While what you said is true, it's also irrelevant. Nothing suggests they got a license from Facebook, if you do something newsworthy on your totally own, self-hosted blog it can be reported on the news. So if you have a problem with this story, go see Congress. There's nothing Facebook could have done to prevent this use of the content, even if the wanted to.
As far as PC games go, Microsoft Windows dominates although if you go to Steam and look at the number of games available for Linux and SteamOS there are over 5,000 and some are AAA. Good luck finding the time to play them all.
And yet the trend is backwards towards less Linux users... Linux used to have something like 1% when SteamOS was being hyped, today it's at 0.8%. You keep talking it up, I'm telling you users aren't buying it.
In the motherboard BIOS there is an option for "Other OS" and I initially installed Fedora 24 (now 25) on the Z170 (takes Sky Lake) without any problems so I don't forsee any issues with the motherboards for Ryzen (when it comes out) or Kaby Lake which has the same LGA 1151 socket as Sky lake and will run on Z170, H170, B150 and H110 series motherboards
Well except that AMD has explicitly said there won't be any chipset drivers for Ryzen on Win7. That Kaby Lake is supported is more of an accident because it's so similar to Skylake and even Skylake support was only after a business uproar against Microsoft.
The majority of people will not upgrade to Windows 10 unless Microsoft use the same tactics when they made the OS a free upgrade if you had a legitimate copy of Windows 7 or Widows 8.1. If you wish to upgrade now you have to pay for Windows 10 and most people will not do that unless they replace their PC which in the majority of cases the new PC will come with Windows 10 as the default OS.
In other words they will move to Windows 10 one way or the other. Who cares if they don't upgrade? It means they still use Windows software and when their Windows box finally dies they'll get a new one. That's what I said, the total number of Windows users is flat. A WinXP/Vista/7/8 user disappears, a Win10 user appears and hardly any new Mac/Linux users.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Seriously though, I wish them the best of luck but I hate corporate entities without any clear ownership. Product owner, system owner, process owner, project owner, customer owner (key account manager), it doesn't have to be a dictatorship but someone you can point to and say "Hey you, this is your responsibility and I need a change/decision". And it's their job to take input from whoever should give input, get approval from whoever should give approval and overall facilitate the process to make it happen. Otherwise it'll always end up with you stepping on somebody's toes and screwing it up for them or they don't know your needs and screw it up for you. Not to mention you'll have some continuity so you don't end up explaining and rehashing the same issues over and over again, like having a fixed support contact instead of a random help desk worker.
Having a democratic and consensus based process doesn't eliminate the need for someone to drive that process. Development, Ops, Finance, HR, Marketing, Sales and so on somebody needs to make sure they're all pulling in roughly the same direction. And it sounds like they haven't had their first big conflict yet, most people try to find solutions on their own. You escalate when their conflict and at some point you need a referee to make the call to move on. If you end up with competing factions because nobody has the authority to settle it and move on they'll likely fail fast. Look at Nokia for example, apart from Elop they also had way too many competing platforms and nobody to cut through and decide on one good customer experience everyone should get behind. Meanwhile Apple had like three models and crushed them.
M$ is pretty much killing itself in the consumer market and is rapidly reaching the point of no return and perhaps even crossed over.
Windows (all versions): 85% and stable OS X: 11% Linux: 1.5% Misc (possibly mis-ID as desktop): 2.5%
One third of the 85% above is now using Win10. Half the gamers on Steam now run Win10. With Ryzen and Kaby Lake there is no Win7 support. Sorry to disappoint you, but even as people are holding on to Win7 there zero evidence of any migration away. When push comes to shove I imagine most will begrudgingly upgrade like they did with WinXP.
Verizon isn't making enough money with FIOS to repair expected to fail fibers in the future... looks like that network won't be rebuilt. Comcast/Xfinity is built on fiber to the neighborhood, then coax to each home and port. Coax is slower but lasts longer, but still fast enough to offer a gigabit per second to each customer.
Underground fiber will last just as long as underground coax, least that's the prediction. The fiberoptic cable itself is even more inert than copper, it'll fail when the surrounding plastic fails and water gets in for freeze/thaw cycles. No idea about above ground, almost never use it here since you can lay it 30cm below the surface with the simplest of cable diggers and it'll be way more protected and still not deeper than that you can easily reach it with a shovel. Fiber to the home is now the dominant broadband tech here in Norway, just passed cable and DSL.
Whoops, actually mean to preview not submit. But the other part I wanted to say is that a lot of the talking heads aren't actually very innovative and they act like all the hard work was in the idea. Like if they were doing Google's self-driving car project they'd spent tons of time on an overarching architecture concept that'd essentially say sensors -> analysis -> decision -> execution -> feedback and spend six months and 100 pages to say it. Well duuuuuuuuuh. And it'd be full of vaguely unimplementable yet obvious specifications like "must be able to detect pedestrians" and "must follow traffic signs". And pompous steering documents that have been endlessly tweaked and a plan that doesn't touch first base with reality.
Finally they'd steal most the budget by acting like they're everything down to an implementable design, when in reality we have to throw out their pie-in-the-sky trash and start looking at what we got and what we can do with it. Did I mention that in our version of Agile they're developer-ish enough they make the grand estimates for the backlog? For a sane implementation they should be 10x higher. For their fantasy land maybe 100x higher. Then we deliver maybe 1% of the spec and get cheers all around. Wait, we don't. We take the shit for not delivering, while they're off to blow more money on creating an unimplementable beast for another project. Honestly we'd get a lot more done and better if we fired all of them, even if we developed like headless chickens with no direction.
I think it depends on where you think the innovation ends and the perspiration begins. If Musk says he wants to build a rocket that can land again that's not very innovative. If SpaceX actually builds a rocket that can land again it's very innovative. Between the former and the latter is the 99% perspiration Linux talks about. Granted, occasionally it's the very concept that's so new and popular it'll sell your idea even if you stumble on the implementation. But most of those I'd call marketing gimmicks, catching trends or building brands, don't get me wrong you can make a lot of money that way but Angry Birds isn't exactly a revolution.
