On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd call it a tablet either... perhaps a drawing tablet, but not a tablet in mobility sense.
You just have to have used an iPad, iPad mini, Galaxy Tab, among others to know how hard it is to use a Surface Pro or other Windows tablets to do stuff like reading books and comics, among others - they are too bulky and heavy. It's closer to holding a hybrid.
Then again, can we really hold Microsoft responsible for something like that? Apple calls the iPad Pro a "portable PC"... heh. Lenovo calls the Yoga Book a 2 in 1 tablet. There are several cases of class confusion since guts and form factors are getting highly interchangeable.
Microsoft positions the Surface Pro as a laptop... and it has positioned it that was for a long time now because originally it was made to compete with Macbooks. They are referencing to the guts of the device, which are closer to a Windows laptop than an Android or iOS tablet. I think it's fair enough, you are of course free to disagree. It's advertising, semantics, and whatnot battle, but one thing you can't disagree no matter how much you hate Microsoft: they put a whole lot of thought to let people use the Surface Pro line... on their laps. So, it's a laptop. Or even more so, a notebook?
China is already outdoing the US in a whole bunch of things, but international press do not cover this so lots of people don't really know what's going on there.
This is an understandable, often overlooked problem that not many people stop to think about.
The way press works for international coverage, for several countries, is to only publish a limited range of stories that overcomes the cultural/language barrier, when not ultimately going only for eye grabbing content.
And that's fine, because really, who's got the time and attention to know everything that's happening all around the world? It's just naive and kinda dangerous to build an image of a country and it's industry based on the very limited information you get from main channels.
It's why even nowadays we still have so many people with this image that products coming from China are all shoddily made or clones of american/european products, when in fact not only China controls the vast majority of production for most electronics we use in a daily basis, several design decisions and technology advances also happen there.
It's nothing magical really... when you have a single country taking care of a huge percentage of worldwide production and manufacturing of tech related products for over a decade, of course they'll start developing their own products from start to finish. Think about what your own country would do in a similar situation.
People who have been paying attention for one reason or another to chinese branded smartphones, tablets, laptops and several other lines of products will know that they are fast becoming indistinguishable from high end lines of american and european brands. And particularly for their own market, there is no culural barrier to overcome. Technologies that are highly related to culture like AI (because recent advancements have been going around speech recognition and such) are bound to evolve in a different way.
Who's the leader in end-consumer quadcopters right now? DJI, indisputably, right? You know what DJI stands for? Dà-Jing Innovations Science and Technology Co. It's a Shenzhen based and born company. There's a whole bunch of tech crammed in those drones that were developed by the company... tech for obstacle avoidance, 3d tech for hand gesture recognition, radars and sensors. Some people might not know, but Lenovo is also a chinese company. Yes, the one that now owns the staple of business laptops, the Thinkpad line. The same company that owns Motorola. There's a whole bunch of cases like those in the tech industry.
Not to mention how chinese companies have been buying left and right a whole bunch of hotel businesses, movie studios and other companies people have no idea about: http://fortune.com/2016/03/18/...
Sure, a whole bunch of tech that several chinese companies made in the past were straight rip offs of designs from US, europeran and japanese based companies, but this has changed in later years. And the further you go into several tech devices, the more you understand how much of the technology behind them are really not coming from a single US brand.
High end technology for all sorts of displays nowadays have a majority made in South Korea (LG and Samsung). Central parts of cameras of all shapes and sizes, including smartphone cameras, mostly comes from Sony, a japanese company. Samsung also dominates when it comes to technology related to storage (memory chips and whatnot), but that market is a bit more balanced. CPUs, GPUs and SOCs are still mostly developed by american and british companies (Qualcomm, Intel nVidia), but that doesn't mean they don't have chinese or asian competition (Samsung, Mediatek, Allwinner). More importantly though is that in several areas of technology, if a chinese company isn't already there among the top businesses involved, there's likely to be one encroaching.
Not that I think companies implementing bug bounties is a bad idea, but for government departments, I wouldn't be too sure... Problems aplenty. For hackers, it's hard to overcome years of being looked down upon, plus the risks of being prossecuted. And then, for stuff on this level there are always chances of other governments doubling the offer. CIA is plenty ok with keeping the bugs and exploits they find for themselves, why wouldn't others also do it? Not sure how much of a cross section there is between hardcore patriots and hackers.
In any case, given the situation, perhaps it's the only reasonable way to go. Hiring based on competence doesn't seem to be much of a thing for this administration.
Let me just warn you about something Wycliffe... other than working well with Ubuntu (Dell Venue 11 Pro comes with Windows 8.0), it's actually a pretty crap tablet tho. xD
I bought it a couple of years ago, along with a docking station. The tablet is horribly constructed, too heavy to be used as a reading tablet, it has a plastic back that gets deformed overtime and won't fit anymore, and the batteries that came with it puffed up out of nowhere (at least they didn't explode).
Docking Station was also very poorly built. It has a single proprietary connector that supports the entire weight of the tablet that eventually gave away... I had to dismantle the whole thing, pull the connector out of the docking station so that I could make it work again.
It also puzzlingly has a microUSB port for charging, but it needs a proprietary brick to supply enough power to charge... horrible decision that goes against the standard. It won't work with external batteries or regular smartphone chargers.
Other stuff you might want to know: it uses a non-standard size for m.2 SSD storage that is hard to find and very expensive, power button is very easy to break, and despite having core i5 models and such, it's actually dual core and a series of CPUs designed with power savings in mind, which means it's far less powerful and sluggish than a Surface Pro 3 or so.
The whole thing smells like initial prototype for a tablet that Dell decided to sell. I got so fed up with it's quirks and problems that I ended up abandoning it and buying myself a Samsung Galaxy Tab S2... which is why I even started experimenting with Ubuntu in it in the first place.
