I really really wish the pendulum would swing back to the operating system to just being an operating system. The kernel, drivers, window manager, desktop environment, etc., but basically no built-in apps, personal assistants, advertising, activation, or any other nonsense unless I want it.
If you want to be innovative with your OS, make it run faster and more securely. Improve your APIs and frameworks to make it easier to develop applications. Make it easier to administer devices in bulk-- and don't make it "easier to administer" by creating some complex proprietary system that anticipates that you're an enterprise customer who can afford to employ a full-time expert of your expensive suite of tools. Make is actually easy. Let owners own their computers again. Let administrators administer their computers. Stop forcing updates and burdensome "security" restrictions. The OS should serve the computer's owner's needs, not the manufacturer's business interests.
I know, I know... "Use Linux!" When someone can get hardware vendors and software developers to support it, I'll switch to it. I'd love to. I can't.
The larger point of the article is that while we're using tests for planet surface based life, when there's a decent chance for non-surface life. Therefore we need to expand the toolset we use, because we've become biased based on our test data (Earth).
Right, but this does sort of raise the problem that we don't know the boundaries of what life could be, so devising tests to scan for something that we don't know what we're looking for might be... not very productive. If an unknown form of life is living deep under the surface of a planet, we don't know what signs might be exhibited above the surface to indicate life-- or even that there will be any.
Not that I'd oppose a little research into the subject, but it doesn't make sense to me that it warrants much investment-- not unless someone can present a convincing argument. Even if we could detect that there are some microbes living under the surface of a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, I'm struggling to think of what benefit it would gain us. If we could get there and study those microbes, that'd be something, but the mere knowledge of its existence without a means to get there is a bit unimportant.
Maybe that's just because I already assume that there are other microbes on other planets somewhere in the universe.
A vanishingly small number compared to liberal wing nuts.
No, it's not a vanishingly small number. Even if you want to argue that it's not the majority, it's certainly the loudest contingent. Look on Fox News, or any of the Republican "news" outfits. They all still talk like Obama and Clinton are evil incarnate. Even the current president spent years pushing the racist conspiracy theory that Obama wasn't a real American.
This was a product of MASSACHUSETS
Ok, history lesson: Massachusetts isn't the only place that sort of setup has been suggested. Back when Bill Clinton was president, he was pushing for a single-payer system, and the response from Republicans in Congress was to suggest something very similar to what eventually became the Affordable Care Act. Then, when Obama was running for president, he and McCain were both advocating for something like the Affordable Care Act, the big difference being that Obama didn't want to have a mandate that everyone buy insurance, and McCain argued that you needed the mandate or else the requirement to cover pre-existing conditions would be too expensive for insurance companies, thereby driving up prices.
Obama eventually compromises and adopts the Republican plan, at which point the Republicans shift, throw a hissy fit, and claim the whole plan is socialist wealth redistribution. They make a big stink about the mandate, which was something that Republicans wanted in order to protect insurance companies.
My guess is that what's different is they're seeing traction with Azure.
If you can build your infrastructure in Azure and then Microsoft creates a VDI product in Azure that is easy to setup, manage, and use, I could see it working this time. At least working better.
It also might be that they don't see the remote desktop situation as having changed, but just that their position has changed. They don't have the same kind of lock on the desktop OS market that they used to, and they're not charging for upgrades. Instead, they're looking for ways to push it as a subscription. Turning it into an online service by hosting the desktop would accomplish that.
This is why I fucking hate the Democrats. It's not a "good thing" or "bad thing" with them. It's a bad person, and EVERY SINGLE THING HE DOES is resisted and casted in the worst possible light, every time. It gets old.
This isn't really a "Democrat"-specific thing. A lot of Republicans treated Obama like the boogeyman, and everything he did was somehow nefarious. They tried to roadblock everything he did. They spent years hammering the Affordable Care Act-- which was largely a Republican bill, put forward as a compromise.
And not to say that Obama was perfect, but his behavior was, at the very least, much more in line with normal, respectable, Presidential behavior. Trump is a legitimate problem. He's a criminal and a walking disaster who has abused power at every turn.