For the most part you have at least budding competition and not a total greenfield market, Google didn't win by sucking more than AltaVista. Facebook didn't win by sucking more than MySpace. The iPhone could be as innovative as it wants but without a considerable amount of perspiration it'd get slaughered as a piece of alpha-quality trash.
I'm guessing swappable buses. The drivers aren't committed to a single bus like a person is to their car. Just like the local electric go-kart track, pull the dead one into the station, get out, get in the charged one in front, continue on your route. It has a high capital cost, but probably isn't necessary on all routes.
Yeah and you have fairly short demand peaks in the morning and afternoon that you have to account for anyway. As long as you can keep them in rotation so you have almost every bus on the road in the 7-9 and 16-18 rush the remaining hours there's probably capacity to spare for charging. Like if peak hours are every 15 minutes maybe it's every 30 or 60 minutes. Half the buses go into the rush on a 30 minute schedule and end afterwards, other buses start with the rush and continue on a 30 minute schedule afterwards.
Also they mostly have some slack to catch up with delays so you could set up opportunistic end point charging, a five minute supercharge on an hour's route would help. Or maybe they'll finally get that battery swap thing going, there's lots of possibilities.
And before you go down there....those imperfect copies are what leads to genetic variation (important to fend off predators both macro and microscopic) and evolution. Cancer is just about inevitable in any DNA based system
Past child-bearing age it's also wholly unnecessary. So if we invented individualized drugs or gene therapy or nanobots or whatever to kill off all non-conforming cells it'd be great.
The NSA isn't snooping on Facebook and Gmail because they expect to find Chinese and Russian military secrets there. Almost all active conflicts now are asymmetric warfare where at least one of the parties aren't enrolled in regular armies of any kind, it's just people. They don't dress up in uniform, they don't have any particular military infrastructure, they hide among the civilian population in civilian buildings and use civilian tools. The general population's freedom, privacy and anonymity will come under attack again and again. I can wave a convention at the NSA all I want, they don't care. What we need are hardened tools, better transparency and more control. And the legal protection to be able to use those tools freely.
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone. --Bjarne Stroustrup
On behalf of all C++ developers past, present and future it's called karma. And you have a very long way to go to break even.
...as much as I'd like to strongly disagree with him, I'm simply not going to go after something a parent says after losing a child. No matter how dumb or self-destructive the child was, etc. That person is grasping at whatever straws they can to maintain their sanity. They're out of bounds. Now, I would take to task the editor(s) of the Indianapolis Star for printing that shit. At a certain point, morally, one would have to say "You know, maybe that doesn't need to be in our article."
It's the clickbait that got it to the front page of/. so I'm sure the editors think it was a job well done. If it was some crazy lawsuit I'd rake him over the coals but this seems just a grieving dad that can't cope. Like every other "good kid hanging with a bad crowd" story, really.
So really what you're saying is that the whole Web-of-Trust support needs a little more automation
No, he wants to scrap it. Completely. You just automatically swap keys and display it so you could verify it out-of-band or in-band and warn if it changes. And by in-band I mean that if you say something like "middle three of second group is the http code for file not found, please post it back to me" you need an exceptionally good AI or a live agent there to censor/rewrite it on the fly to match the MITM key even if it's technically not secure. Maybe you know each other in real life and you'll compare keys or make a phone call to confirm the code. Maybe you just agree to both tell a third party part of the code, that would still be hell to catch in an automated fashion. Basically, you'll do more if and only if it's important for you.
The point is, your opponent doesn't know if it's important for you. Your opponent doesn't know whether you have verified it. Your opponent doesn't know whether a new key will set off big red flags. You've made the bar to entry so low as possible, for the people who just click yes yes yes to every security dialog it won't really have any security. But if you're doing mass surveillance you don't know who the 99% who won't notice or care and the 1% that will notice and care are. The only way to avoid being caught regularly would be to not do it on a mass scale. And that's the battle we'd like to win. Activists and such that genuinely need a key vetting procedure, third party verifications and all that can still use GPG. But then the other 99% use no encryption at all.
What's more comforting is that Apple don't have an "approved" display. What would be even more comforting is if they never did and if consumers didn't need such arbitrary "approvals" to plug a display into a computer. What an absurd idea that is.
Do you know why motherboards have CPU and memory compatibility lists, NAS have HDD compatibility lists and so on? Because no matter how much you try adhering to a standard nothing beats actually testing the combination in question. Granted, graphics cards and monitors haven't been very big offenders in that department but I don't mind that Apple tries to sell you an Apple branded or recommended display, just like Dell will try to sell you a Dell monitor. And that does make it hurt when you tried buying the "safe" option and not try your own franken-combination of hardware and get bitten by compatibility bugs. It's the kind of thing that makes you go screw this, might as well buy a third party accessory because it won't be worse for wear. And I think you know why that's not good for Apple's business model...
You forgot to mention how electronic money leaves a complete record of where everyone goes, what they buy, how much they spend, their preferences, their patterns of behavior, and what they believe in based on their donations to charity. This is nothing short of mass surveillance of everything everybody does. You cannot get away with that in a free country. I don't expect you to think of freedom and privacy as important, given that you live in a monarchy. However, in America the government is supposed to respect the rights, freedoms, and privacy of her citizens.
Snowden has already proved that the government will get away with it, in fact many applaud it. The king has no actual part in the political process and we lead the Democracy Index.
Holding your citizens liable for the behavior of others (cheating on their taxes) is ridiculous; laws like that are illegal in America.
In the US the government can rob you blind if a crime is committed with or from your property, see civil forfeiture. And parallel construction means you can wipe your ass with the constitution because they'll lie about how it happened.
Finally, you haven't addressed the technological issues. Cash doesn't require any electricity or internet connections. You just hand it to the merchant and buy your stuff. What happens to your precious cashless surveillance-based economy when a natural disaster strikes? How will people buy things in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina or Sandy while the power is out and people are desperate for food, supplies, or transportation away from the crisis?
