1) Kickstarter. Sign of a project doomed to failure when it concerns hardware, really. Especially where they are talking on the scale of producing hardware boards with en-masse dozens of cores on them from a few hundred thousand dollars.
2) No OS support - it seems to be a number-cruncher with an ARM-controller, not a generic computer with lots of software already ported. Nobody will rewrite their software to take advantage of it unless it's MADLY to their advantage (i.e. number crunchers, not generic machines). Sure, it has a C compiler but so does a Z80. That means nothing if they can't be turned to generic-purpose cores that anything can use without having to change the way they work / thread.
3) $99 (not guaranteed, they don't even have the tooling for it yet!) for the prototype which barely has two ARM cores as the power house and 16 of their custom (unsupported) cores for doing some floating-point. Not worth it compared to, say, a $25 Raspberry Pi en masse.
I'm not a RPi fan, to be honest - I have one, and I've commented enough on here about its shortcomings. But they *are* delivering hardware (not perfect, but it's usable if you know about the problems with it), it's quite simple, bog-standard, cheap, works, there are half-a-dozen Linux distros with optimised code available for it already and it "just runs" Debian ARM programs without needing to recompile to take advantage of its hardware.
This, in comparison, isn't/doesn't.
There's a point at which the sacrifices to squeeze another core or reduce power by another watt, or decrease size by another mm will cost you ordinary users even if they don't cost you hardcore, specific-purpose hardware geeks out to save everything they can.
Hell, the RPi is being bought by/for kids so they can play on it - it's really that well rounded, supported and available.
I once saw a 1U rack that contained something like 16 ARM boards (the entire board, networked together with a switch, powered from individual cables, with disk interfaces over some custom central channel). It cost less, used less power, and did more in the same amount of space. It was a bit homebrew-esque (despite being a professional product), but the advantages were rife.
I was sorely tempted to use it just because, as you say, server-side doesn't matter for most things. And with that sort of basic setup, you could deploy one app per board and not worry about having enough power for all the tasks combined (firewall on one, http server on another, mail on another, auth on another etc.). And keep a board or two in reserve for spares / failures and it would last longer too. Rather than having one monolithic machine and hoping it never goes wrong, have a bunch of them in a box (yes, the box can still go wrong, of course) each modularised to do one task and then adjust / failover accordingly without anyone even knowing there's more than one computer serving their request or even what architecture they are).
And software support? Well, you just install the same version of Linux on them all, then install one of those multi-SSH utils that executes the same command on all the servers (hell, you could have one board do nothing but monitor and repeat all commands onto the others).
If I were to put a 1U rack in colocation, that's how I'd do it. Who cares what's underneath so long as you have power enough to do everything and OS-support enough to run it. And with ARM, OS support isn't a problem.
£500 to the first person to supply a 1U filled to the brim with Raspberry Pi's (or equivalent) with appropriate "single point" Ethernet access and mains power input on the exterior and some kind of central storage for them all.
Okay, so *someone* has to pay to put the fuel into that foreign country in the first place, then pay for the extra bit in the tank required to move it *and* the cargo to its destination.
Whatever way you look at it, you paid to move X amount of rubbish to your country and burn it, where you could have just moved Y amount of oil to your country and burned it instead without any intermediate losses and conversions and it wouldn't have cost any more.
But the *killer* is that you're still burning diesel, just indirectly to move vehicles carrying your fuel (and generating waste heat and pollution) instead of just burning it AS a fuel.
But, how much energy does it take to move that amount of waste, from those countries, to Sweden, sort, process, and extract energy from them compared to, say, the useful energy out from the process that's heating those 250,000 homes (which doesn't seem an awful lot, and I live in the UK which is smaller but has more people in it)?
Surely the transport costs alone would mean it would be better to buy the diesel used to transport that amount of material, then burn that directly?
I use Eclipse for C99-development. It's wonderful and, most importantly, free.
I use everything from SVN-integration and version control, to the diff-generation / compare, to multiple projects (with common projects auto-included and updated when necessary), with multiple compile-paths (Debug, Release, other architectures, other compilers etc.), refactoring, debugging, hell it even integrates with the Android development kits if you set it up right.
Years ago I was introduced to Eclipse when I sought an alternative for my university Java course (which was pathetic even back then and used some horrendous IDE). Since then, my entire development environment for several projects has just sat in the same Eclipse folder and suffered everything from computer moves to Eclipse upgrades to compiler upgrades (e.g. through several Cygwin and MinGW upgrades and conversions) to even OS-changes (currently using the same basic setup for both Windows and Linux) without problems.
An IDE is there to make life easy. Sure, it would be wonderful if no programming language required multiple files but it would also be wonderful for every setup program in the world to consist of a single file, every application to be a single file, and none of them be obscured archives that contain multiple internal files. But, in real life, C has been around a lot longer and nobody's really found a solution for using and working with multiple files.
In fact,.h files are ENTIRELY a traditional fabrication - there's nothing in them that you can't append to a.c /.cpp file and still have things work. We *deliberately* duplicate unnecessary prototypes for functions we've written for a COMPLETELY administrative purpose. There's nothing in the standards about REQUIRING things to have multiple files. And yet every single non-trivial program that exists separates things out and the IDE has to cope with that to make it manageable.
And the other features of the IDE are there to help, not because the underlying code is unreadable (the IDE can't perform miracles and make gibberish into perfect prose) but because humans work better when they build tools to aid how they work (colour-coding, cross-references etc.).
The IDE is the computer-human interface. It has to deal more with the human than it does the language, and the human has to do a huge range of idiosyncratic things that have NOTHING to do with the language construct whatsoever. Playing with the IDE trying to solve that is really just trying to break the way people work, not solve an inherent language problem.
Agreed, and I do mention that in my post (albeit discretely).
But the fact remains that the pay-off won't be there. The cover-up element is only a part of the story, though. The difference, though, is that it's also much easier to fake such "indicators" if they are public - getting a gunman who aligns to your enemy and thinks he's working for them to do the dirty work and you immediately implicate them (falsely). You can't do that with a "stealth" assassination.
Hell, there are still countries technically at war / not at war after ten years with other countries because of a terrorist that operated from inside one of those countries (not the country itself). And I've repeatedly seen that China is "cyber-attacking" the US, which I'd love to know how they know that and/or how they are sure they aren't being used as a proxy target.
The value of steering a misdirected retaliation probably far outweighs any benefit of secrecy (especially secrecy at ENORMOUS expense).
If I was a foreign power wanting to specifically target the President, I wouldn't be concerned about the collateral damage of the rest of the people wherever he was. You could argue they might be interested in remaining undiscovered, but that's just an application of military secrecy to whatever you plan anyway.
And the president has a publicly announced schedule for a lot of things, an easily-discovered schedule for the majority of what remains, and will be in secure military facilities for whatever is left anyway.
As a terror plot, it's not really very interesting, and the complexities involved go slightly beyond lumping a few scientists in a room with some kit from eBay. The effort-payoff ratio just isn't worth it, like almost all "potential" terror scenarios, but it makes a nice headline, like almost all "potential" terror scenarios.
In fact, what would happen is one of several thousand people watching him (or her) give some speech somewhere would have a conventional weapon. Effort-payoff is vastly increased and you can probably get a lot of attempts before you need one to be successful or run out of opportunities.
Now if we were talking about a genocide-weapon, then the possibility is more realistic. There are countries and dictators that would happily spend whatever it took to wipe out people with whatever-variant in their DNA, not care about being too specific, and applying it globally, and if the technology had been around in the Second World War, things might have played out a LOT differently.
And I would say that Psychonauts is horrendous, personally. I got it from somewhere (probably some bundle or freebie at some point because I never bought it myself).
I loaded it up ONCE to get an achievement for something-or-other (probably a Steam competition of some kind) and it was literally unbearable.
In the end, I found a walkthrough for the achievement I wanted, downloaded someone else's saved game, loaded it, did the achievement and then immediately deleted it.
Everything from the graphic design to the controls to the "story" to the actual gameplay I found horrible and never want to play it again.
Now get him to go into the network device settings and disable TCP offloading. Or change the IP. Or remove a rogue program from the context menu when you right-click files.
Whoops. Maybe that analogy doesn't seem so close now, does it?
Sure a 3-year-old can "use" the OS to do everything a 3 year old might want to do. But how easy is it for a parent to configure so that that 3-year-old CAN'T do things (e.g. get on the Internet in any way, shape or form, but be on the wireless so he can print out his work?), or for someone to set it up so that even the most genius 3-year-old + parent helping can't modify the settings you don't want modified (so that the staff member who brings their kid into school and let's them "just play" on the laptop can't run off and mess up their computer?)
