I find the idea that we can change so much to be intriguing, not a problem so much as a sign of opportunities. It makes me wonder if anyone has ever researched the changes that would occur in an environment with increased gravity.
What would happen if you were to put an athlete in a huge centrifuge and gradually increasing the "gravity" for a year prior to the Olympics? You'd probably have to get them out a few weeks early so that they could relearn dexterity in our lower environment, but the increase in strength throughout their system would likely last for months.
Anytime the scale is increased and there is a competitor (both Walmart and the "competition" of all brick and mortar versus online are Amazon competitors), prices will be under pressure to stay low and can be kept that way in this case both by reduction in costs (no store fronts in prime locations) and by voluntary reduction in profit margins.
This is nothing new. If you look at what we have today versus 50 years ago from an absolute point of view instead of a relative to others of the same day point of view, we've experienced tremendous deflation. This is what tech does. It will inevitably end in either our destruction or everything eventually being free.
I guess my impressions were formed further back than most (this is not my original account). In the 1998-2002 realm (Google News came out in 2002 and helped a lot when combined with the right searches) the only other way I had to find good geek news was to visit a whole bunch of sites that were mostly not technical. Slashdot usually had tech news up within 12 hours or so and often in less than 6. But, perhaps more importantly, it had tech news that didn't come from mainstream sources and, in that day, never would.
Of course, my impression might be more because there were no tech sites like phys.org, arstechnica, etc. that now serve to deliver tech news. I don't even remember EE Times being online yet. I think I was still getting the paper version.
I originally started using Slashdot because it was the fastest site at picking up the scattered tech news and concentrating it in one place - a one stop index to the nearly up to the moment breaking news. Now...
I think this is due to more than the loss of subscribers. The system has changed and doesn't support quick promotion of articles.
It can be and already has been, but it requires a pilot's license and air traffic control. So the more people you carry, the greater the efficiency not only in terms of energy per person-mile but in terms of pilot costs per person-mile and traffic control cost per person-mile.
You're mostly correct. I remember instances of sites hosted at home and of sites where people had dynamic content. There were cases of people begging for help to refactor their database interface. Often, sites would go static for a day. Volume was as high as thousands of requests per minute, which, yes, is low by today's standards. But I also seriously doubt Slashdot could cause a volume of thousands of request per minute for most of a day now.
The name, however, is somewhat dated, as flash crowds from Slashdot were reported to be diminishing as of 2005 due to competition from similar sites.
There was a day when Slashdot was the only site big enough and interested enough in non-mainstream sites to cause this issue on a fairly regular basis, hence the name for the effect. That day has been gone for over a decade.
I'm in central Florida. My immediate neighborhood has buried lines placed by the developer instead of the power company. The lines feeding the neighborhood were the problem. And no, they aren't above ground because they are higher voltage. They dive underground at the edge of the neighborhood and don't reach the first step-down for the neighborhood for several hundred more feet. It's a pure cost equation. The power companies don't suffer the cost of the lost wages and business.
I just spent 8 days without power in the wonderful land of Florida. The winds that took down my lines were in the 50 mph range. Our infrastructure sucks. Florida almost never gets bad weather and is spoiled by the fact. These folks should experience living someplace that gets several ice storms every year or hail storms punching out half of the roofs almost every May.
On the other hand, I lived in Kansas for a couple of years once. We almost never went without power despite 25-30 mph winds being almost normal and 50-60 mph winds happening many times a year during storms. The lines where I lived were nearly 100% underground. Florida and Puerto Rico could both learn a lesson by that.
Interestingly, it wasn't the choice of the utility companies in Kansas to design well. It was regulated by the government. It is time for the national government to regulate that utilities and construction in all areas of the country be appropriate to survive the natural conditions normal to those areas. The only way the disasters and the following bailouts will stop is when the need stops.
Sadly, when was the last time the "slashdot effect" was actually observed to cause a virtual DOS attack due to a link from slashdot as opposed to some other site?
A true FOSS AI assistant that I can be trained a small piece at a time and run at home with no cloud assistance should be taking priority over all other FOSS efforts right now. The OS and browser are yesterday's products. It is time to create the long-predicted by sci-fi assistant.
but it got about 15-25% of the things we yelled at it wrong or just didn't understand
Because it is Bing based. Bing is Alexa's biggest problem.
