You seem to be pointing to some things you don't like and concluding "therefore government should step in".
I know you tend to see us Europeans as communi-lefties that want to throw an evil-tyrannical-overreaching government to legislate the shit out of everything, but at no point in my post did I invoke it.
I was simply contrasting the parent poster's positive side of acquisition (usually the dev of the startup can reap the [mostly financial] benefits of their hardwork) With the negative side : users are usually on the losing side, because the startup's own service/product is actually going to get shut down fast, because most often the corporation are looking to shut down competitors and move brain power to their own project.
(Facebook keeping WhastApp and Instragram alive on purpose is more the exception than the norm. Google replacing their own failing Google Video with the much more successful Youtube is bordering on it - though its almost not "buying competition" but closer to the "buy someone from a new sector to gain a new market" - see Microsoft buying LinkedIn, Skype, Hotmail, etc.)
This requires a very dangerous assumption: that government will do what you want.
{ The US even has laws against a platform like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube censoring conservatives. } It's just that laws are implemented to serve the ruling class.
So where do you get the idea that any law will be used to serve the people?
You know there's this thing called "direct democracy". It works. You should try it sometimes.
The whole idea is that you vote what you want to force your government to do (= direct democracy), instead of voting for some random idiot making empty promises on the TV, and hoping that he'll somehow keep his promises once in power (= representative democracy).
People choose to keep using Facebook to the extent they feel it provides them with value. We may not like it, but value is entirely subjective.
Actually, part of my rant went the opposite way : - Facebook *is starting to provide less and less* value to new generations of customer who know it and eventually decide to go somewhere else (nothing new, same thing happened with any other predecessors in the "social media" category - e.g.: MySpace mostly died out). - Mark Zuckerberg knows this phenomenon perfectly well. - That's why he's been buying upcoming startup: He's not actually shutting down competitors and "aqui-hiring" new talent (like most giants), he does indeed buy startups with the purpose of keeping them because he tries to find out the most likely new comer that will eventually succeed to Facebook. - Giving the current popularity trends of Instagram and WhatsApp (the current day popular trending social networks), he's been indeed successful (he was correct in predicting which "Facebook successors" to buy).
Technically, the idea is that for MMO you aren't paying for the game itself. You're paying for the "online experience" of playing together "with thousands of other people".
(Kind of the difference between: - paying for you drinks at a store and drinking them at home while enjoying the evening on your balcony, - and paying an obscene mark-up for going out in club where the main selling point is supposed to be the ambiance and the opportunity to hook up with other human beings).
The fee you pay is supposed to cover for the technical cost (keeping servers up), and all the personnel (developers and artists making new missions and content, moderators or whatever the actors doing the LARP-equivalent of NPC are called, etc.)
So in theory the monthly fee would be making sense. The problem is that most corporation decided to turn it as much as possible into cash-cows.
Yes, there exist such things like RPGs whose code is even opensource and you would only pay for the experience on the server.
Yes, there are things like Minecraft, where microsoft would like you to pay them some subscription to play on their realms. But you could as well play on a private sever that you setup with a bunch of friends.
But then there's the other darker side of corporations that go out of they way to make sure that you won't be playing on anything but a server where you have to keep playing them.
See companies suing attempts to re-implement 3rd party servers.
See Blizzard suing players that want to set-up servers that imitate older version of the game.
That is the problem.
You should be able to run an online game on any server that you like. As long as that server didn't straight up lift non-public executable blobs from the official server (but instead runs a 3rd party re-implementation) (I really don't agree with Blizzard's complains that the small text descriptions of objects or quest stored in a SQL databse that is mandatory to make the game working could be considered copyright violations).
Just the same way that on older generations of games, mods became a thing and a couple of big players (including id software) managed to convince the lawyers that users shouldn't be sued for modding.
We need the companies to accept that playing against a different server that they don't own and don't get money from is basically just a different type of mod.
If they want us to believe that monthly fee are to cover the "playing on our servers" experience, we should be able to answer "no thanks I'm going to play on my own".
It just funny when you think about the higher level implication and the evolution of the prediction models.
Starting from old days like Quake 3 (where basically the syste1m predicts objects keeping the same linear motions) and then following the current progressive trend of machine learning, we'll eventually end up at a point where complex deep-neural-nets are used to predict the inputs.
You'll basically be training an IA to play you're self. Each play will be in practice playing against a local AI avatar replicating in advance the intention of the remote player.
Basically, you as a player won't be a player anymore, but a coach for AI remote players, if you think about it.
You won't be realizing it, but in a very abstract way all FPS will become war-stategy game where you aren't controlling the main character, but instructing a remote AI how to move it (by controlling directly the main character on your screen).
Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them.
One potential way to partially solve the problem is what is currently being done by several IPTV, video streaming (Netflix does it) or messageing/voice-/video-chactting (WhatsApp is doing it) and even was done by some ISPs back in the Quake-over-modem era in order to reduce (outbound) bandwidth costs and (your local) latency: put servers in the ISPs local point of presence server room. Your lag will be mostly influenced by the latency over your home internet connection (optical fiber, cable or dsl), and the connection within the server room.
You won't be having horrendous ping time because you need to contact some streaming server at the opposite side of the continent.
As long as you have a good connection (fiber) and a decent local network, that might help making non-twitchy games bearable.
Here around in most European countries it should be legal (With some exceptions)
In the US : actually, no.
On two grounds :
1 - DRM and DMCA. Any media since the DVD is encrypted (okay, its often encrypted with some laughable scheme that barely qualifies as such in the eyes of most cryptographers. Cue in usual discussion that "Bob" and "Eve" are the same person). Let's call it "scrambled" which is closer to reality. DCMA restricts you severly in how you can un-scramble it. Even something as stupid as the CSS on DVDs that can be trivially broken with libdvdcss. This piece of code is considered illegal in the US (and is hosted by the VLC project *in France* were it is considered legal under fair use) BlueRays and HDDVDs have similar problem as you need to break their AACS.
2 - Patents More recent media (e.g.: BlueRays) use codecs for video (H264, H265) and audio (AAC) which are covered by patents. Libraries that can decompress them are considered illegal in jurisdictions that recognize software patents (e.g. US) as they don't have a license to the patents. You would need to obtain a patent to the corresponding codec before being able to run libavcodec.
let's translate to a slightly more modern time :
In the early 80s, functionally :
- vinyl played the same role as audio CDs played a decade or so ago (the media that you buy your music on), - tape cassettes played the role that USB stick or CD-R/RW played at the same time on which you could write heavily compressed MP3s with your whole collection of favorite palylist, that you stick in your MP3-compatible car radio. Or iPod/other MP3 player, plugged in the car's AUX-in port if you're unlucky to have a car radio that doesn't support MP3 and doesn't have a standard DIN format so you could swap it easily with a better one. (Really gettho solution: small FM-emitter attached to the iPod/MP3 player, broadcasting your own private local radio within the confine of the car to which you could tune your car radio. Or which other people stuck in the same traffic JAM could eavesdrop, because lots of these emitter came from China and weren't that precise with frequency broadcasting legislation).
