I will assert that the taxes to the -government- are not high in the US. However, there are "taxes", that one has fork over to businesses or else:
1: Health insurance. 2: Toll roads/commuting. There is no government interest in public transportation, so one has to have a vehicle and drive. This means forking over cash for car insurance, vehicle upkeep, parking, traffic costs, etc. 3: Pollution. 4: Potential losses due to sickness/injury. Those costs going to inscos don't mean that they might bother paying a hospital bill bursting with zeros. It is pretty common for someone to lose their entire fortune with one serious illness. 5: Unemployment. Not everyone has a 2 year "fuck you" fund. Benefits can be quite limited, if one can get them at all, since ex-employers fight unemployment claims tooth-and-nail as a matter of routine. 6: Training and education. When I was in college, my German classmate had his tuition paid for by the state. Same with my Russian, Chinese, French, English, and Indian classmates. I was the only one there forking out fees out of my pocket or getting student loans for it.
I would be more than happy to pay more in taxes, provided it gave single-payer health coverage, a usable public transportation system, some type of income if jobless for the short and long term, and education so I can keep relevant when job skills shift. In fact, if those things were covered by taxes, I'd be far better off financially, and I'm sure most people would be as well.
I'm hoping that more USB 3.1 arrays wind up on the market, because they can not just be used at a high speed, but work everywhere, be it a Mac, a newer PC, or heck, even an older PC running at a lower speed. Thunderbolt drives do run faster, but the bottleneck winds up being the drives or the array, and not the bus, so the added headroom that Thunderbolt gives isn't worth the cost in most cases.
For "slow" storage, NAS units from QNAP, Synology, etc. are ideal, just because they bring so much functionality to the table. They can do Time Machine backups, encryption, various sharing, as well as other low-end server tasks. Plus, they can back up to a cloud provider so if ransomware nukes a share, you can get it back easily, or (with some models) just roll back to a previous btrfs snapshot without having to do a full blown restore.
Ideally, Apple should ship a 256 GB NVMe SSD and a 1TB HDD, using that for a baseline Fusion configuration. For expanded stuff, the machine should have at least two NVMe slots (for SSD RAID), and a good amount of SATA slots with a hardware RAID controller that supports autotiering, and RAID 6.
I would not be surprised if Apple would never make a "Mac Pro Mini", just because they know that such a machine is -exactly- what buyers want. They want people to either buy cheaper Macs and toss them every few years, or go buy the top tier machines.
Back in 1995, Compaq had a desktop, the Compaq Pro, which could be placed either horizontally or vertically, and if need be, rack ears could be attached so it could be tossed into a frame and used that way.
If a PC maker can do this with a machine, then why can't Apple design a Mac Pro that would function as a tower, plopped horizontally as a place for a monitor, or have a way to flip out some eyelets for some rack rails? Done right, this would mean Apple wouldn't need to worry about an XServe form factor, but still have a usable server form factor for the data center.
Of course, it would be nice to see RAID-6 in macOS, or a good hardware RAID controller which can work well with HDDs and SSDs. It would be nice if Apple would refresh the Mac line more often as well, even if it is an incremental upgrade like Kaby Lake to Coffee Lake or whatnot.
APFS is definitely in production now, especially with the last iOS update which pushed it out to every recent device. Of course, my biggest beef about it is that it has no checksumming to detect bit rot, but it might be that Apple didn't add that functionality for performance reasons.
This just oozes stupid. To boot, we already had a company (VeriChip) already try this over a decade ago, to at best a ho-hum audience. Here is why this sucks:
1: The chip can't really be updated. If there is a security break, the insecure chip is there forever. 2: Someone can be looking for the company employees to target them. 3: With how employees are hired/fired, having an armful of chips will suck over time. 4: I read about bad reactions to these in animals. 5: This is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Nobody glues a mechanical key to their body for a reason.