This is why Apple recently switched Siri to Google. They do not want to release their new $300-class Alexa and Home competitor on Bing after seeing the degree of its impact on Alexa's ratings in most head-to-head comparisons of Alexa and Google Home.
This article was about long-term Linux kernel support which Android happens to benefit from. Just because Google asked for it and may be helping it to occur doesn't mean that they are the only ones needing it or who will benefit from it. Any device manufacturer using a Linux kernel to create a smart connected device should be interested in this.
au contraire. As a device engineer, I can attest the word, and the relevance of this article, covers far more than you're thinking.
Devices that I'd expect to last decades have been running Linux kernels and even Android for quite some time now. Here's a refrigerator introduced in January 2013. The more recent Samsung refrigerators are much fancier than this with massive screens.
In addition, every major appliance manufacturer now has WiFi-enabled appliances of every variety I can think of. Even dishwashers are WiFi connected now.
This article was about Linux kernel support, not just Android, and I'd bet the majority of the WiFi-enabled appliances have a Linux kernel.
The point is that every device is now an electronic device. Android is available in every kitchen device I can think of from refrigerators to coffee makers. And they are all being networked to facilitate home and life automation.
I agree with all that you said. And, as an engineer, I believe that this is an area where we are not meeting our responsibilities. We should be creating solutions, not problems. An engineer has a responsibility to society.
In this case, we need to be pointing out the problem and demanding regulation, not to stop the trend, but to minimize the long-term costs so that the economy can expand by creating more different things, not by creating the same thing more often. This kind of regulation helps to explode diversity of solutions by freeing up consumer resources currently spent on repeating a cycle to fuel the next big thing.
As I pointed out in another post above, I believe these issues are solvable by deploying dumber connected devices with smarter centralized controls. The centralized controls can then be upgraded independently of the connected devices.
We standardized electricity many years ago so that devices could be plugged in anywhere nationwide and flourish. We need to standardize home intelligence as an infrastructure to the same degree towards the same ends. The industry is too competitive to choose to do this on their own.
You were obviously smart enough not to buy plasma. That is good.
But I am currently sitting in front of a two-year-old 32" LCD that has very notable shadowy areas across the white field. I know that is because I didn't get a TV (which I use as my monitor) with LED backlighting. The tubes lighting it are aging though they probably only have about 10K hours of usage in two years (about 14 hours a day). The question now is whether I will become too annoyed by the uneven field first or the fluorescent backlighting will fail first.
My current vehicle is 11 years old and with only 90K miles likely has another 10 on it. The infotainment unit is indeed one of the most dating elements. I am looking to replace the vehicle now because it is not mainstream enough and has high maintenance costs. My next choice will be in the Camry / Accord / Prius type class just to get into a higher volume solution in hopes that it can be my last car.
But, I am used to replacing cars after 10-12 years. They are one of the few things that seem to have made an improvement in life expectancy over the last 20 years.
I am not used to replacing household appliances in less than 20 years. My current washer and dryer is 25 years old. The oven/stove is 30 years old. The refrigerator is at least 20. My thermostat is 30 years old.
All of these and many other elements in my home are coming up for replacement soon, and I would like to make the jump to a fully-connected home. But, I am very concerned that, in doing so, I am guaranteeing that this will not be my last appliance upgrade in my lifetime as it should be.
Most of my life, I've received 20 to 30 years of service out of appliance-class products such as televisions, refrigerators, stoves, microwaves, washing machines, and dryers. I have noticed a steep downtrend in those lifecycles, particularly in televisions, washing machines and dryers. But that reduction has been due to engineering choices in the machinery.
Now I'm interpreting this as an indication that devices with Android are targeting a six-year lifecycle!!! No way.
Android is in all of the above device types today and even in our cars. Android needs to be thinking in terms of how to at least maintain security updates for 30 years. Perhaps that may have to involve some standard pluggable module so that the hardware can be upgraded too, but it has to happen. The ever falling device lifetimes are soaking up both the piddling economic growth of the middle class and our resources.
But, I wouldn't underestimate the desire for the success of their Apple Homepod. Google Home's superior search result quality has been causing it to win most head-to-head comparisons with Alexa (which uses Bing) and is likely the reason that it already leads the market in dollar sales despite giving Alexa a head start of over a year.
Apple has likely decided that, especially given the price point of their entry into the market, they cannot hope to succeed if they enter the market with the same glaring deficiency.