In other words, both with cassettes and later with CR-R/USB sticks/MP3 player, there was a ton copying going on, but it wasn't that much what the **AA call "stealing" but much more for format shifting. Which back then was still considered completely legal. Still, some jurisdiction managed to impose taxes on blank media, on ground that the media was mostly used for "stealing" so that the content owner get compensated for every blank media sold (e.g.: France had a tax on blank CD-R/RW. There are case of french people sued for "piracy" that have successfully defended, arguing that they only burned downloaded content on media that is taxed (CD-R/RW) and that the burned media was only used privately - no commercial exploitation )
or more "nowadays" example: - vinyl played the same role as your Spotify/Netflix/Youtube Pro subscription (The thing you pay to obtain music). - tape played the same role as your 400gb A1 microSDXC card into your smartphone's slot (The thing on which you copy it, to be able to listen to it while on the go, by streaming it to your car's bluetooth receiver).
The subtle difference is that nowadays, due to DMCA law and similar laws in other countries format shifting might be considered outlawed in some jurisdiction. (US, I think ?) (Here in CH, the local DMCA-like clone has exceptions explicitely put in place for Fair-Use exception of the copyright law, which in turn lists "technical reasons" as a reason which could be argued to cover gray areas such as "My device doesn't support the format of my legal music that I have legally purchased, I need to format shift and for that I need to blow up the encryption". Though it hasn't been tester in court)
So nowadays, the format shifting (from streaming to on-card) is done by the app itself controller by the content provider and is still protected by some form of DRM. (Netflix and Spotify apps store in their own private storage, and you should not be able to open this content with the VLC app).
On the other hand, these app can offer better quality for offline storage than for streaming (you could set Spotify to use a lower quality setting when streaming music on the go over 3G, and a higher quality setting when downloading and storing playlists over Wifi). That wasn't necessarily the case back with tape (most people only could afford cheap lower quality tape material, and cheaper higher noise recorders - the end result being poorer quality than the original. But who cares, the point is to listen to it while on the go in a noisy car. Silent e-Car weren't a thing back then*)
---
* - There *were* e-vehicles even back in the (late) 80s (/90s): Citroen did have NiCd-powered mini-vans even back then. They were mainly used to fuel economy for frequent "stop-and-go" in city routes : Mostly used by postal services. But outside of postal service, e-cars weren't a thing, indeed.
He has been in regular e-mail contact with Ahmed Y. who is not a terrorist. How long will it be before Ahmed Y. finds himself on a on a no-fly list??
Come on, the correct question would be :
- How long before Ahmed Y. finds himself waterboarded at some black site, just in case he could be having something interesting to say ?
As a side note this would not have been such a problem if the journalist Ali Watkins had actually run their own email server like ms clinton had...
Well, fundamentally : NO it won't have been *that* much different.
In theory :
- The justice could have just as well gotten a warrant to search her private sever.
- She could have argued that as a reporter, she should protect her source
- She would have been sued in turn for obstruction of justice.
In practice :
- Securing a mail server is hard.
- The court could "accidentally find" the needed information in one of the inevitable hack that the server is going to sustain. (Whether the government would have anything to do with that specific hack is left to the reader's imagination)
so lesson learnt dont depend on a third party like gmail/office365 if you want privacy and certainly do not depend on something like signal not to leak your metadata
The best way would be to combine 2 things :
- use end-to-end encryption (for the specific case of e-mail: that would be using GPG or S/MIME, either as a mail client plugin, or as a browser plugin if you're using webmail. For chats that would be using something like OTR or Openwhisper protocols). That would prevent the content being visible during transit at the servers.
- use something that can hide the connection between the users. For e-mail the point is moot, because even if you encrypt the mail body as stated before, due to the way the mailing protocol works the headers are going to be kept accessible for message routing, and any server relaying the messages along the way will know that the 2 persons have communicated(*). Instead you should go for something that can successfully leverage onion routing (like TOR or I2P) : - Chat system working over Tor (i think Tox can work over it ?) - Plain simple drop boxes that are accessible through.onion addresses. (Several newspapers have setup such) etc.
---
(*) you could rig something by using a single private server, that can be accessed over tor as a.onion addresses and have both the journalist and the source use local accounts on that server (thus never routing them outside the server). basically, you're setting up a glorified drop box that uses SSMTP and IMAPS instead of HTTPS/FTPS/SFTP
Your head (if upright) is further from the center of the Earth, so it's traveling faster than your feet. Should it not age more slowly?
That's what is predicted by the theory of special relativity (the first one coming from Einstein, the one that posits that the speed of light remains constant in all referentials, no mater their speed).
The above post mentions prediction comming from the theory of general relativity (the second that Einstein made, the one that looks how space time is distorted by mass)
The final delta in aging that you'll be observing (the whole couple of fractions of nanoseconds of it) will heavily depend on the effect of both speed and gravity.
This has actually been measured for real (but at much larger scale) with GPS satellites (which orbit at a much higher altitude and much farther away from Earth's grativy well's center, compared to the head in your example) : They are basically glorified orbital atomic clocks, and once you factor in relativity, taking into account both speed and gravity, you can explain the observed drift over time with a convincing precision.
and branded products (Toys, T-Shirts, etc) they'll still make a small fortune on this movie.
Actually, by significance, you should put this one first on the list.
Even more so as George Lucas himself came up with the idea of merchandising with the first movie in the series (he on purpose kept the right on merch for himself and that's how he became so much financially successful), and as the franchise is currently owned by Disney who are (Jedi- ?) masters of the merchandising revenue.
Disney will end up making gobs of money, if only due to the giant flood of tie-in products on the shelves, but probably even for the mass of avarege people who are just happy to enjoy any so-so summer (Also docker leverages the capabilties system of the kernel)movie. No matter how much nerd-rage is going on by an extremely vocal but relatively small community of geeks complaining "#NotMyHan" on forums and youtube channels.
- Lots of Linux daemons are designed to drop root privileges and switch to another UID/GID as soon as possible.
- Some are designed to coordinate with other tools (such as systemd or formelly inetd) that handle root-level actions themselves (like grabbig a low number port and hand an already opened socket), so starting a serivce though those doesn't even require root access to the daemon.
So as long as a the daemon are well designed and follow such good practices, they won't ever run as root.
Of course then you have lots of quickly thrown together crap written in the latest high-level scripting language du jour that was quickly packaged together into docker because that language isn't even incorporated into the current stable Linux distros. (You know the same kind of software that relying on git-pulling javascript modules from 10'000 different git repos, and completely break because someone decide to retire their string-alignement function) Typical authors of such "things" probably won't follow best practice.
Luckily, the container infrastucture inside the Linux kernel features uid namespaces (and docker uses those). So the user root is only root inside the docker, but actually maps to uid 45869 or something similar outside the container. This virtualised root user has only admin rights within the container. Also docker leverages the capabilties system of the kernel, so those admin rights can only manage a very small subset of things. And only very few things are actually offered within a container (eg.: it doesn't have access to the real network, only to a virtual bridge that's not connected to the net. The docker deamon on the host system is in charge in setting up some routing if the container is to have net access).
