Apple doesn't need to come up with the next big thing. They just need everybody to think they've come up with the next big thing. Which, by the way, they are very very good at. And they've got 300 billion in the bank to prove it. Apple has, in public perception, made the perfect transition from technology company to Fashion Brand without anybody really noticing. As one expert put it a few weeks ago: There isnt a Market for smartwatches, there is a market for the apple watch. No other company could pull a stunt like that and get away with it.
Yes they build innovative tech, but only as a means to their end. Their end is selling flashy products, tech innovation is just their way of achieving that goal.
This is a serious question. As somebody who lives in Germany where everything that can be regulated is regulated - and I mean *everything* - building my own home is a massive hassle and something of a burocratic endeavour on top of the work needed to do the actual building. We have rules for the angle of roofs - they aren't allowed to diverge off certain angles as not to disturb the overall appearance of settlements (no joke!).
But my understanding of the US is that you can go out into the countryside, buy a few acres of land for what basically amounts to a handful of bucks, get one or two shipping containters, plant them in the middle of said property and call it a home and then slowly start building away, cutting away windows, laying floors growing your garden and no "Bauamt" (Building Authority) will come bugging you with regulations about fire-safety, wether the fire-extinguisher is hanging at the correct position or sanitary conditions are up to modern regulations or if the containers fit the general regulated aestetics of the area.
AFAICT from across the pond building your own microhome in the US amounts to simply getting off your lazy ass, start doing it and having some patience as you wittle away and a chain of projects to build it. This is next to impossible in Germany, if you don't want to enter a legal gray area with some risks attached - which some people do.
Am I getting something wrong here? Please enlighten. How easy is it to build your own home in the US, just the way you like it with no authorities coming to bug you with details on how you are alowed to do it?
The concept of blame should disappear if you are diagnosed by a system that is orders of magnitude more precise than any human could ever be. AFAIK that is exactly the point of medical AIs like Watson. If maintained well, a system like Watson can "know" things a human or an entire army of human medical experts could never know, can process cross-reference cases and drug interference and genetic information at a speed, scale and accuracy that will make the last 500 years of advancement in medicine look like a pre-school exercise in comparsion. Miss- or non-diagnosis by human medical experts is high, and we wouldn't be happier about it if we have someone to blame. Doctors can only operate because there are catch-alls in place that keep a doctor who screwed up from going to jail. Given the 80% chance of dying in the next 5 years or the 80% chance of being cured with an 20% chance of an operation done by a human still failing and killing me really fast I probably would still take my chances. It's always a trade-off and capable AIs driving for us or doing 95% of all medical diagnose work will tip the odds so far in favour of humans, playing the blame game if something at some point does go wrong would be nothing short of stupid and/or silly.
The same goes for "Whos the AI driven car going to kill? The the young handicapped kid on life support or the old grandma 5 years away from the grave but with 4 grandchildren who love her?".
This type of question entirely misses the point. AI will be let on to the streets when they drive way, way better than a human ever could, always and everywhere. Deaths in traffic will plummet by orders of magnitude and the occasional situation where an AI can't prevent someone from dying will be so rare society will shrug it off. Experts even expect an extreme organ donor shortage once AI hits the streets. Less idiots killing themselves and others.... On second though, maybe we should keep a subset of roads for those who insist on racing around.
Highly optimised systems get increasingly fragile. A highly optimised market for drugs will falter on the slightest off-the-regular imbalance. Same goes for IT services. Imagine everything running on and with Google in 3 decades. And Google then having some kind of hickup that puts the entire society of humanity to a grinding halt for a few days. Or weeks.
A Utopia would have to be built taking this systemic problem into account. But then again, this might not be the best example. As we all know, the US medical system is about as far away from Utopia as it gets.
I agree to an extent. Slowly phasing out existing plants where the financial investment was already made could be smarter than simply turning them off and building intermediary coal plants to buffer the transition.
However, there is one thing to observe: Transition, where it is taken on, is happening at rate faster than anyone predicted, simply because setting up a windmill or a solar array is so much less hassle than building an nuclear fission cycle that follows all the required regulations. So we'd have to look very carefull if even existing nuclear cycles are cost effective vis-a-vis contemporary alternatives. Modern day stuff like Elon Musks solar roof and the powerwall basically pay for itself with current energy costs. No need to lug nuclear fuel and waste about anymore. The only infrastucture needed for larger off-shore windparks and desert-bound solar-arrays that isn't in existance are powerlines. And even those are cheaper and less fuss than NF, even if you put them into the ground.