Cards have an offline backup system, the merchant can accept your card number and signature if they want. It's just their liability if they get defrauded so most will refuse to take it unless their own systems are out or it's an actual emergency.
Because it preserves freedom and privacy, and because of its practicality, cash will never go away.
I'm telling you that it has been and is rapidly disappearing. With cell phones they know where you are at all times, very soon it'll be the same with money. Convenience beats privacy for 99% of the population. For example cash tickets on public transport is almost gone because you pay ~30% more than an electronic ticket. Automatic toll roads track your license plates, there is no cash lane you just get the bill in the mail.
No, the electron is NOT "in two places at once". That is nonsense. Prior to measurement the electron (and indeed, any quantum particle) simply does not have a well-defined position; rather, there is a set of points in space where it could be found (weighted by the probabilities returned by the* wave function of the electron in the given physical setup ("the potential well")). It is only when a measurement is made that the probabilities resolve to a certainty--and the electron is then found in literally one position in space.
That doesn't really explain the crazy part of QM, it just sounds like a particle bouncing around to form the probabilities, like saying Schrödinger's cat is dead or alive long before you open the box. What's so hard to understand is that it's not just passive observation, the act of observation collapses the wave function. The opening of the box decides if the cat is alive or dead. I think in laymen's terms you can't explain an uncollapsed wave function any more correctly than that a qubit is both 0 and 1 at the same time. Both possibilities exist as a potential, until you try reading it. Except it doesn't really have both values, it's more like a lottery that hasn't been drawn yet. The balls have the potential to make any winning numbers, but the drawing collapses the possibilities down to just one. As long as you don't draw, everything is possible. Actually that is a good analogy, a qubit isn't heads or tails. It's a coin you haven't flipped yet.
1. Create baseless lawsuit and lots of FUD about the legality of Linux 2. Collect "license fees" from companies that benefit from the FUD 3. Pay CEO/lawyer-brother salaries based on the billions they'd allegedly win 4. Flop with no real legal reprecussions for the lack of merit
Microsoft got what they wanted. The McBrides got what they wanted. The stock holders got the chance to cash out on a failing company. The rest were suckers and victims.
In the Oracle case I think Oracle is plain old losing. If their Java business was bad before, it's getting worse now. Nobody's propping them up to fight Android, there's no FUD that users might have to pay a $699 licensing fee. Oracle is burning their own money and like everything but their core product ends up leaving a scorched earth.
That said, one thing that I actually do agree is that APIs have a creative element. If I call "setBold( true )" or "setStyle( Font::Bold )" it isn't just a listing of facts, someone has made a creative choice in how to organize the interface. Not sure I feel about that, if you made say a Photoshop clone and replicated every menu, location of every tool, every shortcut and dialog layout are you infringing on something? On the one hand Adobe could claim this is the product of lots of man years put into usability testing and UX design that is shamelessly copied.
On the other hand, it's like claiming ownership of where the steering wheel and pedals goes on a car, obviously if you had to swap brake and gas that would be pretty anti-competitive from a functional point of view. I'm not really in agreement with myself here, one car's "interface" should look very similar to another car's interface. But if it's shamelessly copied down to the dot, that smells a bit wrong too. Except when it doesn't, like if you have mechanical buttons on a keyboard having the exact same travel and activation force seems like it'd be perfectly reasonable.
With basic income you' ll need only one computer which would send checks around based on census data.
Well, collecting extra child support (particularly migrants that "loan" children) and pensions of dead people depend on messing with census data in the first place. Unemployment benefit fraud generally depends on income tax fraud, which will probably be more popular with the much higher gross tax rate of UBI. So the biggest area you could eliminate is disability fraud, but I honestly don't think we'll force someone who was in a major traffic accident at 20 to live 50+ years on UBI with no hope of improvement.
I'll tell you the future because I think I'm living it here in Norway. First of all 90% of the population now use online banking. Between 98 and 99% of the population have payment cards, 91% prefer paying with card and 81% say they prefer it even for amounts less than 50 NOK ($6). In volume 97.3% is now paid electronically. Part of this is because we have a national standard for a no-frills debit card (BankAxept) that costs merchants a few cents per transaction, it's used in 90%+ of all card transactions which translates to 2 billion times at 100k+ sites in a population of 5 million.
Of course average people don't have card terminals, so it's been either online banking or cash. But now consumer to consumer mobile paying has taking off like crazy through a service called "Vipps", essentially for registered users it takes a cell phone number (which is tied to a unique person, no anonymous phones) and turns it into a bank account. It has gone to zero from 2.2 million users in no time and is now the de facto standard for settling debts between friends and colleagues. I suspect that the 81% who always prefers cards will now live totally cashless, short of malfunctions.
Where am I going with this? Well I'm already liable if I pay above 10000 NOK ($1200) to someone in cash and they cheat on their taxes. There is talk of doing away with the requirement that shops take cash, there's talk of requiring businesses to take electronic payment and there's talk of banning cash altogether and to be honest I don't think the 19%/9%/1-2% who remain will have the market power to resist. Even if they can't kill it completely I suspect all that take out or deposit cash will come under scrutiny. Once they're done I don't think it'll be the census computer, it'll be the all-seeing IRS computer.
Who cares if it's the year of the blah blah blah or not? Or if the mainstream software is available? For those few times it matters, you sneak in a Wintendo or a Mac. Mostly it doesn't, especially when you're governmental entity and in a position to set standards. If people want to communicate with you, they can damned well speak your language â" especially if it's ODF, if the alternative is DOC.
You'd think so, but it's surprisingly difficult because of how such a selection process works. First we need a requirements document, that's fine. Then vendors submit bids to fulfill those requirements, except nobody does that for LibreOffice. And if you propose an in-house solution everyone is afraid of being stuck with a custom hack job. Budgets are also a funny business, if I can replace a piece of commercial software with open source can I roll the savings over on hardware and in-house staff? Not likely.Also when shit hits the fan you can blame the vendor if you have on, if it's in-house you take the shit. And unlike in the private sector, you get very little personal gain from savintg the "company" money. The shit your bosses take when something's not working though, that still flows downhill. And then it's convenient to have a vendor to blame.
