If it's anything like the awesome revolutionary capabilities of Facetime (which probably has two, maybe three active users), I think I'll skip this version. And the next, and the next...
More bullshit marketing, or they've somehow managed how to fabricate the brain's speech center. Companies have been trying for the better part of 20 years now to make effective speech recognition. That's one step which is still well out of reach, with the best attempts being halting and only somewhat effective.
The same goes for AI. Human-conversant AI has been 'in the works' and '5 years off' for over 30 years, now. It's only marginally more impressive now than it was then, and only (largely) due to the improvements in hardware.
Combining the two to make a 'digital assistant'? Please! It's almost impossible to accurately convey information about a specific to topically trained and scripted human (eg. technical support or billing services with any company) making well over minimum wage. Highly, highly unlikely they'll get close.
If anything, it's the same thing Android, WindowsCE/MinMo, and PCs (not to say Macs) have had for quite some time.
In terms of impact, Ritchie had more direct impact upon the world than Jobs, Shakespeare, Plato, and possibly even Einstein. The work of his mind is in, or directly assists, every household in the world with any sort of modern convenience. He was a modern-day Leonardo.
Most Americans, as opposed to California, has a "fix it if it's broken" mentality. It's not a closed box. Opposed piston designs, like boxer engines, are not well suited for this. Neither are EVs. They have parts that wear out and are either too cost prohibitive to replace, or too difficult (in terms of accessing them to take them out).
Meanwhile, something like a Detroit engine, as we're calling it now, can have the engine pulled and replaced with relatively little effort still, in many vehicles. Plug, wire, etc. maintenance is still easy (except in designs that crowd the engine bay). It's a design that's known to work fairly reliably, and when it doesn't, it can be fixed. Try replacing the engine in something like a Subaru sometime... or even getting at the plugs.
On the other hand, I'd love to see more inline engines. They have a lot of the same benefits.
I think you're giving Jobs too much credit. The Apple II was primarily (I'd say 'exclusively' but my recollection of his autobiography is murky, and Wikipedia disagrees) designed by Steve Wozniak.
What Jobs was was this: he was a shrewd marketer. In the footsteps of Marx and Lenin, he knew how to sell ideas, and that's why Apple gave so many computers to schools in the 1980s and early 90s. Indoctrination goes a long way: the generation which got those free school Apples (and, if like me, remembered them and Oregon Trail quite fondly) is the generation that had the most disposable income when Jobs came back a decade later. Apples have been marketed since as sleek, futuristic, and no-strings-attached computing devices (despite the factuality of the contrary, in many regards).
Was he a visionary? Yes. He was very good and true to his ideas. He was great at marketing, absolutely astounding. But the important things that he pushed weren't created by him. I give him credit for recognizing them, but arguably he encumbered them with more baggage (patent lawsuits, litigation against users, etc) than was good, and things would be drastically different (for the better) had he not gone that route.
Steve really didn't contribute that much to technology.
Marketing, yes. He was a fucking genius when it came to marketing, and entire industries have attempted to emulate the approach since. He did revolutionize how technology marketing is performed, but other than that, I'd be hard pressed to name anything that he was personally driving.
Consumer electronics, maybe. He did push those. He wasn't much of a fan of the functional computer, as we still know it today.
Even the likes of Isaac Newton believed in alchemy.
I'm not saying this isn't crackpot deceptive bullshit, mind you. (I mean, it's an Italian we're talking about here, right?:P) But it shouldn't be ruled out so fast. Fight bad science with science and all that.
I seem to recall seeing this, or a very similar theory, passed around a couple months ago, maybe even posted to slashdot. Wonder if it's the same guy...
As the Earth heats, we can expect to find less arable land.
Oh, really? I just see an assertion here that's contrary to reality in many ways, and thus invalid. You basically seem to be basing your opinion (as many people do) on "deserts are hot!"
So are rain forests. Believe it or not, crops like a lot of heat, which is why the non-arid parts of California tend to have a lot of them and in colder regions, people depend on at least a couple weeks of good heat every summer to make their crops flourish. In the higher latitudes, people will use cold frames and greenhouses to try to get an extra crop out of their gardens: all they do is increase the ambient temperature so plants will continue to grow.
Increased heat causes more rapid evaporation, both from land and sea. This causes rain to fall. It's fairly simple. (Go read a book.) Oddly in contrast to your theory, hot arid deserts are, while fragile, teeming with wildlife. Arctic deserts have somewhat less (though it's still there).
