The mining farms pay very close attention to that value because if the cost of mining the very next coin is higher than the coin is worth, they will shut down their mining operation and liquidate. Not right away, of course, but after they've decided that the new norm isn't profitable.
If all the mining farms shut down except for those in China and a few other rare locations where energy is cheap, then there's a very real concern that China, or at least one of only a few agents in China, could control the Bitcoin network - which could lead to forks, fake transactions, or the shutdown of the network entirely.
The key point of the article is that mining coins for profit doesn't appear to be sustainable any longer. If the value of Bitcoin in terms of dollars doesn't go back up, people will start turning off their bitcoin miners which also conduct transactions for the network. We could wake up one day and find there is no network to make a transaction on if the value goes down much farther.
Today's CPUs and GPUs are essentially silicon, copper, and various doping ions in a thin sheet that we pump electricity through. They're glorified heating elements that happen to do "work" in a useful way. They're a brilliant design for what's essentially lightning in a rock, but they're very limited.
The human brain is made of many kinds of cells in various arrangements -- each cell being a small three dimensional world full of molecular machines and nearly every connection between those cells exponentially grows the power of what they can do together. Its analog computations can be less precise and more error prone, but sometimes vastly faster and extremely power efficient depending on the scenario.
Only a fool would think we won't somehow, someday create our own synthetic cellular machinery to make synthetic living computers with amazing capabilities, not to mention the possibilities of using quantum processors to solve computationally intense algorithms.
The US intelligence community doesn't have backdoors into all phones. They have backdoors into the phone carriers for certain, though. AT&T, etc have fiber optic runs to spy closets where audio is recorded and speech-to-text tools are used to help search for key words. Snowden wasn't even the first to know about it. I remember when Shia Labeouf talked about it during an interview where he worked with the feds to prepare for a movie. He mentioned government spying, and the feds played him back a recording of a cell phone call he'd made years before to show off what they could do. This is why everyone who actually works for the government in high positions all use encryption for their calls and texts (while simultaneously fighting for backdoors for encryption) -- because those apps circumvent the carrier's recording technology.
Phones are pretty rock solid - especially Apple iphones. I've heard from local law enforcement that there's a huge backlog of iphones and other equipment with strong encryption that the feds can't break into yet. For simple codes on Android, they use a USB that fakes a keyboard input trying all the possibilities 'til it unlocks - doesn't take long for simple numeric codes. iPhones will make you wait between tries and the wait time gets longer with each failed try. Biometric ones are easy to unlock - use a lifted print or a photo if it's a face unlock... but, they still have to unlock it b/c there's no actual backdoor.
Verizon and some other carriers have their own OS modifications for Android, so who knows what they put on their phones when they flash the ROMs to make them work. I assume carrier unlocked factory-default phones would be free of such spyware, but simply making a call on a carrier means the carrier can listen in to the call since they make the connection.
Any funny looking hardware would get scrutinized and would kill a phone maker's business if found, but software can be tricky. Apple is the only company I know of for certain that loads their own un-modified OS on their hardware. Verizon, Sprint, and others tend to tweak the OS and flash the ROM... they could be doing anything, really. Huawei, if it were allowed to play in the US market, would be subject to Verizon, Sprint, AT&T etc... the carriers would mandate what software was on the devices and flash their spyware if there is some there to flash. Huawei could have a super-secret hardware firmware backdoor, kill switch, or the like, but a physical rogue chip would be detected, and any malware would have to navigate through the flashed telcom firmware to operate. The minute malware is discovered, their business would be over. It'd be suicide for them to do that.
The US is just upset that China isn't following US sanctions on other countries in addition to the current trade war. Huawei being Chinese government controlled will always be a threat to US security as at any time, Hauwei could flip a switch, flash an update, and own your device.... but, it wasn't until recently that the US told their govt contractors to ban Hauwei devices. It's all politics at this point.
I sympathize, but there is always a cost/benefit analysis to be done for supporting older hardware and software which will run under the limitations of old hardware. Windows XP SP3 was roughly the final version of XP in 2008, so we're talking about maybe 10 year old netbook that was designed with a 2 to 3 year lifespan to begin with (Atom processors were barely capable of running XP -- I used to manage a few netbooks on an organization's network). I can't even get Google to support Android OS security updates on their own products released more than 3 years ago. The last Intel consumer CPUs that were 32 bit were Atoms in 2011. The last desktop/laptop CPUs that were 32 bit only were Intel Core Duos in 2006.
Someone could continue to support 32 bit Linux for the device - maybe a different distribution. Lubuntu will still support 32 bit linux on the LTS release until 2021, which isn't bad for an Ubuntu flavor supporting what will then be 10 to 15 year old hardware. I'm sure someone will continue to support 32 bit Linux as there are still a lot of imbedded 32 bit processors - one might just have to seek out a more niche distro.
I'm always a little sad to see working hardware tossed into the trash, and I've always tried to find uses for older machines - either as donations to students or families that need one or as simple, single-use devices. Sometimes, though... it's simply not worth the cost of electricity to use them when one can purchase a small low-powered replacement. For instance, I had an old laptop with a cracked and useless screen that was still good to connect to a TV to watch Hulu, Netflix, and other streaming services (though it couldn't handle 1080p), but a simple Roku Stick replaced it for very little cost and huge power savings.
Think of Lubuntu as "lightweight ubuntu." Debian creates most of the base, Canonical polishes most of what's left and adds in some goodies and releases Ubuntu as its main distro with the Gnome Desktop Environment. Then, Canonical and/or their partners also support other "flavors" of Ubuntu which use other Desktop Environments. Think of the DE as just another program - the user interface is just a shell over the rest of the OS.
