x86 isn't going anywhere and too much manpower has been spent perfecting compilers, interpreters and OSs on it and the superscalar/ooe/pipelining below it. The cost of implementing any new ISA, even if open source, would simply be too much compared to an equivalent x86 chip and it still wouldn't perform as well. It would become another costly walled garden. A better idea would probably be to create an open-source x86 chip, i.e. open source the microcode and all the architecture below the ISA. It could be a community designed processor, a publicly available VHDL/verilog/whatever file that anyone with a silicon wafer etching machine in their backyard could print for themselves. Cheap chinese manufacturing would make the processor easily available to everyone, and it would be plug-in replaceable for intel/amd chips. It would probably make Intel and AMD both charge less for their IP and bring prices down all around.
for every single "bug-sized robots are coming" I've read over the years, I'd probably be able to make one myself now. It's a great idea but it's been in the pipeline far too long. Calling it now, in the next 3 months we're going to see another "bug-sized robots are here" story. That's about all one can say with certainty about this invention. As long as science exists, there will always be a researcher looking for funding so they can design a bug-sized robot, only to fail at the last second when they realize they can't put a practical battery on these things.
I've watched every season of the new Top Gear and about half of the old ones and always dreamt of the day when Top Gear would come to my city in India. They did, but I wasn't there, and their coverage was overwhelmingly negative. Highly disappointing. The first shot of my city is a video of someone pissing on the street. That's like introducing NYC by showing a crackhead smoking openly on the subway.
Jeremy being himself was highly inconsiderate with people's lunchboxes in Mumbai, but that wasn't offensive as such and those boxes were probably just props. The thing they did with the train was slightly offensive but really not that bad. The most offensive thing was James putting a Ganesha idol on the hood of his Rolls Royce instead of on the dashboard where it's supposed to go. It's really subtle but makes a huge difference because out here people consider idols to be an embodiment of the actual deity, and you would never tie somebody to the front of your car and race it unless you were trying to torture them. Poor James: he was really trying to be as PC and respectful of the culture as possible but it failed.
As a huge fan of the trio, I don't think they're all that offensive when they intentionally make a joke about this or that culture or demographic. Their jokes (even the offensive ones) have good entertainment value and tell it like it is. They only cross the line when they do something racist or offensive inadvertently (like that car in Argentina, or the slope joke, or the n-word slip, or the Ganesha idol), and those are the instances that they need to avoid by, say, including an actual local in their production crew.
Also, Grand Tour is a shitty name for the show. I hope they go with something else.
You can't blame them for not posting something that anyone who needs it can find through the article/google, and you can't blame them for being lazy when you yourself are too lazy to post an anchor tag around that link. I miss the/. of 1999 too, but what we have now is much better than what we had a year ago.
All the examples you gave are for computer companies and it is acceptable for them to have funny/pointless names but this does not always extend to enterprises in other sciences, especially those where real physical objects and real (sometimes public) money is involved. The problem is that at the end of the day you need to be able to sell it to grumpy old men who do not have the training/mental capacity to understand the importance of the actual science and all they can see is balance sheets and the name. Say you're on a senate floor and trying to argue for more funding for this research ship. You give a well prepared 10 minute speech on how it can benefit society, only to be shot down by a simple jab at the funny name of the ship: "While Mr. XYZ wants to spend our outstretched budget on pipe dreams and Boaty McBoat, what about the poor, hungry and disrobed on our streets?". David Attenborough goes a long way in decreasing the impact of that sentence.
Research that does not have short term results is fighting an uphill battle for funding in these times because most countries that can afford to pay for such research have unbalanced budgets and are still operating in recession mode, i.e. 0% or nearly 0% interest rates. At a time like this, it is prudent to have a name for this research vessel that can be used in all contexts even if it may come at the cost of being seen as humorless or old fashioned. You can't compare a privately funded here today gone tomorrow software company with a publicly funded research juggernaut.
That said, I do look forward to a time when all those old men are dead, people are playing super smash brothers and dubstep at retirement homes, and someone has the gall to name a space rocket Dicky McDickface.
when they start holding Saudi Arabia accountable and stop sending those Toyotas and H&K G34s to ISIS. These airstrikes on empty buildings and trollings of ISIS websites are little more than PR stunts.
There is some precedent for this in India. We have what are called minibuses which are run within cities and are owned by private bus companies as opposed to the government. These buses are about half the size of a regular city bus (Mercedes Sprinter from 70 years ago), have fewer rules and regulations, and pay huge amounts of money to lobby local cops and politicians. For passengers, they can be useful sometimes because they serve the same routes as the city buses, but are more unsafe to ride in than city buses because they get crowded as fuck. In my family, no one has ever come back from a minibus unharmed. But like most people from the lower-middle-class and up, we never ride in any public transport. For drivers on the road, minibuses are a huge nuisance because they drive fast and aggressive in order to maximize their trips, don't follow traffic rules because of said lobbying. I once saw a minibus driver purposely reverse into the car behind him in stop and go traffic.