I'm sure the founders of the LiMux project thought that by 2017 the YotLD had long since come and gone, that mainstream drivers and software would be there almost by default at near zero cost. The latest stats from StatCounter says that worldwide Linux has 1.55% desktop OS market share. Even if I pick Germany which is a very pro-Linux market it's 3.46%. From a local politician's view I can understand that it looks like an endless uphill battle, regardless of the actual merits of the OS there will be far more solutions for Windows. It's just a fact of running an obscure solution.
Rail's problem is the infrastructure costs are really high.
Also the loading/unloading time and effort, unless both the source and destination has rail it's easier to get a truck to deliver door to door. You could also use a truck that transports a shipping container but they're heavy steel boxes made to be stacked on ships that add weight and you still need to get to and from the railway stations and wait for a crane to pick it up and drop it off. The rail system is best suited to extending the port system really, stuff arrives on shipping containers that you grab and put on railway cars and then reload to trucks closer to the final destination. That said, if you don't have drivers hanging around costing $$$ maybe self-driving trucks can switch modes of transport with less overhead than now.
Can't they just encase the thing in some kind of packaging with its own cooling system? Or is it a case of whatever it takes to keep it running on Venus is too fucking big to send to Venus?
Well in order to make some bits of the system cooler than the environment it has to make other bits hotter so it'll radiate away, which is done by forcing the refrigerant to go through a phase change. There aren't exactly many refrigerants that'll be useful at those temperatures and you'd also need a compressor that can operate at 500+ C and the whole process will be very power intensive. It'll be nothing like the refrigerator you have, it'll be more like tryng to keep room temperature inside an egg submerged in boiling water, only much worse. Basically you're swapping a hard problem for an even harder one, which is likely to fail pretty quick unless you also have a huge power source. It is much better if we can make a computer that can work under the conditions that exist.
lolwut, rushing to first post so you didn't read it properly?
the hard bit is not being cremated by the surface temperature of 470ÂC (878ÂF) or crushed by the atmospheric pressure, which is about 90 times that of Earth, the same as swimming 900 metres under water.
For one, Vulkan and its competitors aren't designed for use with untrusted code, so there are quite a number of significant security and technical concerns with your notion that we can simply adopt one of them as a web standard that any random web developer has full access to (which would've been just as true had you said Metal or Direct 3D 12 instead). What you "need", then, is a safe layer that abstracts the underlying API and provides safety to the user (I say "need" in quotes, because I'm not actually clear that this is something we want, let alone need).
I would hope they already offer some protection against one malicious or malfunctioning process crashing or snooping on other processes or hogging all the resources, I'm sure you need some kind of sandbox but creating a whole new API for that seems like major overkill. You got JS in the browser, Node.JS on the server. Java applets in the browser, Java on the server. If you need a whole new API something's very wrong.
Second, neither Vulkan nor its competitors are actually cross-platform in practice today. It may be the case that one of them will become more widespread over time, but, for now, the world we live in is a fragmented one. Any given platform likely supports at least one of these competing standards, but you can't count on having support for any particular one. A web standard that lives over all of them would make it possible to tap into that power without having to know anything about any of them.
The DirectX/OpenGL divide is ancient, AMD's Mantle API mostly got rolled into Vulkan so Apple is the only company that in modern times has caused more fragmentation.
When they talk about using Metal for this standard's initial implementation, what they mean is that they've already done most of the work of mapping Metal back to existing web standards (e.g. Javascript), so they have a head start on which features a standard may be able to support and what that web API may look like. They'll likely take something resembling the intersection of Metal's features with Direct 3D 12's and Vulkan's features so as to provide an initial release of the standard that works across most platforms.
Actually the article said they skipped the "shading language" part which where the bulk of the work is done because it's split between HLSL (DirectX), GLSL (OpenGL tranditional), SPIR-V (Vulkan) and MSL (Metal). And let's just start with Apple's own, sounds a lot like the tag without actually requiring a common codec but let's start with H.264 and see what happens.
When they talk about Metal going cross-platform, that's a separate (but related) topic. It wouldn't affect this standard (i.e. you should eventually be able to use this standard with Metal as easily as with Vulkan), but it would provide them with a means for ensuring the availability of the standard across any platforms supported by Metal.
Yeah... but nobody except Apple has shown any interest in Metal, they're deeply committed to DirectX (Windows, Xbox) or OpenGL (most everyone but Apple). It's Apple that want to spread their first-party creation, not any collaborative effort.
It's against the TOS for the user to let another access their account via the password. I didn't see anything in there about being on the receiving end. I would say it's implied, but it's not explicit. So security would be effectively forcing the user to violate the agreement with Facebook. Not sure how that plays out legally, but I'm assuming Facebook has every right to terminate their account for complying with the security check.
Regarding the receiving end it's really quite easy, Facebook has authorized you to use their service and the password is just your authorization token. If anyone else is using your token to access their service they should be hit with some felony "unlawful access to computer resources" hacking charges, regardless if they got the token by accident, theft, blackmail or given voluntarily. Same as if I give you a key to water my plants, no matter who else ends up with the key they don't have my permission, even if you can physically delegate the key you can't legally delegate my permission.
As for the terms of service the recipient is not a party to the contract, so it can't regulate this in any way. It can only regulate the relationship between you and Facebook, if you hand over the password they have cause to terminate your account. That can of course leave the user caught between a rock and a hard place, either they "voluntarily" hand over the password to US customs or they're refused entry into the US. But neither contract nor criminal law absolves you of any duties just because complying is difficult.
Personally I'd probably resist enough that I could claim it was under duress and hope Facebook decides to press charges. Because as a private individual you don't really have much leverage here, the US is free to refuse entry to anyone but its own citizens so they can set any conditions they want. If they want to require the rubber glove treatment it's either bend over and spread'em or stay home. The only leverage you have is if they break the constitution - unlikely, as the 4th amendment doesn't apply at the border - or the rules violate some other US laws.