What I'm trying to say is this: perhaps, if you can find out someone who tried to do a similar thing with a more robust tablet, it'd be a better route. Dell deserves only shame for putting out such a shoddy product in the market.:P I've been trying to find out if there are other smaller Windows tablets from other brands that will also take Ubuntu, no luck so far. I remember there were a bunch of them of the 8 inch type that came out around the same time the Venue also came out, but I'm finding hard to get real experience information...
Is it? I thought micro-ATX was the smallest currently available size for motherboards...:P Either way, if he's looking for battery powered, neither are gonna cut it... it's either tablet, laptop, or a board that goes with mobile CPU like Intel Atom X5 series.
Oooh, I forgot to mention something I'm keeping an eye on: GPD Win. It's the only device I know that has a better CPU than the Kangaroo PC... it has an Intel Atom X7 Z8700. I don't think the difference is big, but still... http://www.gpdwin.com/
Unfortunately, if you want a full fledged computer, you probably won't find anything smaller than a Zotac. That's the limitation of micro ATX boards basically. And then, unless you are very well versed in the dark arts of DIY electronics, it's gonna be very hard to make a battery work with a setup like that... Zotac and other microATX desktop PCs were not designed to work with batteries, but with a good power supply and AC. Unless there's some ready made solution, afaik, the power motherboards, components and whatnot needs are very finnicky. Not only they need all sorts of voltages, the overall power draw is too much for batteries to handle.
If you don't mind having a lower powered desktop, I suggest looking for InFocus' Kangaroo PC. Packs an Intel Atom X5-Z8500 which is among the best you can get for the size, has an internal battery, and is the size of a smartphone only thicker. I have one. It's cheap too, around 100 something bucks. http://www.kangaroo.cc/kangaro... Problem is, it's still closer to Compute Stick than a laptop. And it's not getting better since Intel abandoned Atom.
Other options along the same line of Zotac is Intel NUC and... I think ASUS has some small boxes too. But they are all wall powered.
Last option might be just getting a laptop and taking the screen off I guess.:P I understand why some people want that, but apparently upscaling doesn't make much sense... you also need to understand that even though components on laptops might fit into a smaller form factor, the biggest part of a laptop ends up being the custom made batteries.
As for a tablet which you can install Linux on, I have a Dell Venue 11 Pro that originally came with Windows 8, installed Ubuntu on it, worked fine.
I'm also trying to force a Gole 1 ( http://www.gearbest.com/tv-box... ) to work with Linux but it has been a bit hard. I can force it to run Ubuntu, but neither wi-fi nor ethernet are working - you have to use an USB adaptor. Also, it seems the company used a smartphone touchscreen which doesn't flip orientation along with the screen. But likewise, the Gole 1 has an Atom CPU that is worse than the one inside the Kangaroo PC (Z83500). But it comes with a screen and a bunch of ports, Windows 10 and Android installed, at around double the price.
I'm not sure how compatibility goes, but there were some smaller tablets that ran Windows which I'm not sure if they'd work or not. Ubuntu also had their own smartphone and tablet, and I think they made a fork that worked with some of the Nexus devices... but I think the whole thing has been abandoned: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch
Anyways, if you find out new stuff post here! I'm also interested.
Google just announced to advertisers that they have access to 70% of offline retail credit card data, and they are planning to give it up all for better tracking capability... and they are whinning about costs to keep track of data on the wage of their own employees? Give me a fucking break.
Well, in all fairness, it's quite likely that the guy would never be able to close deals with any studios if he didn't go overboard in showing how many measures against piracy he's doing NOW... xD Why he's even trying, that's an entire other question.
I find these oversimplistic generalizations that do not take changes in politics, culture, cost of health and education, among several other factors just to bunch in an entirely diverse category of the population in a homogeneous mass extremely troubling and extremely disingenuous.
It's just food for trolls of the "everything was good back when everything was worse" kind. I'm not a "millennial" myself, but analysis like these reeks of prejudice. More problematic is that it ends up masking real problems for the sake of scapegoating. It only helps spread the holier than thou attitude some people already mount on.
Back when I was your age I had 5 jobs, lived on a grass and water diet and the occasional rat I killed, skinned and cooked myself, and I still saved enough to buy my mansion in the suburbs... omg, who the fuck cares.
Well, he's the former CTO, so he's free to say whatever he wants... but I personally feel way less tied to Chrome in comparison to other services like how I feel tied to Facebook, Gmail or YouTube.
I'm willing to give Firefox and Opera another try, and I feel the browser market has always been mostly about inertia... IE stayed in the top for the longest time only because it was already there. From what I heard coming from Mac users, this is basically also the case for Safari.
IE lost it's position because of pure and huge incompetence from Microsoft's part. The incredible ammounts of bugs, vulnerabilities, lack of features and problems that the browser overall had forced people out of inertia. Safari is the standard on Macs and iPhones and it works well enough not to make anyone switch to something else, but it also has nothing special about it.
Opera lately has been having some good ideas, but it still hasn't been enough to make people move, plus the fact that it's owned by a Chinese Consortium does not help it.
As privacy continues to erode, I'll probably be looking into alternatives pretty soon. But I think there's still potential for competition in this market.
Never heard of the app, then I went to look further into it:
"On November 4, 2014, Kik scored 1 out of 7 points on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's secure messaging scorecard."
"Kik Messenger has drawn controversy due to its reported involvement in a number of incidents of child exploitation. The app has been criticized as unsafe for minors due to its anonymity features and allegedly weak parental control mechanisms."
"Kik has been criticized for providing inadequate parental control over minors' use of the app. The ability to share messages without alerting parents has been noted as "one of the reasons why teens like Kik".Parents cannot automatically view their child's Kik communications remotely from another device, but instead must have the password to their child's user account and view the communications on the same device used by their child."