So any attack that try to over right files is pretty much limited even if the server process inside insists on not following best preactices and on running as root. The daemon can basically wreck itself but that's about it.
modifying the EULA to grant themselves the ability to copy/paste into proprietary software, or even patent rights or coownership,
The biggest part of GitHub, i.e.: what is publicly visible (except for a few paid projects) is explicitely opensource.
- For the BSD and other permissive-style licensed code : that's already the case. You can do pretty much everything you want with this code (and Microsoft has already done in the past. If I remember correctly, 1they've used bits of BSD-licensed Unix BSD code in their networking tools and stacks.)
- For the GPL and other copyleft-style licensed code : nope, that's not legally possible. GPL explicitely forbids hiding code/making it user-inaccessible (the GPLv2 and GPLv3 were on purpose designed to address ways that company have imagined to circumvent this forbidding) GPLv2 and up mandate that the patents should be licensed for free to be used together with the GPL code. The only way would be re-license the software under a new license that allows it. And that impossible in practice for some pieces of software (e.g.: Linux kernel. Each chunk of code is still the copyright of whomever happens to have written it. Re-licensing the Linux kernel would require tracking every single last damn author and ask each one individually if they agree to relicense their small chunk of the code under something else than the GPLv2 (strictly version 2) that it was initially released under. That's what it takes. That one part of the various reasons why Linus did never ever consider switching the kernel to GPLv2+ or GPLv3(+) ). If Microsoft were to merely add an attribution clause (similar to Ubuntu's CLA) it would only grant them copyright owner ship of any *up-coming* new contribution which was assigned to them. It would have no way to work retro-actively on past code (so Linux kernel remain GPLv2), nor code that wasn't assigned to them (anything contributed to Freedesktop's Gitlab and merely mirrored on github won't be affected either. The original contributors did not agree to the Microsoft attribution).
tracking what open source projects to target/disrupt, etc.
That's the only strategy that microsoft could try (and has been trying for several decades) : try to immediately propose something better to attract attention away from the opensource project. There are lots of recent exemples that Microsoft is critically failing on the "better" part.
What we have here is a problem of centralization. Switching to other centralized solutions isn't what we need. Decentralized solutions need to be invented.
You might have missed it, but the parent poster did mention that GitLab is opensource. That means you can also deploy locally to your own server. You don't need to host everything at http://gitlab.com/ you could be hosting on you own server as https://gitlab.ethz.ch/ or https://gitlab.sib.swiss/ did.
It's a possible solution for semi-decentralized hosting.
And the GIT DCVS is fully *decentralized* by definition, as pointed by others.
Apparently, Microsoft thought the cost of licenses for all the code on GitHub was included in the price.
Well, given that all the (publicly visible*) code on GitHub is licensed under some opensource license (most likely GPL or BSD). The monetary cost of code under these licenses is traditionally zero (0) dollars**.
The 7.5 billion dollars they paid for GitHub also includes a sum of zero (0) dollars.
So they have paid the whole zero dollars it takes to license all the opensource code currently on GitHub.
It only remain to be seen if they'll also pay the non-monetary** cost that is required by the licensing.
---
* - Yes, I know, there are commercially paid repos that can be closed course. My joke only works for the publicly visible part of GitHub.
** - Though yes, *copyleft* license like *GPL* comes at a different, *non monetary, costs*. It costs zero dollar to get the source and this covers anything you might want to do/edit/experiment, but it comes at the cost that you *MUST* keep the same freedom to do/edit/experiment as you want to anyone else to whom you further give copy. Hence the "cancer" moniker that Microsoft was throwing around not so long ago.
Luckily as a tiny consolation, even if GitHub gets extinguished, Git it self as a repo technologgy is distributed, so any content on GitHub is basically already replicated across thounsands of laptops.
Yup, we will miss on some of the advanced (and much appreciated) features that GitHub did provide : issue tracking, organisation tools (Projects), and the whole social network aspect.
But at least the code currently hosted there will live on, no matter what happens.
Never rely to much on a centralized solution (even more so if it's one you don't own). the Git distributed concurrent version system is guaranteed resilient to this part.
2. Buying competing companies Great, rewards innovators for their work, motivates more to do the same and also get paid.
The problem is that very often this is done by the buyer corporation for 2 goals :
- Stop the competitor
- Acquire the talents and mind behind the startup to use them. It usually doesn't include the goal that interests most end-users :
- Keep the startup's project alive thanks to bigger infrastructure.
- Usually that project get shut down, and the brains reassigned to the corporation other targets/projects.
Facebook's keeping alive competing social networks WhatsApp and Instagram after aquiring them is mroe the exception than the norm. (Mostly due to very strong generation cycles in that market: Facebook the social network will eventually follow MySpace and die as well, and Mark Zuckerberg has been very carefully planning the follow up by sucessfully buying any upcoming future successor).
So although the devs get money that rewards them for the hardwork, users might lose an interesting alternative, and get a less diverse eco-system.
People with ear buds or beats headphones seem typical these days. This ain't hurting them.
Those people are indeed most likely to listen to music from their smartphone. Appart from the oddballs (Apple own patents on AAC and thus pretty much does whatever they want with it), nearly all the smartphone/app/internet/webapp ecosystem has been taken over by OPUS an openstandars and open source high qality codec (beats nearly everything else, the only exception being the extreme low bandwidth which doesn't fit the internet use-cases). Close to all modern apps (be it for voice calls or for music) have shifthed to this (with the high visible exception of Spotify, they started with Vorbis, OPUS' predecessor open source web standart). Because most of the internet and app devs got fed up with the licensing shenanigans formerly around MP3 and then around AAC.
So most of these people won't give a damn about Dolby, and multi channel speaker upmixing (they only have 2 channels to begin with anyway). That technology got excised out of the mobile scene.
The problem is the home theater, home cinema, TV, etc. These are the people having multi-speaker setup, and the TV world seems much more entrenched into older standard (e.g.: MPEG's video and audio codecs, Dolby's and DTS' codecs for sound, etc.) These are the people affected by the licensing shenanigans of Dolby.
Of course Dolby *has* an excuse : they don't want their logo stuck on a piece of shitty hardware that does catastrophic multi-channel sound generation, and then only use Dolby to stream the badly distorted noise to the speaker system : that will ruin Dolby's reputation due to factors that have nothing to do with their technology.
The problem is that in practice, Dolby will most likely abuse the duopoly they have (together with DTS) in the movie audio market to mostly try to make sure to get some money out of every bit of sound played together with any movie.
But Dolby should be paying attention to what happened with OPUS on the internet/smartphone market. If they start pissing way to many people with their licensing practice, they might be next.
Netflix, Youtube, Amazon, etc. : nowadays the various streaming platforms represent together a bigger market share than the classical TV channels and satellite cable networks together. They come from a more internet oriented background. They got fed up with MPEG's licensing bullshit, and they banded together with all the other members behind AOMedia, and sent a giant collective "fuck you" to MPEG in the form of AV-1 codec.
Nowadays, there's no technical reason why Dolby should be important in the TV market.
