exactly. One should not have to log in to read the content. Already now, when getting promotional emails from twitter about new tweets, the email refers to twitter links which require login even so the tweets are public.
These breaches illustrate is what is possible today. Personal information is still relatively harmless and could in principle be collected by anybody from publicly available information. Imagine forced backdoor technology (as proposed again and again both from democrat and republican politicians) is implemented: then also bank, tax, health or business information of a larger population can be collected and be made available on a large scale. If FBI affiliated sites can not keep their data safe, what guarantees that backdoor information will be kept away from the wrong hands, once such technology is implemented.
it is nice to see that machine back on and working. I would have liked a bit more background, what actually has changed during the upgrade. It seems that this contained only in a ``premium article" in the new scientist. Fortunately there are other sources where on can look things up: 40 percent more sensitive machine leading to twice the volume of space to be observable. Some main mirrors were replaced, the laser power increased and a technique called ``squeezing" introduced which counteracts the now stronger distortion of the beam. Also new is that detections of events are publicly announced as soon as they are available. Here is the source: https://news.stanford.edu/2019...
Of course, science journals need some revenue and one can understand if they don't just want to open things up for free. But the prizes are just ridiculous. See https://www.elsevier.com/about...
Every issue a few hundred dollars. This is similarly insane with textbook prizes. It is hard to understand for journal prizes because almost all content is written by authors who are not payed (in some cases even have to pay to be published) and where also the referees are not payed. Having reliable journals with a rigorous review process is however extremely important. The predatory open access models are not a solution. The best solution would probably be if reputable organizations like AMS, APS, ACS or ASCB would get some funds to publish more open access content and have these available through major libraries. scientific publication is too important to be left to profit driven forces only.
one can also delete tweets. This is not an issue. With respect to accountability. Tweets of relevant politicians are anyway backed up by activists) and even if the tweets should disappear, somebody has a copy. Having politicians twitter is not a bad thing. It often reveals what they really think, often unfiltered, not run through a PR machine. That might change in the future and twitter might be run more and more by PR agencies promoting a person. Given the users more rights is good. What would be a problem is a feature where one could change a tweet later or change the time stamp of a tweet.
I vastly prefer advertisement over subscription. A subscription service is an eldorado for data collectors. (I avoid add blocks because somehow, we need to pay for the content). It is today technically quite easy to fend off the data collectors on websites (if not subscribing) and avoid getting profiled and getting targeted by personized adds but in a subscription this is impossible. I personally would not like that a service keeps track of what, when and from where I read it in which order. If one wants to get away from advertisement, there should be a micro-payment mechanism which allows to do that without having your reading habits ending up in a data base and in a few years sold or worse, just made available (data breaches can happen anytime). It is a good assumption that whatever reading data I produce somewhere as a user of a subscription service will be publicly available sometimes, somewhere or sold. If some subscription service can do that and assure that no personal information is collected, we can talk. There was something nice about good old newspapers and journals as there is something nice about cash: it is not the case that a few data collectors constantly watch the reader over the shoulders or keep track about what you buy. We only start to wake up. The recent data scandals with websites or apps which have been discovered to collect personal information and sellling them without consent were just the tip of the iceberg.
e-voting will almost certainly remain impossible to
implement in a way that it is secure, autitable and
trusted by the population.The last point is the most important one so that democracy works. Security through obscurity does not help. But even if there should be a secure, and auditable and intelligable system, how can one be sure as a voter that this system is really used in the end. How can one audit, whether the data are not tempered with, independent of that secure system? Again, even if there is an audit trail, how can make sure that it so simple that can be understood. There appears currently only one way to make sure that voting is secure and this is to have a paper trail which can be audited by many, also by non-experts and which is more difficult to temper with just because of the physical presence of the paper.
When this passes, there will be many in that state who feel:
"Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."
Seriously, how can this be enforced? You would have to
leave the state to buy a phone? And how much more expensive would the modified devices become, running a government mandated filter. How much safer would these devices become? Would anybody really selling phones in Kanas any more?
Some politicians live in a dream world. "Somewhere over the rainbow. Bluebirds fly. And the dreams that you dare to. Oh why, oh why can't I?"