Yeah... I mean, I'm fully expecting messaging apps to have payment options and to even implement virtual stores as a feature of sorts, but this is the worst way of it happening.
Why would Pandora like to be confused with PayPal? Is there any actual reason for it? Would it benefit Pandora in any way to be confused with an online payment system?
I mean, sure, they look similar... but it's not like the PayPal logo is something unique. Slanted Ps in blue with the most basic principle of minimalism applied, big f*cking whoop. It's lazy design in it's ultimate form.
And please.. pleeease, if you are a designer/typographer with the urge to reply to me to say how a logo like that takes hundreds of man hours to come about, and how much time and money companies invest into that, please don't. It's a stupid f*cking P.
I dunno on what grounds Switzerland voted for it, but it sounds like a very risky bet.
Look, I'm no climate change denialist, and I know that nuclear power has it's own share of problems that not even modern technologies can solve. I'm all for decomissioning old nuclear power plants because those are massive liabilities waiting to happen. Modern nuclear plants tech have solved most of the problems, but they yet have to prove themselves (if we only let them), and all modern propositions will still produce some form of nuclear waste... even if quantities are way smaller in comparison.
Plus, implementing new modern tech for the first time will be costly.
But abandoning nuclear in favor of renewables like wind and solar can end up being even worse. The first thing people have to understand is that with current tech, both wind and solar requires multiple times more investment and landmass to get near nuclear plants output. It's not "just a bit more"... we're talking about 200+ times more for wind, and 40+ times more for solar. I hope people understand this. We're talking about the dismantling of a single nuclear power plant requiring a city's worth of land covered in solar panels to get the same energy, or an entire state worth of wind towers.
Another thing that people need to pay attention to is that even if renewables don't produce radioactive waste, construction still generates toxic waste. It's not like we plant seeds to grow solar panels and huge wind towers, and it's not like those don't have an impact on the ecossystem, specially when we need a whole lot more of them. Chemicals produced by current solar panel manufacturing at proportional rates for energy generation can have a more impactful and long lasting effect on the environment than even an isolated nuclear meltdown. It's just that one is more imediate and impressive than the other.
Future technology can go both ways quite frankly, the important thing is not to halt development of neither. We could end up with nuclear power plants that have such a low possibility of accident and generates so little nuclear waste that it'd replace all forms of electricity generation. On the other hand, renewables also could reach a state of efficiency and eliminate needs for all sorts of toxic materials that it'd end being a viable alternative.
But we're not there just yet, and we have to work with current reality, not speculation.
Household electricity consumption is not = CO2 reductions. This article "alludes" to nothing you talked about, it's a single positive marker in a long list of negative ones. And if you read the source, you'll see there are reservations about it right by the end and conclusions of the article itself.
That's great and all, but before people start patting themselves in the back, read the source and understand the limits of what is being presented. The study on the source, right by the end of it, talks about a possible rebound effect. Speculative, but still, it does make sense.
Also, this is only about US households... here's what the wordwide energy consumption statistics look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... US basically comes in second with China in first, that's considering that China has 4x the population yet consumes less than double, and basically is the factory of the world right now.
To be fair, electricity usage in households is not a good measure of anything other than itself. Different countries will have different needs, and the numbers will vary quite a lot depending on location. The stuff that usually consumes electricity the most in a household are heating and AC.
Gosh, I hope nothing unpredictable and horrible comes out of the ice with all these changes... like smallpox and anthrax that is coming out of the arctic. https://news.vice.com/article/...
A manager or CEO sleeping on the factory floor in a sleeping bag is not what a manager "should do", it's something made just for show that is usually irked by workers that are not in for the cult-like fanatic ride.
This is basically the same crap some game and software development companies say about crunch time. If problems were solved by managers and CEOs putting up little shows, there would be no need for labor laws. People need to understand that even if management gets sick when employees also get sick due to poor work conditions, that's never enough for businesses to avoid liability. Tesla is basically risking a stream of future, justifiable lawsuits there.
What good management does is finding ways to keep the company profitable while not endangering workers' health because they can't pay or find more workers, diversify shifts, improve the line, among others.
Everything since Windows 10 happened has been a case for Linux, it's just still not an easy one by any means to your average Windows user unfortunately.
Let's see here. Shady strategies to force users to upgrade, horrible advertisement schemes, forced telemetry, always on always listening always dialing back strategies... not to mention how Microsoft keeps persisting on ideas like Windows 10 S because what they really want is to copy Apple and the walled garden model.
Malware, vulnerabilities and ramsonware have been there for the longest time, and arguably for regular users the horrible experiences of the past with Vista, BSoD, among several other problems have been a far more convincing case for Linux. We don't even have that many shovelware as we did in the past.
It just won't happen. Sorry. It's not your fault, but this has never been a convincing argument, not for regular Windows users. It won't start being because of WannaCry. And defeatingly enough, other than our own tech circles, it's likely that most people haven't even paid much attention to WannaCry anyways... it'll be forgotten, if it isn't already, as fast as stuff like Mirai Botnet, among others. I mean, even techies, do most people remember the most publicized malware attacks of 2016? I have to admit I don't.
And yes, I know Android exploded in popularity, I know over half of servers these days uses Linux, I know almost all supercomputers also do... but your regular non-techie consumer will, for the foreseeable future, always run to Windows, or at most Macs. In fact, if WannaCry was really going to do any substantial push for migration (which let's admit it, it won't), it'd be for Windows users going for Macs.
The unsolvable problems that Linux will seemingly never be able to overcome are: 1. Advertisement and marketing. An image problem; 2. Community. Even for folks like my mom who avoids using computers like the plague, if she has a problem with it, there's bound to be someone near her that can help. Linux? I wouldn't even know were to start. Neither I nor her friends would be able to indicate a repair shop or something with someone who could deal with command line configuration. I perhaps have a couple of friends who could help, but which would most likely be working with no free time to help.