If we de-throne the power cartels and allow for decentralised power we'd see all nuclear plants put into hybernation-mode faster than expected, simply because it's too much hassle to maintain them for regular throughput. I'd expect nuclear plants to simply be repurposed as storage facilities for their own waste.
That's the plain and simple truth. Nuclear Fission only looks like it works if it is cross-funded by obscene truckloads of taxpayers money and nobody looks too hard at centralized power cartels (funded by said taxpayers money), reactor runtimes and maintenance costs (also paid by taxpayers mones). Factor in waste handling, storage and the risks of nuclear disasters and the balance sheet goes really deep-red.
The numbers don't add up and the whole concept simply doesn't work. Even the conservatives in Germany have noticed this. Replenishing Plant Wackersdorf - a multi-billion dollar project for the treatment and replenishing of nuclear waste - wasn't closed down by left-wing hippie protesters raising a stink of the better part of a decade, it was closed down by southern Germany state officials doing the math. Some backroom clerk adding up the numbers and seeing in awe and amazement that it wouldn't work, even with the best predictions. Same goes for the most advanced fast breeder at Kalkar - a building estimated more expensive than the Pyramids of Gizeh, inflation factored in.
Now Germany is moving out of nuclear alltogether and for once we're actually ahead of schedule - even with all the fuss about the new powerlines crossing the republic. AFAI understand we've simply decided to front a few extra billion and move those underground, so nobody can complain of them blocking their view. We crossed the 80% renewables a few weeks ago. If Germany can do this - really not a country known for it's sunny days - the rest of the world can do it too.
People have to see the light: Nuclear Fission as we know it is a 60ies techno-romatic pipe-dream. And a dangerous one at that, with a 200 000 year waste problem attached.
IMHO the world should move to decommission classic nuclear fission ASAP. I'm glad the swiss voted in favor of this. I personally don't want to many chernobyls and fukushimas happening before the world finally catches on.
... please rent a few laps on the race-track like any other respectable engine-nut.
Please leave the regular roads to us normal people, so we can actually go on with our lives without having to fear being killed by some idiot. Mind you, I'm not implying that _you're_ an idiot, I'm just telling the truth and making a reasonable demand. Seeing the way idiots drive on the Autobahn or through our cities has me praying for Google/Tesla/Mecredes-Benz/Whoever to finally get this self-driving-car show on the road. Like, literally. And this is Germany, where getting a divers licence costs north of 1500 Euros and equivalates to something like getting a PhD in Abstract Algebra, Training to become a Fighter Pilot or something of the sorts somewhere else.
The only thing slowing this down is batteries and their raw materials. Experts expect ~150000 jobs to go away in the German IC supplier industry due to electric in the next decade or so. Thats high profile engineering and manufacturing we're talking about.
A modern German IC engine has 200+ moving parts, not counting transfer,clutch and gearbox. An e-motor in a tesla has 18 moving parts and is basically directly attached to the axle.
Conclusion: Raw materials for batteries aside, this study isn't to far off imho. What will happen in the next 20 years will totally baffle most people and will cough up a mix of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.
Don't be too quick in calling this study stupid is my strong advice.
Seriously. Disney has such a trackrecord as a bad company I can't even muster a shrug. And, btw., who would want to watch that movie anyway? PotC #5 it is or something? Give me a break. If I had that movie on my disk I would probably delete it without watching, to free up some space. I can imagine countless other things to way better spend 2.5 hours of my life.
... have policies in place that prevent mission-critical systems from being proprietary, dependent on one vendor, insecure, not updated and open to being messed up by clueless users who click on links and download and install everything they can lay their hands on.
Also they should all have in place: Up and running intrusion detection on their intranets, regular automated overturning backups and regularly tested zero-fuss disaster recovery. Have all that in place and you wouldn't even notice WannaCry.
Extra brownie points for building and maintaining all that with FOSS systems and giving back to the community.
WannaCry happened because of Windows which is in its sorry state because MS doesn't want to help users, they want to sell software or - better yet - software subscriptions.
Watch what happens when cleaning and care-robots become normal and not just something barely moving out of the novelty zone.
Point in case: I checked out vacuum robots a few days ago. Dyson is still cleaning out software bugs and comes with a but-ugly charging station and roomba has a lauchable dust compartment. They're just not quite there yet.
When I'm in my 80ies (34 years to go) I hope carebots can take 95% or the burden from my daughter and the rest of society. Once that happens, jobs will go away.
Same goes for transport. Self-driving cars are two re- regulation and three Tesla software upgrades away from actually driving around on our roads. Once that's on thats roughly 80 million jobs globally up for grabs.
Bottom line: Prepare for incoming. Whats happening right now is just a transition phase.