There is zero information about a user contained within the results of cryptocurrency mining operations. The result is simply cash or a piece of the puzzle necessary to create cash.
Furthermore, the current system is fully based not only on the hijacking of our computer resources but on the attempted hijacking of our attention and thoughts... is the data transmission, cpu cycles, memory, screen real estate, etc used up to display ads free? We pay in many insidious ways via the current system. I suppose some may be like my ex who actually stated "if we didn't have ads, how would we know what to buy"? Somehow, she didn't get my answer which was simply that we'd know because we needed it.
The extensions could set a price, not a "share", expressed perhaps as some number of calculations per second while the extension is active. That price would be made known to the user. I would expect it to typically be something that would result in pennies per month of revenue from a user. Extensions would be pressured to keep that down by users who would have to turn extensions off or pay in some other fashion if the overall budget was being exceeded. Frankly, even my quad core GPU equipped desktop replacement laptop couldn't consume enough electricity in the 10 hours a day or so that I run it to outright pay for many things like Netflix. The idea here would be to give developers who are currently getting nothing or nearly nothing (donations that typically amount to some hobby money) a micropayment type revenue stream if they can get many thousands of users and to eliminate ads on many websites.
My GPU is almost never used and I rarely go over 25% CPU usage with typical usage around 5%. There is a lot of budget there. Of course, I say "a lot" but if I use my laptop which has a 120W supply at full power 10 hours a day for 30 days it can consume a maximum of 36 kWHs or about $4 of electricity at my current rate.
So, yes, this only works if developers are happy with something like $0.05 of value from a user per month. This would be awesome for many extension developers. A mere 20,000 users would create a steady stream of $1000 per month. Sites would have to be happy with a fraction of the remaining available CPU time during the time that tab is in the foreground only.
Add the consent factor... allow websites to monetize via a mining micropayment when Firefox is detected, ads are turned off and the user consents - and you will either put Google out of business by wiping out the ad-supported web model or the cryptocurrency industry will be made illegal depending on who wins the war that would ensue.
Slashdot Mirror
I find the idea that we can change so much to be intriguing, not a problem so much as a sign of opportunities. It makes me wonder if anyone has ever researched the changes that would occur in an environment with increased gravity.
What would happen if you were to put an athlete in a huge centrifuge and gradually increasing the "gravity" for a year prior to the Olympics? You'd probably have to get them out a few weeks early so that they could relearn dexterity in our lower environment, but the increase in strength throughout their system would likely last for months.
Anytime the scale is increased and there is a competitor (both Walmart and the "competition" of all brick and mortar versus online are Amazon competitors), prices will be under pressure to stay low and can be kept that way in this case both by reduction in costs (no store fronts in prime locations) and by voluntary reduction in profit margins.
This is nothing new. If you look at what we have today versus 50 years ago from an absolute point of view instead of a relative to others of the same day point of view, we've experienced tremendous deflation. This is what tech does. It will inevitably end in either our destruction or everything eventually being free.
Actually, it is legal to drive with only one eye.
I guess my impressions were formed further back than most (this is not my original account). In the 1998-2002 realm (Google News came out in 2002 and helped a lot when combined with the right searches) the only other way I had to find good geek news was to visit a whole bunch of sites that were mostly not technical. Slashdot usually had tech news up within 12 hours or so and often in less than 6. But, perhaps more importantly, it had tech news that didn't come from mainstream sources and, in that day, never would.
Of course, my impression might be more because there were no tech sites like phys.org, arstechnica, etc. that now serve to deliver tech news. I don't even remember EE Times being online yet. I think I was still getting the paper version.
Give them credit by using their link - John Kelly's personal cellphone was compromised, White House believes
This is over 24 hours old. Why now?
I originally started using Slashdot because it was the fastest site at picking up the scattered tech news and concentrating it in one place - a one stop index to the nearly up to the moment breaking news. Now...
I think this is due to more than the loss of subscribers. The system has changed and doesn't support quick promotion of articles.
It can be and already has been, but it requires a pilot's license and air traffic control. So the more people you carry, the greater the efficiency not only in terms of energy per person-mile but in terms of pilot costs per person-mile and traffic control cost per person-mile.
You're mostly correct. I remember instances of sites hosted at home and of sites where people had dynamic content. There were cases of people begging for help to refactor their database interface. Often, sites would go static for a day. Volume was as high as thousands of requests per minute, which, yes, is low by today's standards. But I also seriously doubt Slashdot could cause a volume of thousands of request per minute for most of a day now.