And this isn't only about OS, it's about apps. Sure, Linux have plenty of basic office level apps and whatnot, but it's not about having an app that works in a similar way, it's about having people around to help with specific tasks as they arise. This is also why Microsoft Office still dominates while open source alternatives like LibreOffice or OpenOffice never catches on.
The needs non-computer geeks have around computers are often misunderstood, underestimated, and superficially analized. I feel bad because I'd really love for everyone to move to Linux. With enough people there, developers would be forced to migrate too. I'd love to have a fully functional Ubuntu smartphone. A Debian desktop with all I need. A Mint tablet to go around. Well, actually I have an Ubuntu laptop and tablet. But it's not something that I'd recommend for family and friends who don't know much about computers, because the whole thing makes no sense to them. Basically all of them (and I come from a big family) have no friends or relatives that would be able to help either to make their regular stuff work, or to solve problems when they come up. Among my multiple uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces... I must be the only one to have had contact with Linux. And I don't even know how to handle it properly myself.
This case is pretty straightforward, no need for long legal battles. If it's in contract that Apple needs to pay for the licensed technology with no substantial unfair hike in prices and a fair comparison with competing technologies, then Apple has to pay, period.
It's weird enough that Apple is the only company going after Qualcomm given that Snapdragon and other Qualcomm chips are on a whole metric ton of other brands. I'd figured that if Qualcomm was unfairly ramping up prices and charging more than the average, all these companies involved would either be filling a business class action lawsuit, or fleeing to the competition altogether.
Gotta be honest, I have no pitty for Apple for this. They'd do the same if only they had the technology.
...in broke patent land. Because of course the US Patent Office would grant patents to a company when competing companies not only came up with the concept first, they already have multiple models on the market to prove it while Apple has none.
Guys, the patent for the bezel free display isn't even a matter of talking about the S8... the Note Edge which fits the description perfectly came out in 2014. Interestingly enough, Sharp also had a prototype phone that's more or less similar to the Xiaomi Mi Mix that also had curved edges: https://www.gizmochina.com/201...
This was also back in 2014. But it's to be expected by the US Patent Office to grant stuff that's in direct conflict with existing products. The whole system has been broken for a while now, it only serves to feed patent trolls and the entire system supporting frivolous lawsuits and whatnot.
I wonder how much the recent substantial investment Apple made in Corning has directly to do with these applications.
These analysts sometimes needs to wake the fuck up and look past their fancy apartment windows or their well groomed and trimmed lawns.
Let me guess his other guesses... does he also think that in 10 or 20 years time no one will drive cars anymore, they'll be all automated and interconnected and some such bullshit? Yeah... that's not all that different from drawings of the 60s imagining the future of the year 2000 or, you know, Jetsons. More current comparison, it's the same shit as Solar FREAKIN' Roadways.
We have huge portions of the world that are still using horses as means of transportation, firewood heated ovens, and whatnot - not by choice, but because technology never reached them. It's not like struggling economies will easibly be able to switch from one fuel category to another magically as if that required zero effort, time and money.
And if we're talking about fuel which some entire countries economies are heavily dependant on, it's more likely that whatever is left of humanity after multiple wars that happens due to oil dependancy fallout, we'll actually all be back on horses or on foot, those who are left.
Can you even imagine all the countries that are heavily dependant on oil suffering an economic fallout and ending up like the current war torn refugee producing countries that we have right now? It'd be catastrophic.
I support going green as much as anyone else who's worried about how much pollution is going into the ecosystem plus climate change, but realistically speaking, don't think the fossil fuel industry will take drastic changes without a fight. Our dependancy got to the point of entire economies supporting some extremely horrible stuff in exchange for oil, and the consequences of that will echo for centuries.
Dang, we're not even close to a road to being ready for the energy scalability problem. I dunno if people or this guy realizes this, but electric cars right now don't account for even 1% of new car sales in even the most modern countries. It's a fraction of a percentage, which is a start, but it can basically be seen as novelty.
Once sales starts ramping up, then things start getting exponentially complicated. The energy you use to charge cars with has to come from somewhere, and the national electric grid for most countries are not prepared to replace oil in even minor scales... most of them already have their hands full with how things are progressing now with oil based vehicles being prevalent, they can't be expected to upgrade in any short to mid timeframe.
We already need more than a decade for battery technology and other technological barriers to progress and get implemented.
We will need slow and steady growth to avoid multiple types of problems. If we even get there, that is.
The idea of the majority of people switching to public transportation is great on paper, but it's been around since ancient times, and there are multiple obstacles that each can take decades of development to overcome for most countries in the world, and there needs to be focus on those alone for it to happen. Stuff like public security, optimization of city infrastructures, cultural shifts, welfare and work relatioship reforms... I'm talking the tip of the iceberg only here.
You can look at this on another way. Mass production of cars came around a century ago, and an exponential number of paradigms were created on top of it. Cities were built and grew around the idea, cultures were formed on top of it, how we work, get entertainment, do everyday stuff, how security works, and a whooole bunch of other things were built assuming we have access to cars. It's an unfanthomable ammoung of things to unwrap. So it's no surprise how paradigms like those are not simple to change.
Short of an alien race coming down to Earth, enslaving all of us, killing half of Earth's population and then mandating everything we do essencially changing life how we know it, the fossil fueled vehicles paradigm will not vanish or fundamentally change in 8 years. Oh, and you know what also won't happen in 8 years... or ever? That Hyperloop crap. Mark my words.
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On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd call it a tablet either... perhaps a drawing tablet, but not a tablet in mobility sense.
You just have to have used an iPad, iPad mini, Galaxy Tab, among others to know how hard it is to use a Surface Pro or other Windows tablets to do stuff like reading books and comics, among others - they are too bulky and heavy. It's closer to holding a hybrid.