There are often a few other changes to preferred programs like text editors, terminal viewers, file managers, etc. that come with the Desktop environments. Lubuntu, being a lightweight distro meant for older machines with fewer resources especially has some changes to default installations - mostly replacing Ubuntu's default programs with other smaller, less resource-hungry programs so that you can get the most out of a system with a small hard drive and low RAM.
It's still a lot of work to maintain the differences in the packages and the separate desktop environments, but the differences in the Ubuntu flavors largely come down to selecting between a few swappable programs - you can even install a different desktop environment and uninstall your original one and effectively change flavors -- since they're all built on the same basic Ubuntu base built on the same Debian base.
You could think of Lubuntu as a partnership between Debian, Canonical, the LXQT team, and everyone else that contributes to the GNU/LINUX operating system. I don't know the breakdown of funding, but as it's supported by Canonical, I suspect most of the funding is supported the same as the regular Ubuntu release with LXQT mostly supporting their desktop environment.
I always go with Samsung EVO or PRO. Things may be different now, but when I was first in the market for SSDs, Samsung was the only one that designed every part of the device - not a cobbled together mess of components and software from various vendors made into a franken-device that might work ok most of the time. Now, I just buy Samsungs out of habit & the fact I've never had one fail on me. Samsung DID have a huge blunder with one or two specific lines of SSDs, but that was widespread with those specific models, not random deaths on random models.
I've never had to use the Samsung software included other than a firmware update once, but it has lots of tools for diagnostics and recovery. I can't vouch for how well they work since I haven't had to use them.
No drive will last forever, but considering I generally put my apps and OS on the C: Samsung and all my media and Windows profile on separate drives, my write/overwrite rate on the SSD is consistent with allowing it to last until sometime after our Sun turns into a red giant.
Man, I thought they killed that feature way back when they axed RSS.
I loved that feature - let me see all the FARK, Slashdot, Cnet, and other techie article headlines with a click and hover & it auto-updated so I didn't have to even visit the actual pages, just picked the story I wanted right from the bookmarks.
I switched to Chrome way, way back after FF made it near impossible for some of my other workflows, extensions, etc to work properly. I also got tired of having to track down an extension or two that quit working due to either changes or lack of support.
Wow, that reminds me. Remember when FF took out the ability to even see the html link on hover that used to help you figure out whether a link was a phishing attack or some other malware site disguised as a credible link? It took me an extension or two just to bring that functionality back. Those guys are crazy. I'll stick with Chrome, Chromium, Opera, and/or Vivaldi. FF is dead to me.
I tend to agree, and apparently so do IBM, Google, et al. Still, the larger the system, the more error prone it becomes. Obviously, we have quantum computers (or at least functioning parts of ones) working today and can entangle up to 50 qubits or more with relative stability... but, the question is whether we can do it at the scale needed to be "useful" (according to this individual) without losing the signal for all the noise.
This person's perspective is that what we naively see as an engineering problem to be resolved with future refinements is actually an issue that can't be resolved because nature at a fundamental particle physics level can't be controlled or tuned to the degree necessary to get one working, nor reasonably checked for accuracy because the states to be checked are beyond astronomical.
I think the key problem is theory vs physical reality. In theory, if you have a set of qubits entangled with zero noise at near absolute zero, you can send a quantum program to the qubits & have them process your data without you worrying about what their individual states are & then capture their completed output.
In reality, how do you entangle enough qubits to be useful? How do you prevent noise or correct for the errors of noise? How do you ensure your qubits are properly entangled? How do you accurately send your quantum program to the qubits for processing? How do you aide in processing the qubits accurately without generating more noise? How do you extract the output without generating more noise? And ultimately, how are you going to ensure that you are entangling 10^300 attributes of your qubits perfectly in the first place, much less correcting for errors in processing them?
I think the TL,DR is that this quantum physicist sees all the places errors can creep in and how difficult it can be to correct for them. The answers he sees coming from the community seems to be to just add more qubits for error correction - or even process the same data with multiple quantum computers or with multiple paths through the same qubits.
I understand his/her frustration. It seems a difficult task to precisely manipulate qubits using modern technology, and an impossible task to know and/or set the states of everything to ultimately know for certain whether an error has been generated.
As a fellow Nexus 7 2013 owner, I share your pain in finding an improved model after so many years. I like the specs of the M5, but I hear there are 2.4 Ghz wifi / Bluetooth interference issues and there's no 3.5 headphone jack, so the search goes on for me.
I get what you're saying about the marketing, but really... tablets just have a much longer product life cycle and the profits are razor thin, so there aren't many models. Phones which are still often replaced every 2 years (thanks to "new every 2" phone plans) have a much shorter cycle and can be mass produced at a much larger scale.
The tablet market was saturated quickly. Then, e-readers and smart phones cannibalized most of the tablet market. Amazon's Fire HD tablets and other low-end tablets ate the rest of the Android tablet market. Most adults have large smart phones and give their kids the cheap, even larger tablets. (You can get a refurbished Fire HD 10" for only $120... or a Fire HD 8" Kid's Edition for $130)
Me, I want something like the M5, but with better quality wifi/bluetooth... and I'll use a USB C to 3.5 jack if I have to, but I'd rather have the native 3.5 jack. The M5 has double the cores and RAM of my Nexus with a higher def screen and 4x the internal storage plus a card slot for more. NICE! But, it doesn't come with Android 9.... and there's no indication of when it'll get it - if ever. With Nexus devices, Google does OTA updates almost instantaneously upon release, but even Google only supports devices for a couple years, then you're on your own with your unsupported device with gaping security holes.