Yes, one can question physical textbooks. I avoid them also as much as possible but
there are still various issues with electronic texts:
1. Loss of control:
Even with free versions of books or videos or resources, they can disappear at any moment.
How many electronic resources which were available 20 years ago are available still now? I
myself have the habit of keeping copies of everything I see electronically which I like because it can
be pulled at any moment. Books don't just disappear. You can still read them in 50 years if they are
converted first into a industry independent format.
2. Long term backup:
Having a private library however requires to have a good backup system, decentralized because
one can not trust any service in the long run. I'm old enough to have seen many things come and go,
terms of services change and it is only 25 years now, that we teach and distribute online (i had my
first course websites for classes in 1994 and still have all these resources online, but how many
things from 25 years ago are still there? The biggest shock for me was the pull of google video
to youtube. It can well be that in 10 years, youtube is sold to an other company, or only available
behind a paywall. Services like Kahn academy etc, we will have to see how long they are still free.
3. Privacy:
Even in the ``free textbook movement", one has started to look for ways to mine the information
like tracking students readings. Like in e-books, the information what a reader reads, how fast
and possibly annotates is used or sold. I personally do try to avoid such resources, because
it is as if somebody constantly looks you over the shoulder. How long did I read what? What do I read?
When do I read? Where do I read? This information is all given away for free to the reader.
I know that even well intended projects for free textbooks start having students to register (yes
it is free), but all this information is kept somewhere and evaluated. Who is naive enough to believe
that this information stays confined. We have seen massive data breaches recently.
This by the way is the same also for online newspapers. I have concerns with being tracked all the time
telling an anonymous entity what articles I read when and how and from where.
4. Screen and write technology:
Electronic reading has become better with the emergence of tablets and good computer screens.
It is still not there. Annotation with pen still beats annotation by electronic pens which can
be sluggish and depends on industry controlled technology which changes still frequently.
We will eventually get there, once the screen technology has the resolution, speed and comfort
of paper. It is a matter of time only but it is not there.
The tablets of today also run on operating systems where one has lost control.
Even well intended systems start to bug you to log in. Sorry. I keep all my library in a gold old
fashioned directory tree which I'm sure I can read also in 10 years, which I can print out if
needed and annotate with an old fashioned pen if needed.
5. Proprietary formats:
One of the biggest problems with electronic reading is proprietary formats. I don't know how many
different reading systems (apps) i have tried and which were abandoned or then bought by a big
company which then only allows to use the service while registered. The best systems for writing
on a tablet or screen are all proprietary and could disappear any moment. It is essential for
example to have wrist protection technology when writing and drawing on a tablet. The pens have
become great already, but the apps continue to disappear and appear. There were apps I liked which
do not exist any more. Come on. If I write something, I need it to be available not only the 3 years
of the life span of the app, I need to be able to read and modify it in 20 years. I have still documents
written in software written by companies which disappeared or were bought by others. If the document was
exported as a PDF and put on my own machine, yes, I can still read it. Other things have disappeared
once one does not pay any more for the service.
it is ``planning on ales growth" which is unsustainable. Nothing can grow exponentially in the long term. Once the market is saturated there will be overall sales decay, inevitably, until a new big revolution comes in. We have been spoiled with progress and innovation for the last two decades. So, the improvements feel less impressive. Consolidation has something good: we don't need to buy new phones every year, the devices have become pretty reliable. I'm also still amazed and pleased how good the cameras in the phones have become (this was still one of the main reasons for me to upgrade to a newer phone).
