Nobody wants cables to be expensive - cables are expendable goods, prone to mechanical wear out, and you need to have a lot of them to be prepared for many situations, some of which might never occur. A connector standard that requires expensive active electronics as an integral part of any cable is sure to fail with regards to mass market penetration.
Don't forget Etherium was the group touting "the code is the contract" until the very moment someone outsmarted their code, at which point they suddenly changed their mind.
"Hard forking" whenever someone claims the system was abused does not scale to any reasonable size - a blockchain utilized by millions would require "hard forks" every day.
I'm sure US hospitals are hoarding these vials in preparation to ship them to some miserable 3rd-world country with an incredibly underdeveloped healthcare system, but the article misses to tell us which country that is... right?
It is one of the greatest features of computers that they work reliably, all the time, with consistent results, regardless of whether I am hitting my keyboard happily or not.
A computer trying to interpret and/or react differently based on how I feel is exactly the opposite of what I would like to have near me.
These "movie ransom" stories are weird - I wonder whether these stories are "based on true events" (of incredibly stupid criminals) or whether they are made up PR-stories from movie studios to draw attention (and maybe also a little compassion).
Of course, even the dumbest studio accountant knows that it does not have any significant impact on his revenue whether unlicensed copies of his movie are "out there" some weeks sooner or later. People will certainly not make a decision for or against watching the movie "unpaid" based on whether that is possible a little sooner or later.
These ransom schemes, if they actually exist, are 100% certain to fail.
before they had an "Internet Connection". I don't understand why any critical infrastructure (which, like a hospital, should function even in cases of catastrophy or war) connects any vital computer to a public network.
There could have hardly been any more "wrong" hands than those of the NSA, obviously. The "right" hands would have acted in favor of mankind, not like a villain stockpiling doomsday devices in a garden locker for any petty thiev to steal.
You should try listening to (a) an electric car stopping at your neighbour's house and compare it to (b) an electric helicopter landing in your neighbour's garden. There is hell of a lot of difference. Air travel is loud because lots of air needs to be moved at high speed to make something hover, this won't change even if the motor was completely quiet.
Actually, the Itanium architecture was not very different from PA-RISC, it just allowed to issue multiple instructions to parallel execution units without the CPU trying to solve dependency issues between those execution units, leaving that task to the compiler.
I am pretty sure HP would have been better off not forfeiting their PA-RISC architecture to Intel at that time - the PA 8000 CPUs ran circles around the x86 CPU from the same time while using much less transistors.
If everyone who drives a car now goes by some sort of air-traffic, cities will become a nightmare of constant, extreme noise.
Those who dream of flying cars usually dream of only themselves using them while everybody else keeps quiet.
think again - because for saving a penny, companies (including those running hospitals) will sacrifice everything.
Just to give you one example from the banking industry: I only recently learned that hundreds of banks allow a 3rd-party vendor of some dubious "sentiment analytics" to inject "widgets" into their banking home page, which they welcome because they are served for free - paid by advertisements the 3rd-party injects alongside their data into those HTML widgets.
Can you believe it? They voluntarily invite the number one vector for trojan software - malvertisement - into their "official" banking home page, just because "it is for free"! And that is the attitude which makes this century a golden age for cybercrime.
this invention clearly promises a great path to even more expensive printing.
If I were those researchers, I would have spoken of potential use cases not quite competing with ordinary laser printers.
After all, the rest of the world has plenty of nice, welcoming places to go to, and I'm perfectly fine to restrict business contacts to the the Hysterial States of America to video conferencing.
Whoever wrote that "if there's a business in which there are 35 percent net margins, that would attract a huge amount of new capital" must have never worked for any larger global corporation. I have been working for parts of such corporations that were sold off because we only had a margin < 50%.
Never underestimate the greed ruling investors.
that would be hard to do without a computer. Now more and more computers become a tool that trades in minimal help on trivial tasks against all your data, freedom and privacy.
Corporations like IBM are not really keen to retain their best employees, they want large amounts of cheap, docile personnel. IBM is not selling lots of stuff because their stuff is great or made by brilliant minds, they sell lots of stuff because masses of mediocre buyers, who are not even skilled enough to determine the quality of the product/service, buy IBM because of their brand name.
