Way back in the mists of time I worked for a chip fab company. They bought some competitor chips, whipped the tops off them and examined them under a microscope.
Granted, you're unlikely to see a one-transistor change or something, but it's incredibly unlikely any change that actually does more than introduce some bugs is going to be that small. It's a tedious process though, and the chip you examine is waste afterwards, so you can only check a small subset, and even then you don't know if the one you chose at random was a 'good' one or that the one you put into your laptop was a p0wned one.
Another alternative that's less destructive is to have the fab make the wafers and ship them to you (perhaps after chopping them up into die). You then package them yourself after visual checks on each one. The security responsibility is yours, and checking every single die is going to add a lot of expense, but it would be possible to ensure security this way. How you convince anyone else that you've done all of this correctly and that they should now pay top-prices for 'secure' chips is another problem you'd have to solve though.
Someone's got to do it - either the government pays the old electric companies to do it, and they go ahead and fix up whatever old crap they have (or maybe they'd get new stuff in, we don't really know), or else the government pays Musk, who definitely puts in new stuff, which arguably should have a lower running cost than anything that preceded it.
I wouldn't really call this 'preying on the weak' - it's not like the people in PR are going to pay directly for this - it'll come federally, and then possibly get paid back by raising the price of electricity. If Musk is true to his word, he'll be able to make the power so cheap, that even with some paying back added to the price, it'll still work out cheaper for the people in PR.
'bashing' Musk (or indeed anyone else) is a bit unnecessary - he's saying he's got a way to help. I haven't really heard anyone else stepping up and saying "we can fix this" - have you? If so, who? How are they better than Musk?
Exactly, and if you were one of those financial companies, or now facebook - it's be far more news-worthy if you *didn't* fight those laws/rules, or indeed actually lobbied for them.
Of course Facebook fought any and all rules or laws that might impede their ability to operate without any oversight. Why would anyone think they'd do differently?
It's got a fingerprint reader, NFC, decent screen, decent enough camera, decent processor, stock Android (almost crapware free), and you can use it dual-sim if you want (or put in a big SD card). It's not perfect, but I seriously doubt the Samsungs are either (being that Samsung software is universally terrible). Jury's out on the Apples, but I'll buy 5 of these before paying for even one Apple.
We have an Outlander PHEV (a plug in hybrid). The school run, and the weekend trips to the woods or the shops are 99% electric. A trip to see the folks (about 1 hr, motorway driving) uses some petrol though (and no, they don't have a charge point, and even getting access to a 13A socket near the driveway would be a chore).
Why would I want to hire a car every time I want to go further than the range of the perfectly good car I have on the driveway? How do I put the kids seats into the whatever-the-hire-company-gave-me? They're hard enough to get into our own car, I really don't want to keep switching them around - the kids already know far too many swear words as it is. Then daft stuff like the music we have on USB in our car - can I have that in the hire car? Nope, because they always seem to come with the most basic radio you can get. How about GPS? I'd have to hire an 'executive' or 'premium' car to get those features, and I'd still be left with the car seat problem, and would pay more, have a higher 'bar' of cleanliness/scratches on return and have availability issues too. I also need to make sure I don't leave any identifiable data on their radio/GPS or whatever. We don't have a dog, but have a suitable place to put one right now - not so likely in a hire car (again, unless I'm very careful about exactly what I hire). Then, despite the "we'll pick you up" claims, I've got to get to and from the hire place, got to faff about with ID and going through the upsell-checklist every bloody time. I, frankly, don't have enough time for all that - and don't need to, because they made a hybrid that does both jobs - who the hell cares if one or the other was "better" at one or two aspects of the whole thing!?
"...made the game less interesting to watch"? Wow - I didn't know that was possible;-)
More seriously though, if the NFL can fix up some of the more tedious aspects of the game, make a game last the 25 minutes of actual play, versus the 5 hours of ads + inane commentary, then it might have an exportable product. They'd have to rebrand to be the IFL, and they'd need to change the F to be something else, because most of the rest of the world thinks football is a game where you're only allowed to touch the ball with your feet. But if they can do all that, then the rest of us might be a market to grow into.
baseball on the other hand... I can't see that catching on anywhere. It's cricket without the good bits, and cricket's got the market sown up for "sit around drinking while some people play a technical, but not terribly energetic sport".