The Android ecosystem is enough to make me want to pull my hair out over the security issues and lack of support and updates by hardware manufacturers. I'd like to switch to LineageOS, but they're in eternal beta as well.
That, and my 6 year old tablet is still good enough for most everything I use it for & there's no way in Hades I'd pay more than $200 for a newer model with better specs. (mostly because today's specs aren't much better, yet the prices are higher than a decent laptop).
802.11a came first, so let's call it WiFi 1 802.11b came next, so let's refer to it as Wifi 2
a and b were NOT compatible -- used different frequencies and hardware. There was a time when you could get one or the other and there were pros and cons to both.
802.11g was next, so Wifi 3 -- was mostly compatible with b, but not a... and if you truly wanted g speeds without issues, you'd tell the wifi access point to NOT allow b to work on it because otherwise, whenever a b device connected, everything dropped to b speeds.
802.11n, 802.11ac, etc.. these are all just IEEE spec names and were never supposed to be consumer friendly. It's fine that they're making a clearer naming scheme for marketing purposes to ordinary consumers, but... it's just not true that all newer versions of Wifi are backward compatible with older ones... and there are even wifi specs for things that were designed around the same time period for different purposes that were never meant to be compatible.... like wireless connectivity between buildings that works on a diff spec and frequency than your general access points indoors.
I've been reading about this daytime cooling through infra-red emissivity to space stuff for a while now. The biggest benefit isn't the color (or the reflective value), but that it will absorb heat from whatever the source and radiate that energy away in the mid-IR band that will allow it to leave Earth's atmosphere without being re-absorbed by anything nearby. That makes it effectively a way to remove heat from the surface of the earth by emitting that energy into space.... heat that would otherwise be trapped by our atmosphere's greenhouse effect.
This is the first time I've seen this expressed as a coating for everyday consumer items rather than as a heat sink layer added to an exterior A/C unit or a potential roofing material, though.
My understanding is that generally these coatings are white in the visible spectrum to reflect sunlight, but emit light in the mid-IR range. There's a startup company for using this to improve efficiency in A/C units I read a while back, and they tested the material in the hot sun on a roof in India -- you could put your hand on it after it had been baking in the sun, and it was cool to the touch. That's relative term, though. I don't recall the actual temperature readings.
I respectfully disagree. Also, word to the wise, don't ever say that to an IT department during an interview. Counties and banks keep hardware 50 years old and maintain OSes that are decades old -- and many run on COBOL and various ancient, long-dead languages. Then, there's the product designers -- like boat hull manufacturers which use CAD-based systems that are easily 15 to 20 years old running on OSes almost just as old.
You want the latest and greatest libraries and functionality -- great. Good for you. Most organizations want to buy something and keep it 'til the wheels come off. Even with regular rotations for equipment, the old 5 year life cycle has turned into a 7 to 10 year one in most counties.
My photographer friends use Adobe Lightroom mostly, but some use Adobe CS 6 and will stay with it until their machine dies and it's impossible to re-install and activate the product. Most of them use Windows 7 and will gladly disconnect the Win 7 box from the network and transfer files by hand to keep it going without having to update to Windows 10 -- ever.
If you're selling a subscription model software, then one should poll the base to see whether or not it's worth supporting their respective OSes. If they've done that and have decided to nuke support for older OSes, then they should just stop offering the subscription license for the unsupported OSes. Let them get a notice -- hey, upgrade your box or your license will de-activate and we'll stop billing you.
That way, there's no half-hearted attempt at keeping the customer happy by allowing them to use unsupported software for a fee.
Love to see the sources for that, because it'd be amazing if true. Best I can find on nanoimprint lithography from the wiki is 10nm -- and that's with overlays. Toshiba got 22 nm and smaller, but no specs on how small.
Intel is having trouble with 7 nm because it's using 4 masks to get there. So, it's really using older tech with many steps to etch smaller w/ these overlays. If you have to run the silicon through the light 4 times in different positions using different patterns, you can get horrible yields as the slightest deviation will either ruin chips or severely impact their performance.
Roadmaps don't impress me as they can and do get pushed back as issues arise. I haven't seen anything credible beyond 5 nm -- and that wasn't even using silicon as the substrate.
that's not to say self-assembling structures and nanotubes won't save the day, but... standard lithography with standard silicon is almost done. No one denies that 5nm is going to be extremely difficult without different materials or exotic methods.
Possible, but I doubt it. Intel may not be able to figure out how to get 7 nm to work for years. TSMC is the obvious choice for AMD to remain in the lead for CPUs and their only hope for parity on GPUs. TSMC may make them pay more for the best quality silicon and fastest capacity, but it'd be worth it.
The only prayer for them to survive was to have such a vast membership that they could mine them for data to sell and/or control the flow of people to movie theaters in such a way that they became the middle-men that theaters would have to partner with and give discounts towards.
They knew they were going to burn through a LOT of cash before that scenario could happen, but they didn't have deep enough pockets to actually make it happen. They came close at one point.
Not only was the business model so shady that everyone took notice, the CEO kept giving rosy best-case scenarios for profitability that made no sense because they didn't take into account some very basic business principles like adverse selection.
Actually, if prices remained fairly stable, it would be a currency.
That's what it was designed to be. These booms and busts are what prevent it from being taken seriously by all the major players in the financial sector.