It's amazing how outdatet and steam-agey 1984 seems from a 2017 perspective. The encroachment on total control of the individual would be beyond anything imaginable 30 years ago if this Smartphone Cash thing gains foothold and pushes cash away.
It's definitely a pressing time to get a good look into cryptocurrency.
Fission is not cost effective and only works with massive amounts of taxpayers money. And the only real effect it has is putting power in to the hands of few to the disadvantage of many.
The world as such should decommision Fission ASAP, just like Germany is doing. The next Tchernobyl/Fukushima Fuckup is bound to happen, so we might aswell slim down our chances of that happening ASAP.
If computers would be infinitely fast and thus also have nigh infinite memory and storage (because fractal compression at zero cost - duh) we'd all inmediately be using what is called a Direct Manipulation Interface (DMI) or Direct Manipulation Environment. Squeak comes close to that, but a good DMI would be something like Flash combined with RunRev using Python or something as a PL, including a touchscreen object modeller for contemporary tablets and some other niceties. The difference between programming and runtime environment would basically completely disappear.
There would be no files anymore, just "Objects" and no starting or stopping of programms, just saved "states" of objects or processes running in and on objects. Again, Squak or RunRev/LiveCode come close to this, but of course are a little flakey to be true contenders for the proposed computing utopia in the GP.
The best experiences I had actually were with Flash, although flashes timeline stuff always was a step backwards vis-a-vis hypercard, squeak and such. But still... Need a loading bar? Draw one and apply something like >>bar.width = myFile.loading,percentage Done. Doesn't get any better than that short of the computer reading your mind.
I would love to have a Python or JS 2018 driven DMI/DME with triple-A 3D and Flash-style 2D vector graphics. Completely FOSS. That would totally rock!
Just about any FOSS system is a viable alternative to Windows, because it doesn't rely on certain functions becoming obsolute and needing to be upgraded. The prime mechanism of cashflow for MS.
This is the reason I abandoned Windows after Win2K and moved to Linux. The lack in convenience is annoying - I once again had to manually fiddle with modlines and x11.conf just a few weeks ago (... in effing 2017!!). But in the long run my *nix skills will still be useful and applicable when todays versions of Windows have long since passed again.
How far ReactOS is in replacing older versions on Windows is I don't know, but AFAIHH it is pretty impressive how far it has come. Although progress is very slow, AFAICT.
However, don't use ReactOS for the wrong reasons!
If you are relying on React to run older versions of MS Office, I strongly recommend you move to some FOSS office package like LibreOffice and ditch the Windows camp alltogether. Also 3D shouldn't be a reason wantig to keep old versions of Windows around. Switcihing to a modern platform and using the tool of your choice or the FOSS tool Blender is a way better idea for stuff like that. ReactOS is a platform for good functional custom legacy software built for Windows - and if it succeeds at being exactly that, then that is a good thing. Testing legacy software with ReactOS might yield results that can save companies massive amounts of money, because they now know a platform their stuff runs on that MS doens't controll and can continue developing against it rather than ditching millions worth of software and starting from scratch. And that is always a good thing.
Like many here on slashdot I'm an A-Grade Computer Expert.
I had my fist encounter with microcomputers at the delicate age of 9, playing Lunar Landing on a Comodore PET at my dad's workplace back in the late 70ies. For me being able to Programm a computer off the bat was always the main and most important trait of a computer. My first own computer was a Sharp PC 1402 (PC standing for "Pocket Computer") - it was portable, had a small Qwerty Keyboard but most of all it was programmable, in Basic.
Long story short, I've alway gone the programmer side of the beated path when it comes to computers. I got my first Mac roughly in 2003, when the famous 12" iBook G4 (with seperate Wifi Module) was the best Subnotebook you could get for 1000 Euros, hundreds of euros cheaper than the next cheapest offering from Toshiba. I wanted to run the Flash IDE and wouldn't touch a portable Windows machine with a ten-foot pole.
The one thing that struck me with the Apple Computers, aside from the Windows boxes, my self-made Abit BP6 dual celeron running SuSE Linux and all the other stuff Nerds like us tinker with day-in and day-out, was that the Apple devices work.
Out of the box.
This is the plain and simple truth that holds until today, even with the golden cage in iTunes and "secure pay" or whatever it's called built into the newest Macbook Pros moving further in to give users a cushy lock-in.
When it comes to zero-fuss "buy, unpack, works" computing, Apple rules unchallanged in every imaginable way. Good hardware, good design, unmatched out-of-the-box usability just short of an meticulously expert-configured KDE on an expert-built custom box.... No shovelware. No shitty third-party endorsements (how I hate these shitty windows notebooks with their stickers and crap...) , no MS crap (Oh God, the MS crap - just thinking of it makes me sick)... Apple is passionate about software and they build their own hardware. This shows at every corner. It is very much as Steve Jobs said: They don't want to build crap - and it shows.
