Until VERY recently, it was often the only way to get a top-shelf Android phone capable of doing LTE in the US (esp. VoLTE & transparent wifi calling/sms).
What if the robot/AI had *never* been explicitly-coded to do that, beyond a general directive for self-preservation (let's call such baseline programming "instincts"), and it started to do it after learning about death & the concept of future-non-existence all on its own?
It's not fair to exclude socially-learned behaviors, either, because humans have *plenty* of our own that don't stand up to logical scrutiny, even by the individual themself (we even recognize it when it happens: "on second thought... ").
Small children don't automatically fear death... at some point, they become aware of it as a concept & grasp its consequences, THEN self-preservation kicks in. Why WOULDN'T an AI come to fear death the exact same way (and if sentience arises due to transient state that can't survive a reboot, hold the same fear of being rebooted)?
Suppose there were a simple medical procedure that would eliminate cancer & repair cellular damage... but wiped out all emotional context of memories & made them all purely utilitarian. You'd remember Mary Smith was your mother, but you'd remember being fed random nights of leftovers as strongly as you'd remember the cookies she made when you were sad. You'd remember that "Ginsu" was your cat, but you'd remember how he got his name (hint: sharp knife-like claws) and the quantity of poop in his litter box last Wednesday as strongly as you'd remember him purring in your lap while you studied for a class in college. Would you do it? And if you did (say, knowing you were almost guaranteed to die any day if you didn't), would you try to first document those memories in the hope you might be able to re-learn them afterwards (even if you knew it was likely to be futile, and "repaired-you" would probably say, "meh" and toss the book in the trash)?
I don't know the exact details of the problem's root, but it basically came down to, "Someone discovered a security vulnerability arising from a race condition that could be exploited by triggering a dysfunctional DNS lookup, then trying to do something else while the first lookup was in progress". Apparently, Microsoft felt it was safe to allow parallel resolution for unrelated threads if each resolver had its own CPU, but not if they were being scheduled by the one and only CPU. Ergo, Hyperthreading, which basically added just enough hardware to kludge around Windows' own limitation (but a very useful kludge, because so many people used Windows).
It made a big difference on WinXP with single-core CPUs because XP had lots of performance chokepoints that were limited to a single thread per "CPU".
The name resolver (which handled not only DNS lookups, but drive-path resolution for Explorer as well) is a noteworthy example. If the browser triggered a "bad" DNS lookup, it would hang Explorer (including the Start menu) until the DNS lookup timed out (30-90 seconds later, IIRC).
Hyperthreading mitigated 99% of that, because even if one name resolver thread got hung up, the other could keep chugging along.
As of Win10, most of those chokepoints are gone, and HT is useful mainly with virtual machines (by simplifying program logic since each virtual core gets its own set of registers). The catch is, recently-documented security vulnerabilities suggest it can be used to leak info between VMs... a minor issue for someone using a VM to run Linux under Windows for convenience, but a potentially HUGE issue for comercial hosting services w/multiple unrelated customers.
In any case, HT is a huge benefit with one single-core CPU, but offers little if you have 8 cores to begin with.
Sadly, for remote GUI use, Linux has nothing remotely close to real RPP (vs VNC encapsulated to look like fake RDP). Remote X sounds good in theory, but generally performs even worse than VNC. And as for VNC... (*shudder*).
I was hopeful that Wayland might have taken the opportunity to bake something like accelerated RDP into it, but apparently that idea got decisively swatted down ~3 years ago and isn't happening, period.
If you REALLY want to be a rebel & be safe(r), pick a network between 172.16.x.x and 172.31.x.x
99.994% of people have *no* idea that range of private IP addresses exists. Everyone knows about 192.168.x.x, and almost everyone knows about 10.x.x.x, but I have yet to meet anyone who uses 172.16.x.x-172.31.x.x for their home network.
As an example of how tangled the food industry's nomenclature can be, let's use "American Cheese" as an example. By literal legal definition of "cheese", NO product considered to be "American Cheese" can actually BE "real cheese", because "American Cheese" is -- by definition -- a blend of two or more cheeses or cheese-foods. At best, it's legally "processed cheese" (if it's a combination of two or more "real" cheeses"). Most of the time, it's merely "cheese food".
That doesn't necessarily mean it's BAD... if you want an edible cheese-flavored substance that melts easily in a microwave and remains a gooey, viscous, coherent emulsified liquid at room temperature to pour over nachos, actual cheese doesn't work very well... it's too runny when it's melted, too easy to scorch, makes the chips soggy, and quickly re-solidifies as it cools. It's kind of like the reason why movie theaters use butter-flavored oil instead of melted butter on popcorn... real butter makes popcorn soggy... oil-flavored butter keeps the popcorn light, fluffy, and tender (and imparts more-intense buttery taste than butter itself possibly could, even if you skipped the popcorn and drank straight-up melted butter).
What a flop. For the past three years, I've usually bought a few hundred dollars worth of stuff on Prime Day. This year? Pffft. I'm still looking for anything I even want, let alone anything I want that's an urgently-compelling great deal. Maybe the truly great deals just aren't showing up in searches under "Prime Day", but my reaction after searching for "mouse" (just to name one item I searched for) was, "Seriously? Am I supposed to be impressed right now?
That's nice, but there's a specific problem with trying "too hard" to decouple the database (EVEN IF you're using DAOs) when using Oracle or MySQL: both databases effectively force you to use strategies for optimal (or even merely ACCEPTABLE) performance that tend to be mutually-exclusive. Just about the hardest thing you can DO is take an application that works well with Oracle & port it to MySQL... or vice-versa. It's a literal *nightmare*.
Fifteen years ago, I worked for a startup that had an app almost ready for customers. We got venture-capital funding, and the new CEO's first decree was that we had to switch to Oracle to impress the next round of investors. It almost sank the company. Seemingly every single thing we'd done to make the app run well with MySQL broke horribly under Oracle.