Cool. 300 watts. Huge heat blower in the back. You can even dry your hair with it or blow away fellow coffee shop guys yacking on the phone opposite to you. Nice is the small form factor graphics cards. Maybe that technology will also transfer to desktops.
maybe that UI designers come from the gaming industry. They design puzzles. Once one get used to things, hide the toolbar, hide the scrolling bars, hide and seek is the new trend. That is what games are for: find the treasure! Find the current URL, fine the place to print, jackpot. Even when reading stories, the pictures have to appear dynamically, nonlinear story telling makes even reading a text feel like running through a maze. Maybe one has to swipe left, maybe down, maybe click. Just add a few adds, which attack from random sides and we are in a full blown computer game. Sometimes, one really misses the simplicity of the 90ies.
the demo of the flexible phone looked more like two phones stuck together. The presentation could not hide that the thickness of the foldable object was essentially the thickness of two phones. It would make much more sense to have the operating system be able to connect and combine two phones which are stuck together with magnetic frames. If there is no bezel, then one could even put together a couple of phones to temporarily build a larger reading or writing platform. For desktop monitors, multiple monitor support is standard, building that for phones should not be impossible. Two ``friendly phones" stuck together would just become one.
not all times are times of opportunities. This is also not different in sciences or art. after relativity was formulated, a time of consolidation and application followed, the same with many other theories. Our modern time just made us extremely impatient. In all areas, science, art or technology. Look back 20 years and see what happened since. It is enormous. A major breakthrough had been the new smart phone interface paradigms and it was immediately adapted by others. The technology improvement since was incremental which makes it look less dramatic but still milestones. This is similar in physics. Yes, there had not been a major successful revolution for a while similar than general relativity but the progress has been incremental and enormous, we can measure gravitational waves from distant parts of the universe for example.
It is human to put achievements down: "Oh, Einstein had been a great inventor when young, later he was not making any progress any more, he was a thud!" Similarly with the title of this slashdot article. One really likes to put achievements down. It makes us (who did not create anything big) feel so much better!
There is an other aspect: Apple had to learn the hard way that there is also an art in making innovation to a business success. Your great idea is sometimes immediately (within weeks or months copied almost verbatim: computer or smart phone interfaces for example) or then does not make any impact as it is too far ahead (like the Newton, LISA or NeXT). I have had a NeXT workstation during my school time and it had been a fantastic thing, innovative in many parts, but it did not make money. It was too far ahead.
Yes, sometimes you have to build houses, but there are also times, when you have to be a landlord and get the money to feed the folks who built the house!
There will be times again for groundbreaking innovations. If we look at the history of technology, sciences or art, major shifts do not happen very often. But this makes them even greater and we should appreciate them more.
things used to be much more open and innocent. it was possible to talk to any user via "talk" (a unix program) that had been installed by default on any work station. You could telnet into any other workstation (and even printers) and run jobs or have the computer talk like
echo "You work too hard today"|festival --tts;
fortune|festival --tts
Things are less innocent today. I guess, technology has just grown up and things which were funny are no more funny. Part of the humor was also surprise like "I did not know that one can do that" and the target of the joke was known to appreciate it. Very few today would think the BOFH is funny (it contains a few pranks). It used to be different as there were times, when using a computer would already mean by definition that a user had basic sysadmin skills (like being able uuencode an attachment and submit without an attachment protocol) or even developer skills (as it required to write a program like a printer driver if it did not exist). There was a good chance that if somebody had access to mail or a workstation , the person was appreciative for a joke or prank. Today, that slice has become thinner as the technology is used by everybody.
if the scenario described in the article happens and only one tape player will survive and prizes will go up, this will accelerate the death of tape storage. It seems that currently tape is still 2-3 times cheaper. It seems only a matter of time until tape will no more be competitive. There is still the legacy issue. Also, tape seems to last 30-50 years. It will be interesting to see whether a hard drive from today will still start up in 30 years. Officially, one estimates 10 years (but I guess it is more as I have been able to boot up drives older than 10 years). It will be important in the future to have cheap long term storage which lasts.
the problem of excel is that data and code are mixed. This makes it extremely difficult to audit and verify. One knows that there are many errors in spreadsheets just because of that. This is long documented and has appeared in slashdot discussions since at least a decade. Some good comments from that time (how I miss the user base of slashdot from 14 years ago!)
https://slashdot.org/comments....https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
I have seen such errors myself. The advantage of having the data separate is that one can run the data analysis with different programming languages. This allows to proofread the data base and proofread the code (run the code on different data for example first). This is especially important if the spreadsheet has been written by somebody else. In that case, the best advise is indeed to run away (as it is almost impossible to figure out what nonsense has been programmed into it). If an audit needs to be done, it is best to extract the data and write a program using a decent programming language, better with two. Here are just some data:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/... : 20 percent of corporate spreadsheets have material errors.