As others have stated, it doesn't technically require a user to choose to run something. A simple web page with javascript can do it without even prompting you.
Still, Meltdown was the worst because it actually ran code that didn't have the user rights to run. AMD checked permissions before running anything; Intel ran everything and checked AFTER -- leaving data in the cache for other processes to find that it shouldn't have.
But, the fixes for Meltdown and various Spectre variants should also make it much more difficult for other issues to be exploited -- because a lot of the newer exploits require multiple steps and some intuition about what is useful info.
With Meltdown, a web page could have asked for login/password info or other sensitive data that might have prompted a remote exploit, a phishing attack, or just a general attack on various web sites you frequent to try to gain access to them using your info. Now, it's more akin to learning that part of your OS is on a certain sector of your hard drive... kinda useless info unless you have another tool to do something with that information.
nope. Meltdown was an Intel exclusive. Both AMD and Intel run speculative code, but the difference is AMD checked privileges before running speculative code. Intel checked AFTER running it -- meaning unauthorized code could be run before being cleared. That means AMD took a performance hit, but Intel had all kinds of info left in the cache that shouldn't be there so other processes could snoop on things that they shouldn't have privileges to access -- possibly passwords, memory locations, file locations, output for programs that should not have had authorization to run, etc.
Intel's work-around was to clear the cache whenever switching between code of different privileges. That's right -- they dump the cache memory every time a program accesses something of a higher security level so that there's nothing there for a rogue program to access something that's not on its same security level. Side effect being that an empty cache has to be refilled to properly speed up the CPU operations. Things that don't switch much aren't affected much, but some things are severely impacted.
Intel intends to fix this in a few years by changing the silicon to check FIRST -- like AMD does. It takes 2-3 years to design a new processor, though... and I doubt they'll get it in the 2019 silicon. Supposedly, they'll have a quick fix for 2019 silicon and a proper fix for 2020/2021, but who knows. They have been suffering from manufacturing delays b/c they're trying to squeeze the most the can out of outdated lithography and are getting high defects. My bet is the fixes will come when they jump to 7 nm.
This wasn't a new chip -- it was a rebranded server chip overclocked to 5 Ghz using external -10 C (14 F) temp cooling system and a modified motherboard that could use non-ECC memory.
No one would seriously purchase that abomination. It was meant as a distraction and a bit of marketing to compete with AMD's upcoming 32 core Threadripper 2 that was announced shortly after. It was literally a "hey, we got something that can compete with that!" pony show where no one talked about the cooling system needed to overclock it that high -- or even that it was overclocked. Inexperienced reporters ran with a headline that this was a new desktop CPU we might be seeing in the near future. Nope.
They are already now fessing up that if this thing sees daylight, it won't be stock clocked to 5 Ghz -- you'd be lucky to see it at 3.7 Ghz with boost to 4.2 Ghz on some cores. It's literally nothing new and worse than AMD's threadripper model with more cores and made with a better manufacturing process.
It's beyond BS when you take a chip already in use in servers, cherry pick one that has the best (almost miracle perfect) overclock capability and use what was basically a refrigerator to cool the water cooling system and hype it as a DEMO for some upcoming product. Tis vaporware to compete on paper with a soon-to-be shipping AMD product.
There is a possibility that the red giant sun might not go out farther than Venus's orbit, thus merely turning Earth into a molten wasteland on the side tidally locked with the sun. There's also the possibility that even if the red giant sun's size extends to Earth's orbit, Earth may have moved to a more distant orbit from the loss of the sun's mass through fusion and solar wind.... but, again -- molten wasteland on tidally locked side.... at least until the sun becomes a white dwarf star.
Here's hoping we'll have moved to Mars long before then as Earth will be a dry wasteland long before Sol goes red giant.
Could you elaborate? I'm not sure how preventing ISPs from omitting services from their data caps or treating services differently otherwise through throttling or QoS methods has anything to do with what you mentioned.
Netflix isn't an ISP, it's a service. T-mobile isn't an ISP, it's a cellular network and is exempt from these rules as it's "different." DirectTV isn't an ISP, it's a satellite TV / psuedo ISP that plays by different rules as well as far as I can tell. This should only affect landline phone, cable, and fiber customers. (ATT Uverse, Comcast, Charter, Google Fiber, etc)
All it should mean is if say... Comcast has a data cap for service tiers, they can't exempt their own programming or Hulu from that cap but include Netflix or others in data for that cap. They also can't throttle Netflix.
It's a brilliant business strategy. They basically control the natural diamond supply, and the best way to continue to artificially prop up their value is by ensuring everyone perceives artificial diamonds as an inferior product. One way to do that is through pricing.
We all know that lab made diamonds can be pretty much identical to mined diamonds. Different defects creep into both, but the lab ones usually have fewer defects.
By De Beers claiming all lab-grown diamonds are the same and not worth grading, they're marketing how each of their mined diamonds are unique and special. By selling the lab ones for a tenth the cost of a mined one, they're not only crushing the competition that sells them for 5 times as much, but marketing that these are inferior and too cheap to be a replacement for a true mined diamond for an engagement ring, etc.
Of course, the marketing is all hot garbage, but... so is the idea that diamonds are rare valuable stones to begin with. De Beers is king of manipulation here. If De Beers is selling these lab ones at near cost, the lab market might crash and burn from lack of profit leaving De Beers as the only lab grown seller as well.
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I prefer the more intuitive "about two round-trip flights between LA and NY."
The mining farms pay very close attention to that value because if the cost of mining the very next coin is higher than the coin is worth, they will shut down their mining operation and liquidate. Not right away, of course, but after they've decided that the new norm isn't profitable.
