This article just goes to show how insanely stupid the whole Imaginary Property industry is. We have to cripple one of the most useful inventions in the history of the world, that has the potential to help raise billions out of poverty, just so a rentier class can make money.
Their quality is poor compared to the 90s (I still have my late-90s Sony camcorder, and it still works), and their hardware is crippled by market segmentation (can't have feature X enabled on this version of the camera because we can sell it to the pro market in a black case with that feature enabled in the firmware for $1,000 more), and/or DRM (can't record 44.1kHz on DAT because you might be an EVIL CD PIRATE! can't play foreign DVDs on this DVD player because it might be one of our movies).
do you really think that you could travel to a foreign country and back and be able to hide it?
In a couple of decades, travel will be considered tediously quaint, when we can just rent a body and operate it remotely in that foreign country.
You clearly haven't even thought about what kind of technologies will be commonplace before the end of the century, and how they'll make surveillance extremely difficult.
technology will soon be (if it isn't already) at a point where it will be impossible to escape surveillance. so stop worrying about that.
Uh, no, it won't. The harder the spies try to spy on us, the harder we work to avoid it.
Besides which, a world where everyone was spied on at all times and all laws were enforced automatically as a result would collapse within two generations.
Yeah, there's a game I own. First there was an ad to buy the sequel when you exit the game, which delays the exit for a few seconds. Then, in a patch, they added an ad at the start of the game telling you to buy the next one. Then they added a new window when you start the game so you have to hit 'Play' to play, and the window is... guess what... advertising the sequel.
Needless to say, I won't be buying it precisely because of the advertising.
If Google becomes THE autonomous car company, it doesn't matter that they also experimented with ten other things that didn't bdo great - and even the ones that don't do great sometimes make a little money.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, we won't wake up one morning and find Google autonomous cars driving everyone around, the technology will start out with hands-free cruise control and similar relatively simple systems, probably progress to self-driving trucks on the highways, and evolve over the years in new models until, one day, your new Ford can drive itself.
Apple won't be able to last long when their tablets and phones are asking a premium price and delivering the same experience as devices at half their price.
You mean, like an Android tablet? As much as I hate to admit it, iPads provide a better experience than both Android and Windows, but you can buy a perfectly capable Android tablet for half the price of an iPad right now if you don't mind a clunkier UI.
It's interesting that you add in the price of the keyboard when the iPad doesn't come with one either.
You don't need a keyboard with an iPad, because it's not designed to run desktop apps. The whole 'killer feature' of the Surface is supposed to be that it can run desktop Windows apps... for which you need a keyboard. No-one buys a Windows tablet to run Metro apps, because if they want to run apps, they buy Android or iPad, because no-one in their right mind writes Metro apps.
And even the lowest end Surface comes with 64 GB of storage, plus room for an SD Card (Or use USB3 Storage).
And needs it, for Windows and all those desktop Windows apps you're going to install on it.
Why pay $500 for a tablet that is so limited when you can get a Surface Pro that does so much more for only a little bit more.
What 'so much more' does a Surface Pro do that iPad owners want to do?
Hint: nothing, which is why they use iPads. Microsoft have been pushing tablets that run desktop Windows apps since at least 2001, and hardly anyone bought them because hardly anyone wants to do that. It's a brain-dead idea, but when the only profit centres you have are Windows and Office, every piece of hardware you produce looks like it should run Windows and Office.
If I remember correctly, they turned around the booster during the previous barge landing attempt and did a partial boostback burn, just not the full burn to take it back to Florida. So they're already most of the way there.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that, when I was still reading game magazines, the games that got high review scores were usually the ones that had full-page ads in the magazine.
And it still runs like a pig, thanks to garbage collection, lack of unsigned types, and the need to go through Java bytecode to generate the final host code. I remember the joyous days of running software that did encryption in Java rather than calling a native library, and ran at least ten times slower than it would have in C.
UI code is bulky, because it's extraordinarily detail-oriented. Think of all of the operations that your application UI has to support: windows, and resizing, and hotkeys, and scrolling, and drag-and-drop, and accessibility features and visual themes and variable text sizes and multithreaded event loops and asynchronous event handlers and standard file dialogs and child window Z-ordering and printing and saving application configuration info... etc.
Is that really 28MB of code, or is that 1MB of code and 27MB of bitmaps, sound files, and other crud?
Pre-PC days, you had to develop for a specific target OS/machine combo, and if you wanted to port across it was nearly impossible (even dealing with things like little/big endian systems).
Uh, wut?
Back in the EVIL PRE-PC DAYS--or, at least, the EVIL PRE-WINDOWS DOMINANCE DAYS--we cross-compiled our code onto at least half a dozen Unix variants, and Macs, with a mix of big- and little-endian, and 32-bit and 64-bit.