That's an ENTIRELY different question. And something a 3-year-old can't do, and probably never will be able to do, on a Windows 8 PC.
My complaint with Windows 8 is not the lack of ability for a newbie to do things. It's the exact opposite. A lack of ability for a SKILLED IT USER to do things, and also a lack of ability to STOP a newbie doing things that are hard to undo for them (A show of hands: How many network admin's usual policy is to just delete the network profile of a user having trouble when the hardware is working fine and let it recreate itself?)
Now if someone could actually do a half-decent job of removing the other-side of the page that leaks through on EVERY page, it might be readable without giving me a headache.
Seriously, would it be that hard to do some kind of light-trick or image-editing afterwards (especially as you have an image of the reverse page which could be tweaked and pulled to provide a lined-up mask to dial down those parts of the page), or hell even just a bit of contrast adjustment etc. so that the presumably very thin paper doesn't leak everything through?
1) Except for that time that the entire European Blackberry base couldn't send or receive email for several days because it was all routed through one datacenter (even if you used a local Exchange connector, I believe) and there was a "data incident" that took WEEKS for them to catch up properly with normal email delivery for an entire continent? (Nothing to do with connectivity or the hardware itself, just the stupid idea of routing ALL email through a central server!)
Because that's what killed my employer's use of Blackberry from that day onwards.
2) The best tool for business is generally the best tool full stop. I'm not aware of many areas of technology where consumer/business versions aren't pretty much identical unless you're doing something quite serious - and that's a different matter. The majority of "business" is NOT huge corporations with thousands of employees.
Mobile phones, for example, were always consumer items until BB turned up. They got used in business. They were so popular that people offered business packages. And now BB is dying because all consumer phones can do what the BB can do.
Because that's what my employer did when the contract for the BB phones came up for renewal - they evaluated it, ditched it, went consumer, and never had any problems or missing features. They actually saved money at no loss.
3) You think your employees aren't surfing anyway? Sure you can chain them to the desk and enforce a "no-mobiles" rule, and block everything online, but you won't make a happier or more productive staff by doing so.
Whereas if you just open it up but say "on your head be it, and don't let it interfere with work", there's no expensive and resource-intensive management required, your staff will be happy that they can check that little Jimmy got to the doctors okay with his grazed knee without worrying, they'll be able to do what they want in lunch-hour anyway and you can STILL sack them if they don't do the work you require in a reasonable timeframe (which is the ONLY metric worth bothering with).
Though I agree that work is a place for work, I'd die in a place that wouldn't let me show others a picture of my kid from Facebook while I'm chatting at lunchtime, or log in to check my delivery status on my Christmas order just before the end of the day to see if I can drive straight home or need to drive 20 miles out of my way to pick up a parcel before leaving or, hell, just do things like add things to my personal calendar or sort out family "emergencies" (like Jimmy's left his school shoes at home but only I know where they are).
Sure, I can do that some other time. And I do. But I also do "work" stuff on my own time too and getting strict about that border actually works AGAINST my employers. Vastly.
The company that treats its employees like the enemy is like the customer services department that treats its callers like the enemy. Costing you more to do less and making everyone miserable in the process.
This is, I think, the last barrier to myself literally just buying an SDR to tinker with. I know nothing of radio beyond simple physics and all SDR's that I see have various antenna/tuner/amplifier/whatever-they-are stages that cater for different frequencies. I keep going back to things like GNU Radio to see if they've got something for me, but it's all prototypes and "just add your own antenna worth more than my car".
As such, it's out of my tinker-budget because I can't justify spending that money on something that will need extras that might not do what I want, especially if I spend hours listening to static because I don't *know* that it can't pick up the signal I want to tinker with. I just want to see Wifi pop up on my screen as a waveform that I can dig into, play with the neighbour's doorbell, see the protocol of my external weather station on 433MHz so I can extend it myself, listen out for the MSF atomic clock signal (though that's at 60KHz which is a LONG way down the scale this device can manage), pick up FM and DVB-T and capture a screenshot, etc.
The day someone makes a USB-encapsulated, single-antenna design that's "good enough" over a huge range of frequencies and comes with enough software to actually see, analyse (I'm thinking specifically of a Wireshark-like capture where you can specify what protocol it *should* be hearing and it can work out what's being said in a nice format), record and playback the signal, I will have one. Until then, it seems they are still firmly in the realm of the radio ham.
Incidentally, it'll also put Wireshark's nose out of joint because their main sponsor is the manufacture of the AirPCap which does what this does but only for Wifi.
The point is that you've always been able to do that. Radio hams have been building radios and you've been able to buy scanners that will let you listen and transmit on any frequency you like for decades.
That's part of the article summary - people STILL using "security by obscurity" because they don't expect people to bother to record, modify and playback openly-available data is LUDICROUS. See the article just now about being able to scam public transport because of homebrew-encryption used over the airwaves.
The problem is not the airwaves, or the devices available to read them. They've existed since Marconi, if you had the brains. It's that people still deploy systems where the wireless part is treated like some mystical, magical medium that stops people doing things to it.
You can already listen to GSM. Radio hams found and cracked the encryption on it before it was even standardised. 3G technologies have similar problems. DECT, also. Smart-meters, some of them too. The problem is relying on untested encryption or no encryption/authentication at all in order to make things work and then being shocked when someone clones your phone.
This is nothing new. It just makes it slightly cheaper and more convenient.
Because those people have to pay to send the spam.
Because those people are traceable (or their service provider is and can be held accountable).
Because those people have an incentive not to have the ability to send phone calls to others being cut off (the hassle of moving phone operators is more than the hassle of having a band of millions of compromised machines spamming).
None of which happen with email spam. And even with email spam, just putting ONE GUY and his spam operation offline once resulted in a 33% drop of spam worldwide overnight.
As someone else pointed out, it's not just a case of energy.
My car carries 60kg (or thereabouts) of petrol (gasoline to the Americans) around with it. But it only does that when the tank is full. On average, it's actually only carrying 30kg of petrol. That makes a huge difference to just how far it can drive itself.
And then, a battery in an electric car, say the Honda EV+, weighs 374 Kg - ten times as much on average - no matter what you do with it or how charged it is. That's not counting the fact that the engine itself might weigh more, etc. That battery alone weighs more than the entire engine in my car, for example.
And weight is one of the huge contributors to not only poor efficiency on the road but efficiency of construction too - from getting the parts made, to shipping them, to assembling them, to repairing them, even to just how much metal you need in the bodywork to hold them safely. And that all adds up, especially when you're carrying lots of that around all day as you drive.
And the other problem is, that amount of weight has to be changed occasionally - so it's not static compared to my "constantly burnt off" petrol, it actually has to be completely replaced (by more infrastructure), recycled, recharged etc. by something else. That's a lot of energy NOT counted in a simple comparison of mpg for two cars, for instance. How do is even out? Nobody's really sure at the moment.
This is also one of the reasons, for instance, that American cars are seen as "gas guzzlers" while European cars (despite being able to tow trailers, load goods, etc. just the same) are more efficient. We just don't carry the same amount of weight around unnecessarily. Some of the Fiat's weigh only slightly more than that battery!
The carbon cost of something is inherently meaningless unless you add up EVERYTHING and often that up is almost impossible. Converting every car in the world to run on batteries would have MASSIVE economic and envrionmental effects, if we even HAD that much lithium around. Just shipping that amount of solid lithium around the world would actually cancel out quite a lot of the savings that you'd expect to see over the lifetime of a converted car, for instance.
Not to mention, we'd have to dispose of everything we were scrapping, and that's not a zero-cost exercise environmentally or economically either, extract huge amounts of lithium, pay companies to do it within the timeframe specified, refine it, convert it, pack it into batteries, test it, provide recycling facilities for it, ship it, and deal with it at end-of-life. And the knock-on effects on every component in the car would also have enormous amounts of sub-projects that would also cost environmentally too.
Yeah, petrol is going to go away, and no extracting it from the air isn't efficient enough to bother with it (even if it's the only way to get petrol any more, it would still cost more than just converting to whatever everyone else is using by then).
New batteries = new engines = new designs = new structures = new supports = new tests = a lot of money and effort to make all our cars twice as heavy and still need (indirectly) to power themselves (at much less efficiency, and much higher reliance on global extraction of metals from copper to gold to lithium) from "dino-juice" because our politicians are too scared to put a nuclear plant down near a voter.