If a company wants to ensure individuals can get in without an ID card, go with biometrics and a PIN, the biometrics being a "username", the PIN being the password. If a company wants higher security than a badge, have a badge + PIN, badge + biometrics, or all three. That will work for 99.99% of all security needs.
If I have to open an attachment, it goes in a VM with no virtual adapters. If it is a Trojan and craps all over the VM, oh well. I just roll back the snapshot.
This makes me wonder why we have not moved back to a Harvard architecture for fundamental computing. The #1 way that the bad guys get in is that data gets executed somehow, be it HTML, Flash, or anything winding in documents. Having separate data and code spaces would stop this line of attack cold.
I've been going to the Alamo Drafthouse for decades. The food is expensive, but it is decent. The beer selection is as good as you are going to get. Desserts are surprisingly good. The ushers hunt down texters and yappers methodically and without mercy.
How would the data be vulnerable to the VPN provider's ISP? The ISP I am using, their ISP, and everyone in between the endpoints sees a stream of encrypted traffic on port 1194. The ISPs can throttle or delay the traffic, but they can't really do much else.
Very true. However, for a lot of items, that isn't a big issue. I'm not running P2P clients, but oftentimes doing web browsing and such, where it doesn't take that much bandwidth.
There is always the option of creating a VPN server on AWS, but I'd just rather use a known good service which can be cheaper.
With ISPs, you can't really choose who gives you the pipe to your home or school. You may have a telco, and a cable company, if that.
With VPNs, if one is found to be selling data, you can switch in a heartbeat.
Then, there are the privacy policies. A VPN having a privacy policy of not handing your traffic over will get in a lot more trouble if they sell that data than an ISP that has a privacy policy of "if it goes through our fiber, we can do what we please with it."
VPNs are not perfect... but they do help significantly. It is sad that things have come down to this, as it makes police work a lot harder once the bad guys "go dark", but people are tired of having their data sold, or advertising IDs added to non-encrypted traffic.
That is true. Samsung may have their own OS, but what sells phones is the app ecosystem. I would assert that Windows phones have a decent OS, but what brutalized them wasn't the OS, but the relative paucity of apps and developers writing for the platform. Samsung is a strong company, but convincing developers to write apps for only their hardware and only their OS would be an uphill battle.
Where Android excels at is running on inexpensive devices and having an open app market. This is only going to be more important over time as the middle class in the US and Europe shrink, where that latest and greatest smartphone may not be something people want, because they have rent to pay or food to eat. Plus, a midrange or even entry level smartphone is good enough for almost everything.
The reason Google allowed carriers to do what they pleased with Android was to speed up market adaptation. It was either give in to get all the arguing carriers onto one OS and app standard or have the entire cellphone market completely and utterly swept aside by Apple.
Thankfully there are better choices. Unlocked phones are not too expensive. Buy one, use the OEM ROM that isn't beholden to any carrier.
VPNs are a lot more sensitive to bad press, because they can be tossed and another one picked up pretty easily. ISPs, you likely have the telco or cable, and that's it. VPNs also offer much better privacy guarantees.
Plus, VPNs also protect against a lot of attacks, from FireSheep-like spoofing of HTTP headers to adding additional HTTP headers for identifying reasons into every handshake, which two ISPs did a few years ago so sites could ID even "anonymous" users. It also locks out people trying to attack via spoofed Wi-Fi networks as well.
The tinfoil hatter in me makes me wonder if it is because the Snapdragon is more resistant to unlocking the bootloader or rooting, while other countries don't really give a rat's ass about that.
The average theater is going to not make it. However, chains like the Alamo Drafthouse are still making money hand over fist, just because they offer not just a baby-free, cellphone-free, and chatter-free experience, but decent food and suds.
Theater chains like AMC may still be around for entertaining kids or whatnot, and they will still have a spot, but their market share will definitely shrink. The days of grabbing a XL Coke and popcorn and considering that as decent food are gone.