While I agree that buses should be made to go faster and avoid stopping and waiting as much, this acceleration should be done with care so as to not end up like the anarchist minibuses of India.
There's no reasonable expectation of privacy on a public bus. If you say something in a bus, you're clearly ok with the other passengers hearing it, so why not the government? Same thing with video surveillance. If anything it provides security in the DC/MD/VA area where without this surveillance it would be super unsafe on the bus/train because mugging and murder is a cottage industry in PG county and other shitty areas around DC. I understand that its a systemic problem and the government (and hence everyone) is mainly responsible for the poverty in the DC area that gives rise to the crime, but I'll still tazer the fuck out of anyone who tries to steal my overpriced tablet and I'm thankful for the protection those cameras provide me.
John von Neumann is helping Islamic terrorists from his grave. Our correspondent found out that ISIS has been using von Neumann computers to propagate terrorist propaganda over the Internet. Find out more tonight at 8...
In all seriousness, though, I don't think this is Slashdot's fault. They're just reporting the story as is without filtering it, under the assumption that their readers will be able to make out what's happening right from the summary itself.
I agree with you on how refreshing it is to have someone running who says it like it is, but Trump adds unnecessary vitriol to everything he says in order to go 'viral' and snag the most headlines. This type of rhetoric can be a slippery slope and start an unpleasant race to the bottom. The former President of Mexico went on record calling him a lunatic and said he won't pay for Trump's "fucking wall". If Trump was running for the mayor of Chicago this would probably be okay, but as a President he would make the country lose respect every time he loses respect like this. Moral superiority and all that gone down the toilet.
IMHO Sanders is equally good in the saying it like it is department but without the extra negativity and oversimplification of issues.
but you also are still pushing this over the same SAS/SATA connection, which means you approach a SSD's lower-end performance.
For non-cached data, I don't see these new 2.5" drives exceeding SATA's 6Gbps (about 600 MBps) or SAS's 12Gbps (1.2 GBps). By the time these get put into production, SATA and SAS 4 (or, who knows, 5) will already be out.
Then you just write it in fancy sounding bullshit, and pass it off as a unique invention -- and the morons at the patent office, whose only real criteria is if the checks clear, will rubber stamp it and suddenly you have a patent.
To a great degree this is actually true. The patent officers don't care about the checks that much, though. It just creates a lot of work for them when they reject a patent claim and the lawyers of the people applying for the patent, i.e. prosecuting (that's the technical term) it prove them wrong and get their rejections overturned. It also shows badly on the record of the patent officer if their rejections tend to not hold up. The lawyers usually have more resources and motivation to make the patent pass through. So, the patent clerks tend to take the path of least resistance, i.e. approving the patents after doing their due diligence. Patent officers have a pre defined set of databases(including scientific journals, previous patents, etc) that they look through for prior art, and they don't look outside of that set (for example on Google) to find out if an idea is original. There is a fair amount of screening that goes into granting a patent for sure, and they don't just stamp anything. But they will stamp anything as long as their asses are covered. And they are really tiny asses that don't need a whole lot of cover.
Now when you bring up a case in court to invalidate somebody else's patent, that's when your lawyers will do all the google searches and thorough research to show that the invention was publicly known before the patent was granted. This research would go in front of a judge who will most likely rule in favor of whoever hired the bigger guns.
The problem with ideas in software (as opposed to, say, chemistry) is that they are generated far too quickly and anonymously to be included in formal databases and journals, even though they may be publicly known. I'll give you a rough example. Around the year 1998, you could use a plugin in Winamp called Geiss that showed trippy visualizations of music. Before that plugin (correct me if I'm wrong), music visualization was mostly just fancy waveforms. Apple lifted this idea wholesale and made it part of iTunes in 2001. Sony patented this idea in 2009. Poor Mr. Geiss got diddly squat for his invention, even though millions or even billions have probably used it till date, and his idea got patented more than a decade after conception. Such is the state of affairs: big tech companies go out and patent ideas that they learn from the general public. If the idea's implementation takes off, the patent provides them security, and if it doesn't, it's a bargaining chip to gouge money from anyone that tries to use the idea.
Regarding the patenting of ideas versus inventions, in theory you can only patent inventions, but the definition of what constitutes an invention is very lax, especially for software, and you don't have to go and show a working proof of concept to a patent officer. If the patent application describes the software in enough detail so as to allow an average programmer to develop it based on just the description, it's good enough to qualify. In other words, you can pretty much patent a piece of software at the requirements and architecture stage.