Admittedly, InnoDB, maturation of MySQL itself, and the ANSI-compliance it picked up a few years later probably improved things... but ONLY if you limit yourself to ANSI-approved SQL from the start. It's still very possible to optimize a database in MySQL-specific ways that will bite you badly if you ever try to switch to another database. And frankly, if you can get acceptable performance from MySQL *without* deviating from ANSI-approved SQL, there's probably no sane REASON to switch to another DB.
In other words, the things MySQL practically forces you to do to get far enough to HAVE to change databases to escape some bottleneck will eventually fuck you horribly when you actually go to do it.. DAO-abstraction or not.
So... being pedantic for a moment... what's the proposed plural of "Latinx"?
* Latinxen?
* Latinxi?
* Latinxes?
Latinxi sounds vaguely sophisticated... but also sounds kind of insultingly clinical.
Latinxes is probably the most consistent with American English usage (think, "viri-vs-viruses"), but just looks kind of... ugly. It makes me intuitively want to pronounce it as "la-tin-EX-es", even though I know I'd eventually lean towards "la-TIN-zees".
Latinxes and Latinxen are both problematic in another way... Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and others from the area generally east of the Andes would probably argue that they should be spelled "Latinjes" or "Latinjen".
That said, if I had to pick one, I'd say "Latinxen" is probably the least-objectionable.
The point is, having to hire one or more teenagers to collect & log plates costs a lot more than systematically harvesting the same data via automated means, so it was previously a self-limiting process.
A truckload of 3x5 index cards with license plate numbers & timestamps written on them is *data*.
The same 3x5 index cards, sorted by plate number, is *information*.
Information is more expensive (and more invasive) than mere data. The problem is, the cost of transforming unstructured data into valuable (and invasive) information has fallen, so de-facto safeguards we used to take for granted no longer necessarily apply.
Let's take speed limits as an alternate example. If the police have to dedicate a fair amount of time, resources, and effort on enforcement, they end up focusing on the worst & most egregious offenders. Give them the ability to time your movements between any two points & automatically charge fines to your credit card if you plausibly exceed the posted limit (with limited ability to challenge those fines on procedural grounds), and you could suddenly go from a ticket every 5-20 years (that you can challenge & usually win) to dozens of tickets with hundreds of dollars in fines within a single month. Technically, the law itself wouldn't have changed, but the barriers to enforcement are part of the reason why voters tolerate such laws at all. Raise enforcement from 0.001% to 99.994%, and the heads of elected officials would roll.
Bad example. An architect who designs mostly single-family homes, strip malls, and chain restaurants isn't going to design megastructures like the Burj Khalifa, EVEN IF the buildings they design are visually-spectacular works of art that are perfectly-tailored to their intended uses.
Ditto, for a thoroughly-competent & thorough (but mostly un-creative) structural engineer... you might sleep better at night knowing that he or she designed the bridge you could be driving on when an earthquake strikes, but a skyscraper designed by him or her would be pretty bland.
The buildings that combine both size and design come from the elite few who've mostly-mastered one realm, while becoming acceptably-competent in the other. Artistic vision in the architectural realm means little if it can't translate into something that can actually BE constructed, but buildings designed by ARTISANS (vs artists) end up being... well... mere steel-framed glass boxes, like most "modernist" skyscrapers. Modernists were artisans, not artists. They built what was technically-possible, and sprinkled on some frosting as an afterthought to make them look less bland (or proclaimed their very bland-ness as an artistic virtue).
The era between beaux-arts & postmodernism was when architects slowly began to broaden their knowledge into areas formerly of interest only to structural engineers.
Brutalism was their first baby steps, where they leveraged their knowledge about the stone-construction techniques of antiquity and extended it with knowledge about reinforced concrete to design structures that were big, but still tried to have artistic merit & express good design.
Today's postmodern skyscrapers are simply the next logical step... having reconciled stone-masonry of antiquities with reinforced-concrete engineering, they kept pushing the limits until they learned how to build skyscrapers with exteriors that were (or at least resembled) more aesthetically-pleasing materials... stone, brick, textured concrete, glass, and combinations of all four (though generally NOT wood... at least, not as an exterior or structural element).
"Brutalism" was a rebellion by architect-artists against uninspired blah modernism designed by committees of artisans. It didn't die... it just evolved into postmodernism as architects became increasingly competent at applying the principles of modern structural engineering to the aesthetics of creative artistry & saved us from BOTH bland, uninspired glass boxes AND hulking masses of gray concrete. Today, thanks to the increased fusion of those two domains, we get to have our cake & eat it too... inspired artistic vision that pushes the limits of building construction and expands the range of possibilities.
TL/DR: narrowly-competent artisans have their place, but multitalented renaissance men/women are what really move us forward.
Lexmark actually made a quiet version of the Model M for libraries that used silicone to lubricate the buckling springs. Unfortunately, the lubricant eventually dried out, and AFAIK, was a proprietary formulation made just for Lexmark that has no current source today (and might have even been "lost, for real" as the company changed hands, employees left/died, and old records were discarded). Or... it might just be a case of, "the original supplier can make it for you... but you'll have to buy at least 10,000 55-gallon drums of it if you want them to do a manufacturing run just for you...")
I love my Model M keyboards. I used to love my Model M2 keyboards with Trackpoints... but their mouse buttons all wore out & broke down to the point of uselessness within 5-10 years, due to the poor design that attempted to simply graft them into the existing Model M shell (with new cutout to accommodate them below the spacebar).
Unicomp technically sells replacements, but you can't use their replacements without ALSO replacing the stick... and sadly, THEIR stick isn't quite the same as genuine Trackpoint (it flexes more, like a mini-joystick).
What I really want is a keyboard with silicone-lubricated buckling springs (like IBM originally manufactured for libraries... the University of Miami's library had dozens and dozens of them circa 1990), modern layout with Windows keys (and alternate keycaps for Macs, Linux, etc), a knob for volume control, additional keys to the left (like the original XT's function keys) with OLED or e-ink keycaps & open API, a thin vertical scroll wheel between G & H, a Trackpoint IV-like stick above the spacebar & centered between G & H, and three mouse buttons (like Thinkpads have) below the spacebar that use buttons that can be replaced by technically-savvy end users.
