I worked on the first major device running QNX as a kernel for an interactive device. It was the most difficult platform I ever coded for and to be honest, there were many things which were very problematic with the platform.
Gosh, I remember when Commodore suggested that the next Amiga might use QNX, before they fell over and died....
Look up the Unisys ICON, an 80186 based computer back in the 1980's that ran QNX. They had quite the interesting architecture, and were basically early network computing environments (they had their own local memory and processing, but a centralized network disk share by all systems).
Real time systems got it right (as opposed to pre-emptive).
Huh? Real time systems can still pre-empt. Time sharing RTOS' do exactly this. Depending on wether the RTOS is hard of soft; so long as you can deterministically meet a deadline, you can pre-empt and still be a hard RTOS.
I am 100% certain that their cloud (think iCloud, Siri, iTunes store, App Store) and administrative infrastructure (think CRM, ERP, HR, etc) do not run on Apple Servers, and does not use Apple's OS.
I suspect you were the last person on the planet to know about this.
I doubt any long-time/. readers are surprised by this at all. Apple hasn't made a proper server since 2011, and doesn't sell or advertise macOS as a high-performance server OS (while they do still sell a "server" edition, it's more geared towards SOHO use than datacenter use).
Apple left the server space quite some time ago. They run iCloud off a combination of Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, none of which run macOS. And this comes as a surprise to nobody at all who has paid a gram of attention over the last 8 years.
I received an Echo Dot as a present recently. I'm actually surprised by how much I use it.
The biggest use tends to be in the mornings, when I'm preparing breakfast and lunch for the wife and daughter. While I'm buttering bread and slicing cheese I get my Flash Briefing, a traffic report, a weather report, and then have Alexa turn on my TV and surround sound system, switch them to the correct inputs, and automatically switch to the morning cartoon channel my daughter prefers, all with a single command.
Outside of the morning, it's nice to be able to get music on command, or listen to my favourite podcast, or start my favourite radio station. I have full control of my entertainment centre, and hope to add some lighting control soon as well..
I will agree however that currently the vast bulk of Alexa skills are trivial junk. There are some key ones for integrating with various home control systems, but the vast majority of skills are just sound effects, useless trivia, or silly games of the sort that you get bored of 10 minutes after you install them. I've avoided these myself, but when you look through Amazon's list of Alexa skills and this appears to be 95% of the skill base, it does bring you a bit of despair.
I should note the ability to make phone calls is interesting, although I've only once used it for such (to call the person who sent it as a gift). The intercom capability might be useful if we ever add another to our setup. It's both a strength and a weakness that you have to have the computation for the skills run through AWS (a strength because of the easy to develop skills, and Amazon provides everything you need; a weakness because you can't avoid it, and you can't easily integrate your own devices without exposing them to the cloud. I've really been wanting to figure out a good way to write a skill that can tell me how last nights builds at work turned out, but it's not readily possible as the system lives behind a corporate firewall).
Everyone knows you can just snap your fingers and hire piles of capable engineers who deliver excellent products!
The big tech companies have each compiled a significant list of talented developers. They look at Open Source development projects, student research papers, competitors employees, etc., and compile sizeable lists of talent.
I get calls form Google roughly every 6 months, e-mails from Apple at least once a year, and Amazon a handful of times (once had two of their recruiters trying to recruit me for the same job at the same time!). For positions like these they aren't just putting up a "for hire" sign and hoping talent comes to them -- they already have the talent they want identified, and then just have to find the right set of incentives to bring them aboard.
If you can get them from Apple's refurbished store, and if you're in the Mac ecosystem, they're worth grabbing for $65 or thereabouts.
They're great little gadgets -- I'm rather sorry that Apple hasn't really done anything with them for some time (while I can understand they want to differentiate, would it have killed them to release an 802.11ac version). I have two -- an 802.11n model acting as an AirPlay server connected to my surround receiver and as a second access point for my WiFi network (for better coverage in the living room and back yard -- this is where 802.11ac would be nice, as my main WiFi access point is 802.11ac), and an older 802.11g model. The second one burnt out its 5V power supply -- I keep it around as I've convinced myself that some day I'll fix the PSU and use it as another AirPlay sink.