This may come a little bit from left field and won't get upvoted much, but I really hope whiplash et al get to read this. Why is it that the #1 news source and forum for scientists and engineers, etc gets sold for chump change to the highest bidder? Profitability. For some reason, a me-too job site (Dice) makes a lot more money than good old Slashdot. The new management team has got to do what it takes to keep Slashdot profitable for their own sake and for the sake of this community we've got brewing for decades now. Two more sales like this one and Slashdot will be practically dead. The feature set has been rich enough to keep so many of us hooked to the site for years and that is not where the problem lies. Yes, you need to do something about Unicode and the quality of submissions here, but on the whole the content and features of this site are fine the way they are. You just need some more continuous improvement and keeping up with the times (i.e. Reddit). What slashdot needs is more ways to make revenue without appearing to have sold out. The problem with this site is that even though there are lots of visitors, there aren't as many ads sold because most of the people who come here are technologically adept enough to use AdBlock or avoid Ad networks some other way (DNS). What you guys need to do is to come up with ways to advertise on Slashdot that don't use popular ad networks because network Ads simply don't reach most of your audience. Maybe it takes the form of sponsoring individual stories or sections, or the whole site for a number of visitors, but it has to avoid the major ad networks. I post this not for Internet karma but because I truly care about this site, so please feel free to contact me if you need more input.
Yes, processing power and bandwidth have gone up significantly but what do we do with them? The same things we did on the old systems. You could stream video on 56k using Real player, or play Doom with your friends over 9600 baud. Now there is Netflix and GTA Online. Apart from a little extra HTML5/Ajax widgetry, Slashdot looked and functioned pretty much the same on my 640x480 screen over a 33.6k modem. Those supercomputers in our pockets are used for random chitchat on Twitter and Facebook and playing Angry Birds. Not very different from Yahoo messenger over SMS and Snakes. All those features you mention about the iPhone were present on the Nokia series 60 phones about 15 years ago. Even modern smartphones themselves have had pretty much the same feature set for the last 4-5 years. The base technologies have improved vastly and everything is bigger, faster and better now, but what I'm trying to say is that the way we use them hasn't changed all that much, i.e. the use cases have remained pretty much the same and not as many new use cases (such as booking taxis over the internet) have come up as I would expect with exponential growth in the technology. It's the exact same painting made with a thousand more strokes.
That's a wonderful passage and truly deserves to be published. I wish I was a schoolteacher just so I could show it to my kids in class. I agree with all of it: there are lots of miracles both man-made and god-made all around us that we never come to appreciate. But here's my gripe with the state of technological innovation today: all this stuff except for cellphones has been with us for decades, or at least for as long as I've had my eyes open. Sure there are minor improvements everywhere: carburetors got replaced by injectors, brick phones got replaced with Nokia 6610s which got replaced by iPhones. The Internet was a big one, but that was about 20 years ago for me. There haven't been any giant leaps in technology for as long as I can remember except for the Internet. I've been reading about nanotechnology for about 15 years now, and I know universities are all abuzz about it, but so far I haven't seen it affect my life in any meaningful way. Someone needs to come up with a way to bring all this new technology that we hear about in papers to market more quickly.
Yeah that voter manipulation trick has has been imported to India from K Street with some enhancements and is wreaking havoc here. We now we have a genocidal fundamentalist running the country with a perfectly astroturfed social media based campaign. For example, he circulated a false jpeg on WhatsApp claiming that Julian Assange says Modi is incorruptible. This was happening at a time when social media had just hit critical mass in India, e.g. the average 40+ year old citizen and the middle class had just moved to smartphones that display HTML properly. So perfectly astroturfed that he got a stadium literally astroturfed just so that searching 'modi astroturf' doesn't turn people to anybody talking about the ruling party's deceptive campaign. The government is spending huge amounts on tailored suits, pointless public addresses and inconsequential foreign visits that do nothing except create a cult of personality around Modi. Public schools where kids don't even have benches or books were rented high-end video equipment just so they could see Modi's swearing-in ceremony. Hindu fundamentalists have been given his silent assent, and if a muslim was caught with beef and murdered for it (which happened recently), there would be no action by the authorities or acknowledgement by the government. The first time Modi addressed religiously motivated killings of muslims in India was to the BBC on a visit to England, a month after the fact. Imagine if POTUS did that after a mass public shooting. You all in America have a duty to protect your country from the likes of Trump, Cruz and Fiorina by going to the voting booths and voting. Heck, even Bush and Hillary look good in comparison to them.
Maybe not the oldest, but I still use these 3 fairly frequently and download them onto almost every new computer:
1. SpeedSwitchXP: For breathing life into old XP machines by making them run in max-fan-noise-mode. I guess I could use Power options, but this is more forceful.
2. SpaceMonger 1.x: An old utility for visualizing disk space usage. Still runs beautifully.
3. PuTTY/pscp: There's this old-school HTML 3.0 page that I download them from. I should probably switch to something newer.
