Surely the problem is the whole architecture then?
x86 etc. is an architecture - a standard chip, a standard instruction set (even if it evolves), and a standard set of interfaces, memory locations, hardware and functions.
ARM is just a chip.
x86 has common platforms like UEFI and even BIOS, as well as standard buses and standard interfaces.
ARM doesn't. At least not enough to guarantee.
It's like saying you've released Linux for Z80. Cool. What's the Z80 plugged into because that's by no means a given in any way.
Nobody really puts x86 chips into embedded hardware without replicating the entire x86 architecture (e.g. XBox). But ARM chips can be joined in all kinds of ways and all kinds of free-for-all designs.
It's not a problem you can solve with just a boot menu and a USB.
If you want Serif or Sans Serif, those are entirely different typefaces.
If you want monospaced or not, again those are entirely different typefaces.
All Unicode does - especially when you combine it with TrueType semantics or want a font that works everywhere - is provide characters for everything you might need.
You're saying that what you're PROTECTING is the language used to describe the invention. As such, design patents (e.g. buttons, curved corners) etc. aren't affected. Mechanical patents also.
But patenting "writing a bit of software to do X", for any particular X, which is what software patents are about would be like trying to patent "using English to describe this procedure". Which is - quite rightly - unprotectable.
I've just spent four days on the phone with Apple.
I work for a school.
We have iPads. Lots of iPads.
We were blocked by their automated system for reasons unknown, so we couldn't create iTunes accounts, given that it's a few weeks into term this is our device roll-out period.
Four people from Apple, from four countries, and four days later, I was still no closer. I'd been told I needed to sign up for Beta/Preview services in order for it to work now, then that the school wasn't eligible for that exact service, then we were but I had to provide contacts of the IT Manager (me!). When I did, they then refused it because I hadn't included a verification contact. Did the verification contact need to be anyone higher? Oh, no, I was perfectly capable of signing the forms necessary - I just needed a random employee. So I added the cleaner. Yep, they then accepted it.
It was then discovered that that WASN'T the problem at all. Four days of shouting, I got one guy who "would lift the restriction on our domain for 30 days". Great. What about the rest of the year? No, they can't do that at all, ever, for anyone. Agreed to at least get it working for now - more paperwork. More bullshit. To sign up student iTunes accounts into a school domain for what is quite clearly a government-authorised school in the UK.
In the end, I'm just preparing my record of the entire farce to pass to senior management. Google have offered us an iPad buy-back scheme where they'll take in our hundreds of iPads and give us Chromebooks instead. Our Chromebook trial was a raging success after the shit that was an iPad rollout and we have nothing but trouble with Apple.
I told the Apple guy on the phone that they don't care about education, they don't even HAVE an education line you can call in the line (he literally confessed they don't even have a number they can publish for that team), and when you call on the published numbers, it takes FOUR DAYS to get through to the guy who can actually do the bare fucking minimum of what you need to do and nothing else. He was utterly powerless and useless, there's no escalation and no customer service that I can see at all.
I told him I needed something longer-term if I'm going to plan deployments like this. He said he wasn't able to commit to anything like that. Game over.
I wouldn't mind but I inherited the iPad deployment and we have very expensive MDM and Mac servers and everything you need. And yet all we EVER get from them is hassle and people on support lines that know nothing and can do nothing. I would never have chosen them.
Hell, their Apple School Manager "preview" (i.e. Beta) that they forced me onto - you can't even create users that can download a free app. You can't customise the user types. You can't even turn the users off (it takes 30 days for a user you "deactivate" using that to disappear, and in that time nobody can create another with their same email). And their "student" user cannot download apps - not even the approved MDM apps that push the paid-for apps. It basically is incompatible with any third-party MDM, so it's useless.
Apple way or the fucking highway, and no care for anything slightly different to what they TELL you you will have.
I've honestly had enough of them to NEVER voluntarily deal with them ever again, and I was never too pleased with them in the first place.
Any advanced civilisation will, it's believed, end up creating simulations which can be convincing enough to want to live in. Start with a teenagers inability to remove themselves from The Sims or Pokemon, add VR, a million year's of technological advances, and it's a not-unreasonable assumption.
Assuming that's true, it then becomes possible, even likely, that every civilisation ends up that way. And that, in those simulations, universes can be simulated recursively.
It then follows - if you believe the assumptions - that if you pick a civilisation at random, from the beginning of time to the present day, across the entire universe and every universe simulated inside it, the vast overwhelming probability is that that universe is - in itself - simulated. Purely because real universes are hard to come by, but a simulated universe that contains civilisations who themselves create simulated universes that contain civilisations who.....
Thus, IN ALL PROBABILITY, we're in a simulated universe NOW. It doesn't mean we are. We could be the first. We could be in a real universe surrounded by others full to the brim of simulated ones. Or the assumption could be wrong. But if the assumption is right, we are more likely to be in a simulation than in a real universe.
Taking that as anything other than a philosophical exercise is really an quick way to lose lots of money, however.
