The monopoly commission should investigate exFAT... It's not the best filesystem on offer, there are many much better filesystems which are more suitable for use on flash media, and which are available royalty free... The only reason anyone even considers exfat is because microsoft will intentionally never support anything else.
Even with access to the source, we're talking about running services rather than code you run on your own hardware. There is no reason to believe that the source they provide is the same as they're running, and there's no way to tell who else has access to their systems.
Most other big providers such as google and yahoo run most of their stuff on open source software, so while we have the code we have no way to tell what they're doing with it.
Or they can simply provision the availability of service at the boundary of your property, and make it your responsibility to deal with getting it across your own private land (or not, if you dont want the service).
Note that at some point every service anyone uses will have had to cross private land in that way, any house built before the days or electricity, sewerage, telephone and running water had to have these services retrofitted at some point. Installing fibre is simply the next logical step on from installing copper telephone wires.
Sure, it is often more expensive to replace something when it catastrophically breaks, and your more likely to screw the process up because at that point you no longer have the luxury of being able to plan the transition. That said, IT departments are often sailing on luck alone, lots of places have no redundancy, no DR plan, no backups, massive easily exploitable security holes etc and yet they get away with it out of pure luck. So this crufty old system that needs replacing may well continue running for a long time.
The problem is that upper management rarely understands IT, they see it as a necessary but unwanted cost and will try to minimise it. They also rarely see any downside to minimising costs.
And then those who do understand IT are generally not very good at explaining things to those who don't, or they create the wrong image (geeky etc) which causes upper management to disrespect their opinion.
Plus the inherent complexities of the problem... Someone who is extremely competent will be able to keep a system running on a low budget, but not everyone is so competent and the typical people doing the hiring aren't qualified to judge IT competence, plus while a lot can be done with a small budget and lots of knowledge there is still a limit... Also its possible to make a lot of extremely poor decisions in IT and simply get lucky... You can do with no redundancy, no DR plan, poor security etc and if your lucky nothing will go wrong and you won't get hacked. A lot of companies are in this boat, basically riding along on luck with a highly risky setup.
Upper management focuses on the bottom line because thats what they understand, it is their core business and they founded the business or were hired into a high position in it specifically because they understand it... They often don't understand other areas of business, and will often trust the wrong people (ie salesmen instead of their own staff) when it comes to matters they themselves don't understand.
Another serious problem is short term thinking... Your existing IT system may be slow, unreliable, clunky, but it limps along and the staff are familiar with it... If you replace it, users will have to get used to the new system, a new way of working and probably a new set of bugs to work around. A new system may cost a lot to implement, may result in a long period of reduced efficiency as staff get used to it etc.
And then you have history, many IT projects promise to deliver all manner of amazing improvements, but the reality when implemented can often be a system which is worse than what it replaced. This happens in a number of ways, external salesmen talk up a product which is nowhere near as good as they claim, the purchasing decision is made by upper management or by IT without any involvement of the people who will actually be expected to use the system. And on the flip side, those people expected to use the system will often resent and resist change simply because they've had experience with poorly implemented systems in the past.
So you have a lot of hurdles to overcome implementing a new system, and although the end result *can* be a significant improvement, often it's not and in the short term there will often be a negative impact to the bottom line.
A lot of people just overwork themselves trying to get everything done... If they succeed, then management think everything is just fine and ignore the fact you've been working twice your contracted hours to get everything done. As far as they're concerned, the existing staff are achieving everything required in the contracted hours and they have no need for extra staff. If you keep working like this it creates precedence and upper management will expect things to continue the same.
They will only take notice if there is an obvious problem, ie projects getting delayed and other areas of the business complaining about the delays.
The problem is if you suddenly stop overworking yourself and doing so causes these delays, management won't accept that you were overworking before, they will assume that you were doing your contracted hours before and are therefore slacking now.
A skilled driver would realise that in situations where he doesn't have sufficient visibility, or there are other unpredictable obstacles, that he needs to slow down in order to remain safe.
They're quite suitable.. They were used by plenty of non technical users for several decades.
And the end result has been an epidemic of malware... People used them because they didn't have anything better available.
Tablets and 'smart' phones are a recent development, and are really only adequate for a small subset of the uses a PC has, and ideal for none of them.
The real development is not so much the tablet and smart phone, but the walled garden that came along with them... Look at ChromeOS for an example, a system which removes the unnecessary complexity from the user and allows them to get on with what they're doing safely and without requiring in depth knowledge of the system. Games consoles are another such example, and have been around a lot longer.