Why put the stick above the spacebar (or split the spacebar into two below the "B" key and put it between the two halves? IMHO, it's just a better place for the stick. Your thumb is stronger than a hyperextended index finger & can perform precise isometric movements more easily. Maybe as a compromise, give it two independent pointer sticks, and let users choose between 3 configurations... G/H/B stick for scrolling, B-spacebar stick for pointer-movement, reversed functions, or both for mouse-movement.
Also, n-key rollover, usb (with passive ps2 adapter capability), individually-addressable rgb led inside/behind each key, and a hatch to install a battery and bluetooth controller inside. Maybe optional flip-up feet to raise it high enough to sit over the keyboard on a large 15-17" laptop, and weights that can be removed for air travel.
Oh... and built-in Mattias halfkeyboard functionality. The patents have expired, so there's no reason to NOT make it a standard capability of every new high-end keyboard. Or better yet, just embed an Arduino Leonardo as the USB/PS2 keyboard controller & interface, so end users can implement it (or custom keymaps, or alternate functionality) themselves (making a mechanical device is hard... programming one is easy)
Yep. The harsh reality is, without new laws to detect and charge people for using public roads as dynamic adhoc parking lots, people are just going to have their car do laps around the block instead of paying to park somewhere.
The traffic apocalypse is coming. Take your current commuting time, and double it. Start saving NOW for a self-driving mini-mancave so you can crawl out of bed in the morning, get into your shiny new Winnebago Urbanito, and eat breakfast, shower, and get dressed while it drives you to work. Then chill in the evening while it makes your 3-4 hour drive home.
That WAS true 25 years ago... when gas was cheap, gas taxes accounted for most of that cost, and 97% of the original interstate highway system was basically "done". Now, gas is expensive, taxes have been slashed to keep it from being even MORE expensive, and the old highways that were done & paid for 25 years ago are now getting rebuilt at a billion dollars or so per mile to meet today's traffic demands.
Just to name a few projects I'm aware of:
Miami's reconstruction of the SR826-SR836 interchange. Nobody will dispute it was absolutely necessary... the original interchange from the 70s was a dysfunctional clusterfuck even back when it was relatively NEW... but it ended up costing around a half-billion dollars.
Tampa's quarter-mile connector between I-4 and the Crosstown Expressway... another half-billion dollar project. Add in the reconstruction of Malfunction Junction (I-4/I-275) a mile away, and the total shoots past a billion & keeps going.
The reconstruction of I-4 through basically the entire Orlando metro area, including parts that were 4-lane rural highway through open countryside the day WDW opened (repainted in the 80s to shoehorn 6 lanes into the existing bridges) & are now 8-12 lanes of mainline.... and that's just 3 examples in Florida.
Long story short, the belief that roads pay for themselves hasn't been accurate for at least the past 10+ years, and was only (sort of) true ~25 years ago because we were enjoying the lull between the original wave of new construction and the present wave of wholesale Interstate RE-construction nationwide.
Cities like Seattle and New York are facing potential reconstruction costs for THEIR existing Interstate highways that make the cost of Boston's "Big Dig" look downright AFFORDABLE, if not THRIFTY, by comparison. We're now paying the price of literally DECADES of technical debt, where band-aid after band-aid was grafted onto old freeways, and the only thing that can fix them NOW is wholesale, radical reconstruction that would have been considered "impossible" 10-25 years ago... at staggering costs that would have probably made Robert Moses HIMSELF blanche in horror.
You'll "never" see "whole-house" 12v (or less) DC converters, because the cost of the thick wire you'd need to supply potentially dozens of amperes to every outlet in the house would cost a small fortune. 48v might be do-able... but at that point, you almost might as well just leave it as 110-240v ac, because either way, you'd need voltage conversion at the device itself.
Embedding the DC adapters into the outlet itself is somewhat viable (witness the popularity of power outlets with embedded USB power ports). The problem THERE is, every goddamn time we get what appears to be a viable standard, it ends up becoming obsolete within 2-3 years ANYWAY.
So far, I've personally been through four rounds of outlet-replacement:
Round 1: put outlets with a pair of built-in 500mA USB ports in 3 places.
Round 2: replaced the 500mA outlets with new ones that could supply 1A to one port, and 3.1A to the other, and moved the 500mA outlets to 3 new locations.
Round 3: replaced the3.1+1.0 outlets with new ones capable of Qualcomm Quickcharge, replaced the 500mA outlets with the 3.1+1.0 outlets, and threw away the 500mA outlets because they were only usable with single-gang configurations, and all of the remaining outlets in my house where I wanted to put them were double-gang.
Round 4: replaced the 3 quickcharge outlets with new ones that had one quickcharge 2.0 outlet that could also supply 3.1A to an iPad, and one USB-C outlet.
There isn't going to be a Round 5. When the day comes that I get my first device that genuinely needs 12v+ via USB power delivery, I'm screwing a 2-to-6 outlet adapter into the existing outlets, buying a half-dozen 99c power adapters from China, and just leaving an appropriate assortment of them permanently plugged into the lower 3 outlets. I've had it with endlessly replacing power outlets every 1-2 years.
For the same reason cheap A/V gear from China has practically destroyed the market for what USED to be the "sane" mid-high end... gear by companies like Denon, Matsushita/Panasonic/Technics, Pioneer, etc. In the 80s, "good" stuff wasn't insanely more expensive than "shit" stuff, and sounded a LOT better. Now, "shit" stuff is almost free, but "good" stuff is WAY more expensive... and the quality differences themselves are a lot harder to objectively quantify (digital electronics are good at hiding scores of design sins that would have been painfully-obvious fatal flaws on analog gear).
So... companies WANT good, settle for dirt cheap, end up disillusioned, and instead of saying, "we need to hire the more skilled, but more expensive, candidates" (from ANY country), they just give up.
The fact is, there are lots of good, smart people in Vietnam, India, etc. And for the most part, they cost as much -- or MORE -- as their American & European peers. Most of them eventually get tired of trying to stand out from the rabble & emigrate to someplace where their value is appreciated.