I bought a mac mini a few years later and then a few years later the 2011 MB Air. Again, a totally new category of device that works out of the box. With Unix. And lot's of very neat open source offerings to improve your development life.
Fast forward to today, my latest computer is a 300 Euro Free-DOS netbook (Asus Travelmate B117) that I installed Lubuntu 16 LTS on, for the simple reason that I didn't want to shell out 2300 Euros for those new MacBook touchbar devices and I'm actually faster at work if I use a box that forces me to use the CLI and a lightweight WM. Also, Flash is dead, so I don't need it's IDE anymore. And it's the first and probably last proprietary technology I will ever have worked with. Adobe can go and f*ck itself - I will probably never use any of their tools for anything mission critical again. I also find the iTunes and apple-lock-in secure-fingerprint thingie on the new MBs a little disconcerting. Also right now Apple is expensive again in every device category including the mac mini - which used to be a real bargain deal throughout the entire industry.
So after 13 years, macs are off the menu again and I'm back to Linux as my main system and once again a cheap Linux netbook is a good choice.
But all that aside, it still holds true: If you want the all-out zero-fuss experience, you can not go wrong with a mac. The only thing lately competing with Apple in this regard is Google with their ecosystem and Chromebooks rounding off the upper edge. You can have an experience simular to Apples with a notably cheaper Chromebook. But I'm not quite there yet throwing myself completely into the arms of Google. I'm a computer expert, I want control and I distrust the big corporations - and for good reasons too.
But if you're not an expert and you have money to spare, Apple will never let you down. And AFAICT it has been that way ever since Steve Jobs came back on board and introduc
Seriously. They talk about being eco-friendly, so they really should start covering the back-end of their production chain with conflict-free minerals, eco-friendly mining and aluminum production and the likes. Cash like that buys you giant branches of entire industries and they could use that money to start fixing things inmediately. Call the new subsidary "Apple Raw Materials" or something and spread out eco-standards across the globe through sheer market and marketing force - that would actually be cool and justify the obscene amount of net gain they get per device.
I still get hardcovers if the topic seems interesting enough and appears to have a long term value.
I don't get DRM ebooks, they are a pain and a burden. I tried one amazon ebook "reamde" for kicks and one google playstore book, a thick WP devguide. DRM turned me off quickly in both cases. Reamde I'll get as paperback some day if I want to read it again and got the WP book as a zero-fuss PDF.
I do have my fat Oreillys as PDF too - way easyer to lug around on my tablet. But getting them through official chanels is prohibitively expensive.
Bottom line: I'm a tablet guy ( 10" Yoga 2 with Android) and even I distrust regular ebooks to an extent. So I'm not really surprised about about this news.
Serisously: Where are these Cobol positions in desperate need of filling?
If they really are desperately needed, they should translate into 80 000€+/Year, 40 hour workweeks, 30 days of vacation, zero-fuss relocation support and some other niceties. Give me that and I'll drop my current hard-pressing hipster-induced TypeScript/JS/NodeJS ambitions instantly and dive into Cobol right away. I'll be the Cobol master in a year and enjoy it aswell. And as a guy with ERP/E-Commerce order processing experience, I get serial processing (which banks still do for transactional safety) and other old-school super-conservative ways of doing things.
But somehow something tells me they want people no older than 28 with 10+ years of Cobol experience and top-grade proficiency with Oracle 4.x and some obscure version of AIX. And offer a laughable 44 000€/Year and I have to move to Frankfurt, a town that is ugly as hell and has real-estate and living costs move off the charts big time, even more so since Brexit.
So, unless I get a call by a banking Ops manager telling me that he's in desperate need for Coders willing to move to Cobol and if I would care to give it a shot and offers me something along the lines stated in the first paragraph, I'm not really holding my breath or feeling to much pitty for the banks.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple doesn't need to come up with the next big thing. They just need everybody to think they've come up with the next big thing. Which, by the way, they are very very good at. And they've got 300 billion in the bank to prove it. Apple has, in public perception, made the perfect transition from technology company to Fashion Brand without anybody really noticing.
As one expert put it a few weeks ago: There isnt a Market for smartwatches, there is a market for the apple watch. No other company could pull a stunt like that and get away with it.
Yes they build innovative tech, but only as a means to their end. Their end is selling flashy products, tech innovation is just their way of achieving that goal.