Only dumb companies built in dependencies on endianness or word size that made their code not work. Almost all the OS inconsistencies for us were hidden in a low-level OS-specific wrapper, except for the places where we had to use hand-coded assembler.
Most of the complaints I hear about Window 8 come from people who've bought a new PC, booted it up, and have no freaking clue how to use it. 'WTF?' they say, 'I thought this thing ran Windows?'
New machines with Windows XP were still on sale two or three years before they stopped supporting it.
And the reasons Microsoft have to keep supporting old versions are:
1. They make you pay for new versions. 2. New versions often suck so bad that no-one wants them. 3. They change the driver model so old drivers for crusty old hardware don't work.
If new versions were free, or actually provided enough value to users that they were worth paying for, rather than usually making users go 'WTF were they thinking?' this wouldn't be required. ME, Vista and Window 8 have all been crap that no sane person would pay for and made users stick to their old OS.
SpaceX need something to launch to generate the economies of scale required in the launch market to really slash launch costs (i.e by mass-producing reusable rockets and flying them a lot). This isn't a bad one, and it could be much cheaper than previous attempts.
Or does he intentionally want to bankrupt Silicon Valley?
No-one in their right mind wants anything to do with US software products any more, because we've no idea how many backdoors they've built in, and can't trust them an inch.
What puzzled me more was the speed at which the stage hit the barge. It should have been a lot slower, even with the failure of the guidance fins.
It was coming down tipped over at 45 degrees, using much of the thrust for trajectory correction when it should have been used for slowing down for landing. So I'm not surprised it hit hard.
Yes, those of us whose systems have to run 24/7 for years at a time do actually prefer reliability over The New Shiny, thanks.
I finally had to try a version of Linux running systemd. Even the installer tends to say 'oh crap, I couldn't boot' and give absolutely no explanation of why. Real warm fuzzy feeling that gives me.
Have you forgotten? Up to and including the Clinton years, encryption was classified as a "munition" and was very much controlled by the US Government.
Only in the sense that the rest of the world had to OCR the printed source code if they wanted to use it legally.
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Why would that be piracy?
There are probably fifteen patents on that part.
Think of the patent holders, dude!
This article just goes to show how insanely stupid the whole Imaginary Property industry is. We have to cripple one of the most useful inventions in the history of the world, that has the potential to help raise billions out of poverty, just so a rentier class can make money.
Anyone can make a computer.
Anyone can make a TV.
But what can Sony make?
Their quality is poor compared to the 90s (I still have my late-90s Sony camcorder, and it still works), and their hardware is crippled by market segmentation (can't have feature X enabled on this version of the camera because we can sell it to the pro market in a black case with that feature enabled in the firmware for $1,000 more), and/or DRM (can't record 44.1kHz on DAT because you might be an EVIL CD PIRATE! can't play foreign DVDs on this DVD player because it might be one of our movies).
Right, but does the existence of a PC disguised as console and preloaded with Steam really say anything about Sony?
Indeed. Unlike the Playstation, which is, oh, a PC disguised as a console and preloaded with some Sony crap.
do you really think that you could travel to a foreign country and back and be able to hide it?
In a couple of decades, travel will be considered tediously quaint, when we can just rent a body and operate it remotely in that foreign country.
You clearly haven't even thought about what kind of technologies will be commonplace before the end of the century, and how they'll make surveillance extremely difficult.
technology will soon be (if it isn't already) at a point where it will be impossible to escape surveillance. so stop worrying about that.
Uh, no, it won't. The harder the spies try to spy on us, the harder we work to avoid it.
Besides which, a world where everyone was spied on at all times and all laws were enforced automatically as a result would collapse within two generations.
Yeah, there's a game I own. First there was an ad to buy the sequel when you exit the game, which delays the exit for a few seconds. Then, in a patch, they added an ad at the start of the game telling you to buy the next one. Then they added a new window when you start the game so you have to hit 'Play' to play, and the window is... guess what... advertising the sequel.
Needless to say, I won't be buying it precisely because of the advertising.
If Google becomes THE autonomous car company, it doesn't matter that they also experimented with ten other things that didn't bdo great - and even the ones that don't do great sometimes make a little money.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, we won't wake up one morning and find Google autonomous cars driving everyone around, the technology will start out with hands-free cruise control and similar relatively simple systems, probably progress to self-driving trucks on the highways, and evolve over the years in new models until, one day, your new Ford can drive itself.
Apple won't be able to last long when their tablets and phones are asking a premium price and delivering the same experience as devices at half their price.
You mean, like an Android tablet? As much as I hate to admit it, iPads provide a better experience than both Android and Windows, but you can buy a perfectly capable Android tablet for half the price of an iPad right now if you don't mind a clunkier UI.
It's interesting that you add in the price of the keyboard when the iPad doesn't come with one either.