Electric cars are not, and never have been, the answer. We've had them in toys for DECADES, forklifts run off them, and even my milkman has driven around in a milk-float that is entirely reliant on electrical energy since I was a child (1970's, but they were all over Britain in the 60's too). The originals used lead-acid, the new ones use lithium, but they are only efficient for very specific loads and journeys (e.g. once a day, in the morning, after a whole day of charging, etc.)
The problem is the ultimate source of energy. That's oil. That's the problem, not what fancy methods you use to convert it to run your c
If people get a call they didn't solicit, encourage them to dial that number. It can be automated and will list the previous X calls to their number, with time, date and duration. Let them mark those calls as spam or not.
Collect the results nationally, the ones who are spam could easily be shut down in a matter of minutes by distributing a list of numbers that have seen a sharp rise in the number of complaints against them.
Additionally, callers can use it as a blacklist tied into their telco so that numbers they have PERSONALLY flagged can never, ever, ever again dial their number even if it's not accepted as "spam" on a national scale.
Then enforce valid Caller-ID numbers for even international calls even if they are never displayed to the end caller. Anyone spoofing a Caller-ID (or allowing Caller-ID's on their network to be spoofed by not just IGNORING what the sender has sent but replacing it with the Caller-ID info of the end transit) that's not been assigned to them loses all their connections.
A couple of bits of legislation, an automated call centre (which shouldn't be hard to set up for those people COMBATTING automated call centres), and you're done.
Sure, some will still get through, but will be killed quickly, will be nowhere near as profitable, will have real consequences, will stop the majority of users being subjected to it, and will look like you're actually getting off your backside and doing something about the problem.
Every single time, ever, that someone has told me that something would "change the way I work", it never has. Not once. Except in a case or two where it "changed the way I worked" by stopping me being able to work, and then eventually getting scrapped.
And every single thing that *HAS* genuinely changed the way I work has come not from marketers telling me that would be so but by a stealthy, insidious insertion of something quite simple into my daily life and then one day realising I couldn't do without it.
So, by that history, this looks like something I'll say "And?" to and then never hear of it again. Can I come back in 5 years and see if I'm wrong?
And anyone who thinks that the brain is inherently capable of only doing one thing has never driven long-distance.
Has *anybody* never had that experience where you are driving along thinking and then suddenly realise you've just navigated the past 20 miles, through traffic, round corners, through junctions, with gear-changes, etc. without remembering doing so?
Your brain is more than capable of doing those tasks - and alerting you to problems just as quickly as when you're concentrating on the task - in the background without you knowing. (What scares me most about them is not the fact that it happens, but that I assume I stopped at red lights, followed traffic signs, didn't ram someone off the road, etc. and have to quickly recall events that I seem to have taken no conscious part in!)
I've also had the (strange) privilege of knowing someone with multiple-personality-syndrome. This is extremely similar - one personality is at the fore but the others are there, in the background, observing events and doing things, just out of mind at that moment. In fact, in MPS, it's just a more pronounced version triggered by certain psychological problems (lots of abuse cases, lots of a very particular type of psychiatric therapy that seems to "trigger" MPS in vulnerable individuals - and is STILL practised in the one part of America where most MPS cases come from!).
Your brain is not a single thing. It's a collection of billions of things, each with their own job. They group and work together but they also can separate off (otherwise you would have to "think" about how to move your arm rather than just passing it off to a group of brain cells that do that all day long) and even divide your consciousness in two in perfectly ordinary people with no mental health issues.
And, like others have said, have you never had that thing late at night where you wake up because of an odd (and quiet) sound despite the fact that every other night you slept like a baby. How do you think that works? The brain is always awake, in some fashion, it's just a matter of whether it decides something is a threat or not (otherwise every predator would just wait until your were asleep because you'd be an easy target), and then "presses the emergency button" to get the rest operational very quickly.
The dolphin thing is well-known. And any idiot with a cat knows that it doesn't really "sleep" for 18 hours a day, it's always aware and very, very rarely in an actual complete sleep (for the first time in 12 years, I manage to "scare" my cat the other day because it was completely, 100% asleep and didn't hear me come in, didn't feel me approach, until I stroked its fur - I actually thought it was dead, it was so deep in sleep).
And every driver will tell you that they have driven on a kind of "automatic pilot" including some of the most complex observation, judgement, quick-reaction and motor skills that the average person will perform in a day, while they were thinking about what to have for dinner.
Humans are animals. Animals have brains. Brains are a collection of groups of cells that, by their very nature, are inherently malleable, ever-changing and independent. It's no shock that dolphins can do this. What's more interesting is that humans seem to have lost the ability/need to do this so much.
Though I suspect you were attempting humour based on the similarity of the word "raid" and the acronym "RAID":
It would be quite easy to "RAID" remote devices, even encrypted ones. The beauty of the Unix "everything is a file" concept. Nothing stopping someone accessing files from remote servers via authenticated and encrypted connections, mounting them as a loopback filesystem, applying RAID to those filesystems, and compensate for any dropping-off that may occur without losing data.
Or, if you could do it properly, you'd have it so that only X% of the data existed on each node and you needed the data from Y nodes to make sense of it or know you had complete logs, ala things like Tahoe-LAFS.
I hope they used similar techniques on their "real" servers as well as their "virtual" ones.
Let's be honest - Voyager was never intended to be a transport to get to Alpha Centuri. It's designed to be a low-power "poodle-along" slowcoach to get to the outer planets, not to get much further, and to take it slow because it takes DAYS to send back an image that it's captured and anything faster moving wouldn't provide enough useful data.
The problems of scaling up and speeding up aren't insurmountable but are HUGE, I grant you. But considering that 51 years ago no man had ever gone into space whatsoever, that's pretty quick progress to keep an eye on.
And we all KNOW that the space programme is being seriously held back by other matters at the moment and if we *wanted* to we could fund it ten times better (e.g. the US pays more to air-condition its military facilities in the Middle East than NASA's entire budget, for instance).
So, even being conservative, if we assume there's a proper incentive (i.e. there's a habitable planet on our closest star), some funding appears for it, we can use vaguely modern technology and have the aim to just "get there" and take a photo of it (not even land necessarily), and let's say that in 30 years we launch something towards it (non-human-bearing) that's capable of moving at 10 times Voyager's speed.
That's a launch in 2040-ish - long enough away to seem futuristic even to use, and long enough way that our technology now would appear then to be like 1980's technology does to us now (when computers BARELY entering a handful of MHz and coming into homes - your top-of-the-range PC would be the equivalent of a ZX Spectrum in 2040).
Then we're honestly talking contact with an extra-solar planet sometime this century. That's a HUGE step. Much larger than setting foot on the moon or doing whatever on Mars. That's something completely outside the Solar System which is a scale never before imagined compared to all previous human endeavours (except, possibly, Voyager by then).
That's pretty damn close, and pretty damn good, and pretty damn realistic, and pretty damn achievable, and pretty damn likely I could even be around to see it happen (depending on what happens with medical science in that time), but certainly my children or (absolute worst-case) grand-children would definitely see it.
Colonising it? Terraforming it? Stripping it of resources? We can do all that to Mars etc. in the meantime if we really want, to get the hang of it. But we could easily make physical contact with any planet on Alpha Centauri that's in a safe-enough orbit, take photos of the star and planets directly, etc. before my daughter pops her clogs.
Nothing. A lot of things are exempt. And this isn't law at all, and certainly not law in all EU countries yet (that takes years to happen).
And, at the end of the day, RoHS regulations, CE testing / FCC certification (only one of which is necessary for any one country but BOTH of which are passed for almost every device, even if that means limiting the device in a way not required by local law!), etc. put a MILLION times more constraints and restrictions on things that you have in your PC and you haven't once moaned about that. Because, by and large, you won't notice and won't care. I bet your PC has a "spread spectrum" option in the BIOS and, if it doesn't, it's because it's on by default.
In the same way that nobody cares about energy ratings on their fridge or freezer (I don't even know what mine is), nobody would care about a voluntary system. So, over time, the ratings move to mean that any fridge has to have a basic minimum criteria in order to work and be sold as a fridge. As a result, almost all the fridges in shops nowadays are A-rated because people DIDN'T care (like you don't care about the reason behind the proposed legislation, you just want to run your unnecessarily-powerful-when-idle graphics card), so they made the manufacturer's care instead.