Slashdot Mirror
While what you said is true, it's also irrelevant. Nothing suggests they got a license from Facebook, if you do something newsworthy on your totally own, self-hosted blog it can be reported on the news. So if you have a problem with this story, go see Congress. There's nothing Facebook could have done to prevent this use of the content, even if the wanted to.
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-m...
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-v...
http://store.steampowered.com/...
As far as PC games go, Microsoft Windows dominates although if you go to Steam and look at the number of games available for Linux and SteamOS there are over 5,000 and some are AAA. Good luck finding the time to play them all.
And yet the trend is backwards towards less Linux users... Linux used to have something like 1% when SteamOS was being hyped, today it's at 0.8%. You keep talking it up, I'm telling you users aren't buying it.
In the motherboard BIOS there is an option for "Other OS" and I initially installed Fedora 24 (now 25) on the Z170 (takes Sky Lake) without any problems so I don't forsee any issues with the motherboards for Ryzen (when it comes out) or Kaby Lake which has the same LGA 1151 socket as Sky lake and will run on Z170, H170, B150 and H110 series motherboards
Well except that AMD has explicitly said there won't be any chipset drivers for Ryzen on Win7. That Kaby Lake is supported is more of an accident because it's so similar to Skylake and even Skylake support was only after a business uproar against Microsoft.
The majority of people will not upgrade to Windows 10 unless Microsoft use the same tactics when they made the OS a free upgrade if you had a legitimate copy of Windows 7 or Widows 8.1. If you wish to upgrade now you have to pay for Windows 10 and most people will not do that unless they replace their PC which in the majority of cases the new PC will come with Windows 10 as the default OS.
In other words they will move to Windows 10 one way or the other. Who cares if they don't upgrade? It means they still use Windows software and when their Windows box finally dies they'll get a new one. That's what I said, the total number of Windows users is flat. A WinXP/Vista/7/8 user disappears, a Win10 user appears and hardly any new Mac/Linux users.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Seriously though, I wish them the best of luck but I hate corporate entities without any clear ownership. Product owner, system owner, process owner, project owner, customer owner (key account manager), it doesn't have to be a dictatorship but someone you can point to and say "Hey you, this is your responsibility and I need a change/decision". And it's their job to take input from whoever should give input, get approval from whoever should give approval and overall facilitate the process to make it happen. Otherwise it'll always end up with you stepping on somebody's toes and screwing it up for them or they don't know your needs and screw it up for you. Not to mention you'll have some continuity so you don't end up explaining and rehashing the same issues over and over again, like having a fixed support contact instead of a random help desk worker.
Having a democratic and consensus based process doesn't eliminate the need for someone to drive that process. Development, Ops, Finance, HR, Marketing, Sales and so on somebody needs to make sure they're all pulling in roughly the same direction. And it sounds like they haven't had their first big conflict yet, most people try to find solutions on their own. You escalate when their conflict and at some point you need a referee to make the call to move on. If you end up with competing factions because nobody has the authority to settle it and move on they'll likely fail fast. Look at Nokia for example, apart from Elop they also had way too many competing platforms and nobody to cut through and decide on one good customer experience everyone should get behind. Meanwhile Apple had like three models and crushed them.
M$ is pretty much killing itself in the consumer market and is rapidly reaching the point of no return and perhaps even crossed over.
Windows (all versions): 85% and stable
OS X: 11%
Linux: 1.5%
Misc (possibly mis-ID as desktop): 2.5%
One third of the 85% above is now using Win10. Half the gamers on Steam now run Win10. With Ryzen and Kaby Lake there is no Win7 support. Sorry to disappoint you, but even as people are holding on to Win7 there zero evidence of any migration away. When push comes to shove I imagine most will begrudgingly upgrade like they did with WinXP.
Verizon isn't making enough money with FIOS to repair expected to fail fibers in the future... looks like that network won't be rebuilt. Comcast/Xfinity is built on fiber to the neighborhood, then coax to each home and port. Coax is slower but lasts longer, but still fast enough to offer a gigabit per second to each customer.
Underground fiber will last just as long as underground coax, least that's the prediction. The fiberoptic cable itself is even more inert than copper, it'll fail when the surrounding plastic fails and water gets in for freeze/thaw cycles. No idea about above ground, almost never use it here since you can lay it 30cm below the surface with the simplest of cable diggers and it'll be way more protected and still not deeper than that you can easily reach it with a shovel. Fiber to the home is now the dominant broadband tech here in Norway, just passed cable and DSL.
Whoops, actually mean to preview not submit. But the other part I wanted to say is that a lot of the talking heads aren't actually very innovative and they act like all the hard work was in the idea. Like if they were doing Google's self-driving car project they'd spent tons of time on an overarching architecture concept that'd essentially say sensors -> analysis -> decision -> execution -> feedback and spend six months and 100 pages to say it. Well duuuuuuuuuh. And it'd be full of vaguely unimplementable yet obvious specifications like "must be able to detect pedestrians" and "must follow traffic signs". And pompous steering documents that have been endlessly tweaked and a plan that doesn't touch first base with reality.
Finally they'd steal most the budget by acting like they're everything down to an implementable design, when in reality we have to throw out their pie-in-the-sky trash and start looking at what we got and what we can do with it. Did I mention that in our version of Agile they're developer-ish enough they make the grand estimates for the backlog? For a sane implementation they should be 10x higher. For their fantasy land maybe 100x higher. Then we deliver maybe 1% of the spec and get cheers all around. Wait, we don't. We take the shit for not delivering, while they're off to blow more money on creating an unimplementable beast for another project. Honestly we'd get a lot more done and better if we fired all of them, even if we developed like headless chickens with no direction.
I think it depends on where you think the innovation ends and the perspiration begins. If Musk says he wants to build a rocket that can land again that's not very innovative. If SpaceX actually builds a rocket that can land again it's very innovative. Between the former and the latter is the 99% perspiration Linux talks about. Granted, occasionally it's the very concept that's so new and popular it'll sell your idea even if you stumble on the implementation. But most of those I'd call marketing gimmicks, catching trends or building brands, don't get me wrong you can make a lot of money that way but Angry Birds isn't exactly a revolution.