Not just that such machines are overkill, full blown computers running traditional systems are for geeks, and are unsuitable for typical users.
Users do not want to constantly be installing updates, they do not want to worry about security and they do not want to be braving random potentially malicious websites to install software.
They want (and indeed need) a walled garden, where they have a central place from which to get software which they know won't be malicious.
Only a small niche of people can safely deal with the complexities of traditional computers, so the market will contract as people who were previously using devices which are unsuitable for their needs move on to more suitable devices.
Many older vehicles don't have ESP or ABS at all... Should these vehicles be made illegal? Lower end vehicles often don't have such features either, should these also be illegal?
Such features are never even used except under exceptional circumstances, and those circumstances usually mean the road conditions are dangerous (eg ice, snow) or you are doing something illegal like speeding or tailgating.
Chances are that even without ABS, the Porsche can stop quicker than most vehicles due to larger brakes and better grip from the wheels etc.
Which is why we have speed limits, and other road rules eg "drive as close to the speed limit as it is safe to do so"...
A skilled driver in an appropriate vehicle and good conditions could drive through town at 100+mph and not hit anything, and yet the speed limit is typically 30mph to give a larger margin for error. If you are driving in sub optimal conditions, or when tired, or in a car not suited to the conditions then you should slow down to give yourself more room. You only need 100% accurate decision making if your pushing the car close to its limits, and you should never be doing that on public roads. Driving around at 30mph you don't have much need for stability control.
I should add that there are lots of lowend cars out there which have little or no safety features, but also little or no performance... It is only the combination of high performance, few safety features *and* a poor driver which makes such cars dangerous.
And just because a car is capable of high performance, doesn't mean you have to drive it that way, or that you should drive it in such a way when the conditions are not safe to do so. There's nothing to stop you plodding around town in a high performance car, and taking advantage of the performance by going to a racing track.
I drive a relatively high performance car, which does have a fair number of safety features (many of which can be turned off), and i'm fully aware that it's usually not safe to push the car.. So the vast majority of my driving is done using only a small fraction of what the car is capable of. If i were to drive like a retard i could easily kill myself, kill others and/or destroy the car.
Many lowend cars don't have stability control at all, and when driving within the speed limit on reasonable roads it's not needed. Typically you only get such features on higher end cars, you almost always have the ability to turn it off, and even with a powerful car you shouldn't need it under normal road driving conditions. And even if you are blatantly breaking the speed limit, a lower end car is likely to lose control at far lower speeds than a porsche. Sure lower end cars arent going to be able to accelerate as quick but they can still go quickly enough to be dangerous if poorly driven or in bad conditions.
Many people hold on to bitcoins, especially with their value increasing at the current rate...
Many people don't hold on to traditional currencies, and exchange them for goods/services almost as soon as they get them, lots of people live from one payday to the next like this.
Components which are the same on every console, giving developers the chance to bypass any driver layers and program the hardware directly in order to get better performance from it.
Current generation ASICS are capable of hashing bitcoin faster than supercomputers, which consist of thousands of high end CPUs running 24/7... Your network of compromised computers won't all be running 24/7, won't all be the latest processors and won't have exclusive use of the CPU...
Incidentally this article isn't talking about bitcoin, but about an alternative coin which works similarly to bitcoin but using a different proof of work algorithm, one that is designed to be less suited to GPU and ASIC implementation, while also being less popular and thus having less competition (and much lower value).
You won't get to a situation where noone is mining at all, as those for who mining is no longer profitable stop mining the share of profits for those who remains will go up and the difficulty goes down. Eventually you will hit a plateau where the people with cheap electricity and the latest asics will make money and noone else will bother.
This is exactly why walled gardens are taking off, traditional computers are simply not suitable for average users as they require users to know how to avoid malicious sites while working out which ones are not malicious, and all manner of other crap.
If a number of different governments, or different government agencies get together (or even with other non government organisations) and develop software jointly, the individual cost will be much less... One of the main benefits of open source is that you don't need to fund all of the development yourself, other people will have similar requirements and you can share the development costs. This is exactly how commercial software works too, only in the commercial case you have an extra non essential middleman between end users and developers who wants to make a very large profit.
It's more likely that a large food processing factory will do several things with the carrots and broccoli...