You didn't complain about your car needing to have electronic engine management to pass EU emissions tests. That's basically the whole point of catalytic convertors and ECU's in cars - to allow you to pass the emissions tests. They actually severely limit the car's capabilities for the sake of an environmental concern that only affects things when scaled up by millions of units. Yet every year the tests get more stringent.
What's different? Because it touches your PC? PC's are somehow magically exempt from regulation because you're a geek? I'm sorry to tell you that they aren't. They are already the subject of lots of changes that were enforced upon them by both EU and US laws (and where most manufacturers target the lowest common denominator, losing you even more) and so cost more than they theoretically need to, perform less than they theoretically could and aren't allowed to be sold if they don't.
P.S. your graphics card doesn't need to consume 200W on idle. It really doesn't. And, nowadays, that's the equivalent of a houseful of light bulbs. You were just the next highest-energy user on the list of home products that doesn't involve heating (a necessary expense if you don't want millions to die from the cold / undercooked food).
I don't live in the US, but I kept my TV when I moved out of the parental home, because it was a habit that I'd been ingrained into.
Then I realised that, actually, there wasn't anything worth paying the amount I was.
I don't watch sports.
The movies that I watch I bought on DVD first and the only things on TV were outdated and (usually) junk and if they weren't, they were more expensive than going to a video rental shop (yep, they were still around back then).
I thought I'd watch the science and documentary channels. Turns out that I learned more from a box set of David Attenborough and a handful of Mythbusters than I ever did anything else (and, again, the cost and repetition of such things means that they are only cost-effective the first few months). Occasionally there's an episode on something I'm interested in and it invariably has all the science content of a modern "Royal Institution Christmas Lecture" (which nowadays consists of kiddies being amazed that something goes bang).
The comedy channels? Apparently my definition that comedy should be funny isn't shared by the people who work there. Apart from a few 20+ year old comedies / sketch shows / stand-up routines that I either owned every episode of or could get them all for free online (legally), there was nothing worth worrying about.
The general entertainment channels? Shoot me now. Tacky documentaries about things I don't care about, celebrity shows, makeovers, "My dad's a transvestite", who cares?
The "home" channels? Watch highly-overpaid people knock down perfectly-good houses and spend millions "revamping" them to look like something out of a design brochure that will fall apart the minute you want to put up a shelf? No thanks.
The shopping channels and the religious channels? Please, I only watch them to laugh at them and pick holes in their claims.
Hell, even the adult channels - who the hell would pay for them?
And this was many years ago. I do still have a TV but, outside of pre-recorded media, it's there for a known, specified, recognised purpose - to have some noise in the background while I eat breakfast or similar.
A similar move was mooted in the UK - FreeView, our free-to-air digital terrestrial service, wanted to encrypt a load of channels. All that happened was that viewers dropped dramatically for them all. Sky (digital satellite) provide the back-end of a free-to-air service where they do the same (pay-for the Sky premium channels, or get the free-to-air with just buying a box + dish). And cable, you've *always* had to pay for the box, but you have to pay for anything decent.
To be honest, all it means is that I have a Freeview TV and if they start cutting channels, or start raising costs and cutting people out, the TV becomes a device solely aimed at it's primary function - a display device. I won't even bother to connect an aerial / dish / cable to it. It'll just be there to watch what I download or already own.
When I was a kid, we had literally 4 channels. That was it. And Saturday night TV was something worth watching and still some of the best entertainment that they play on repeat 30 years later. When what we Brits think of as "American-style TV" came over in the form of Sky, we were astounded by the number of channels and the amount of content. But very, very quickly we learned that it's just the same amount of good stuff diluted over more channels.
Now, there's little good stuff at all and diluted over the number of channels available, the value is next to nothing. Hell, a lot of people had to think twice about buying a £20 adaptor to turn their TV digital, and hardly anyone had one on EVERY TV that they own until very recently (where the TV's have had it built-in for long enough that it's absorbed into basic replacement prices as people throw out CRT's and put flat-screens in to save room).
TV is dying, dead, gone. It's background noise. Kids are being brought up to get the content they want at one click a
Someone, somewhere, every day, protests somewhere in London about something.
Every Wednesday for years, motorcyclists gathered by the thousands on London streets to protest about the parking facilities for them in Central London (an inherently over-populated and over-crowded place where you will NEVER park sensibly). Nobody really cared.
This might have made the telegraph but I've seen no mention of it in any other media. Hell, the BBC has next-to-no news on it today and it's not on their website.
And, literally, every single day some group will protest in London. Hell, we have areas of London parks SET ASIDE for people to soap-box from and protest, it's that common. What did make the news today? Two girls handcuffing themselves in St Paul's Cathedral at protest of the churches support for the banks that brought the economic crisis.
Any mention of Muslim protest? None.
It's a non-story. Really. And, more importantly, 99% of the Muslim people in the capital (let alone the country or the world) might be condemning such protests for all I know.
People will literally protest about anything in London (and even come to London to protest, not realising that it makes your issue seem small in comparison to all the other protests that commuters have to walk through every day), from the devolution of Scotland to the petrol prices to the way that someone looked at them last Thursday. It means nothing.
You want my attention to this issue that offends you? Start negotiating, not dictating.
When you make the front page of Slashdot, with software you've written yourself, sold under the name of your one-man company, with free slashvertisement by submitting them yourself using your work email, ride on the coattails of the completely-unrelated humble bundles (seriously - zero connection), offer a pay-what-you-want scheme, and still only get (at the time of writing) 26 customers, you know it's time to find another career.
I could give you any number of stories, but sadly no pretty sales girl (not to my knowledge, anyway).
Machines arriving with BIOS POST errors because motherboard jumpers were missing (and no, not loose in the case / box, just entirely missing).
Machines overheating because their default BIOS was set to never check the fans at all and never warn about temperatures (in a school, ffs!).
Machines going off for repair six times in a row and coming back each time with "CMOS Error - Checksum Incorrect". Literally machines (plural) out of action for months because they didn't change a CMOS battery. I got my first big contract by spotting this on the little tour they gave me prior to hiring me, going down to the shops for some CR2035's and bringing several thousands pounds of equipment "back up" by replacing their CMOS battery that RM couldn't fix over the space of several years.
Motherboards dying because of the capacitor-fatigue because of the cheap boards they used. Rather than replace, the RM guys would slap in a network card, then a year later a sound card when that cap blew, then a year later a USB card, then when there was nothing left that could be worked around, they'd sell you a new machine.
Not to mention things like them claiming the cheque-printing software endorsed by the borough "had to" print a blank page after each cheque (and thus requiring pre-prepared stacks of cheque/paper/cheque/paper from the office staff all the time) after several YEARS and dozens of callouts, because they never noticed the printer they'd supplied was set to "manual duplex" or some such that told it to do just that. Changed that option and solved the problem in ten minutes and my fix lasted 5 years without anyone finding a problem with it.
Or their "Connect" upgrade which saw a wireless trolley which didn't have enough "wireless" to cope with even a simple login from 2-3 machines at the same time, let alone run a full class of them from across the room. And who's solution was to upgrade. And whose "troubleshooter" from Abingdon (who we MADE come because it was so atrocious and he was supposed to be their main man for the whole of the South of England) was overheard by myself telling the sales guys who we'd brought back in until the problem was solved that "we can't install the newer drivers, they're not compatible with the other RM drivers we install and never will be" (also meant they had NOTHING to upgrade to past 802.11b for YEARS on that model, despite being brand-new and in the pre-N era). Their solution? But more 802.11b wireless routers from them.
RM are in with the boroughs. The borough I worked in, dozens of schools got sick of the local support because they would ONLY endorse / sell / fix RM products, and their support was basically to go to RM, find out their fix, and then blindly apply the RM-style fixes themselves. The "exclusive" contract was written into the entire Borough's schools contracts, quite clearly.
They also tried their best to sabotage and/or poke blame at me at every opportunity but never quite managed to pin anything on me that stuck when they were in the same room as me (apparently it was my fault the wireless didn't work because I was "overloading the system with logins" - from two laptops! Kinda backfired, that one, when I mentioned what I'd overheard). I used to get more schools in even a single borough phoning me for help from recommendations than I could handle and they all wanted rid of RM.
RM are, basically, scum and I've walked (politely, but firmly) out of job interviews when I've realised that schools are using them.
It doesn't mean they're the ONLY scum (I've met a lot of other companies trying to do the same, and the Academies program is RIFE with that sort of thing), but they are a well-established one.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really.
