And just how are these devices any different than all the other IoT devices that phone home tons of personal information about you and your surroundings to their real owners (the manufacturers) so that they can mine it, sell it, and push ads to you based off it?
I started my own software company so I never have to worry about getting fired or downsized. I just have to worry about finding customers so there is revenue to pay myself something for my efforts. Not the easiest thing either.
Mining in this way seems like it would yield very low value for the amount of electricity used and only makes sense if electricity was free (or you are not the one paying for it). That seems to be the case here. They don't care one bit if they only get $.05 worth of bitcoin after expending $1 worth of electricity if you are the one paying the dollar instead of them. It is like those charitable organizations that sign up all these ridiculous call centers that take 90% of your donations. The charity still gets 10% which beats nothing, so they do it. It's also like those copper thieves who don't mind at all destroying $100,000 worth of equipment as long as they can scavenge $300 worth of copper to sell to feed their drug habit.
How about someone who does not want all those cloud storage providers having ultimate control over all their data? Even if you encrypt everything so that they don't spy on you, sell your private information to the highest bidder, or turn it over to the government; they could still destroy everything or simply block your access to it if you refuse to pay their new 'access' fee.
Drive capacity and drive performance improvements have always been different lines on the graph. Both lines go up, but capacity is on a steeper curve. It has always been much cheaper and easier to double the capacity of a hard drive than it has been to double its performance. The same is true of SSD. A 1TB SSD is not twice as fast as a 512GB SSD. This means that with every generation of all kinds of storage devices, it takes longer and longer to copy all the data on one (or back one up, or rebuild a RAID, or find things, or synchronize, etc.).
Windows might be the worst at this, but it is still a big problem on OSX and all the Linux distributions as well. Maybe you organize things perfectly so all your files are exactly where you expect them to be and you never move things around, but 99.9% of users out there have stuff thrown all over their directory trees (on multiple devices). Search is a big problem on ALL file systems.
HDD storage is about $25 per TB. How much is SDD storage per TB these days? SDD technology is great for storing your most accessed data, if you have 40TB of data that you only might need to access a few times a year, it really hits your pocketbook hard to try and store it all on SSD.
Once you get a few million files on these things, you can't find anything in a reasonable time frame. A 40TB HDD will hold about 40 million files if the average file size is about 1MB. Sure there are lots of really big video files, but there are lots of little tiny ones too, so an average of 1MB is very reasonable. Once you have 40 million files trying to find those 10 JPG files you took of your son's birthday party can take an hour or more. Why is that? File systems were invented a long time ago and have had only minor architectural changes since then. Searching still requires a folder traversal and examining the extension of each file name. Meta-data structures are too big (NTFS is the worst at 4K for each file record). Just reading in the file table in Windows is 160GB if you have 40 million files. If you don't want to read it again every time you search, then you need 160GB of RAM to cache it in memory. You can make things faster if you let Windows Search or Spotlight on OSX index your whole drive (basically read all the metadata and put it in a separate database), but that can take hours already. It might take days with a 40TB drive.
I am working on a new data management system that will easily handle 100 million files. You can load the whole meta-data table for that many files into just 6.4GB of RAM from a cold boot in about 30 seconds and then every query (e.g. find all my photos) only takes a second or two.
There is a big difference between making something illegal that should always be illegal (e.g. anthrax) and making something illegal that has many legitimate uses (e.g. guns and encryption). That was my point. Outlawing something very useful just because someone abuses it to harm others is not a good reason.
This is another argument for a decentralized web. Too much of our data is congregating in the hands of fewer and fewer players. We are going back to the mainframe days where all the data was managed in a central location. Everything is being stored in 'the cloud' which is just another name for somebody else's hard drive where it can be copied, stolen, or turned over to the government. Time for the pendulum to start swinging the other way.
In order to make everyone safe, we have to restrict law abiding citizen's access to guns and encryption, The only people who need encryption must be people who have something to hide; just like the only people who need something stronger than a bb-gun must be people who want to shoot innocent people in the streets.