1, use more of the spoiled/bad vegetables that most people would discard 2, use less vegetables and add more cheap filler materials to bulk out the product 3, use more fat, salt, msg etc to improve the flavor (which may have been ruined by the filler materials) in the cheapest way possible 4, replace other ingredients with cheaper substitutions wherever possible, again using more salt/fat/msg/etc to try and disguise the difference
If carrots and broccoli are sold in their original form you can see what they are, and you can see that unknown substances have not been mixed in to bulk them out. The same can't be said of a processed product, where the end result will usually make it very difficult if not impossible to identify the source ingredients and processes used.
Companies want to reduce costs in order to increase profits, and profits are considered far more important than customer satisfaction or health. Processed foods allow them to hide all manner of things that people would disapprove of and which might alter their purchasing decision. I doubt you'd buy a 200g pack of broccoli if it came with 50g of broccoli and a 150g blob of grey paste and instructions to blend them together and then reform it in broccoli shaped moulds to get the final product.
And over the many years that humans have lived on this planet we have learned which naturally occurring items should not be consumed. That's why only some naturally occurring items are considered to be "food" and other things are not.
Also its not necessarily "processing" that people have a problem with, its the underhanded and greedy methods of the food processing companies who will mix in all manner of nasty crap that we wouldn't normally want to eat. Some of us like to know exactly what we're eating.
What i also absolutely detest is "new improved recipe", where "new" and "improved" mean that its now cheaper to produce but probably doesn't taste as good. There are all manner of products i used to buy but which now either taste revolting or contain substances i wouldn't want to consume. If you change the recipe you should be forced to change the brand too, if the recipe is different then you've create a new different product.
Electric cars cost considerably more than traditional vehicles, such that the extra cost of the vehicle outweighs the savings made from running it. Electric cars would be good for people who do high mileage, only they don't have sufficient range for that.
And herein lies the problem... It used to be common to return empty bottles etc, but at least in the UK that's never done anymore. You *can* turn in your bottles for recycling, but you have to make an extra stop to do so and there is no incentive offered. If they offered a rebate for returned bottles and accepted them in store like they do in other countries, a lot more people would do that.
Also on the point of recycling bottles, they should clean and refill the bottles rather than melting them down... It is a colossal waste of energy to melt a glass/plastic bottle only to them make another identical bottle.
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The PS4/XB1 will remain the same spec, while PC hardware advances... Before too long it won't be very difficult at all.
The monopoly commission should investigate exFAT...
It's not the best filesystem on offer, there are many much better filesystems which are more suitable for use on flash media, and which are available royalty free... The only reason anyone even considers exfat is because microsoft will intentionally never support anything else.
Even with access to the source, we're talking about running services rather than code you run on your own hardware. There is no reason to believe that the source they provide is the same as they're running, and there's no way to tell who else has access to their systems.
Most other big providers such as google and yahoo run most of their stuff on open source software, so while we have the code we have no way to tell what they're doing with it.
Or they can simply provision the availability of service at the boundary of your property, and make it your responsibility to deal with getting it across your own private land (or not, if you dont want the service).
Note that at some point every service anyone uses will have had to cross private land in that way, any house built before the days or electricity, sewerage, telephone and running water had to have these services retrofitted at some point. Installing fibre is simply the next logical step on from installing copper telephone wires.
Sure, it is often more expensive to replace something when it catastrophically breaks, and your more likely to screw the process up because at that point you no longer have the luxury of being able to plan the transition.
That said, IT departments are often sailing on luck alone, lots of places have no redundancy, no DR plan, no backups, massive easily exploitable security holes etc and yet they get away with it out of pure luck. So this crufty old system that needs replacing may well continue running for a long time.
The problem is that upper management rarely understands IT, they see it as a necessary but unwanted cost and will try to minimise it. They also rarely see any downside to minimising costs.
And then those who do understand IT are generally not very good at explaining things to those who don't, or they create the wrong image (geeky etc) which causes upper management to disrespect their opinion.
Plus the inherent complexities of the problem...
Someone who is extremely competent will be able to keep a system running on a low budget, but not everyone is so competent and the typical people doing the hiring aren't qualified to judge IT competence, plus while a lot can be done with a small budget and lots of knowledge there is still a limit...
Also its possible to make a lot of extremely poor decisions in IT and simply get lucky... You can do with no redundancy, no DR plan, poor security etc and if your lucky nothing will go wrong and you won't get hacked. A lot of companies are in this boat, basically riding along on luck with a highly risky setup.
Upper management focuses on the bottom line because thats what they understand, it is their core business and they founded the business or were hired into a high position in it specifically because they understand it... They often don't understand other areas of business, and will often trust the wrong people (ie salesmen instead of their own staff) when it comes to matters they themselves don't understand.