You say you're not a fan, but I don't believe you. You say you don't care, but then you hope he "crushes them". If you're a Trump fan, at least admit it. Maybe you don't want to because you yourself know that he's a legitimate problem.
Yeah, it's weird because he's sort of saying the same thing, but sort of saying the opposite. And I have no doubt that he knows more about the how these things work, but I think it's possible that this is an issue where technical expertise blinds people to some practical considerations.
And what I mean by that is that he seems to be arguing (as far as I understand) that a lot of our problems come from having operating systems that abstract programming from the hardware, and the solution is to have programmers write things to basically run directly on the hardware. And that's all well and good for the programmers who are happy to handle all of that stuff, but I suspect that an awful lot of programmers need or want the abstraction.
He sort of acknowledges this when he talks about having low friction by having APIs like DirectX and Vulcan. I'm not a genius programmer, so I want the abstraction of APIs and frameworks that let me just think about what I want the software to do rather than how, on a machine level, it's supposed to do it. So I think you need that abstraction.
I maybe we're saying the same sort of thing, but I might not really "get it". I just don't really understand, for example, why printer drivers are still such a problem. There should be a standard set of instructions that the OS can send to the printer to say, "This is what I want to print," and then the printer should know enough to know how to print it. I feel like it's kind of the same thing with keyboards, mice, hard drive controllers, network interfaces, wifi chipsets, etc. Like why can't the OS tell the NIC, "I want you to send this information out according to this protocol, or whatever, and have the NIC know what it needs to do to send that data out? Why can't the OS tell the storage device, "I want you to store this data" and the storage device know how to do that?
So in that sense, it seems to me that, instead of having programmers more involved in the nitty-gritty of hardware, the hardware should already present a pretty abstract interface to the OS, and the hardware should hard firmware and whatnot to optimize those requests without the OS needing to know much about the nitty-gritty of what's going on in hardware. And then the OS should basically be responsible for abstracting all of that hardware stuff, to the point of providing libraries, APIs, and frameworks for app developers, so applications can be made easily without knowing much about what's going on in the OS or hardware.
Because I feel like this guy is a super-nerd (I'm saying that in an admiring way, not derogatory) who wants to deal with all the hardware stuff so he can get games running as fast as possible. From my point of view, I'm much closer to a layman and I care less about games and I don't have a huge problem with performance. I just want to make things simple, and for things to work without problems. It seems to me that the solution is try to try make things modular, and push the nuts-and-bolts optimization close to the hardware, done by only a few really amazing programmers who really know what they're doing. And then assume we're going to have a bunch of dumb programmers who don't know what they're doing, but just know what they want their program to do.
I'm not sure I understand, but I don't really see the point in having individual applications be bootable on hardware. If anything, it'd make more sense to me to push more stuff from the OS into the firmware so that the firmware would present a standard set of APIs/protocols and the OS wouldn't need to worry about drivers. And then, in turn, standardize APIs across operating systems so that cross-platform apps would be easier.
Either way, good luck getting any meaningful change out of the computing industry. There are too many powerful entrenched players who aren't interested in playing well with others.
Please don't take offense, but the only thing making you work the extra time... is YOU.... why would any sane person keep working for a company that is willing to lie so blatantly to you?
I don't know why you're making this about me personally. The point of my story is that this has become the norm. Yeah, anyone who objects to this sort of thing can just quit their job and then... not have a job, or get another job that's going to be equally abusive. There's this fiction out there that there's just an endless supply of awesome jobs for anyone, and everyone can just quit their job and find a better one, no problem. For most people, even during a good economy, it's just not that simple.
But actually, this doesn't apply to me specifically. The story I told was from my past. I did quit that job, found another that was worse, and then quit that job. At my current company, I'm high enough up the food chain that I've been able to insist that employees get a lunch break, and that they can leave at the end of the day. I'm fine. But my story isn't going to work for everyone, and I'm pretty sure the "9 to 5" work day is just gone from our cultural consciousness. We seem to have convinced ourselves that it was always 9 to 6.