If all the mining farms shut down except for those in China and a few other rare locations where energy is cheap, then there's a very real concern that China, or at least one of only a few agents in China, could control the Bitcoin network - which could lead to forks, fake transactions, or the shutdown of the network entirely.
The key point of the article is that mining coins for profit doesn't appear to be sustainable any longer. If the value of Bitcoin in terms of dollars doesn't go back up, people will start turning off their bitcoin miners which also conduct transactions for the network. We could wake up one day and find there is no network to make a transaction on if the value goes down much farther.
Bingo.
Today's CPUs and GPUs are essentially silicon, copper, and various doping ions in a thin sheet that we pump electricity through. They're glorified heating elements that happen to do "work" in a useful way. They're a brilliant design for what's essentially lightning in a rock, but they're very limited.
The human brain is made of many kinds of cells in various arrangements -- each cell being a small three dimensional world full of molecular machines and nearly every connection between those cells exponentially grows the power of what they can do together. Its analog computations can be less precise and more error prone, but sometimes vastly faster and extremely power efficient depending on the scenario.
Only a fool would think we won't somehow, someday create our own synthetic cellular machinery to make synthetic living computers with amazing capabilities, not to mention the possibilities of using quantum processors to solve computationally intense algorithms.
The US intelligence community doesn't have backdoors into all phones. They have backdoors into the phone carriers for certain, though. AT&T, etc have fiber optic runs to spy closets where audio is recorded and speech-to-text tools are used to help search for key words. Snowden wasn't even the first to know about it. I remember when Shia Labeouf talked about it during an interview where he worked with the feds to prepare for a movie. He mentioned government spying, and the feds played him back a recording of a cell phone call he'd made years before to show off what they could do. This is why everyone who actually works for the government in high positions all use encryption for their calls and texts (while simultaneously fighting for backdoors for encryption) -- because those apps circumvent the carrier's recording technology.
Phones are pretty rock solid - especially Apple iphones. I've heard from local law enforcement that there's a huge backlog of iphones and other equipment with strong encryption that the feds can't break into yet. For simple codes on Android, they use a USB that fakes a keyboard input trying all the possibilities 'til it unlocks - doesn't take long for simple numeric codes. iPhones will make you wait between tries and the wait time gets longer with each failed try. Biometric ones are easy to unlock - use a lifted print or a photo if it's a face unlock... but, they still have to unlock it b/c there's no actual backdoor.
Verizon and some other carriers have their own OS modifications for Android, so who knows what they put on their phones when they flash the ROMs to make them work. I assume carrier unlocked factory-default phones would be free of such spyware, but simply making a call on a carrier means the carrier can listen in to the call since they make the connection.
Any funny looking hardware would get scrutinized and would kill a phone maker's business if found, but software can be tricky. Apple is the only company I know of for certain that loads their own un-modified OS on their hardware. Verizon, Sprint, and others tend to tweak the OS and flash the ROM... they could be doing anything, really. Huawei, if it were allowed to play in the US market, would be subject to Verizon, Sprint, AT&T etc... the carriers would mandate what software was on the devices and flash their spyware if there is some there to flash. Huawei could have a super-secret hardware firmware backdoor, kill switch, or the like, but a physical rogue chip would be detected, and any malware would have to navigate through the flashed telcom firmware to operate. The minute malware is discovered, their business would be over. It'd be suicide for them to do that.
The US is just upset that China isn't following US sanctions on other countries in addition to the current trade war. Huawei being Chinese government controlled will always be a threat to US security as at any time, Hauwei could flip a switch, flash an update, and own your device.... but, it wasn't until recently that the US told their govt contractors to ban Hauwei devices. It's all politics at this point.
I sympathize, but there is always a cost/benefit analysis to be done for supporting older hardware and software which will run under the limitations of old hardware. Windows XP SP3 was roughly the final version of XP in 2008, so we're talking about maybe 10 year old netbook that was designed with a 2 to 3 year lifespan to begin with (Atom processors were barely capable of running XP -- I used to manage a few netbooks on an organization's network). I can't even get Google to support Android OS security updates on their own products released more than 3 years ago. The last Intel consumer CPUs that were 32 bit were Atoms in 2011. The last desktop/laptop CPUs that were 32 bit only were Intel Core Duos in 2006.
Someone could continue to support 32 bit Linux for the device - maybe a different distribution. Lubuntu will still support 32 bit linux on the LTS release until 2021, which isn't bad for an Ubuntu flavor supporting what will then be 10 to 15 year old hardware. I'm sure someone will continue to support 32 bit Linux as there are still a lot of imbedded 32 bit processors - one might just have to seek out a more niche distro.
I'm always a little sad to see working hardware tossed into the trash, and I've always tried to find uses for older machines - either as donations to students or families that need one or as simple, single-use devices. Sometimes, though... it's simply not worth the cost of electricity to use them when one can purchase a small low-powered replacement. For instance, I had an old laptop with a cracked and useless screen that was still good to connect to a TV to watch Hulu, Netflix, and other streaming services (though it couldn't handle 1080p), but a simple Roku Stick replaced it for very little cost and huge power savings.
Think of Lubuntu as "lightweight ubuntu." Debian creates most of the base, Canonical polishes most of what's left and adds in some goodies and releases Ubuntu as its main distro with the Gnome Desktop Environment. Then, Canonical and/or their partners also support other "flavors" of Ubuntu which use other Desktop Environments. Think of the DE as just another program - the user interface is just a shell over the rest of the OS.