Blurry. From a distance. Inconclusive. No follow up, other evidence, etc.
Like every UFO, ghost, loch ness monster or other story: It's BOLLOCKS until you actually have something worth showing.
There are entire tribes that have only been contacted by modern civilisation in the last few years. They are places in the ocean that we've never been to. We barely understand how many planets there are in our own solar system, let alone anyone else's.
But the more BOLLOCKS like this that appears as "news" or even a funny, the more idiots confuse "open scepticism and probability" with "acceptance of absolute shite as fact".
I can't even work out why this is on here, why it's worthy of a submission, why it passed moderation, or why I'm seeing it at all.
If the chances are that we're humans IN a simulation, surely there's an EQUAL or GREATER chance that we're actually simulated ourselves?
If the argument is that a civilisation will eventually live inside a simulation, they will want companions, and those might not necessarily be real instead of sufficiently advanced simulations themselves.
As the underlying animals would liable to death, disease and resource shortage, surely the chances are that - eventually - the simulated world would empty of real beings over time and live in perpetuity (given that it's survived that long without the civilisation needing to maintain, as they're all in cyberspace).
Thus, surely there's a similar almost-certainty that they are in fact all going to empty of fragile, dependent, real beings and become virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people themselves, who have a lifespan not nearly as limited as that of even an advanced being?
And that would mean that, given enough complexity, we could ALL be simulations and not even realise it? If the chances are there that most civilisations will ultimately go into cyberspace, surely extrapolation over time suggests that most of those will similarly end up with no real beings but a sufficiently advanced populous of simulated beings inside them, for much longer period of time?
Most likely, I'm not sitting here. And "here" doesn't exist except in the memory of a computer. And "I" am nothing more than a complex program.
In fact, my phone is - right this second - in my pocket with a bunch of 20+ metal keys, on a metal carabiner, while I'm sitting down. The other pocket has another set of keys. That's my default setup (anything else makes me pat my pockets because I think something's missing).
Have done with every phone ever owned. A great big chunky set of keys, sometimes two (one for work, one for personal keys). Plus screwdrivers, screws, bolts, Allen keys, and anything else that I don't want to walk around holding while I'm working on a rack cabinet.
Never scratched, cracked or broke a screen on a phone, and my first phone was a Philips C12 "Savvy". Current is Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini. Previous was an S4 Mini.
I also carry my phone in my back pocket a lot, never had a problem, even sitting on it hundreds of times.
My phones have taken tumbles down stairs and onto hard concrete floors, no problem. Some of them were quite spectacular, spewing batteries and covers over the floor, always just picked it back up, put it back together, turned it back on.
I work IT in schools. Out of all the school-issued devices, I've had precisely.... zero repairs for our official non-Apple devices. And we get parent, pupil and staff personal devices quite often too. I actually have a company I have a cheap deal with for repairing iPads and iPhone's screens because we put so many their way - whether they are new, recon or previous repairs, the screens are shit and just break, shatter or scratch all the damn time.
Purely anecdotal, non-statistically-signficant, yada, yada... 1000+ devices of both kinds, over 2 years of working here and 15 years of working in IT in schools. Chromebook repairs? Zero. Samsung tablet repairs? Zero. Laptop repairs? Nowhere near the same order of magnitude (one was broken this year, because a small child thought it was a touchscreen so kept pressing hard on the screen, pinching the edge in their hands, until it shattered). Apple repairs? DOZENS upon DOZENS. The parents are actually getting pissed off with it, as they are required to pay for repairs or insure them.
Apple screens are shit. And if you're not careful and you bend the corners or anything when you drop it, most repairers won't ever touch it again because the replacement screen will just shatter too.
I've had parents not believe me and take back their broken iPhones/iPads when our repairers have refused them (fortunately, they don't charge me for looking at ones they deem irreparable), only to have them come back three or more months later unable to find anyone else willing to touch them either.
Part of it is the design (screen edges, etc.), part of it is the glass, part of it is what's underneath the glass. But I've yet to have to send off a non-iPhone for repair except for a Nokia Lumia once, that was found in the bottom of a box which had been used for storing weights in.
Go to Southend pier on the SE coast of the UK (i.e. the wrong side for any kind of Great Pacific Garbage Patch). The same happens.
That's not proof.
I'm sure there is a ton of plastic floating in every sea-sized body of water on Earth, but that we've just found out that this one is X times bigger than we thought? That suggests nobody's been looking properly and/or it doesn't have that much an effect that we've not noticed a glaring hole in our data up till now.
It's shit that shouldn't be there, we should stop just dumping waste and thinking "out of sight, out of mind", but in millions of square kms of ocean, I would expect to find millions of bits of plastic. And wood. And small metals. And just about every substance that human's discard. Even food and seashells.
But some plastic on a beach isn't evidence of it's existence or size.
I don't watch YouTube links to get the 1.5 facts you're trying to point me to. Certainly not when they are overloaded with links, all from one "facts" website, and by a guy who is a "professional speaker on public health issues, particularly the benefits of a plant-based diet and the harms of eating animal products."
