Of course the problem with your statement is it isn't the 'assholes' who will slow down.
The ones who are convinced they're the awesomest driver on the road will be the least likely to slow down for this.
I've also been on roads where every single car was driving well above the limit -- that one guy driving along at exactly the speed limit was more of a danger than anything. That person probably should have decided to stay off the highway if they were afraid of it -- because on some roads it's not much different from being the guy who is driving well under the limit.
If every other driver, including the police, is ripping along at well over the limit... the guy who is being the rolling roadblock is a hazard.
On the other side are security researchers screaming that we're installing remote access with little thought about securing it properly.
Well, that and the weekly stories we see which demonstrates just how terrible the security of this crap really is. It's not like it's a hypothetical case researchers are warning us about.
Those of us who have been around long enough know damned well not to take a day-one update, because companies have become lazy and sloppy and don't find out what they've missed until some poor schmuck has it go wrong.
And now we're supposed to trust a vendor to push out an update to the things which run our homes and have them not screw it up?
You can keep your interweb of crap, and I'll keep assuming the people making it don't give a damn about security or testing their products.
The IoT is a model in which all of the consumers are the beta testers, and which security is a farce, if it exists at all. It's all gimmicks and toys, lacking either substance or quality.
I already encounter plenty of people who, upon encountering an obstacle on their side of the road, will happily veer over into my side of the road, even if it means crossing a yellow(*) line. They don't seem to grasp that if they have an obstacle on their side, they should slow or stop instead of just veering into oncoming traffic like a moron.
If with a big strip down the center of the road which indicates "your side/my side" people will still cross into oncoming traffic, there is no way in hell I would trust them without the damned line. Hell, I routinely see places with two left turning lanes where half the drivers just stray into their neighbors lane like +- 15 feet is just fine.
Trusting the average driver I see to know where the middle of the road is without some form of guidance seems idiotic, because they can't do it now. I can't tell you how many people I see who seem to think they need 15 feet of space on their right to clear a parked car, which puts them firmly onto the side of oncoming traffic and are apparently too stupid to realize they can't do that.
As TFA says, "Absurd, barmy, crazy".
It's not a shared space, I get a lane, you get a lane, you stay the hell out of mine. You don't get to make use of my lane just because it's there and you don't know where your car is.
This sounds really really stupid.
(*) we use solid yellow lines to separate from on-coming traffic for you Brits, instead of dashed white ones -- white ones are to separate you from people going in the same direction.
Trust me, it makes no sense... I can guarantee you that it takes a lot more energy input than you can get out of the methanol.
And which is then going to just... release all of that carbon dioxide.
It isn't magic.
But, in case you really needed to know:
but they admit that such a system may be five to 10 years away and will probably be still more expensive than ordinary fuel production.
Which over the years I have taken to mean "it kind works in the lab, we need to publish now, but there will never be any applications of this technology on a meaningful scale".
An awful lot of things which are 5-10 years away are really never going to happen. In fact, most such things are pretty much doomed to never be useful.
Not saying basic research isn't cool, but I don't think we'll expect to see this any time soon.
Now, if you can make ethanol, we're listening. Why no, officer, that's not a still...;-)
Sure, both of them do... but with airlines you build the infrastructure at the end-points only. The bits which connect those end-points? You don't need to build anything, because it's just the atmosphere.
With a hyperloop... you need either central hubs to get people to their destinations, or multiple routes to get to multiple destinations. Just like cars and trains do now.
Connecting all of your destinations with lots of routes, that's going to get expensive. Doing them with many hubs and hops from one to the other? One begins to wonder if the whole thing still works as claimed or is even viable, or if it just becomes the same issues we have now.
Or, worse, you hyperloop to an airport and then get on a plane... and all of your supposed benefits pretty much vanish.
You quickly wonder just how many thousands of miles of this stuff you'd need to build, and just how huge of an undertaking that would be.
A ground-level, rail-mounted tube doesn't expend energy holding itself against gravity, and faces less wind resistance than an airplane in orbit. That means operating the hyperloop would require less total energy expenditure than operating an air plane.