1) Kickstarter. Sign of a project doomed to failure when it concerns hardware, really. Especially where they are talking on the scale of producing hardware boards with en-masse dozens of cores on them from a few hundred thousand dollars.
2) No OS support - it seems to be a number-cruncher with an ARM-controller, not a generic computer with lots of software already ported. Nobody will rewrite their software to take advantage of it unless it's MADLY to their advantage (i.e. number crunchers, not generic machines). Sure, it has a C compiler but so does a Z80. That means nothing if they can't be turned to generic-purpose cores that anything can use without having to change the way they work / thread.
3) $99 (not guaranteed, they don't even have the tooling for it yet!) for the prototype which barely has two ARM cores as the power house and 16 of their custom (unsupported) cores for doing some floating-point. Not worth it compared to, say, a $25 Raspberry Pi en masse.
I'm not a RPi fan, to be honest - I have one, and I've commented enough on here about its shortcomings. But they *are* delivering hardware (not perfect, but it's usable if you know about the problems with it), it's quite simple, bog-standard, cheap, works, there are half-a-dozen Linux distros with optimised code available for it already and it "just runs" Debian ARM programs without needing to recompile to take advantage of its hardware.
This, in comparison, isn't/doesn't.
There's a point at which the sacrifices to squeeze another core or reduce power by another watt, or decrease size by another mm will cost you ordinary users even if they don't cost you hardcore, specific-purpose hardware geeks out to save everything they can.
Hell, the RPi is being bought by/for kids so they can play on it - it's really that well rounded, supported and available.
I once saw a 1U rack that contained something like 16 ARM boards (the entire board, networked together with a switch, powered from individual cables, with disk interfaces over some custom central channel). It cost less, used less power, and did more in the same amount of space. It was a bit homebrew-esque (despite being a professional product), but the advantages were rife.
I was sorely tempted to use it just because, as you say, server-side doesn't matter for most things. And with that sort of basic setup, you could deploy one app per board and not worry about having enough power for all the tasks combined (firewall on one, http server on another, mail on another, auth on another etc.). And keep a board or two in reserve for spares / failures and it would last longer too. Rather than having one monolithic machine and hoping it never goes wrong, have a bunch of them in a box (yes, the box can still go wrong, of course) each modularised to do one task and then adjust / failover accordingly without anyone even knowing there's more than one computer serving their request or even what architecture they are).
And software support? Well, you just install the same version of Linux on them all, then install one of those multi-SSH utils that executes the same command on all the servers (hell, you could have one board do nothing but monitor and repeat all commands onto the others).
If I were to put a 1U rack in colocation, that's how I'd do it. Who cares what's underneath so long as you have power enough to do everything and OS-support enough to run it. And with ARM, OS support isn't a problem.
£500 to the first person to supply a 1U filled to the brim with Raspberry Pi's (or equivalent) with appropriate "single point" Ethernet access and mains power input on the exterior and some kind of central storage for them all.
Okay, so *someone* has to pay to put the fuel into that foreign country in the first place, then pay for the extra bit in the tank required to move it *and* the cargo to its destination.
Whatever way you look at it, you paid to move X amount of rubbish to your country and burn it, where you could have just moved Y amount of oil to your country and burned it instead without any intermediate losses and conversions and it wouldn't have cost any more.
But the *killer* is that you're still burning diesel, just indirectly to move vehicles carrying your fuel (and generating waste heat and pollution) instead of just burning it AS a fuel.
But, how much energy does it take to move that amount of waste, from those countries, to Sweden, sort, process, and extract energy from them compared to, say, the useful energy out from the process that's heating those 250,000 homes (which doesn't seem an awful lot, and I live in the UK which is smaller but has more people in it)?
Surely the transport costs alone would mean it would be better to buy the diesel used to transport that amount of material, then burn that directly?
How is this "green"?
I use Eclipse for C99-development. It's wonderful and, most importantly, free.
I use everything from SVN-integration and version control, to the diff-generation / compare, to multiple projects (with common projects auto-included and updated when necessary), with multiple compile-paths (Debug, Release, other architectures, other compilers etc.), refactoring, debugging, hell it even integrates with the Android development kits if you set it up right.
Years ago I was introduced to Eclipse when I sought an alternative for my university Java course (which was pathetic even back then and used some horrendous IDE). Since then, my entire development environment for several projects has just sat in the same Eclipse folder and suffered everything from computer moves to Eclipse upgrades to compiler upgrades (e.g. through several Cygwin and MinGW upgrades and conversions) to even OS-changes (currently using the same basic setup for both Windows and Linux) without problems.
An IDE is there to make life easy. Sure, it would be wonderful if no programming language required multiple files but it would also be wonderful for every setup program in the world to consist of a single file, every application to be a single file, and none of them be obscured archives that contain multiple internal files. But, in real life, C has been around a lot longer and nobody's really found a solution for using and working with multiple files.
In fact, .h files are ENTIRELY a traditional fabrication - there's nothing in them that you can't append to a .c / .cpp file and still have things work. We *deliberately* duplicate unnecessary prototypes for functions we've written for a COMPLETELY administrative purpose. There's nothing in the standards about REQUIRING things to have multiple files. And yet every single non-trivial program that exists separates things out and the IDE has to cope with that to make it manageable.
And the other features of the IDE are there to help, not because the underlying code is unreadable (the IDE can't perform miracles and make gibberish into perfect prose) but because humans work better when they build tools to aid how they work (colour-coding, cross-references etc.).
The IDE is the computer-human interface. It has to deal more with the human than it does the language, and the human has to do a huge range of idiosyncratic things that have NOTHING to do with the language construct whatsoever. Playing with the IDE trying to solve that is really just trying to break the way people work, not solve an inherent language problem.
Agreed, and I do mention that in my post (albeit discretely).
But the fact remains that the pay-off won't be there. The cover-up element is only a part of the story, though. The difference, though, is that it's also much easier to fake such "indicators" if they are public - getting a gunman who aligns to your enemy and thinks he's working for them to do the dirty work and you immediately implicate them (falsely). You can't do that with a "stealth" assassination.
Hell, there are still countries technically at war / not at war after ten years with other countries because of a terrorist that operated from inside one of those countries (not the country itself). And I've repeatedly seen that China is "cyber-attacking" the US, which I'd love to know how they know that and/or how they are sure they aren't being used as a proxy target.
The value of steering a misdirected retaliation probably far outweighs any benefit of secrecy (especially secrecy at ENORMOUS expense).
If I was a foreign power wanting to specifically target the President, I wouldn't be concerned about the collateral damage of the rest of the people wherever he was. You could argue they might be interested in remaining undiscovered, but that's just an application of military secrecy to whatever you plan anyway.
And the president has a publicly announced schedule for a lot of things, an easily-discovered schedule for the majority of what remains, and will be in secure military facilities for whatever is left anyway.
As a terror plot, it's not really very interesting, and the complexities involved go slightly beyond lumping a few scientists in a room with some kit from eBay. The effort-payoff ratio just isn't worth it, like almost all "potential" terror scenarios, but it makes a nice headline, like almost all "potential" terror scenarios.
In fact, what would happen is one of several thousand people watching him (or her) give some speech somewhere would have a conventional weapon. Effort-payoff is vastly increased and you can probably get a lot of attempts before you need one to be successful or run out of opportunities.
Now if we were talking about a genocide-weapon, then the possibility is more realistic. There are countries and dictators that would happily spend whatever it took to wipe out people with whatever-variant in their DNA, not care about being too specific, and applying it globally, and if the technology had been around in the Second World War, things might have played out a LOT differently.
And I would say that Psychonauts is horrendous, personally. I got it from somewhere (probably some bundle or freebie at some point because I never bought it myself).
I loaded it up ONCE to get an achievement for something-or-other (probably a Steam competition of some kind) and it was literally unbearable.
In the end, I found a walkthrough for the achievement I wanted, downloaded someone else's saved game, loaded it, did the achievement and then immediately deleted it.
Everything from the graphic design to the controls to the "story" to the actual gameplay I found horrible and never want to play it again.
Now get him to go into the network device settings and disable TCP offloading. Or change the IP. Or remove a rogue program from the context menu when you right-click files.
Whoops. Maybe that analogy doesn't seem so close now, does it?
Sure a 3-year-old can "use" the OS to do everything a 3 year old might want to do. But how easy is it for a parent to configure so that that 3-year-old CAN'T do things (e.g. get on the Internet in any way, shape or form, but be on the wireless so he can print out his work?), or for someone to set it up so that even the most genius 3-year-old + parent helping can't modify the settings you don't want modified (so that the staff member who brings their kid into school and let's them "just play" on the laptop can't run off and mess up their computer?)