Some examples:
Kubuntu -- KDE Plasma desktop
Lubuntu -- LXQT desktop
Xubuntu -- XFCE desktop
Ubuntu Mate -- Mate desktop
Ubuntu Budgie -- Budgie desktop
There are often a few other changes to preferred programs like text editors, terminal viewers, file managers, etc. that come with the Desktop environments. Lubuntu, being a lightweight distro meant for older machines with fewer resources especially has some changes to default installations - mostly replacing Ubuntu's default programs with other smaller, less resource-hungry programs so that you can get the most out of a system with a small hard drive and low RAM.
It's still a lot of work to maintain the differences in the packages and the separate desktop environments, but the differences in the Ubuntu flavors largely come down to selecting between a few swappable programs - you can even install a different desktop environment and uninstall your original one and effectively change flavors -- since they're all built on the same basic Ubuntu base built on the same Debian base.
You could think of Lubuntu as a partnership between Debian, Canonical, the LXQT team, and everyone else that contributes to the GNU/LINUX operating system. I don't know the breakdown of funding, but as it's supported by Canonical, I suspect most of the funding is supported the same as the regular Ubuntu release with LXQT mostly supporting their desktop environment.
I always go with Samsung EVO or PRO. Things may be different now, but when I was first in the market for SSDs, Samsung was the only one that designed every part of the device - not a cobbled together mess of components and software from various vendors made into a franken-device that might work ok most of the time. Now, I just buy Samsungs out of habit & the fact I've never had one fail on me. Samsung DID have a huge blunder with one or two specific lines of SSDs, but that was widespread with those specific models, not random deaths on random models.
I've never had to use the Samsung software included other than a firmware update once, but it has lots of tools for diagnostics and recovery. I can't vouch for how well they work since I haven't had to use them.
No drive will last forever, but considering I generally put my apps and OS on the C: Samsung and all my media and Windows profile on separate drives, my write/overwrite rate on the SSD is consistent with allowing it to last until sometime after our Sun turns into a red giant.
Man, I thought they killed that feature way back when they axed RSS.
I loved that feature - let me see all the FARK, Slashdot, Cnet, and other techie article headlines with a click and hover & it auto-updated so I didn't have to even visit the actual pages, just picked the story I wanted right from the bookmarks.
I switched to Chrome way, way back after FF made it near impossible for some of my other workflows, extensions, etc to work properly. I also got tired of having to track down an extension or two that quit working due to either changes or lack of support.
Wow, that reminds me. Remember when FF took out the ability to even see the html link on hover that used to help you figure out whether a link was a phishing attack or some other malware site disguised as a credible link? It took me an extension or two just to bring that functionality back. Those guys are crazy. I'll stick with Chrome, Chromium, Opera, and/or Vivaldi. FF is dead to me.
I tend to agree, and apparently so do IBM, Google, et al. Still, the larger the system, the more error prone it becomes. Obviously, we have quantum computers (or at least functioning parts of ones) working today and can entangle up to 50 qubits or more with relative stability... but, the question is whether we can do it at the scale needed to be "useful" (according to this individual) without losing the signal for all the noise.
This person's perspective is that what we naively see as an engineering problem to be resolved with future refinements is actually an issue that can't be resolved because nature at a fundamental particle physics level can't be controlled or tuned to the degree necessary to get one working, nor reasonably checked for accuracy because the states to be checked are beyond astronomical.
I think the key problem is theory vs physical reality. In theory, if you have a set of qubits entangled with zero noise at near absolute zero, you can send a quantum program to the qubits & have them process your data without you worrying about what their individual states are & then capture their completed output.
In reality, how do you entangle enough qubits to be useful? How do you prevent noise or correct for the errors of noise? How do you ensure your qubits are properly entangled? How do you accurately send your quantum program to the qubits for processing? How do you aide in processing the qubits accurately without generating more noise? How do you extract the output without generating more noise? And ultimately, how are you going to ensure that you are entangling 10^300 attributes of your qubits perfectly in the first place, much less correcting for errors in processing them?
I think the TL,DR is that this quantum physicist sees all the places errors can creep in and how difficult it can be to correct for them. The answers he sees coming from the community seems to be to just add more qubits for error correction - or even process the same data with multiple quantum computers or with multiple paths through the same qubits.
I understand his/her frustration. It seems a difficult task to precisely manipulate qubits using modern technology, and an impossible task to know and/or set the states of everything to ultimately know for certain whether an error has been generated.
As a fellow Nexus 7 2013 owner, I share your pain in finding an improved model after so many years. I like the specs of the M5, but I hear there are 2.4 Ghz wifi / Bluetooth interference issues and there's no 3.5 headphone jack, so the search goes on for me.
I get what you're saying about the marketing, but really... tablets just have a much longer product life cycle and the profits are razor thin, so there aren't many models. Phones which are still often replaced every 2 years (thanks to "new every 2" phone plans) have a much shorter cycle and can be mass produced at a much larger scale.
The tablet market was saturated quickly. Then, e-readers and smart phones cannibalized most of the tablet market. Amazon's Fire HD tablets and other low-end tablets ate the rest of the Android tablet market. Most adults have large smart phones and give their kids the cheap, even larger tablets. (You can get a refurbished Fire HD 10" for only $120... or a Fire HD 8" Kid's Edition for $130)
Me, I want something like the M5, but with better quality wifi/bluetooth... and I'll use a USB C to 3.5 jack if I have to, but I'd rather have the native 3.5 jack. The M5 has double the cores and RAM of my Nexus with a higher def screen and 4x the internal storage plus a card slot for more. NICE! But, it doesn't come with Android 9.... and there's no indication of when it'll get it - if ever. With Nexus devices, Google does OTA updates almost instantaneously upon release, but even Google only supports devices for a couple years, then you're on your own with your unsupported device with gaping security holes.