...where most of the readers use an adblocker;-)/.: "Yeah, our site gets ten bajillion page views per day" Advertiser: "Hmm, we only see 367 ad impressions per day"
I'm not sure how it's gonna cope with "Alexa, tell Starbucks on the A3, but the one north of Guildford going towards the M25, not the one you chose last time to make me a soya-milk latte, extra hot with a double shot and one and a half sugars please" is going to work out. Unless it's really, really good, and gets a signal when my phone can't, and preferably works with a coffee shop that sells actual coffee rather than brown water, then maybe, just maybe it could be good. More than likely though, by the time you've got Alexa to order you a coffee successfully, you'd have been better off lining up and getting it the old fashioned way (or, shock horror - going home and making your own).
I've love to see a 'heat map' of the world with the location (to the nearest country would do) for these lazy ISPs and issues. I'll bet it'll either look exactly as you'd expect, or the exact opposite of what you'd expect;-)
That's a great idea - I'll get a lectern and some mics setup in the corner of my home office. Does Elbonia or Durkadurkastahn have a flag? I could put one of those behind me. My morning standups are never going to be the same again, dotards!
I thought that Apple had made it so that it's all done on the phone, and stored in the secure enclave, and it's a 'hash' of your face, not your actual face that gets stored anyway.
As for the recommendation - I'd agree with you on all counts (but for different reasons).
I'm with you on this one - No company or organisation has ever lost any data to persons-unknown on the Internet, so whatever recordings or videos they happen to make, intentionally or otherwise are completely safe. Thinking about it, no company has ever been found using 'production data' for testing purposes, or just 'employee browsing' either. Yep, double-safe. Where do I sign up?
Who's driving an SUV with only 22MPG? That's awful mileage - our old diesel got about 35MPG, and our hybrid does 40 with no charge in the battery*.
Perhaps California just needs to put up petrol taxes? Those shitty MPG cars will find their way to other states or the scrapyard pretty quick.
* fun fact: I got our hybrid to tell me it was giving me 968MPG the other day - I drove to the shops on a full battery charge, but accelerated hard to get around a bit of trouble. The engine kicked in for maybe a minute, and so used a tiny bit of fuel, so the MPG thing stopped reading "- - -" and started showing me crazy numbers like this. Made me giggle a bit, and wonder how high I could get it to go;-)
Email's a bit less important than it was a few years ago, because of other messaging solutions, but slowing it down doesn't seem like a good idea. Once the ability to slow it down is in place, it'll go from a few seconds today to minutes tomorrow, perhaps to hours in years to come. That makes email considerably less useful than today, so effectively you've given an ISP the ability to decide what apps you should and should not be using.
Besides, this isn't about slowing down one protocol or another - it's about slowing down your entire life, except for facebook, foxnews and livejasmin because you bought the 'premium' package that makes those sites go quicker. The fact you never read foxnews is immaterial - you're gonna pay anyway. Don't want to pay? No problem just go down to the worst possible service they can offer without getting sued for it.
How about instead, you work the commerical arrangements for ISPs so that they get rewarded for providing better service, rather than providing worse service? You do that by introducing competition.
Headcount is a terrible metric of anything - how many western jobs were lost to exactly one person in the developing world? Yep, 0.3-0.5. Pretty much every time a team of 50 in the west gets replaced, it's by a team of 100 or more in India.
Headcount might be a headline-grabbing metric, but it's pretty terrible for anything else. How about revenue? That would probably be a better metric - and for the US, how much of that money earned internationally made it back to the US? With your crazy tax rules, not much, I'd guess.
You say you don't know what you'll buy next - then you're the perfect person to advertise to.