I've used the Airport Express for this sort of thing. Alternatively, if you want optical audio out, you could do the same thing with a cheap third-gen Apple TV (probably cheaper than the Express).
The Airport Express also has optical out built-in.
This is my work life in a nutshell. I've never met my boss or any of my co-workers -- they are several thousand kilometres away. My employer has offices all around the world, but not in my city, so I have no office to go to even if I wanted to. Even my interview was over the phone (although I should note I was already an employee of the company at the time, and the position was tailor-made for me).
The work gets done, and so my employer is happy. I have time to take care of things at home as needed, such as picking up my daughter from school. I can work from wherever I want, so long as I have online access. I could move across the country, and wouldn't need to find new employment. I can work in my pyjamas and slippers. I have a fully stocked and equipped kitchen at my disposal.
Frankly, I've had to turn down some offers and interest from some pretty big, well known companies, because they simply can't match my current work environment. Every day I can't help but feel like one of the luckiest guys in the world (for a working stiff, at least).
macOS on the Server side of things is so far behind what can be done with Linux, it isn't even funny. You can't run macOS in AWS. You can't containerize macOS apps (Docker on macOS uses macOS's hypervisor to run Linux in the background). If you want to run in the server space, and you aren't tied to Microsoft proprietary ways of doing things, Linux is the place to be. Apple knows this -- they're already too far behind, and are simply never going to be able to keep pace with what's going on in the Linux world.
Apple needs to focus on continuing to ensure that macOS is a highly compatible client OS. Linux still falls flat in this area. Other than for some Apple proprietary stuff (like iOS provisioning), a macOS server is pointless. Use Linux on the server and macOS on the client.
And they managed to give the kid every imaginable annoyingly on-trend and precocious quality. He's an intellectual, an artist, a scientist, and environmentalist, a bike rider, coffee shop denizen, transit rider AND is gender-flexible with his painted fingernails.
That is Hannah Alligood, and she is a girl. But please, don't let that get in the way of some good old-fashioned transgender bashing. Pathetic.
Steve Jobs had the perfect sense of exactly how to package something at exactly the right price point for the consumer.
In most instances, yes. However, this isn't the first time Apple has decided to get into the speaker business; the last time was on Job's watch, and it failed pretty hard in the marketplace: the Apple iPod Hi-Fi.
Like the Apple iPod Hi-Fi, it looks like they're going to try to position this as an audiophile speaker. I have little doubt from that perspective it's probably a better music device than its competitors; the thing to watch for is to see if people are going to care enough about that this time around (they didn't seem to last time around). Most people don't seem to care if their speakers are crappy, so long as they can hear their tunes.
A system crash implies that it is a software problem.
You have a faulty definition of crash. A "crash" is any unexpected, abnormal end of processing. Bad memory chips can cause a system to "crash", with nothing directly to do with software.
In fact, Apple could have had the phone show some message "Your battery needs replaced - your phone only has 75% of the capacity from when it was new" and could have made a lot of money off of people replacing their batteries.
Or alternately this thread would instead be about money-grabbing Apple scaring people into paying them for new batteries when their existing battery was "just fine", and that Apple was crippling people phones on purpose to extract maximum cash.
It's more like... "no longer enforced at the federal level". But yeah, that still sucks. And it sucks for Europe as well because you're currently reading text that was served to you from the United States.
The lack of Net Neutrality rules in the US probably won't affect tier 1 or tier 2 ISPs however. They don't really have a business case to deny carriage to anyone. And besides which if that ever were the case, sites could simply pack up and move their hosting to some other first world country outside the US.
However, even if for some reason Slashdot was being disadvantaged by the lack of NN rules in the US and for some reason didn't feel like moving their hosting to outside the US, it would hardly be some great loss. It isn't as if some other company can't setup shop and provide me text from outside the US instead. Indeed,/. could move their hosting to Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver tomorrow, and chances are nobody would notice any difference.
For people with intermittent or unexistent connectivity, ISP-free mesh networks with moderate but consistent speeds become quite attractive. Facebook and Google are desperate for getting an early grip of those four billion people, e.g. through Internet.org and Project Loon. However, because their middlemen businesses are tethered to the internet, all of these projects require the old hierarchical structures of ISPs and cables.