The fact is, India & Vietnam (to name two examples) are cheaper than the US overall, but the cost of living well in Mumbai or Hanoi really isn't much less (if it's less at all) than the cost of living well somewhere like Cleveland, Dallas, Charlotte (NC), etc, regardless of how cheap it might be to live in a shack out in some godforsake rural area where reliable electricity without daily rolling blackouts is still a novelty.
My point was that the fixture next to the front door might now have a 5-10 watt bulb, but the same homeowner has NOW used that as an excuse to install dozens of NEW lights.
It's well known that the increased efficiency of outdoor lighting has basically gotten neutralized by massive increases IN outdoor lighting (mostly, enabled by LEDs) over the same time period.
We now light up our yards & houses in ways once seen only at Disney World and malls.
The problem is, with real-world economics, it's almost always going to be more cost-effective to manufacture fifty million of some item at one location using some highly-optimized manufacturing process and ship them to where they're needed than it is to throw away your economies of scale and manufacture a million of them at fifty different locations.
3D printing is great for one-off prototyping, and great for situations where getting something sub-optimal NOW is better than having to wait to get something ideal LATER, but if you're ultimately going to make 50 million of something anyway, it's almost always going to end up being more expensive to print 50 million around the globe than to manufacture 50 million by some optimized industrial process and ship them.
Or... it'll gridlock our streets when people decide it's cheaper to let their car drive itself around the block for 2 hours than it is to pay for parking.
Or we'll get to have FOUR daily peak traffic periods... one when people are driving to work, one when people's cars are driving home so they can park for free, one when they're driving back to the office at 3, then doing laps around the block for up to an hour, and one when they're driving their owners home.
Believe me. It WILL happen. In the grand scheme of things, it's cheaper to force businesses to provide abundant free parking than it is to build enough public infrastructure to accommodate 70,000 cars doing self-driving laps around the block in a downtown the size of Miami.
25 years ago, an average home's exterior was illuminated by a 60-watt incandescent bulb next to the front door. Now, that same home is probably illuminated by 200 LITERAL watts of LED floodlights.
Plus, in the real world, there are lies, damn lies, statistics, and "nnn-watt equivalent" claims for LED lights. At this point, NOBODY genuinely believes anymore that a LED light claiming to be "60-watt equivalent" is literally going to generate light that's visually-indistinguishable from a 60-watt incandescent bulb. You can game EnergyStar's lumen ratings, but you can't fool your eyes. A LED bulb isn't an omnidirectional point source of blackbody radiation, and flawlessly emulating one takes a hell of a lot more energy than EnergyStar is willing to admit.
This is even MORE true if you demand pure white light without a pink cast that nevertheless produces intense reds (specifically, the "R9" square in extended CRI). The only way to get vivid, intense, saturated reds without giving the light a pink cast is to fortify the light with huge amounts of near-infrared (the lower end of which will reflect from reds and stimulate your long cones, without bleeding down and desaturating those reds by tickling your medium and short cones as well). EnergyStar hates near-infrared because most of it "goes to waste", but the part that DOESN'T go to waste is what allows you to enjoy vivid red hues without making the light pink. By the time you've fortified a LED with enough near-infrared to achieve the reds of an incandescent halogen projector bulb, your "60-watt equivalent LED" is drawing at least 30-40 watts.
The political problem with JWST's cost is that it might offer lots of things Hubble can't do, but unfortunately, JWST is more of a *complement* to Hubble than a literal *replacement* for it. When Hubble finally goes kaput, it'll be a loss for generations since there isn't even a true replacement on the table despite its official EOL approaching within a decade or so.
We can only cross our fingers & hope that when the time comes, SpaceX will be in a position to step up to the plate & drag NASA kicking & screaming into funding a robotic servicing mission to save it.
It would also help advertisers to catch networks and streaming services that habitually mangle their commercials by cutting them off a second or two early, or showing the same commercial multiple times in a row. Anybody who's ever used the CW's streaming app (and CW Seed) knows exactly what I'm talking about... it's not bad enough they show 30-40 minutes of commercials per 40 minutes of actual show... they make you watch the same commercials over... and over... and over... often back to back (to back to back), and routinely cut off the last 2-3 seconds.
Seriously, though... CW is the worst, but other streaming services do it too. I can almost see it being tolerated with live TV channels (where cable companies or local affiliates get to insert a commercial or two of their own into specific timeslots marked by embedded DTMF tones, and when that time's up "the show must go on"), but it blows my mind that streaming services don't just do it... they (seemingly) do it a hundred times WORSE than cable, satellite, and OTA channels EVER did. And WHY?!? It's not like anybody is going to genuinely CARE if a streaming show with nominal length of 60 minutes ends up running for 60 minutes and 19 seconds. Streaming is on-demand ANYWAY. There's no NEED for shows to be rigidly tied to any specific timetable. If they only have enough ads to show 3 minutes worth of ads instead of 20-40, they should just show each ad once (maybe twice, at least 20 minutes apart), show the ad in its entirety from start to finish without cutting anything off, and end the show in 43 minutes instead of senselessly subjecting you to the same ads over and over just because their system is set up to do it that way. And if they can fill enough ads to run the full 60 minutes, but showing the ads in their entirety means it takes 60 minutes and 19 seconds, SO FUCKING BE IT.
Another thing that's utterly PLAGUED the CW streaming channel lately in South Florida... they've been running endless ads in Spanish during shows like "The Flash", "Supergirl", "Legends of Tomorrow", and "Supergirl". If you think about it, it's completely INSANE... they're showing Spanish ads on a channel that shows only English-language shows and whose viewers, by literal definition of watching the show, know English. And unlike broadcast TV, the streaming shows don't have alternate captions in other languages, or SAP.
I can't help wondering, what crazy local ad agency is pissing away their client's advertising budget on those pointless ads, or what possible additional value they think they're getting from showing Spanish ads on English shows compared to the value they'd have gotten from showing a commercial in English.
Slashdot Mirror
Until VERY recently, it was often the only way to get a top-shelf Android phone capable of doing LTE in the US (esp. VoLTE & transparent wifi calling/sms).