He's at the extreme end of the bias scale. Using big-words and showing screenshots of scientific papers doesn't make whatever you spout true.
Do you mean health issues in our fish or in us?
Because plastic is pretty inert, even more inert when it's been in the sunlight/ocean for a few years, and the quantities transferred to the human food chain via eating fish are minimal. In fact, there's a LOT more things we do that are much more dangerous.
And there is no evidence to suggest there's any kind of measurable human effect at all, really. If there was, we'd ALL be keeling over. So I think your "already causing major health issues" might just be a bit overblown. Sure, if we look deep, we might find out that it's not good.
But are we suggesting it's somehow worse than the crap that people choose to shove down their throats knowing full well that's it's no good for them?
Pretty much the only guys going to follow your expert's advice are other guys that think that plant-based diets are the only thing we can ever possibly eat (which is stupid beyond the extreme for a natural omnivore).
- Rape victims seeking advice online. - People who are being stalked by their ex, or eye-witnesses to crimes, who might have someone kill them if they find them (sure, they could live their entire life offline in perpetuity, but that's just as oppresive) - Political dissidents - People who publish honest things about oppressive regimes (e.g. Salman Rushdie) - You, writing this post, hoping that your employer doesn't find that story about him being a shithead last month. - Some guy in China / Korea wondering what all this democracy shit is about and why it's blocked.
All kinds of decent reasons for anonymity. Very few for identity for just casual browsing. Sure, buying products, paying for services, these things come with identity attached in one way or another (even Bitcoin could catch up with you years later if someone bothers to track the blockchain transactions). But general web browsing? Nah.
And the companies making money from your data are, basically not. They're making money from other people who pay to show you ads. A slightly better rate can be had using data, but Google et al all have opt-outs which turn the ads into generic bollocks rather than anything to do with your life, profession, shopping habits, etc. As such, data for that isn't **necessary**.
Anonymity has a million reasons for and very little against.
Oh, no, a terrorist used an anonymous means of warning us about the bomb! Like a phone call from a throwaway phone, or a message sent from a cyber-cafe, or posting a clean piece of paper to a police station.
Taking away anonymity on the net doesn't "solve" any problem. It might shift it to other media for a while. But solving the need for identity is a solution which solves a lot of problems.
P.S. Don't use Tor. Opt-out of ads but don't really care about Google. Far from privacy-paranoid. Just understand the need for it.
I also didn't buy Seagate for hard drives, or the IBM range of Deskstars that were experiencing high failure rates.
Your point? You need to shop around whatever you touch. It doesn't mean that SSDs as a technology are inherently less reliable just because there are some manufacturers out there churning out junk.
Because a browser app can't run in the background, run on startup, suck your contacts lists off your phone, force you to provide your location as soon as you load it, etc. etc. etc.
Browsers have security. Apps have free reign. Now question why you would want to run Facebook as an app rather than (as I do) access it in "Desktop Site" mode inside the Chrome I already have (which gives you message access but is a pain in the butt to navigate).
My old ISP used to detect SMB port access. If they witnessed any - i.e. your connection was opening your file shares to the world - they would block your web and replace every page with a notice until you signed a document stating that you intended to do this. I think you needed customer number so not something that the kids could just press okay on for you.
At that point, they would open up the port again, or - if you'd fixed the problem and they detected that - they'd check once an hour and take the block off.
Force ISPs to do the same for when they detect spam email, or botnet-contribution, etc. Then when they detect it again after they'd signed, you can just kick them off for AUP violation.
But easier - just charge people by the byte. That's what'll end up happening. And most people won't even know or care that they're sending gigabytes to some poor sod's website.
As an IT Manager for over 15 years, I call bullshit.
RAID arrays running on drives shouldn't be allowed to approach anywhere near 10 years. You're dangerous. And, anecdotally, I've yet to see a set of drives get through 5 year renewals without at least one failure, and often more (I have replaced about 10 failed server drives out of 100 in various RAID sets this year alone - nothing older than 4 years, and anything older than 2 is in "non-critical" devices). In fact, it's the highest failure rate on hardware I manage, and I manage about a quarter of a million pounds worth of server estate just in this job alone.
Several hundred clients, bought at the cheapest possible rate and even "end-of-line" stock, I have a failure rate of 1 or 2 a year.
SSD's - zero failures. I'm seriously considering all-SSD upgrades for every client as they come in the door, and full replacement of all existing client devices.
Sure, my backup sets, my servers (IBM BladeCentres), my arrays, will stay HDD because that's the only supported configuration for most of them and because they do a LOT MORE writes than the clients, but there's no reason to suspect that won't change next time I refresh.
And the reason I have my job? The last guy didn't backup adequately. A RAID failed. The second and third disks failed when resyncing. Everything was lost. A disk recovery firm got about 75% of everything back, but that was from the still-working disks - they paid £15k and got nothing back from the dead disks. They had to claw back some data from CLIENT machines, they lost so much.