What I'd like to now is where is this place in the world where people typically own smartphones, but who don't have any sort of Internet connectivity?
I have little doubt there are parts of the world where people have dumbphones with no Internet connectivity (North Korea?), but I don't think there is anywhere on this globe where there is a major area filled with people saying "well, I paid a bunch to get this amazing smartphone, but I can't use any of its features because there are no options for Internet access. Why did I buy this thing again?"
Well, Google controls how most people find things on the web and a browser that controls how they see it.
But when it comes to search, there is no real vendor lock-in. Don't like Google's search? Think they are blocking relevant results? You can use DuckDuckGo, or Bing, or Yahoo. And you can change right now, as there is no search lock-in.
Amazon hosts a large percentage of web sites through AWS.
Citation needed. They are hardly the only hosting service out there; they aren't doing anything you can't replicate through some other provider, like Google, Microsoft, or any number of smaller regional players. If they don't want to host your site, you have options.
Facebook is the dominant social network where people communicate with each other.
The massive user bases of WeChat, WhatsApp, Line, iMessage, Skype, and Google Hangouts (never mind old-school SMS) would seem to show that users have a lot of options in the user-to-user communication space. While wildly popular, I'm having a hard time seeing what service Facebook provides that you can't get elsewhere should you choose.
Now that Net Neutrality is dead, ISPs now can control who goes over those pipes. The concern is real.
Net Neutrality is only dead in the United States. The world is a damn big place outside the US. I would agree there is a real concern that inside the US there are some real concerns that the tier 3 access providers may start picking winners and losers, but outside the US that's only the situation in countries with tight Internet control, such as China or North Korea.
Performance as a metric doesn't tell me squat on its own, as it's pretty damn easy to have better performance by ignoring standards compliance, and Microsoft doesn't exactly have the best track record when it comes to fully complying to web standards.
I'm sure that elinks renders even faster than Edge, but that fact on its own isn't all that helpful if you expect ECMAScript and full CSS support.
My wife owns an iPhones 5s. The battery is pretty worn, and needs replacement.
I borrowed it the other day to use the GPS to get somewhere; half-way to my destination it shut down, even though it claimed to have 15% battery remaining. I would MUCH rather it had slowed down and stayed running; as I was driving at the time I didn't notice it had turned itself off (as I was driving, I relied on the audio cues), and missed my turn.
If Apple should have done anything different, it's that there should be a notification letting the user know that their battery is failing, needs to be replaced, and was being slowed down to allow the phone to run as long as possible. It's not the throttling code that is at fault -- it's the social conventions that were missed that is the problem.
But then again, even if they had provided a pop-up to warn users, there would be a cabal of Apple-haters claiming it was just some plot by Apple to get people to replace their iPhone batteries before it was necessary to do so. Apple could invent the cure for cancer, and some people would bitch about it.
The U.S. military command that is charged with protecting the airspace for North America
That should be US and Canadian military command. You'd have a pretty hard time protecting all of North America without Canada's vigilance in the North, you know.
Aren't you admitting that you work for a cable company with that admission?
Nope -- I do work for a large private global corporation with revenues over $2 billion US per year (for not quite Fortune 500) as a fully remote employee; early on they decided to pay the full bill, as my cable company doesn't break out the charge for TV versus Internet.
Technically it's up to me to pay for any PPV type charges that may occur on the bill, but as we don't incur any such charges in our household, it's never come up.
Slashdot Mirror
What possible leverage could the US possibly have to re-join the TPP after Trump exited it with such fanfare?
But if we don't let the US back in, how will Trump howl and scream how unfair it is to American workers and pull out of it again next month?
Yaz
I worked on the first major device running QNX as a kernel for an interactive device. It was the most difficult platform I ever coded for and to be honest, there were many things which were very problematic with the platform.
ICON?
Gosh, I remember when Commodore suggested that the next Amiga might use QNX, before they fell over and died....