That's an ENTIRELY different question. And something a 3-year-old can't do, and probably never will be able to do, on a Windows 8 PC.
My complaint with Windows 8 is not the lack of ability for a newbie to do things. It's the exact opposite. A lack of ability for a SKILLED IT USER to do things, and also a lack of ability to STOP a newbie doing things that are hard to undo for them (A show of hands: How many network admin's usual policy is to just delete the network profile of a user having trouble when the hardware is working fine and let it recreate itself?)
Great.
Now if someone could actually do a half-decent job of removing the other-side of the page that leaks through on EVERY page, it might be readable without giving me a headache.
Seriously, would it be that hard to do some kind of light-trick or image-editing afterwards (especially as you have an image of the reverse page which could be tweaked and pulled to provide a lined-up mask to dial down those parts of the page), or hell even just a bit of contrast adjustment etc. so that the presumably very thin paper doesn't leak everything through?
1) Except for that time that the entire European Blackberry base couldn't send or receive email for several days because it was all routed through one datacenter (even if you used a local Exchange connector, I believe) and there was a "data incident" that took WEEKS for them to catch up properly with normal email delivery for an entire continent? (Nothing to do with connectivity or the hardware itself, just the stupid idea of routing ALL email through a central server!)
Because that's what killed my employer's use of Blackberry from that day onwards.
2) The best tool for business is generally the best tool full stop. I'm not aware of many areas of technology where consumer/business versions aren't pretty much identical unless you're doing something quite serious - and that's a different matter. The majority of "business" is NOT huge corporations with thousands of employees.
Mobile phones, for example, were always consumer items until BB turned up. They got used in business. They were so popular that people offered business packages. And now BB is dying because all consumer phones can do what the BB can do.
Because that's what my employer did when the contract for the BB phones came up for renewal - they evaluated it, ditched it, went consumer, and never had any problems or missing features. They actually saved money at no loss.
3) You think your employees aren't surfing anyway? Sure you can chain them to the desk and enforce a "no-mobiles" rule, and block everything online, but you won't make a happier or more productive staff by doing so.
Whereas if you just open it up but say "on your head be it, and don't let it interfere with work", there's no expensive and resource-intensive management required, your staff will be happy that they can check that little Jimmy got to the doctors okay with his grazed knee without worrying, they'll be able to do what they want in lunch-hour anyway and you can STILL sack them if they don't do the work you require in a reasonable timeframe (which is the ONLY metric worth bothering with).
Though I agree that work is a place for work, I'd die in a place that wouldn't let me show others a picture of my kid from Facebook while I'm chatting at lunchtime, or log in to check my delivery status on my Christmas order just before the end of the day to see if I can drive straight home or need to drive 20 miles out of my way to pick up a parcel before leaving or, hell, just do things like add things to my personal calendar or sort out family "emergencies" (like Jimmy's left his school shoes at home but only I know where they are).
Sure, I can do that some other time. And I do. But I also do "work" stuff on my own time too and getting strict about that border actually works AGAINST my employers. Vastly.
The company that treats its employees like the enemy is like the customer services department that treats its callers like the enemy. Costing you more to do less and making everyone miserable in the process.
This is, I think, the last barrier to myself literally just buying an SDR to tinker with. I know nothing of radio beyond simple physics and all SDR's that I see have various antenna/tuner/amplifier/whatever-they-are stages that cater for different frequencies. I keep going back to things like GNU Radio to see if they've got something for me, but it's all prototypes and "just add your own antenna worth more than my car".
As such, it's out of my tinker-budget because I can't justify spending that money on something that will need extras that might not do what I want, especially if I spend hours listening to static because I don't *know* that it can't pick up the signal I want to tinker with. I just want to see Wifi pop up on my screen as a waveform that I can dig into, play with the neighbour's doorbell, see the protocol of my external weather station on 433MHz so I can extend it myself, listen out for the MSF atomic clock signal (though that's at 60KHz which is a LONG way down the scale this device can manage), pick up FM and DVB-T and capture a screenshot, etc.
The day someone makes a USB-encapsulated, single-antenna design that's "good enough" over a huge range of frequencies and comes with enough software to actually see, analyse (I'm thinking specifically of a Wireshark-like capture where you can specify what protocol it *should* be hearing and it can work out what's being said in a nice format), record and playback the signal, I will have one. Until then, it seems they are still firmly in the realm of the radio ham.
Incidentally, it'll also put Wireshark's nose out of joint because their main sponsor is the manufacture of the AirPCap which does what this does but only for Wifi.
The point is that you've always been able to do that. Radio hams have been building radios and you've been able to buy scanners that will let you listen and transmit on any frequency you like for decades.
That's part of the article summary - people STILL using "security by obscurity" because they don't expect people to bother to record, modify and playback openly-available data is LUDICROUS. See the article just now about being able to scam public transport because of homebrew-encryption used over the airwaves.
The problem is not the airwaves, or the devices available to read them. They've existed since Marconi, if you had the brains. It's that people still deploy systems where the wireless part is treated like some mystical, magical medium that stops people doing things to it.
You can already listen to GSM. Radio hams found and cracked the encryption on it before it was even standardised. 3G technologies have similar problems. DECT, also. Smart-meters, some of them too. The problem is relying on untested encryption or no encryption/authentication at all in order to make things work and then being shocked when someone clones your phone.
This is nothing new. It just makes it slightly cheaper and more convenient.
Because those people have to pay to send the spam.
Because those people are traceable (or their service provider is and can be held accountable).
Because those people have an incentive not to have the ability to send phone calls to others being cut off (the hassle of moving phone operators is more than the hassle of having a band of millions of compromised machines spamming).
None of which happen with email spam. And even with email spam, just putting ONE GUY and his spam operation offline once resulted in a 33% drop of spam worldwide overnight.
As someone else pointed out, it's not just a case of energy.
My car carries 60kg (or thereabouts) of petrol (gasoline to the Americans) around with it. But it only does that when the tank is full. On average, it's actually only carrying 30kg of petrol. That makes a huge difference to just how far it can drive itself.
And then, a battery in an electric car, say the Honda EV+, weighs 374 Kg - ten times as much on average - no matter what you do with it or how charged it is. That's not counting the fact that the engine itself might weigh more, etc. That battery alone weighs more than the entire engine in my car, for example.
And weight is one of the huge contributors to not only poor efficiency on the road but efficiency of construction too - from getting the parts made, to shipping them, to assembling them, to repairing them, even to just how much metal you need in the bodywork to hold them safely. And that all adds up, especially when you're carrying lots of that around all day as you drive.
And the other problem is, that amount of weight has to be changed occasionally - so it's not static compared to my "constantly burnt off" petrol, it actually has to be completely replaced (by more infrastructure), recycled, recharged etc. by something else. That's a lot of energy NOT counted in a simple comparison of mpg for two cars, for instance. How do is even out? Nobody's really sure at the moment.
This is also one of the reasons, for instance, that American cars are seen as "gas guzzlers" while European cars (despite being able to tow trailers, load goods, etc. just the same) are more efficient. We just don't carry the same amount of weight around unnecessarily. Some of the Fiat's weigh only slightly more than that battery!
The carbon cost of something is inherently meaningless unless you add up EVERYTHING and often that up is almost impossible. Converting every car in the world to run on batteries would have MASSIVE economic and envrionmental effects, if we even HAD that much lithium around. Just shipping that amount of solid lithium around the world would actually cancel out quite a lot of the savings that you'd expect to see over the lifetime of a converted car, for instance.
Not to mention, we'd have to dispose of everything we were scrapping, and that's not a zero-cost exercise environmentally or economically either, extract huge amounts of lithium, pay companies to do it within the timeframe specified, refine it, convert it, pack it into batteries, test it, provide recycling facilities for it, ship it, and deal with it at end-of-life. And the knock-on effects on every component in the car would also have enormous amounts of sub-projects that would also cost environmentally too.
Yeah, petrol is going to go away, and no extracting it from the air isn't efficient enough to bother with it (even if it's the only way to get petrol any more, it would still cost more than just converting to whatever everyone else is using by then).
New batteries = new engines = new designs = new structures = new supports = new tests = a lot of money and effort to make all our cars twice as heavy and still need (indirectly) to power themselves (at much less efficiency, and much higher reliance on global extraction of metals from copper to gold to lithium) from "dino-juice" because our politicians are too scared to put a nuclear plant down near a voter.