Then again, can we really hold Microsoft responsible for something like that? Apple calls the iPad Pro a "portable PC"... heh. Lenovo calls the Yoga Book a 2 in 1 tablet. There are several cases of class confusion since guts and form factors are getting highly interchangeable.
Microsoft positions the Surface Pro as a laptop... and it has positioned it that was for a long time now because originally it was made to compete with Macbooks. They are referencing to the guts of the device, which are closer to a Windows laptop than an Android or iOS tablet. I think it's fair enough, you are of course free to disagree. It's advertising, semantics, and whatnot battle, but one thing you can't disagree no matter how much you hate Microsoft: they put a whole lot of thought to let people use the Surface Pro line... on their laps. So, it's a laptop. Or even more so, a notebook?
China treating privacy with more respect than most western countries... what a time to be alive
China is already outdoing the US in a whole bunch of things, but international press do not cover this so lots of people don't really know what's going on there.
This is an understandable, often overlooked problem that not many people stop to think about.
The way press works for international coverage, for several countries, is to only publish a limited range of stories that overcomes the cultural/language barrier, when not ultimately going only for eye grabbing content.
And that's fine, because really, who's got the time and attention to know everything that's happening all around the world?
It's just naive and kinda dangerous to build an image of a country and it's industry based on the very limited information you get from main channels.
It's why even nowadays we still have so many people with this image that products coming from China are all shoddily made or clones of american/european products, when in fact not only China controls the vast majority of production for most electronics we use in a daily basis, several design decisions and technology advances also happen there.
It's nothing magical really... when you have a single country taking care of a huge percentage of worldwide production and manufacturing of tech related products for over a decade, of course they'll start developing their own products from start to finish. Think about what your own country would do in a similar situation.
People who have been paying attention for one reason or another to chinese branded smartphones, tablets, laptops and several other lines of products will know that they are fast becoming indistinguishable from high end lines of american and european brands. And particularly for their own market, there is no culural barrier to overcome. Technologies that are highly related to culture like AI (because recent advancements have been going around speech recognition and such) are bound to evolve in a different way.
Who's the leader in end-consumer quadcopters right now? DJI, indisputably, right? You know what DJI stands for? Dà-Jing Innovations Science and Technology Co. It's a Shenzhen based and born company. There's a whole bunch of tech crammed in those drones that were developed by the company... tech for obstacle avoidance, 3d tech for hand gesture recognition, radars and sensors.
Some people might not know, but Lenovo is also a chinese company. Yes, the one that now owns the staple of business laptops, the Thinkpad line. The same company that owns Motorola.
There's a whole bunch of cases like those in the tech industry.
Not to mention how chinese companies have been buying left and right a whole bunch of hotel businesses, movie studios and other companies people have no idea about:
http://fortune.com/2016/03/18/...
Sure, a whole bunch of tech that several chinese companies made in the past were straight rip offs of designs from US, europeran and japanese based companies, but this has changed in later years. And the further you go into several tech devices, the more you understand how much of the technology behind them are really not coming from a single US brand.
High end technology for all sorts of displays nowadays have a majority made in South Korea (LG and Samsung). Central parts of cameras of all shapes and sizes, including smartphone cameras, mostly comes from Sony, a japanese company. Samsung also dominates when it comes to technology related to storage (memory chips and whatnot), but that market is a bit more balanced. CPUs, GPUs and SOCs are still mostly developed by american and british companies (Qualcomm, Intel nVidia), but that doesn't mean they don't have chinese or asian competition (Samsung, Mediatek, Allwinner). More importantly though is that in several areas of technology, if a chinese company isn't already there among the top businesses involved, there's likely to be one encroaching.
So yeah, I don't know if chinese companie
Not that I think companies implementing bug bounties is a bad idea, but for government departments, I wouldn't be too sure...
Problems aplenty. For hackers, it's hard to overcome years of being looked down upon, plus the risks of being prossecuted.
And then, for stuff on this level there are always chances of other governments doubling the offer.
CIA is plenty ok with keeping the bugs and exploits they find for themselves, why wouldn't others also do it? Not sure how much of a cross section there is between hardcore patriots and hackers.
In any case, given the situation, perhaps it's the only reasonable way to go. Hiring based on competence doesn't seem to be much of a thing for this administration.
Let me just warn you about something Wycliffe... other than working well with Ubuntu (Dell Venue 11 Pro comes with Windows 8.0), it's actually a pretty crap tablet tho. xD
I bought it a couple of years ago, along with a docking station. The tablet is horribly constructed, too heavy to be used as a reading tablet, it has a plastic back that gets deformed overtime and won't fit anymore, and the batteries that came with it puffed up out of nowhere (at least they didn't explode).
Docking Station was also very poorly built. It has a single proprietary connector that supports the entire weight of the tablet that eventually gave away... I had to dismantle the whole thing, pull the connector out of the docking station so that I could make it work again.
It also puzzlingly has a microUSB port for charging, but it needs a proprietary brick to supply enough power to charge... horrible decision that goes against the standard. It won't work with external batteries or regular smartphone chargers.
Other stuff you might want to know: it uses a non-standard size for m.2 SSD storage that is hard to find and very expensive, power button is very easy to break, and despite having core i5 models and such, it's actually dual core and a series of CPUs designed with power savings in mind, which means it's far less powerful and sluggish than a Surface Pro 3 or so.
The whole thing smells like initial prototype for a tablet that Dell decided to sell. I got so fed up with it's quirks and problems that I ended up abandoning it and buying myself a Samsung Galaxy Tab S2... which is why I even started experimenting with Ubuntu in it in the first place.
What I'm trying to say is this: perhaps, if you can find out someone who tried to do a similar thing with a more robust tablet, it'd be a better route. Dell deserves only shame for putting out such a shoddy product in the market. :P I've been trying to find out if there are other smaller Windows tablets from other brands that will also take Ubuntu, no luck so far. I remember there were a bunch of them of the 8 inch type that came out around the same time the Venue also came out, but I'm finding hard to get real experience information...