There used to be a technical restriction in the past making it mandatory to use DTS or Dolby to transmit the audio to the speaker system : there's only so much data that you can cram within the fixed ~1.0-1.5Mbps bandwidth of SPDIF and TOSLink. You need to compress it to transmit it, and Dolby and DTS managed to get into the home theater market due to their presence in the commercial movie theaters. This made possible to have Video Laser Discs (on their digital track), then DVDs and now current media and streams that contain a standard format that can be streamed straight to the audio receiver.
But nowadays with standards like HDMI, that can pipe multiple uncompressed streams to the audio receiver, the Dolby or DTS compressions make a lot less sense. A movie streaming app running on the smartTV/HDMI stick/set top box could fetch audio in any format it want (including the above mentioned OPUS), decompress it, optionally up-mixes it if the user has more speakers in their home cinema than what is streamed, and send it as raw uncompressed audio the speaker system, without Dolby ever being involved at any sstep. Dolby should watch out to not piss off the market because some player (mostly the modern movie streaming platform) could pretty well do exactly that.
yea, the texas law is similar to NYS as well. it even goes one step further. as long as your car isnt moving, you can look at your phone. this includes not only stopped at a stop light, but sitting in traffic as well.
Well, from a "danger* point of view, it makes sense :
- if your car is moving, if you're distracted, you're at heavy risk of causing some accident.
- if your car is immobile (no matter if it's because you've parked and shut down the engine, or simply because the traffice is stoped), if you're distracted, at worse you're only at risk at make the people behind you angry because you didn't resume driving as fast a they would have wished, but otherwise you don't cause any danger.
That is going to be highly hampered by the fact that it's a Windows machine (thus relying on a SecureBoot UEFI bootloader). Unlike on the x86_64 world, where UEFI is *required* to allow end users to boot a 3rd party payload (either by disabling the SecoreBoot, or by adding their own signing key), there's no similar mandatory bootloader unlocking in ARM land.
There's a risk that these devices come with a UEFI bootloader that will only exclusively boot kernels that have been signed by a secret key that only Microsoft has access to. (And no way to persuade Microsoft so sign some boot shim like on some GNU/Linux x86_64 distros - with the excuse that "it's an appliance, not a computer").
Of course Dell could preclude the flop by offering it with Linux (I'd really like such a device) or Android, or at least supporting Linux development.
That would really save the day if Dell gets involved to make sure that 3rd party firmware are going to be bootable. Then you're bound to see some LineageOS port of Androdi, right after the device gets released. And various full blown GNU/Linux following shortly after that, by leveraging libhybris and co (AFAIK Qualcomm only releases Android/Linux drivers for their SoCs, no GNU/Linux ones).
But "I wish I could run the same software on my tiny smartphone as I run on my giant over powered multi-screen workstation" isn't something you hear that often.
Yes, Windows has a giant collection of legacy applications. But not much of them could actually be useful in a "smartphone with a soft-keyboard clamshell" form factor.
In other word, very few users in of portable device are actually interested in running MS Windows software on their devices. (I think the above mentioned support for Office might be the only case getting any significant amount of vague user interest)
Android apps are what seems to be the most enviable thing to run in that form factor. Seems that if you can't run apps from any of the too main ecosystem of the current duopoly (Android or iOS apps), your device will flop. Main reason why Windows 10 Mobile never of on anything small than "transformable tablet" (i.e.: a glorified laptop with a weird keyboard) and even there, they're having they lunch eaten by ChromeOS.
Yup, Dell has probably noticed the popularity of crowd funding campaing like Gemini's revival of the Psion form factor. But Dell hasn't been paying attention to the fine details (Psion was popular back in its era because of an OS and software suite geared to the form factor. Gemini is currently targetting also OSes that are either geared to the form factor (Android currently supported, Sailfish OS collaboration with Jolla upcoming) or are customizable enough for us nerds to adapt it to the formfactor (GNU/Linux distributions are supported).
I predict this device won't be as popular as Dell expects them, even with gimmicks like the clamshell keyboard being software on a a secondary screen. (And thus doubling as a digitizer tablet)
The fact that it does monetization is often the cherry on top. Facebook? They don't pay you jack squat But make a mindless YouTube video about crap and you can rake in real money. Do it particularly well and you might not even need a job because YouTube can pay you better than any job you'd ever get
Until 1 year later (exactly when you've got credit to reimburse and need stable income) when Google decides to update the Youtube algorithm and suddenly you're not getting as many view / getting as much monetization. (Those vloggers have vaguely heard once some weird saying about "eggs" and "baskets", but didn't really pay attention to what was meant).
Or some big drama controversy or whatever-gate emerges yet again, causing anything between advertiser pulling out, trolls trying to report videos just to demonetize them, all the way to Youtube banning a user due to the wrong controversial word having been uttered in some video.
Yeah, youtube could help some teen grab some quick cash if they got lucky, but replacing a job with "Youtube" as a regular income requires a tiny bit more strategy and planning.
Given that the Linux devs are also getting good support for the Video Core V and 6, we might indeed get within a couple of years some Raspberry Pi running newer SoCs from broadcom.
Until then, you can count on the less known/widespread manufacturer to make SBC with A76 cores from other chip makers.
How can the A76 be compared to Skylake when it doesn't have Skylake's X86/X64's command set and cannot run Skylake's X86/X64 code natively?
The instruction set is absolutely completely irrelevant.
It's targetting smartphone/tablet/embed not desktops.
i.e.: a market that almost exclusively runs Android (save for Apple, a couple of things trying to add full blown GNU/Linux support (SBCs, after market OSes like Sailfish), and the big joke coming from Microsoft). not a market that is stuck to Windows 10.
i.e.: a market where (parts of) the OS is available for free and can be compiled for your CPU (AOSP, Armbian/Sailfish/Etc.), and most of the applications are delivered as bytecode that get JIT/AOT during installation and will run on whatever architecture your CPU runs (except for a few apps packing native libraries, but those are usually available for both x86 and ARM arches) not a market that is stuck with proprietary closed source blobs.
i.e.: each CPU will be running natively. the support for x86/x86_64 is completely irrelevant. Nobody with any level of sanity wants to run Microsoft Windows binaries on a smartphone/tablet/SBC.
The problem of comparing lays elsewhere :
- the Skylake is a chip that actually exists in the real world. You could make the Android x86 benchmarks on it using some dev board.
- ARM Cortex-A76 is a core. A design. That a company could license and then ask TMSC to actually build. There are no current physical chips that you could benchmark Android on them. You need first for, e.g.: Qualcom to announce they'lll use this core in the upcomming Snapdragon 900 or whatever number they'll decide to slap on it. Once they start producing actuall chips, you'll finally be able to get real world numbers.
Until then all you have is engineers' speculations "can be clocked at 3GHz+ when produced on a 7nm process, can perform within 10 percent of an Intel Skylake core within the same thermal constrain". Not necessarily will.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be pointing to some things you don't like and concluding "therefore government should step in".
I know you tend to see us Europeans as communi-lefties that want to throw an evil-tyrannical-overreaching government to legislate the shit out of everything, but at no point in my post did I invoke it.