In my experience, a dead drive is dead. Throw it in the bin and forget about it. I wouldn't have paid a company to try and recover anything, I'd have called it lost and spent £15k on finding a better guy to run their network, and a decent backup set. SSDs and USB sticks are no different in this regard to HDDs. A failure is a failure is a failure. Forget it, replace it, move on with your other copies.
There's a reason that on my wall there's a plaque with several hard drives with covers removed and data recovery stickers over them.
Underneath is the best pseudo-Latin I could come up with: "Cogito Ergo Facsimile" - "I think, therefore I make copies".
Disks are no less reliable than SSDs. I'm not even going to go near saying that SSDs are signficantly better - I don't have the data longevity to know that. But failure rates are already dropping just by putting SSDs where HDDs were. But they're not measurably worse.
And RAID is a really bad use case for SSDs unless you buy properly. RAIDs rewrite themselves all the time, and force minor writes to hit all disks. IBM offer a SSD option, but the disks cost 10 times as much as their approved 15k drives, presumably because of the write impact.
And I don't even want to think what you think SSDs cache that HDDs don't. And writing to chips from a capacitor backup (your SSDs do have backup, yes? Your RAIDs have BBUs, yes?) on an SSD is feasible. Writing to a spinning disk before power dies requires external RAID cards with big batteries.
Anything OUTSIDE the drive (i.e. synced filesystems, RAID-BBU, etc.) is common to both technologies and should be in place if you CARE about that stuff.
I've been seeing dead HDD ever since the days of the 286. I'll come back and tell you when I see my first, dead SSD.
I use a 1Tb SSD in my laptop. It was expensive, but the performance increase was like buying a new laptop. And I'm a lot less wary of jolting the thing or moving it while it's powered on. It's also quite quieter.
In work, I bought RAM upgrades for every machine. Then we discovered that some were so old they could run 64-bit Windows but the motherboard couldn't boot with more than 4Gb of RAM.
Instead, we bought dirt-cheap SSDs for those models. If anything, the SSDs made MORE of a difference and make the SSD machines run faster on 4Gb than the non-SSD newer machines run on 8Gb. We ran the statistics in real-world use and they will last 5 years, even with the swapfiles unchanged from their cloned HDD. Literally, our write-numbers for our everyday usage over the last six months don't come close to the lifetime of the disks and we fully expect those machines to get to the scrapheap with those drives still working.
I honestly don't get why anyone buys HDD now. The capacity is there. The speed is stupendous. Power can be less (depends on the model, though). Heat can be less. Noise is significantly less. Reliability is up-there (alright, I wouldn't use them for a write-heavy server, but that's a specialist use - most office and small business servers would greatly benefit from SSD RAIDs). Physical size isn't an issue at all. The only stopper is cost, and that's coming down all the time and would be round our ankles if companies actually bothered to shut down HDD plants and spun up more SSD plants.
There's no future in HDD. SSD will soon be at the point where you'll buy one and not even notice (it's currently an option in most webshops I see for consumers, for instance). And the problems they have can be solved by bringing the price down, squeezing them all into a bigger space (i.e. traditional 3.5" instead of 2.5") and over-compensating for failures. They are really just a cell-level RAID array if you think about it hard enough. And you can easily throw dozens of Tbs - with tons of spare - into one small 3.5" sized drive.
Stop faffing about, and start making so many of these SSDs in every format possible that you can just kill off HDDs overnight.
I honestly cannot see myself buying another HDD ever again.
Because the distribution is the only possible factor?
Maybe you have hardware that allows things to use a different path? Maybe you have speed that the author's computer doesn't. There are LOTS of bug-confirmations in the bug report, from independent people.
Did you try it inside the infinite loop? Because even in the bug report they have to do that to get it to trigger and it can takes minutes to do so.
This is why bug-reporting, bug-detecting, and de-bugging are HARD. "It doesn't happen for me" is not a solution to a bug. Finding out where the path was that hit the bug, why that path was taken, whether that path is reasonable, and what happens when that path is taken is HARD and may bring things crashing down for some and nothing for others.
Reminds me of a guy who runs a software company I deal with a lot. I submitted screenshots of their website totally fucking up on a range of devices - Android, iPhone, tablet, smartphone, Chrome, Safari - that made it unusable. He sent me a back a screenshot of his Samsung tablet where it worked as expected.
My reply was less than polite. The bug report confirms that it DOES EXIST, AS IT IS DESCRIBED, and has independent confirmations.
Rather than make excuses, how about thinking yourself lucky and still pressing people to fix confirmed problems?
Slashdot Mirror
Surely the problem is the whole architecture then?
x86 etc. is an architecture - a standard chip, a standard instruction set (even if it evolves), and a standard set of interfaces, memory locations, hardware and functions.
ARM is just a chip.
x86 has common platforms like UEFI and even BIOS, as well as standard buses and standard interfaces.
ARM doesn't. At least not enough to guarantee.
It's like saying you've released Linux for Z80. Cool. What's the Z80 plugged into because that's by no means a given in any way.