As far as replacing parts is concerned, you can always pop a new battery or memory card (at least on non-iOS devices). By the time a non-replaceable part is gone, chances are that other parts are also getting old and you probably need a new phone anyway. If you want to spare the money buy a ~$400+ phone, and if you don't, you can get a ~$100 model that does everything your old phone did, and use the old phone for a simpler purpose just like you would do with an old laptop. If you still insist on replacing the part, you can always go to a "mobile hospital" (there are literally hundreds here in India, and I've seen one or two in pretty much every major US city) and get the screen, camera, or charger port replaced. Spares are available for everything. If you did the same replacement on a Fairphone, the most you would be saving on is the labor that the mobile repair guy would be charging. And even that savings would probably get lost because the Fairphone modules would be costly because of their low volumes, proprietary physical interface, and 'ethical manufacturing'. Sure, it's ethical for the big picture and Gaia would be so happy, but it's probably cruel to my communications budget which is already getting bled dry paying ridiculous prices for mobile data. $10 for 3 long youtube videos over your data limit? It's highway robbery out there.
As far as actual customization goes, the smartphone OS and hardware ecosystem pretty much has you locked in place. You can't really remove any features. Want a phone without a camera? you'll either have a half-functional phone (no QR codes, etc.), or you'll have a buggy piece of shit. Maybe the developer of your favorite app did the right thing and added a check for a camera, but most likely he just programmed it to go straight to the camera and getImage(). Want a phone without a GPS to go with your tinfoil hat? It's most likely coupled with some other useful part (like a modem) in a module, and even if you could take it out, the Google WiFi SSID-based location system's already got your exact location within 3 feet as soon as you turn on the WiFi. Want a phone with a bigger camera? Why not get the extra processing power that it would end up needing anyways and get the newest and biggest Samsung, HTC or Xiaomi. Wanna upgrade GPU, CPU, RAM or root storage? Fuggedaboutit - It's probably soldered to the base phone and/or inside an SoC chip. Want a new OS? Good luck finding anything that is worth switching to and will run reliably unless your phone sold at least a 100,000 copies. Want a bigger battery or a wireless charging system? Most good and recent-ish phones can be easily fitted with one.
You can't compare the IBM PC platform to these SoC phones, and here's why:
1. The choice of internal components is very limited, and a lot of stuff is combined into one chip. There are 3-4 major SoC vendors out there. Same goes for the Camera CCDs, sensors, and all the chips that go in there. Compare that to the ~10 major graphics card and motherboard manufacturers in the market. Or the ~40 different types of CPUs you can install on a given motherboard socket.
2. Unlike a desktop OS with replaceable drivers, an Android OS image has to already have all the drivers it needs installed in the image. With a desktop OS you get an installer that lets you install it on any compatible hardware. With a smartphone OS, the install takes a team of 40 engineers 6 months of work, day and night, after which they release the OS image (which still has fucking bugs in it, mind you, till they iron half of them out with every +.001 version). Or some smart kid makes the install using Cyanogen or something in one all nighter, but it ends up having bugs that never go away because the kid got bored of the project or got hired to that team of 40 engineers.
3. The choice of manufacturers and models at different price points is simply fucking crazy. There are easily hundreds of smartphone/tablet manufacturers out there if you know how to look beyond what Best Buy/Verizon will sell you. You can pretty
I don't see why this represents a serious objection. You would obviously have the vehicle software / sensor stack optimized for local conditions. Indian designers could rig it so that lights flashed and horns honked. Algorithms could be designed so that you could simulate bluff charges / random aggressive behavior / whatnot.
Really, from what I've seen of third world driving, a simple pseudo random number generator along with five or so stock behaviors (go, stop, go faster, swerve, swerve more) should do just fine.
You present the problem better than I do. In third world driving, the road is full of random actors like that, and in close enough proximity that any automated driving device/"stack" safe enough to be made road legal would keep the car stopped the whole time. I have a reverse sensor that pings if there's an obstruction some x feet away from the car. If I'm reversing out of parking into busy mixed vehicle/pedestrian traffic (and you have to in places), it just beeps constantly - if I was to go strictly by the sensor I'd probably have to wait hours. Bad third world traffic requires a human driver who also acts as a negotiator for the right of way, and has a sensor grid complex enough to sense every inch of the car, and has the human intelligence required to predict the actions of these random actors quick enough. I'm not saying it's impossible for self-driving to one day be good enough to use here. It's just that the state of the art is not as advanced right now. No amount of million dollar cars that can barely traverse the I-90 by itself will convince me that self-driving cars are going to be a thing any year soon. All kinds of automation is already used for safety features and assists and that will keep getting advanced, but autonomous driving throughout the world is still pretty far from real.
the day you can make it drive in heavy Indian traffic. Out here in the traffic, you have to use the horn, stare down at other drivers, sense the other driver's next move (which may or may not be predictable from their vehicles' movements), dodge cows, camels, donkeys, motorbikes, tuk-tuks, and hand pulled rickshaws. Sometime's if you're stuck in a lane behind a truck that's not moving, you have to change lanes while frantically honking, flickering your headlights, and motioning with your hands. Check out the Top gear India special if you think I'm joking - and those guys didn't even get into some of the nastiest traffic.