Electric cars are not, and never have been, the answer. We've had them in toys for DECADES, forklifts run off them, and even my milkman has driven around in a milk-float that is entirely reliant on electrical energy since I was a child (1970's, but they were all over Britain in the 60's too). The originals used lead-acid, the new ones use lithium, but they are only efficient for very specific loads and journeys (e.g. once a day, in the morning, after a whole day of charging, etc.)
The problem is the ultimate source of energy. That's oil. That's the problem, not what fancy methods you use to convert it to run your c
Set up and advertise a number.
If people get a call they didn't solicit, encourage them to dial that number. It can be automated and will list the previous X calls to their number, with time, date and duration. Let them mark those calls as spam or not.
Collect the results nationally, the ones who are spam could easily be shut down in a matter of minutes by distributing a list of numbers that have seen a sharp rise in the number of complaints against them.
Additionally, callers can use it as a blacklist tied into their telco so that numbers they have PERSONALLY flagged can never, ever, ever again dial their number even if it's not accepted as "spam" on a national scale.
Then enforce valid Caller-ID numbers for even international calls even if they are never displayed to the end caller. Anyone spoofing a Caller-ID (or allowing Caller-ID's on their network to be spoofed by not just IGNORING what the sender has sent but replacing it with the Caller-ID info of the end transit) that's not been assigned to them loses all their connections.
A couple of bits of legislation, an automated call centre (which shouldn't be hard to set up for those people COMBATTING automated call centres), and you're done.
Sure, some will still get through, but will be killed quickly, will be nowhere near as profitable, will have real consequences, will stop the majority of users being subjected to it, and will look like you're actually getting off your backside and doing something about the problem.
Every single time, ever, that someone has told me that something would "change the way I work", it never has. Not once. Except in a case or two where it "changed the way I worked" by stopping me being able to work, and then eventually getting scrapped.
And every single thing that *HAS* genuinely changed the way I work has come not from marketers telling me that would be so but by a stealthy, insidious insertion of something quite simple into my daily life and then one day realising I couldn't do without it.
So, by that history, this looks like something I'll say "And?" to and then never hear of it again. Can I come back in 5 years and see if I'm wrong?
And anyone who thinks that the brain is inherently capable of only doing one thing has never driven long-distance.
Has *anybody* never had that experience where you are driving along thinking and then suddenly realise you've just navigated the past 20 miles, through traffic, round corners, through junctions, with gear-changes, etc. without remembering doing so?
Your brain is more than capable of doing those tasks - and alerting you to problems just as quickly as when you're concentrating on the task - in the background without you knowing. (What scares me most about them is not the fact that it happens, but that I assume I stopped at red lights, followed traffic signs, didn't ram someone off the road, etc. and have to quickly recall events that I seem to have taken no conscious part in!)
I've also had the (strange) privilege of knowing someone with multiple-personality-syndrome. This is extremely similar - one personality is at the fore but the others are there, in the background, observing events and doing things, just out of mind at that moment. In fact, in MPS, it's just a more pronounced version triggered by certain psychological problems (lots of abuse cases, lots of a very particular type of psychiatric therapy that seems to "trigger" MPS in vulnerable individuals - and is STILL practised in the one part of America where most MPS cases come from!).
Your brain is not a single thing. It's a collection of billions of things, each with their own job. They group and work together but they also can separate off (otherwise you would have to "think" about how to move your arm rather than just passing it off to a group of brain cells that do that all day long) and even divide your consciousness in two in perfectly ordinary people with no mental health issues.
And, like others have said, have you never had that thing late at night where you wake up because of an odd (and quiet) sound despite the fact that every other night you slept like a baby. How do you think that works? The brain is always awake, in some fashion, it's just a matter of whether it decides something is a threat or not (otherwise every predator would just wait until your were asleep because you'd be an easy target), and then "presses the emergency button" to get the rest operational very quickly.
The dolphin thing is well-known. And any idiot with a cat knows that it doesn't really "sleep" for 18 hours a day, it's always aware and very, very rarely in an actual complete sleep (for the first time in 12 years, I manage to "scare" my cat the other day because it was completely, 100% asleep and didn't hear me come in, didn't feel me approach, until I stroked its fur - I actually thought it was dead, it was so deep in sleep).
And every driver will tell you that they have driven on a kind of "automatic pilot" including some of the most complex observation, judgement, quick-reaction and motor skills that the average person will perform in a day, while they were thinking about what to have for dinner.
Humans are animals. Animals have brains. Brains are a collection of groups of cells that, by their very nature, are inherently malleable, ever-changing and independent. It's no shock that dolphins can do this. What's more interesting is that humans seem to have lost the ability/need to do this so much.
Though I suspect you were attempting humour based on the similarity of the word "raid" and the acronym "RAID":
It would be quite easy to "RAID" remote devices, even encrypted ones. The beauty of the Unix "everything is a file" concept. Nothing stopping someone accessing files from remote servers via authenticated and encrypted connections, mounting them as a loopback filesystem, applying RAID to those filesystems, and compensate for any dropping-off that may occur without losing data.
Or, if you could do it properly, you'd have it so that only X% of the data existed on each node and you needed the data from Y nodes to make sense of it or know you had complete logs, ala things like Tahoe-LAFS.
I hope they used similar techniques on their "real" servers as well as their "virtual" ones.
Let's be honest - Voyager was never intended to be a transport to get to Alpha Centuri. It's designed to be a low-power "poodle-along" slowcoach to get to the outer planets, not to get much further, and to take it slow because it takes DAYS to send back an image that it's captured and anything faster moving wouldn't provide enough useful data.
The problems of scaling up and speeding up aren't insurmountable but are HUGE, I grant you. But considering that 51 years ago no man had ever gone into space whatsoever, that's pretty quick progress to keep an eye on.
And we all KNOW that the space programme is being seriously held back by other matters at the moment and if we *wanted* to we could fund it ten times better (e.g. the US pays more to air-condition its military facilities in the Middle East than NASA's entire budget, for instance).
So, even being conservative, if we assume there's a proper incentive (i.e. there's a habitable planet on our closest star), some funding appears for it, we can use vaguely modern technology and have the aim to just "get there" and take a photo of it (not even land necessarily), and let's say that in 30 years we launch something towards it (non-human-bearing) that's capable of moving at 10 times Voyager's speed.
That's a launch in 2040-ish - long enough away to seem futuristic even to use, and long enough way that our technology now would appear then to be like 1980's technology does to us now (when computers BARELY entering a handful of MHz and coming into homes - your top-of-the-range PC would be the equivalent of a ZX Spectrum in 2040).
Then we're honestly talking contact with an extra-solar planet sometime this century. That's a HUGE step. Much larger than setting foot on the moon or doing whatever on Mars. That's something completely outside the Solar System which is a scale never before imagined compared to all previous human endeavours (except, possibly, Voyager by then).
That's pretty damn close, and pretty damn good, and pretty damn realistic, and pretty damn achievable, and pretty damn likely I could even be around to see it happen (depending on what happens with medical science in that time), but certainly my children or (absolute worst-case) grand-children would definitely see it.
Colonising it? Terraforming it? Stripping it of resources? We can do all that to Mars etc. in the meantime if we really want, to get the hang of it. But we could easily make physical contact with any planet on Alpha Centauri that's in a safe-enough orbit, take photos of the star and planets directly, etc. before my daughter pops her clogs.
That's pretty damn impressive.
Nothing. A lot of things are exempt. And this isn't law at all, and certainly not law in all EU countries yet (that takes years to happen).
And, at the end of the day, RoHS regulations, CE testing / FCC certification (only one of which is necessary for any one country but BOTH of which are passed for almost every device, even if that means limiting the device in a way not required by local law!), etc. put a MILLION times more constraints and restrictions on things that you have in your PC and you haven't once moaned about that. Because, by and large, you won't notice and won't care. I bet your PC has a "spread spectrum" option in the BIOS and, if it doesn't, it's because it's on by default.
In the same way that nobody cares about energy ratings on their fridge or freezer (I don't even know what mine is), nobody would care about a voluntary system. So, over time, the ratings move to mean that any fridge has to have a basic minimum criteria in order to work and be sold as a fridge. As a result, almost all the fridges in shops nowadays are A-rated because people DIDN'T care (like you don't care about the reason behind the proposed legislation, you just want to run your unnecessarily-powerful-when-idle graphics card), so they made the manufacturer's care instead.