In theory that sounds nice. Unfortunately, you would spend all your time explaining to your customers why your application runs on their laptop but not on their desktop with a different OS. Or why they cannot do feature X on one platform while they can do it on another. Half your bugs entered would be of this type as well. It is not just the applications either. I see this with platform stuff like file systems. A new file system tries to implement some new feature that no other file system supports, but can't get any application to actually use it because they don't want to act differently between different file systems.
Get ready for paying more just because you bought a regular CPU with lots of cores/threads too. This announcement appears to only apply to Xeon processors but where will this lead? I have the feeling that all those AMD Threadripper or Intel i9 CPUs with tons of cores (16 or more) will soon cost you a lot more to use Windows than on a plain old Quad-Core CPU.
It's kind of like that 'asteroid belt' between Mars and Jupiter. When you see it in movies, they show it like the asteroid field in Star Wars (Empire Strikes Back, I think) where there are thousands of asteroids very close to one another and constantly smashing into one another. In reality, the average distance between objects is something like 2 million miles and most of them aren't any bigger than a basketball. All the asteroids put together wouldn't create a planet even half the size of Pluto.
I think the market would be the most healthy if there were 3 or 4 of them, each with about 30% or less of the market. They would compete with one another for the best features and most stable platform. What we don't need is a highly fractured market where there are dozens of OS choices that would choke any good application development because it takes way too much effort to build for every OS.
The market in general is very risk averse. Innovation requires risk..a step into the unknown. Almost every new invention or innovation requires at least a small group of 'early adopters' who will take a chance on the new thing enough to get some market traction. If the product is truly good, then lots of people will jump on board once they know most of the risks have been eliminated. But until then, it sees little support. This is a primary reason many startups fail. They are caught in a 'catch-22'. Cannot get the resources needed to build and perfect the product without market adoption first. Cannot get any market adoption since the resources to actually build it are not there.
It needs to be like the Oscars where you have categories like 'best foreign short film by a left-handed director'. Of course, they might have to split up the money a lot more so rather than getting a million dollars for the Nobel Prize for Chemistry you get $35.27 instead.
The first question everyone should ask before buying any kind of IoT device or one that uses AI is: Where is the data sent and stored? If all the data remains on devices in your home or business that you control, then go ahead and get it if it improves your life. If all the data is sent up to the manufacturers 'cloud' then don't be surprised when all your private information gets stolen by hackers; walks out the company door on a flash drive; or is just outright sold to the highest bidder by that company. It doesn't matter what the privacy statement says right now, they can ignore it or change that at a whim. It won't be long until naked pictures of you are spread across social media. It won't be long until your vacation habits are known to burglars. It won't be long until neighbors know your darkest secrets. If the data is not exclusively on YOUR devices, then you do not own it. Period.
So let's just assume that because Dynamite has been used occasionally to kill people, that the invention itself is evil. I take it that you have nothing to do with the construction, demolition, or mining industries where it has been used heavily for very good purposes.
As usual, many of the comments reflect the idea that us peons are Google's customers. We want Google to cater to OUR needs, instead of Google's real customers...those who pay Google real money to show up in search results. It is funny to hear people who never want to pay a cent for anything expect their needs to be considered by (and be a top priority for) various businesses who are in it for the money.
Banks learned long ago that security measures had to be escalated along with the pile of money being kept. If a small branch only had a few $100K in cash, it didn't need the same security as a big bank with several $Million in the vault. When you have so much gold that it requires dump trucks to carry it in and out, you need the security of Fort Knox. Any bank that had $Billions stored in a file cabinet with only a single 80 year old security guard watching it, should be held responsible when it gets robbed. It sounds like that was the case at Equifax.
...and we need to charge everybody a $10,000 tax every time they buy a new car worth more than $5,000. After all, nobody needs a car that is more reliable than the junker I drove back in college and I sold for $800 when I was done, right? Of course, there would not be any unintended consequences to this radical tax policy, right? Everyone would gladly pay it and our streets would not start to look like Cuba where 80% of the cars are rusted junkers built 50 years ago. Right?
NOT! Gee, I wonder why companies like this don't take cyber security seriously? If there is a massive breach like this one, do those responsible feel the slightest bit of personal pain from it? No. Just rake in the bucks and let everyone else suffer the collateral damage.
Slashdot Mirror
And just how are these devices any different than all the other IoT devices that phone home tons of personal information about you and your surroundings to their real owners (the manufacturers) so that they can mine it, sell it, and push ads to you based off it?