She pushes random buttons until the weird prompt(s) go away. Congratulations grandma, you've set an unknown password and effectively bricked your new TV. Who is going to unbrick it? How?
First, devices often have some method to reset the password. They hold a button a 'reset' button while they reboot the device, and the password gets reset. So the TV doesn't need to be bricked.
Second, when talking about the various dangers of internet connected devices, it's this kind of unknowing user that make this default password such a big problem. A lot of grandmothers (and other people), instead of pressing random buttons to get past the prompts, will just leave all the default settings, leaving their devices completely exposed. It's often going to be better that they lock themselves in than if they leave the device completely open.
Well that's the sort of thing you hear about, but... well, first, in order to see that the database is in plaintext, you have to get access first. It's not uncommon for people to get into the systems because of password reuse or weak passwords or default passwords.
Also, you don't hear much about the compromises that are due to default passwords because it's not a big scary unexpected security flaw. It's written off as, "Yeah, that guy's dumb for leaving the default password." But I think when you're designing these things, you have to kind of assume that the guy setting it up is going to be stupid, and therefore make some effort to make the defaults secure.
So yes, the whole "default password" thing is a genuine problem. In fact, you might go as far as to say, the whole "password" thing is a problem, but it's not clear what the solution is, and it doesn't look like anyone is going to fix it.
How does having a secure operating system help when the web frontend developer doesn't understand how to correctly validate passwords.
Well the IoT manufacturer also has to do their job in building whatever web interface they build, but it certainly helps to start from a secure OS.
While having the source code available is helpful to see if there are security issues, that doesn't mean they will be found. Open source doesn't provide for greater security though.
Well it doesn't inherently completely make for better security. It does have some advantages, though. There's the obvious fact that there are generally more eyes on an open source project, so security problems may be more likely to be noticed. Also, frankly, security is hard to do well, and having a bunch of random developers coming up with their own solution will result in a lot of those developers doing it wrong. If you can create a coherent security standard that everyone can work from, then a lot of people have a vested interest in doing it well, and it'll probably be done well.
Obviously there are also downsides. The fact that there are a lot of eyes on the source also might make it easier for someone malicious to find an opening. Also, everyone standardizing on one security standard (or one OS) makes a monoculture. It means there's one big target to exploit, and if you can exploit it, you can get access to pretty much everything.
On the whole, I think it is smart for IoT manufacturers to use an established open source OS, both to save themselves money and to start from a point of relative security... but I think they already do that. AFAIK, a lot of those things are somehow built on Linux or a BSD. I don't think we need a singe OS, but I do think we need to figure out some security standards that establish what constitutes an acceptable level of security for an internet connected device.
I also think that, for consumer protection reasons, there should be some kind of push to open source the software computerized devices and appliances. Manufacturers can too easily stop updating things and drop support, leaving the people who owned it with no options but to replace the device.
Yeah, but I thought the point of the thought experiment was to point out the problematic nature of quantum mechanics-- because the cat isn't actually be both alive and dead at the same time.
Whether the cat is alive or dead is a problem of incomplete knowledge, not of an uncertain quantum state. The box is sealed so we don't know whether the cat is alive or dead, but it is either alive or dead. If the geiger counter is measuring the decay of an atom, that counts as a measurement. We can put other equipment in the box to record when the geiger counter was triggered and when the cat was killed. We still won't know whether the cat is alive or dead while it's sealed, but we can go back to the recording and determine whether it was alive at a given moment.
This is in contrast to theories about quantum mechanics which state that there actually is no outcome until it's measured. It's not just that you don't know where the photon is until you detect it, but the photon doesn't exist in an exact location until it's detected.
At least, that was my understanding of the thought experiment.
I'm also not understanding the modified version of the thought experiment proposed in the article. It says that Alice can, "using her knowledge of quantum physics — prepare a quantum message to send to the other friend". What is a quantum message in this context? Then it says:
The experiment cannot be put into practice, because it would require the Wigners to measure all quantum properties of their friends, which includes reading their minds, points out theorist Lídia Del Rio, a colleague of Renner’s at ETH Zurich.