This is a serious question. As somebody who lives in Germany where everything that can be regulated is regulated - and I mean *everything* - building my own home is a massive hassle and something of a burocratic endeavour on top of the work needed to do the actual building. We have rules for the angle of roofs - they aren't allowed to diverge off certain angles as not to disturb the overall appearance of settlements (no joke!).
But my understanding of the US is that you can go out into the countryside, buy a few acres of land for what basically amounts to a handful of bucks, get one or two shipping containters, plant them in the middle of said property and call it a home and then slowly start building away, cutting away windows, laying floors growing your garden and no "Bauamt" (Building Authority) will come bugging you with regulations about fire-safety, wether the fire-extinguisher is hanging at the correct position or sanitary conditions are up to modern regulations or if the containers fit the general regulated aestetics of the area.
AFAICT from across the pond building your own microhome in the US amounts to simply getting off your lazy ass, start doing it and having some patience as you wittle away and a chain of projects to build it. This is next to impossible in Germany, if you don't want to enter a legal gray area with some risks attached - which some people do.
Am I getting something wrong here? Please enlighten. How easy is it to build your own home in the US, just the way you like it with no authorities coming to bug you with details on how you are alowed to do it?
This type of question is a non-existant dilemma.
The concept of blame should disappear if you are diagnosed by a system that is orders of magnitude more precise than any human could ever be. AFAIK that is exactly the point of medical AIs like Watson. If maintained well, a system like Watson can "know" things a human or an entire army of human medical experts could never know, can process cross-reference cases and drug interference and genetic information at a speed, scale and accuracy that will make the last 500 years of advancement in medicine look like a pre-school exercise in comparsion. Miss- or non-diagnosis by human medical experts is high, and we wouldn't be happier about it if we have someone to blame. Doctors can only operate because there are catch-alls in place that keep a doctor who screwed up from going to jail. Given the 80% chance of dying in the next 5 years or the 80% chance of being cured with an 20% chance of an operation done by a human still failing and killing me really fast I probably would still take my chances. It's always a trade-off and capable AIs driving for us or doing 95% of all medical diagnose work will tip the odds so far in favour of humans, playing the blame game if something at some point does go wrong would be nothing short of stupid and/or silly.
The same goes for "Whos the AI driven car going to kill? The the young handicapped kid on life support or the old grandma 5 years away from the grave but with 4 grandchildren who love her?".
This type of question entirely misses the point. AI will be let on to the streets when they drive way, way better than a human ever could, always and everywhere. Deaths in traffic will plummet by orders of magnitude and the occasional situation where an AI can't prevent someone from dying will be so rare society will shrug it off. Experts even expect an extreme organ donor shortage once AI hits the streets. Less idiots killing themselves and others. ... On second though, maybe we should keep a subset of roads for those who insist on racing around.
Highly optimised systems get increasingly fragile. A highly optimised market for drugs will falter on the slightest off-the-regular imbalance. Same goes for IT services. Imagine everything running on and with Google in 3 decades. And Google then having some kind of hickup that puts the entire society of humanity to a grinding halt for a few days. Or weeks.
A Utopia would have to be built taking this systemic problem into account. But then again, this might not be the best example. As we all know, the US medical system is about as far away from Utopia as it gets.
I agree to an extent. Slowly phasing out existing plants where the financial investment was already made could be smarter than simply turning them off and building intermediary coal plants to buffer the transition.
However, there is one thing to observe: Transition, where it is taken on, is happening at rate faster than anyone predicted, simply because setting up a windmill or a solar array is so much less hassle than building an nuclear fission cycle that follows all the required regulations. So we'd have to look very carefull if even existing nuclear cycles are cost effective vis-a-vis contemporary alternatives. Modern day stuff like Elon Musks solar roof and the powerwall basically pay for itself with current energy costs. No need to lug nuclear fuel and waste about anymore. The only infrastucture needed for larger off-shore windparks and desert-bound solar-arrays that isn't in existance are powerlines. And even those are cheaper and less fuss than NF, even if you put them into the ground.
If we de-throne the power cartels and allow for decentralised power we'd see all nuclear plants put into hybernation-mode faster than expected, simply because it's too much hassle to maintain them for regular throughput. I'd expect nuclear plants to simply be repurposed as storage facilities for their own waste.
That's the plain and simple truth. Nuclear Fission only looks like it works if it is cross-funded by obscene truckloads of taxpayers money and nobody looks too hard at centralized power cartels (funded by said taxpayers money), reactor runtimes and maintenance costs (also paid by taxpayers mones). Factor in waste handling, storage and the risks of nuclear disasters and the balance sheet goes really deep-red.