I was simply contrasting the parent poster's positive side of acquisition (usually the dev of the startup can reap the [mostly financial] benefits of their hardwork)
With the negative side : users are usually on the losing side, because the startup's own service/product is actually going to get shut down fast, because most often the corporation are looking to shut down competitors and move brain power to their own project.
(Facebook keeping WhastApp and Instragram alive on purpose is more the exception than the norm.
Google replacing their own failing Google Video with the much more successful Youtube is bordering on it - though its almost not "buying competition" but closer to the "buy someone from a new sector to gain a new market" - see Microsoft buying LinkedIn, Skype, Hotmail, etc.)
This requires a very dangerous assumption: that government will do what you want.
{ The US even has laws against a platform like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube censoring conservatives. }
It's just that laws are implemented to serve the ruling class.
So where do you get the idea that any law will be used to serve the people?
You know there's this thing called "direct democracy".
It works. You should try it sometimes.
The whole idea is that you vote what you want to force your government to do (= direct democracy),
instead of voting for some random idiot making empty promises on the TV, and hoping that he'll somehow keep his promises once in power (= representative democracy).
People choose to keep using Facebook to the extent they feel it provides them with value.
We may not like it, but value is entirely subjective.
Actually, part of my rant went the opposite way :
- Facebook *is starting to provide less and less* value to new generations of customer who know it and eventually decide to go somewhere else (nothing new, same thing happened with any other predecessors in the "social media" category - e.g.: MySpace mostly died out).
- Mark Zuckerberg knows this phenomenon perfectly well.
- That's why he's been buying upcoming startup: He's not actually shutting down competitors and "aqui-hiring" new talent (like most giants), he does indeed buy startups with the purpose of keeping them because he tries to find out the most likely new comer that will eventually succeed to Facebook.
- Giving the current popularity trends of Instagram and WhatsApp (the current day popular trending social networks), he's been indeed successful (he was correct in predicting which "Facebook successors" to buy).
Technically, the idea is that for MMO you aren't paying for the game itself.
You're paying for the "online experience" of playing together "with thousands of other people".
(Kind of the difference between:
- paying for you drinks at a store and drinking them at home while enjoying the evening on your balcony,
- and paying an obscene mark-up for going out in club where the main selling point is supposed to be the ambiance and the opportunity to hook up with other human beings).
The fee you pay is supposed to cover for the technical cost (keeping servers up), and all the personnel (developers and artists making new missions and content, moderators or whatever the actors doing the LARP-equivalent of NPC are called, etc.)
So in theory the monthly fee would be making sense. The problem is that most corporation decided to turn it as much as possible into cash-cows.
Yes, there exist such things like RPGs whose code is even opensource and you would only pay for the experience on the server.
Yes, there are things like Minecraft, where microsoft would like you to pay them some subscription to play on their realms. But you could as well play on a private sever that you setup with a bunch of friends.
But then there's the other darker side of corporations that go out of they way to make sure that you won't be playing on anything but a server where you have to keep playing them.
See companies suing attempts to re-implement 3rd party servers.
See Blizzard suing players that want to set-up servers that imitate older version of the game.
That is the problem.
You should be able to run an online game on any server that you like. As long as that server didn't straight up lift non-public executable blobs from the official server (but instead runs a 3rd party re-implementation) (I really don't agree with Blizzard's complains that the small text descriptions of objects or quest stored in a SQL databse that is mandatory to make the game working could be considered copyright violations).
Just the same way that on older generations of games, mods became a thing and a couple of big players (including id software) managed to convince the lawyers that users shouldn't be sued for modding.
We need the companies to accept that playing against a different server that they don't own and don't get money from is basically just a different type of mod.
If they want us to believe that monthly fee are to cover the "playing on our servers" experience, we should be able to answer "no thanks I'm going to play on my own".
It just funny when you think about the higher level implication and the evolution of the prediction models.
Starting from old days like Quake 3 (where basically the syste1m predicts objects keeping the same linear motions) and then following the current progressive trend of machine learning, we'll eventually end up at a point where complex deep-neural-nets are used to predict the inputs.
You'll basically be training an IA to play you're self.
Each play will be in practice playing against a local AI avatar replicating in advance the intention of the remote player.
Basically, you as a player won't be a player anymore, but a coach for AI remote players, if you think about it.
You won't be realizing it, but in a very abstract way all FPS will become war-stategy game where you aren't controlling the main character, but instructing a remote AI how to move it (by controlling directly the main character on your screen).
It's fun to think about it at this level.
Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them.
One potential way to partially solve the problem is what is currently being done by several IPTV, video streaming (Netflix does it) or messageing/voice-/video-chactting (WhatsApp is doing it) and even was done by some ISPs back in the Quake-over-modem era in order to reduce (outbound) bandwidth costs and (your local) latency:
put servers in the ISPs local point of presence server room.
Your lag will be mostly influenced by the latency over your home internet connection (optical fiber, cable or dsl), and the connection within the server room.
You won't be having horrendous ping time because you need to contact some streaming server at the opposite side of the continent.
As long as you have a good connection (fiber) and a decent local network, that might help making non-twitchy games bearable.
Let me guess too :
"Red Team" - also known as, the team at Microsoft with the highest stress-related burnout and suicide rates ?
How to legally skip "unskippable" trailers:
Put the DVD in a linux PC.
That depends on your local jurisdiction.
Here around in most European countries it should be legal (With some exceptions)
In the US : actually, no.
On two grounds :
1 - DRM and DMCA.
Any media since the DVD is encrypted (okay, its often encrypted with some laughable scheme that barely qualifies as such in the eyes of most cryptographers. Cue in usual discussion that "Bob" and "Eve" are the same person). Let's call it "scrambled" which is closer to reality.
DCMA restricts you severly in how you can un-scramble it. Even something as stupid as the CSS on DVDs that can be trivially broken with libdvdcss. This piece of code is considered illegal in the US (and is hosted by the VLC project *in France* were it is considered legal under fair use)
BlueRays and HDDVDs have similar problem as you need to break their AACS.
2 - Patents
More recent media (e.g.: BlueRays) use codecs for video (H264, H265) and audio (AAC) which are covered by patents.
Libraries that can decompress them are considered illegal in jurisdictions that recognize software patents (e.g. US) as they don't have a license to the patents.
You would need to obtain a patent to the corresponding codec before being able to run libavcodec.
To build upon the answers of that AC and that AC,
let's translate to a slightly more modern time :
In the early 80s, functionally :
- vinyl played the same role as audio CDs played a decade or so ago (the media that you buy your music on),
- tape cassettes played the role that USB stick or CD-R/RW played at the same time on which you could write heavily compressed MP3s with your whole collection of favorite palylist, that you stick in your MP3-compatible car radio.
Or iPod/other MP3 player, plugged in the car's AUX-in port if you're unlucky to have a car radio that doesn't support MP3 and doesn't have a standard DIN format so you could swap it easily with a better one.
(Really gettho solution: small FM-emitter attached to the iPod/MP3 player, broadcasting your own private local radio within the confine of the car to which you could tune your car radio. Or which other people stuck in the same traffic JAM could eavesdrop, because lots of these emitter came from China and weren't that precise with frequency broadcasting legislation).