The Android ecosystem is enough to make me want to pull my hair out over the security issues and lack of support and updates by hardware manufacturers. I'd like to switch to LineageOS, but they're in eternal beta as well.
Yep. Market saturation.
That, and my 6 year old tablet is still good enough for most everything I use it for & there's no way in Hades I'd pay more than $200 for a newer model with better specs. (mostly because today's specs aren't much better, yet the prices are higher than a decent laptop).
Ah, for want of Mod points! This. So much this.
802.11a came first, so let's call it WiFi 1
802.11b came next, so let's refer to it as Wifi 2
a and b were NOT compatible -- used different frequencies and hardware. There was a time when you could get one or the other and there were pros and cons to both.
802.11g was next, so Wifi 3 -- was mostly compatible with b, but not a... and if you truly wanted g speeds without issues, you'd tell the wifi access point to NOT allow b to work on it because otherwise, whenever a b device connected, everything dropped to b speeds.
802.11n, 802.11ac, etc.. these are all just IEEE spec names and were never supposed to be consumer friendly. It's fine that they're making a clearer naming scheme for marketing purposes to ordinary consumers, but... it's just not true that all newer versions of Wifi are backward compatible with older ones... and there are even wifi specs for things that were designed around the same time period for different purposes that were never meant to be compatible.... like wireless connectivity between buildings that works on a diff spec and frequency than your general access points indoors.
I've been reading about this daytime cooling through infra-red emissivity to space stuff for a while now. The biggest benefit isn't the color (or the reflective value), but that it will absorb heat from whatever the source and radiate that energy away in the mid-IR band that will allow it to leave Earth's atmosphere without being re-absorbed by anything nearby. That makes it effectively a way to remove heat from the surface of the earth by emitting that energy into space.... heat that would otherwise be trapped by our atmosphere's greenhouse effect.
This is the first time I've seen this expressed as a coating for everyday consumer items rather than as a heat sink layer added to an exterior A/C unit or a potential roofing material, though.
My understanding is that generally these coatings are white in the visible spectrum to reflect sunlight, but emit light in the mid-IR range. There's a startup company for using this to improve efficiency in A/C units I read a while back, and they tested the material in the hot sun on a roof in India -- you could put your hand on it after it had been baking in the sun, and it was cool to the touch. That's relative term, though. I don't recall the actual temperature readings.
I respectfully disagree. Also, word to the wise, don't ever say that to an IT department during an interview. Counties and banks keep hardware 50 years old and maintain OSes that are decades old -- and many run on COBOL and various ancient, long-dead languages. Then, there's the product designers -- like boat hull manufacturers which use CAD-based systems that are easily 15 to 20 years old running on OSes almost just as old.
You want the latest and greatest libraries and functionality -- great. Good for you. Most organizations want to buy something and keep it 'til the wheels come off. Even with regular rotations for equipment, the old 5 year life cycle has turned into a 7 to 10 year one in most counties.
My photographer friends use Adobe Lightroom mostly, but some use Adobe CS 6 and will stay with it until their machine dies and it's impossible to re-install and activate the product. Most of them use Windows 7 and will gladly disconnect the Win 7 box from the network and transfer files by hand to keep it going without having to update to Windows 10 -- ever.
If you're selling a subscription model software, then one should poll the base to see whether or not it's worth supporting their respective OSes. If they've done that and have decided to nuke support for older OSes, then they should just stop offering the subscription license for the unsupported OSes. Let them get a notice -- hey, upgrade your box or your license will de-activate and we'll stop billing you.
That way, there's no half-hearted attempt at keeping the customer happy by allowing them to use unsupported software for a fee.
Love to see the sources for that, because it'd be amazing if true. Best I can find on nanoimprint lithography from the wiki is 10nm -- and that's with overlays. Toshiba got 22 nm and smaller, but no specs on how small.
Intel is having trouble with 7 nm because it's using 4 masks to get there. So, it's really using older tech with many steps to etch smaller w/ these overlays. If you have to run the silicon through the light 4 times in different positions using different patterns, you can get horrible yields as the slightest deviation will either ruin chips or severely impact their performance.
Roadmaps don't impress me as they can and do get pushed back as issues arise. I haven't seen anything credible beyond 5 nm -- and that wasn't even using silicon as the substrate.
that's not to say self-assembling structures and nanotubes won't save the day, but... standard lithography with standard silicon is almost done. No one denies that 5nm is going to be extremely difficult without different materials or exotic methods.
Possible, but I doubt it. Intel may not be able to figure out how to get 7 nm to work for years. TSMC is the obvious choice for AMD to remain in the lead for CPUs and their only hope for parity on GPUs. TSMC may make them pay more for the best quality silicon and fastest capacity, but it'd be worth it.
The only prayer for them to survive was to have such a vast membership that they could mine them for data to sell and/or control the flow of people to movie theaters in such a way that they became the middle-men that theaters would have to partner with and give discounts towards.
They knew they were going to burn through a LOT of cash before that scenario could happen, but they didn't have deep enough pockets to actually make it happen. They came close at one point.
Not only was the business model so shady that everyone took notice, the CEO kept giving rosy best-case scenarios for profitability that made no sense because they didn't take into account some very basic business principles like adverse selection.