As the Russian Facebook adevrtising story is telling us, despite what we may think, we're manipulated to some degree by the things we see and read. If we read that "everyone" is doing X, then in some small way we may consider "X" to be a little less abhorrent than we thought it was a moment ago. And thus, we've been manipulated.
You too can be manipulated. Perhaps your policy of spreading purchases around multiple sites means that manipulation isn't as effective as it would be if you only shopped on Amazon, but manipulated you will be, and so that future purchase stands a greater chance of being the one "they" want you to buy than it would have been without their efforts.
Now, wouldn't you just love a nice, cool glass of coke?
I didn't see the show, although I notice it's drip-feeding into Netflix over here, so maybe I'll give it a whirl sometime.
Anyway... How about instead of the Klingon enemies, there's a faction of mixed races that form their own group/planet/club or whatever and cause problems for both the Federation and the Klingons? If you want social commentary, that sounds a lot closer to home and means you can't just "blame it on the foreigners", and the Federation might not always be entirely the good guys, and maybe the Klingons might actually be virtuous from time to time. Maybe that's too complex for the dip-shit viewing public that a lot of US stuff seems to be aimed at, but it would allow for a whole world of intrigue, politics, back-stabbing and plot twists.
FWIW, I tend to agree - most of my recent jobs have been on Centos* - it's whatever it is, and it does that thing pretty well. The devs complain because they can't get QT to work on it, or some other 'shiny', and that "we never had these problems when we used ubuntu", but Centos offers long supported lifespans, decent update schedules and for the most part it's pretty solid (I found a machine not so long ago with process that were 6 years old on it - that's pretty awesome, even if it's a complete security fail).
So yes, Centos is good for what it does, and so Redhat is good for making it. How Redhat really benefts from all this Centos is not really clear though.
* one such job was at a very wealthy stock traders. I did have something of a moral objection that they were cheaping-out on Centos (which at the time wasn't sanctioned by Redhat, and so we had a few problems upgrading the OS). It's harder to begrudge a 5 person company doing that, and I'm not sure where on 'the scale' my objection would sit. Either way though, Redhat still aren't getting much out of the deal.
If indeed jobs do keep getting created, what will they be in? Advanced Quantum Mathematics with Midwifery? How may humans are ever going to be qualified to do these jobs? Right now we/.ers can see a whole load of tech jobs have been created by previous semi-revolutions, and we're 'consuming' them. However, for every one of us, there are dozens of kids we went to school with who'd just never get qualified enough for an interview, let alone a first-line support job.
If the only jobs left are super-advanced, high brain-function type jobs, then 99% of the world just won't be doing much. In that sense, things are somewhat worrisome if AI really does become a 'thing'.
It's possible that more of us will start to do things which previously weren't economically sensible. For example, I might decide to make wooden furniture. I'd probably make quite decent stuff, but right now I couldn't make something as good, or anywhere nearly as cheaply as a machine can do it - so it's not economically sensible to give up even a day a week of my IT job working on it. However, if I spent a bit of time learning, I could conceivably make "nostalgic, man-made stuff" which looked good, worked well and allowed people to have an emotional attachment to the object in a way that a machine made one wouldn't. With machines growing, harvesting and planking up the raw materials for me, I'd presumably be able to get them quite cheaply, and as my other primary needs were taken care of, I'd only need to sell for cost + margin.
How the world will react when there's a market flooded with 'authentic man-made' spice racks, wonky shelves and wobbly chairs is anyone's guess though;-) How anyone would pay for any of it also remains to be seen.
As a European, I'd rather like to think that if half a million euros of our money is spent on anything that I'd at least see the outcome of it. Hell, if they spend half a million euros taking a shit, I'd expect some cut-price compost to be available somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Way back in the mists of time I worked for a chip fab company. They bought some competitor chips, whipped the tops off them and examined them under a microscope.
Granted, you're unlikely to see a one-transistor change or something, but it's incredibly unlikely any change that actually does more than introduce some bugs is going to be that small. It's a tedious process though, and the chip you examine is waste afterwards, so you can only check a small subset, and even then you don't know if the one you chose at random was a 'good' one or that the one you put into your laptop was a p0wned one.