In other words, both with cassettes and later with CR-R/USB sticks/MP3 player, there was a ton copying going on, but it wasn't that much what the **AA call "stealing" but much more for format shifting. Which back then was still considered completely legal.
Still, some jurisdiction managed to impose taxes on blank media, on ground that the media was mostly used for "stealing" so that the content owner get compensated for every blank media sold (e.g.: France had a tax on blank CD-R/RW. There are case of french people sued for "piracy" that have successfully defended, arguing that they only burned downloaded content on media that is taxed (CD-R/RW) and that the burned media was only used privately - no commercial exploitation )
or more "nowadays" example:
- vinyl played the same role as your Spotify/Netflix/Youtube Pro subscription (The thing you pay to obtain music).
- tape played the same role as your 400gb A1 microSDXC card into your smartphone's slot (The thing on which you copy it, to be able to listen to it while on the go, by streaming it to your car's bluetooth receiver).
The subtle difference is that nowadays, due to DMCA law and similar laws in other countries format shifting might be considered outlawed in some jurisdiction.
(US, I think ?)
(Here in CH, the local DMCA-like clone has exceptions explicitely put in place for Fair-Use exception of the copyright law, which in turn lists "technical reasons" as a reason which could be argued to cover gray areas such as "My device doesn't support the format of my legal music that I have legally purchased, I need to format shift and for that I need to blow up the encryption". Though it hasn't been tester in court)
So nowadays, the format shifting (from streaming to on-card) is done by the app itself controller by the content provider and is still protected by some form of DRM. (Netflix and Spotify apps store in their own private storage, and you should not be able to open this content with the VLC app).
On the other hand, these app can offer better quality for offline storage than for streaming (you could set Spotify to use a lower quality setting when streaming music on the go over 3G, and a higher quality setting when downloading and storing playlists over Wifi).
That wasn't necessarily the case back with tape (most people only could afford cheap lower quality tape material, and cheaper higher noise recorders - the end result being poorer quality than the original. But who cares, the point is to listen to it while on the go in a noisy car. Silent e-Car weren't a thing back then*)
---
* - There *were* e-vehicles even back in the (late) 80s (/90s): Citroen did have NiCd-powered mini-vans even back then. They were mainly used to fuel economy for frequent "stop-and-go" in city routes : Mostly used by postal services. But outside of postal service, e-cars weren't a thing, indeed.
He has been in regular e-mail contact with Ahmed Y. who is not a terrorist. How long will it be before Ahmed Y. finds himself on a on a no-fly list??
Come on, the correct question would be :
- How long before Ahmed Y. finds himself waterboarded at some black site, just in case he could be having something interesting to say ?
As a side note this would not have been such a problem if the journalist Ali Watkins had actually run their own email server like ms clinton had...
Well, fundamentally : NO it won't have been *that* much different.
In theory :
- The justice could have just as well gotten a warrant to search her private sever.
- She could have argued that as a reporter, she should protect her source
- She would have been sued in turn for obstruction of justice.
In practice :
- Securing a mail server is hard.
- The court could "accidentally find" the needed information in one of the inevitable hack that the server is going to sustain.
(Whether the government would have anything to do with that specific hack is left to the reader's imagination)
so lesson learnt dont depend on a third party like gmail/office365 if you want privacy and certainly do not depend on something like signal not to leak your metadata
The best way would be to combine 2 things :
- use end-to-end encryption (for the specific case of e-mail: that would be using GPG or S/MIME, either as a mail client plugin, or as a browser plugin if you're using webmail. For chats that would be using something like OTR or Openwhisper protocols). That would prevent the content being visible during transit at the servers.
- use something that can hide the connection between the users. .onion addresses. (Several newspapers have setup such)
For e-mail the point is moot, because even if you encrypt the mail body as stated before, due to the way the mailing protocol works the headers are going to be kept accessible for message routing, and any server relaying the messages along the way will know that the 2 persons have communicated(*).
Instead you should go for something that can successfully leverage onion routing (like TOR or I2P) :
- Chat system working over Tor (i think Tox can work over it ?)
- Plain simple drop boxes that are accessible through
etc.
---
(*) .onion addresses and have both the journalist and the source use local accounts on that server (thus never routing them outside the server).
you could rig something by using a single private server, that can be accessed over tor as a
basically, you're setting up a glorified drop box that uses SSMTP and IMAPS instead of HTTPS/FTPS/SFTP
Your head (if upright) is further from the center of the Earth, so it's traveling faster than your feet. Should it not age more slowly?
That's what is predicted by the theory of special relativity (the first one coming from Einstein, the one that posits that the speed of light remains constant in all referentials, no mater their speed).
The above post mentions prediction comming from the theory of general relativity (the second that Einstein made, the one that looks how space time is distorted by mass)
The final delta in aging that you'll be observing (the whole couple of fractions of nanoseconds of it) will heavily depend on the effect of both speed and gravity.
This has actually been measured for real (but at much larger scale) with GPS satellites (which orbit at a much higher altitude and much farther away from Earth's grativy well's center, compared to the head in your example) : They are basically glorified orbital atomic clocks, and once you factor in relativity, taking into account both speed and gravity, you can explain the observed drift over time with a convincing precision.
and branded products (Toys, T-Shirts, etc) they'll still make a small fortune on this movie.
Actually, by significance, you should put this one first on the list.
Even more so as George Lucas himself came up with the idea of merchandising with the first movie in the series (he on purpose kept the right on merch for himself and that's how he became so much financially successful),
and as the franchise is currently owned by Disney who are (Jedi- ?) masters of the merchandising revenue.
Disney will end up making gobs of money, if only due to the giant flood of tie-in products on the shelves, but probably even for the mass of avarege people who are just happy to enjoy any so-so summer (Also docker leverages the capabilties system of the kernel)movie.
No matter how much nerd-rage is going on by an extremely vocal but relatively small community of geeks complaining "#NotMyHan" on forums and youtube channels.
- Lots of Linux daemons are designed to drop root privileges and switch to another UID/GID as soon as possible.
- Some are designed to coordinate with other tools (such as systemd or formelly inetd) that handle root-level actions themselves (like grabbig a low number port and hand an already opened socket), so starting a serivce though those doesn't even require root access to the daemon.
So as long as a the daemon are well designed and follow such good practices, they won't ever run as root.
Of course then you have lots of quickly thrown together crap written in the latest high-level scripting language du jour that was quickly packaged together into docker because that language isn't even incorporated into the current stable Linux distros.
(You know the same kind of software that relying on git-pulling javascript modules from 10'000 different git repos, and completely break because someone decide to retire their string-alignement function)
Typical authors of such "things" probably won't follow best practice.
Luckily, the container infrastucture inside the Linux kernel features uid namespaces (and docker uses those).
So the user root is only root inside the docker, but actually maps to uid 45869 or something similar outside the container.
This virtualised root user has only admin rights within the container.
Also docker leverages the capabilties system of the kernel, so those admin rights can only manage a very small subset of things.
And only very few things are actually offered within a container (eg.: it doesn't have access to the real network, only to a virtual bridge that's not connected to the net. The docker deamon on the host system is in charge in setting up some routing if the container is to have net access).