In contrast, the little ice age around 1200AD did the opposite. It got colder. This roughly coincides with when the Black Death came about, the Nordic powers fell into decline, and for several+ hundred years, most of Europe and the East were fairly stagnant.
Now, you may be inadvertently correct in your conclusion, but not because of your premise. We are deforesting land. Population centers are full of (generally useless) people, and there are a lot of them. While Western pollution levels and rates decrease, China is kicking out more than the West ever has (both in China and Africa, where they are now colonizing). These things very likely will result in war.
First, we already have a market framework that works - people don't buy or use the crappiest code when given a choice.
But it doesn't work, because we have a LOT of companies which go around selling shit Indian-developed projects/products. You don't know this until you're balls deep into the product, of course, because everything from pre-sales to final implementation and maintenance is highly controlled by marketing bullshit. The 'developers' are gone, but the product remains and needs support. It becomes a massive money sink and a few select 'vendors' become massively rich. There are entire companies of just sales and marketing people who do this, taking advantage of smaller (and often larger) organizations who don't know better.
Sometimes, they don't know any better themselves. But that's rare. I'm sure that in most cases, they know they're fucking the customers, because they're able to sell the company and/or retire in a couple years...
How did this get a FP post? Does the iiotic poster and, apparently, the 'editor', doesn't realize that Meego, Moblin, Android, et al. are all cut from the same cloth?
I would not be surprised if these low-end phones ran some version of something like a stripped Opie or something based on minimalised QT libraries/UI. With 200Mhz for a low-end smartphone would be enough to make this work, and potentially much more featureful than existing crap phones. We were running more, back in the day, on 200Mhz/32Mb RAM/32Mb ROM PDAs, after all...
Madison is fucking mild. Berkeley is like watching Across the Universe... during a bad acid trip. You've got hippies in trees singing the death of America while flags burn nearby... literally.
As a sysadmin dealing with these so-called 'agile' developers, I'd mod you through the fucking sky, if I could.
You describe it as it is. They write what I would call "quick one-off shit scripts/programs" and call it production quality code. Sure, it gets a 'finished product' done quickly, but it sure as hell won't be fun for the people who get hired on months later to fix it.
People need to realize that custom applications take a long damn time to develop properly. Maintaining custom software is expensive largely due to the time involved to do it right. As in most things in lunch, there is no such thing as 'a free lunch'.
Sorry, that's just a bit of bullshit. In today's IT organizations, a sysadmin can't be a curdmungeonly small-minded person. He's got to accept and embrace newer technologies for the specific purposes of reducing the amount of work he has to do.
If the sysadmins are resisting, it's because it means it's more work, or they're simply not up to the task of newer things. The distinction may be hard to understand by someone who doesn't do sysadmin work. Often, changing to a new approach means they won't be able to get the things done they know they need to get done in a timely fashion if they comply with some policy pushed down from above.
Having just looked up what this DevOps cult is, it's largely just good principle, from a systems perspective. Often, however, those things aren't possible in an environment without significant ground-up rebuilds of not only the systems but the networks. Virtual infrastructure requires storage and concentration of machines into fewer hosts. This means network ops needs to be involved. (They're even more stick-in-the-mud and difficult to work with than sysadmins, IME.)
I came into a position a while back where my predecessor had run everything ass-backwards. He'd roll out a 'standard' FreeBSD install he built onto all the hardware which consisted of software he'd compiled years prior. He ran SSH on non-standard ports. He didn't believe in DNS (or hardware RAID, for that matter, believing in the obscurity of geom). For just a couple racks of equipment (two) there were over 15 VLANs. He didn't label anything, and documentation was worse.
When I started, the software he was installing on new hardware was over 3 years old. Some of it had vulnerabilities. But it mostly had no public face, and when it did, it was obscure (eg. SSH on a non-standard port) or it was facing something that wasn't of much of a threat (eg. LAN workstations). SSH never got exploited (that I could tell), and password cracking attempts against the machines were very rare.
Furthermore, this guy was seen as somewhat of a messiah because he could do "hard things quickly". Sure, it's impressive to do a build ina couple minutes, I suppose. But it was obscure due to being cloistered knowledge. It gave him a hell of a lot of job security, too.
The proper tool for this job is a 12 gauge shotgun. It's cheaper per destructive unit vs. a.308 cartridge, and your cost is about $1 a drive - maybe a little more, if you're a bad shot.
What I've done is keep them on a RAID array, and back them up to external media routinely. This has worked well for 7+ years, so far.
