3: USB data + power
using one connector, USB-C. You still have five support levels though, USB speed level, PCIe speed level, DP level, HDMI level, power level. It's hard to be everything for everyone...
You're wrong, for the simple fact that most times it's better if something works in a degraded mode than not at all. Like if I charge a device or transfer a file it's better that it works and that I get a software warning that things aren't working optimally. Sometimes there's a hard minimum, like I depend on USB power to operate and you can't supply it or that it doesn't support what you want it to do but that's the exception. We could color code all ports and cables with a ring of capabilities, like if your source port, cable and destination port all have a blue or green or yellow segment you're good. That still wouldn't tell you if you're getting the best possible result. And even if we marked that specifically, it still wouldn't tell you that a USB 3.1 5 Gbps port is better than USB 2.0 even though the ideal would be USB 3.2 20 Gbps, for that you need a scale.
And you're trying to convey all this information on phones, tablets and ultra-portables that are a few mm thick and trying to look stylish too. That very often have just the one port, there's no plugging it wrong. The rest of the time the manufacturer has usually given you a hint of what port does what. The only time you have to care is when purchasing, like are these products supposed to work together well or at all? Maybe there ought to be a central compatibility database operated by the USB consortium, where you pick device A, pick device B and it'll tell you if they're compatible. Maybe with a hub in the middle too. But I have the feeling the kind of people you're talking about are those who wouldn't check anyway.
Your business model is dying. The sooner you become an IPTV on-demand gateway for content distributors, the better. Otherwise, the Roku boxes of the world will do it for you.
Well they could, but what value would they add? Of course the streaming platform has to actually work, but other than that it's not music where you have playlists and sharing and artists hoping to be discovered on Spotify. If I want to see a 30+ minute show I can be arsed to log in to whatever service has it, whether it's Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBO or their own portal. The production companies and movie studios are no small fish either, they're perfectly capable of doing it on their own. There's not much money in being the middleman if you got plenty competition.
You're assuming everybody starts out like some super-secret agent. If you're trying to recruit people to join your cause, you need feelers out there to find possible sympathizers. Even if you do the real talking offline, you've probably been in contact via phone or chat before that if nothing else then just to agree where and when to meet. It's metadata about who you have talked to. You make people afraid to say the wrong things. You make people afraid to agree with those who say it. You make the process slow and tedious. You make any act of rebellion be a small spark that'll fizzle. The Chinese government is too big to care about one lone wolf here and one wolf there. They just don't want anything big and organized and this is to pour sand in the machinery.
Quite aside from the price of the extra equipment. India is still the place that wants and needs to build sub-$6000 vehicles. There's not a lot of room in that budget for servos and sensors.
And the labor costs are very low, so the savings are small. They're basically last in line and talking as if it was coming any day now.
High speed rail require a much higher population than an airport and the terrain can drive the costs nuts. Here in Norway there's 42 official commercial airports, one high speed rail line and it's only from the capital to the capital's airport. They did a survey to see what it would take to hook up our four biggest cities and it was a ridiculous number of billions, lots of tunnels and bridges get the curvature required, securing everything from landslides, floods and avalanches not to mention the maintenance cost. And even if we got a HSR line to the capital, it would remove exactly one flight route, granted a popular one but the nice thing about airports that once they're in place to sustain a route it only needs enough passengers for that airplane, unlike rail where every new route is a massive cost.
Intel's problem is that they have already cut their losses and ran from the invasion of phone/tablet products. It's the 11th straight quarter of declining PC shipments. Meanwhile smartphone sales are up again now outselling PCs at a rate well over 5:1. Tablet sales are also down (Q1 numbers) so you might say Microsoft has managed to shore up the convertible/laptop market with the Surface line, but WinTel is completely on the sidelines in the global smartphone revolution. According to the platform statistics 53% of all Internet access is now mobile, 42% PC, 5% tablets.