So any attack that try to over right files is pretty much limited even if the server process inside insists on not following best preactices and on running as root.
The daemon can basically wreck itself but that's about it.
modifying the EULA to grant themselves the ability to copy/paste into proprietary software, or even patent rights or coownership,
The biggest part of GitHub, i.e.: what is publicly visible (except for a few paid projects) is explicitely opensource.
- For the BSD and other permissive-style licensed code : that's already the case. You can do pretty much everything you want with this code (and Microsoft has already done in the past. If I remember correctly, 1they've used bits of BSD-licensed Unix BSD code in their networking tools and stacks.)
- For the GPL and other copyleft-style licensed code : nope, that's not legally possible. GPL explicitely forbids hiding code/making it user-inaccessible (the GPLv2 and GPLv3 were on purpose designed to address ways that company have imagined to circumvent this forbidding)
GPLv2 and up mandate that the patents should be licensed for free to be used together with the GPL code.
The only way would be re-license the software under a new license that allows it.
And that impossible in practice for some pieces of software (e.g.: Linux kernel. Each chunk of code is still the copyright of whomever happens to have written it. Re-licensing the Linux kernel would require tracking every single last damn author and ask each one individually if they agree to relicense their small chunk of the code under something else than the GPLv2 (strictly version 2) that it was initially released under. That's what it takes. That one part of the various reasons why Linus did never ever consider switching the kernel to GPLv2+ or GPLv3(+) ).
If Microsoft were to merely add an attribution clause (similar to Ubuntu's CLA) it would only grant them copyright owner ship of any *up-coming* new contribution which was assigned to them. It would have no way to work retro-actively on past code (so Linux kernel remain GPLv2), nor code that wasn't assigned to them (anything contributed to Freedesktop's Gitlab and merely mirrored on github won't be affected either. The original contributors did not agree to the Microsoft attribution).
tracking what open source projects to target/disrupt, etc.
That's the only strategy that microsoft could try (and has been trying for several decades) : try to immediately propose something better to attract attention away from the opensource project. There are lots of recent exemples that Microsoft is critically failing on the "better" part.
What we have here is a problem of centralization. Switching to other centralized solutions isn't what we need. Decentralized solutions need to be invented.
You might have missed it, but the parent poster did mention that GitLab is opensource.
That means you can also deploy locally to your own server.
You don't need to host everything at http://gitlab.com/ you could be hosting on you own server as https://gitlab.ethz.ch/ or https://gitlab.sib.swiss/ did.
It's a possible solution for semi-decentralized hosting.
And the GIT DCVS is fully *decentralized* by definition, as pointed by others.
Apparently, Microsoft thought the cost of licenses for all the code on GitHub was included in the price.
Well, given that all the (publicly visible*) code on GitHub is licensed under some opensource license (most likely GPL or BSD).
The monetary cost of code under these licenses is traditionally zero (0) dollars**.
The 7.5 billion dollars they paid for GitHub also includes a sum of zero (0) dollars.
So they have paid the whole zero dollars it takes to license all the opensource code currently on GitHub.
It only remain to be seen if they'll also pay the non-monetary** cost that is required by the licensing.
---
* - Yes, I know, there are commercially paid repos that can be closed course. My joke only works for the publicly visible part of GitHub.
** - Though yes, *copyleft* license like *GPL* comes at a different, *non monetary, costs*.
It costs zero dollar to get the source and this covers anything you might want to do/edit/experiment, but it comes at the cost that you *MUST* keep the same freedom to do/edit/experiment as you want to anyone else to whom you further give copy.
Hence the "cancer" moniker that Microsoft was throwing around not so long ago.
Luckily as a tiny consolation, even if GitHub gets extinguished, Git it self as a repo technologgy is distributed, so any content on GitHub is basically already replicated across thounsands of laptops.
Yup, we will miss on some of the advanced (and much appreciated) features that GitHub did provide : issue tracking, organisation tools (Projects), and the whole social network aspect.
But at least the code currently hosted there will live on, no matter what happens.
Never rely to much on a centralized solution (even more so if it's one you don't own). the Git distributed concurrent version system is guaranteed resilient to this part.
2. Buying competing companies
Great, rewards innovators for their work, motivates more to do the same and also get paid.
The problem is that very often this is done by the buyer corporation for 2 goals :
- Stop the competitor
- Acquire the talents and mind behind the startup to use them.
It usually doesn't include the goal that interests most end-users :
- Keep the startup's project alive thanks to bigger infrastructure.
- Usually that project get shut down, and the brains reassigned to the corporation other targets/projects.
Facebook's keeping alive competing social networks WhatsApp and Instagram after aquiring them is mroe the exception than the norm.
(Mostly due to very strong generation cycles in that market: Facebook the social network will eventually follow MySpace and die as well, and Mark Zuckerberg has been very carefully planning the follow up by sucessfully buying any upcoming future successor).
So although the devs get money that rewards them for the hardwork, users might lose an interesting alternative, and get a less diverse eco-system.
0 != strcmp("Office Open XML", "Open Office XML")
Cool !
Tell my, where can I get a corporate manager that runs C natively ? I want to get one too...
People with ear buds or beats headphones seem typical these days. This ain't hurting them.
Those people are indeed most likely to listen to music from their smartphone.
Appart from the oddballs (Apple own patents on AAC and thus pretty much does whatever they want with it),
nearly all the smartphone/app/internet/webapp ecosystem has been taken over by OPUS an openstandars and open source high qality codec (beats nearly everything else, the only exception being the extreme low bandwidth which doesn't fit the internet use-cases).
Close to all modern apps (be it for voice calls or for music) have shifthed to this (with the high visible exception of Spotify, they started with Vorbis, OPUS' predecessor open source web standart).
Because most of the internet and app devs got fed up with the licensing shenanigans formerly around MP3 and then around AAC.
So most of these people won't give a damn about Dolby, and multi channel speaker upmixing (they only have 2 channels to begin with anyway). That technology got excised out of the mobile scene.
The problem is the home theater, home cinema, TV, etc.
These are the people having multi-speaker setup, and the TV world seems much more entrenched into older standard (e.g.: MPEG's video and audio codecs, Dolby's and DTS' codecs for sound, etc.)
These are the people affected by the licensing shenanigans of Dolby.
Of course Dolby *has* an excuse : they don't want their logo stuck on a piece of shitty hardware that does catastrophic multi-channel sound generation, and then only use Dolby to stream the badly distorted noise to the speaker system : that will ruin Dolby's reputation due to factors that have nothing to do with their technology.
The problem is that in practice, Dolby will most likely abuse the duopoly they have (together with DTS) in the movie audio market to mostly try to make sure to get some money out of every bit of sound played together with any movie.
But Dolby should be paying attention to what happened with OPUS on the internet/smartphone market.
If they start pissing way to many people with their licensing practice, they might be next.
Netflix, Youtube, Amazon, etc. : nowadays the various streaming platforms represent together a bigger market share than the classical TV channels and satellite cable networks together.
They come from a more internet oriented background. They got fed up with MPEG's licensing bullshit, and they banded together with all the other members behind AOMedia, and sent a giant collective "fuck you" to MPEG in the form of AV-1 codec.