Look up the Unisys ICON, an 80186 based computer back in the 1980's that ran QNX. They had quite the interesting architecture, and were basically early network computing environments (they had their own local memory and processing, but a centralized network disk share by all systems).
I have fond memories of those machines.
Yaz
Real time systems got it right (as opposed to pre-emptive).
Huh? Real time systems can still pre-empt. Time sharing RTOS' do exactly this. Depending on wether the RTOS is hard of soft; so long as you can deterministically meet a deadline, you can pre-empt and still be a hard RTOS.
Yaz
I am 100% certain that their cloud (think iCloud, Siri, iTunes store, App Store) and administrative infrastructure (think CRM, ERP, HR, etc) do not run on Apple Servers, and does not use Apple's OS.
I suspect you were the last person on the planet to know about this.
I doubt any long-time /. readers are surprised by this at all. Apple hasn't made a proper server since 2011, and doesn't sell or advertise macOS as a high-performance server OS (while they do still sell a "server" edition, it's more geared towards SOHO use than datacenter use).
Apple left the server space quite some time ago. They run iCloud off a combination of Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, none of which run macOS. And this comes as a surprise to nobody at all who has paid a gram of attention over the last 8 years.
Yaz
I received an Echo Dot as a present recently. I'm actually surprised by how much I use it.
The biggest use tends to be in the mornings, when I'm preparing breakfast and lunch for the wife and daughter. While I'm buttering bread and slicing cheese I get my Flash Briefing, a traffic report, a weather report, and then have Alexa turn on my TV and surround sound system, switch them to the correct inputs, and automatically switch to the morning cartoon channel my daughter prefers, all with a single command.
Outside of the morning, it's nice to be able to get music on command, or listen to my favourite podcast, or start my favourite radio station. I have full control of my entertainment centre, and hope to add some lighting control soon as well..
I will agree however that currently the vast bulk of Alexa skills are trivial junk. There are some key ones for integrating with various home control systems, but the vast majority of skills are just sound effects, useless trivia, or silly games of the sort that you get bored of 10 minutes after you install them. I've avoided these myself, but when you look through Amazon's list of Alexa skills and this appears to be 95% of the skill base, it does bring you a bit of despair.
I should note the ability to make phone calls is interesting, although I've only once used it for such (to call the person who sent it as a gift). The intercom capability might be useful if we ever add another to our setup. It's both a strength and a weakness that you have to have the computation for the skills run through AWS (a strength because of the easy to develop skills, and Amazon provides everything you need; a weakness because you can't avoid it, and you can't easily integrate your own devices without exposing them to the cloud. I've really been wanting to figure out a good way to write a skill that can tell me how last nights builds at work turned out, but it's not readily possible as the system lives behind a corporate firewall).
Yaz
Everyone knows you can just snap your fingers and hire piles of capable engineers who deliver excellent products!
The big tech companies have each compiled a significant list of talented developers. They look at Open Source development projects, student research papers, competitors employees, etc., and compile sizeable lists of talent.
I get calls form Google roughly every 6 months, e-mails from Apple at least once a year, and Amazon a handful of times (once had two of their recruiters trying to recruit me for the same job at the same time!). For positions like these they aren't just putting up a "for hire" sign and hoping talent comes to them -- they already have the talent they want identified, and then just have to find the right set of incentives to bring them aboard.
Yaz
If you can get them from Apple's refurbished store, and if you're in the Mac ecosystem, they're worth grabbing for $65 or thereabouts.
They're great little gadgets -- I'm rather sorry that Apple hasn't really done anything with them for some time (while I can understand they want to differentiate, would it have killed them to release an 802.11ac version). I have two -- an 802.11n model acting as an AirPlay server connected to my surround receiver and as a second access point for my WiFi network (for better coverage in the living room and back yard -- this is where 802.11ac would be nice, as my main WiFi access point is 802.11ac), and an older 802.11g model. The second one burnt out its 5V power supply -- I keep it around as I've convinced myself that some day I'll fix the PSU and use it as another AirPlay sink.
Yaz
I've used the Airport Express for this sort of thing. Alternatively, if you want optical audio out, you could do the same thing with a cheap third-gen Apple TV (probably cheaper than the Express).