The ironic thing is that both the preppers I know and the hippies both actually like photo-voltaic technology. One camp likes it because it is off grid and frees them from being dependent on a central electricity system. Another camp likes it because it is not throwing pollution into the air. Plus, it is pretty foolproof. You can get electrocuted or have a panel fall on your head... but for the most part, setup is idiot resistant, especially compared to almost any other power generation out there. Plus, once set up, it requires little upkeep other than battery watering (if lead-acid or NiFe.)
Solar power has almost zero downsides. The only thing is requires is energy storage technology, and that eventually will get there, especially with China and other countries looking into this.
I've found that the charger you are using makes a difference. If it is a PWM charger that cuts the voltage down to whatever the batteries take, you can lose 25-50% of the incoming wattage. For example (and note, these figures vary widely in real life since batteries require different voltages in different charging stages), a 24 volt panel feeding a PWM charger that is using a 12 volt battery, the PWM charger will not use 12 volts of the 24 coming in. However, a MPPT controller will reduce the voltage and double the amperage.
The difference is quite noticeable when it comes to smaller applications.
Panels that are cheap for areas such as building roofs where grabbing every last watt isn't such a big deal, due to the availability of space. It is just getting the solar cells on the area that is the main thing.
Panels where surface area is hard to obtain (satellites is one example.) where every watt is precious. A more realistic example are solar panels on class "B" motorhomes (campervans.) There isn't much in the way of square footage, so the trick is to maximize what can be gotten.
Similar argument can be made regarding PWM versus MPPT controllers. You can buy a PWM controller for $8 which "lops off" excess voltage and passes the batteries what it needs. MPPT controllers require an inductor and coil to change volts into amps and vice versa, so are usually an order of magnitude more expensive... but for areas where space is precious, they allow more energy to hit the batteries.
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I will assert that the taxes to the -government- are not high in the US. However, there are "taxes", that one has fork over to businesses or else:
1: Health insurance.
2: Toll roads/commuting. There is no government interest in public transportation, so one has to have a vehicle and drive. This means forking over cash for car insurance, vehicle upkeep, parking, traffic costs, etc.
3: Pollution.
4: Potential losses due to sickness/injury. Those costs going to inscos don't mean that they might bother paying a hospital bill bursting with zeros. It is pretty common for someone to lose their entire fortune with one serious illness.
5: Unemployment. Not everyone has a 2 year "fuck you" fund. Benefits can be quite limited, if one can get them at all, since ex-employers fight unemployment claims tooth-and-nail as a matter of routine.
6: Training and education. When I was in college, my German classmate had his tuition paid for by the state. Same with my Russian, Chinese, French, English, and Indian classmates. I was the only one there forking out fees out of my pocket or getting student loans for it.
I would be more than happy to pay more in taxes, provided it gave single-payer health coverage, a usable public transportation system, some type of income if jobless for the short and long term, and education so I can keep relevant when job skills shift. In fact, if those things were covered by taxes, I'd be far better off financially, and I'm sure most people would be as well.
I'm hoping that more USB 3.1 arrays wind up on the market, because they can not just be used at a high speed, but work everywhere, be it a Mac, a newer PC, or heck, even an older PC running at a lower speed. Thunderbolt drives do run faster, but the bottleneck winds up being the drives or the array, and not the bus, so the added headroom that Thunderbolt gives isn't worth the cost in most cases.
For "slow" storage, NAS units from QNAP, Synology, etc. are ideal, just because they bring so much functionality to the table. They can do Time Machine backups, encryption, various sharing, as well as other low-end server tasks. Plus, they can back up to a cloud provider so if ransomware nukes a share, you can get it back easily, or (with some models) just roll back to a previous btrfs snapshot without having to do a full blown restore.
Ideally, Apple should ship a 256 GB NVMe SSD and a 1TB HDD, using that for a baseline Fusion configuration. For expanded stuff, the machine should have at least two NVMe slots (for SSD RAID), and a good amount of SATA slots with a hardware RAID controller that supports autotiering, and RAID 6.