Nobody really puts x86 chips into embedded hardware without replicating the entire x86 architecture (e.g. XBox). But ARM chips can be joined in all kinds of ways and all kinds of free-for-all designs.
It's not a problem you can solve with just a boot menu and a USB.
That's not what Unicode is for.
If you want Serif or Sans Serif, those are entirely different typefaces.
If you want monospaced or not, again those are entirely different typefaces.
All Unicode does - especially when you combine it with TrueType semantics or want a font that works everywhere - is provide characters for everything you might need.
I'm infinitely more scared of you than any feasible apocalypse or war scenario.
Thank fuck I don't live in the same country!
Well, what are those US probes doing burning the phone in the first place?!
You're saying that what you're PROTECTING is the language used to describe the invention. As such, design patents (e.g. buttons, curved corners) etc. aren't affected. Mechanical patents also.
But patenting "writing a bit of software to do X", for any particular X, which is what software patents are about would be like trying to patent "using English to describe this procedure". Which is - quite rightly - unprotectable.
Five. Per. Day.
But I appreciate your honesty.
Yeah, because schools ONLY sign up students in a 30-day window during the year.
It's shit, is what it is. And no educationally-focused company would DREAM of doing it.
I've just spent four days on the phone with Apple.
I work for a school.
We have iPads. Lots of iPads.
We were blocked by their automated system for reasons unknown, so we couldn't create iTunes accounts, given that it's a few weeks into term this is our device roll-out period.
Four people from Apple, from four countries, and four days later, I was still no closer. I'd been told I needed to sign up for Beta/Preview services in order for it to work now, then that the school wasn't eligible for that exact service, then we were but I had to provide contacts of the IT Manager (me!). When I did, they then refused it because I hadn't included a verification contact. Did the verification contact need to be anyone higher? Oh, no, I was perfectly capable of signing the forms necessary - I just needed a random employee. So I added the cleaner. Yep, they then accepted it.
It was then discovered that that WASN'T the problem at all. Four days of shouting, I got one guy who "would lift the restriction on our domain for 30 days". Great. What about the rest of the year? No, they can't do that at all, ever, for anyone. Agreed to at least get it working for now - more paperwork. More bullshit. To sign up student iTunes accounts into a school domain for what is quite clearly a government-authorised school in the UK.
In the end, I'm just preparing my record of the entire farce to pass to senior management. Google have offered us an iPad buy-back scheme where they'll take in our hundreds of iPads and give us Chromebooks instead. Our Chromebook trial was a raging success after the shit that was an iPad rollout and we have nothing but trouble with Apple.
I told the Apple guy on the phone that they don't care about education, they don't even HAVE an education line you can call in the line (he literally confessed they don't even have a number they can publish for that team), and when you call on the published numbers, it takes FOUR DAYS to get through to the guy who can actually do the bare fucking minimum of what you need to do and nothing else. He was utterly powerless and useless, there's no escalation and no customer service that I can see at all.
I told him I needed something longer-term if I'm going to plan deployments like this. He said he wasn't able to commit to anything like that. Game over.
I wouldn't mind but I inherited the iPad deployment and we have very expensive MDM and Mac servers and everything you need. And yet all we EVER get from them is hassle and people on support lines that know nothing and can do nothing. I would never have chosen them.
Hell, their Apple School Manager "preview" (i.e. Beta) that they forced me onto - you can't even create users that can download a free app. You can't customise the user types. You can't even turn the users off (it takes 30 days for a user you "deactivate" using that to disappear, and in that time nobody can create another with their same email). And their "student" user cannot download apps - not even the approved MDM apps that push the paid-for apps. It basically is incompatible with any third-party MDM, so it's useless.
Apple way or the fucking highway, and no care for anything slightly different to what they TELL you you will have.
I've honestly had enough of them to NEVER voluntarily deal with them ever again, and I was never too pleased with them in the first place.
The reasoning is quite simple:
Any advanced civilisation will, it's believed, end up creating simulations which can be convincing enough to want to live in. Start with a teenagers inability to remove themselves from The Sims or Pokemon, add VR, a million year's of technological advances, and it's a not-unreasonable assumption.
Assuming that's true, it then becomes possible, even likely, that every civilisation ends up that way. And that, in those simulations, universes can be simulated recursively.
It then follows - if you believe the assumptions - that if you pick a civilisation at random, from the beginning of time to the present day, across the entire universe and every universe simulated inside it, the vast overwhelming probability is that that universe is - in itself - simulated. Purely because real universes are hard to come by, but a simulated universe that contains civilisations who themselves create simulated universes that contain civilisations who.....
Thus, IN ALL PROBABILITY, we're in a simulated universe NOW. It doesn't mean we are. We could be the first. We could be in a real universe surrounded by others full to the brim of simulated ones. Or the assumption could be wrong. But if the assumption is right, we are more likely to be in a simulation than in a real universe.
Taking that as anything other than a philosophical exercise is really an quick way to lose lots of money, however.
Blurry.
From a distance.
Inconclusive.
No follow up, other evidence, etc.