The Wikipedia article on Slashdot Effect indicates that it was in decline relative to other sites prior to being mostly obsoleted by tech.
The name, however, is somewhat dated, as flash crowds from Slashdot were reported to be diminishing as of 2005 due to competition from similar sites.
There was a day when Slashdot was the only site big enough and interested enough in non-mainstream sites to cause this issue on a fairly regular basis, hence the name for the effect. That day has been gone for over a decade.
I'm in central Florida. My immediate neighborhood has buried lines placed by the developer instead of the power company. The lines feeding the neighborhood were the problem. And no, they aren't above ground because they are higher voltage. They dive underground at the edge of the neighborhood and don't reach the first step-down for the neighborhood for several hundred more feet. It's a pure cost equation. The power companies don't suffer the cost of the lost wages and business.
I just spent 8 days without power in the wonderful land of Florida. The winds that took down my lines were in the 50 mph range. Our infrastructure sucks. Florida almost never gets bad weather and is spoiled by the fact. These folks should experience living someplace that gets several ice storms every year or hail storms punching out half of the roofs almost every May.
On the other hand, I lived in Kansas for a couple of years once. We almost never went without power despite 25-30 mph winds being almost normal and 50-60 mph winds happening many times a year during storms. The lines where I lived were nearly 100% underground. Florida and Puerto Rico could both learn a lesson by that.
Interestingly, it wasn't the choice of the utility companies in Kansas to design well. It was regulated by the government. It is time for the national government to regulate that utilities and construction in all areas of the country be appropriate to survive the natural conditions normal to those areas. The only way the disasters and the following bailouts will stop is when the need stops.
Sadly, when was the last time the "slashdot effect" was actually observed to cause a virtual DOS attack due to a link from slashdot as opposed to some other site?
A true FOSS AI assistant that I can be trained a small piece at a time and run at home with no cloud assistance should be taking priority over all other FOSS efforts right now. The OS and browser are yesterday's products. It is time to create the long-predicted by sci-fi assistant.
but it got about 15-25% of the things we yelled at it wrong or just didn't understand
Because it is Bing based. Bing is Alexa's biggest problem.
This is why Apple recently switched Siri to Google. They do not want to release their new $300-class Alexa and Home competitor on Bing after seeing the degree of its impact on Alexa's ratings in most head-to-head comparisons of Alexa and Google Home.
This article was about long-term Linux kernel support which Android happens to benefit from. Just because Google asked for it and may be helping it to occur doesn't mean that they are the only ones needing it or who will benefit from it. Any device manufacturer using a Linux kernel to create a smart connected device should be interested in this.
au contraire. As a device engineer, I can attest the word, and the relevance of this article, covers far more than you're thinking.
Devices that I'd expect to last decades have been running Linux kernels and even Android for quite some time now. Here's a refrigerator introduced in January 2013. The more recent Samsung refrigerators are much fancier than this with massive screens.
In addition, every major appliance manufacturer now has WiFi-enabled appliances of every variety I can think of. Even dishwashers are WiFi connected now.
This article was about Linux kernel support, not just Android, and I'd bet the majority of the WiFi-enabled appliances have a Linux kernel.
The point is that every device is now an electronic device. Android is available in every kitchen device I can think of from refrigerators to coffee makers. And they are all being networked to facilitate home and life automation.
I agree with all that you said. And, as an engineer, I believe that this is an area where we are not meeting our responsibilities. We should be creating solutions, not problems. An engineer has a responsibility to society.
In this case, we need to be pointing out the problem and demanding regulation, not to stop the trend, but to minimize the long-term costs so that the economy can expand by creating more different things, not by creating the same thing more often. This kind of regulation helps to explode diversity of solutions by freeing up consumer resources currently spent on repeating a cycle to fuel the next big thing.
As I pointed out in another post above, I believe these issues are solvable by deploying dumber connected devices with smarter centralized controls. The centralized controls can then be upgraded independently of the connected devices.
We standardized electricity many years ago so that devices could be plugged in anywhere nationwide and flourish. We need to standardize home intelligence as an infrastructure to the same degree towards the same ends. The industry is too competitive to choose to do this on their own.
You were obviously smart enough not to buy plasma. That is good.