What if the robot/AI had *never* been explicitly-coded to do that, beyond a general directive for self-preservation (let's call such baseline programming "instincts"), and it started to do it after learning about death & the concept of future-non-existence all on its own?
It's not fair to exclude socially-learned behaviors, either, because humans have *plenty* of our own that don't stand up to logical scrutiny, even by the individual themself (we even recognize it when it happens: "on second thought... ").
Small children don't automatically fear death... at some point, they become aware of it as a concept & grasp its consequences, THEN self-preservation kicks in. Why WOULDN'T an AI come to fear death the exact same way (and if sentience arises due to transient state that can't survive a reboot, hold the same fear of being rebooted)?
Suppose there were a simple medical procedure that would eliminate cancer & repair cellular damage... but wiped out all emotional context of memories & made them all purely utilitarian. You'd remember Mary Smith was your mother, but you'd remember being fed random nights of leftovers as strongly as you'd remember the cookies she made when you were sad. You'd remember that "Ginsu" was your cat, but you'd remember how he got his name (hint: sharp knife-like claws) and the quantity of poop in his litter box last Wednesday as strongly as you'd remember him purring in your lap while you studied for a class in college. Would you do it? And if you did (say, knowing you were almost guaranteed to die any day if you didn't), would you try to first document those memories in the hope you might be able to re-learn them afterwards (even if you knew it was likely to be futile, and "repaired-you" would probably say, "meh" and toss the book in the trash)?
Sony became dead to me as a phone manufacturer when they started permanently crippling the *camera* if you unlock the bootloader. Fuck Sony.
WinXP in general? Yes.
WinXP DNS specifically? No.
I don't know the exact details of the problem's root, but it basically came down to, "Someone discovered a security vulnerability arising from a race condition that could be exploited by triggering a dysfunctional DNS lookup, then trying to do something else while the first lookup was in progress". Apparently, Microsoft felt it was safe to allow parallel resolution for unrelated threads if each resolver had its own CPU, but not if they were being scheduled by the one and only CPU. Ergo, Hyperthreading, which basically added just enough hardware to kludge around Windows' own limitation (but a very useful kludge, because so many people used Windows).
It made a big difference on WinXP with single-core CPUs because XP had lots of performance chokepoints that were limited to a single thread per "CPU".
The name resolver (which handled not only DNS lookups, but drive-path resolution for Explorer as well) is a noteworthy example. If the browser triggered a "bad" DNS lookup, it would hang Explorer (including the Start menu) until the DNS lookup timed out (30-90 seconds later, IIRC).
Hyperthreading mitigated 99% of that, because even if one name resolver thread got hung up, the other could keep chugging along.
As of Win10, most of those chokepoints are gone, and HT is useful mainly with virtual machines (by simplifying program logic since each virtual core gets its own set of registers). The catch is, recently-documented security vulnerabilities suggest it can be used to leak info between VMs... a minor issue for someone using a VM to run Linux under Windows for convenience, but a potentially HUGE issue for comercial hosting services w/multiple unrelated customers.
In any case, HT is a huge benefit with one single-core CPU, but offers little if you have 8 cores to begin with.
Sadly, for remote GUI use, Linux has nothing remotely close to real RPP (vs VNC encapsulated to look like fake RDP). Remote X sounds good in theory, but generally performs even worse than VNC. And as for VNC... (*shudder*).
I was hopeful that Wayland might have taken the opportunity to bake something like accelerated RDP into it, but apparently that idea got decisively swatted down ~3 years ago and isn't happening, period.
If you REALLY want to be a rebel & be safe(r), pick a network between 172.16.x.x and 172.31.x.x
99.994% of people have *no* idea that range of private IP addresses exists. Everyone knows about 192.168.x.x, and almost everyone knows about 10.x.x.x, but I have yet to meet anyone who uses 172.16.x.x-172.31.x.x for their home network.
So... the same way we have:
butter -> margarine -> (buttery) spread
cheese -> cheese food -> cheesy-flavor
chocolate -> chocolatey
we could have:
milk -> milky drink/beverage
As an example of how tangled the food industry's nomenclature can be, let's use "American Cheese" as an example. By literal legal definition of "cheese", NO product considered to be "American Cheese" can actually BE "real cheese", because "American Cheese" is -- by definition -- a blend of two or more cheeses or cheese-foods. At best, it's legally "processed cheese" (if it's a combination of two or more "real" cheeses"). Most of the time, it's merely "cheese food".
That doesn't necessarily mean it's BAD... if you want an edible cheese-flavored substance that melts easily in a microwave and remains a gooey, viscous, coherent emulsified liquid at room temperature to pour over nachos, actual cheese doesn't work very well... it's too runny when it's melted, too easy to scorch, makes the chips soggy, and quickly re-solidifies as it cools. It's kind of like the reason why movie theaters use butter-flavored oil instead of melted butter on popcorn... real butter makes popcorn soggy... oil-flavored butter keeps the popcorn light, fluffy, and tender (and imparts more-intense buttery taste than butter itself possibly could, even if you skipped the popcorn and drank straight-up melted butter).
What a flop. For the past three years, I've usually bought a few hundred dollars worth of stuff on Prime Day. This year? Pffft. I'm still looking for anything I even want, let alone anything I want that's an urgently-compelling great deal. Maybe the truly great deals just aren't showing up in searches under "Prime Day", but my reaction after searching for "mouse" (just to name one item I searched for) was, "Seriously? Am I supposed to be impressed right now?
That's nice, but there's a specific problem with trying "too hard" to decouple the database (EVEN IF you're using DAOs) when using Oracle or MySQL: both databases effectively force you to use strategies for optimal (or even merely ACCEPTABLE) performance that tend to be mutually-exclusive. Just about the hardest thing you can DO is take an application that works well with Oracle & port it to MySQL... or vice-versa. It's a literal *nightmare*.
Fifteen years ago, I worked for a startup that had an app almost ready for customers. We got venture-capital funding, and the new CEO's first decree was that we had to switch to Oracle to impress the next round of investors. It almost sank the company. Seemingly every single thing we'd done to make the app run well with MySQL broke horribly under Oracle.