Another alternative that's less destructive is to have the fab make the wafers and ship them to you (perhaps after chopping them up into die). You then package them yourself after visual checks on each one. The security responsibility is yours, and checking every single die is going to add a lot of expense, but it would be possible to ensure security this way. How you convince anyone else that you've done all of this correctly and that they should now pay top-prices for 'secure' chips is another problem you'd have to solve though.
...and it'll be sick when they hire the next CEO too ;-)
Someone's got to do it - either the government pays the old electric companies to do it, and they go ahead and fix up whatever old crap they have (or maybe they'd get new stuff in, we don't really know), or else the government pays Musk, who definitely puts in new stuff, which arguably should have a lower running cost than anything that preceded it.
I wouldn't really call this 'preying on the weak' - it's not like the people in PR are going to pay directly for this - it'll come federally, and then possibly get paid back by raising the price of electricity. If Musk is true to his word, he'll be able to make the power so cheap, that even with some paying back added to the price, it'll still work out cheaper for the people in PR.
'bashing' Musk (or indeed anyone else) is a bit unnecessary - he's saying he's got a way to help. I haven't really heard anyone else stepping up and saying "we can fix this" - have you? If so, who? How are they better than Musk?
Exactly, and if you were one of those financial companies, or now facebook - it's be far more news-worthy if you *didn't* fight those laws/rules, or indeed actually lobbied for them.
Of course Facebook fought any and all rules or laws that might impede their ability to operate without any oversight. Why would anyone think they'd do differently?
If we're playing that game, I'll 'raise' you a WileyFox for £150 (UKP): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wiley...
It's got a fingerprint reader, NFC, decent screen, decent enough camera, decent processor, stock Android (almost crapware free), and you can use it dual-sim if you want (or put in a big SD card). It's not perfect, but I seriously doubt the Samsungs are either (being that Samsung software is universally terrible). Jury's out on the Apples, but I'll buy 5 of these before paying for even one Apple.
In other news, Groove Music gets more public exposure because it's closing than it ever did when it was supposedly trying to gain some eyeballs.
Microsoft: You do some things very well, but pretty much everything else you do terribly badly. Maybe stick with the things you do well, yeah?
We have an Outlander PHEV (a plug in hybrid). The school run, and the weekend trips to the woods or the shops are 99% electric. A trip to see the folks (about 1 hr, motorway driving) uses some petrol though (and no, they don't have a charge point, and even getting access to a 13A socket near the driveway would be a chore).
Why would I want to hire a car every time I want to go further than the range of the perfectly good car I have on the driveway? How do I put the kids seats into the whatever-the-hire-company-gave-me? They're hard enough to get into our own car, I really don't want to keep switching them around - the kids already know far too many swear words as it is. Then daft stuff like the music we have on USB in our car - can I have that in the hire car? Nope, because they always seem to come with the most basic radio you can get. How about GPS? I'd have to hire an 'executive' or 'premium' car to get those features, and I'd still be left with the car seat problem, and would pay more, have a higher 'bar' of cleanliness/scratches on return and have availability issues too. I also need to make sure I don't leave any identifiable data on their radio/GPS or whatever. We don't have a dog, but have a suitable place to put one right now - not so likely in a hire car (again, unless I'm very careful about exactly what I hire). Then, despite the "we'll pick you up" claims, I've got to get to and from the hire place, got to faff about with ID and going through the upsell-checklist every bloody time. I, frankly, don't have enough time for all that - and don't need to, because they made a hybrid that does both jobs - who the hell cares if one or the other was "better" at one or two aspects of the whole thing!?