Intel is not in trouble, they have the server market and so far AMD's offering is basically a return to competition, it's a long way to go until Intel is on the ropes fighting for survival. But they and Microsoft completely failed to bring out a good x86 smartphone leveraging the tons of existing win32 code, I don't know why. I mean all the alarm bells should have gone off when the iPhone became a success in 2007, even with 3-4 years development time they should be ready to kick ass around 2011 but instead we got the Nokia flop. Considering the power of phones relative to typical office applications I'm kinda waiting for the phone with a cheap dock that gives you charging, display, keyboard, mouse, a chromebook-like UI and a bluetooth headset in case you need to answer the phone while docked. Like if you already have a phone and a TV, add these accessories and you won't need a laptop.
Agree. There many environments where one cannot install apps from the Windows Store even if it is free. I use Windows Paint quite regularly for work.
On the bright side, maybe this will make organizations include something better than MS Paint in the default desktop image. Together with Powerpoint (or Visio if available) I can usually abuse it to do what I want, but for some things something like Paint.NET would be much better. I don't expect Photoshop on every desktop but it's so extremely rudimentary, I think the only things it does well is:
1. Crop screenshots 2. Add filled black boxes to censor sensitive data 3. Add red boxes to point to the error/discrepancy 4. Add simple paint-by-numbers, click here then here
Even drawing an arrow from somewhere to somewhere is crap, I usually just do it crayon-style like a 5yo. And it's always destructive editing, no layers you can flatten when you're happy with it or keep for later adjustments. So it's for simple internal one-offs only, I feel like I'm back in the stone age with hammer and chisel when I use it.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Brexiteers either haven't figured this out or are in denials. Want to go to Spain? You'll need a visa. France? Visa. Ireland? Well, if you are travelling overland a visa and an amoured car.
In theory they don't need to issue visas at all and the English channel is a better wall than Trump could ever make. In practice this is just the kind of scare-mongering that led to the Brexit vote, trying to act like the UK has no choice in the matter or that all hell would rain down on them if they did. I just checked here in Norway and I can go to 127 countries around the world without a visa, at least for vacations shorter than a month. It's a standard courtesy offered by most friendly nations and all that want to encourage tourism.
If the EU refused this to the UK, their neighbor and former union member it would have all the telltale marks of a vindictive divorce that would cast a very long and dark shadow over the EU. While it is the UK that wanted to part ways it's not like they started a war or anything, despite the political positioning I doubt the EU will act like the psycho ex. Obviously the UK won't get to pick and choose the parts of the EU agreement they liked, but to think that the EU wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire is nonsense.
- DNS needs a redo, that's for sure. Whom am I paying 2 Euros a month just for an entry anyway? Namecoin uses the blockchain for naming, and that is the way to go. A state-of-the-art DNS replacement would use that and some central registration authority where you can get a batch of tokens to register/claim the domains of your choosing and be done with it once and for all.
So when someone steals the keys for google.com then...?
- E-Mail. Well, being just about the oldest service ever and still in existance. It shows at every corner. Replacement desperately needed. Default built-in hard crypto signing
With what keys? And what happens when they lose the key?
- Web needs a redo.
Actually I want more web, less apps. The pendulum is swinging towards only certain platforms being usable again, only this time it's iOS and Android instead of Windows and Mac.
- Offline. (...) Ok, we have (had) Usenet and E-Mail, but Web? Not really.
Local applications is what we had before the web. The lack of local code is why we migrated to the web. You want to redo the web to not be a web.
Half of the trouble we face today with the internet doesn't require a new *physical* network. We need instead to prefer standard protocols, and stop centralizing information with big companies. That means run your email address from your own domain instead of using gmail for everything. Don't use Facebook to login to everything. Share pictures with friends over email. Put your public thoughts on your own blog instead of tweeting them. If people are interested in following you, they will use your RSS or Atom feed. Everything these big companies are doing to mine your data and overwhelm you with useless information are inferior (but more convenient!) replacements for the standard decentralized protocols we already had.
So by inferior you mean superior (but more centralized)? I've used email, IRC, newsgroups etc. and one of the problems is that because it was a standard protocol it's usually stuck at the state of the art from when it was created and can barely move because an ungodly number of clients and users will never support anything but the 1.0 features. There will be someone doing plain-text email because HTML is the work of the devil. One of the biggest advantages of Facebook is that there are no versions of Facebook, they upgrade and for better or worse everyone's got it. The second most powerful ability they have is that when someone is trying to overrun it with spam and bots and flooding attacks there's someone in power to stop the barrage and clean up the mess. I can't count the number of places that used to be good and then got trashed.