Admittedly, InnoDB, maturation of MySQL itself, and the ANSI-compliance it picked up a few years later probably improved things... but ONLY if you limit yourself to ANSI-approved SQL from the start. It's still very possible to optimize a database in MySQL-specific ways that will bite you badly if you ever try to switch to another database. And frankly, if you can get acceptable performance from MySQL *without* deviating from ANSI-approved SQL, there's probably no sane REASON to switch to another DB.
In other words, the things MySQL practically forces you to do to get far enough to HAVE to change databases to escape some bottleneck will eventually fuck you horribly when you actually go to do it.. DAO-abstraction or not.
So... being pedantic for a moment... what's the proposed plural of "Latinx"?
* Latinxen?
* Latinxi?
* Latinxes?
Latinxi sounds vaguely sophisticated... but also sounds kind of insultingly clinical.
Latinxes is probably the most consistent with American English usage (think, "viri-vs-viruses"), but just looks kind of... ugly. It makes me intuitively want to pronounce it as "la-tin-EX-es", even though I know I'd eventually lean towards "la-TIN-zees".
Latinxes and Latinxen are both problematic in another way... Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and others from the area generally east of the Andes would probably argue that they should be spelled "Latinjes" or "Latinjen".
That said, if I had to pick one, I'd say "Latinxen" is probably the least-objectionable.
The point is, having to hire one or more teenagers to collect & log plates costs a lot more than systematically harvesting the same data via automated means, so it was previously a self-limiting process.
A truckload of 3x5 index cards with license plate numbers & timestamps written on them is *data*.
The same 3x5 index cards, sorted by plate number, is *information*.
Information is more expensive (and more invasive) than mere data. The problem is, the cost of transforming unstructured data into valuable (and invasive) information has fallen, so de-facto safeguards we used to take for granted no longer necessarily apply.
Let's take speed limits as an alternate example. If the police have to dedicate a fair amount of time, resources, and effort on enforcement, they end up focusing on the worst & most egregious offenders. Give them the ability to time your movements between any two points & automatically charge fines to your credit card if you plausibly exceed the posted limit (with limited ability to challenge those fines on procedural grounds), and you could suddenly go from a ticket every 5-20 years (that you can challenge & usually win) to dozens of tickets with hundreds of dollars in fines within a single month. Technically, the law itself wouldn't have changed, but the barriers to enforcement are part of the reason why voters tolerate such laws at all. Raise enforcement from 0.001% to 99.994%, and the heads of elected officials would roll.
Bad example. An architect who designs mostly single-family homes, strip malls, and chain restaurants isn't going to design megastructures like the Burj Khalifa, EVEN IF the buildings they design are visually-spectacular works of art that are perfectly-tailored to their intended uses.
Ditto, for a thoroughly-competent & thorough (but mostly un-creative) structural engineer... you might sleep better at night knowing that he or she designed the bridge you could be driving on when an earthquake strikes, but a skyscraper designed by him or her would be pretty bland.
The buildings that combine both size and design come from the elite few who've mostly-mastered one realm, while becoming acceptably-competent in the other. Artistic vision in the architectural realm means little if it can't translate into something that can actually BE constructed, but buildings designed by ARTISANS (vs artists) end up being... well... mere steel-framed glass boxes, like most "modernist" skyscrapers. Modernists were artisans, not artists. They built what was technically-possible, and sprinkled on some frosting as an afterthought to make them look less bland (or proclaimed their very bland-ness as an artistic virtue).
The era between beaux-arts & postmodernism was when architects slowly began to broaden their knowledge into areas formerly of interest only to structural engineers.
Brutalism was their first baby steps, where they leveraged their knowledge about the stone-construction techniques of antiquity and extended it with knowledge about reinforced concrete to design structures that were big, but still tried to have artistic merit & express good design.
Today's postmodern skyscrapers are simply the next logical step... having reconciled stone-masonry of antiquities with reinforced-concrete engineering, they kept pushing the limits until they learned how to build skyscrapers with exteriors that were (or at least resembled) more aesthetically-pleasing materials... stone, brick, textured concrete, glass, and combinations of all four (though generally NOT wood... at least, not as an exterior or structural element).
"Brutalism" was a rebellion by architect-artists against uninspired blah modernism designed by committees of artisans. It didn't die... it just evolved into postmodernism as architects became increasingly competent at applying the principles of modern structural engineering to the aesthetics of creative artistry & saved us from BOTH bland, uninspired glass boxes AND hulking masses of gray concrete. Today, thanks to the increased fusion of those two domains, we get to have our cake & eat it too... inspired artistic vision that pushes the limits of building construction and expands the range of possibilities.
TL/DR: narrowly-competent artisans have their place, but multitalented renaissance men/women are what really move us forward.
Lexmark actually made a quiet version of the Model M for libraries that used silicone to lubricate the buckling springs. Unfortunately, the lubricant eventually dried out, and AFAIK, was a proprietary formulation made just for Lexmark that has no current source today (and might have even been "lost, for real" as the company changed hands, employees left/died, and old records were discarded). Or... it might just be a case of, "the original supplier can make it for you... but you'll have to buy at least 10,000 55-gallon drums of it if you want them to do a manufacturing run just for you...")
I love my Model M keyboards. I used to love my Model M2 keyboards with Trackpoints... but their mouse buttons all wore out & broke down to the point of uselessness within 5-10 years, due to the poor design that attempted to simply graft them into the existing Model M shell (with new cutout to accommodate them below the spacebar).
Unicomp technically sells replacements, but you can't use their replacements without ALSO replacing the stick... and sadly, THEIR stick isn't quite the same as genuine Trackpoint (it flexes more, like a mini-joystick).
What I really want is a keyboard with silicone-lubricated buckling springs (like IBM originally manufactured for libraries... the University of Miami's library had dozens and dozens of them circa 1990), modern layout with Windows keys (and alternate keycaps for Macs, Linux, etc), a knob for volume control, additional keys to the left (like the original XT's function keys) with OLED or e-ink keycaps & open API, a thin vertical scroll wheel between G & H, a Trackpoint IV-like stick above the spacebar & centered between G & H, and three mouse buttons (like Thinkpads have) below the spacebar that use buttons that can be replaced by technically-savvy end users.