There once was a time when corporations had established the network of their dreams in Germany: It was called "BTX", run by the "Bundespost" (later to become Deutsche Telekom). You had to use that one entrypoint to BTX which was connected to your personal data, and every single page you wanted to look at could ask for a price - so even the coarsest of pixel-graphics came at a 10 Deutsche Mark charge and even the most irrelevant information presented came at hilarious page prices.
Of course, it was also important for the corporations to make sure that not just anybody could present data - otherwise, Joe User could have presented information competing with the one already sold by some corporation via BTX.
Guess what, BTX never became very popular, and died off quickly once the World Wide Web became popular.
Corporations are still mad at the freedom and choice available there, so they'll do anything to turn back the wheel of time to the dark age of "BTX".
... which is very very far from any practically working piece of hardware. At least the text of the university itself clearly states this is a "proposed procect":
"The objective of this research is to explore new classes of compounds that exhibit multifunctional magnetic properties of fundamental importance to high-density storage methods and molecular electronics. The scope of the proposed projects cover a broad range of fundamental topics in chemistry, including organic and inorganic synthesis, structure and bonding, electronic structure, magnetochemistry, photochromism, photophysics, and materials chemistry."
for this brilliant campaign teaching the gullible consumer zombies about the dangers of "always on" listening devices. Would... if only their junk food was palatable.
It is the bloody same to a power plant whether 100W go to John Smith and 900W to Joe User, or whether both of them use 500W.
It is even much cheaper and more accurate to measure the power where a multitude of users are connected.
The only reason for the introduction of "smart meters" has been to collect personal data to sell and to con people into more expenses for their particular pattern of power usage.
The first thing MicroSoft will do when WebAssembly becomes a success will be introducing additional "features"/interfaces in their Windows browser, making sure that their deciples program WebAssembly software that will run well only under Windows. It has always been like that. Doesn't matter whether the abstraction layer is called "WebAssembly" or "POSIX" or "JavaScript".
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody wants cables to be expensive - cables are expendable goods, prone to mechanical wear out, and you need to have a lot of them to be prepared for many situations, some of which might never occur.
A connector standard that requires expensive active electronics as an integral part of any cable is sure to fail with regards to mass market penetration.
Don't forget Etherium was the group touting "the code is the contract" until the very moment someone outsmarted their code, at which point they suddenly changed their mind.
"Hard forking" whenever someone claims the system was abused does not scale to any reasonable size - a blockchain utilized by millions would require "hard forks" every day.
I'm sure US hospitals are hoarding these vials in preparation to ship them to some miserable 3rd-world country with an incredibly underdeveloped healthcare system, but the article misses to tell us which country that is... right?
It is one of the greatest features of computers that they work reliably, all the time, with consistent results, regardless of whether I am hitting my keyboard happily or not.
A computer trying to interpret and/or react differently based on how I feel is exactly the opposite of what I would like to have near me.
These "movie ransom" stories are weird - I wonder whether these stories are "based on true events" (of incredibly stupid criminals) or whether they are made up PR-stories from movie studios to draw attention (and maybe also a little compassion).
Of course, even the dumbest studio accountant knows that it does not have any significant impact on his revenue whether unlicensed copies of his movie are "out there" some weeks sooner or later. People will certainly not make a decision for or against watching the movie "unpaid" based on whether that is possible a little sooner or later.
These ransom schemes, if they actually exist, are 100% certain to fail.
before they had an "Internet Connection".
I don't understand why any critical infrastructure (which, like a hospital, should function even in cases of catastrophy or war) connects any vital computer to a public network.
There could have hardly been any more "wrong" hands than those of the NSA, obviously. The "right" hands would have acted in favor of mankind, not like a villain stockpiling doomsday devices in a garden locker for any petty thiev to steal.
You should try listening to (a) an electric car stopping at your neighbour's house and compare it to (b) an electric helicopter landing in your neighbour's garden. There is hell of a lot of difference. Air travel is loud because lots of air needs to be moved at high speed to make something hover, this won't change even if the motor was completely quiet.
Actually, the Itanium architecture was not very different from PA-RISC, it just allowed to issue multiple instructions to parallel execution units without the CPU trying to solve dependency issues between those execution units, leaving that task to the compiler.
I am pretty sure HP would have been better off not forfeiting their PA-RISC architecture to Intel at that time - the PA 8000 CPUs ran circles around the x86 CPU from the same time while using much less transistors.