I would not be surprised if Apple would never make a "Mac Pro Mini", just because they know that such a machine is -exactly- what buyers want. They want people to either buy cheaper Macs and toss them every few years, or go buy the top tier machines.
Back in 1995, Compaq had a desktop, the Compaq Pro, which could be placed either horizontally or vertically, and if need be, rack ears could be attached so it could be tossed into a frame and used that way.
If a PC maker can do this with a machine, then why can't Apple design a Mac Pro that would function as a tower, plopped horizontally as a place for a monitor, or have a way to flip out some eyelets for some rack rails? Done right, this would mean Apple wouldn't need to worry about an XServe form factor, but still have a usable server form factor for the data center.
Of course, it would be nice to see RAID-6 in macOS, or a good hardware RAID controller which can work well with HDDs and SSDs. It would be nice if Apple would refresh the Mac line more often as well, even if it is an incremental upgrade like Kaby Lake to Coffee Lake or whatnot.
There is one advantage of the USB-C connector over MagSafe. When the wire starts fraying, you just buy a new cable, as opposed to a new charger.
APFS is definitely in production now, especially with the last iOS update which pushed it out to every recent device. Of course, my biggest beef about it is that it has no checksumming to detect bit rot, but it might be that Apple didn't add that functionality for performance reasons.
This just oozes stupid. To boot, we already had a company (VeriChip) already try this over a decade ago, to at best a ho-hum audience. Here is why this sucks:
1: The chip can't really be updated. If there is a security break, the insecure chip is there forever.
2: Someone can be looking for the company employees to target them.
3: With how employees are hired/fired, having an armful of chips will suck over time.
4: I read about bad reactions to these in animals.
5: This is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Nobody glues a mechanical key to their body for a reason.
If a company wants to ensure individuals can get in without an ID card, go with biometrics and a PIN, the biometrics being a "username", the PIN being the password. If a company wants higher security than a badge, have a badge + PIN, badge + biometrics, or all three. That will work for 99.99% of all security needs.
Nope, companies will just start abusing L-1 or even B-1 visas. The fines are so low that it would be just written off as a cost of doing business.
If I have to open an attachment, it goes in a VM with no virtual adapters. If it is a Trojan and craps all over the VM, oh well. I just roll back the snapshot.
This makes me wonder why we have not moved back to a Harvard architecture for fundamental computing. The #1 way that the bad guys get in is that data gets executed somehow, be it HTML, Flash, or anything winding in documents. Having separate data and code spaces would stop this line of attack cold.
I've been going to the Alamo Drafthouse for decades. The food is expensive, but it is decent. The beer selection is as good as you are going to get. Desserts are surprisingly good. The ushers hunt down texters and yappers methodically and without mercy.
How would the data be vulnerable to the VPN provider's ISP? The ISP I am using, their ISP, and everyone in between the endpoints sees a stream of encrypted traffic on port 1194. The ISPs can throttle or delay the traffic, but they can't really do much else.
This. I wonder what he would get if he analyzed for pay services like HMA, VyprVPN, SwissVPN, ipredator, and other commercial offerings.
Very true. However, for a lot of items, that isn't a big issue. I'm not running P2P clients, but oftentimes doing web browsing and such, where it doesn't take that much bandwidth.
There is always the option of creating a VPN server on AWS, but I'd just rather use a known good service which can be cheaper.
With ISPs, you can't really choose who gives you the pipe to your home or school. You may have a telco, and a cable company, if that.
With VPNs, if one is found to be selling data, you can switch in a heartbeat.
Then, there are the privacy policies. A VPN having a privacy policy of not handing your traffic over will get in a lot more trouble if they sell that data than an ISP that has a privacy policy of "if it goes through our fiber, we can do what we please with it."
VPNs are not perfect... but they do help significantly. It is sad that things have come down to this, as it makes police work a lot harder once the bad guys "go dark", but people are tired of having their data sold, or advertising IDs added to non-encrypted traffic.
