Desktops as we know them are going away. We are seeing a trend toward increased reliance on mobile devices, even at the desk.
There are two main operating systems on those mobile devices, iOS and Android. Android has about an 80-85% share of the mobile market worldwide. iOS is around 12-18%, depending on who's doing the study.
Five times as many mobile devices as PCs are sold each year.
Android has, at its base, a Linux kernel. Sure, the hardware doesn't look anything like a desktop machine; Android doesn't look like a traditional Linux distribution; the update and application management is different; and the applications are different, but it's still Linux.
When Android and ChromeOS devices become the platform of choice, we will have achieved the Year of Linux on the Desktop. Maybe we already have.
How will this work when Mary calls the helpdesk, and as soon as Victor the desktop tech sits down the screen locks because Mary isn't the one sitting there?
I think the idea is that if you are at your desk but idle (say, for example, you're on a long phone call with your chair tipped back and your feet on the desk), the computer won't lock down after X minutes of inactivity passes. But if you step away, it locks within seconds. You probably want to have some delay before locking, just in case you bend down to tie your shoe or something else where you are out of the view of the camera for a moment.
The problem with the typical timeout we've used for years is that it can leave the desktop vulnerable between the time you leave the computer and the timeout expires. Most places set the timeout to several minutes to avoid employee irritation of having to unlock their computers several times a day, just because they were doing something else even though the computer was never out of their sight. A timeout is, at best, a compromise between security and convenience.
This new method has the potential to improve BOTH security and convenience.
People complained about the bulk and weight of having a removable cover and another layer of hard plastic around the battery. Reporters making comparison charts and designers decided that thin and light were more important than a replaceable battery. OEM upper managers approved when they realized people could be convinced to replace the whole phone instead of replacing just a battery.
The only people who complained were reviewers on tech sites. Everyone else added weight and bulk by wrapping "protective" shells around their phones.
Just have the study participants floss only half (the same half) of their mouth every day. Monitor their oral health for several years. If flossing makes a significant difference in dental decay, it should become obvious by the differing rate of decay of flossed and unflossed teeth.
It seems to me that this would be a reasonable approach to a study. Aside from flossing, the oral health of each subject should be the same on both sides of the mouth. That means you wouldn't have to account as much for variations in oral hygeine among subjects.
Disclaimer: I have never knowingly conducted or participated in medical research.
There are many industrial processes and machines running ancient hardware. Also common in the medical field.
A local radio station I service (IT) finally replaced an audio editing computer last year. This computer was running Windows 95. Why? A 'bespoke' audio editing card, which required an EISA bus. So why not some other software solution? Because this software did EXACTLY what they wanted to do, was very easy to use, and very easy to train new users on. We maintained an inventory of spare parts -- including a spare motherboard -- to keep the system running.
So why did they replace it? The audio editing card (which was a dedicated computer on a daughter card) began to fail, and that's the part they didn't have a spare for. The replacement product they are using is Adobe Audition.
I know of many other industrial and medical machines that are running old versions of windows on old hardware because they have proprietary software or hardware that is not cost-effective to upgrade (and is working perfectly fine). Some of the software and hardware would be tens of thousands (in some cases hundreds of thousands) of dollars to upgrade -- just to run a more modern OS. If a return on investment cannot be identified, the hardware will not be upgraded.
It seems that most laws and regulations enacted in the past half century in the United States serve not to punish actual harm done, or the intent to do harm, but to punish the potential to do harm.
Stop it. Already. Unless you can show intent to harm or resultant harm don't punish people for excersising their liberties just because there is potential for harm.
It's like awarding the Nobel Peace Prize on the potential to go good. Or rewarding innovative designs before they are implemented.
I see potential here: strap an accelerometer array (smartphone) to each wrist, and enable typing without a keyboard. Write your next novel tapping away at a blank desk... or even just wiggling your fingers in the air. Sure would be easier than tapping away at a tiny smartphone screen, and you wouldn't have to lug around a BT keyboard.
As for entering PINs, I always have at least three fingers over the keypad at all times, to obfuscate which key is being pressed/tapped. Not foolproof, but maybe makes it just difficult enough for the nefarious person to move on to the next potential victim.
In most cases, software isn't controlling large objects with damage potential. And when they are, they are in systems that are not interacting with other systems in a nonlinear fashion.
Factory machinery, for example, tends to be monolithic. When interacting with other machinery, it's expecting a limited, controlled input and output. If one machine malfunctions, it's highly unlikely that it will affect other, nearby machinery. Not because of some insight by the programmer, but because the machine has physical bounds of operation.