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I've looked at Apple's biggest secrets and there really aren't any bigger secrets in there than just good engineering and good UI design.
x86 isn't going anywhere and too much manpower has been spent perfecting compilers, interpreters and OSs on it and the superscalar/ooe/pipelining below it. The cost of implementing any new ISA, even if open source, would simply be too much compared to an equivalent x86 chip and it still wouldn't perform as well. It would become another costly walled garden. A better idea would probably be to create an open-source x86 chip, i.e. open source the microcode and all the architecture below the ISA. It could be a community designed processor, a publicly available VHDL/verilog/whatever file that anyone with a silicon wafer etching machine in their backyard could print for themselves. Cheap chinese manufacturing would make the processor easily available to everyone, and it would be plug-in replaceable for intel/amd chips. It would probably make Intel and AMD both charge less for their IP and bring prices down all around.
for every single "bug-sized robots are coming" I've read over the years, I'd probably be able to make one myself now. It's a great idea but it's been in the pipeline far too long. Calling it now, in the next 3 months we're going to see another "bug-sized robots are here" story. That's about all one can say with certainty about this invention. As long as science exists, there will always be a researcher looking for funding so they can design a bug-sized robot, only to fail at the last second when they realize they can't put a practical battery on these things.
So there really must be very intelligent and productive Indian engineers. Just not in my company :D.
I can say the same thing about white, black, yellow, purple or green engineers. Low-quality talent comes in all colors, shapes and sizes.
I've watched every season of the new Top Gear and about half of the old ones and always dreamt of the day when Top Gear would come to my city in India. They did, but I wasn't there, and their coverage was overwhelmingly negative. Highly disappointing. The first shot of my city is a video of someone pissing on the street. That's like introducing NYC by showing a crackhead smoking openly on the subway.
Jeremy being himself was highly inconsiderate with people's lunchboxes in Mumbai, but that wasn't offensive as such and those boxes were probably just props. The thing they did with the train was slightly offensive but really not that bad. The most offensive thing was James putting a Ganesha idol on the hood of his Rolls Royce instead of on the dashboard where it's supposed to go. It's really subtle but makes a huge difference because out here people consider idols to be an embodiment of the actual deity, and you would never tie somebody to the front of your car and race it unless you were trying to torture them. Poor James: he was really trying to be as PC and respectful of the culture as possible but it failed.
As a huge fan of the trio, I don't think they're all that offensive when they intentionally make a joke about this or that culture or demographic. Their jokes (even the offensive ones) have good entertainment value and tell it like it is. They only cross the line when they do something racist or offensive inadvertently (like that car in Argentina, or the slope joke, or the n-word slip, or the Ganesha idol), and those are the instances that they need to avoid by, say, including an actual local in their production crew.
Also, Grand Tour is a shitty name for the show. I hope they go with something else.
You can't blame them for not posting something that anyone who needs it can find through the article/google, and you can't blame them for being lazy when you yourself are too lazy to post an anchor tag around that link. I miss the /. of 1999 too, but what we have now is much better than what we had a year ago.
All the examples you gave are for computer companies and it is acceptable for them to have funny/pointless names but this does not always extend to enterprises in other sciences, especially those where real physical objects and real (sometimes public) money is involved. The problem is that at the end of the day you need to be able to sell it to grumpy old men who do not have the training/mental capacity to understand the importance of the actual science and all they can see is balance sheets and the name. Say you're on a senate floor and trying to argue for more funding for this research ship. You give a well prepared 10 minute speech on how it can benefit society, only to be shot down by a simple jab at the funny name of the ship: "While Mr. XYZ wants to spend our outstretched budget on pipe dreams and Boaty McBoat, what about the poor, hungry and disrobed on our streets?". David Attenborough goes a long way in decreasing the impact of that sentence.
Research that does not have short term results is fighting an uphill battle for funding in these times because most countries that can afford to pay for such research have unbalanced budgets and are still operating in recession mode, i.e. 0% or nearly 0% interest rates. At a time like this, it is prudent to have a name for this research vessel that can be used in all contexts even if it may come at the cost of being seen as humorless or old fashioned. You can't compare a privately funded here today gone tomorrow software company with a publicly funded research juggernaut.
That said, I do look forward to a time when all those old men are dead, people are playing super smash brothers and dubstep at retirement homes, and someone has the gall to name a space rocket Dicky McDickface.
when they start holding Saudi Arabia accountable and stop sending those Toyotas and H&K G34s to ISIS. These airstrikes on empty buildings and trollings of ISIS websites are little more than PR stunts.