But, a massive expenditure of energy to build this thing and connect it to where you want to go.. which means you spend a LOT of money building it.
And presumably, things like trans-oceanic things require vast bits of infrastructure of a sort we've not built.
Say what you will about aircraft, but if you build an airport with the right size runways, any aircraft with the range can use them.
I question is the hyperloop doesn't become one of those things which only gets you to a few places -- in which you still get on a plane anyway, or if it will really just prove to be a cool sounding idea which isn't really feasible.
Just how expensive is a network of hyperloop tubes to get you to all of these places, and is this in any way economically sane to think will ever happen?
So many of these things futurists tell us will be coming Real Soon Now more or less assume vast sums of money (spent by someone else) to tear down the world and rebuild it to work with your fancy new toy.
You'll excuse me if I'm not looking to invest in anything related to hyperloops. I have yet to be convinced this will ever happen.
I hardly think this is a new thing... in 1999 you could say you were a dot-com, and people would be throwing money at you. For a while you could declare an iAnything and people would be all over it. Business to Business caused a lot of hype for a while. Web 2.0 also had this huge amount of companies in the gold rush to get rich, as did Social Media. Internet of Things got all the hype you could imagine, but nobody even knew what it was yet.
Now it's "overhyped hyperloop hype". Once again, tons of people (both sincere but deluded and just hucksters cashing in) are all over this Next Big Thing.
People just go crazy and want to cash in, this isn't a new thing we're seeing. It just seems like in the last 20 years the hype cycle has gotten much shorter.. in a couple of years there will be done of companies left in the wake as the hype machine moved onto something else.
Somewhere, there are people with investment money looking to monetize an investment in something they've never heard of just in case it turns into something huge -- but I suspect an awful lot of wealth gets wiped as all these people just on random bandwagons which sound awesome.
but this doesn't provide protection for a phone or tablet that requires the original power supply (can't be charged from a notebook USB port)
That sucks, because my suggestion was going to be to get something like this Kensington charger. I have one with the standard North American plugs, it works with 100-240VACm, 50-60Hz.
I have a strict rule... down own anything which can't charge from stock USB. I find between my Kensington and a couple of 6600MAh USB power bricks, I can pretty much keep everything charged.
Things which require their own chargers just create more hassles in terms of what chargers you need to bring... whereas bringing 5-6 USB cables of several different sizes and one or two good chargers is pretty damned easy.
Just say no to devices with proprietary chargers, because you can eliminate a lot of stuff with a decent USB charger which already handles the different voltages -- they're easy enough to find these days, relatively inexpensive, and help you cover a lot of cases much more conveniently.
Things are a whole lot easier when you just have some generic cables and a multi-port charger.
So, I've obviously never seen what FB is offering, but this sounds like it's partitioned:
Yet the Free Basics program was controversial from the start in India, where critics accused Facebook of creating a "walled garden" for poor users that only allowed them access to a portion of the web that Facebook controlled.
Dozens of well-known tech entrepreneurs, university professors and tech industry groups spoke out against it, saying that the curated app, with its handpicked weather, job and other listings, put India's scrappy start-ups and software developers at a disadvantage.
So, are they really getting "pretty much the rest of the net"? Or are they getting to see the stuff FB controls and nothing else?
As I understand it, differential pricing is "this data will be free for you, whereas accessing this stuff will cost you" -- because you're getting a cut from the revenue of the first set of data.
Basically people would be pushed to preferentially use Facebook for everything, while being penalized for using anything else.
So, we'll give you all the Facebook you can handle, but go to YouTube and we'll charge you more.
It boils down to differential pricing when data from one source is made to artificially cost less than data coming from another source.
gstoddart once again proves he has the minimum specs to qualify as a doltish mongoloid cretin brain with his unoriginal scribblings wasting slashdot posting space with his drooling dribblings.
Speaking of dribblings, do you still fuck your dad on the weekends?
