That is the issue. VCs don't want anything but the tried and true. If the app slings ads, and it slurps up data to be sold for analytics, -boom- it gets funded. If your app actually does something useful, it won't. Look at the Meitu app as an example of the what is the Holy Grail of what is wanted by the VC people.
The ironic thing is that anything LTO-4 and newer come with AES encryption built into the tape drive. Set a password, make sure it is kept by important people, and forget about it. That way, if tapes go missing or fall out of the Iron Mountain van, it isn't good, but it doesn't mean disaster.
This. I'm on occasion at a couple farms where the closest town is at least 20 miles away. I've had good luck with T-Mobile, and even can stream YouTube without issue.
Even though I do worry about China (and tactics they have used in the past to get businesses on their soil), China seems to have very similar problems as the US. The US is also definitely two countries in one, with the rural areas and the urban areas (and the red/blue constant squabbling because one side doesn't have a clue about what the other side's needs are.)
I will say, there are some things China is getting "right". The idea of a middle class and not just tycoons and peasants was what allows the US to rise as a dominant world power, because it meant more people with access to not just tools and transportation, but education to make new things. Here in the US, access to education is becoming harder and harder.
China is also doing some basic things that are lacking here in the US. They are actually laying infrastructure, and have been. In 2008 when there were deals for cars, "cash for clunkers", China took about a trillion dollars and built roads, airports, laid fiber, and are modernizing. They are evolving, and are dealing with the same smog issues that we dealt with in the 50s/60s that were issues in Pittsburgh and LA. As they move from coal/oil to solar, we will see similar things happen, with cities winding up a lot more environmentally friendly.
My biggest fear is the "we/they" thing. A US/Sino war doesn't have to happen. Right now it doesn't seem like it, but there always can be a "Guns of August" which changes world from unease peace to a true war mentality on many fronts, similar to what happened in WW1.
This isn't a new item. In the 1990s, you could have a conversation with a VC, they were willing to fund a venture into completely uncharted waters, even it meant a miserable failure later.
These days, a VC won't plunk money on the line unless you have a way for them to immediately exit with them being richer. You have to run your startup yourself, then what will happen is that some company will make you a "deal you can't refuse" and your startup will be bought out. You also have to either be into analytics (i.e. have a new way to suck data from the end user), or advertising (pushing stuff at the end user) in order to have a chance at succeeding, much less having your startup become a unicorn.
Because PCs are open, and that is something considered Very Bad in today's industry. If you don't like Steam or Apple's App Store, you can download it from another source. The goal is for makers to wall the desktop environment in, providing not just a guaranteed revenue stream like Apple's 30% toll, but also be able to control the platform and suck more of that sweet, valued telemetry data, where nobody can do anything about it.
Plus, it would allow DRM to be added, so people with those pesky music files can't play them unless they are signed copies from the official store.
This sort of reminds me of the old Windows Starter Editions, but my cynical self makes me wonder if this is a trial balloon for upcoming releases of Windows. It benefits Microsoft a lot, because they will own the entire ecosystem similar to Apple, but even Apple wouldn't have this much of a lock on the desktop.
This. Farmers understand the concept of seeds, and tilling a field, if they expect a usable harvest. Why can't CEOs understand that if you eat your seed grain, come harvest time, there isn't anything usable in the fields.
China and India are already competing. Having domestic workers changes nothing on this front, other than the fact that it will get people in the US coming back to STEM majors as opposed to going to other vocations (no such thing as filling the barn with clueless H-1Bs in law, accounting, trades, construction, and other items.)
What will no H-1B abuse bring? A benefit to everyone in the US as a whole, as opposed to the money just being sent back to India to family and never seen again.
Solar is making a lot of strides. It is starting to cover peak energy, and as per a/. article a few months ago, it is becoming cheaper to deploy than coal (although I don't remember if this is TCO per terawatt, cost to deploy, or whatnot.)
Solar does have two bottlenecks. The first is energy storage, be it batteries, supercaps, flywheels, or using the energy to turn CO2 into a fuel. If someone makes a battery with 1/10 the energy density by volume of gasoline, transportation will be as radically changed as when the internal combustion went mainstream.
The second are charge controllers. PWM charge controllers are common, but MPPT controllers are what is really needed, and those are still relatively expensive, even though the only hardware difference is an inductor to allow for volts/amps to be changed around (PWM controllers only can reduce voltage.) If these get to an inexpensive price point, it will help significantly in energy obtained from solar panels for battery setups.