Perhaps the third most important thing is that most people still don't have a 24x7 redundant system with backups and enough bandwidth to deal with everything and they're not willing to pay for hosting nor do they want the administration, many people want a "free" ad supported service and it has to integrate well with people who'd like to self-host everything and loathe ads with a passion. Particularly this is true so you can have a single login to view/comment/like/vote on your friends/family/coworkers' posts, otherwise you'll be back to why a lot of people quit their public blog to use Facebook. It's a convenient way to share things with a lot of people but not the world. The last really sticky point is loss of passwords and loss of control, honestly most people shouldn't be entrusted with the root keys to anything.
I think the first one is mostly solvable by using modern web app technology, you can have new features without the client being upgraded specifically to support it. The spam maybe, if you carefully design it so that you have a plug-in structure to support different CAPTCHAs, invite links, answering user-supplied questions etc. The third one is tough, I don't think you can convert the world. There has to be an easier way and then you're like a Facebook wannabe without users and with very little revenue to support it, dealing with all the bots, DMCA takedowns, police requests, fake profiles, COPPA and whatnot. It's probably going to burn money. And the last one is hell, people will get hacked. People will lose their user credentials, admin credentials, root keys, have their accounts hacked, identities stolen etc. and you will end up dealing with it somehow.
Sorry, forgot to also mention the corresponding "different, but similar" operator: ~=!=~
Oh god I know who built this "same same but different" language, it's the guys selling Rollex watches on the beach. Explains a lot...
However, at base, the government shouldn't have an interest in providing internet access to citizens. It's not a fundamental need (despite what city folk think would happen to their lives if they were without net access for more than an hour).
Where my mother grew up doesn't have running water, much less hot and cold water nor a phone line. It has electricity but I'm sure if you could ask her parents or grandparents they'd say electricity wasn't a fundamental need either. The concept evolves, I'd say any place without internet access lacks fundamental needs in the 21st century. Fortunately there's very few places you got absolutely no mobile/radio/satellite link. Is broadband a fundamental need? Eh, I think that's a much more questionable concept to sell.
It also depends on how much other services are shut down, like when we bought our cabin a few decades ago there was a payphone. There were many thousands of them, because cabins and such rarely had phones and cell phones were in their infancy. Today you only find a few at the airport and big transport hubs, for 99.99% of the use cases you're expected to have a cell phone and the payphones are in museums. If you don't have one, you're actually more crippled now than in the 80s. So if society starts to assume you have broadband, then it might become a fundamental need.
Of course I don't think it's necessary to be a need, which means everyone should get it is required for the government to say it would be preferable and have some sort of fund for that.
Why don't you RTFSummary?
The apps, which made their way onto about 100 phones, exploited known vulnerabilities to root devices running older versions of Android....
Everything you said made sense. And yet I fear the world where any company will roll over and submit the moment the government wants something. A lot of modern rule of law is based on the assumption that a private entity like say your phone company has records and the government needs a warrant to see it. Whether that system is officially broken like in China or unofficially broken like with the NSA in the US, it's getting to the point where you should just assume any information given to any organization for any reason whatsoever is stored and passed to the government willingly or unwillingly. And since most of us have embraced civilization and is dependent on trade to survive it's pretty hard to avoid. It's depressing.
Even in a modestly large group somebody will always be unhappy, but since opinions are like assholes meaning everybody's got one I'll share mine - the opinion that is, the rest I leave for the goatse.cx guy. The articles here have always sucked donkey balls, they're an untimely mess from an odd selection of subjects and done better by many other sites. The value has always been the discussion, which means the valuable articles have been those who create an interesting discussion. Sometimes there's been very nerdy articles that just doesn't leave much to discuss. Other times it's been soap opera drama that - if you take one step back - is like who gives a shit.