An autonomous vehicle does not have physical bounds of operations. It will be interacting both with other autonomous vehicles and with real people that behave in unplanned ways.
A fully autonomous system can only react properly to those situations which the programmer has anticipated. When something unanticipated happens, chaos breaks loose.
Even with non-autonomous vehicles, chaotic situations can happen. But at least there's a better chance of a real person being able to respond properly to unanticipated situations and therefore minimize the damage.
How do autonomous vehicles fare when an oncoming drunk driver zones in on their headlights, veers into the lane and tracks the autonomous vehicle as it tries to avoid the collision?
How will the autonomous vehicle avoid the T-bone collision from the driver that fails to stop at the red light on the cross street? Does the autonomous vehicle have peripheral scanning that will detect a cross-traffic vehicle that doesn't appear to be stopping?
How about four fully autonomous vehicles that approach a 4-way stop from four directions at the same time? Who gets to go first? Will they communicate somehow?
So many of these articles that proclaim how inexpensive it is to produce things with 3-D printing technology completely misrepresent the true cost.
That 30 cents figure is probably just for the materials. It doesn't consider the development cost (which in this case may be donated, but in many cases must be amortized across every piece produced), the cost of production equipment (also to be amortized), employment of production labor, distribution costs, marketing, overhead, and any number of other real business expenses above and beyond materials costs.
Realistically, I would expect this to have a market price in the low 10s of USD, not "30 cents." That puts in the range of pretty much every stethoscope available. The typical third-world MD isn't going to have a 3-D printer at her disposal.
The "cleanness" of energy is determined by political expediency, not actual impact on the environment. And even if it were based on environmental impact, the negativity of those impacts would be debated. So really, there is no truly "clean" energy.
Liberties are of utmost importance, whether it be for digital data, sexual preference, religion, property, or any other activity that does not INJURE others.
When you demand the right to control how your neighbor uses his property, you give implicit permission for him to control how you use your property. And that expands into every other facet of life.
I don't like the flooding of historic neighborhoods with huge boxes any more than you do, nor would I want my neighbor to build an asphalt plant, but the loss of liberty is of even greater concern to me. If my neighbor did choose to build an asphalt plant, I would complain loudly, but I would also defend his right to do so. I do not have a "right" to not see, not hear, or not smell that which offends me provided it does not injure me. There is no right to not be threatened; no right to "feel safe." And I have no right to guaranteed property value at all. But I do have the right to move somewhere else, and I have the responsibility to accept whatever that costs me.
Everyone is assuming that the spent fluid is being dumped overboard. Do we know that to be the case?
It's only necessary to expel the spent fluid externally if you want to reduce overall rocket mass while doing so. If that's not necessary, you can still use an open loop system but have a recovery tank to receive the spent fluid, thereby preventing environmental contamination. That's really the only reason to contain it; the cost of lost spent fluid is probably minimal.
Tape media's greatest benefit is its long storage life. Providing you have the equipment to do it, you could read a tape created 25 years ago.
Tape media's greatest liability is its long storage life. Will you be able to find equipment to read it 25 years from now? If not, you have what we call write-only media.
I think that tape is going to disappear as a viable storage medium, at least in the small business sector. The equipment and media is expensive, and most small businesses don't have the resources to employ someone trained in proper media management.
The replacement is going to be offsite storage farms, whether from a third-party cloud provider, or farms owned by the company that needs the backups. As the per-byte cost of disk storage continually and rapidly falls and wide-area network (Internet) bandwidth increases, offsite/online backups are becoming more and more feasible. Data deduplication and image management software technologies mean that a company can have daily backups completely automated and available as far back as they want. Restoring a file or two from these backups is quick and easy. My company already supports several small businesses using this backup technology; as existing tape drives fail they are seldom being replaced with more tape hardware.
The downside of offsite/online backups is that bare-metal recovery of a failed system from those backups is still extremely time-consuming. Eventually the bandwidth will become available to make it viable; until then tape still seems to be the best option for bare-metal recovery.
No. You are being sold AS a product in the name of 'profits' and 'growth'. You are not the customer. The article is not the product, it is the medium by which the product (your eyes) is delivered to the customer (the advertiser).
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like a good place to dump vitrified radioactive waste.
Desktops as we know them are going away. We are seeing a trend toward increased reliance on mobile devices, even at the desk.
There are two main operating systems on those mobile devices, iOS and Android. Android has about an 80-85% share of the mobile market worldwide. iOS is around 12-18%, depending on who's doing the study.