However, the better pictures often just 'disappear' in the gigs of files. Knowing which is which is not always so clear. What I plan to do is go through at some point and have the better ones printed out for safe-keeping in a physical photo album (like my parents did, and their parents). This does not really address the 'video' situation, however. We mostly just keep those on the original DV tapes, or encoded on the same system the holds the photos.
Professionally, I'm faced with the same problem, and have seen people implement the solution in a similar fashion: lots and lots of storage with backups to secondary storage.
Concur. As a storage guy, I would absolutely love to have one of these. I'm sure they're going to be pushing ZFS at this thing, hard. It's (almost) purpose-built. Nothing else can even come close to touching it.
I used to buy a new computer every 2-3 years from NewEgg. I would buy and build a dozen systems, in components, for small offices that needed them.
Now, I still do that, to some degree. I'll by the odd component (RAM, video card) - that market isn't going to disappear outright, overnight. I'll also buy set-top boxes through them.
However, I also buy a great deal of server hardware from them, now (Supermicro). The profit margin on that stuff is a lot higher, and I'm buying thousands of dollars more of it than I bought other things. And they're starting to sell a lot more than just computer parts.
I'm not the exception. They're not going away anytime soon.
All this will do, long term, is concentrate power. Despite what people tell you, there are very, very few truly "exceptional" people. Those at the top will mostly get there (and stay there) through cronyism and nepotism and, later, most likely solely through nepotism. The people at the top will be those who control the design, production, and utilization of these technologies. In the
In the short term, we will have a lot of people out of jobs. Jobs will get sent overseas, until that becomes not profitable enough. They'll be shipped elsewhere, and then elsewhere again. Then, machines will do it as world economies equalize and a dollar is a yuan is a euro, and there are no more capable, trainable populaces. The poor regions of the world will get poorer and the average regions of the world will as well. The rich nations will highly polarize, and the only significant portion of the populace actually still working - and working their asses off - will be those who know, or are sufficiently able to convince their 'superiors' that they know - how to maintain these systems.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's anything like the awesome revolutionary capabilities of Facetime (which probably has two, maybe three active users), I think I'll skip this version. And the next, and the next...
More bullshit marketing, or they've somehow managed how to fabricate the brain's speech center. Companies have been trying for the better part of 20 years now to make effective speech recognition. That's one step which is still well out of reach, with the best attempts being halting and only somewhat effective.
The same goes for AI. Human-conversant AI has been 'in the works' and '5 years off' for over 30 years, now. It's only marginally more impressive now than it was then, and only (largely) due to the improvements in hardware.
Combining the two to make a 'digital assistant'? Please! It's almost impossible to accurately convey information about a specific to topically trained and scripted human (eg. technical support or billing services with any company) making well over minimum wage. Highly, highly unlikely they'll get close.
If anything, it's the same thing Android, WindowsCE/MinMo, and PCs (not to say Macs) have had for quite some time.
In terms of impact, Ritchie had more direct impact upon the world than Jobs, Shakespeare, Plato, and possibly even Einstein. The work of his mind is in, or directly assists, every household in the world with any sort of modern convenience. He was a modern-day Leonardo.
And I don't even like programming.
It has nothing to do with NIH.
Most Americans, as opposed to California, has a "fix it if it's broken" mentality. It's not a closed box. Opposed piston designs, like boxer engines, are not well suited for this. Neither are EVs. They have parts that wear out and are either too cost prohibitive to replace, or too difficult (in terms of accessing them to take them out).
Meanwhile, something like a Detroit engine, as we're calling it now, can have the engine pulled and replaced with relatively little effort still, in many vehicles. Plug, wire, etc. maintenance is still easy (except in designs that crowd the engine bay). It's a design that's known to work fairly reliably, and when it doesn't, it can be fixed. Try replacing the engine in something like a Subaru sometime... or even getting at the plugs.
On the other hand, I'd love to see more inline engines. They have a lot of the same benefits.
I think you're giving Jobs too much credit. The Apple II was primarily (I'd say 'exclusively' but my recollection of his autobiography is murky, and Wikipedia disagrees) designed by Steve Wozniak.
What Jobs was was this: he was a shrewd marketer. In the footsteps of Marx and Lenin, he knew how to sell ideas, and that's why Apple gave so many computers to schools in the 1980s and early 90s. Indoctrination goes a long way: the generation which got those free school Apples (and, if like me, remembered them and Oregon Trail quite fondly) is the generation that had the most disposable income when Jobs came back a decade later. Apples have been marketed since as sleek, futuristic, and no-strings-attached computing devices (despite the factuality of the contrary, in many regards).