Actually, if prices remained fairly stable, it would be a currency.
That's what it was designed to be. These booms and busts are what prevent it from being taken seriously by all the major players in the financial sector.
As others have stated, it doesn't technically require a user to choose to run something. A simple web page with javascript can do it without even prompting you.
Still, Meltdown was the worst because it actually ran code that didn't have the user rights to run. AMD checked permissions before running anything; Intel ran everything and checked AFTER -- leaving data in the cache for other processes to find that it shouldn't have.
But, the fixes for Meltdown and various Spectre variants should also make it much more difficult for other issues to be exploited -- because a lot of the newer exploits require multiple steps and some intuition about what is useful info.
With Meltdown, a web page could have asked for login/password info or other sensitive data that might have prompted a remote exploit, a phishing attack, or just a general attack on various web sites you frequent to try to gain access to them using your info. Now, it's more akin to learning that part of your OS is on a certain sector of your hard drive... kinda useless info unless you have another tool to do something with that information.
nope. Meltdown was an Intel exclusive. Both AMD and Intel run speculative code, but the difference is AMD checked privileges before running speculative code. Intel checked AFTER running it -- meaning unauthorized code could be run before being cleared. That means AMD took a performance hit, but Intel had all kinds of info left in the cache that shouldn't be there so other processes could snoop on things that they shouldn't have privileges to access -- possibly passwords, memory locations, file locations, output for programs that should not have had authorization to run, etc.
Intel's work-around was to clear the cache whenever switching between code of different privileges. That's right -- they dump the cache memory every time a program accesses something of a higher security level so that there's nothing there for a rogue program to access something that's not on its same security level. Side effect being that an empty cache has to be refilled to properly speed up the CPU operations. Things that don't switch much aren't affected much, but some things are severely impacted.
Intel intends to fix this in a few years by changing the silicon to check FIRST -- like AMD does. It takes 2-3 years to design a new processor, though... and I doubt they'll get it in the 2019 silicon. Supposedly, they'll have a quick fix for 2019 silicon and a proper fix for 2020/2021, but who knows. They have been suffering from manufacturing delays b/c they're trying to squeeze the most the can out of outdated lithography and are getting high defects. My bet is the fixes will come when they jump to 7 nm.
This wasn't a new chip -- it was a rebranded server chip overclocked to 5 Ghz using external -10 C (14 F) temp cooling system and a modified motherboard that could use non-ECC memory.
No one would seriously purchase that abomination. It was meant as a distraction and a bit of marketing to compete with AMD's upcoming 32 core Threadripper 2 that was announced shortly after. It was literally a "hey, we got something that can compete with that!" pony show where no one talked about the cooling system needed to overclock it that high -- or even that it was overclocked. Inexperienced reporters ran with a headline that this was a new desktop CPU we might be seeing in the near future. Nope.
They are already now fessing up that if this thing sees daylight, it won't be stock clocked to 5 Ghz -- you'd be lucky to see it at 3.7 Ghz with boost to 4.2 Ghz on some cores. It's literally nothing new and worse than AMD's threadripper model with more cores and made with a better manufacturing process.
It's beyond BS when you take a chip already in use in servers, cherry pick one that has the best (almost miracle perfect) overclock capability and use what was basically a refrigerator to cool the water cooling system and hype it as a DEMO for some upcoming product. Tis vaporware to compete on paper with a soon-to-be shipping AMD product.
There is a possibility that the red giant sun might not go out farther than Venus's orbit, thus merely turning Earth into a molten wasteland on the side tidally locked with the sun. There's also the possibility that even if the red giant sun's size extends to Earth's orbit, Earth may have moved to a more distant orbit from the loss of the sun's mass through fusion and solar wind.... but, again -- molten wasteland on tidally locked side.... at least until the sun becomes a white dwarf star.
Here's hoping we'll have moved to Mars long before then as Earth will be a dry wasteland long before Sol goes red giant.
Could you elaborate? I'm not sure how preventing ISPs from omitting services from their data caps or treating services differently otherwise through throttling or QoS methods has anything to do with what you mentioned.
Netflix isn't an ISP, it's a service. T-mobile isn't an ISP, it's a cellular network and is exempt from these rules as it's "different." DirectTV isn't an ISP, it's a satellite TV / psuedo ISP that plays by different rules as well as far as I can tell. This should only affect landline phone, cable, and fiber customers. (ATT Uverse, Comcast, Charter, Google Fiber, etc)
All it should mean is if say... Comcast has a data cap for service tiers, they can't exempt their own programming or Hulu from that cap but include Netflix or others in data for that cap. They also can't throttle Netflix.
Am I missing something?
It's a brilliant business strategy. They basically control the natural diamond supply, and the best way to continue to artificially prop up their value is by ensuring everyone perceives artificial diamonds as an inferior product. One way to do that is through pricing.
We all know that lab made diamonds can be pretty much identical to mined diamonds. Different defects creep into both, but the lab ones usually have fewer defects.
By De Beers claiming all lab-grown diamonds are the same and not worth grading, they're marketing how each of their mined diamonds are unique and special. By selling the lab ones for a tenth the cost of a mined one, they're not only crushing the competition that sells them for 5 times as much, but marketing that these are inferior and too cheap to be a replacement for a true mined diamond for an engagement ring, etc.
Of course, the marketing is all hot garbage, but... so is the idea that diamonds are rare valuable stones to begin with. De Beers is king of manipulation here. If De Beers is selling these lab ones at near cost, the lab market might crash and burn from lack of profit leaving De Beers as the only lab grown seller as well.