You don't need a keyboard with an iPad, because it's not designed to run desktop apps. The whole 'killer feature' of the Surface is supposed to be that it can run desktop Windows apps... for which you need a keyboard. No-one buys a Windows tablet to run Metro apps, because if they want to run apps, they buy Android or iPad, because no-one in their right mind writes Metro apps.
And even the lowest end Surface comes with 64 GB of storage, plus room for an SD Card (Or use USB3 Storage).
And needs it, for Windows and all those desktop Windows apps you're going to install on it.
Why pay $500 for a tablet that is so limited when you can get a Surface Pro that does so much more for only a little bit more.
What 'so much more' does a Surface Pro do that iPad owners want to do?
Hint: nothing, which is why they use iPads. Microsoft have been pushing tablets that run desktop Windows apps since at least 2001, and hardly anyone bought them because hardly anyone wants to do that. It's a brain-dead idea, but when the only profit centres you have are Windows and Office, every piece of hardware you produce looks like it should run Windows and Office.
If I remember correctly, they turned around the booster during the previous barge landing attempt and did a partial boostback burn, just not the full burn to take it back to Florida. So they're already most of the way there.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that, when I was still reading game magazines, the games that got high review scores were usually the ones that had full-page ads in the magazine.
And it still runs like a pig, thanks to garbage collection, lack of unsigned types, and the need to go through Java bytecode to generate the final host code. I remember the joyous days of running software that did encryption in Java rather than calling a native library, and ran at least ten times slower than it would have in C.
UI code is bulky, because it's extraordinarily detail-oriented. Think of all of the operations that your application UI has to support: windows, and resizing, and hotkeys, and scrolling, and drag-and-drop, and accessibility features and visual themes and variable text sizes and multithreaded event loops and asynchronous event handlers and standard file dialogs and child window Z-ordering and printing and saving application configuration info... etc.
Is that really 28MB of code, or is that 1MB of code and 27MB of bitmaps, sound files, and other crud?
If Microsfot cared about corporate users, they wouldn't have released Window 8.
Pre-PC days, you had to develop for a specific target OS/machine combo, and if you wanted to port across it was nearly impossible (even dealing with things like little/big endian systems).
Uh, wut?
Back in the EVIL PRE-PC DAYS--or, at least, the EVIL PRE-WINDOWS DOMINANCE DAYS--we cross-compiled our code onto at least half a dozen Unix variants, and Macs, with a mix of big- and little-endian, and 32-bit and 64-bit.
Only dumb companies built in dependencies on endianness or word size that made their code not work. Almost all the OS inconsistencies for us were hidden in a low-level OS-specific wrapper, except for the places where we had to use hand-coded assembler.
Most of the complaints I hear about Window 8 come from people who've bought a new PC, booted it up, and have no freaking clue how to use it. 'WTF?' they say, 'I thought this thing ran Windows?'
New machines with Windows XP were still on sale two or three years before they stopped supporting it.
And the reasons Microsoft have to keep supporting old versions are:
1. They make you pay for new versions.
2. New versions often suck so bad that no-one wants them.
3. They change the driver model so old drivers for crusty old hardware don't work.
If new versions were free, or actually provided enough value to users that they were worth paying for, rather than usually making users go 'WTF were they thinking?' this wouldn't be required. ME, Vista and Window 8 have all been crap that no sane person would pay for and made users stick to their old OS.
SpaceX need something to launch to generate the economies of scale required in the launch market to really slash launch costs (i.e by mass-producing reusable rockets and flying them a lot). This isn't a bad one, and it could be much cheaper than previous attempts.
Why would kids who've been butt-fscked by Democrats for years want to vote for them? Particularly for a woman who looks like their grandmother?
He does know he's not campaigning for re-election, right?
Or does he intentionally want to bankrupt Silicon Valley?
No-one in their right mind wants anything to do with US software products any more, because we've no idea how many backdoors they've built in, and can't trust them an inch.
It's supposed to land like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You know, vertical and stuff.
What puzzled me more was the speed at which the stage hit the barge. It should have been a lot slower, even with the failure of the guidance fins.
It was coming down tipped over at 45 degrees, using much of the thrust for trajectory correction when it should have been used for slowing down for landing. So I'm not surprised it hit hard.
Yes, those of us whose systems have to run 24/7 for years at a time do actually prefer reliability over The New Shiny, thanks.
I finally had to try a version of Linux running systemd. Even the installer tends to say 'oh crap, I couldn't boot' and give absolutely no explanation of why. Real warm fuzzy feeling that gives me.
Have you forgotten? Up to and including the Clinton years, encryption was classified as a "munition" and was very much controlled by the US Government.
Only in the sense that the rest of the world had to OCR the printed source code if they wanted to use it legally.