But minimum specs are for running only Windows - not even any bundled applications like calendar, calculator, minesweeper, or recommended ones like antivirus, MS Office. How many people do that?
Apparently, if you're running the minimum specs... nobody!
Sure, but I bought it at the end of 2008 specifically knowing I'd run Vista on it, and my way of future proofing is as much cheaper trailing edge CPU as I can find, and as much RAM as I can afford -- especially since I'd seen our poor QA guys trying to run it on a cobbled together machine with 512MB of RAM.
It worked just fine until the machine keeled over about a year ago, but it was starting to push the memory (I was also running VMware on it).
Then I replaced with a box with an AMD FX-8320E/8 core and 16GB of RAM... over many years I've found almost nothing future proofs a machine than what sounds like a stupid amount of RAM.
Part of the problem is I don't think "minimum specs" for a Windows machine has ever been anything but a lie. It's always required much more than MS ever claimed it should.
It still amazes me that people are still selling machines with 4GB of RAM like it was 10 years ago. That just screams of leaving people with machines with far too little resources.
Even in 2008 machines with 4GB of RAM wasn't nearly enough.
Microsoft lying about minimum requirements. The question is why?
Honestly, when machines had 4MB of RAM, but Windows was almost useless on it... it was assumed it was largely because they wouldn't admit to real requirements.
They've been notoriously optimistic about actual requirements for years.. including Vista.
You can likely blame marketing for trying to downplay just how much it really needed.
Boo hoo.. the multi-billion dollar corporation who spends billions of dollars annually can't maintain product releases and instead has decided the world gets to be their beta testers as they go to a shitty rolling release of incomplete software they've announced they'll force people to get.
I'm sorry, are we supposed to feel sorry because MS no longer wishes to to proper release engineering and life cycle management of their products? All so they can jam ads and analytics into our machines without our permission?
Performance wise yes with enough resources it was fine. But the oem's never sold stock systems with "enough" for the entire time vista was on the market.
Well, was that Microsoft lying about minimum requirements, or OEMs ignoring them?
Because, really, way back in the day with Windows 3.11 when machines were sold with 4MB of RAM... it was still unusable with only one application running.
Companies have been selling Windows machines with too damned little RAM for 25 years.
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Of course the problem with your statement is it isn't the 'assholes' who will slow down.
The ones who are convinced they're the awesomest driver on the road will be the least likely to slow down for this.
I've also been on roads where every single car was driving well above the limit -- that one guy driving along at exactly the speed limit was more of a danger than anything. That person probably should have decided to stay off the highway if they were afraid of it -- because on some roads it's not much different from being the guy who is driving well under the limit.
If every other driver, including the police, is ripping along at well over the limit ... the guy who is being the rolling roadblock is a hazard.
Well, that and the weekly stories we see which demonstrates just how terrible the security of this crap really is. It's not like it's a hypothetical case researchers are warning us about.
Those of us who have been around long enough know damned well not to take a day-one update, because companies have become lazy and sloppy and don't find out what they've missed until some poor schmuck has it go wrong.
And now we're supposed to trust a vendor to push out an update to the things which run our homes and have them not screw it up?
You can keep your interweb of crap, and I'll keep assuming the people making it don't give a damn about security or testing their products.
The IoT is a model in which all of the consumers are the beta testers, and which security is a farce, if it exists at all. It's all gimmicks and toys, lacking either substance or quality.
That sounds like a terrible idea.
I already encounter plenty of people who, upon encountering an obstacle on their side of the road, will happily veer over into my side of the road, even if it means crossing a yellow(*) line. They don't seem to grasp that if they have an obstacle on their side, they should slow or stop instead of just veering into oncoming traffic like a moron.
If with a big strip down the center of the road which indicates "your side/my side" people will still cross into oncoming traffic, there is no way in hell I would trust them without the damned line. Hell, I routinely see places with two left turning lanes where half the drivers just stray into their neighbors lane like +- 15 feet is just fine.
