" We are not even having the conversation of what society will look like when all but the most brilliant among us are incapable of performing useful work."
Whoever owns the machines lives like a king. The rest of us starve, or get shot by the robot police force during the inevitable food riots.
The only use I can see even if it were mature would be handling ancient legacy apps that won't run on a new version of windows. If the program demands XP, then the options will be either XP (with a ton of security holes MS no longer patches) or ReactOS. And if MS stops selling XP licenses, there may be a very business-specific applications end up on it. But it's a very small niche.
Because, 1. By the time it's got a decent compatibility with Windows XP, we'll be on Windows 12. 2. It's only legally safe because it's only a novelty. Should it become mature enough to use in a production environment, Microsoft would surely wish to assert about a bajillion patents. Most of them rubbish ones, but enough to cripple the project with legal costs and scare away developers.
FOSS isn't always viable, true. But those applications are all very specialised - I can't imagine many employees would want to steal the key for a car-tuner or corporate accounting program. Things like office suites or DTP software are the problem, and in those areas FOSS is, if not always as good a solution as the established commercial software, at least good enough that it can be considered as an option.
"1 IT person should be able to support 1000-10,000 people depending on system homogeneity. BYOD makes everything heterogeneous unless the company mandates what hardware you're allowed to buy"
So the company gets the equipment they want, and someone else pays for it. Management must love that idea. Way to externalise those costs!
Sure, it'll upset the employees. But what are they going to do about it?
"Not sure about you, but no one plugs in whatever they want to our network, all network ports are authenticated at the switch, you plug in a non authorized device the port simply shuts off".1x? We use that too. No-one has yet figured out that the network printers, scanners and phones don't support it, so anyone could just unplug one of those. It doesn't get them on the main VLAN, but it's a foot in the door.
I've come across malware in pirate games before, but it's very difficult to get malware to work in a media file - there are player-specific exploits, but that depends on the downloader having an outdated version of the correct player.
Just think of future politics. It'll be even more difficult to find a squeaky-clean politician, and you can imagine every campaign manager will be trawling the opponent's pasts and putting every little thing they did or said wrong up on public display.
Aside from the 'affordable' bit. The dream of nuclear was that power would become 'too cheap to meter.' That didn't happen. It's still more expensive than coal, though at least it'll last longer and doesn't screw up the climate.
Aside from everything getting cheaper, access to truly ridiculous amounts of energy at an affordable price opens up whole new areas of industry. Recycling, for one - no messing around with separate processing and delicate, fiddly chemistry. Just dump the whole lot into the blast chamber, reduce it all to plasma and condense whatever you need from the atoms as they cool. Literally anything goes in, valuable raw materials come out. Food production goes up dramatically as it becomes practical to maintain fields under artificial sunlight all night. Water shortage becomes a non-issue as desalination becomes affordable to all. It really would be one of the great revolutions of history: Agricultural, industrial, information, fusion.
Not that it matters, because cold fusion isn't going to be invented tomorrow. Or ever.
There isn't much legitimate research because cold fusion violates some very well-established laws regarding energy requirements: You need to put energy into fusion to get more energy out, and that energy in is rather a lot. The more widely accepted not-cold fusion provides this energy by operating at extreme temperatures, and certainly can work in theory - the barriers are purely engineering problems, difficulties in containing a stable reaction using equipment a bit more compact than a star.
But the transition from an economy entirely built around the labor market could be a big problem. If done well, it gives us a utopia where no-one need want for anything they desire. If done poorly, it ends in a world where a fraction of a percent of the world population control almost all the resources and the rest live in abject poverty.
Sure. But to have any chance, the tech needs three things: 1. It has to be very good indeed. At least as good as the existing offerings. Open source can do this - the existance of x264 shows this is true - but starting over from scratch? That's a massive project. 2. It has to be patent-proof. That's just not possible. No way. Patents are so broad now, it'd be impossible not to violate a lot of them without even knowing about them. That's why we need google: Their big money and legal muscle let them fight the legal battle. 3. It has to be supported by at least one major player, who has the clout to get players widely available. Not just on PCs, but embedded codecs on phones and tablets too. Distributed with browsers or operating systems, so my mother who has no idea what 'codec' means can still watch her silly dog videos on the internet.
To ask for all that, and full ideological compliance too, is just asking too much. Not going to happen.
My suggestion sounds like a good approach. A good old-fashioned truck to haul the supplies most of the way, to the edge of the rubble/rabble/flood/ash, then use drones to distribute the supplies from there. The drones don't need really long range then, and their low capacity isn't such an issue when they can make a trip in half an hour.
Slashdot Mirror
" We are not even having the conversation of what society will look like when all but the most brilliant among us are incapable of performing useful work."
Whoever owns the machines lives like a king. The rest of us starve, or get shot by the robot police force during the inevitable food riots.
No reason it couldn't support ext-something. It won't be NTFS, but the software doesn't have to know that. It just sees files.
The only use I can see even if it were mature would be handling ancient legacy apps that won't run on a new version of windows. If the program demands XP, then the options will be either XP (with a ton of security holes MS no longer patches) or ReactOS. And if MS stops selling XP licenses, there may be a very business-specific applications end up on it. But it's a very small niche.