While I agree that buses should be made to go faster and avoid stopping and waiting as much, this acceleration should be done with care so as to not end up like the anarchist minibuses of India.
where are my mod points when I need them
There's no reasonable expectation of privacy on a public bus. If you say something in a bus, you're clearly ok with the other passengers hearing it, so why not the government? Same thing with video surveillance. If anything it provides security in the DC/MD/VA area where without this surveillance it would be super unsafe on the bus/train because mugging and murder is a cottage industry in PG county and other shitty areas around DC. I understand that its a systemic problem and the government (and hence everyone) is mainly responsible for the poverty in the DC area that gives rise to the crime, but I'll still tazer the fuck out of anyone who tries to steal my overpriced tablet and I'm thankful for the protection those cameras provide me.
John von Neumann is helping Islamic terrorists from his grave. Our correspondent found out that ISIS has been using von Neumann computers to propagate terrorist propaganda over the Internet. Find out more tonight at 8... In all seriousness, though, I don't think this is Slashdot's fault. They're just reporting the story as is without filtering it, under the assumption that their readers will be able to make out what's happening right from the summary itself.
It doesn't matter, really. OP was saying that the interface will be a bottleneck for these drives and I was trying to say that it won't be.
IMHO Sanders is equally good in the saying it like it is department but without the extra negativity and oversimplification of issues.
but you also are still pushing this over the same SAS/SATA connection, which means you approach a SSD's lower-end performance.
For non-cached data, I don't see these new 2.5" drives exceeding SATA's 6Gbps (about 600 MBps) or SAS's 12Gbps (1.2 GBps). By the time these get put into production, SATA and SAS 4 (or, who knows, 5) will already be out.
Then you just write it in fancy sounding bullshit, and pass it off as a unique invention -- and the morons at the patent office, whose only real criteria is if the checks clear, will rubber stamp it and suddenly you have a patent.
To a great degree this is actually true. The patent officers don't care about the checks that much, though. It just creates a lot of work for them when they reject a patent claim and the lawyers of the people applying for the patent, i.e. prosecuting (that's the technical term) it prove them wrong and get their rejections overturned. It also shows badly on the record of the patent officer if their rejections tend to not hold up. The lawyers usually have more resources and motivation to make the patent pass through. So, the patent clerks tend to take the path of least resistance, i.e. approving the patents after doing their due diligence. Patent officers have a pre defined set of databases(including scientific journals, previous patents, etc) that they look through for prior art, and they don't look outside of that set (for example on Google) to find out if an idea is original. There is a fair amount of screening that goes into granting a patent for sure, and they don't just stamp anything. But they will stamp anything as long as their asses are covered. And they are really tiny asses that don't need a whole lot of cover.
Now when you bring up a case in court to invalidate somebody else's patent, that's when your lawyers will do all the google searches and thorough research to show that the invention was publicly known before the patent was granted. This research would go in front of a judge who will most likely rule in favor of whoever hired the bigger guns.
The problem with ideas in software (as opposed to, say, chemistry) is that they are generated far too quickly and anonymously to be included in formal databases and journals, even though they may be publicly known. I'll give you a rough example. Around the year 1998, you could use a plugin in Winamp called Geiss that showed trippy visualizations of music. Before that plugin (correct me if I'm wrong), music visualization was mostly just fancy waveforms. Apple lifted this idea wholesale and made it part of iTunes in 2001. Sony patented this idea in 2009. Poor Mr. Geiss got diddly squat for his invention, even though millions or even billions have probably used it till date, and his idea got patented more than a decade after conception. Such is the state of affairs: big tech companies go out and patent ideas that they learn from the general public. If the idea's implementation takes off, the patent provides them security, and if it doesn't, it's a bargaining chip to gouge money from anyone that tries to use the idea.
Regarding the patenting of ideas versus inventions, in theory you can only patent inventions, but the definition of what constitutes an invention is very lax, especially for software, and you don't have to go and show a working proof of concept to a patent officer. If the patent application describes the software in enough detail so as to allow an average programmer to develop it based on just the description, it's good enough to qualify. In other words, you can pretty much patent a piece of software at the requirements and architecture stage.