Trusting the average driver I see to know where the middle of the road is without some form of guidance seems idiotic, because they can't do it now. I can't tell you how many people I see who seem to think they need 15 feet of space on their right to clear a parked car, which puts them firmly onto the side of oncoming traffic and are apparently too stupid to realize they can't do that.
As TFA says, "Absurd, barmy, crazy".
It's not a shared space, I get a lane, you get a lane, you stay the hell out of mine. You don't get to make use of my lane just because it's there and you don't know where your car is.
This sounds really really stupid.
(*) we use solid yellow lines to separate from on-coming traffic for you Brits, instead of dashed white ones -- white ones are to separate you from people going in the same direction.
And which is then going to just ... release all of that carbon dioxide.
It isn't magic.
But, in case you really needed to know:
Which over the years I have taken to mean "it kind works in the lab, we need to publish now, but there will never be any applications of this technology on a meaningful scale".
An awful lot of things which are 5-10 years away are really never going to happen. In fact, most such things are pretty much doomed to never be useful.
Not saying basic research isn't cool, but I don't think we'll expect to see this any time soon.
Now, if you can make ethanol, we're listening. Why no, officer, that's not a still ... ;-)
Sure, both of them do ... but with airlines you build the infrastructure at the end-points only. The bits which connect those end-points? You don't need to build anything, because it's just the atmosphere.
With a hyperloop ... you need either central hubs to get people to their destinations, or multiple routes to get to multiple destinations. Just like cars and trains do now.
Connecting all of your destinations with lots of routes, that's going to get expensive. Doing them with many hubs and hops from one to the other? One begins to wonder if the whole thing still works as claimed or is even viable, or if it just becomes the same issues we have now.
Or, worse, you hyperloop to an airport and then get on a plane ... and all of your supposed benefits pretty much vanish.
You quickly wonder just how many thousands of miles of this stuff you'd need to build, and just how huge of an undertaking that would be.
But, a massive expenditure of energy to build this thing and connect it to where you want to go .. which means you spend a LOT of money building it.
And presumably, things like trans-oceanic things require vast bits of infrastructure of a sort we've not built.
Say what you will about aircraft, but if you build an airport with the right size runways, any aircraft with the range can use them.
I question is the hyperloop doesn't become one of those things which only gets you to a few places -- in which you still get on a plane anyway, or if it will really just prove to be a cool sounding idea which isn't really feasible.
Just how expensive is a network of hyperloop tubes to get you to all of these places, and is this in any way economically sane to think will ever happen?
So many of these things futurists tell us will be coming Real Soon Now more or less assume vast sums of money (spent by someone else) to tear down the world and rebuild it to work with your fancy new toy.
You'll excuse me if I'm not looking to invest in anything related to hyperloops. I have yet to be convinced this will ever happen.
I hardly think this is a new thing ... in 1999 you could say you were a dot-com, and people would be throwing money at you. For a while you could declare an iAnything and people would be all over it. Business to Business caused a lot of hype for a while. Web 2.0 also had this huge amount of companies in the gold rush to get rich, as did Social Media. Internet of Things got all the hype you could imagine, but nobody even knew what it was yet.
Now it's "overhyped hyperloop hype". Once again, tons of people (both sincere but deluded and just hucksters cashing in) are all over this Next Big Thing.
People just go crazy and want to cash in, this isn't a new thing we're seeing. It just seems like in the last 20 years the hype cycle has gotten much shorter .. in a couple of years there will be done of companies left in the wake as the hype machine moved onto something else.
Somewhere, there are people with investment money looking to monetize an investment in something they've never heard of just in case it turns into something huge -- but I suspect an awful lot of wealth gets wiped as all these people just on random bandwagons which sound awesome.
Go to page 2 of the phoronix.com link ... 131073MB of RAM (1024x128) ... which, as you point out, is probably 128GB in terms of being 1024x1024x128.
It is listed, but the interpretation of how much that actually is might be sketchy.
But ... but ... didn't the Empire outlaw Talos worship?
Apparently, only sometimes ... I can see 4 stories on the front page in which that isn't true.
So, it's not even consistent.