The numbers don't add up and the whole concept simply doesn't work. Even the conservatives in Germany have noticed this. Replenishing Plant Wackersdorf - a multi-billion dollar project for the treatment and replenishing of nuclear waste - wasn't closed down by left-wing hippie protesters raising a stink of the better part of a decade, it was closed down by southern Germany state officials doing the math. Some backroom clerk adding up the numbers and seeing in awe and amazement that it wouldn't work, even with the best predictions. Same goes for the most advanced fast breeder at Kalkar - a building estimated more expensive than the Pyramids of Gizeh, inflation factored in.
Now Germany is moving out of nuclear alltogether and for once we're actually ahead of schedule - even with all the fuss about the new powerlines crossing the republic. AFAI understand we've simply decided to front a few extra billion and move those underground, so nobody can complain of them blocking their view. We crossed the 80% renewables a few weeks ago. If Germany can do this - really not a country known for it's sunny days - the rest of the world can do it too.
People have to see the light: Nuclear Fission as we know it is a 60ies techno-romatic pipe-dream. And a dangerous one at that, with a 200 000 year waste problem attached.
IMHO the world should move to decommission classic nuclear fission ASAP. I'm glad the swiss voted in favor of this. I personally don't want to many chernobyls and fukushimas happening before the world finally catches on.
"Nothing our 280 Billion $ in the bank can't handle. Here, check out our new iPhone ..."
And everybody: "Oooooh, shiny!"
Said it before.
Facebook is not a social network, it's is a global mental illness.
... their doctors even as they get older.
Film at eleven.
I wonder:
Did the PhD get 500 000 in funding for this?
... please rent a few laps on the race-track like any other respectable engine-nut.
Please leave the regular roads to us normal people, so we can actually go on with our lives without having to fear being killed by some idiot.
Mind you, I'm not implying that _you're_ an idiot, I'm just telling the truth and making a reasonable demand. Seeing the way idiots drive on the Autobahn or through our cities has me praying for Google/Tesla/Mecredes-Benz/Whoever to finally get this self-driving-car show on the road. Like, literally. And this is Germany, where getting a divers licence costs north of 1500 Euros and equivalates to something like getting a PhD in Abstract Algebra, Training to become a Fighter Pilot or something of the sorts somewhere else.
The only thing slowing this down is batteries and their raw materials. Experts expect ~150000 jobs to go away in the German IC supplier industry due to electric in the next decade or so. Thats high profile engineering and manufacturing we're talking about.
A modern German IC engine has 200+ moving parts, not counting transfer,clutch and gearbox. An e-motor in a tesla has 18 moving parts and is basically directly attached to the axle.
Conclusion: Raw materials for batteries aside, this study isn't to far off imho. What will happen in the next 20 years will totally baffle most people and will cough up a mix of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.
Don't be too quick in calling this study stupid is my strong advice.
Seriously. Disney has such a trackrecord as a bad company I can't even muster a shrug. And, btw., who would want to watch that movie anyway? PotC #5 it is or something? Give me a break. If I had that movie on my disk I would probably delete it without watching, to free up some space. I can imagine countless other things to way better spend 2.5 hours of my life.
Smartphone prices are artificial anyway. No one can tell me that 64gb of Memory cost 250 Euros.
I'm still waiting for the 5.5 " Stock Android Phone with a feasible 8 core CPU, 128gb of storage for 250 Euros. Perhaps in a Generation or two.
... have policies in place that prevent mission-critical systems from being proprietary, dependent on one vendor, insecure, not updated and open to being messed up by clueless users who click on links and download and install everything they can lay their hands on.
Also they should all have in place: Up and running intrusion detection on their intranets, regular automated overturning backups and regularly tested zero-fuss disaster recovery. Have all that in place and you wouldn't even notice WannaCry.
Extra brownie points for building and maintaining all that with FOSS systems and giving back to the community.
WannaCry happened because of Windows which is in its sorry state because MS doesn't want to help users, they want to sell software or - better yet - software subscriptions.
My 2 cents.
Watch what happens when cleaning and care-robots become normal and not just something barely moving out of the novelty zone.
Point in case: I checked out vacuum robots a few days ago. Dyson is still cleaning out software bugs and comes with a but-ugly charging station and roomba has a lauchable dust compartment. They're just not quite there yet.
When I'm in my 80ies (34 years to go) I hope carebots can take 95% or the burden from my daughter and the rest of society. Once that happens, jobs will go away.
Same goes for transport. Self-driving cars are two re- regulation and three Tesla software upgrades away from actually driving around on our roads. Once that's on thats roughly 80 million jobs globally up for grabs.