More recent:
https://www.onmsft.com/news/20...
having a smart watch since about a year, there some things besides the time which are really nice and I use regularly
- map while running
- two factor authentication
- stopwatch
- check on email
- weather
- alarm
There is room for improvement. like the annoying
bugging if the phone is not nearby (like when running). One should be able to download and keep certain frequently used map areas for example.
> We no longer have a usable desktop operating system!
This might be your opinion. I think the facts are that there had been never so much choice of great desktop operating systems, both commercial and free. You must be doing something very wrong or something very esoteric. But I would agree when saying "We no longer have a usable desktop operating system made by microsoft".
> Linux as a desktop operating system has gotten worse every year, not better.
Not my experience. The reason you give is actually a plus. We don't need a mono culture. In my experience, things have never been so stable. The time of system administration has become minimal. Competition between different distributions is good and healthy.
> Linux has VERY poor documentation
What are you talking about? It is in most cases easy to find good advise. Fortunately, it is almost no more necessary to have documentation because things just work.
I don't care so much about minimal CPU improvements.
What would be much more important in a time of video
editing, large music and book collections etc that we finally have mac books with 1TB drives! We have freeking memory cards with 512 Gig. What is the holdup?
Somebody watched too much Serenity (movie from 2005), where reactions of River are triggered by TV messages https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0...
It is insane what some consider now patentable.
The new book is by Hugh Newman and Robin Heath. Heath is a teacher of astrology. There is a difference between using the Pythagoras
theorem in examples or realizing that there is a theorem. This difference is often confused. The Babylonians also used the theorem in examples. I have not read the book, nor seen any new evidence in the articles about the appearance of the book. There is a book already out since 2013 Duncan Lunan called Megalith. Lunan already mentioned the use of Pythagoras in his book. I would like to see what is the new evidence coming forward in the new book.
Slashdot Mirror
exactly. One should not have to log in to read the content. Already now, when getting promotional emails from twitter about new tweets, the email refers to twitter links which require login even so the tweets are public.
... but what if he lands on the other side of the disk?
These breaches illustrate is what is possible today. Personal information is still relatively harmless and could in principle be collected by anybody from publicly available information. Imagine forced backdoor technology (as proposed again and again both from democrat and republican politicians) is implemented: then also bank, tax, health or business information of a larger population can be collected and be made available on a large scale. If FBI affiliated sites can not keep their data safe, what guarantees that backdoor information will be kept away from the wrong hands, once such technology is implemented.
it is nice to see that machine back on and working. I would have liked a bit more background, what actually has changed during the upgrade. It seems that this contained only in a ``premium article" in the new scientist. Fortunately there are other sources where on can look things up: 40 percent more sensitive machine leading to twice the volume of space to be observable. Some main mirrors were replaced, the laser power increased and a technique called ``squeezing" introduced which counteracts the now stronger distortion of the beam. Also new is that detections of events are publicly announced as soon as they are available. Here is the source: https://news.stanford.edu/2019...
Of course, science journals need some revenue and one can understand if they don't just want to open things up for free. But the prizes are just ridiculous. See https://www.elsevier.com/about... Every issue a few hundred dollars. This is similarly insane with textbook prizes. It is hard to understand for journal prizes because almost all content is written by authors who are not payed (in some cases even have to pay to be published) and where also the referees are not payed. Having reliable journals with a rigorous review process is however extremely important. The predatory open access models are not a solution. The best solution would probably be if reputable organizations like AMS, APS, ACS or ASCB would get some funds to publish more open access content and have these available through major libraries. scientific publication is too important to be left to profit driven forces only.
one can also delete tweets. This is not an issue. With respect to accountability. Tweets of relevant politicians are anyway backed up by activists) and even if the tweets should disappear, somebody has a copy. Having politicians twitter is not a bad thing. It often reveals what they really think, often unfiltered, not run through a PR machine. That might change in the future and twitter might be run more and more by PR agencies promoting a person. Given the users more rights is good. What would be a problem is a feature where one could change a tweet later or change the time stamp of a tweet.