The best articles IMHO are those about some sort of tech/sci advance that sets off a discussion about the subject/implications. Like, SpaceX can land a rocket but I can read that in a thousand places. What will that mean for the future of space travel? That's what is interesting to discuss. Probably second most interesting are the legal subjects, usually because we have a good understanding of the practical feasibility or consequences of implementing the law. Or sometimes how the absence of law lets technology accumulate information and erode their privacy. Of course that could get very narrow and repetitive, like the 1000th time refueling the BSD vs GPL flame war.
I remember us talking about Bush in 2001, so there's politics, so Trump is not new to the mix. There was point releases of the Linux kernel, though of course they usually turned into YotLD discussions. I remember /.'s best headline as "Lance Bass to Continue to Plague Earth's Surface" which ultimately is about a boy band artist's ego trip and not really "news for nerds" at all. It was always kinda CmdrTaco's random blog with comments, it's hard to pin it down. But it was mostly nerdy things that even if they weren't your kind of nerd it felt like they could have been. If anything I'd say it lost that randomness and got too driven by certain submitters' repetitive agendas, like this is the 10th Bitcoin or SJW propaganda this week. Shit got old, discussions were rehashed, many people left.
And call me when they get it down to $1K.
And call me when I can't get the product I want cheaper off one of the owners on eBay. Seriously, this reminds me of someone trying to make the business case that I should buy a gym at home. I don't have the space and it would be idle 99.9% of the time. Seriously, some of these machines I spend like 5 minutes exercising (1m series-1m break-1m series-1m break-1m series-done) that I might do once a week. I'd rather just pay for a gym membership. Even if I have a custom design job unless I need it very often and/or very quickly - though 3D printers are far from instant - I'd just upload the blueprint.
I see this a lot on /. like trying to push ideas that I think if it made sense someone would do it on an industrial scale. Like for example solar power and energy storage, if solar panels and batteries "makes sense" then why not a huge array of them. Not 5 sqm on my roof and a battery in my basement. If that makes sense there must be some pretty fucked up incentives to do it that'll probably go away. Heck, I can't even print an A3 picture at home even though it's obviously available at home. It's just cheaper to go to a print shop when I have the need and they can do A2/A1/A0 too.
Well if it has a FLOPS rating I'm guessing my microwave, dishwasher, washing machine, TV, car and well.... pretty much any other part of modern equipment I own is a computer. You might say general purpose computer but then you'd probably argue when or if they've crossed that line. If you don't got root, is it just a very flexible appliance? You probably have to nail down the definition first and when you've done that you'll probably figure out it's changed because language isn't static. I'd wager that 99% of the time if I said "I'll check that on my computer" the reply would be "Don't you have your phone on you?", as in the phone is not recognized as such. Laptop is a type of computer, desktop is a type of computer, workstation is a type of computer, server is a type of computer... phone? Not in ordinary English.
Now Intel and what we call the PC isn't going to die, but be used more towards workstation and server jobs. There is plenty of business opportunity and long term growth in these markets. As long as Microsoft and Intel don't try to bring back the good old days of dominance again.
WinTel hasn't exactly given up the business desktop or the gaming desktop just yet. I think it'll be a long while before they retreat into the workstation/server market.
drop out to land a regular job -> that says "I can't be bothered to finish my formal education (the reason itself is unimportant, though some people have legitimately good reasons for dropping out) and now I want to come work for you" (most sensible hiring managers would look at that and ask "well, what else are you going to leave only half done?")
Depends on the type of job... a lot of hiring managers are trying to avoid people with too much education / experience / ambitions who'll jump ship as soon as the opportunity arises. If you've kinda hit your ceiling already I think you can convince a manager you want a decent job and steady paycheck that's not rocket science and usually they have some work like that. But then you're not really the kind of person you'd see in start-ups or high-end positions, more the kind of guy who knows how to make the TPS reports at a major company. There's a procedure, you learn it, you follow it and that's your job.
Well, if it was exactly like home, why would you go there?
Well, good point. But you're in an airtight suit so you can't really feel it and you can't go hiking very far, surviving even a single night outside would be very complicated in terms of oxygen and temperature. Mars is barren, there's no vegetation or animals so apart from the sunlight there are no seasons just dust and rocks that look just the same day in and day out. There's no precipitation of any kind, no running water. There's not even any wind, at least not any stronger than that it barely wipes dust off the solar panels. No, that was just a movie. It's alien, but it also looks incredibly dull if you're going to look at it every day for years. Even in Sahara or Antarctica there's more action than on Mars.