I don't understand that, since it says that the information would be transmitted in a "quantum message". But apparently you need to know the "quantum properties" of the person in the other box?
Maybe not if you're being paid hourly, but in the traditional "8 hour work day" for salaried employees, those 8 hours were 9-5. The any breaks you took were included in those 8 hours.
I agree that there's a question about the reliability of the data if they're gathering it from online quizzes, but that's not even the first thing that comes to mind. What I always wonder when they have these kinds of personality tests is, how are they even coming up with these things?
These personality tests always seem suspect to me. They question will be something like, "Consider the statement, 'I care deeply about other people's emotions.' Do you strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, somewhat agree, or strongly agree?" To what extent to they take the response at face value? Maybe the test-taker will lie because they want a particular outcome on the test. Maybe they'll just answer with whatever answer they think they're supposed to. Maybe they think they care deeply about other people's emotions, but actually they're very inconsiderate people. There might even be a sort of Dunning–Kruger effect, where the most emotionally tuned-in people are more likely to understand the extent to which they don't consider other people's feelings, and score themselves lower than those who are completely inconsiderate.
And I'm not even sure I buy the "Big Five" traits as particularly worthwhile. Even though there's been some attempt to arrive at them scientifically, that kind of narrowing is always going to be somewhat arbitrary and subject to existing philosophical assumptions.
Maybe these scientists are really brilliant and have carefully crafted these tests to account for all this, and I just don't understand psychology enough. However, I suspect that it's just not very scientific. And that makes it particularly dangerous when scientists try to make claims like, "This is the sort of person who should be in charge of things." That just seems like a statement outside of the scope of a scientific study.
Yeah, it's... almost baffling how this happened. I remember having a 9-5 job a few decades ago. One day, I interviewed for a new job which I'd been told was a "standard 8 hour work day." When I started the job, I was told the hours were 9-6. I said, "I thought you said this was a standard 8 hour work day. If I work 9-6, that's 9 hours." I was told no, that's still 8 hours. I got a 1 hour lunch break, and that didn't count.
But the lunch hour always counted before. For decades of people working 9-5, the lunch break counted. And then, after working there for a few days, I realized that I didn't, in fact, get a 1 hour lunch break anyway. I could leave my desk for maybe 20 minutes before my boss got upset that I'd just disappeared in the middle of the day.
And I thought, "Wow, this boss is being abusive." I started talking to friends about it, and they told me, no, that's normal now. Nobody counts the lunch hour, and a "standard 8 hour work day" is 9am to 6pm. Also, in spite of the 1 hour lunch break not counting towards the "8 hours", it was also normal that you didn't actually get that lunch break, and worked through lunch at your desk. Nobody could account for how or why or even when this happened. It was as though all the companies got together and just decided to pretend that things have always been that way.
And yeah, I've started hearing places that will say they have a "normal 40 hour work week" where people are expected to work 8-6 or 9-7. They've dropped the excuse that the lunch hour doesn't count. They just act like you're stupid if you expected a 40 hour work week to be literally 40 hours.
Those are the mythical academics who sit posh furnished college offices and debate the abstract idea of the day.
Yeah, I like my academics sitting in unfurnished offices!</sarcasm>
Sorry, I'm not trying to make a real argument there, but I don't really agree with you very much. I mean, yes, education needs to have some eventual application to the real world in order to be useful, but that doesn't mean that education should simply be vocational. Some of the effects on the worlds are indirect and take time, but that doesn't make them useless.
I don't even think that the goal of educators should be to "improve human kind". It's enough if they improve the life and the mind of the students. Let the students then "improve human kind", for whatever that means. And in that sense, K-8 isn't "worthless". It's not enough to get a very good job all on its own, but most kids leave 8th grade better, more informed people than if they hadn't gone to school.