Anyways, here's something else I've been looking into since yesterday, thanks to your post:
https://www.indiegogo.com/proj...
Must admit I'm very tempted. xD
Thanks for sharing... probably has some very interesting cases.
Ooh, nice, I didn't know there were ready made stuff for this. Thanks!
Is it? I thought micro-ATX was the smallest currently available size for motherboards... :P
Either way, if he's looking for battery powered, neither are gonna cut it... it's either tablet, laptop, or a board that goes with mobile CPU like Intel Atom X5 series.
Oooh, I forgot to mention something I'm keeping an eye on: GPD Win. It's the only device I know that has a better CPU than the Kangaroo PC... it has an Intel Atom X7 Z8700. I don't think the difference is big, but still...
http://www.gpdwin.com/
Unfortunately, if you want a full fledged computer, you probably won't find anything smaller than a Zotac. That's the limitation of micro ATX boards basically. And then, unless you are very well versed in the dark arts of DIY electronics, it's gonna be very hard to make a battery work with a setup like that... Zotac and other microATX desktop PCs were not designed to work with batteries, but with a good power supply and AC.
Unless there's some ready made solution, afaik, the power motherboards, components and whatnot needs are very finnicky. Not only they need all sorts of voltages, the overall power draw is too much for batteries to handle.
If you don't mind having a lower powered desktop, I suggest looking for InFocus' Kangaroo PC. Packs an Intel Atom X5-Z8500 which is among the best you can get for the size, has an internal battery, and is the size of a smartphone only thicker. I have one. It's cheap too, around 100 something bucks.
http://www.kangaroo.cc/kangaro...
Problem is, it's still closer to Compute Stick than a laptop. And it's not getting better since Intel abandoned Atom.
Other options along the same line of Zotac is Intel NUC and... I think ASUS has some small boxes too. But they are all wall powered.
Last option might be just getting a laptop and taking the screen off I guess. :P I understand why some people want that, but apparently upscaling doesn't make much sense... you also need to understand that even though components on laptops might fit into a smaller form factor, the biggest part of a laptop ends up being the custom made batteries.
As for a tablet which you can install Linux on, I have a Dell Venue 11 Pro that originally came with Windows 8, installed Ubuntu on it, worked fine.
I'm also trying to force a Gole 1 ( http://www.gearbest.com/tv-box... ) to work with Linux but it has been a bit hard. I can force it to run Ubuntu, but neither wi-fi nor ethernet are working - you have to use an USB adaptor. Also, it seems the company used a smartphone touchscreen which doesn't flip orientation along with the screen. But likewise, the Gole 1 has an Atom CPU that is worse than the one inside the Kangaroo PC (Z83500). But it comes with a screen and a bunch of ports, Windows 10 and Android installed, at around double the price.
I'm not sure how compatibility goes, but there were some smaller tablets that ran Windows which I'm not sure if they'd work or not. Ubuntu also had their own smartphone and tablet, and I think they made a fork that worked with some of the Nexus devices... but I think the whole thing has been abandoned:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch
Anyways, if you find out new stuff post here! I'm also interested.
Google just announced to advertisers that they have access to 70% of offline retail credit card data, and they are planning to give it up all for better tracking capability... and they are whinning about costs to keep track of data on the wage of their own employees?
Give me a fucking break.
Well, in all fairness, it's quite likely that the guy would never be able to close deals with any studios if he didn't go overboard in showing how many measures against piracy he's doing NOW... xD
Why he's even trying, that's an entire other question.
I find these oversimplistic generalizations that do not take changes in politics, culture, cost of health and education, among several other factors just to bunch in an entirely diverse category of the population in a homogeneous mass extremely troubling and extremely disingenuous.
It's just food for trolls of the "everything was good back when everything was worse" kind. I'm not a "millennial" myself, but analysis like these reeks of prejudice. More problematic is that it ends up masking real problems for the sake of scapegoating. It only helps spread the holier than thou attitude some people already mount on.
Back when I was your age I had 5 jobs, lived on a grass and water diet and the occasional rat I killed, skinned and cooked myself, and I still saved enough to buy my mansion in the suburbs... omg, who the fuck cares.
Well, he's the former CTO, so he's free to say whatever he wants... but I personally feel way less tied to Chrome in comparison to other services like how I feel tied to Facebook, Gmail or YouTube.
I'm willing to give Firefox and Opera another try, and I feel the browser market has always been mostly about inertia... IE stayed in the top for the longest time only because it was already there. From what I heard coming from Mac users, this is basically also the case for Safari.
IE lost it's position because of pure and huge incompetence from Microsoft's part. The incredible ammounts of bugs, vulnerabilities, lack of features and problems that the browser overall had forced people out of inertia. Safari is the standard on Macs and iPhones and it works well enough not to make anyone switch to something else, but it also has nothing special about it.
Opera lately has been having some good ideas, but it still hasn't been enough to make people move, plus the fact that it's owned by a Chinese Consortium does not help it.
As privacy continues to erode, I'll probably be looking into alternatives pretty soon. But I think there's still potential for competition in this market.
Never heard of the app, then I went to look further into it:
"On November 4, 2014, Kik scored 1 out of 7 points on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's secure messaging scorecard."
"Kik Messenger has drawn controversy due to its reported involvement in a number of incidents of child exploitation. The app has been criticized as unsafe for minors due to its anonymity features and allegedly weak parental control mechanisms."
"Kik has been criticized for providing inadequate parental control over minors' use of the app. The ability to share messages without alerting parents has been noted as "one of the reasons why teens like Kik".Parents cannot automatically view their child's Kik communications remotely from another device, but instead must have the password to their child's user account and view the communications on the same device used by their child."