But once they can relyably reuse their rockets on a regular basis, price to orbit will drop by orders of magnitude and change humanities entire perspective on space travel, Neuromancer style. SpaceX could easily become the most valuable company ever on an entirely new scale.
Orders of magnitude? No. Musk said fuel is currently about 3% of total launch cost. One order of magnitude would make that 30%, two orders would be 300%. Unless you can work magic in fuel efficiency and do the rest for free, not happening. Even with Musk's most generous long time full reuse scenario (where a booster has 1000 launches, tanker 100 and the spaceship 12 and the refurb costs are minimal like <0.1% on the booster and <1% on the tanker) he's estimating $140/kg to Mars surface. Until you got a working fuel production plant on Mars so the spaceship can return - a highly theoretical idea at the moment - then $520/kg. And I'm pretty sure that doesn't include development costs, this is purely marginal costs but let's ignore those.
So for a person ~$50k minimum ticket price, of course that doesn't include air, water, food, heating, shielding or anything else you'd need on a months-long trip through space. Or anything you'd need to survive on Mars a couple years, if not you personally then all the people working there maintaining the base and supporting you. I'm thinking $200k at least. So after being stuck in a tin can for months you're stuck in a slightly bigger dome for 2.5 years and even though you can go outside it's not exactly like home. Then some more months in a tin can before you land back on earth and discover your muscles haven't tried 1G for almost three years. And unlike a submarine that can actually abort and surface if they have to, that's not an option here.
I think the novelty of it will wear off real quick and after three years you'll feel more like a supermax prisoner that's finally out of jail than anyone who has had the experience of a lifetime. That is unless there's any system failure of any kind along the way where you'll most likely end up dead. Don't get me wrong, the first to go will be super-celebrities and all that so that will be cool. But when you're like the 834th person on Mars, eh... and it's not like you're climbing Mount Everest or something, you're probably doing routine maintenance most the time. I should probably also remind you that nobody has come up with any commercially viable business on Mars - at best it's reducing the costs so Earth won't have to pay as much to support a Mars outpost. It still takes political will to fund it, cost-plus or fixed price.
Or maybe I should put this in a TL;DR form: Even if Musk achieves everything he wants to do, most space sci-fi will remain fiction.
Gattaca predicted that we'd be able to read more in to the results of a genetic test than we currently can, but it may still happen. It also predicted that genetic testing would be cheap and easy for corporations to do.
Well I don't know about corporations, but I think we're nearing the point where it ought to be a no-brainer for medicine. Your DNA doesn't change, that means if we sequence a newborn today it's good for ~80 years of treatments and 80 years of accumulating knowledge and the cost is now around $1000. So like $12.50 a year to know your current and future risk factors, even if it's almost useless the amortized cost is trivial. Of course that's assuming we stick this result in a database somewhere... a lot of people aren't not going to be happy about that. There's got to be a lot of info in there though on what nature has given us...
Your memory is short, Athlon 64 was released in 2004 and really put Intel's feet to the flame for several years.
Intel had been losing ever since the original Athlon (mid-99) vs the Pentium IV (nov 2000) and Athlon 64 (sept 2003) was really killing it, but only until Intel Core (jan 2006). So who was killing who is almost split 50-50, first half AMD was killing Intel and last half Intel was killing AMD. Though in retrospect AMD pretty much killed themselves by buying ATI, if they had another $5.4 billion in their war chest they'd have pulled off a better response than Bulldozer. And if Intel had bought ATI which was the rumor then they'd make partners with nVidia, instead they forced it to a showdown of AMD/ATI vs Intel/nVidia.
On the bright side, despite 11 years of losses and selling off pretty much everything that isn't nailed down and low-balling the offer to get the console volume to stay afloat it looks like with Intel is finally running into the brick wall on 10nm so that AMD can make a comeback. Despite many parts of the enterprise market being conservative I think there are also many that need cheap nodes who don't mind if some go out of service aching for AMD to create better bang for the buck.