Another serious problem is short term thinking... Your existing IT system may be slow, unreliable, clunky, but it limps along and the staff are familiar with it... If you replace it, users will have to get used to the new system, a new way of working and probably a new set of bugs to work around. A new system may cost a lot to implement, may result in a long period of reduced efficiency as staff get used to it etc.
And then you have history, many IT projects promise to deliver all manner of amazing improvements, but the reality when implemented can often be a system which is worse than what it replaced. This happens in a number of ways, external salesmen talk up a product which is nowhere near as good as they claim, the purchasing decision is made by upper management or by IT without any involvement of the people who will actually be expected to use the system.
And on the flip side, those people expected to use the system will often resent and resist change simply because they've had experience with poorly implemented systems in the past.
So you have a lot of hurdles to overcome implementing a new system, and although the end result *can* be a significant improvement, often it's not and in the short term there will often be a negative impact to the bottom line.
A lot of people just overwork themselves trying to get everything done... If they succeed, then management think everything is just fine and ignore the fact you've been working twice your contracted hours to get everything done. As far as they're concerned, the existing staff are achieving everything required in the contracted hours and they have no need for extra staff. If you keep working like this it creates precedence and upper management will expect things to continue the same.
They will only take notice if there is an obvious problem, ie projects getting delayed and other areas of the business complaining about the delays.
The problem is if you suddenly stop overworking yourself and doing so causes these delays, management won't accept that you were overworking before, they will assume that you were doing your contracted hours before and are therefore slacking now.
A skilled driver would realise that in situations where he doesn't have sufficient visibility, or there are other unpredictable obstacles, that he needs to slow down in order to remain safe.
They're quite suitable.. They were used by plenty of non technical users for several decades.
And the end result has been an epidemic of malware... People used them because they didn't have anything better available.
Tablets and 'smart' phones are a recent development, and are really only adequate for a small subset of the uses a PC has, and ideal for none of them.
The real development is not so much the tablet and smart phone, but the walled garden that came along with them... Look at ChromeOS for an example, a system which removes the unnecessary complexity from the user and allows them to get on with what they're doing safely and without requiring in depth knowledge of the system.
Games consoles are another such example, and have been around a lot longer.
Not just that such machines are overkill, full blown computers running traditional systems are for geeks, and are unsuitable for typical users.
Users do not want to constantly be installing updates, they do not want to worry about security and they do not want to be braving random potentially malicious websites to install software.
They want (and indeed need) a walled garden, where they have a central place from which to get software which they know won't be malicious.
Only a small niche of people can safely deal with the complexities of traditional computers, so the market will contract as people who were previously using devices which are unsuitable for their needs move on to more suitable devices.
Many older vehicles don't have ESP or ABS at all... Should these vehicles be made illegal?
Lower end vehicles often don't have such features either, should these also be illegal?
Such features are never even used except under exceptional circumstances, and those circumstances usually mean the road conditions are dangerous (eg ice, snow) or you are doing something illegal like speeding or tailgating.
Chances are that even without ABS, the Porsche can stop quicker than most vehicles due to larger brakes and better grip from the wheels etc.
Which is why we have speed limits, and other road rules eg "drive as close to the speed limit as it is safe to do so"...
A skilled driver in an appropriate vehicle and good conditions could drive through town at 100+mph and not hit anything, and yet the speed limit is typically 30mph to give a larger margin for error. If you are driving in sub optimal conditions, or when tired, or in a car not suited to the conditions then you should slow down to give yourself more room. You only need 100% accurate decision making if your pushing the car close to its limits, and you should never be doing that on public roads. Driving around at 30mph you don't have much need for stability control.
I should add that there are lots of lowend cars out there which have little or no safety features, but also little or no performance...
It is only the combination of high performance, few safety features *and* a poor driver which makes such cars dangerous.
And just because a car is capable of high performance, doesn't mean you have to drive it that way, or that you should drive it in such a way when the conditions are not safe to do so. There's nothing to stop you plodding around town in a high performance car, and taking advantage of the performance by going to a racing track.
I drive a relatively high performance car, which does have a fair number of safety features (many of which can be turned off), and i'm fully aware that it's usually not safe to push the car.. So the vast majority of my driving is done using only a small fraction of what the car is capable of. If i were to drive like a retard i could easily kill myself, kill others and/or destroy the car.
Many lowend cars don't have stability control at all, and when driving within the speed limit on reasonable roads it's not needed.