You didn't complain about your car needing to have electronic engine management to pass EU emissions tests. That's basically the whole point of catalytic convertors and ECU's in cars - to allow you to pass the emissions tests. They actually severely limit the car's capabilities for the sake of an environmental concern that only affects things when scaled up by millions of units. Yet every year the tests get more stringent.
What's different? Because it touches your PC? PC's are somehow magically exempt from regulation because you're a geek? I'm sorry to tell you that they aren't. They are already the subject of lots of changes that were enforced upon them by both EU and US laws (and where most manufacturers target the lowest common denominator, losing you even more) and so cost more than they theoretically need to, perform less than they theoretically could and aren't allowed to be sold if they don't.
P.S. your graphics card doesn't need to consume 200W on idle. It really doesn't. And, nowadays, that's the equivalent of a houseful of light bulbs. You were just the next highest-energy user on the list of home products that doesn't involve heating (a necessary expense if you don't want millions to die from the cold / undercooked food).
I don't live in the US, but I kept my TV when I moved out of the parental home, because it was a habit that I'd been ingrained into.
Then I realised that, actually, there wasn't anything worth paying the amount I was.
I don't watch sports.
The movies that I watch I bought on DVD first and the only things on TV were outdated and (usually) junk and if they weren't, they were more expensive than going to a video rental shop (yep, they were still around back then).
I thought I'd watch the science and documentary channels. Turns out that I learned more from a box set of David Attenborough and a handful of Mythbusters than I ever did anything else (and, again, the cost and repetition of such things means that they are only cost-effective the first few months). Occasionally there's an episode on something I'm interested in and it invariably has all the science content of a modern "Royal Institution Christmas Lecture" (which nowadays consists of kiddies being amazed that something goes bang).
The comedy channels? Apparently my definition that comedy should be funny isn't shared by the people who work there. Apart from a few 20+ year old comedies / sketch shows / stand-up routines that I either owned every episode of or could get them all for free online (legally), there was nothing worth worrying about.
The general entertainment channels? Shoot me now. Tacky documentaries about things I don't care about, celebrity shows, makeovers, "My dad's a transvestite", who cares?
The "home" channels? Watch highly-overpaid people knock down perfectly-good houses and spend millions "revamping" them to look like something out of a design brochure that will fall apart the minute you want to put up a shelf? No thanks.
The shopping channels and the religious channels? Please, I only watch them to laugh at them and pick holes in their claims.
Hell, even the adult channels - who the hell would pay for them?
And this was many years ago. I do still have a TV but, outside of pre-recorded media, it's there for a known, specified, recognised purpose - to have some noise in the background while I eat breakfast or similar.
A similar move was mooted in the UK - FreeView, our free-to-air digital terrestrial service, wanted to encrypt a load of channels. All that happened was that viewers dropped dramatically for them all. Sky (digital satellite) provide the back-end of a free-to-air service where they do the same (pay-for the Sky premium channels, or get the free-to-air with just buying a box + dish). And cable, you've *always* had to pay for the box, but you have to pay for anything decent.
To be honest, all it means is that I have a Freeview TV and if they start cutting channels, or start raising costs and cutting people out, the TV becomes a device solely aimed at it's primary function - a display device. I won't even bother to connect an aerial / dish / cable to it. It'll just be there to watch what I download or already own.
When I was a kid, we had literally 4 channels. That was it. And Saturday night TV was something worth watching and still some of the best entertainment that they play on repeat 30 years later. When what we Brits think of as "American-style TV" came over in the form of Sky, we were astounded by the number of channels and the amount of content. But very, very quickly we learned that it's just the same amount of good stuff diluted over more channels.
Now, there's little good stuff at all and diluted over the number of channels available, the value is next to nothing. Hell, a lot of people had to think twice about buying a £20 adaptor to turn their TV digital, and hardly anyone had one on EVERY TV that they own until very recently (where the TV's have had it built-in for long enough that it's absorbed into basic replacement prices as people throw out CRT's and put flat-screens in to save room).
TV is dying, dead, gone. It's background noise. Kids are being brought up to get the content they want at one click a
Someone, somewhere, every day, protests somewhere in London about something.
Every Wednesday for years, motorcyclists gathered by the thousands on London streets to protest about the parking facilities for them in Central London (an inherently over-populated and over-crowded place where you will NEVER park sensibly). Nobody really cared.
This might have made the telegraph but I've seen no mention of it in any other media. Hell, the BBC has next-to-no news on it today and it's not on their website.
And, literally, every single day some group will protest in London. Hell, we have areas of London parks SET ASIDE for people to soap-box from and protest, it's that common. What did make the news today? Two girls handcuffing themselves in St Paul's Cathedral at protest of the churches support for the banks that brought the economic crisis.
Any mention of Muslim protest? None.
It's a non-story. Really. And, more importantly, 99% of the Muslim people in the capital (let alone the country or the world) might be condemning such protests for all I know.
People will literally protest about anything in London (and even come to London to protest, not realising that it makes your issue seem small in comparison to all the other protests that commuters have to walk through every day), from the devolution of Scotland to the petrol prices to the way that someone looked at them last Thursday. It means nothing.
You want my attention to this issue that offends you? Start negotiating, not dictating.
When you make the front page of Slashdot, with software you've written yourself, sold under the name of your one-man company, with free slashvertisement by submitting them yourself using your work email, ride on the coattails of the completely-unrelated humble bundles (seriously - zero connection), offer a pay-what-you-want scheme, and still only get (at the time of writing) 26 customers, you know it's time to find another career.
I could give you any number of stories, but sadly no pretty sales girl (not to my knowledge, anyway).
Machines arriving with BIOS POST errors because motherboard jumpers were missing (and no, not loose in the case / box, just entirely missing).
Machines overheating because their default BIOS was set to never check the fans at all and never warn about temperatures (in a school, ffs!).
Machines going off for repair six times in a row and coming back each time with "CMOS Error - Checksum Incorrect". Literally machines (plural) out of action for months because they didn't change a CMOS battery. I got my first big contract by spotting this on the little tour they gave me prior to hiring me, going down to the shops for some CR2035's and bringing several thousands pounds of equipment "back up" by replacing their CMOS battery that RM couldn't fix over the space of several years.
Motherboards dying because of the capacitor-fatigue because of the cheap boards they used. Rather than replace, the RM guys would slap in a network card, then a year later a sound card when that cap blew, then a year later a USB card, then when there was nothing left that could be worked around, they'd sell you a new machine.
Not to mention things like them claiming the cheque-printing software endorsed by the borough "had to" print a blank page after each cheque (and thus requiring pre-prepared stacks of cheque/paper/cheque/paper from the office staff all the time) after several YEARS and dozens of callouts, because they never noticed the printer they'd supplied was set to "manual duplex" or some such that told it to do just that. Changed that option and solved the problem in ten minutes and my fix lasted 5 years without anyone finding a problem with it.
Or their "Connect" upgrade which saw a wireless trolley which didn't have enough "wireless" to cope with even a simple login from 2-3 machines at the same time, let alone run a full class of them from across the room. And who's solution was to upgrade. And whose "troubleshooter" from Abingdon (who we MADE come because it was so atrocious and he was supposed to be their main man for the whole of the South of England) was overheard by myself telling the sales guys who we'd brought back in until the problem was solved that "we can't install the newer drivers, they're not compatible with the other RM drivers we install and never will be" (also meant they had NOTHING to upgrade to past 802.11b for YEARS on that model, despite being brand-new and in the pre-N era). Their solution? But more 802.11b wireless routers from them.
RM are in with the boroughs. The borough I worked in, dozens of schools got sick of the local support because they would ONLY endorse / sell / fix RM products, and their support was basically to go to RM, find out their fix, and then blindly apply the RM-style fixes themselves. The "exclusive" contract was written into the entire Borough's schools contracts, quite clearly.
They also tried their best to sabotage and/or poke blame at me at every opportunity but never quite managed to pin anything on me that stuck when they were in the same room as me (apparently it was my fault the wireless didn't work because I was "overloading the system with logins" - from two laptops! Kinda backfired, that one, when I mentioned what I'd overheard). I used to get more schools in even a single borough phoning me for help from recommendations than I could handle and they all wanted rid of RM.
RM are, basically, scum and I've walked (politely, but firmly) out of job interviews when I've realised that schools are using them.
It doesn't mean they're the ONLY scum (I've met a lot of other companies trying to do the same, and the Academies program is RIFE with that sort of thing), but they are a well-established one.