Was he a visionary? Yes. He was very good and true to his ideas. He was great at marketing, absolutely astounding. But the important things that he pushed weren't created by him. I give him credit for recognizing them, but arguably he encumbered them with more baggage (patent lawsuits, litigation against users, etc) than was good, and things would be drastically different (for the better) had he not gone that route.
So I guess he doesn't want them to replace his batteries this time around. Sad.
Steve really didn't contribute that much to technology.
Marketing, yes. He was a fucking genius when it came to marketing, and entire industries have attempted to emulate the approach since. He did revolutionize how technology marketing is performed, but other than that, I'd be hard pressed to name anything that he was personally driving.
Consumer electronics, maybe. He did push those. He wasn't much of a fan of the functional computer, as we still know it today.
Even the likes of Isaac Newton believed in alchemy.
I'm not saying this isn't crackpot deceptive bullshit, mind you. (I mean, it's an Italian we're talking about here, right? :P) But it shouldn't be ruled out so fast. Fight bad science with science and all that.
I seem to recall seeing this, or a very similar theory, passed around a couple months ago, maybe even posted to slashdot. Wonder if it's the same guy...
As the Earth heats, we can expect to find less arable land.
Oh, really? I just see an assertion here that's contrary to reality in many ways, and thus invalid. You basically seem to be basing your opinion (as many people do) on "deserts are hot!"
So are rain forests. Believe it or not, crops like a lot of heat, which is why the non-arid parts of California tend to have a lot of them and in colder regions, people depend on at least a couple weeks of good heat every summer to make their crops flourish. In the higher latitudes, people will use cold frames and greenhouses to try to get an extra crop out of their gardens: all they do is increase the ambient temperature so plants will continue to grow.
Increased heat causes more rapid evaporation, both from land and sea. This causes rain to fall. It's fairly simple. (Go read a book.) Oddly in contrast to your theory, hot arid deserts are, while fragile, teeming with wildlife. Arctic deserts have somewhat less (though it's still there).
In contrast, the little ice age around 1200AD did the opposite. It got colder. This roughly coincides with when the Black Death came about, the Nordic powers fell into decline, and for several+ hundred years, most of Europe and the East were fairly stagnant.
Now, you may be inadvertently correct in your conclusion, but not because of your premise. We are deforesting land. Population centers are full of (generally useless) people, and there are a lot of them. While Western pollution levels and rates decrease, China is kicking out more than the West ever has (both in China and Africa, where they are now colonizing). These things very likely will result in war.
Nigh. Fucking nigh. Night is when it's dark.
First, we already have a market framework that works - people don't buy or use the crappiest code when given a choice.
But it doesn't work, because we have a LOT of companies which go around selling shit Indian-developed projects/products. You don't know this until you're balls deep into the product, of course, because everything from pre-sales to final implementation and maintenance is highly controlled by marketing bullshit. The 'developers' are gone, but the product remains and needs support. It becomes a massive money sink and a few select 'vendors' become massively rich. There are entire companies of just sales and marketing people who do this, taking advantage of smaller (and often larger) organizations who don't know better.
Sometimes, they don't know any better themselves. But that's rare. I'm sure that in most cases, they know they're fucking the customers, because they're able to sell the company and/or retire in a couple years...
The first thing they'd need to put on the menu was colonic cleansing drinks and shakes with wheatgrass. It's the perfect demographic.
How did this get a FP post? Does the iiotic poster and, apparently, the 'editor', doesn't realize that Meego, Moblin, Android, et al. are all cut from the same cloth?
I would not be surprised if these low-end phones ran some version of something like a stripped Opie or something based on minimalised QT libraries/UI. With 200Mhz for a low-end smartphone would be enough to make this work, and potentially much more featureful than existing crap phones. We were running more, back in the day, on 200Mhz/32Mb RAM/32Mb ROM PDAs, after all...
Have you been to Berkeley in the past decade?
Madison is fucking mild. Berkeley is like watching Across the Universe... during a bad acid trip. You've got hippies in trees singing the death of America while flags burn nearby... literally.
As a sysadmin dealing with these so-called 'agile' developers, I'd mod you through the fucking sky, if I could.
You describe it as it is. They write what I would call "quick one-off shit scripts/programs" and call it production quality code. Sure, it gets a 'finished product' done quickly, but it sure as hell won't be fun for the people who get hired on months later to fix it.
People need to realize that custom applications take a long damn time to develop properly. Maintaining custom software is expensive largely due to the time involved to do it right. As in most things in lunch, there is no such thing as 'a free lunch'.
Sorry, that's just a bit of bullshit. In today's IT organizations, a sysadmin can't be a curdmungeonly small-minded person. He's got to accept and embrace newer technologies for the specific purposes of reducing the amount of work he has to do.