I started my own software company so I never have to worry about getting fired or downsized. I just have to worry about finding customers so there is revenue to pay myself something for my efforts. Not the easiest thing either.
Mining in this way seems like it would yield very low value for the amount of electricity used and only makes sense if electricity was free (or you are not the one paying for it). That seems to be the case here. They don't care one bit if they only get $.05 worth of bitcoin after expending $1 worth of electricity if you are the one paying the dollar instead of them. It is like those charitable organizations that sign up all these ridiculous call centers that take 90% of your donations. The charity still gets 10% which beats nothing, so they do it. It's also like those copper thieves who don't mind at all destroying $100,000 worth of equipment as long as they can scavenge $300 worth of copper to sell to feed their drug habit.
How about someone who does not want all those cloud storage providers having ultimate control over all their data? Even if you encrypt everything so that they don't spy on you, sell your private information to the highest bidder, or turn it over to the government; they could still destroy everything or simply block your access to it if you refuse to pay their new 'access' fee.
Drive capacity and drive performance improvements have always been different lines on the graph. Both lines go up, but capacity is on a steeper curve. It has always been much cheaper and easier to double the capacity of a hard drive than it has been to double its performance. The same is true of SSD. A 1TB SSD is not twice as fast as a 512GB SSD. This means that with every generation of all kinds of storage devices, it takes longer and longer to copy all the data on one (or back one up, or rebuild a RAID, or find things, or synchronize, etc.).
Windows might be the worst at this, but it is still a big problem on OSX and all the Linux distributions as well. Maybe you organize things perfectly so all your files are exactly where you expect them to be and you never move things around, but 99.9% of users out there have stuff thrown all over their directory trees (on multiple devices). Search is a big problem on ALL file systems.
HDD storage is about $25 per TB. How much is SDD storage per TB these days? SDD technology is great for storing your most accessed data, if you have 40TB of data that you only might need to access a few times a year, it really hits your pocketbook hard to try and store it all on SSD.
Once you get a few million files on these things, you can't find anything in a reasonable time frame. A 40TB HDD will hold about 40 million files if the average file size is about 1MB. Sure there are lots of really big video files, but there are lots of little tiny ones too, so an average of 1MB is very reasonable. Once you have 40 million files trying to find those 10 JPG files you took of your son's birthday party can take an hour or more. Why is that? File systems were invented a long time ago and have had only minor architectural changes since then. Searching still requires a folder traversal and examining the extension of each file name. Meta-data structures are too big (NTFS is the worst at 4K for each file record). Just reading in the file table in Windows is 160GB if you have 40 million files. If you don't want to read it again every time you search, then you need 160GB of RAM to cache it in memory. You can make things faster if you let Windows Search or Spotlight on OSX index your whole drive (basically read all the metadata and put it in a separate database), but that can take hours already. It might take days with a 40TB drive.
I am working on a new data management system that will easily handle 100 million files. You can load the whole meta-data table for that many files into just 6.4GB of RAM from a cold boot in about 30 seconds and then every query (e.g. find all my photos) only takes a second or two.
There is a big difference between making something illegal that should always be illegal (e.g. anthrax) and making something illegal that has many legitimate uses (e.g. guns and encryption). That was my point. Outlawing something very useful just because someone abuses it to harm others is not a good reason.
So would a psychotic person intent on inflicting pain and damage pay any more attention to laws against encryption than he would to laws against guns?
This is another argument for a decentralized web. Too much of our data is congregating in the hands of fewer and fewer players. We are going back to the mainframe days where all the data was managed in a central location. Everything is being stored in 'the cloud' which is just another name for somebody else's hard drive where it can be copied, stolen, or turned over to the government. Time for the pendulum to start swinging the other way.
In order to make everyone safe, we have to restrict law abiding citizen's access to guns and encryption, The only people who need encryption must be people who have something to hide; just like the only people who need something stronger than a bb-gun must be people who want to shoot innocent people in the streets.