I'm amazed it took this long to get down the comments to find this one ;-)
"...made the game less interesting to watch"? Wow - I didn't know that was possible ;-)
More seriously though, if the NFL can fix up some of the more tedious aspects of the game, make a game last the 25 minutes of actual play, versus the 5 hours of ads + inane commentary, then it might have an exportable product. They'd have to rebrand to be the IFL, and they'd need to change the F to be something else, because most of the rest of the world thinks football is a game where you're only allowed to touch the ball with your feet. But if they can do all that, then the rest of us might be a market to grow into.
baseball on the other hand... I can't see that catching on anywhere. It's cricket without the good bits, and cricket's got the market sown up for "sit around drinking while some people play a technical, but not terribly energetic sport".
...where most of the readers use an adblocker ;-) /.: "Yeah, our site gets ten bajillion page views per day"
Advertiser: "Hmm, we only see 367 ad impressions per day"
I really hope the 'in car Alexa' is better than the utter shit most cars have in them:
Me: (presses button) "Call home"
Car: (pause) "Airconditioning on"
I'm not sure how it's gonna cope with "Alexa, tell Starbucks on the A3, but the one north of Guildford going towards the M25, not the one you chose last time to make me a soya-milk latte, extra hot with a double shot and one and a half sugars please" is going to work out. Unless it's really, really good, and gets a signal when my phone can't, and preferably works with a coffee shop that sells actual coffee rather than brown water, then maybe, just maybe it could be good. More than likely though, by the time you've got Alexa to order you a coffee successfully, you'd have been better off lining up and getting it the old fashioned way (or, shock horror - going home and making your own).
I've love to see a 'heat map' of the world with the location (to the nearest country would do) for these lazy ISPs and issues. I'll bet it'll either look exactly as you'd expect, or the exact opposite of what you'd expect ;-)
That's a great idea - I'll get a lectern and some mics setup in the corner of my home office. Does Elbonia or Durkadurkastahn have a flag? I could put one of those behind me. My morning standups are never going to be the same again, dotards!
I thought that Apple had made it so that it's all done on the phone, and stored in the secure enclave, and it's a 'hash' of your face, not your actual face that gets stored anyway.
As for the recommendation - I'd agree with you on all counts (but for different reasons).
1 in 1,000,000 with 5% confidence ;-)
I'm with you on this one - No company or organisation has ever lost any data to persons-unknown on the Internet, so whatever recordings or videos they happen to make, intentionally or otherwise are completely safe. Thinking about it, no company has ever been found using 'production data' for testing purposes, or just 'employee browsing' either. Yep, double-safe. Where do I sign up?
Who's driving an SUV with only 22MPG? That's awful mileage - our old diesel got about 35MPG, and our hybrid does 40 with no charge in the battery*.
Perhaps California just needs to put up petrol taxes? Those shitty MPG cars will find their way to other states or the scrapyard pretty quick.
* fun fact: I got our hybrid to tell me it was giving me 968MPG the other day - I drove to the shops on a full battery charge, but accelerated hard to get around a bit of trouble. The engine kicked in for maybe a minute, and so used a tiny bit of fuel, so the MPG thing stopped reading "- - -" and started showing me crazy numbers like this. Made me giggle a bit, and wonder how high I could get it to go ;-)
Email's a bit less important than it was a few years ago, because of other messaging solutions, but slowing it down doesn't seem like a good idea. Once the ability to slow it down is in place, it'll go from a few seconds today to minutes tomorrow, perhaps to hours in years to come. That makes email considerably less useful than today, so effectively you've given an ISP the ability to decide what apps you should and should not be using.
Besides, this isn't about slowing down one protocol or another - it's about slowing down your entire life, except for facebook, foxnews and livejasmin because you bought the 'premium' package that makes those sites go quicker. The fact you never read foxnews is immaterial - you're gonna pay anyway. Don't want to pay? No problem just go down to the worst possible service they can offer without getting sued for it.
How about instead, you work the commerical arrangements for ISPs so that they get rewarded for providing better service, rather than providing worse service? You do that by introducing competition.
Headcount is a terrible metric of anything - how many western jobs were lost to exactly one person in the developing world? Yep, 0.3-0.5. Pretty much every time a team of 50 in the west gets replaced, it's by a team of 100 or more in India.