My point is that it's nonsense to complain that the government should stay out of regulate the pharmaceutical industry because the "free market" will sort things out. Since the industry relies so heavily on patents and trademarks, it's inherently a non-free market already, due to government intervention. That's before we even start talking about the FDA.
In fairness, there's still not much fragmentation among iPhones/iPads. The big difference is basically just screen resolution, and the event yesterday suggests they're pushing toward 3 sizes of the same aspect ratio. It's not even clear you need to worry much about the difference between the iPhone X and the iPhone XR, since the XR seems to be similar in size but lower resolution. Your UI elements can just be displayed at a lower resolution.
But more importantly, there's basically 1 iOS. There are 50 different vendors struggling to differentiate their own version of iOS. While Android vendors often don't let users upgrade to the latest version of Android, Apple's pretty good at pushing people to keep their devices update, so developers can mostly focus on making sure their app runs on the latest version of iOS.
And when you complain about the "iPhone Xs Max SE Plus Rose Gold Special Edition", I don't know why the color matters at all.
There's still things to complain about with Apple, but it still doesn't seem very fragmented, compared to Android at least.
User deletes content from their device thinking it will be available on iCloud for restoring.
I suspect that you think this is an important point, implying that the person purchased it, downloaded it, deleted it, and was foolish for expecting that they could download it again. It's not quite that simple.
Here's the thing: Apple encourages users to think that the "purchase" includes hosting for re-downloads. It's part of the service they provide. I've had dealings with their customer support where they say, "Oh, just delete it and redownload it." If you buy it on your Apple TV, you can't really download it to the Apple TV for storage. If you buy it on an iOS device, you can download it to the device, but can't then transfer it off the device. If you download it to your computer, you can back it up and all of that, but it still has DRM. You continue to need access to Apple's servers in order to watch the movie.
Personally I make copies of my content and crack the DRM...
Ok, that's nice and all, but the companies "selling" this content actively discourage this behavior. My point was basically that companies should be legally required to allow this. If they're losing distribution rights, fine, but provide warning to people who are relying on your streaming service. Give them an opportunity to download a DRM-free copy.
Markets can't correct this behavior because drugs are effectively a monopoly situation.
Not only that, but the reason they're effectively a monopoly is because of patents-- which is already a form of government regulation. The idea that the pharmaceuticals industry is a "free market" is absurd. It's a highly regulated market, but it's a very poorly regulated market. It probably needs to be highly regulated, but the regulations could be modernized and improved.
Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to pass sensible regulation because so many people are so strongly unsophisticatedly pro-business that they're anti-government, anti-consumer, anti-evironment, and opposed to any form of economic or scientific expertise.
This is why we need stronger consumer protection. This isn't a weird, difficult, complex issue. In my mind, there's a very simple solution to this:
Make it illegal for digital media stores to remove access to anything that has been purchased. If, for some reason, they're unable to continue hosting it for streaming, they should be legally required to provide you with a DRM-free download.
Or else, they should be barred from using words like "buy" or "purchase". They can offer "long term rentals" with clear and explicit wording that access may be revoked at any time. Those disclaimers should not be buried in a EULA or terms of service. It should be legally required to be displayed obviously each time the long-term rental is offered.
You could debate some of the details, but the basic gist should be clear: Either provide people with what they "bought", or make it clear that they're not buying it.
with net neutrality, content publishers and distributors get to peer directly with an isp and flood their network with whatever data the content provider wants.
No, that's not how that works. Content publishers' ISPs get to peer with other ISPs because that's how the Internet works. Without peering, there's just a bunch of unconnected networks, of "walled gardens", and not the Internet. You want to go back to the days of AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe? Fine. Go start that business and see how it goes. Meanwhile, the rest of us want access to the Internet.
And content providers don't "flood their networks". That shows another fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. This is not a broadcast network. A company like Netflix isn't just sending out all their video, all the time, to everyone. Their users request the video, and then the request goes over the ISP's network, over to Netflix's ISP, to Netflix's server, and Netflix allows the download. Verizon is trying to charge Netflix for Netflix allowing Verizon customers to download something.