That sucks, because my suggestion was going to be to get something like this Kensington charger. I have one with the standard North American plugs, it works with 100-240VACm, 50-60Hz.
I have a strict rule ... down own anything which can't charge from stock USB. I find between my Kensington and a couple of 6600MAh USB power bricks, I can pretty much keep everything charged.
Things which require their own chargers just create more hassles in terms of what chargers you need to bring ... whereas bringing 5-6 USB cables of several different sizes and one or two good chargers is pretty damned easy.
Just say no to devices with proprietary chargers, because you can eliminate a lot of stuff with a decent USB charger which already handles the different voltages -- they're easy enough to find these days, relatively inexpensive, and help you cover a lot of cases much more conveniently.
Things are a whole lot easier when you just have some generic cables and a multi-port charger.
So, I've obviously never seen what FB is offering, but this sounds like it's partitioned:
So, are they really getting "pretty much the rest of the net"? Or are they getting to see the stuff FB controls and nothing else?
As I understand it, differential pricing is "this data will be free for you, whereas accessing this stuff will cost you" -- because you're getting a cut from the revenue of the first set of data.
Basically people would be pushed to preferentially use Facebook for everything, while being penalized for using anything else.
So, we'll give you all the Facebook you can handle, but go to YouTube and we'll charge you more.
It boils down to differential pricing when data from one source is made to artificially cost less than data coming from another source.
Speaking of dribblings, do you still fuck your dad on the weekends?
LOL, don't you usually spend Sunday mornings in a gimp suit bent over a saw horse?
Apparently, if you're running the minimum specs ... nobody!
No, it's 100% genuine real virtual innards.
Sure, but I bought it at the end of 2008 specifically knowing I'd run Vista on it, and my way of future proofing is as much cheaper trailing edge CPU as I can find, and as much RAM as I can afford -- especially since I'd seen our poor QA guys trying to run it on a cobbled together machine with 512MB of RAM.
It worked just fine until the machine keeled over about a year ago, but it was starting to push the memory (I was also running VMware on it).
Then I replaced with a box with an AMD FX-8320E/8 core and 16GB of RAM ... over many years I've found almost nothing future proofs a machine than what sounds like a stupid amount of RAM.
Part of the problem is I don't think "minimum specs" for a Windows machine has ever been anything but a lie. It's always required much more than MS ever claimed it should.
It still amazes me that people are still selling machines with 4GB of RAM like it was 10 years ago. That just screams of leaving people with machines with far too little resources.
Even in 2008 machines with 4GB of RAM wasn't nearly enough.
Looks like yes.
Honestly, when machines had 4MB of RAM, but Windows was almost useless on it ... it was assumed it was largely because they wouldn't admit to real requirements.
They've been notoriously optimistic about actual requirements for years .. including Vista.
You can likely blame marketing for trying to downplay just how much it really needed.
One of the funniest things I ever saw was someone running a version of "Dig Dug" with the Turbo on.
The game lasted less than 1 second ... just thwap.
LOL, oh look, someone with a tiny penis and no brain with too much time on their hands.
Does your mom know you're using the internet again? Or is she still off banging the neighbor's dog?
Boo hoo .. the multi-billion dollar corporation who spends billions of dollars annually can't maintain product releases and instead has decided the world gets to be their beta testers as they go to a shitty rolling release of incomplete software they've announced they'll force people to get.
I'm sorry, are we supposed to feel sorry because MS no longer wishes to to proper release engineering and life cycle management of their products? All so they can jam ads and analytics into our machines without our permission?
Fuck that.
Please, half the posters always link to the same sites for any submission .. which means it's all self promotion, or paid shills these days.
Apparently nobody give a damn ... just like how Nervals' Lobster never posted anything which didn't include a link to Dice.
Well, was that Microsoft lying about minimum requirements, or OEMs ignoring them?
Because, really, way back in the day with Windows 3.11 when machines were sold with 4MB of RAM ... it was still unusable with only one application running.
Companies have been selling Windows machines with too damned little RAM for 25 years.