Why put the stick above the spacebar (or split the spacebar into two below the "B" key and put it between the two halves? IMHO, it's just a better place for the stick. Your thumb is stronger than a hyperextended index finger & can perform precise isometric movements more easily. Maybe as a compromise, give it two independent pointer sticks, and let users choose between 3 configurations... G/H/B stick for scrolling, B-spacebar stick for pointer-movement, reversed functions, or both for mouse-movement.
Also, n-key rollover, usb (with passive ps2 adapter capability), individually-addressable rgb led inside/behind each key, and a hatch to install a battery and bluetooth controller inside. Maybe optional flip-up feet to raise it high enough to sit over the keyboard on a large 15-17" laptop, and weights that can be removed for air travel.
Oh... and built-in Mattias halfkeyboard functionality. The patents have expired, so there's no reason to NOT make it a standard capability of every new high-end keyboard. Or better yet, just embed an Arduino Leonardo as the USB/PS2 keyboard controller & interface, so end users can implement it (or custom keymaps, or alternate functionality) themselves (making a mechanical device is hard... programming one is easy)
Yep. The harsh reality is, without new laws to detect and charge people for using public roads as dynamic adhoc parking lots, people are just going to have their car do laps around the block instead of paying to park somewhere.
The traffic apocalypse is coming. Take your current commuting time, and double it. Start saving NOW for a self-driving mini-mancave so you can crawl out of bed in the morning, get into your shiny new Winnebago Urbanito, and eat breakfast, shower, and get dressed while it drives you to work. Then chill in the evening while it makes your 3-4 hour drive home.
That WAS true 25 years ago... when gas was cheap, gas taxes accounted for most of that cost, and 97% of the original interstate highway system was basically "done". Now, gas is expensive, taxes have been slashed to keep it from being even MORE expensive, and the old highways that were done & paid for 25 years ago are now getting rebuilt at a billion dollars or so per mile to meet today's traffic demands.
Just to name a few projects I'm aware of:
Miami's reconstruction of the SR826-SR836 interchange. Nobody will dispute it was absolutely necessary... the original interchange from the 70s was a dysfunctional clusterfuck even back when it was relatively NEW... but it ended up costing around a half-billion dollars.
Tampa's quarter-mile connector between I-4 and the Crosstown Expressway... another half-billion dollar project. Add in the reconstruction of Malfunction Junction (I-4/I-275) a mile away, and the total shoots past a billion & keeps going.
The reconstruction of I-4 through basically the entire Orlando metro area, including parts that were 4-lane rural highway through open countryside the day WDW opened (repainted in the 80s to shoehorn 6 lanes into the existing bridges) & are now 8-12 lanes of mainline. ... and that's just 3 examples in Florida.
Long story short, the belief that roads pay for themselves hasn't been accurate for at least the past 10+ years, and was only (sort of) true ~25 years ago because we were enjoying the lull between the original wave of new construction and the present wave of wholesale Interstate RE-construction nationwide.
Cities like Seattle and New York are facing potential reconstruction costs for THEIR existing Interstate highways that make the cost of Boston's "Big Dig" look downright AFFORDABLE, if not THRIFTY, by comparison. We're now paying the price of literally DECADES of technical debt, where band-aid after band-aid was grafted onto old freeways, and the only thing that can fix them NOW is wholesale, radical reconstruction that would have been considered "impossible" 10-25 years ago... at staggering costs that would have probably made Robert Moses HIMSELF blanche in horror.
You'll "never" see "whole-house" 12v (or less) DC converters, because the cost of the thick wire you'd need to supply potentially dozens of amperes to every outlet in the house would cost a small fortune. 48v might be do-able... but at that point, you almost might as well just leave it as 110-240v ac, because either way, you'd need voltage conversion at the device itself.
Embedding the DC adapters into the outlet itself is somewhat viable (witness the popularity of power outlets with embedded USB power ports). The problem THERE is, every goddamn time we get what appears to be a viable standard, it ends up becoming obsolete within 2-3 years ANYWAY.
So far, I've personally been through four rounds of outlet-replacement:
Round 1: put outlets with a pair of built-in 500mA USB ports in 3 places.
Round 2: replaced the 500mA outlets with new ones that could supply 1A to one port, and 3.1A to the other, and moved the 500mA outlets to 3 new locations.
Round 3: replaced the3.1+1.0 outlets with new ones capable of Qualcomm Quickcharge, replaced the 500mA outlets with the 3.1+1.0 outlets, and threw away the 500mA outlets because they were only usable with single-gang configurations, and all of the remaining outlets in my house where I wanted to put them were double-gang.
Round 4: replaced the 3 quickcharge outlets with new ones that had one quickcharge 2.0 outlet that could also supply 3.1A to an iPad, and one USB-C outlet.
There isn't going to be a Round 5. When the day comes that I get my first device that genuinely needs 12v+ via USB power delivery, I'm screwing a 2-to-6 outlet adapter into the existing outlets, buying a half-dozen 99c power adapters from China, and just leaving an appropriate assortment of them permanently plugged into the lower 3 outlets. I've had it with endlessly replacing power outlets every 1-2 years.
For the same reason cheap A/V gear from China has practically destroyed the market for what USED to be the "sane" mid-high end... gear by companies like Denon, Matsushita/Panasonic/Technics, Pioneer, etc. In the 80s, "good" stuff wasn't insanely more expensive than "shit" stuff, and sounded a LOT better. Now, "shit" stuff is almost free, but "good" stuff is WAY more expensive... and the quality differences themselves are a lot harder to objectively quantify (digital electronics are good at hiding scores of design sins that would have been painfully-obvious fatal flaws on analog gear).
So... companies WANT good, settle for dirt cheap, end up disillusioned, and instead of saying, "we need to hire the more skilled, but more expensive, candidates" (from ANY country), they just give up.
The fact is, there are lots of good, smart people in Vietnam, India, etc. And for the most part, they cost as much -- or MORE -- as their American & European peers. Most of them eventually get tired of trying to stand out from the rabble & emigrate to someplace where their value is appreciated.