I like Apple products, but this turns my desktop into essentially a locked down iOS box. No development, no UNIX tools, no "vagrant up", what I would have is something less functional than a Chromebook for 20-50 times the cost.
Lenovo and Dell is running rings around Apple. I can buy a 13" laptop from Dell that is a better 13" MBP than the MBP. It has USB-C... but it has USB, a SD card slot, and everything else one would need or use on a daily basis. To boot, it is a fraction of the price. If I were gaga over the touch screen for the top row of keys... Lenovo has had that in the Carbon X1 for a while now (although the fact that there is no Caps Lock key and other keys are randomly rearranged makes it not a buy in my book.)
If macOS becomes so locked down that it is worthless, Windows 10 has its issues, but it is an acceptable replacement. If neither, there is always Linux.
I am not surprised that Apple wants to have all their shiny things running on their own ARM chips. It guarantees the walls in their walled garden are far higher. However, unlike days past where there was no acceptable alternative, Apple's competition is just as good, if not better on all fronts. Heck, even in the MS environment, I have not just WSL access, but if I need full Linux support, I can use Hyper-V and spin up a VM.
If locked down ARM machines is the future of Apple, then that's fine. They signed their death warrant in the marketplace come the next economic downturn.
It does have its advantages if needing to get supplies over terrain where even 4x4s may not cut it. I can see it usable for getting stuff to a place in the mountains should there be a disaster. If one had a convoy of these, it would make it fairly economical as opposed to using a helicopter. Other uses can be replacing bong sniffing dogs at an airport, since if something does go off, PETA doesn't care if a robot gets destroyed.
The thing about AV... it is there mainly to tick off a checkbox. Does it actually work? At best, it might catch a moldie oldie, but in reality, it will do nothing against major infection vectors like malvertising. In my experience, an ad blocker, setting "click to play" for content, and something like NoScript is far more effective than any AV will be. Mainly because when the AV utility detects things, it is usually too late.
So, because AV really can't do that much, might as have it use as little resources as possible and still at least be minimally effective against non zero-days.
These price hikes may benefit neither Amazon nor Oracle... people might just jump from Oracle to MS SQL Server and Azure, because Microsoft doesn't really care where you run SQL Server, as they make their cash regardless.
In my experience, I see businesses moving full tilt to AWS, regardless of how much it costs. If it means redesigning the DB's core schema to move to something AWS DB server friendly, forcing a rewrite of a ton of code, so be it.
Why would I have an intrusive social media platform be the gatekeeper for my recovery stuff? Too many eggs in one basket, and FB is many things, but they really don't have independent certification as a security provider.
My recovery tools for 2FA stuff is a printout of Google Authenticator codes stashed in my floor safe, and my iPod Touch.
The problem is that the industry as a whole is stagnating. Apple has been neglecting macOS and Mac hardware to the point where even dedicated Mac people are jumping ship. Microsoft can't really get much more cash from home users, so is viewing them as a product, not the customer, and is milking the home user market for everything they can, throwing ads, and adding telemetry data. Linux is going strong, but until end users can go to Office Depot and buy a copy of Turbotax and slap it on the machine, it will trail behind as a consumer OS.
It would be nice if Apple got on the ball and focused on Macs and macOS, or spin it off to another company (think FileMaker/Claris) that can hire independent engineers and teams that can focus on that product line to keep it ahead of the competition. It also would be nice for companies like Intuit to offer their products for Linux, making it a viable third option.
The problem is that the audio upgrades to CDs came with new DRM systems, making them useless for tossing onto a MP3 player or into a car's audio head. The best media format out there (digital that is) would be 48/96 (or higher quality) in FLAC.
LP is made for not just an audio experience. There is the large space for artwork, the physical medium, and the fact that it is a very simple thing that works fairly well.
I would say each has different audiences, similar to having a DVD player, as well as going to a movie theater. Same movie, different type of experience.
On SATA? Days to weeks would be my guess. With drives this size, RAID-6 isn't even enough. It really needs triple parity, especially with drive arrays that contain 8-10 drives, or with 12+, quad parity.
I'd like to see drive makers focus on reliability. Aerial density is quite high these days. Why not build in two different drive heads that can work in an active/active configuration (some drives about a decade ago had this ability), more ECC, bit-rot resistance, and more resistance to shock and vibration, as well as the other causes of data loss. Perhaps larger bad sector replacement tables as well.
Maybe even go for speciality drives. One drive type would be dedicated to long term archive storage (perhaps as a WORM format with UDF as a filesystem). Another drive type would improve on the SSHD concept, with 256-512GB of SSD, and a good amount of HDD, so shingled writes are less of a performance bottleneck. Still another drive type would have 2-4 different heads, SSD, and be designed for fast, sequential I/O.