Yeah... I mean, I'm fully expecting messaging apps to have payment options and to even implement virtual stores as a feature of sorts, but this is the worst way of it happening.
Man, the chinese government just gets all the good things.... wait what?
Why would Pandora like to be confused with PayPal? Is there any actual reason for it? Would it benefit Pandora in any way to be confused with an online payment system?
I mean, sure, they look similar... but it's not like the PayPal logo is something unique. Slanted Ps in blue with the most basic principle of minimalism applied, big f*cking whoop. It's lazy design in it's ultimate form.
And please.. pleeease, if you are a designer/typographer with the urge to reply to me to say how a logo like that takes hundreds of man hours to come about, and how much time and money companies invest into that, please don't. It's a stupid f*cking P.
I dunno on what grounds Switzerland voted for it, but it sounds like a very risky bet.
Look, I'm no climate change denialist, and I know that nuclear power has it's own share of problems that not even modern technologies can solve. I'm all for decomissioning old nuclear power plants because those are massive liabilities waiting to happen. Modern nuclear plants tech have solved most of the problems, but they yet have to prove themselves (if we only let them), and all modern propositions will still produce some form of nuclear waste... even if quantities are way smaller in comparison.
Plus, implementing new modern tech for the first time will be costly.
But abandoning nuclear in favor of renewables like wind and solar can end up being even worse. The first thing people have to understand is that with current tech, both wind and solar requires multiple times more investment and landmass to get near nuclear plants output. It's not "just a bit more"... we're talking about 200+ times more for wind, and 40+ times more for solar. I hope people understand this. We're talking about the dismantling of a single nuclear power plant requiring a city's worth of land covered in solar panels to get the same energy, or an entire state worth of wind towers.
Another thing that people need to pay attention to is that even if renewables don't produce radioactive waste, construction still generates toxic waste. It's not like we plant seeds to grow solar panels and huge wind towers, and it's not like those don't have an impact on the ecossystem, specially when we need a whole lot more of them. Chemicals produced by current solar panel manufacturing at proportional rates for energy generation can have a more impactful and long lasting effect on the environment than even an isolated nuclear meltdown. It's just that one is more imediate and impressive than the other.
Future technology can go both ways quite frankly, the important thing is not to halt development of neither. We could end up with nuclear power plants that have such a low possibility of accident and generates so little nuclear waste that it'd replace all forms of electricity generation. On the other hand, renewables also could reach a state of efficiency and eliminate needs for all sorts of toxic materials that it'd end being a viable alternative.
But we're not there just yet, and we have to work with current reality, not speculation.
Here are some links for those interested:
http://tsp-data-portal.org/Bre...
http://energyrealityproject.co...
https://nei.org/News-Media/New...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
Think again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Household electricity consumption is not = CO2 reductions. This article "alludes" to nothing you talked about, it's a single positive marker in a long list of negative ones. And if you read the source, you'll see there are reservations about it right by the end and conclusions of the article itself.
That's great and all, but before people start patting themselves in the back, read the source and understand the limits of what is being presented.
The study on the source, right by the end of it, talks about a possible rebound effect. Speculative, but still, it does make sense.
Also, this is only about US households... here's what the wordwide energy consumption statistics look like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
US basically comes in second with China in first, that's considering that China has 4x the population yet consumes less than double, and basically is the factory of the world right now.
To be fair, electricity usage in households is not a good measure of anything other than itself. Different countries will have different needs, and the numbers will vary quite a lot depending on location. The stuff that usually consumes electricity the most in a household are heating and AC.
Gosh, I hope nothing unpredictable and horrible comes out of the ice with all these changes... like smallpox and anthrax that is coming out of the arctic.
https://news.vice.com/article/...
A manager or CEO sleeping on the factory floor in a sleeping bag is not what a manager "should do", it's something made just for show that is usually irked by workers that are not in for the cult-like fanatic ride.
This is basically the same crap some game and software development companies say about crunch time. If problems were solved by managers and CEOs putting up little shows, there would be no need for labor laws. People need to understand that even if management gets sick when employees also get sick due to poor work conditions, that's never enough for businesses to avoid liability. Tesla is basically risking a stream of future, justifiable lawsuits there.
What good management does is finding ways to keep the company profitable while not endangering workers' health because they can't pay or find more workers, diversify shifts, improve the line, among others.
Everything since Windows 10 happened has been a case for Linux, it's just still not an easy one by any means to your average Windows user unfortunately.
Let's see here. Shady strategies to force users to upgrade, horrible advertisement schemes, forced telemetry, always on always listening always dialing back strategies... not to mention how Microsoft keeps persisting on ideas like Windows 10 S because what they really want is to copy Apple and the walled garden model.
Malware, vulnerabilities and ramsonware have been there for the longest time, and arguably for regular users the horrible experiences of the past with Vista, BSoD, among several other problems have been a far more convincing case for Linux. We don't even have that many shovelware as we did in the past.
It just won't happen. Sorry. It's not your fault, but this has never been a convincing argument, not for regular Windows users. It won't start being because of WannaCry. And defeatingly enough, other than our own tech circles, it's likely that most people haven't even paid much attention to WannaCry anyways... it'll be forgotten, if it isn't already, as fast as stuff like Mirai Botnet, among others. I mean, even techies, do most people remember the most publicized malware attacks of 2016? I have to admit I don't.
And yes, I know Android exploded in popularity, I know over half of servers these days uses Linux, I know almost all supercomputers also do... but your regular non-techie consumer will, for the foreseeable future, always run to Windows, or at most Macs. In fact, if WannaCry was really going to do any substantial push for migration (which let's admit it, it won't), it'd be for Windows users going for Macs.