In theory that sounds nice. Unfortunately, you would spend all your time explaining to your customers why your application runs on their laptop but not on their desktop with a different OS. Or why they cannot do feature X on one platform while they can do it on another. Half your bugs entered would be of this type as well. It is not just the applications either. I see this with platform stuff like file systems. A new file system tries to implement some new feature that no other file system supports, but can't get any application to actually use it because they don't want to act differently between different file systems.
Get ready for paying more just because you bought a regular CPU with lots of cores/threads too. This announcement appears to only apply to Xeon processors but where will this lead? I have the feeling that all those AMD Threadripper or Intel i9 CPUs with tons of cores (16 or more) will soon cost you a lot more to use Windows than on a plain old Quad-Core CPU.
It's kind of like that 'asteroid belt' between Mars and Jupiter. When you see it in movies, they show it like the asteroid field in Star Wars (Empire Strikes Back, I think) where there are thousands of asteroids very close to one another and constantly smashing into one another. In reality, the average distance between objects is something like 2 million miles and most of them aren't any bigger than a basketball. All the asteroids put together wouldn't create a planet even half the size of Pluto.
I think the market would be the most healthy if there were 3 or 4 of them, each with about 30% or less of the market. They would compete with one another for the best features and most stable platform. What we don't need is a highly fractured market where there are dozens of OS choices that would choke any good application development because it takes way too much effort to build for every OS.
The market in general is very risk averse. Innovation requires risk..a step into the unknown. Almost every new invention or innovation requires at least a small group of 'early adopters' who will take a chance on the new thing enough to get some market traction. If the product is truly good, then lots of people will jump on board once they know most of the risks have been eliminated. But until then, it sees little support. This is a primary reason many startups fail. They are caught in a 'catch-22'. Cannot get the resources needed to build and perfect the product without market adoption first. Cannot get any market adoption since the resources to actually build it are not there.
It needs to be like the Oscars where you have categories like 'best foreign short film by a left-handed director'. Of course, they might have to split up the money a lot more so rather than getting a million dollars for the Nobel Prize for Chemistry you get $35.27 instead.
The first question everyone should ask before buying any kind of IoT device or one that uses AI is: Where is the data sent and stored? If all the data remains on devices in your home or business that you control, then go ahead and get it if it improves your life. If all the data is sent up to the manufacturers 'cloud' then don't be surprised when all your private information gets stolen by hackers; walks out the company door on a flash drive; or is just outright sold to the highest bidder by that company. It doesn't matter what the privacy statement says right now, they can ignore it or change that at a whim. It won't be long until naked pictures of you are spread across social media. It won't be long until your vacation habits are known to burglars. It won't be long until neighbors know your darkest secrets. If the data is not exclusively on YOUR devices, then you do not own it. Period.
So let's just assume that because Dynamite has been used occasionally to kill people, that the invention itself is evil. I take it that you have nothing to do with the construction, demolition, or mining industries where it has been used heavily for very good purposes.
I am so glad that the telemarketers disappeared and now I never get calls from strangers wanting to sell me stuff. /sarcasm
As usual, many of the comments reflect the idea that us peons are Google's customers. We want Google to cater to OUR needs, instead of Google's real customers...those who pay Google real money to show up in search results. It is funny to hear people who never want to pay a cent for anything expect their needs to be considered by (and be a top priority for) various businesses who are in it for the money.
Banks learned long ago that security measures had to be escalated along with the pile of money being kept. If a small branch only had a few $100K in cash, it didn't need the same security as a big bank with several $Million in the vault. When you have so much gold that it requires dump trucks to carry it in and out, you need the security of Fort Knox. Any bank that had $Billions stored in a file cabinet with only a single 80 year old security guard watching it, should be held responsible when it gets robbed. It sounds like that was the case at Equifax.
...and we need to charge everybody a $10,000 tax every time they buy a new car worth more than $5,000. After all, nobody needs a car that is more reliable than the junker I drove back in college and I sold for $800 when I was done, right? Of course, there would not be any unintended consequences to this radical tax policy, right? Everyone would gladly pay it and our streets would not start to look like Cuba where 80% of the cars are rusted junkers built 50 years ago. Right?
NOT! Gee, I wonder why companies like this don't take cyber security seriously? If there is a massive breach like this one, do those responsible feel the slightest bit of personal pain from it? No. Just rake in the bucks and let everyone else suffer the collateral damage.