This may come a little bit from left field and won't get upvoted much, but I really hope whiplash et al get to read this. Why is it that the #1 news source and forum for scientists and engineers, etc gets sold for chump change to the highest bidder? Profitability. For some reason, a me-too job site (Dice) makes a lot more money than good old Slashdot. The new management team has got to do what it takes to keep Slashdot profitable for their own sake and for the sake of this community we've got brewing for decades now. Two more sales like this one and Slashdot will be practically dead. The feature set has been rich enough to keep so many of us hooked to the site for years and that is not where the problem lies. Yes, you need to do something about Unicode and the quality of submissions here, but on the whole the content and features of this site are fine the way they are. You just need some more continuous improvement and keeping up with the times (i.e. Reddit). What slashdot needs is more ways to make revenue without appearing to have sold out. The problem with this site is that even though there are lots of visitors, there aren't as many ads sold because most of the people who come here are technologically adept enough to use AdBlock or avoid Ad networks some other way (DNS). What you guys need to do is to come up with ways to advertise on Slashdot that don't use popular ad networks because network Ads simply don't reach most of your audience. Maybe it takes the form of sponsoring individual stories or sections, or the whole site for a number of visitors, but it has to avoid the major ad networks. I post this not for Internet karma but because I truly care about this site, so please feel free to contact me if you need more input.
Yes, processing power and bandwidth have gone up significantly but what do we do with them? The same things we did on the old systems. You could stream video on 56k using Real player, or play Doom with your friends over 9600 baud. Now there is Netflix and GTA Online. Apart from a little extra HTML5/Ajax widgetry, Slashdot looked and functioned pretty much the same on my 640x480 screen over a 33.6k modem. Those supercomputers in our pockets are used for random chitchat on Twitter and Facebook and playing Angry Birds. Not very different from Yahoo messenger over SMS and Snakes. All those features you mention about the iPhone were present on the Nokia series 60 phones about 15 years ago. Even modern smartphones themselves have had pretty much the same feature set for the last 4-5 years. The base technologies have improved vastly and everything is bigger, faster and better now, but what I'm trying to say is that the way we use them hasn't changed all that much, i.e. the use cases have remained pretty much the same and not as many new use cases (such as booking taxis over the internet) have come up as I would expect with exponential growth in the technology. It's the exact same painting made with a thousand more strokes.
That's a wonderful passage and truly deserves to be published. I wish I was a schoolteacher just so I could show it to my kids in class. I agree with all of it: there are lots of miracles both man-made and god-made all around us that we never come to appreciate. But here's my gripe with the state of technological innovation today: all this stuff except for cellphones has been with us for decades, or at least for as long as I've had my eyes open. Sure there are minor improvements everywhere: carburetors got replaced by injectors, brick phones got replaced with Nokia 6610s which got replaced by iPhones. The Internet was a big one, but that was about 20 years ago for me. There haven't been any giant leaps in technology for as long as I can remember except for the Internet. I've been reading about nanotechnology for about 15 years now, and I know universities are all abuzz about it, but so far I haven't seen it affect my life in any meaningful way. Someone needs to come up with a way to bring all this new technology that we hear about in papers to market more quickly.
Yeah that voter manipulation trick has has been imported to India from K Street with some enhancements and is wreaking havoc here. We now we have a genocidal fundamentalist running the country with a perfectly astroturfed social media based campaign. For example, he circulated a false jpeg on WhatsApp claiming that Julian Assange says Modi is incorruptible. This was happening at a time when social media had just hit critical mass in India, e.g. the average 40+ year old citizen and the middle class had just moved to smartphones that display HTML properly. So perfectly astroturfed that he got a stadium literally astroturfed just so that searching 'modi astroturf' doesn't turn people to anybody talking about the ruling party's deceptive campaign. The government is spending huge amounts on tailored suits, pointless public addresses and inconsequential foreign visits that do nothing except create a cult of personality around Modi. Public schools where kids don't even have benches or books were rented high-end video equipment just so they could see Modi's swearing-in ceremony. Hindu fundamentalists have been given his silent assent, and if a muslim was caught with beef and murdered for it (which happened recently), there would be no action by the authorities or acknowledgement by the government. The first time Modi addressed religiously motivated killings of muslims in India was to the BBC on a visit to England, a month after the fact. Imagine if POTUS did that after a mass public shooting. You all in America have a duty to protect your country from the likes of Trump, Cruz and Fiorina by going to the voting booths and voting. Heck, even Bush and Hillary look good in comparison to them.
Maybe not the oldest, but I still use these 3 fairly frequently and download them onto almost every new computer: 1. SpeedSwitchXP: For breathing life into old XP machines by making them run in max-fan-noise-mode. I guess I could use Power options, but this is more forceful. 2. SpaceMonger 1.x: An old utility for visualizing disk space usage. Still runs beautifully. 3. PuTTY/pscp: There's this old-school HTML 3.0 page that I download them from. I should probably switch to something newer.