That is true. Samsung may have their own OS, but what sells phones is the app ecosystem. I would assert that Windows phones have a decent OS, but what brutalized them wasn't the OS, but the relative paucity of apps and developers writing for the platform. Samsung is a strong company, but convincing developers to write apps for only their hardware and only their OS would be an uphill battle.
Where Android excels at is running on inexpensive devices and having an open app market. This is only going to be more important over time as the middle class in the US and Europe shrink, where that latest and greatest smartphone may not be something people want, because they have rent to pay or food to eat. Plus, a midrange or even entry level smartphone is good enough for almost everything.
The reason Google allowed carriers to do what they pleased with Android was to speed up market adaptation. It was either give in to get all the arguing carriers onto one OS and app standard or have the entire cellphone market completely and utterly swept aside by Apple.
Thankfully there are better choices. Unlocked phones are not too expensive. Buy one, use the OEM ROM that isn't beholden to any carrier.
Correction: Use a VPN regardless.
VPNs are a lot more sensitive to bad press, because they can be tossed and another one picked up pretty easily. ISPs, you likely have the telco or cable, and that's it. VPNs also offer much better privacy guarantees.
Plus, VPNs also protect against a lot of attacks, from FireSheep-like spoofing of HTTP headers to adding additional HTTP headers for identifying reasons into every handshake, which two ISPs did a few years ago so sites could ID even "anonymous" users. It also locks out people trying to attack via spoofed Wi-Fi networks as well.
The tinfoil hatter in me makes me wonder if it is because the Snapdragon is more resistant to unlocking the bootloader or rooting, while other countries don't really give a rat's ass about that.
The average theater is going to not make it. However, chains like the Alamo Drafthouse are still making money hand over fist, just because they offer not just a baby-free, cellphone-free, and chatter-free experience, but decent food and suds.
Theater chains like AMC may still be around for entertaining kids or whatnot, and they will still have a spot, but their market share will definitely shrink. The days of grabbing a XL Coke and popcorn and considering that as decent food are gone.
The ironic thing is that both the preppers I know and the hippies both actually like photo-voltaic technology. One camp likes it because it is off grid and frees them from being dependent on a central electricity system. Another camp likes it because it is not throwing pollution into the air. Plus, it is pretty foolproof. You can get electrocuted or have a panel fall on your head... but for the most part, setup is idiot resistant, especially compared to almost any other power generation out there. Plus, once set up, it requires little upkeep other than battery watering (if lead-acid or NiFe.)
Solar power has almost zero downsides. The only thing is requires is energy storage technology, and that eventually will get there, especially with China and other countries looking into this.
I've found that the charger you are using makes a difference. If it is a PWM charger that cuts the voltage down to whatever the batteries take, you can lose 25-50% of the incoming wattage. For example (and note, these figures vary widely in real life since batteries require different voltages in different charging stages), a 24 volt panel feeding a PWM charger that is using a 12 volt battery, the PWM charger will not use 12 volts of the 24 coming in. However, a MPPT controller will reduce the voltage and double the amperage.
The difference is quite noticeable when it comes to smaller applications.
We need both:
Panels that are cheap for areas such as building roofs where grabbing every last watt isn't such a big deal, due to the availability of space. It is just getting the solar cells on the area that is the main thing.
Panels where surface area is hard to obtain (satellites is one example.) where every watt is precious. A more realistic example are solar panels on class "B" motorhomes (campervans.) There isn't much in the way of square footage, so the trick is to maximize what can be gotten.
Similar argument can be made regarding PWM versus MPPT controllers. You can buy a PWM controller for $8 which "lops off" excess voltage and passes the batteries what it needs. MPPT controllers require an inductor and coil to change volts into amps and vice versa, so are usually an order of magnitude more expensive... but for areas where space is precious, they allow more energy to hit the batteries.
I've made jokes about a fleshlight app... scary to think that may wind up a reality.