I vastly prefer advertisement over subscription. A subscription service is an eldorado for data collectors. (I avoid add blocks because somehow, we need to pay for the content). It is today technically quite easy to fend off the data collectors on websites (if not subscribing) and avoid getting profiled and getting targeted by personized adds but in a subscription this is impossible. I personally would not like that a service keeps track of what, when and from where I read it in which order. If one wants to get away from advertisement, there should be a micro-payment mechanism which allows to do that without having your reading habits ending up in a data base and in a few years sold or worse, just made available (data breaches can happen anytime). It is a good assumption that whatever reading data I produce somewhere as a user of a subscription service will be publicly available sometimes, somewhere or sold. If some subscription service can do that and assure that no personal information is collected, we can talk. There was something nice about good old newspapers and journals as there is something nice about cash: it is not the case that a few data collectors constantly watch the reader over the shoulders or keep track about what you buy. We only start to wake up. The recent data scandals with websites or apps which have been discovered to collect personal information and sellling them without consent were just the tip of the iceberg.
e-voting will almost certainly remain impossible to implement in a way that it is secure, autitable and trusted by the population.The last point is the most important one so that democracy works. Security through obscurity does not help. But even if there should be a secure, and auditable and intelligable system, how can one be sure as a voter that this system is really used in the end. How can one audit, whether the data are not tempered with, independent of that secure system? Again, even if there is an audit trail, how can make sure that it so simple that can be understood. There appears currently only one way to make sure that voting is secure and this is to have a paper trail which can be audited by many, also by non-experts and which is more difficult to temper with just because of the physical presence of the paper.
When this passes, there will be many in that state who feel: "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." Seriously, how can this be enforced? You would have to leave the state to buy a phone? And how much more expensive would the modified devices become, running a government mandated filter. How much safer would these devices become? Would anybody really selling phones in Kanas any more? Some politicians live in a dream world. "Somewhere over the rainbow. Bluebirds fly. And the dreams that you dare to. Oh why, oh why can't I?"
Yes, one can question physical textbooks. I avoid them also as much as possible but there are still various issues with electronic texts: 1. Loss of control: Even with free versions of books or videos or resources, they can disappear at any moment. How many electronic resources which were available 20 years ago are available still now? I myself have the habit of keeping copies of everything I see electronically which I like because it can be pulled at any moment. Books don't just disappear. You can still read them in 50 years if they are converted first into a industry independent format. 2. Long term backup: Having a private library however requires to have a good backup system, decentralized because one can not trust any service in the long run. I'm old enough to have seen many things come and go, terms of services change and it is only 25 years now, that we teach and distribute online (i had my first course websites for classes in 1994 and still have all these resources online, but how many things from 25 years ago are still there? The biggest shock for me was the pull of google video to youtube. It can well be that in 10 years, youtube is sold to an other company, or only available behind a paywall. Services like Kahn academy etc, we will have to see how long they are still free. 3. Privacy: Even in the ``free textbook movement", one has started to look for ways to mine the information like tracking students readings. Like in e-books, the information what a reader reads, how fast and possibly annotates is used or sold. I personally do try to avoid such resources, because it is as if somebody constantly looks you over the shoulder. How long did I read what? What do I read? When do I read? Where do I read? This information is all given away for free to the reader. I know that even well intended projects for free textbooks start having students to register (yes it is free), but all this information is kept somewhere and evaluated. Who is naive enough to believe that this information stays confined. We have seen massive data breaches recently. This by the way is the same also for online newspapers. I have concerns with being tracked all the time telling an anonymous entity what articles I read when and how and from where. 4. Screen and write technology: Electronic reading has become better with the emergence of tablets and good computer screens. It is still not there. Annotation with pen still beats annotation by electronic pens which can be sluggish and depends on industry controlled technology which changes still frequently. We will eventually get there, once the screen technology has the resolution, speed and comfort of paper. It is a matter of time only but it is not there. The tablets of today also run on operating systems where one has lost control. Even well intended systems start to bug you to log in. Sorry. I keep all my library in a gold old fashioned directory tree which I'm sure I can read also in 10 years, which I can print out if needed and annotate with an old fashioned pen if needed. 5. Proprietary formats: One of the biggest problems with electronic reading is proprietary formats. I don't know how many different reading systems (apps) i have tried and which were abandoned or then bought by a big company which then only allows to use the service while registered. The best systems for writing on a tablet or screen are all proprietary and could disappear any moment. It is essential for example to have wrist protection technology when writing and drawing on a tablet. The pens have become great already, but the apps continue to disappear and appear. There were apps I liked which do not exist any more. Come on. If I write something, I need it to be available not only the 3 years of the life span of the app, I need to be able to read and modify it in 20 years. I have still documents written in software written by companies which disappeared or were bought by others. If the document was exported as a PDF and put on my own machine, yes, I can still read it. Other things have disappeared once one does not pay any more for the service.