Like every UFO, ghost, loch ness monster or other story: It's BOLLOCKS until you actually have something worth showing.
There are entire tribes that have only been contacted by modern civilisation in the last few years. They are places in the ocean that we've never been to. We barely understand how many planets there are in our own solar system, let alone anyone else's.
But the more BOLLOCKS like this that appears as "news" or even a funny, the more idiots confuse "open scepticism and probability" with "acceptance of absolute shite as fact".
I can't even work out why this is on here, why it's worthy of a submission, why it passed moderation, or why I'm seeing it at all.
Stop it.
If the chances are that we're humans IN a simulation, surely there's an EQUAL or GREATER chance that we're actually simulated ourselves?
If the argument is that a civilisation will eventually live inside a simulation, they will want companions, and those might not necessarily be real instead of sufficiently advanced simulations themselves.
As the underlying animals would liable to death, disease and resource shortage, surely the chances are that - eventually - the simulated world would empty of real beings over time and live in perpetuity (given that it's survived that long without the civilisation needing to maintain, as they're all in cyberspace).
Thus, surely there's a similar almost-certainty that they are in fact all going to empty of fragile, dependent, real beings and become virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people themselves, who have a lifespan not nearly as limited as that of even an advanced being?
And that would mean that, given enough complexity, we could ALL be simulations and not even realise it? If the chances are there that most civilisations will ultimately go into cyberspace, surely extrapolation over time suggests that most of those will similarly end up with no real beings but a sufficiently advanced populous of simulated beings inside them, for much longer period of time?
Most likely, I'm not sitting here. And "here" doesn't exist except in the memory of a computer. And "I" am nothing more than a complex program.
Here!
Me!
In fact, my phone is - right this second - in my pocket with a bunch of 20+ metal keys, on a metal carabiner, while I'm sitting down. The other pocket has another set of keys. That's my default setup (anything else makes me pat my pockets because I think something's missing).
Have done with every phone ever owned. A great big chunky set of keys, sometimes two (one for work, one for personal keys). Plus screwdrivers, screws, bolts, Allen keys, and anything else that I don't want to walk around holding while I'm working on a rack cabinet.
Never scratched, cracked or broke a screen on a phone, and my first phone was a Philips C12 "Savvy". Current is Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini. Previous was an S4 Mini.
I also carry my phone in my back pocket a lot, never had a problem, even sitting on it hundreds of times.
My phones have taken tumbles down stairs and onto hard concrete floors, no problem. Some of them were quite spectacular, spewing batteries and covers over the floor, always just picked it back up, put it back together, turned it back on.
I work IT in schools. Out of all the school-issued devices, I've had precisely.... zero repairs for our official non-Apple devices. And we get parent, pupil and staff personal devices quite often too. I actually have a company I have a cheap deal with for repairing iPads and iPhone's screens because we put so many their way - whether they are new, recon or previous repairs, the screens are shit and just break, shatter or scratch all the damn time.
Purely anecdotal, non-statistically-signficant, yada, yada... 1000+ devices of both kinds, over 2 years of working here and 15 years of working in IT in schools. Chromebook repairs? Zero. Samsung tablet repairs? Zero. Laptop repairs? Nowhere near the same order of magnitude (one was broken this year, because a small child thought it was a touchscreen so kept pressing hard on the screen, pinching the edge in their hands, until it shattered). Apple repairs? DOZENS upon DOZENS. The parents are actually getting pissed off with it, as they are required to pay for repairs or insure them.
Apple screens are shit. And if you're not careful and you bend the corners or anything when you drop it, most repairers won't ever touch it again because the replacement screen will just shatter too.
I've had parents not believe me and take back their broken iPhones/iPads when our repairers have refused them (fortunately, they don't charge me for looking at ones they deem irreparable), only to have them come back three or more months later unable to find anyone else willing to touch them either.
Part of it is the design (screen edges, etc.), part of it is the glass, part of it is what's underneath the glass. But I've yet to have to send off a non-iPhone for repair except for a Nokia Lumia once, that was found in the bottom of a box which had been used for storing weights in.
"Install this piece of random software to see if you're safe from this vulnerability that affects a ton of devices."
Yeah, right. It's precisely that mentality that causes more problems in the first place.
Go to Southend pier on the SE coast of the UK (i.e. the wrong side for any kind of Great Pacific Garbage Patch). The same happens.
That's not proof.
I'm sure there is a ton of plastic floating in every sea-sized body of water on Earth, but that we've just found out that this one is X times bigger than we thought? That suggests nobody's been looking properly and/or it doesn't have that much an effect that we've not noticed a glaring hole in our data up till now.
It's shit that shouldn't be there, we should stop just dumping waste and thinking "out of sight, out of mind", but in millions of square kms of ocean, I would expect to find millions of bits of plastic. And wood. And small metals. And just about every substance that human's discard. Even food and seashells.
But some plastic on a beach isn't evidence of it's existence or size.