If the sysadmins are resisting, it's because it means it's more work, or they're simply not up to the task of newer things. The distinction may be hard to understand by someone who doesn't do sysadmin work. Often, changing to a new approach means they won't be able to get the things done they know they need to get done in a timely fashion if they comply with some policy pushed down from above.
Having just looked up what this DevOps cult is, it's largely just good principle, from a systems perspective. Often, however, those things aren't possible in an environment without significant ground-up rebuilds of not only the systems but the networks. Virtual infrastructure requires storage and concentration of machines into fewer hosts. This means network ops needs to be involved. (They're even more stick-in-the-mud and difficult to work with than sysadmins, IME.)
I came into a position a while back where my predecessor had run everything ass-backwards. He'd roll out a 'standard' FreeBSD install he built onto all the hardware which consisted of software he'd compiled years prior. He ran SSH on non-standard ports. He didn't believe in DNS (or hardware RAID, for that matter, believing in the obscurity of geom). For just a couple racks of equipment (two) there were over 15 VLANs. He didn't label anything, and documentation was worse.
When I started, the software he was installing on new hardware was over 3 years old. Some of it had vulnerabilities. But it mostly had no public face, and when it did, it was obscure (eg. SSH on a non-standard port) or it was facing something that wasn't of much of a threat (eg. LAN workstations). SSH never got exploited (that I could tell), and password cracking attempts against the machines were very rare.
Furthermore, this guy was seen as somewhat of a messiah because he could do "hard things quickly". Sure, it's impressive to do a build ina couple minutes, I suppose. But it was obscure due to being cloistered knowledge. It gave him a hell of a lot of job security, too.
They shelved it, did they? Why would they do that?
Government would pay good money for it, as would many larger corporations (for internal use, of course).
The proper tool for this job is a 12 gauge shotgun. It's cheaper per destructive unit vs. a .308 cartridge, and your cost is about $1 a drive - maybe a little more, if you're a bad shot.
"For everything else, there are poorly paid, incompetent Indian programmers"? Because that's what it comes down to.
What I've done is keep them on a RAID array, and back them up to external media routinely. This has worked well for 7+ years, so far.
However, the better pictures often just 'disappear' in the gigs of files. Knowing which is which is not always so clear. What I plan to do is go through at some point and have the better ones printed out for safe-keeping in a physical photo album (like my parents did, and their parents). This does not really address the 'video' situation, however. We mostly just keep those on the original DV tapes, or encoded on the same system the holds the photos.
Professionally, I'm faced with the same problem, and have seen people implement the solution in a similar fashion: lots and lots of storage with backups to secondary storage.
fsck on a ZFS datastore? Maybe I misunderstood; as far as I know, that's (still) not possible.
When did you have these 100TB stores? That's still "a lot" of storage by modern standards, to some degree.
Concur. As a storage guy, I would absolutely love to have one of these. I'm sure they're going to be pushing ZFS at this thing, hard. It's (almost) purpose-built. Nothing else can even come close to touching it.
I used to buy a new computer every 2-3 years from NewEgg. I would buy and build a dozen systems, in components, for small offices that needed them.
Now, I still do that, to some degree. I'll by the odd component (RAM, video card) - that market isn't going to disappear outright, overnight. I'll also buy set-top boxes through them.
However, I also buy a great deal of server hardware from them, now (Supermicro). The profit margin on that stuff is a lot higher, and I'm buying thousands of dollars more of it than I bought other things. And they're starting to sell a lot more than just computer parts.
I'm not the exception. They're not going away anytime soon.
"Normal" (eg. 2Gb) encodes of DVDs using fairly standard handbrake x264 settings have problems. Blueray, even worse.
All this will do, long term, is concentrate power. Despite what people tell you, there are very, very few truly "exceptional" people. Those at the top will mostly get there (and stay there) through cronyism and nepotism and, later, most likely solely through nepotism. The people at the top will be those who control the design, production, and utilization of these technologies. In the
In the short term, we will have a lot of people out of jobs. Jobs will get sent overseas, until that becomes not profitable enough. They'll be shipped elsewhere, and then elsewhere again. Then, machines will do it as world economies equalize and a dollar is a yuan is a euro, and there are no more capable, trainable populaces. The poor regions of the world will get poorer and the average regions of the world will as well. The rich nations will highly polarize, and the only significant portion of the populace actually still working - and working their asses off - will be those who know, or are sufficiently able to convince their 'superiors' that they know - how to maintain these systems.