it is ``planning on ales growth" which is unsustainable. Nothing can grow exponentially in the long term. Once the market is saturated there will be overall sales decay, inevitably, until a new big revolution comes in. We have been spoiled with progress and innovation for the last two decades. So, the improvements feel less impressive. Consolidation has something good: we don't need to buy new phones every year, the devices have become pretty reliable. I'm also still amazed and pleased how good the cameras in the phones have become (this was still one of the main reasons for me to upgrade to a newer phone).
Cool. 300 watts. Huge heat blower in the back. You can even dry your hair with it or blow away fellow coffee shop guys yacking on the phone opposite to you. Nice is the small form factor graphics cards. Maybe that technology will also transfer to desktops.
maybe that UI designers come from the gaming industry. They design puzzles. Once one get used to things, hide the toolbar, hide the scrolling bars, hide and seek is the new trend. That is what games are for: find the treasure! Find the current URL, fine the place to print, jackpot. Even when reading stories, the pictures have to appear dynamically, nonlinear story telling makes even reading a text feel like running through a maze. Maybe one has to swipe left, maybe down, maybe click. Just add a few adds, which attack from random sides and we are in a full blown computer game. Sometimes, one really misses the simplicity of the 90ies.
is that not a bit retro? in `mission impossible' they had rubber masks which pretty much fool everybody .... not just dumb smartphones.
the demo of the flexible phone looked more like two phones stuck together. The presentation could not hide that the thickness of the foldable object was essentially the thickness of two phones. It would make much more sense to have the operating system be able to connect and combine two phones which are stuck together with magnetic frames. If there is no bezel, then one could even put together a couple of phones to temporarily build a larger reading or writing platform. For desktop monitors, multiple monitor support is standard, building that for phones should not be impossible. Two ``friendly phones" stuck together would just become one.
not all times are times of opportunities. This is also not different in sciences or art. after relativity was formulated, a time of consolidation and application followed, the same with many other theories. Our modern time just made us extremely impatient. In all areas, science, art or technology. Look back 20 years and see what happened since. It is enormous. A major breakthrough had been the new smart phone interface paradigms and it was immediately adapted by others. The technology improvement since was incremental which makes it look less dramatic but still milestones. This is similar in physics. Yes, there had not been a major successful revolution for a while similar than general relativity but the progress has been incremental and enormous, we can measure gravitational waves from distant parts of the universe for example. It is human to put achievements down: "Oh, Einstein had been a great inventor when young, later he was not making any progress any more, he was a thud!" Similarly with the title of this slashdot article. One really likes to put achievements down. It makes us (who did not create anything big) feel so much better! There is an other aspect: Apple had to learn the hard way that there is also an art in making innovation to a business success. Your great idea is sometimes immediately (within weeks or months copied almost verbatim: computer or smart phone interfaces for example) or then does not make any impact as it is too far ahead (like the Newton, LISA or NeXT). I have had a NeXT workstation during my school time and it had been a fantastic thing, innovative in many parts, but it did not make money. It was too far ahead. Yes, sometimes you have to build houses, but there are also times, when you have to be a landlord and get the money to feed the folks who built the house! There will be times again for groundbreaking innovations. If we look at the history of technology, sciences or art, major shifts do not happen very often. But this makes them even greater and we should appreciate them more.