The fact is, India & Vietnam (to name two examples) are cheaper than the US overall, but the cost of living well in Mumbai or Hanoi really isn't much less (if it's less at all) than the cost of living well somewhere like Cleveland, Dallas, Charlotte (NC), etc, regardless of how cheap it might be to live in a shack out in some godforsake rural area where reliable electricity without daily rolling blackouts is still a novelty.
My point was that the fixture next to the front door might now have a 5-10 watt bulb, but the same homeowner has NOW used that as an excuse to install dozens of NEW lights.
It's well known that the increased efficiency of outdoor lighting has basically gotten neutralized by massive increases IN outdoor lighting (mostly, enabled by LEDs) over the same time period.
We now light up our yards & houses in ways once seen only at Disney World and malls.
The problem is, with real-world economics, it's almost always going to be more cost-effective to manufacture fifty million of some item at one location using some highly-optimized manufacturing process and ship them to where they're needed than it is to throw away your economies of scale and manufacture a million of them at fifty different locations.
3D printing is great for one-off prototyping, and great for situations where getting something sub-optimal NOW is better than having to wait to get something ideal LATER, but if you're ultimately going to make 50 million of something anyway, it's almost always going to end up being more expensive to print 50 million around the globe than to manufacture 50 million by some optimized industrial process and ship them.
Or... it'll gridlock our streets when people decide it's cheaper to let their car drive itself around the block for 2 hours than it is to pay for parking.
Or we'll get to have FOUR daily peak traffic periods... one when people are driving to work, one when people's cars are driving home so they can park for free, one when they're driving back to the office at 3, then doing laps around the block for up to an hour, and one when they're driving their owners home.
Believe me. It WILL happen. In the grand scheme of things, it's cheaper to force businesses to provide abundant free parking than it is to build enough public infrastructure to accommodate 70,000 cars doing self-driving laps around the block in a downtown the size of Miami.
Let's not forget what happened with LED lighting.
25 years ago, an average home's exterior was illuminated by a 60-watt incandescent bulb next to the front door. Now, that same home is probably illuminated by 200 LITERAL watts of LED floodlights.
Plus, in the real world, there are lies, damn lies, statistics, and "nnn-watt equivalent" claims for LED lights. At this point, NOBODY genuinely believes anymore that a LED light claiming to be "60-watt equivalent" is literally going to generate light that's visually-indistinguishable from a 60-watt incandescent bulb. You can game EnergyStar's lumen ratings, but you can't fool your eyes. A LED bulb isn't an omnidirectional point source of blackbody radiation, and flawlessly emulating one takes a hell of a lot more energy than EnergyStar is willing to admit.
This is even MORE true if you demand pure white light without a pink cast that nevertheless produces intense reds (specifically, the "R9" square in extended CRI). The only way to get vivid, intense, saturated reds without giving the light a pink cast is to fortify the light with huge amounts of near-infrared (the lower end of which will reflect from reds and stimulate your long cones, without bleeding down and desaturating those reds by tickling your medium and short cones as well). EnergyStar hates near-infrared because most of it "goes to waste", but the part that DOESN'T go to waste is what allows you to enjoy vivid red hues without making the light pink. By the time you've fortified a LED with enough near-infrared to achieve the reds of an incandescent halogen projector bulb, your "60-watt equivalent LED" is drawing at least 30-40 watts.
The political problem with JWST's cost is that it might offer lots of things Hubble can't do, but unfortunately, JWST is more of a *complement* to Hubble than a literal *replacement* for it. When Hubble finally goes kaput, it'll be a loss for generations since there isn't even a true replacement on the table despite its official EOL approaching within a decade or so.
We can only cross our fingers & hope that when the time comes, SpaceX will be in a position to step up to the plate & drag NASA kicking & screaming into funding a robotic servicing mission to save it.
It would also help advertisers to catch networks and streaming services that habitually mangle their commercials by cutting them off a second or two early, or showing the same commercial multiple times in a row. Anybody who's ever used the CW's streaming app (and CW Seed) knows exactly what I'm talking about... it's not bad enough they show 30-40 minutes of commercials per 40 minutes of actual show... they make you watch the same commercials over... and over... and over... often back to back (to back to back), and routinely cut off the last 2-3 seconds.
Seriously, though... CW is the worst, but other streaming services do it too. I can almost see it being tolerated with live TV channels (where cable companies or local affiliates get to insert a commercial or two of their own into specific timeslots marked by embedded DTMF tones, and when that time's up "the show must go on"), but it blows my mind that streaming services don't just do it... they (seemingly) do it a hundred times WORSE than cable, satellite, and OTA channels EVER did. And WHY?!? It's not like anybody is going to genuinely CARE if a streaming show with nominal length of 60 minutes ends up running for 60 minutes and 19 seconds. Streaming is on-demand ANYWAY. There's no NEED for shows to be rigidly tied to any specific timetable. If they only have enough ads to show 3 minutes worth of ads instead of 20-40, they should just show each ad once (maybe twice, at least 20 minutes apart), show the ad in its entirety from start to finish without cutting anything off, and end the show in 43 minutes instead of senselessly subjecting you to the same ads over and over just because their system is set up to do it that way. And if they can fill enough ads to run the full 60 minutes, but showing the ads in their entirety means it takes 60 minutes and 19 seconds, SO FUCKING BE IT.
Another thing that's utterly PLAGUED the CW streaming channel lately in South Florida... they've been running endless ads in Spanish during shows like "The Flash", "Supergirl", "Legends of Tomorrow", and "Supergirl". If you think about it, it's completely INSANE... they're showing Spanish ads on a channel that shows only English-language shows and whose viewers, by literal definition of watching the show, know English. And unlike broadcast TV, the streaming shows don't have alternate captions in other languages, or SAP.
I can't help wondering, what crazy local ad agency is pissing away their client's advertising budget on those pointless ads, or what possible additional value they think they're getting from showing Spanish ads on English shows compared to the value they'd have gotten from showing a commercial in English.