The Airport Express also has optical out built-in.
Yaz
This is my work life in a nutshell. I've never met my boss or any of my co-workers -- they are several thousand kilometres away. My employer has offices all around the world, but not in my city, so I have no office to go to even if I wanted to. Even my interview was over the phone (although I should note I was already an employee of the company at the time, and the position was tailor-made for me).
The work gets done, and so my employer is happy. I have time to take care of things at home as needed, such as picking up my daughter from school. I can work from wherever I want, so long as I have online access. I could move across the country, and wouldn't need to find new employment. I can work in my pyjamas and slippers. I have a fully stocked and equipped kitchen at my disposal.
Frankly, I've had to turn down some offers and interest from some pretty big, well known companies, because they simply can't match my current work environment. Every day I can't help but feel like one of the luckiest guys in the world (for a working stiff, at least).
Yaz
macOS on the Server side of things is so far behind what can be done with Linux, it isn't even funny. You can't run macOS in AWS. You can't containerize macOS apps (Docker on macOS uses macOS's hypervisor to run Linux in the background). If you want to run in the server space, and you aren't tied to Microsoft proprietary ways of doing things, Linux is the place to be. Apple knows this -- they're already too far behind, and are simply never going to be able to keep pace with what's going on in the Linux world.
Apple needs to focus on continuing to ensure that macOS is a highly compatible client OS. Linux still falls flat in this area. Other than for some Apple proprietary stuff (like iOS provisioning), a macOS server is pointless. Use Linux on the server and macOS on the client.
Yaz
Is the kid in the commercial a girl or boy? These days it could go either way.
That's a 14 year old girl. But even if it weren't -- so what?
Yaz
And they managed to give the kid every imaginable annoyingly on-trend and precocious quality. He's an intellectual, an artist, a scientist, and environmentalist, a bike rider, coffee shop denizen, transit rider AND is gender-flexible with his painted fingernails.
That is Hannah Alligood, and she is a girl. But please, don't let that get in the way of some good old-fashioned transgender bashing. Pathetic.
Yaz
Steve Jobs had the perfect sense of exactly how to package something at exactly the right price point for the consumer.
In most instances, yes. However, this isn't the first time Apple has decided to get into the speaker business; the last time was on Job's watch, and it failed pretty hard in the marketplace: the Apple iPod Hi-Fi.
Like the Apple iPod Hi-Fi, it looks like they're going to try to position this as an audiophile speaker. I have little doubt from that perspective it's probably a better music device than its competitors; the thing to watch for is to see if people are going to care enough about that this time around (they didn't seem to last time around). Most people don't seem to care if their speakers are crappy, so long as they can hear their tunes.
Yaz
Routing however is not an issue - just look to the IT world for examples.
Where collisions at the hub are rampant, so we just wait a bit and retry?
I do NOT want to fly your airline!
Yaz
A system crash implies that it is a software problem.
You have a faulty definition of crash. A "crash" is any unexpected, abnormal end of processing. Bad memory chips can cause a system to "crash", with nothing directly to do with software.
Yaz
In fact, Apple could have had the phone show some message "Your battery needs replaced - your phone only has 75% of the capacity from when it was new" and could have made a lot of money off of people replacing their batteries.
Or alternately this thread would instead be about money-grabbing Apple scaring people into paying them for new batteries when their existing battery was "just fine", and that Apple was crippling people phones on purpose to extract maximum cash.
Yaz
Yeah I might believe that if the other creator of SecureDrop had not also "taken his own life".
Unfortunately for the foil-hatted around here, there is a well researched phenomenon known as "suicide contagion", whereby people who know someone who has committed suicide are themselves at a higher risk of suicidal behaviour -- as high as a 65% increased risk.
Yaz
It's more like... "no longer enforced at the federal level". But yeah, that still sucks. And it sucks for Europe as well because you're currently reading text that was served to you from the United States.
The lack of Net Neutrality rules in the US probably won't affect tier 1 or tier 2 ISPs however. They don't really have a business case to deny carriage to anyone. And besides which if that ever were the case, sites could simply pack up and move their hosting to some other first world country outside the US.