I don't watch YouTube links to get the 1.5 facts you're trying to point me to. Certainly not when they are overloaded with links, all from one "facts" website, and by a guy who is a "professional speaker on public health issues, particularly the benefits of a plant-based diet and the harms of eating animal products."
He's at the extreme end of the bias scale. Using big-words and showing screenshots of scientific papers doesn't make whatever you spout true.
Do you mean health issues in our fish or in us?
Because plastic is pretty inert, even more inert when it's been in the sunlight/ocean for a few years, and the quantities transferred to the human food chain via eating fish are minimal. In fact, there's a LOT more things we do that are much more dangerous.
And there is no evidence to suggest there's any kind of measurable human effect at all, really. If there was, we'd ALL be keeling over. So I think your "already causing major health issues" might just be a bit overblown. Sure, if we look deep, we might find out that it's not good.
But are we suggesting it's somehow worse than the crap that people choose to shove down their throats knowing full well that's it's no good for them?
Pretty much the only guys going to follow your expert's advice are other guys that think that plant-based diets are the only thing we can ever possibly eat (which is stupid beyond the extreme for a natural omnivore).
First category could include:
- Rape victims seeking advice online.
- People who are being stalked by their ex, or eye-witnesses to crimes, who might have someone kill them if they find them (sure, they could live their entire life offline in perpetuity, but that's just as oppresive)
- Political dissidents
- People who publish honest things about oppressive regimes (e.g. Salman Rushdie)
- You, writing this post, hoping that your employer doesn't find that story about him being a shithead last month.
- Some guy in China / Korea wondering what all this democracy shit is about and why it's blocked.
All kinds of decent reasons for anonymity.
Very few for identity for just casual browsing. Sure, buying products, paying for services, these things come with identity attached in one way or another (even Bitcoin could catch up with you years later if someone bothers to track the blockchain transactions). But general web browsing? Nah.
And the companies making money from your data are, basically not. They're making money from other people who pay to show you ads. A slightly better rate can be had using data, but Google et al all have opt-outs which turn the ads into generic bollocks rather than anything to do with your life, profession, shopping habits, etc. As such, data for that isn't **necessary**.
Anonymity has a million reasons for and very little against.
Oh, no, a terrorist used an anonymous means of warning us about the bomb! Like a phone call from a throwaway phone, or a message sent from a cyber-cafe, or posting a clean piece of paper to a police station.
Taking away anonymity on the net doesn't "solve" any problem. It might shift it to other media for a while. But solving the need for identity is a solution which solves a lot of problems.
P.S. Don't use Tor. Opt-out of ads but don't really care about Google. Far from privacy-paranoid. Just understand the need for it.
If nothing else, this is just another confirmation that the modern web isn't set up to allow you to be anonymous.
That's a problem we techy types should be fixing, not encouraging solutions that identify the user even more.
Correct.
I also didn't buy Seagate for hard drives, or the IBM range of Deskstars that were experiencing high failure rates.
Your point? You need to shop around whatever you touch. It doesn't mean that SSDs as a technology are inherently less reliable just because there are some manufacturers out there churning out junk.
Because a browser app can't run in the background, run on startup, suck your contacts lists off your phone, force you to provide your location as soon as you load it, etc. etc. etc.
Browsers have security. Apps have free reign. Now question why you would want to run Facebook as an app rather than (as I do) access it in "Desktop Site" mode inside the Chrome I already have (which gives you message access but is a pain in the butt to navigate).
No problem.
My old ISP used to detect SMB port access. If they witnessed any - i.e. your connection was opening your file shares to the world - they would block your web and replace every page with a notice until you signed a document stating that you intended to do this. I think you needed customer number so not something that the kids could just press okay on for you.
At that point, they would open up the port again, or - if you'd fixed the problem and they detected that - they'd check once an hour and take the block off.
Force ISPs to do the same for when they detect spam email, or botnet-contribution, etc. Then when they detect it again after they'd signed, you can just kick them off for AUP violation.
But easier - just charge people by the byte. That's what'll end up happening. And most people won't even know or care that they're sending gigabytes to some poor sod's website.
As an IT Manager for over 15 years, I call bullshit.
RAID arrays running on drives shouldn't be allowed to approach anywhere near 10 years. You're dangerous. And, anecdotally, I've yet to see a set of drives get through 5 year renewals without at least one failure, and often more (I have replaced about 10 failed server drives out of 100 in various RAID sets this year alone - nothing older than 4 years, and anything older than 2 is in "non-critical" devices). In fact, it's the highest failure rate on hardware I manage, and I manage about a quarter of a million pounds worth of server estate just in this job alone.
Several hundred clients, bought at the cheapest possible rate and even "end-of-line" stock, I have a failure rate of 1 or 2 a year.
SSD's - zero failures. I'm seriously considering all-SSD upgrades for every client as they come in the door, and full replacement of all existing client devices.
Sure, my backup sets, my servers (IBM BladeCentres), my arrays, will stay HDD because that's the only supported configuration for most of them and because they do a LOT MORE writes than the clients, but there's no reason to suspect that won't change next time I refresh.