If everyone who drives a car now goes by some sort of air-traffic, cities will become a nightmare of constant, extreme noise.
Those who dream of flying cars usually dream of only themselves using them while everybody else keeps quiet.
who chose to weaponize security holes rather than having them fixed for some actual security.
think again - because for saving a penny, companies (including those running hospitals) will sacrifice everything.
Just to give you one example from the banking industry: I only recently learned that hundreds of banks allow a 3rd-party vendor of some dubious "sentiment analytics" to inject "widgets" into their banking home page, which they welcome because they are served for free - paid by advertisements the 3rd-party injects alongside their data into those HTML widgets.
Can you believe it? They voluntarily invite the number one vector for trojan software - malvertisement - into their "official" banking home page, just because "it is for free"! And that is the attitude which makes this century a golden age for cybercrime.
and so rather like to go to Israel than to the US ;-)
this invention clearly promises a great path to even more expensive printing.
If I were those researchers, I would have spoken of potential use cases not quite competing with ordinary laser printers.
After all, the rest of the world has plenty of nice, welcoming places to go to, and I'm perfectly fine to restrict business contacts to the the Hysterial States of America to video conferencing.
Whoever wrote that "if there's a business in which there are 35 percent net margins, that would attract a huge amount of new capital" must have never worked for any larger global corporation.
I have been working for parts of such corporations that were sold off because we only had a margin < 50%.
Never underestimate the greed ruling investors.
that would be hard to do without a computer. Now more and more computers become a tool that trades in minimal help on trivial tasks against all your data, freedom and privacy.
Pity the people who fall for such.
Corporations like IBM are not really keen to retain their best employees, they want large amounts of cheap, docile personnel. IBM is not selling lots of stuff because their stuff is great or made by brilliant minds, they sell lots of stuff because masses of mediocre buyers, who are not even skilled enough to determine the quality of the product/service, buy IBM because of their brand name.
There once was a time when corporations had established the network of their dreams in Germany: It was called "BTX", run by the "Bundespost" (later to become Deutsche Telekom). You had to use that one entrypoint to BTX which was connected to your personal data, and every single page you wanted to look at could ask for a price - so even the coarsest of pixel-graphics came at a 10 Deutsche Mark charge and even the most irrelevant information presented came at hilarious page prices.
Of course, it was also important for the corporations to make sure that not just anybody could present data - otherwise, Joe User could have presented information competing with the one already sold by some corporation via BTX.
Guess what, BTX never became very popular, and died off quickly once the World Wide Web became popular.
Corporations are still mad at the freedom and choice available there, so they'll do anything to turn back the wheel of time to the dark age of "BTX".
We are used to see our weekly startup hype, touting miraculous new wonders to attract gullible-investor money.
But M$ really has enough money not to require such cheap scams. Plus they can extort as much money from their office software addicts as they want.
So I think they should really not need to go to such new lows, and leave that to the miracle startups.
They are both thriving on your fear and money while pretending to protect something they are actually the worst enemies of.
... which is very very far from any practically working piece of hardware. At least the text of the university itself clearly states this is a "proposed procect":
"The objective of this research is to explore new classes of compounds that exhibit multifunctional magnetic properties of fundamental importance to high-density storage methods and molecular electronics. The scope of the proposed projects cover a broad range of fundamental topics in chemistry, including organic and inorganic synthesis, structure and bonding, electronic structure, magnetochemistry, photochromism, photophysics, and materials chemistry."
for this brilliant campaign teaching the gullible consumer zombies about the dangers of "always on" listening devices. Would... if only their junk food was palatable.
It is the bloody same to a power plant whether 100W go to John Smith and 900W to Joe User, or whether both of them use 500W.
It is even much cheaper and more accurate to measure the power where a multitude of users are connected.
The only reason for the introduction of "smart meters" has been to collect personal data to sell and to con people into more expenses for their particular pattern of power usage.
The first thing MicroSoft will do when WebAssembly becomes a success will be introducing additional "features"/interfaces in their Windows browser, making sure that their deciples program WebAssembly software that will run well only under Windows. It has always been like that. Doesn't matter whether the abstraction layer is called "WebAssembly" or "POSIX" or "JavaScript".