However, even if for some reason Slashdot was being disadvantaged by the lack of NN rules in the US and for some reason didn't feel like moving their hosting to outside the US, it would hardly be some great loss. It isn't as if some other company can't setup shop and provide me text from outside the US instead. Indeed, /. could move their hosting to Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver tomorrow, and chances are nobody would notice any difference.
Yaz
For people with intermittent or unexistent connectivity, ISP-free mesh networks with moderate but consistent speeds become quite attractive. Facebook and Google are desperate for getting an early grip of those four billion people, e.g. through Internet.org and Project Loon. However, because their middlemen businesses are tethered to the internet, all of these projects require the old hierarchical structures of ISPs and cables.
What I'd like to now is where is this place in the world where people typically own smartphones, but who don't have any sort of Internet connectivity?
I have little doubt there are parts of the world where people have dumbphones with no Internet connectivity (North Korea?), but I don't think there is anywhere on this globe where there is a major area filled with people saying "well, I paid a bunch to get this amazing smartphone, but I can't use any of its features because there are no options for Internet access. Why did I buy this thing again?"
Yaz
Well, Google controls how most people find things on the web and a browser that controls how they see it.
But when it comes to search, there is no real vendor lock-in. Don't like Google's search? Think they are blocking relevant results? You can use DuckDuckGo, or Bing, or Yahoo. And you can change right now, as there is no search lock-in.
Amazon hosts a large percentage of web sites through AWS.
Citation needed. They are hardly the only hosting service out there; they aren't doing anything you can't replicate through some other provider, like Google, Microsoft, or any number of smaller regional players. If they don't want to host your site, you have options.
Facebook is the dominant social network where people communicate with each other.
The massive user bases of WeChat, WhatsApp, Line, iMessage, Skype, and Google Hangouts (never mind old-school SMS) would seem to show that users have a lot of options in the user-to-user communication space. While wildly popular, I'm having a hard time seeing what service Facebook provides that you can't get elsewhere should you choose.
Now that Net Neutrality is dead, ISPs now can control who goes over those pipes. The concern is real.
Net Neutrality is only dead in the United States. The world is a damn big place outside the US. I would agree there is a real concern that inside the US there are some real concerns that the tier 3 access providers may start picking winners and losers, but outside the US that's only the situation in countries with tight Internet control, such as China or North Korea.
Yaz
Performance as a metric doesn't tell me squat on its own, as it's pretty damn easy to have better performance by ignoring standards compliance, and Microsoft doesn't exactly have the best track record when it comes to fully complying to web standards.
I'm sure that elinks renders even faster than Edge, but that fact on its own isn't all that helpful if you expect ECMAScript and full CSS support.
Yaz
My wife owns an iPhones 5s. The battery is pretty worn, and needs replacement.
I borrowed it the other day to use the GPS to get somewhere; half-way to my destination it shut down, even though it claimed to have 15% battery remaining. I would MUCH rather it had slowed down and stayed running; as I was driving at the time I didn't notice it had turned itself off (as I was driving, I relied on the audio cues), and missed my turn.
If Apple should have done anything different, it's that there should be a notification letting the user know that their battery is failing, needs to be replaced, and was being slowed down to allow the phone to run as long as possible. It's not the throttling code that is at fault -- it's the social conventions that were missed that is the problem.
But then again, even if they had provided a pop-up to warn users, there would be a cabal of Apple-haters claiming it was just some plot by Apple to get people to replace their iPhone batteries before it was necessary to do so. Apple could invent the cure for cancer, and some people would bitch about it.
Yaz
The U.S. military command that is charged with protecting the airspace for North America
That should be US and Canadian military command. You'd have a pretty hard time protecting all of North America without Canada's vigilance in the North, you know.
Yaz
Aren't you admitting that you work for a cable company with that admission?
Nope -- I do work for a large private global corporation with revenues over $2 billion US per year (for not quite Fortune 500) as a fully remote employee; early on they decided to pay the full bill, as my cable company doesn't break out the charge for TV versus Internet.
Technically it's up to me to pay for any PPV type charges that may occur on the bill, but as we don't incur any such charges in our household, it's never come up.
Yaz