Maybe add a new form factor. For example, a drive form factor that has a shock-resistant case so the drives can be used in lieu of a LTO tape, and supports hardware AES encryption, as well as a command to check the entire volume for bit rot and fix it, or at least tell that the volume has bad data on it.
I would agree. Microsoft is improving, and Apple isn't bothering to keep in the race. One of the attractions that Apple offered was that they could handle almost every aspect of bread-and-butter computing, from the network router/firewall to the backup device to the monitor to the computer. Now, they seem only interested in iOS, and Macs have suffered because of this.
I think Apple should spin off Macs and anything that isn't their core focus, similar to what they did with Claris/FileMaker. That way, they can focus on iOS, while a different company with a dedicated set of first-string engineers can focus on macOS and improving/refreshing the hardware. Maybe even some focus on making Macs enterprise friendly again, because one company purchase of 10,000 Macs is a lot easier than 10,000 sales of a single Mac to different people.
Browsers have pretty much replaced operating systems these days, so a browser has to have all the security features an OS does, because they execute untrusted code 24/7. Eventually OS makers will get smart, add tier 1 hypervisors, and have the browser be on its own VM with a separate memory and filesystem space, so a compromised browser doesn't hose the user.
The easiest way would be a checkbox to turn off all audio, and not have audio sites have an exception. Even better, a checkbox with a whitelist, so the few sites I want to listen to (i.e. YouTube) are OK, but everything else gets muted.
That is what Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey are for, as an addition to uBlock Origin. They help somewhat, but some sites still skitter around them. Definitely an arms race going on.
Didn't Jobs assume that websites would have this functionality with the first rev of the iPhone, thus it didn't have any additional apps at first?
I can see this functionality useful for limited time events, such as an app used during a music festival which runs for a few days and then is gone, but other than that, a website can do most of the ephemeral functionality, and an app can do more permanent, stateful stuff.
I much rather see fracking and coal production increased here in the US than another theater of combat in the Middle East.
If we get to a point where Iran can mine the Strait of Hormuz, and it has negligible effect for the US economy, this will not just be a victory for the country, but the world.
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That is the issue. VCs don't want anything but the tried and true. If the app slings ads, and it slurps up data to be sold for analytics, -boom- it gets funded. If your app actually does something useful, it won't. Look at the Meitu app as an example of the what is the Holy Grail of what is wanted by the VC people.
That's a HR/legal problem, not a tech problem. Securing tapes with encryption is IT's job. Which people are authorized tends to fall to management.
The ironic thing is that anything LTO-4 and newer come with AES encryption built into the tape drive. Set a password, make sure it is kept by important people, and forget about it. That way, if tapes go missing or fall out of the Iron Mountain van, it isn't good, but it doesn't mean disaster.
This. I'm on occasion at a couple farms where the closest town is at least 20 miles away. I've had good luck with T-Mobile, and even can stream YouTube without issue.
Even though I do worry about China (and tactics they have used in the past to get businesses on their soil), China seems to have very similar problems as the US. The US is also definitely two countries in one, with the rural areas and the urban areas (and the red/blue constant squabbling because one side doesn't have a clue about what the other side's needs are.)
I will say, there are some things China is getting "right". The idea of a middle class and not just tycoons and peasants was what allows the US to rise as a dominant world power, because it meant more people with access to not just tools and transportation, but education to make new things. Here in the US, access to education is becoming harder and harder.
China is also doing some basic things that are lacking here in the US. They are actually laying infrastructure, and have been. In 2008 when there were deals for cars, "cash for clunkers", China took about a trillion dollars and built roads, airports, laid fiber, and are modernizing. They are evolving, and are dealing with the same smog issues that we dealt with in the 50s/60s that were issues in Pittsburgh and LA. As they move from coal/oil to solar, we will see similar things happen, with cities winding up a lot more environmentally friendly.
My biggest fear is the "we/they" thing. A US/Sino war doesn't have to happen. Right now it doesn't seem like it, but there always can be a "Guns of August" which changes world from unease peace to a true war mentality on many fronts, similar to what happened in WW1.
This isn't a new item. In the 1990s, you could have a conversation with a VC, they were willing to fund a venture into completely uncharted waters, even it meant a miserable failure later.
These days, a VC won't plunk money on the line unless you have a way for them to immediately exit with them being richer. You have to run your startup yourself, then what will happen is that some company will make you a "deal you can't refuse" and your startup will be bought out. You also have to either be into analytics (i.e. have a new way to suck data from the end user), or advertising (pushing stuff at the end user) in order to have a chance at succeeding, much less having your startup become a unicorn.