The unsolvable problems that Linux will seemingly never be able to overcome are:
1. Advertisement and marketing. An image problem;
2. Community. Even for folks like my mom who avoids using computers like the plague, if she has a problem with it, there's bound to be someone near her that can help. Linux? I wouldn't even know were to start. Neither I nor her friends would be able to indicate a repair shop or something with someone who could deal with command line configuration. I perhaps have a couple of friends who could help, but which would most likely be working with no free time to help.
And this isn't only about OS, it's about apps. Sure, Linux have plenty of basic office level apps and whatnot, but it's not about having an app that works in a similar way, it's about having people around to help with specific tasks as they arise. This is also why Microsoft Office still dominates while open source alternatives like LibreOffice or OpenOffice never catches on.
The needs non-computer geeks have around computers are often misunderstood, underestimated, and superficially analized. I feel bad because I'd really love for everyone to move to Linux. With enough people there, developers would be forced to migrate too. I'd love to have a fully functional Ubuntu smartphone. A Debian desktop with all I need. A Mint tablet to go around. Well, actually I have an Ubuntu laptop and tablet. But it's not something that I'd recommend for family and friends who don't know much about computers, because the whole thing makes no sense to them. Basically all of them (and I come from a big family) have no friends or relatives that would be able to help either to make their regular stuff work, or to solve problems when they come up. Among my multiple uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces... I must be the only one to have had contact with Linux. And I don't even know how to handle it properly myself.
This case is pretty straightforward, no need for long legal battles.
If it's in contract that Apple needs to pay for the licensed technology with no substantial unfair hike in prices and a fair comparison with competing technologies, then Apple has to pay, period.
It's weird enough that Apple is the only company going after Qualcomm given that Snapdragon and other Qualcomm chips are on a whole metric ton of other brands. I'd figured that if Qualcomm was unfairly ramping up prices and charging more than the average, all these companies involved would either be filling a business class action lawsuit, or fleeing to the competition altogether.
Gotta be honest, I have no pitty for Apple for this. They'd do the same if only they had the technology.
...in broke patent land.
Because of course the US Patent Office would grant patents to a company when competing companies not only came up with the concept first, they already have multiple models on the market to prove it while Apple has none.
Guys, the patent for the bezel free display isn't even a matter of talking about the S8... the Note Edge which fits the description perfectly came out in 2014.
Interestingly enough, Sharp also had a prototype phone that's more or less similar to the Xiaomi Mi Mix that also had curved edges:
https://www.gizmochina.com/201...
This was also back in 2014.
But it's to be expected by the US Patent Office to grant stuff that's in direct conflict with existing products. The whole system has been broken for a while now, it only serves to feed patent trolls and the entire system supporting frivolous lawsuits and whatnot.
I wonder how much the recent substantial investment Apple made in Corning has directly to do with these applications.
...living in the utopia bubble.
These analysts sometimes needs to wake the fuck up and look past their fancy apartment windows or their well groomed and trimmed lawns.
Let me guess his other guesses... does he also think that in 10 or 20 years time no one will drive cars anymore, they'll be all automated and interconnected and some such bullshit? Yeah... that's not all that different from drawings of the 60s imagining the future of the year 2000 or, you know, Jetsons. More current comparison, it's the same shit as Solar FREAKIN' Roadways.
We have huge portions of the world that are still using horses as means of transportation, firewood heated ovens, and whatnot - not by choice, but because technology never reached them. It's not like struggling economies will easibly be able to switch from one fuel category to another magically as if that required zero effort, time and money.
And if we're talking about fuel which some entire countries economies are heavily dependant on, it's more likely that whatever is left of humanity after multiple wars that happens due to oil dependancy fallout, we'll actually all be back on horses or on foot, those who are left.
Can you even imagine all the countries that are heavily dependant on oil suffering an economic fallout and ending up like the current war torn refugee producing countries that we have right now? It'd be catastrophic.
I support going green as much as anyone else who's worried about how much pollution is going into the ecosystem plus climate change, but realistically speaking, don't think the fossil fuel industry will take drastic changes without a fight. Our dependancy got to the point of entire economies supporting some extremely horrible stuff in exchange for oil, and the consequences of that will echo for centuries.
Dang, we're not even close to a road to being ready for the energy scalability problem.
I dunno if people or this guy realizes this, but electric cars right now don't account for even 1% of new car sales in even the most modern countries. It's a fraction of a percentage, which is a start, but it can basically be seen as novelty.
Once sales starts ramping up, then things start getting exponentially complicated. The energy you use to charge cars with has to come from somewhere, and the national electric grid for most countries are not prepared to replace oil in even minor scales... most of them already have their hands full with how things are progressing now with oil based vehicles being prevalent, they can't be expected to upgrade in any short to mid timeframe.
We already need more than a decade for battery technology and other technological barriers to progress and get implemented.
We will need slow and steady growth to avoid multiple types of problems. If we even get there, that is.
The idea of the majority of people switching to public transportation is great on paper, but it's been around since ancient times, and there are multiple obstacles that each can take decades of development to overcome for most countries in the world, and there needs to be focus on those alone for it to happen. Stuff like public security, optimization of city infrastructures, cultural shifts, welfare and work relatioship reforms... I'm talking the tip of the iceberg only here.
You can look at this on another way. Mass production of cars came around a century ago, and an exponential number of paradigms were created on top of it. Cities were built and grew around the idea, cultures were formed on top of it, how we work, get entertainment, do everyday stuff, how security works, and a whooole bunch of other things were built assuming we have access to cars. It's an unfanthomable ammoung of things to unwrap. So it's no surprise how paradigms like those are not simple to change.
Short of an alien race coming down to Earth, enslaving all of us, killing half of Earth's population and then mandating everything we do essencially changing life how we know it, the fossil fueled vehicles paradigm will not vanish or fundamentally change in 8 years. Oh, and you know what also won't happen in 8 years... or ever? That Hyperloop crap. Mark my words.