Because,
1. By the time it's got a decent compatibility with Windows XP, we'll be on Windows 12.
2. It's only legally safe because it's only a novelty. Should it become mature enough to use in a production environment, Microsoft would surely wish to assert about a bajillion patents. Most of them rubbish ones, but enough to cripple the project with legal costs and scare away developers.
I tend to overuse the ... myself, but... once per paragraph is enough.
FOSS isn't always viable, true. But those applications are all very specialised - I can't imagine many employees would want to steal the key for a car-tuner or corporate accounting program. Things like office suites or DTP software are the problem, and in those areas FOSS is, if not always as good a solution as the established commercial software, at least good enough that it can be considered as an option.
"1 IT person should be able to support 1000-10,000 people depending on system homogeneity. BYOD makes everything heterogeneous unless the company mandates what hardware you're allowed to buy"
So the company gets the equipment they want, and someone else pays for it. Management must love that idea. Way to externalise those costs!
Sure, it'll upset the employees. But what are they going to do about it?
"Not sure about you, but no one plugs in whatever they want to our network, all network ports are authenticated at the switch, you plug in a non authorized device the port simply shuts off" .1x? We use that too. No-one has yet figured out that the network printers, scanners and phones don't support it, so anyone could just unplug one of those. It doesn't get them on the main VLAN, but it's a foot in the door.
No, they'd just go to the government and get a law passed declaring such practices 'economic terrorism.'
I've come across malware in pirate games before, but it's very difficult to get malware to work in a media file - there are player-specific exploits, but that depends on the downloader having an outdated version of the correct player.
Given xbox gamers' tendency to explode, I'd say rebus.
The switch. It's happened before - remember Myspace? It's a ghost town now.
The time isn't right just yet, but give it a few more years and facebook may follow, as a new network rises in its place.
Just think of future politics. It'll be even more difficult to find a squeaky-clean politician, and you can imagine every campaign manager will be trawling the opponent's pasts and putting every little thing they did or said wrong up on public display.
"Probably invade the Falkland Islands within the next five years."
Bring it on. We're ready.
The politicians of the UK might not want a(nother) war, but the public and the press wouldn't give them much choice in the matter.
It's not just South American countries. Every country believes they are something special.
Do not underestimate the demands of poorly-coded flash facebook games.
There's a limited number of combinations for any finite number of lego bricks. You could just keep on buying more and building ever-bigger things.
It's not an unlimited plan.
It's an unlimited* plan.
*limited
Aside from the 'affordable' bit. The dream of nuclear was that power would become 'too cheap to meter.' That didn't happen. It's still more expensive than coal, though at least it'll last longer and doesn't screw up the climate.
Aside from everything getting cheaper, access to truly ridiculous amounts of energy at an affordable price opens up whole new areas of industry. Recycling, for one - no messing around with separate processing and delicate, fiddly chemistry. Just dump the whole lot into the blast chamber, reduce it all to plasma and condense whatever you need from the atoms as they cool. Literally anything goes in, valuable raw materials come out. Food production goes up dramatically as it becomes practical to maintain fields under artificial sunlight all night. Water shortage becomes a non-issue as desalination becomes affordable to all. It really would be one of the great revolutions of history: Agricultural, industrial, information, fusion.
Not that it matters, because cold fusion isn't going to be invented tomorrow. Or ever.
There isn't much legitimate research because cold fusion violates some very well-established laws regarding energy requirements: You need to put energy into fusion to get more energy out, and that energy in is rather a lot. The more widely accepted not-cold fusion provides this energy by operating at extreme temperatures, and certainly can work in theory - the barriers are purely engineering problems, difficulties in containing a stable reaction using equipment a bit more compact than a star.
But the transition from an economy entirely built around the labor market could be a big problem. If done well, it gives us a utopia where no-one need want for anything they desire. If done poorly, it ends in a world where a fraction of a percent of the world population control almost all the resources and the rest live in abject poverty.
Sure. But to have any chance, the tech needs three things:
1. It has to be very good indeed. At least as good as the existing offerings. Open source can do this - the existance of x264 shows this is true - but starting over from scratch? That's a massive project.
2. It has to be patent-proof. That's just not possible. No way. Patents are so broad now, it'd be impossible not to violate a lot of them without even knowing about them. That's why we need google: Their big money and legal muscle let them fight the legal battle.
3. It has to be supported by at least one major player, who has the clout to get players widely available. Not just on PCs, but embedded codecs on phones and tablets too. Distributed with browsers or operating systems, so my mother who has no idea what 'codec' means can still watch her silly dog videos on the internet.
To ask for all that, and full ideological compliance too, is just asking too much. Not going to happen.
VP8/WebM is the only halfway-viable competitor to h264. Don't demand perfection, you won't get it.
My suggestion sounds like a good approach. A good old-fashioned truck to haul the supplies most of the way, to the edge of the rubble/rabble/flood/ash, then use drones to distribute the supplies from there. The drones don't need really long range then, and their low capacity isn't such an issue when they can make a trip in half an hour.