Because PCs are open, and that is something considered Very Bad in today's industry. If you don't like Steam or Apple's App Store, you can download it from another source. The goal is for makers to wall the desktop environment in, providing not just a guaranteed revenue stream like Apple's 30% toll, but also be able to control the platform and suck more of that sweet, valued telemetry data, where nobody can do anything about it.
Plus, it would allow DRM to be added, so people with those pesky music files can't play them unless they are signed copies from the official store.
This sort of reminds me of the old Windows Starter Editions, but my cynical self makes me wonder if this is a trial balloon for upcoming releases of Windows. It benefits Microsoft a lot, because they will own the entire ecosystem similar to Apple, but even Apple wouldn't have this much of a lock on the desktop.
This. Farmers understand the concept of seeds, and tilling a field, if they expect a usable harvest. Why can't CEOs understand that if you eat your seed grain, come harvest time, there isn't anything usable in the fields.
China and India are already competing. Having domestic workers changes nothing on this front, other than the fact that it will get people in the US coming back to STEM majors as opposed to going to other vocations (no such thing as filling the barn with clueless H-1Bs in law, accounting, trades, construction, and other items.)
What will no H-1B abuse bring? A benefit to everyone in the US as a whole, as opposed to the money just being sent back to India to family and never seen again.
Solar is making a lot of strides. It is starting to cover peak energy, and as per a /. article a few months ago, it is becoming cheaper to deploy than coal (although I don't remember if this is TCO per terawatt, cost to deploy, or whatnot.)
Solar does have two bottlenecks. The first is energy storage, be it batteries, supercaps, flywheels, or using the energy to turn CO2 into a fuel. If someone makes a battery with 1/10 the energy density by volume of gasoline, transportation will be as radically changed as when the internal combustion went mainstream.
The second are charge controllers. PWM charge controllers are common, but MPPT controllers are what is really needed, and those are still relatively expensive, even though the only hardware difference is an inductor to allow for volts/amps to be changed around (PWM controllers only can reduce voltage.) If these get to an inexpensive price point, it will help significantly in energy obtained from solar panels for battery setups.
I like Apple products, but this turns my desktop into essentially a locked down iOS box. No development, no UNIX tools, no "vagrant up", what I would have is something less functional than a Chromebook for 20-50 times the cost.
Lenovo and Dell is running rings around Apple. I can buy a 13" laptop from Dell that is a better 13" MBP than the MBP. It has USB-C... but it has USB, a SD card slot, and everything else one would need or use on a daily basis. To boot, it is a fraction of the price. If I were gaga over the touch screen for the top row of keys... Lenovo has had that in the Carbon X1 for a while now (although the fact that there is no Caps Lock key and other keys are randomly rearranged makes it not a buy in my book.)
If macOS becomes so locked down that it is worthless, Windows 10 has its issues, but it is an acceptable replacement. If neither, there is always Linux.
I am not surprised that Apple wants to have all their shiny things running on their own ARM chips. It guarantees the walls in their walled garden are far higher. However, unlike days past where there was no acceptable alternative, Apple's competition is just as good, if not better on all fronts. Heck, even in the MS environment, I have not just WSL access, but if I need full Linux support, I can use Hyper-V and spin up a VM.
If locked down ARM machines is the future of Apple, then that's fine. They signed their death warrant in the marketplace come the next economic downturn.
It does have its advantages if needing to get supplies over terrain where even 4x4s may not cut it. I can see it usable for getting stuff to a place in the mountains should there be a disaster. If one had a convoy of these, it would make it fairly economical as opposed to using a helicopter. Other uses can be replacing bong sniffing dogs at an airport, since if something does go off, PETA doesn't care if a robot gets destroyed.
The thing about AV... it is there mainly to tick off a checkbox. Does it actually work? At best, it might catch a moldie oldie, but in reality, it will do nothing against major infection vectors like malvertising. In my experience, an ad blocker, setting "click to play" for content, and something like NoScript is far more effective than any AV will be. Mainly because when the AV utility detects things, it is usually too late.
So, because AV really can't do that much, might as have it use as little resources as possible and still at least be minimally effective against non zero-days.
These price hikes may benefit neither Amazon nor Oracle... people might just jump from Oracle to MS SQL Server and Azure, because Microsoft doesn't really care where you run SQL Server, as they make their cash regardless.
In my experience, I see businesses moving full tilt to AWS, regardless of how much it costs. If it means redesigning the DB's core schema to move to something AWS DB server friendly, forcing a rewrite of a ton of code, so be it.