Five times as many mobile devices as PCs are sold each year.
Android has, at its base, a Linux kernel. Sure, the hardware doesn't look anything like a desktop machine; Android doesn't look like a traditional Linux distribution; the update and application management is different; and the applications are different, but it's still Linux.
When Android and ChromeOS devices become the platform of choice, we will have achieved the Year of Linux on the Desktop. Maybe we already have.
How will this work when Mary calls the helpdesk, and as soon as Victor the desktop tech sits down the screen locks because Mary isn't the one sitting there?
I think the idea is that if you are at your desk but idle (say, for example, you're on a long phone call with your chair tipped back and your feet on the desk), the computer won't lock down after X minutes of inactivity passes. But if you step away, it locks within seconds. You probably want to have some delay before locking, just in case you bend down to tie your shoe or something else where you are out of the view of the camera for a moment.
The problem with the typical timeout we've used for years is that it can leave the desktop vulnerable between the time you leave the computer and the timeout expires. Most places set the timeout to several minutes to avoid employee irritation of having to unlock their computers several times a day, just because they were doing something else even though the computer was never out of their sight. A timeout is, at best, a compromise between security and convenience.
This new method has the potential to improve BOTH security and convenience.
People complained about the bulk and weight of having a removable cover and another layer of hard plastic around the battery. Reporters making comparison charts and designers decided that thin and light were more important than a replaceable battery. OEM upper managers approved when they realized people could be convinced to replace the whole phone instead of replacing just a battery.
The only people who complained were reviewers on tech sites. Everyone else added weight and bulk by wrapping "protective" shells around their phones.
Just have the study participants floss only half (the same half) of their mouth every day. Monitor their oral health for several years. If flossing makes a significant difference in dental decay, it should become obvious by the differing rate of decay of flossed and unflossed teeth.
It seems to me that this would be a reasonable approach to a study. Aside from flossing, the oral health of each subject should be the same on both sides of the mouth. That means you wouldn't have to account as much for variations in oral hygeine among subjects.
Disclaimer: I have never knowingly conducted or participated in medical research.
How is the Tesla's grammar? Hopefully better than that of this article's writer.
Just think of all the Pokemons spawning at the event attended by hundreds of thousands of people that you'd miss out on!
This controversy would be a non issue if there was an option do not upgrade and don't bug me anymore to upgrade.
There are many industrial processes and machines running ancient hardware. Also common in the medical field.
A local radio station I service (IT) finally replaced an audio editing computer last year. This computer was running Windows 95. Why? A 'bespoke' audio editing card, which required an EISA bus. So why not some other software solution? Because this software did EXACTLY what they wanted to do, was very easy to use, and very easy to train new users on. We maintained an inventory of spare parts -- including a spare motherboard -- to keep the system running.
So why did they replace it? The audio editing card (which was a dedicated computer on a daughter card) began to fail, and that's the part they didn't have a spare for. The replacement product they are using is Adobe Audition.
I know of many other industrial and medical machines that are running old versions of windows on old hardware because they have proprietary software or hardware that is not cost-effective to upgrade (and is working perfectly fine). Some of the software and hardware would be tens of thousands (in some cases hundreds of thousands) of dollars to upgrade -- just to run a more modern OS. If a return on investment cannot be identified, the hardware will not be upgraded.
Apologies for misspelling exercising. Please don't punish me.
It seems that most laws and regulations enacted in the past half century in the United States serve not to punish actual harm done, or the intent to do harm, but to punish the potential to do harm.
Stop it. Already. Unless you can show intent to harm or resultant harm don't punish people for excersising their liberties just because there is potential for harm.
It's like awarding the Nobel Peace Prize on the potential to go good. Or rewarding innovative designs before they are implemented.
I see potential here: strap an accelerometer array (smartphone) to each wrist, and enable typing without a keyboard. Write your next novel tapping away at a blank desk... or even just wiggling your fingers in the air. Sure would be easier than tapping away at a tiny smartphone screen, and you wouldn't have to lug around a BT keyboard.
As for entering PINs, I always have at least three fingers over the keypad at all times, to obfuscate which key is being pressed/tapped. Not foolproof, but maybe makes it just difficult enough for the nefarious person to move on to the next potential victim.
In most cases, software isn't controlling large objects with damage potential. And when they are, they are in systems that are not interacting with other systems in a nonlinear fashion.
Factory machinery, for example, tends to be monolithic. When interacting with other machinery, it's expecting a limited, controlled input and output. If one machine malfunctions, it's highly unlikely that it will affect other, nearby machinery. Not because of some insight by the programmer, but because the machine has physical bounds of operation.