They had a partially working prototype, but an inability to push it into a final product. There was also a bunch of managerial incompetence. It's interesting that the prototype that worked best was loaded with Open Source software to do the major work. It was only when the lead software "engineer" scapped it all to rewrite it himself that the product really started falling apart.
That's a very generous reading of the facts. The early prototypes crashed and veered off course and the most positive thing said was "Finally, it hovered anxiously and, according to the review, took a handful of photographs." and also "He emphasized that the initial Lily drone models were built with ready-made parts that weren't customized for the special features the team had envisioned." As for the quality "Mostly, the source said, the color was off and some shots were blurry." and "In terms of the final edit, I'm not sure there's any Lily footage,".
I doubt there's a ready made open source product to operate a flying drone, they hobbled together something was maybe 1% of what they'd promised. That was the concept, use off-the-shelf hardware/software to get the prototype and hype going, then create custom hardware/software to actually deliver. It takes a very special reading to believe that abandoning open source was their downfall. To me this sounds like a basic case of promising the moon and finding out that actually making it works is 10x as much effort and costs 10x as much as you thought it would be.
That's pretty jerkish to all the victims who lost money to those thieves.
Well, these people aren't straight up scammers. It sounds like they actually thought that they were going to deliver and that the money they got from preorders were actually blown trying to create what they had sold. What they were short on is the appropriate legal disclaimers saying this is a product under development, it's a concept video that may not reflect the final product's features or quality and whatnot, all product specifications subject to change. I'm sure they'd get 90% of the suckers even with the small print, but pushed it a little too far and went from shady to shyster.
Where they are starting to mess this up is with four, FOUR, different video modes.
Not really. Thunderbolt is external PCIe with DisplayPort as an alternate video mode, it's an alternative to USB data signaling not video. MHL is essentially HDMI squished to use fewer connectors + power supply, if you got USB-C out you have enough connectors for full HDMI and all MHL receptors are also HDMI ports. The problem is that if you use HDMI mode you don't get the power supply, the only way to get that from a USB-C device connected to a MHL-enabled TV is to fake MHL. That problem goes away if you got a USB-C receptor that can talk USBs power delivery standard.
So really you have:
USB data - suitable for "devices" like printers, scanners, headsets, keyboard, mouse etc.
PCIe data - suitable for "extensions" like external GPUs, storage arrays etc. that could have been on the inside.
DisplayPort video
HDMI video
Bi-directional power delivery with negotiation of capabilities
Thunderbolt = PCIe data + DisplayPort
MHL = HDMI(-ish) + power
The only real redundancy there that is not there for compatibility reasons is DisplayPort and HDMI. As long as TVs mainly come with HDMI and monitors mainly with DisplayPort with no clear winner in sight that's probably not too stupid. In fact PCIe, DP and HDMI are now bundled in TB3 so in practice you have only two ports:
TB3: All of the above
USB3: USB data + power
using one connector, USB-C. You still have five support levels though, USB speed level, PCIe speed level, DP level, HDMI level, power level. It's hard to be everything for everyone...
You're wrong, for the simple fact that most times it's better if something works in a degraded mode than not at all. Like if I charge a device or transfer a file it's better that it works and that I get a software warning that things aren't working optimally. Sometimes there's a hard minimum, like I depend on USB power to operate and you can't supply it or that it doesn't support what you want it to do but that's the exception. We could color code all ports and cables with a ring of capabilities, like if your source port, cable and destination port all have a blue or green or yellow segment you're good. That still wouldn't tell you if you're getting the best possible result. And even if we marked that specifically, it still wouldn't tell you that a USB 3.1 5 Gbps port is better than USB 2.0 even though the ideal would be USB 3.2 20 Gbps, for that you need a scale.
And you're trying to convey all this information on phones, tablets and ultra-portables that are a few mm thick and trying to look stylish too. That very often have just the one port, there's no plugging it wrong. The rest of the time the manufacturer has usually given you a hint of what port does what. The only time you have to care is when purchasing, like are these products supposed to work together well or at all? Maybe there ought to be a central compatibility database operated by the USB consortium, where you pick device A, pick device B and it'll tell you if they're compatible. Maybe with a hub in the middle too. But I have the feeling the kind of people you're talking about are those who wouldn't check anyway.