things used to be much more open and innocent. it was possible to talk to any user via "talk" (a unix program) that had been installed by default on any work station. You could telnet into any other workstation (and even printers) and run jobs or have the computer talk like echo "You work too hard today"|festival --tts; fortune|festival --tts Things are less innocent today. I guess, technology has just grown up and things which were funny are no more funny. Part of the humor was also surprise like "I did not know that one can do that" and the target of the joke was known to appreciate it. Very few today would think the BOFH is funny (it contains a few pranks). It used to be different as there were times, when using a computer would already mean by definition that a user had basic sysadmin skills (like being able uuencode an attachment and submit without an attachment protocol) or even developer skills (as it required to write a program like a printer driver if it did not exist). There was a good chance that if somebody had access to mail or a workstation , the person was appreciative for a joke or prank. Today, that slice has become thinner as the technology is used by everybody.
if the scenario described in the article happens and only one tape player will survive and prizes will go up, this will accelerate the death of tape storage. It seems that currently tape is still 2-3 times cheaper. It seems only a matter of time until tape will no more be competitive. There is still the legacy issue. Also, tape seems to last 30-50 years. It will be interesting to see whether a hard drive from today will still start up in 30 years. Officially, one estimates 10 years (but I guess it is more as I have been able to boot up drives older than 10 years). It will be important in the future to have cheap long term storage which lasts.
the problem of excel is that data and code are mixed. This makes it extremely difficult to audit and verify. One knows that there are many errors in spreadsheets just because of that. This is long documented and has appeared in slashdot discussions since at least a decade. Some good comments from that time (how I miss the user base of slashdot from 14 years ago!) https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... I have seen such errors myself. The advantage of having the data separate is that one can run the data analysis with different programming languages. This allows to proofread the data base and proofread the code (run the code on different data for example first). This is especially important if the spreadsheet has been written by somebody else. In that case, the best advise is indeed to run away (as it is almost impossible to figure out what nonsense has been programmed into it). If an audit needs to be done, it is best to extract the data and write a program using a decent programming language, better with two. Here are just some data: https://www.theregister.co.uk/... : 20 percent of corporate spreadsheets have material errors. More recent: https://www.onmsft.com/news/20...
just say no to voting machines without paper trail.
having a smart watch since about a year, there some things besides the time which are really nice and I use regularly - map while running - two factor authentication - stopwatch - check on email - weather - alarm There is room for improvement. like the annoying bugging if the phone is not nearby (like when running). One should be able to download and keep certain frequently used map areas for example.
> We no longer have a usable desktop operating system!
This might be your opinion. I think the facts are that
there had been never so much choice of great desktop
operating systems, both commercial and free. You must be
doing something very wrong or something very esoteric. But
I would agree when saying
"We no longer have a usable desktop operating system made
by microsoft".
> Linux as a desktop operating system has gotten worse every year, not better.
Not my experience. The reason you give is actually a plus.
We don't need a mono culture. In my experience, things have never been
so stable. The time of system administration has become minimal.
Competition between different distributions is good and healthy.
> Linux has VERY poor documentation
What are you talking about? It is in most cases easy to find
good advise. Fortunately, it is almost no more necessary to have
documentation because things just work.
I don't care so much about minimal CPU improvements. What would be much more important in a time of video editing, large music and book collections etc that we finally have mac books with 1TB drives! We have freeking memory cards with 512 Gig. What is the holdup?
Somebody watched too much Serenity (movie from 2005), where reactions of River are triggered by TV messages https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... It is insane what some consider now patentable.
The new book is by Hugh Newman and Robin Heath. Heath is a teacher of astrology. There is a difference between using the Pythagoras theorem in examples or realizing that there is a theorem. This difference is often confused. The Babylonians also used the theorem in examples. I have not read the book, nor seen any new evidence in the articles about the appearance of the book. There is a book already out since 2013 Duncan Lunan called Megalith. Lunan already mentioned the use of Pythagoras in his book. I would like to see what is the new evidence coming forward in the new book.