An autonomous vehicle does not have physical bounds of operations. It will be interacting both with other autonomous vehicles and with real people that behave in unplanned ways.
A fully autonomous system can only react properly to those situations which the programmer has anticipated. When something unanticipated happens, chaos breaks loose.
Even with non-autonomous vehicles, chaotic situations can happen. But at least there's a better chance of a real person being able to respond properly to unanticipated situations and therefore minimize the damage.
How do autonomous vehicles fare when an oncoming drunk driver zones in on their headlights, veers into the lane and tracks the autonomous vehicle as it tries to avoid the collision?
How will the autonomous vehicle avoid the T-bone collision from the driver that fails to stop at the red light on the cross street? Does the autonomous vehicle have peripheral scanning that will detect a cross-traffic vehicle that doesn't appear to be stopping?
How about four fully autonomous vehicles that approach a 4-way stop from four directions at the same time? Who gets to go first? Will they communicate somehow?
I've seen a few cars in the cloud. Unfortunately, the cloud was blue.
If the government has backdoor access to your car's computers -- and how do we know they don't? -- so will the hackers.
To get out of the car, you'll have to sit in the litter bag.
Oops, I meant recycle bag.
To get out of the car, you'll have to sit in the litter bag.
So many of these articles that proclaim how inexpensive it is to produce things with 3-D printing technology completely misrepresent the true cost.
That 30 cents figure is probably just for the materials. It doesn't consider the development cost (which in this case may be donated, but in many cases must be amortized across every piece produced), the cost of production equipment (also to be amortized), employment of production labor, distribution costs, marketing, overhead, and any number of other real business expenses above and beyond materials costs.
Realistically, I would expect this to have a market price in the low 10s of USD, not "30 cents." That puts in the range of pretty much every stethoscope available. The typical third-world MD isn't going to have a 3-D printer at her disposal.
The "cleanness" of energy is determined by political expediency, not actual impact on the environment. And even if it were based on environmental impact, the negativity of those impacts would be debated. So really, there is no truly "clean" energy.
Liberties are of utmost importance, whether it be for digital data, sexual preference, religion, property, or any other activity that does not INJURE others.
When you demand the right to control how your neighbor uses his property, you give implicit permission for him to control how you use your property. And that expands into every other facet of life.
I don't like the flooding of historic neighborhoods with huge boxes any more than you do, nor would I want my neighbor to build an asphalt plant, but the loss of liberty is of even greater concern to me. If my neighbor did choose to build an asphalt plant, I would complain loudly, but I would also defend his right to do so. I do not have a "right" to not see, not hear, or not smell that which offends me provided it does not injure me. There is no right to not be threatened; no right to "feel safe." And I have no right to guaranteed property value at all. But I do have the right to move somewhere else, and I have the responsibility to accept whatever that costs me.
Everyone is assuming that the spent fluid is being dumped overboard. Do we know that to be the case?
It's only necessary to expel the spent fluid externally if you want to reduce overall rocket mass while doing so. If that's not necessary, you can still use an open loop system but have a recovery tank to receive the spent fluid, thereby preventing environmental contamination. That's really the only reason to contain it; the cost of lost spent fluid is probably minimal.
Tape media's greatest benefit is its long storage life. Providing you have the equipment to do it, you could read a tape created 25 years ago.
Tape media's greatest liability is its long storage life. Will you be able to find equipment to read it 25 years from now? If not, you have what we call write-only media.
I think that tape is going to disappear as a viable storage medium, at least in the small business sector. The equipment and media is expensive, and most small businesses don't have the resources to employ someone trained in proper media management.
The replacement is going to be offsite storage farms, whether from a third-party cloud provider, or farms owned by the company that needs the backups. As the per-byte cost of disk storage continually and rapidly falls and wide-area network (Internet) bandwidth increases, offsite/online backups are becoming more and more feasible. Data deduplication and image management software technologies mean that a company can have daily backups completely automated and available as far back as they want. Restoring a file or two from these backups is quick and easy. My company already supports several small businesses using this backup technology; as existing tape drives fail they are seldom being replaced with more tape hardware.
The downside of offsite/online backups is that bare-metal recovery of a failed system from those backups is still extremely time-consuming. Eventually the bandwidth will become available to make it viable; until then tape still seems to be the best option for bare-metal recovery.
No. You are being sold AS a product in the name of 'profits' and 'growth'. You are not the customer. The article is not the product, it is the medium by which the product (your eyes) is delivered to the customer (the advertiser).