Your business model is dying. The sooner you become an IPTV on-demand gateway for content distributors, the better. Otherwise, the Roku boxes of the world will do it for you.
Well they could, but what value would they add? Of course the streaming platform has to actually work, but other than that it's not music where you have playlists and sharing and artists hoping to be discovered on Spotify. If I want to see a 30+ minute show I can be arsed to log in to whatever service has it, whether it's Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBO or their own portal. The production companies and movie studios are no small fish either, they're perfectly capable of doing it on their own. There's not much money in being the middleman if you got plenty competition.
You're assuming everybody starts out like some super-secret agent. If you're trying to recruit people to join your cause, you need feelers out there to find possible sympathizers. Even if you do the real talking offline, you've probably been in contact via phone or chat before that if nothing else then just to agree where and when to meet. It's metadata about who you have talked to. You make people afraid to say the wrong things. You make people afraid to agree with those who say it. You make the process slow and tedious. You make any act of rebellion be a small spark that'll fizzle. The Chinese government is too big to care about one lone wolf here and one wolf there. They just don't want anything big and organized and this is to pour sand in the machinery.
Quite aside from the price of the extra equipment. India is still the place that wants and needs to build sub-$6000 vehicles. There's not a lot of room in that budget for servos and sensors.
And the labor costs are very low, so the savings are small. They're basically last in line and talking as if it was coming any day now.
High speed rail require a much higher population than an airport and the terrain can drive the costs nuts. Here in Norway there's 42 official commercial airports, one high speed rail line and it's only from the capital to the capital's airport. They did a survey to see what it would take to hook up our four biggest cities and it was a ridiculous number of billions, lots of tunnels and bridges get the curvature required, securing everything from landslides, floods and avalanches not to mention the maintenance cost. And even if we got a HSR line to the capital, it would remove exactly one flight route, granted a popular one but the nice thing about airports that once they're in place to sustain a route it only needs enough passengers for that airplane, unlike rail where every new route is a massive cost.
Intel's problem is that they have already cut their losses and ran from the invasion of phone/tablet products. It's the 11th straight quarter of declining PC shipments. Meanwhile smartphone sales are up again now outselling PCs at a rate well over 5:1. Tablet sales are also down (Q1 numbers) so you might say Microsoft has managed to shore up the convertible/laptop market with the Surface line, but WinTel is completely on the sidelines in the global smartphone revolution. According to the platform statistics 53% of all Internet access is now mobile, 42% PC, 5% tablets.
Intel is not in trouble, they have the server market and so far AMD's offering is basically a return to competition, it's a long way to go until Intel is on the ropes fighting for survival. But they and Microsoft completely failed to bring out a good x86 smartphone leveraging the tons of existing win32 code, I don't know why. I mean all the alarm bells should have gone off when the iPhone became a success in 2007, even with 3-4 years development time they should be ready to kick ass around 2011 but instead we got the Nokia flop. Considering the power of phones relative to typical office applications I'm kinda waiting for the phone with a cheap dock that gives you charging, display, keyboard, mouse, a chromebook-like UI and a bluetooth headset in case you need to answer the phone while docked. Like if you already have a phone and a TV, add these accessories and you won't need a laptop.
Agree. There many environments where one cannot install apps from the Windows Store even if it is free. I use Windows Paint quite regularly for work.
On the bright side, maybe this will make organizations include something better than MS Paint in the default desktop image. Together with Powerpoint (or Visio if available) I can usually abuse it to do what I want, but for some things something like Paint.NET would be much better. I don't expect Photoshop on every desktop but it's so extremely rudimentary, I think the only things it does well is:
1. Crop screenshots
2. Add filled black boxes to censor sensitive data
3. Add red boxes to point to the error/discrepancy
4. Add simple paint-by-numbers, click here then here
Even drawing an arrow from somewhere to somewhere is crap, I usually just do it crayon-style like a 5yo. And it's always destructive editing, no layers you can flatten when you're happy with it or keep for later adjustments. So it's for simple internal one-offs only, I feel like I'm back in the stone age with hammer and chisel when I use it.