Why would I have an intrusive social media platform be the gatekeeper for my recovery stuff? Too many eggs in one basket, and FB is many things, but they really don't have independent certification as a security provider.
My recovery tools for 2FA stuff is a printout of Google Authenticator codes stashed in my floor safe, and my iPod Touch.
The problem is that the industry as a whole is stagnating. Apple has been neglecting macOS and Mac hardware to the point where even dedicated Mac people are jumping ship. Microsoft can't really get much more cash from home users, so is viewing them as a product, not the customer, and is milking the home user market for everything they can, throwing ads, and adding telemetry data. Linux is going strong, but until end users can go to Office Depot and buy a copy of Turbotax and slap it on the machine, it will trail behind as a consumer OS.
It would be nice if Apple got on the ball and focused on Macs and macOS, or spin it off to another company (think FileMaker/Claris) that can hire independent engineers and teams that can focus on that product line to keep it ahead of the competition. It also would be nice for companies like Intuit to offer their products for Linux, making it a viable third option.
The problem is that the audio upgrades to CDs came with new DRM systems, making them useless for tossing onto a MP3 player or into a car's audio head. The best media format out there (digital that is) would be 48/96 (or higher quality) in FLAC.
LP is made for not just an audio experience. There is the large space for artwork, the physical medium, and the fact that it is a very simple thing that works fairly well.
I would say each has different audiences, similar to having a DVD player, as well as going to a movie theater. Same movie, different type of experience.
On SATA? Days to weeks would be my guess. With drives this size, RAID-6 isn't even enough. It really needs triple parity, especially with drive arrays that contain 8-10 drives, or with 12+, quad parity.
I'd like to see drive makers focus on reliability. Aerial density is quite high these days. Why not build in two different drive heads that can work in an active/active configuration (some drives about a decade ago had this ability), more ECC, bit-rot resistance, and more resistance to shock and vibration, as well as the other causes of data loss. Perhaps larger bad sector replacement tables as well.
Maybe even go for speciality drives. One drive type would be dedicated to long term archive storage (perhaps as a WORM format with UDF as a filesystem). Another drive type would improve on the SSHD concept, with 256-512GB of SSD, and a good amount of HDD, so shingled writes are less of a performance bottleneck. Still another drive type would have 2-4 different heads, SSD, and be designed for fast, sequential I/O.
Maybe add a new form factor. For example, a drive form factor that has a shock-resistant case so the drives can be used in lieu of a LTO tape, and supports hardware AES encryption, as well as a command to check the entire volume for bit rot and fix it, or at least tell that the volume has bad data on it.
I would agree. Microsoft is improving, and Apple isn't bothering to keep in the race. One of the attractions that Apple offered was that they could handle almost every aspect of bread-and-butter computing, from the network router/firewall to the backup device to the monitor to the computer. Now, they seem only interested in iOS, and Macs have suffered because of this.
I think Apple should spin off Macs and anything that isn't their core focus, similar to what they did with Claris/FileMaker. That way, they can focus on iOS, while a different company with a dedicated set of first-string engineers can focus on macOS and improving/refreshing the hardware. Maybe even some focus on making Macs enterprise friendly again, because one company purchase of 10,000 Macs is a lot easier than 10,000 sales of a single Mac to different people.
Browsers have pretty much replaced operating systems these days, so a browser has to have all the security features an OS does, because they execute untrusted code 24/7. Eventually OS makers will get smart, add tier 1 hypervisors, and have the browser be on its own VM with a separate memory and filesystem space, so a compromised browser doesn't hose the user.
The easiest way would be a checkbox to turn off all audio, and not have audio sites have an exception. Even better, a checkbox with a whitelist, so the few sites I want to listen to (i.e. YouTube) are OK, but everything else gets muted.
Nope... they will just sell audio ad space to all comers.
That is what Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey are for, as an addition to uBlock Origin. They help somewhat, but some sites still skitter around them. Definitely an arms race going on.
Didn't Jobs assume that websites would have this functionality with the first rev of the iPhone, thus it didn't have any additional apps at first?
I can see this functionality useful for limited time events, such as an app used during a music festival which runs for a few days and then is gone, but other than that, a website can do most of the ephemeral functionality, and an app can do more permanent, stateful stuff.
I much rather see fracking and coal production increased here in the US than another theater of combat in the Middle East.
If we get to a point where Iran can mine the Strait of Hormuz, and it has negligible effect for the US economy, this will not just be a victory for the country, but the world.