For the most part you have at least budding competition and not a total greenfield market, Google didn't win by sucking more than AltaVista. Facebook didn't win by sucking more than MySpace. The iPhone could be as innovative as it wants but without a considerable amount of perspiration it'd get slaughered as a piece of alpha-quality trash.
I'm guessing swappable buses. The drivers aren't committed to a single bus like a person is to their car. Just like the local electric go-kart track, pull the dead one into the station, get out, get in the charged one in front, continue on your route. It has a high capital cost, but probably isn't necessary on all routes.
Yeah and you have fairly short demand peaks in the morning and afternoon that you have to account for anyway. As long as you can keep them in rotation so you have almost every bus on the road in the 7-9 and 16-18 rush the remaining hours there's probably capacity to spare for charging. Like if peak hours are every 15 minutes maybe it's every 30 or 60 minutes. Half the buses go into the rush on a 30 minute schedule and end afterwards, other buses start with the rush and continue on a 30 minute schedule afterwards.
Also they mostly have some slack to catch up with delays so you could set up opportunistic end point charging, a five minute supercharge on an hour's route would help. Or maybe they'll finally get that battery swap thing going, there's lots of possibilities.
And before you go down there....those imperfect copies are what leads to genetic variation (important to fend off predators both macro and microscopic) and evolution. Cancer is just about inevitable in any DNA based system
Past child-bearing age it's also wholly unnecessary. So if we invented individualized drugs or gene therapy or nanobots or whatever to kill off all non-conforming cells it'd be great.
The NSA isn't snooping on Facebook and Gmail because they expect to find Chinese and Russian military secrets there. Almost all active conflicts now are asymmetric warfare where at least one of the parties aren't enrolled in regular armies of any kind, it's just people. They don't dress up in uniform, they don't have any particular military infrastructure, they hide among the civilian population in civilian buildings and use civilian tools. The general population's freedom, privacy and anonymity will come under attack again and again. I can wave a convention at the NSA all I want, they don't care. What we need are hardened tools, better transparency and more control. And the legal protection to be able to use those tools freely.
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone. --Bjarne Stroustrup
On behalf of all C++ developers past, present and future it's called karma. And you have a very long way to go to break even.
...as much as I'd like to strongly disagree with him, I'm simply not going to go after something a parent says after losing a child. No matter how dumb or self-destructive the child was, etc. That person is grasping at whatever straws they can to maintain their sanity. They're out of bounds. Now, I would take to task the editor(s) of the Indianapolis Star for printing that shit. At a certain point, morally, one would have to say "You know, maybe that doesn't need to be in our article."
It's the clickbait that got it to the front page of /. so I'm sure the editors think it was a job well done. If it was some crazy lawsuit I'd rake him over the coals but this seems just a grieving dad that can't cope. Like every other "good kid hanging with a bad crowd" story, really.
So really what you're saying is that the whole Web-of-Trust support needs a little more automation
No, he wants to scrap it. Completely. You just automatically swap keys and display it so you could verify it out-of-band or in-band and warn if it changes. And by in-band I mean that if you say something like "middle three of second group is the http code for file not found, please post it back to me" you need an exceptionally good AI or a live agent there to censor/rewrite it on the fly to match the MITM key even if it's technically not secure. Maybe you know each other in real life and you'll compare keys or make a phone call to confirm the code. Maybe you just agree to both tell a third party part of the code, that would still be hell to catch in an automated fashion. Basically, you'll do more if and only if it's important for you.
The point is, your opponent doesn't know if it's important for you. Your opponent doesn't know whether you have verified it. Your opponent doesn't know whether a new key will set off big red flags. You've made the bar to entry so low as possible, for the people who just click yes yes yes to every security dialog it won't really have any security. But if you're doing mass surveillance you don't know who the 99% who won't notice or care and the 1% that will notice and care are. The only way to avoid being caught regularly would be to not do it on a mass scale. And that's the battle we'd like to win. Activists and such that genuinely need a key vetting procedure, third party verifications and all that can still use GPG. But then the other 99% use no encryption at all.
What's more comforting is that Apple don't have an "approved" display. What would be even more comforting is if they never did and if consumers didn't need such arbitrary "approvals" to plug a display into a computer. What an absurd idea that is.
Do you know why motherboards have CPU and memory compatibility lists, NAS have HDD compatibility lists and so on? Because no matter how much you try adhering to a standard nothing beats actually testing the combination in question. Granted, graphics cards and monitors haven't been very big offenders in that department but I don't mind that Apple tries to sell you an Apple branded or recommended display, just like Dell will try to sell you a Dell monitor. And that does make it hurt when you tried buying the "safe" option and not try your own franken-combination of hardware and get bitten by compatibility bugs. It's the kind of thing that makes you go screw this, might as well buy a third party accessory because it won't be worse for wear. And I think you know why that's not good for Apple's business model...
You forgot to mention how electronic money leaves a complete record of where everyone goes, what they buy, how much they spend, their preferences, their patterns of behavior, and what they believe in based on their donations to charity. This is nothing short of mass surveillance of everything everybody does. You cannot get away with that in a free country. I don't expect you to think of freedom and privacy as important, given that you live in a monarchy. However, in America the government is supposed to respect the rights, freedoms, and privacy of her citizens.
Snowden has already proved that the government will get away with it, in fact many applaud it. The king has no actual part in the political process and we lead the Democracy Index.
Holding your citizens liable for the behavior of others (cheating on their taxes) is ridiculous; laws like that are illegal in America.
In the US the government can rob you blind if a crime is committed with or from your property, see civil forfeiture. And parallel construction means you can wipe your ass with the constitution because they'll lie about how it happened.
Finally, you haven't addressed the technological issues. Cash doesn't require any electricity or internet connections. You just hand it to the merchant and buy your stuff. What happens to your precious cashless surveillance-based economy when a natural disaster strikes? How will people buy things in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina or Sandy while the power is out and people are desperate for food, supplies, or transportation away from the crisis?