Bottom line: Prepare for incoming. Whats happening right now is just a transition phase.
It's amazing how outdatet and steam-agey 1984 seems from a 2017 perspective. The encroachment on total control of the individual would be beyond anything imaginable 30 years ago if this Smartphone Cash thing gains foothold and pushes cash away.
It's definitely a pressing time to get a good look into cryptocurrency.
My 2 eurocents (cash).
... and this proves it too.
Fission is not cost effective and only works with massive amounts of taxpayers money. And the only real effect it has is putting power in to the hands of few to the disadvantage of many.
The world as such should decommision Fission ASAP, just like Germany is doing. The next Tchernobyl/Fukushima Fuckup is bound to happen, so we might aswell slim down our chances of that happening ASAP.
My 2 eurocents.
I don't know about you guys, but to me that thing looks a bit like Googles Hurd. I doubt it will overtake *nix any time soon.
If computers would be infinitely fast and thus also have nigh infinite memory and storage (because fractal compression at zero cost - duh) we'd all inmediately be using what is called a Direct Manipulation Interface (DMI) or Direct Manipulation Environment. Squeak comes close to that, but a good DMI would be something like Flash combined with RunRev using Python or something as a PL, including a touchscreen object modeller for contemporary tablets and some other niceties. The difference between programming and runtime environment would basically completely disappear.
There would be no files anymore, just "Objects" and no starting or stopping of programms, just saved "states" of objects or processes running in and on objects. Again, Squak or RunRev/LiveCode come close to this, but of course are a little flakey to be true contenders for the proposed computing utopia in the GP.
The best experiences I had actually were with Flash, although flashes timeline stuff always was a step backwards vis-a-vis hypercard, squeak and such. But still ... Need a loading bar? Draw one and apply something like >>bar.width = myFile.loading,percentage Done. Doesn't get any better than that short of the computer reading your mind.
I would love to have a Python or JS 2018 driven DMI/DME with triple-A 3D and Flash-style 2D vector graphics. Completely FOSS. That would totally rock!
My 2 eurocents.
Just about any FOSS system is a viable alternative to Windows, because it doesn't rely on certain functions becoming obsolute and needing to be upgraded. The prime mechanism of cashflow for MS.
This is the reason I abandoned Windows after Win2K and moved to Linux. The lack in convenience is annoying - I once again had to manually fiddle with modlines and x11.conf just a few weeks ago (... in effing 2017!!). But in the long run my *nix skills will still be useful and applicable when todays versions of Windows have long since passed again.
How far ReactOS is in replacing older versions on Windows is I don't know, but AFAIHH it is pretty impressive how far it has come. Although progress is very slow, AFAICT.
However, don't use ReactOS for the wrong reasons!
If you are relying on React to run older versions of MS Office, I strongly recommend you move to some FOSS office package like LibreOffice and ditch the Windows camp alltogether. Also 3D shouldn't be a reason wantig to keep old versions of Windows around. Switcihing to a modern platform and using the tool of your choice or the FOSS tool Blender is a way better idea for stuff like that. ReactOS is a platform for good functional custom legacy software built for Windows - and if it succeeds at being exactly that, then that is a good thing. Testing legacy software with ReactOS might yield results that can save companies massive amounts of money, because they now know a platform their stuff runs on that MS doens't controll and can continue developing against it rather than ditching millions worth of software and starting from scratch. And that is always a good thing.
My 2 eurocents.
I bet some guys at Apple are really righfully laughing about this. MS never fails to screw up, do they?
Any curiosity I had about this thing has vanished in an instant. It's amazing to watch.
Like many here on slashdot I'm an A-Grade Computer Expert.
I had my fist encounter with microcomputers at the delicate age of 9, playing Lunar Landing on a Comodore PET at my dad's workplace back in the late 70ies. For me being able to Programm a computer off the bat was always the main and most important trait of a computer. My first own computer was a Sharp PC 1402 (PC standing for "Pocket Computer") - it was portable, had a small Qwerty Keyboard but most of all it was programmable, in Basic.
Long story short, I've alway gone the programmer side of the beated path when it comes to computers. I got my first Mac roughly in 2003, when the famous 12" iBook G4 (with seperate Wifi Module) was the best Subnotebook you could get for 1000 Euros, hundreds of euros cheaper than the next cheapest offering from Toshiba. I wanted to run the Flash IDE and wouldn't touch a portable Windows machine with a ten-foot pole.
The one thing that struck me with the Apple Computers, aside from the Windows boxes, my self-made Abit BP6 dual celeron running SuSE Linux and all the other stuff Nerds like us tinker with day-in and day-out, was that the Apple devices work.