As far as replacing parts is concerned, you can always pop a new battery or memory card (at least on non-iOS devices). By the time a non-replaceable part is gone, chances are that other parts are also getting old and you probably need a new phone anyway. If you want to spare the money buy a ~$400+ phone, and if you don't, you can get a ~$100 model that does everything your old phone did, and use the old phone for a simpler purpose just like you would do with an old laptop. If you still insist on replacing the part, you can always go to a "mobile hospital" (there are literally hundreds here in India, and I've seen one or two in pretty much every major US city) and get the screen, camera, or charger port replaced. Spares are available for everything. If you did the same replacement on a Fairphone, the most you would be saving on is the labor that the mobile repair guy would be charging. And even that savings would probably get lost because the Fairphone modules would be costly because of their low volumes, proprietary physical interface, and 'ethical manufacturing'. Sure, it's ethical for the big picture and Gaia would be so happy, but it's probably cruel to my communications budget which is already getting bled dry paying ridiculous prices for mobile data. $10 for 3 long youtube videos over your data limit? It's highway robbery out there.
As far as actual customization goes, the smartphone OS and hardware ecosystem pretty much has you locked in place. You can't really remove any features. Want a phone without a camera? you'll either have a half-functional phone (no QR codes, etc.), or you'll have a buggy piece of shit. Maybe the developer of your favorite app did the right thing and added a check for a camera, but most likely he just programmed it to go straight to the camera and getImage(). Want a phone without a GPS to go with your tinfoil hat? It's most likely coupled with some other useful part (like a modem) in a module, and even if you could take it out, the Google WiFi SSID-based location system's already got your exact location within 3 feet as soon as you turn on the WiFi. Want a phone with a bigger camera? Why not get the extra processing power that it would end up needing anyways and get the newest and biggest Samsung, HTC or Xiaomi. Wanna upgrade GPU, CPU, RAM or root storage? Fuggedaboutit - It's probably soldered to the base phone and/or inside an SoC chip. Want a new OS? Good luck finding anything that is worth switching to and will run reliably unless your phone sold at least a 100,000 copies. Want a bigger battery or a wireless charging system? Most good and recent-ish phones can be easily fitted with one.
You can't compare the IBM PC platform to these SoC phones, and here's why:
1. The choice of internal components is very limited, and a lot of stuff is combined into one chip. There are 3-4 major SoC vendors out there. Same goes for the Camera CCDs, sensors, and all the chips that go in there. Compare that to the ~10 major graphics card and motherboard manufacturers in the market. Or the ~40 different types of CPUs you can install on a given motherboard socket.
2. Unlike a desktop OS with replaceable drivers, an Android OS image has to already have all the drivers it needs installed in the image. With a desktop OS you get an installer that lets you install it on any compatible hardware. With a smartphone OS, the install takes a team of 40 engineers 6 months of work, day and night, after which they release the OS image (which still has fucking bugs in it, mind you, till they iron half of them out with every +.001 version). Or some smart kid makes the install using Cyanogen or something in one all nighter, but it ends up having bugs that never go away because the kid got bored of the project or got hired to that team of 40 engineers.
3. The choice of manufacturers and models at different price points is simply fucking crazy. There are easily hundreds of smartphone/tablet manufacturers out there if you know how to look beyond what Best Buy/Verizon will sell you. You can pretty
I don't see why this represents a serious objection. You would obviously have the vehicle software / sensor stack optimized for local conditions. Indian designers could rig it so that lights flashed and horns honked. Algorithms could be designed so that you could simulate bluff charges / random aggressive behavior / whatnot.
Really, from what I've seen of third world driving, a simple pseudo random number generator along with five or so stock behaviors (go, stop, go faster, swerve, swerve more) should do just fine.
You present the problem better than I do. In third world driving, the road is full of random actors like that, and in close enough proximity that any automated driving device/"stack" safe enough to be made road legal would keep the car stopped the whole time. I have a reverse sensor that pings if there's an obstruction some x feet away from the car. If I'm reversing out of parking into busy mixed vehicle/pedestrian traffic (and you have to in places), it just beeps constantly - if I was to go strictly by the sensor I'd probably have to wait hours. Bad third world traffic requires a human driver who also acts as a negotiator for the right of way, and has a sensor grid complex enough to sense every inch of the car, and has the human intelligence required to predict the actions of these random actors quick enough. I'm not saying it's impossible for self-driving to one day be good enough to use here. It's just that the state of the art is not as advanced right now. No amount of million dollar cars that can barely traverse the I-90 by itself will convince me that self-driving cars are going to be a thing any year soon. All kinds of automation is already used for safety features and assists and that will keep getting advanced, but autonomous driving throughout the world is still pretty far from real.
the day you can make it drive in heavy Indian traffic. Out here in the traffic, you have to use the horn, stare down at other drivers, sense the other driver's next move (which may or may not be predictable from their vehicles' movements), dodge cows, camels, donkeys, motorbikes, tuk-tuks, and hand pulled rickshaws. Sometime's if you're stuck in a lane behind a truck that's not moving, you have to change lanes while frantically honking, flickering your headlights, and motioning with your hands. Check out the Top gear India special if you think I'm joking - and those guys didn't even get into some of the nastiest traffic.
Even 40 gigs is not small for that matter. The hackers could've attacked multiple machines in multiple locations, and used a botnet/"cloud".