Nowadays, there's no technical reason why Dolby should be important in the TV market.
There used to be a technical restriction in the past making it mandatory to use DTS or Dolby to transmit the audio to the speaker system : there's only so much data that you can cram within the fixed ~1.0-1.5Mbps bandwidth of SPDIF and TOSLink. You need to compress it to transmit it, and Dolby and DTS managed to get into the home theater market due to their presence in the commercial movie theaters. This made possible to have Video Laser Discs (on their digital track), then DVDs and now current media and streams that contain a standard format that can be streamed straight to the audio receiver.
But nowadays with standards like HDMI, that can pipe multiple uncompressed streams to the audio receiver, the Dolby or DTS compressions make a lot less sense.
A movie streaming app running on the smartTV/HDMI stick/set top box could fetch audio in any format it want (including the above mentioned OPUS), decompress it, optionally up-mixes it if the user has more speakers in their home cinema than what is streamed, and send it as raw uncompressed audio the speaker system, without Dolby ever being involved at any sstep.
Dolby should watch out to not piss off the market because some player (mostly the modern movie streaming platform) could pretty well do exactly that.
yea, the texas law is similar to NYS as well. it even goes one step further. as long as your car isnt moving, you can look at your phone. this includes not only stopped at a stop light, but sitting in traffic as well.
Well, from a "danger* point of view, it makes sense :
- if your car is moving, if you're distracted, you're at heavy risk of causing some accident.
- if your car is immobile (no matter if it's because you've parked and shut down the engine, or simply because the traffice is stoped), if you're distracted, at worse you're only at risk at make the people behind you angry because you didn't resume driving as fast a they would have wished, but otherwise you don't cause any danger.
and somebody will port Linux to it. Win!
That is going to be highly hampered by the fact that it's a Windows machine (thus relying on a SecureBoot UEFI bootloader).
Unlike on the x86_64 world, where UEFI is *required* to allow end users to boot a 3rd party payload (either by disabling the SecoreBoot, or by adding their own signing key), there's no similar mandatory bootloader unlocking in ARM land.
There's a risk that these devices come with a UEFI bootloader that will only exclusively boot kernels that have been signed by a secret key that only Microsoft has access to.
(And no way to persuade Microsoft so sign some boot shim like on some GNU/Linux x86_64 distros - with the excuse that "it's an appliance, not a computer").
Of course Dell could preclude the flop by offering it with Linux (I'd really like such a device) or Android, or at least supporting Linux development.
That would really save the day if Dell gets involved to make sure that 3rd party firmware are going to be bootable.
Then you're bound to see some LineageOS port of Androdi, right after the device gets released.
And various full blown GNU/Linux following shortly after that, by leveraging libhybris and co (AFAIK Qualcomm only releases Android/Linux drivers for their SoCs, no GNU/Linux ones).
But "I wish I could run the same software on my tiny smartphone as I run on my giant over powered multi-screen workstation" isn't something you hear that often.
Yes, Windows has a giant collection of legacy applications.
But not much of them could actually be useful in a "smartphone with a soft-keyboard clamshell" form factor.
In other word, very few users in of portable device are actually interested in running MS Windows software on their devices.
(I think the above mentioned support for Office might be the only case getting any significant amount of vague user interest)
Android apps are what seems to be the most enviable thing to run in that form factor.
Seems that if you can't run apps from any of the too main ecosystem of the current duopoly (Android or iOS apps), your device will flop.
Main reason why Windows 10 Mobile never of on anything small than "transformable tablet" (i.e.: a glorified laptop with a weird keyboard) and even there, they're having they lunch eaten by ChromeOS.
Yup, Dell has probably noticed the popularity of crowd funding campaing like Gemini's revival of the Psion form factor.
But Dell hasn't been paying attention to the fine details (Psion was popular back in its era because of an OS and software suite geared to the form factor. Gemini is currently targetting also OSes that are either geared to the form factor (Android currently supported, Sailfish OS collaboration with Jolla upcoming) or are customizable enough for us nerds to adapt it to the formfactor (GNU/Linux distributions are supported).
I predict this device won't be as popular as Dell expects them, even with gimmicks like the clamshell keyboard being software on a a secondary screen. (And thus doubling as a digitizer tablet)
The fact that it does monetization is often the cherry on top. Facebook? They don't pay you jack squat But make a mindless YouTube video about crap and you can rake in real money.
Do it particularly well and you might not even need a job because YouTube can pay you better than any job you'd ever get
Until 1 year later (exactly when you've got credit to reimburse and need stable income) when Google decides to update the Youtube algorithm and suddenly you're not getting as many view / getting as much monetization.
(Those vloggers have vaguely heard once some weird saying about "eggs" and "baskets", but didn't really pay attention to what was meant).
Or some big drama controversy or whatever-gate emerges yet again, causing anything between advertiser pulling out, trolls trying to report videos just to demonetize them, all the way to Youtube banning a user due to the wrong controversial word having been uttered in some video.
Yeah, youtube could help some teen grab some quick cash if they got lucky, but replacing a job with "Youtube" as a regular income requires a tiny bit more strategy and planning.
Given that the Linux devs are also getting good support for the Video Core V and 6,
we might indeed get within a couple of years some Raspberry Pi running newer SoCs from broadcom.
Until then, you can count on the less known/widespread manufacturer to make SBC with A76 cores from other chip makers.
How can the A76 be compared to Skylake when it doesn't have Skylake's X86/X64's command set and cannot run Skylake's X86/X64 code natively?
The instruction set is absolutely completely irrelevant.
It's targetting smartphone/tablet/embed not desktops.
i.e.: a market that almost exclusively runs Android (save for Apple, a couple of things trying to add full blown GNU/Linux support (SBCs, after market OSes like Sailfish), and the big joke coming from Microsoft).
not a market that is stuck to Windows 10.
i.e.: a market where (parts of) the OS is available for free and can be compiled for your CPU (AOSP, Armbian/Sailfish/Etc.), and most of the applications are delivered as bytecode that get JIT/AOT during installation and will run on whatever architecture your CPU runs (except for a few apps packing native libraries, but those are usually available for both x86 and ARM arches)
not a market that is stuck with proprietary closed source blobs.
i.e.: each CPU will be running natively. the support for x86/x86_64 is completely irrelevant.
Nobody with any level of sanity wants to run Microsoft Windows binaries on a smartphone/tablet/SBC.
The problem of comparing lays elsewhere :
- the Skylake is a chip that actually exists in the real world. You could make the Android x86 benchmarks on it using some dev board.
- ARM Cortex-A76 is a core. A design. That a company could license and then ask TMSC to actually build. There are no current physical chips that you could benchmark Android on them. You need first for, e.g.: Qualcom to announce they'lll use this core in the upcomming Snapdragon 900 or whatever number they'll decide to slap on it. Once they start producing actuall chips, you'll finally be able to get real world numbers.
Until then all you have is engineers' speculations "can be clocked at 3GHz+ when produced on a 7nm process, can perform within 10 percent of an Intel Skylake core within the same thermal constrain". Not necessarily will.