Out of the box.
This is the plain and simple truth that holds until today, even with the golden cage in iTunes and "secure pay" or whatever it's called built into the newest Macbook Pros moving further in to give users a cushy lock-in.
When it comes to zero-fuss "buy, unpack, works" computing, Apple rules unchallanged in every imaginable way. Good hardware, good design, unmatched out-of-the-box usability just short of an meticulously expert-configured KDE on an expert-built custom box. ... No shovelware. No shitty third-party endorsements (how I hate these shitty windows notebooks with their stickers and crap ...) , no MS crap (Oh God, the MS crap - just thinking of it makes me sick) ... Apple is passionate about software and they build their own hardware. This shows at every corner. It is very much as Steve Jobs said: They don't want to build crap - and it shows.
I bought a mac mini a few years later and then a few years later the 2011 MB Air.
Again, a totally new category of device that works out of the box. With Unix. And lot's of very neat open source offerings to improve your development life.
Fast forward to today, my latest computer is a 300 Euro Free-DOS netbook (Asus Travelmate B117) that I installed Lubuntu 16 LTS on, for the simple reason that I didn't want to shell out 2300 Euros for those new MacBook touchbar devices and I'm actually faster at work if I use a box that forces me to use the CLI and a lightweight WM.
Also, Flash is dead, so I don't need it's IDE anymore. And it's the first and probably last proprietary technology I will ever have worked with. Adobe can go and f*ck itself - I will probably never use any of their tools for anything mission critical again. I also find the iTunes and apple-lock-in secure-fingerprint thingie on the new MBs a little disconcerting. Also right now Apple is expensive again in every device category including the mac mini - which used to be a real bargain deal throughout the entire industry.
So after 13 years, macs are off the menu again and I'm back to Linux as my main system and once again a cheap Linux netbook is a good choice.
But all that aside, it still holds true: If you want the all-out zero-fuss experience, you can not go wrong with a mac. The only thing lately competing with Apple in this regard is Google with their ecosystem and Chromebooks rounding off the upper edge. You can have an experience simular to Apples with a notably cheaper Chromebook. But I'm not quite there yet throwing myself completely into the arms of Google. I'm a computer expert, I want control and I distrust the big corporations - and for good reasons too.
But if you're not an expert and you have money to spare, Apple will never let you down. And AFAICT it has been that way ever since Steve Jobs came back on board and introduc
Seriously. They talk about being eco-friendly, so they really should start covering the back-end of their production chain with conflict-free minerals, eco-friendly mining and aluminum production and the likes. Cash like that buys you giant branches of entire industries and they could use that money to start fixing things inmediately. Call the new subsidary "Apple Raw Materials" or something and spread out eco-standards across the globe through sheer market and marketing force - that would actually be cool and justify the obscene amount of net gain they get per device.
I still get hardcovers if the topic seems interesting enough and appears to have a long term value.
I don't get DRM ebooks, they are a pain and a burden. I tried one amazon ebook "reamde" for kicks and one google playstore book, a thick WP devguide. DRM turned me off quickly in both cases. Reamde I'll get as paperback some day if I want to read it again and got the WP book as a zero-fuss PDF.
I do have my fat Oreillys as PDF too - way easyer to lug around on my tablet. But getting them through official chanels is prohibitively expensive.
Bottom line: I'm a tablet guy ( 10" Yoga 2 with Android) and even I distrust regular ebooks to an extent. So I'm not really surprised about about this news.
Serisously: Where are these Cobol positions in desperate need of filling?
If they really are desperately needed, they should translate into 80 000€+/Year, 40 hour workweeks, 30 days of vacation, zero-fuss relocation support and some other niceties. Give me that and I'll drop my current hard-pressing hipster-induced TypeScript/JS/NodeJS ambitions instantly and dive into Cobol right away. I'll be the Cobol master in a year and enjoy it aswell. And as a guy with ERP/E-Commerce order processing experience, I get serial processing (which banks still do for transactional safety) and other old-school super-conservative ways of doing things.
But somehow something tells me they want people no older than 28 with 10+ years of Cobol experience and top-grade proficiency with Oracle 4.x and some obscure version of AIX. And offer a laughable 44 000€/Year and I have to move to Frankfurt, a town that is ugly as hell and has real-estate and living costs move off the charts big time, even more so since Brexit.
So, unless I get a call by a banking Ops manager telling me that he's in desperate need for Coders willing to move to Cobol and if I would care to give it a shot and offers me something along the lines stated in the first paragraph, I'm not really holding my breath or feeling to much pitty for the banks.
My 2 eurocents.