Typically you only get such features on higher end cars, you almost always have the ability to turn it off, and even with a powerful car you shouldn't need it under normal road driving conditions.
And even if you are blatantly breaking the speed limit, a lower end car is likely to lose control at far lower speeds than a porsche. Sure lower end cars arent going to be able to accelerate as quick but they can still go quickly enough to be dangerous if poorly driven or in bad conditions.
Many people hold on to bitcoins, especially with their value increasing at the current rate...
Many people don't hold on to traditional currencies, and exchange them for goods/services almost as soon as they get them, lots of people live from one payday to the next like this.
This aspect of trust is no different to existing banks, and it is the reason why banks started to be regulated and insured.
Just as it was for the first gen xbox...
Components which are the same on every console, giving developers the chance to bypass any driver layers and program the hardware directly in order to get better performance from it.
Current generation ASICS are capable of hashing bitcoin faster than supercomputers, which consist of thousands of high end CPUs running 24/7...
Your network of compromised computers won't all be running 24/7, won't all be the latest processors and won't have exclusive use of the CPU...
Incidentally this article isn't talking about bitcoin, but about an alternative coin which works similarly to bitcoin but using a different proof of work algorithm, one that is designed to be less suited to GPU and ASIC implementation, while also being less popular and thus having less competition (and much lower value).
You won't get to a situation where noone is mining at all, as those for who mining is no longer profitable stop mining the share of profits for those who remains will go up and the difficulty goes down. Eventually you will hit a plateau where the people with cheap electricity and the latest asics will make money and noone else will bother.
This is exactly why walled gardens are taking off, traditional computers are simply not suitable for average users as they require users to know how to avoid malicious sites while working out which ones are not malicious, and all manner of other crap.
If a number of different governments, or different government agencies get together (or even with other non government organisations) and develop software jointly, the individual cost will be much less...
One of the main benefits of open source is that you don't need to fund all of the development yourself, other people will have similar requirements and you can share the development costs. This is exactly how commercial software works too, only in the commercial case you have an extra non essential middleman between end users and developers who wants to make a very large profit.
It's more likely that a large food processing factory will do several things with the carrots and broccoli...
1, use more of the spoiled/bad vegetables that most people would discard
2, use less vegetables and add more cheap filler materials to bulk out the product
3, use more fat, salt, msg etc to improve the flavor (which may have been ruined by the filler materials) in the cheapest way possible
4, replace other ingredients with cheaper substitutions wherever possible, again using more salt/fat/msg/etc to try and disguise the difference
If carrots and broccoli are sold in their original form you can see what they are, and you can see that unknown substances have not been mixed in to bulk them out. The same can't be said of a processed product, where the end result will usually make it very difficult if not impossible to identify the source ingredients and processes used.
Companies want to reduce costs in order to increase profits, and profits are considered far more important than customer satisfaction or health. Processed foods allow them to hide all manner of things that people would disapprove of and which might alter their purchasing decision. I doubt you'd buy a 200g pack of broccoli if it came with 50g of broccoli and a 150g blob of grey paste and instructions to blend them together and then reform it in broccoli shaped moulds to get the final product.
And over the many years that humans have lived on this planet we have learned which naturally occurring items should not be consumed. That's why only some naturally occurring items are considered to be "food" and other things are not.
Also its not necessarily "processing" that people have a problem with, its the underhanded and greedy methods of the food processing companies who will mix in all manner of nasty crap that we wouldn't normally want to eat. Some of us like to know exactly what we're eating.
What i also absolutely detest is "new improved recipe", where "new" and "improved" mean that its now cheaper to produce but probably doesn't taste as good. There are all manner of products i used to buy but which now either taste revolting or contain substances i wouldn't want to consume. If you change the recipe you should be forced to change the brand too, if the recipe is different then you've create a new different product.
Electric cars cost considerably more than traditional vehicles, such that the extra cost of the vehicle outweighs the savings made from running it. Electric cars would be good for people who do high mileage, only they don't have sufficient range for that.
And herein lies the problem... It used to be common to return empty bottles etc, but at least in the UK that's never done anymore.
You *can* turn in your bottles for recycling, but you have to make an extra stop to do so and there is no incentive offered.
If they offered a rebate for returned bottles and accepted them in store like they do in other countries, a lot more people would do that.
Also on the point of recycling bottles, they should clean and refill the bottles rather than melting them down... It is a colossal waste of energy to melt a glass/plastic bottle only to them make another identical bottle.