But I am currently sitting in front of a two-year-old 32" LCD that has very notable shadowy areas across the white field. I know that is because I didn't get a TV (which I use as my monitor) with LED backlighting. The tubes lighting it are aging though they probably only have about 10K hours of usage in two years (about 14 hours a day). The question now is whether I will become too annoyed by the uneven field first or the fluorescent backlighting will fail first.
My current vehicle is 11 years old and with only 90K miles likely has another 10 on it. The infotainment unit is indeed one of the most dating elements. I am looking to replace the vehicle now because it is not mainstream enough and has high maintenance costs. My next choice will be in the Camry / Accord / Prius type class just to get into a higher volume solution in hopes that it can be my last car.
But, I am used to replacing cars after 10-12 years. They are one of the few things that seem to have made an improvement in life expectancy over the last 20 years.
I am not used to replacing household appliances in less than 20 years. My current washer and dryer is 25 years old. The oven/stove is 30 years old. The refrigerator is at least 20. My thermostat is 30 years old.
All of these and many other elements in my home are coming up for replacement soon, and I would like to make the jump to a fully-connected home. But, I am very concerned that, in doing so, I am guaranteeing that this will not be my last appliance upgrade in my lifetime as it should be.
Most of my life, I've received 20 to 30 years of service out of appliance-class products such as televisions, refrigerators, stoves, microwaves, washing machines, and dryers. I have noticed a steep downtrend in those lifecycles, particularly in televisions, washing machines and dryers. But that reduction has been due to engineering choices in the machinery.
Now I'm interpreting this as an indication that devices with Android are targeting a six-year lifecycle!!! No way.
Android is in all of the above device types today and even in our cars. Android needs to be thinking in terms of how to at least maintain security updates for 30 years. Perhaps that may have to involve some standard pluggable module so that the hardware can be upgraded too, but it has to happen. The ever falling device lifetimes are soaking up both the piddling economic growth of the middle class and our resources.
That's easy. There is a perfect model for them already. It's called a bit bucket.
I'm sure that has played a part.
But, I wouldn't underestimate the desire for the success of their Apple Homepod. Google Home's superior search result quality has been causing it to win most head-to-head comparisons with Alexa (which uses Bing) and is likely the reason that it already leads the market in dollar sales despite giving Alexa a head start of over a year.
Apple has likely decided that, especially given the price point of their entry into the market, they cannot hope to succeed if they enter the market with the same glaring deficiency.
There is zero information about a user contained within the results of cryptocurrency mining operations. The result is simply cash or a piece of the puzzle necessary to create cash.
Furthermore, the current system is fully based not only on the hijacking of our computer resources but on the attempted hijacking of our attention and thoughts... is the data transmission, cpu cycles, memory, screen real estate, etc used up to display ads free? We pay in many insidious ways via the current system. I suppose some may be like my ex who actually stated "if we didn't have ads, how would we know what to buy"? Somehow, she didn't get my answer which was simply that we'd know because we needed it.
The extensions could set a price, not a "share", expressed perhaps as some number of calculations per second while the extension is active. That price would be made known to the user. I would expect it to typically be something that would result in pennies per month of revenue from a user. Extensions would be pressured to keep that down by users who would have to turn extensions off or pay in some other fashion if the overall budget was being exceeded. Frankly, even my quad core GPU equipped desktop replacement laptop couldn't consume enough electricity in the 10 hours a day or so that I run it to outright pay for many things like Netflix. The idea here would be to give developers who are currently getting nothing or nearly nothing (donations that typically amount to some hobby money) a micropayment type revenue stream if they can get many thousands of users and to eliminate ads on many websites.
My GPU is almost never used and I rarely go over 25% CPU usage with typical usage around 5%. There is a lot of budget there. Of course, I say "a lot" but if I use my laptop which has a 120W supply at full power 10 hours a day for 30 days it can consume a maximum of 36 kWHs or about $4 of electricity at my current rate.
So, yes, this only works if developers are happy with something like $0.05 of value from a user per month. This would be awesome for many extension developers. A mere 20,000 users would create a steady stream of $1000 per month. Sites would have to be happy with a fraction of the remaining available CPU time during the time that tab is in the foreground only.
Add the consent factor... allow websites to monetize via a mining micropayment when Firefox is detected, ads are turned off and the user consents - and you will either put Google out of business by wiping out the ad-supported web model or the cryptocurrency industry will be made illegal depending on who wins the war that would ensue.