Cards have an offline backup system, the merchant can accept your card number and signature if they want. It's just their liability if they get defrauded so most will refuse to take it unless their own systems are out or it's an actual emergency.
Because it preserves freedom and privacy, and because of its practicality, cash will never go away.
I'm telling you that it has been and is rapidly disappearing. With cell phones they know where you are at all times, very soon it'll be the same with money. Convenience beats privacy for 99% of the population. For example cash tickets on public transport is almost gone because you pay ~30% more than an electronic ticket. Automatic toll roads track your license plates, there is no cash lane you just get the bill in the mail.
No, the electron is NOT "in two places at once". That is nonsense. Prior to measurement the electron (and indeed, any quantum particle) simply does not have a well-defined position; rather, there is a set of points in space where it could be found (weighted by the probabilities returned by the* wave function of the electron in the given physical setup ("the potential well")). It is only when a measurement is made that the probabilities resolve to a certainty--and the electron is then found in literally one position in space.
That doesn't really explain the crazy part of QM, it just sounds like a particle bouncing around to form the probabilities, like saying Schrödinger's cat is dead or alive long before you open the box. What's so hard to understand is that it's not just passive observation, the act of observation collapses the wave function. The opening of the box decides if the cat is alive or dead. I think in laymen's terms you can't explain an uncollapsed wave function any more correctly than that a qubit is both 0 and 1 at the same time. Both possibilities exist as a potential, until you try reading it. Except it doesn't really have both values, it's more like a lottery that hasn't been drawn yet. The balls have the potential to make any winning numbers, but the drawing collapses the possibilities down to just one. As long as you don't draw, everything is possible. Actually that is a good analogy, a qubit isn't heads or tails. It's a coin you haven't flipped yet.
The SCO case had a "business model":
1. Create baseless lawsuit and lots of FUD about the legality of Linux
2. Collect "license fees" from companies that benefit from the FUD
3. Pay CEO/lawyer-brother salaries based on the billions they'd allegedly win
4. Flop with no real legal reprecussions for the lack of merit
Microsoft got what they wanted. The McBrides got what they wanted. The stock holders got the chance to cash out on a failing company. The rest were suckers and victims.
In the Oracle case I think Oracle is plain old losing. If their Java business was bad before, it's getting worse now. Nobody's propping them up to fight Android, there's no FUD that users might have to pay a $699 licensing fee. Oracle is burning their own money and like everything but their core product ends up leaving a scorched earth.
That said, one thing that I actually do agree is that APIs have a creative element. If I call "setBold( true )" or "setStyle( Font::Bold )" it isn't just a listing of facts, someone has made a creative choice in how to organize the interface. Not sure I feel about that, if you made say a Photoshop clone and replicated every menu, location of every tool, every shortcut and dialog layout are you infringing on something? On the one hand Adobe could claim this is the product of lots of man years put into usability testing and UX design that is shamelessly copied.
On the other hand, it's like claiming ownership of where the steering wheel and pedals goes on a car, obviously if you had to swap brake and gas that would be pretty anti-competitive from a functional point of view. I'm not really in agreement with myself here, one car's "interface" should look very similar to another car's interface. But if it's shamelessly copied down to the dot, that smells a bit wrong too. Except when it doesn't, like if you have mechanical buttons on a keyboard having the exact same travel and activation force seems like it'd be perfectly reasonable.
With basic income you' ll need only one computer which would send checks around based on census data.
Well, collecting extra child support (particularly migrants that "loan" children) and pensions of dead people depend on messing with census data in the first place. Unemployment benefit fraud generally depends on income tax fraud, which will probably be more popular with the much higher gross tax rate of UBI. So the biggest area you could eliminate is disability fraud, but I honestly don't think we'll force someone who was in a major traffic accident at 20 to live 50+ years on UBI with no hope of improvement.
I'll tell you the future because I think I'm living it here in Norway. First of all 90% of the population now use online banking. Between 98 and 99% of the population have payment cards, 91% prefer paying with card and 81% say they prefer it even for amounts less than 50 NOK ($6). In volume 97.3% is now paid electronically. Part of this is because we have a national standard for a no-frills debit card (BankAxept) that costs merchants a few cents per transaction, it's used in 90%+ of all card transactions which translates to 2 billion times at 100k+ sites in a population of 5 million.
Of course average people don't have card terminals, so it's been either online banking or cash. But now consumer to consumer mobile paying has taking off like crazy through a service called "Vipps", essentially for registered users it takes a cell phone number (which is tied to a unique person, no anonymous phones) and turns it into a bank account. It has gone to zero from 2.2 million users in no time and is now the de facto standard for settling debts between friends and colleagues. I suspect that the 81% who always prefers cards will now live totally cashless, short of malfunctions.
Where am I going with this? Well I'm already liable if I pay above 10000 NOK ($1200) to someone in cash and they cheat on their taxes. There is talk of doing away with the requirement that shops take cash, there's talk of requiring businesses to take electronic payment and there's talk of banning cash altogether and to be honest I don't think the 19%/9%/1-2% who remain will have the market power to resist. Even if they can't kill it completely I suspect all that take out or deposit cash will come under scrutiny. Once they're done I don't think it'll be the census computer, it'll be the all-seeing IRS computer.
Who cares if it's the year of the blah blah blah or not? Or if the mainstream software is available? For those few times it matters, you sneak in a Wintendo or a Mac. Mostly it doesn't, especially when you're governmental entity and in a position to set standards. If people want to communicate with you, they can damned well speak your language â" especially if it's ODF, if the alternative is DOC.
You'd think so, but it's surprisingly difficult because of how such a selection process works. First we need a requirements document, that's fine. Then vendors submit bids to fulfill those requirements, except nobody does that for LibreOffice. And if you propose an in-house solution everyone is afraid of being stuck with a custom hack job. Budgets are also a funny business, if I can replace a piece of commercial software with open source can I roll the savings over on hardware and in-house staff? Not likely.Also when shit hits the fan you can blame the vendor if you have on, if it's in-house you take the shit. And unlike in the private sector, you get very little personal gain from savintg the "company" money. The shit your bosses take when something's not working though, that still flows downhill. And then it's convenient to have a vendor to blame.