And the reason I have my job? The last guy didn't backup adequately. A RAID failed. The second and third disks failed when resyncing. Everything was lost. A disk recovery firm got about 75% of everything back, but that was from the still-working disks - they paid £15k and got nothing back from the dead disks. They had to claw back some data from CLIENT machines, they lost so much.
In my experience, a dead drive is dead. Throw it in the bin and forget about it. I wouldn't have paid a company to try and recover anything, I'd have called it lost and spent £15k on finding a better guy to run their network, and a decent backup set. SSDs and USB sticks are no different in this regard to HDDs. A failure is a failure is a failure. Forget it, replace it, move on with your other copies.
There's a reason that on my wall there's a plaque with several hard drives with covers removed and data recovery stickers over them.
Underneath is the best pseudo-Latin I could come up with: "Cogito Ergo Facsimile" - "I think, therefore I make copies".
Disks are no less reliable than SSDs. I'm not even going to go near saying that SSDs are signficantly better - I don't have the data longevity to know that. But failure rates are already dropping just by putting SSDs where HDDs were. But they're not measurably worse.
And RAID is a really bad use case for SSDs unless you buy properly. RAIDs rewrite themselves all the time, and force minor writes to hit all disks. IBM offer a SSD option, but the disks cost 10 times as much as their approved 15k drives, presumably because of the write impact.
And I don't even want to think what you think SSDs cache that HDDs don't. And writing to chips from a capacitor backup (your SSDs do have backup, yes? Your RAIDs have BBUs, yes?) on an SSD is feasible. Writing to a spinning disk before power dies requires external RAID cards with big batteries.
Anything OUTSIDE the drive (i.e. synced filesystems, RAID-BBU, etc.) is common to both technologies and should be in place if you CARE about that stuff.
I've been seeing dead HDD ever since the days of the 286.
I'll come back and tell you when I see my first, dead SSD.
I use a 1Tb SSD in my laptop. It was expensive, but the performance increase was like buying a new laptop. And I'm a lot less wary of jolting the thing or moving it while it's powered on. It's also quite quieter.
In work, I bought RAM upgrades for every machine. Then we discovered that some were so old they could run 64-bit Windows but the motherboard couldn't boot with more than 4Gb of RAM.
Instead, we bought dirt-cheap SSDs for those models. If anything, the SSDs made MORE of a difference and make the SSD machines run faster on 4Gb than the non-SSD newer machines run on 8Gb. We ran the statistics in real-world use and they will last 5 years, even with the swapfiles unchanged from their cloned HDD. Literally, our write-numbers for our everyday usage over the last six months don't come close to the lifetime of the disks and we fully expect those machines to get to the scrapheap with those drives still working.
I honestly don't get why anyone buys HDD now. The capacity is there. The speed is stupendous. Power can be less (depends on the model, though). Heat can be less. Noise is significantly less. Reliability is up-there (alright, I wouldn't use them for a write-heavy server, but that's a specialist use - most office and small business servers would greatly benefit from SSD RAIDs). Physical size isn't an issue at all. The only stopper is cost, and that's coming down all the time and would be round our ankles if companies actually bothered to shut down HDD plants and spun up more SSD plants.
There's no future in HDD. SSD will soon be at the point where you'll buy one and not even notice (it's currently an option in most webshops I see for consumers, for instance). And the problems they have can be solved by bringing the price down, squeezing them all into a bigger space (i.e. traditional 3.5" instead of 2.5") and over-compensating for failures. They are really just a cell-level RAID array if you think about it hard enough. And you can easily throw dozens of Tbs - with tons of spare - into one small 3.5" sized drive.
Stop faffing about, and start making so many of these SSDs in every format possible that you can just kill off HDDs overnight.
I honestly cannot see myself buying another HDD ever again.
Because the distribution is the only possible factor?
Maybe you have hardware that allows things to use a different path? Maybe you have speed that the author's computer doesn't. There are LOTS of bug-confirmations in the bug report, from independent people.
Did you try it inside the infinite loop? Because even in the bug report they have to do that to get it to trigger and it can takes minutes to do so.
This is why bug-reporting, bug-detecting, and de-bugging are HARD. "It doesn't happen for me" is not a solution to a bug. Finding out where the path was that hit the bug, why that path was taken, whether that path is reasonable, and what happens when that path is taken is HARD and may bring things crashing down for some and nothing for others.
Reminds me of a guy who runs a software company I deal with a lot. I submitted screenshots of their website totally fucking up on a range of devices - Android, iPhone, tablet, smartphone, Chrome, Safari - that made it unusable. He sent me a back a screenshot of his Samsung tablet where it worked as expected.
My reply was less than polite. The bug report confirms that it DOES EXIST, AS IT IS DESCRIBED, and has independent confirmations.
Rather than make excuses, how about thinking yourself lucky and still pressing people to fix confirmed problems?
Why would you class "the EU" along with single countries?
Does saying that the US pollutes more than any single first-world European country hurt for you?
I'd check your computer first.
Nothing here.