Headcount might be a headline-grabbing metric, but it's pretty terrible for anything else. How about revenue? That would probably be a better metric - and for the US, how much of that money earned internationally made it back to the US? With your crazy tax rules, not much, I'd guess.
You say you don't know what you'll buy next - then you're the perfect person to advertise to.
As the Russian Facebook adevrtising story is telling us, despite what we may think, we're manipulated to some degree by the things we see and read. If we read that "everyone" is doing X, then in some small way we may consider "X" to be a little less abhorrent than we thought it was a moment ago. And thus, we've been manipulated.
You too can be manipulated. Perhaps your policy of spreading purchases around multiple sites means that manipulation isn't as effective as it would be if you only shopped on Amazon, but manipulated you will be, and so that future purchase stands a greater chance of being the one "they" want you to buy than it would have been without their efforts.
Now, wouldn't you just love a nice, cool glass of coke?
I didn't see the show, although I notice it's drip-feeding into Netflix over here, so maybe I'll give it a whirl sometime.
Anyway... How about instead of the Klingon enemies, there's a faction of mixed races that form their own group/planet/club or whatever and cause problems for both the Federation and the Klingons? If you want social commentary, that sounds a lot closer to home and means you can't just "blame it on the foreigners", and the Federation might not always be entirely the good guys, and maybe the Klingons might actually be virtuous from time to time. Maybe that's too complex for the dip-shit viewing public that a lot of US stuff seems to be aimed at, but it would allow for a whole world of intrigue, politics, back-stabbing and plot twists.
...and slashdot addiction ;-)
FWIW, I tend to agree - most of my recent jobs have been on Centos* - it's whatever it is, and it does that thing pretty well. The devs complain because they can't get QT to work on it, or some other 'shiny', and that "we never had these problems when we used ubuntu", but Centos offers long supported lifespans, decent update schedules and for the most part it's pretty solid (I found a machine not so long ago with process that were 6 years old on it - that's pretty awesome, even if it's a complete security fail).
So yes, Centos is good for what it does, and so Redhat is good for making it. How Redhat really benefts from all this Centos is not really clear though.
* one such job was at a very wealthy stock traders. I did have something of a moral objection that they were cheaping-out on Centos (which at the time wasn't sanctioned by Redhat, and so we had a few problems upgrading the OS). It's harder to begrudge a 5 person company doing that, and I'm not sure where on 'the scale' my objection would sit. Either way though, Redhat still aren't getting much out of the deal.
If indeed jobs do keep getting created, what will they be in? Advanced Quantum Mathematics with Midwifery? How may humans are ever going to be qualified to do these jobs? Right now we /.ers can see a whole load of tech jobs have been created by previous semi-revolutions, and we're 'consuming' them. However, for every one of us, there are dozens of kids we went to school with who'd just never get qualified enough for an interview, let alone a first-line support job.
If the only jobs left are super-advanced, high brain-function type jobs, then 99% of the world just won't be doing much. In that sense, things are somewhat worrisome if AI really does become a 'thing'.
It's possible that more of us will start to do things which previously weren't economically sensible. For example, I might decide to make wooden furniture. I'd probably make quite decent stuff, but right now I couldn't make something as good, or anywhere nearly as cheaply as a machine can do it - so it's not economically sensible to give up even a day a week of my IT job working on it. However, if I spent a bit of time learning, I could conceivably make "nostalgic, man-made stuff" which looked good, worked well and allowed people to have an emotional attachment to the object in a way that a machine made one wouldn't. With machines growing, harvesting and planking up the raw materials for me, I'd presumably be able to get them quite cheaply, and as my other primary needs were taken care of, I'd only need to sell for cost + margin.
How the world will react when there's a market flooded with 'authentic man-made' spice racks, wonky shelves and wobbly chairs is anyone's guess though ;-) How anyone would pay for any of it also remains to be seen.
As a European, I'd rather like to think that if half a million euros of our money is spent on anything that I'd at least see the outcome of it. Hell, if they spend half a million euros taking a shit, I'd expect some cut-price compost to be available somewhere.