I'm sure the founders of the LiMux project thought that by 2017 the YotLD had long since come and gone, that mainstream drivers and software would be there almost by default at near zero cost. The latest stats from StatCounter says that worldwide Linux has 1.55% desktop OS market share. Even if I pick Germany which is a very pro-Linux market it's 3.46%. From a local politician's view I can understand that it looks like an endless uphill battle, regardless of the actual merits of the OS there will be far more solutions for Windows. It's just a fact of running an obscure solution.
Rail's problem is the infrastructure costs are really high.
Also the loading/unloading time and effort, unless both the source and destination has rail it's easier to get a truck to deliver door to door. You could also use a truck that transports a shipping container but they're heavy steel boxes made to be stacked on ships that add weight and you still need to get to and from the railway stations and wait for a crane to pick it up and drop it off. The rail system is best suited to extending the port system really, stuff arrives on shipping containers that you grab and put on railway cars and then reload to trucks closer to the final destination. That said, if you don't have drivers hanging around costing $$$ maybe self-driving trucks can switch modes of transport with less overhead than now.
Can't they just encase the thing in some kind of packaging with its own cooling system? Or is it a case of whatever it takes to keep it running on Venus is too fucking big to send to Venus?
Well in order to make some bits of the system cooler than the environment it has to make other bits hotter so it'll radiate away, which is done by forcing the refrigerant to go through a phase change. There aren't exactly many refrigerants that'll be useful at those temperatures and you'd also need a compressor that can operate at 500+ C and the whole process will be very power intensive. It'll be nothing like the refrigerator you have, it'll be more like tryng to keep room temperature inside an egg submerged in boiling water, only much worse. Basically you're swapping a hard problem for an even harder one, which is likely to fail pretty quick unless you also have a huge power source. It is much better if we can make a computer that can work under the conditions that exist.
lolwut, rushing to first post so you didn't read it properly?
the hard bit is not being cremated by the surface temperature of 470ÂC (878ÂF) or crushed by the atmospheric pressure, which is about 90 times that of Earth, the same as swimming 900 metres under water.
For one, Vulkan and its competitors aren't designed for use with untrusted code, so there are quite a number of significant security and technical concerns with your notion that we can simply adopt one of them as a web standard that any random web developer has full access to (which would've been just as true had you said Metal or Direct 3D 12 instead). What you "need", then, is a safe layer that abstracts the underlying API and provides safety to the user (I say "need" in quotes, because I'm not actually clear that this is something we want, let alone need).
I would hope they already offer some protection against one malicious or malfunctioning process crashing or snooping on other processes or hogging all the resources, I'm sure you need some kind of sandbox but creating a whole new API for that seems like major overkill. You got JS in the browser, Node.JS on the server. Java applets in the browser, Java on the server. If you need a whole new API something's very wrong.
Second, neither Vulkan nor its competitors are actually cross-platform in practice today. It may be the case that one of them will become more widespread over time, but, for now, the world we live in is a fragmented one. Any given platform likely supports at least one of these competing standards, but you can't count on having support for any particular one. A web standard that lives over all of them would make it possible to tap into that power without having to know anything about any of them.
The DirectX/OpenGL divide is ancient, AMD's Mantle API mostly got rolled into Vulkan so Apple is the only company that in modern times has caused more fragmentation.
When they talk about using Metal for this standard's initial implementation, what they mean is that they've already done most of the work of mapping Metal back to existing web standards (e.g. Javascript), so they have a head start on which features a standard may be able to support and what that web API may look like. They'll likely take something resembling the intersection of Metal's features with Direct 3D 12's and Vulkan's features so as to provide an initial release of the standard that works across most platforms.
Actually the article said they skipped the "shading language" part which where the bulk of the work is done because it's split between HLSL (DirectX), GLSL (OpenGL tranditional), SPIR-V (Vulkan) and MSL (Metal). And let's just start with Apple's own, sounds a lot like the tag without actually requiring a common codec but let's start with H.264 and see what happens.
When they talk about Metal going cross-platform, that's a separate (but related) topic. It wouldn't affect this standard (i.e. you should eventually be able to use this standard with Metal as easily as with Vulkan), but it would provide them with a means for ensuring the availability of the standard across any platforms supported by Metal.
Yeah... but nobody except Apple has shown any interest in Metal, they're deeply committed to DirectX (Windows, Xbox) or OpenGL (most everyone but Apple). It's Apple that want to spread their first-party creation, not any collaborative effort.
It's against the TOS for the user to let another access their account via the password. I didn't see anything in there about being on the receiving end. I would say it's implied, but it's not explicit. So security would be effectively forcing the user to violate the agreement with Facebook. Not sure how that plays out legally, but I'm assuming Facebook has every right to terminate their account for complying with the security check.
Regarding the receiving end it's really quite easy, Facebook has authorized you to use their service and the password is just your authorization token. If anyone else is using your token to access their service they should be hit with some felony "unlawful access to computer resources" hacking charges, regardless if they got the token by accident, theft, blackmail or given voluntarily. Same as if I give you a key to water my plants, no matter who else ends up with the key they don't have my permission, even if you can physically delegate the key you can't legally delegate my permission.
As for the terms of service the recipient is not a party to the contract, so it can't regulate this in any way. It can only regulate the relationship between you and Facebook, if you hand over the password they have cause to terminate your account. That can of course leave the user caught between a rock and a hard place, either they "voluntarily" hand over the password to US customs or they're refused entry into the US. But neither contract nor criminal law absolves you of any duties just because complying is difficult.
Personally I'd probably resist enough that I could claim it was under duress and hope Facebook decides to press charges. Because as a private individual you don't really have much leverage here, the US is free to refuse entry to anyone but its own citizens so they can set any conditions they want. If they want to require the rubber glove treatment it's either bend over and spread'em or stay home. The only leverage you have is if they break the constitution - unlikely, as the 4th amendment doesn't apply at the border - or the rules violate some other US laws.