Without net neutrality, content publishers... have an incentive to keep spurious traffic low
They have an incentive to keep their traffic low regardless. Again using Netflix as an example, they already pay a boatload of money for internet access. They have to move massive amounts of information very quickly, and that's expensive. If they could cut their bandwidth needs by 20%, they'd save a bunch of money. They'd do it if they could.
... and pass on the costs to the consumer.
This is another one of those fundamental misunderstandings of how things work. While it's true that when a company has to pay more, they sometimes "pass on the cost to consumers," that's not necessarily how that works. That economic model imagines a world where businesses set their prices by figuring out their costs and just adding a set percentage to everything. Businesses don't set prices that way!
Let's say you were paying $100 for a product last year, and this year the price is increased to $110. Was that because prices went up somewhere in the supply chain and the product now costs $10 more to produce?
Probably not. Yes, it's possible that the product costs $85 to bring to market, and the cost went up to $95, and they increased their price to account for the difference. Or it might be that it costs $70 to bring to market, and the price went up to $90, but they decided that they could only get away with raising the price by $10. Or it might even be that the price went down from $85 to $75, but they raised the price anyway because demand was high and they thought people would still buy it at the higher price.
Companies don't just transparently pass costs on to consumers. They set the price based on supply and demand, with varying levels of profit margin.
Well reading your post only leads me back around to this question: Why are these VPN services writing their own client anyway?
I understand that a VPN client should theoretically not be doing anything terribly complicated and so shouldn't be too hard to write. At the same time, why are they writing their own clients at all? After decades of dealing with VPN, how is it that we still don't have a simple, open, trouble-free VPN system built into the OS?
As far I can can tell, the biggest problem is the same problem that we're having throughout computing: nobody wants to invest in standards. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft and Cisco will only spend money to develop and secure a solution where they then have a lock on their own proprietary protocols and formats, in order to prevent real competition. If someone else comes up with an open standard, you get some kind of NIH syndrome which explained by another older xkcd comic.
We need to create standards again, instead of each tech company trying to build their own little walled garden. I know having open standards or even FOSS doesn't prevent there from being security issues, but at least it allows interested parties to work together on them.
Yeah, it's actually very bad for Valve for platforms to be locked down. Steam is an alternate distribution method that's in competition with Apple's and Microsoft's app stores. If alternate distribution methods are shut down, they lose a big chunk of their business.
Yeah, I think part of the reason this is happening is that most people don't understand URLs. The different parts seem meaningless and arbitrary, and so they might imagine that they can be omitted without consequence. For example, that part that says, "http://"? It's meaningless and ugly and it's always "http://", so why not just leave it out? And why have the "www." as the beginning part of the name when all websites start with "www." and you could just leave it off?
But that's not true. The "http://" could be "https://" or "ftp://" or any number of other things. And it's not really that the "name of the website" is "www.slashdot.org". ORG is a domain. SLASHDOT is one of many subdomains of ORG. WWW is one of many subdomain of SLASHDOT. You could in turn have any number of subdomains of WWW. Each subdomain can have different information associated with it. It can have it's own A record, MX records, TXT records. The subdomains can be used for any number of things, and not just websites.
And sure, I think it's likely that most of the time, the WWW domain points to all the same stuff as @, but that's not always the case. I'd argue that this move by Google doesn't make things less confusing, but rather makes it more confusing. It means their browser will be displaying incorrect information.
Slashdot Mirror
I really really wish the pendulum would swing back to the operating system to just being an operating system. The kernel, drivers, window manager, desktop environment, etc., but basically no built-in apps, personal assistants, advertising, activation, or any other nonsense unless I want it.
If you want to be innovative with your OS, make it run faster and more securely. Improve your APIs and frameworks to make it easier to develop applications. Make it easier to administer devices in bulk-- and don't make it "easier to administer" by creating some complex proprietary system that anticipates that you're an enterprise customer who can afford to employ a full-time expert of your expensive suite of tools. Make is actually easy. Let owners own their computers again. Let administrators administer their computers. Stop forcing updates and burdensome "security" restrictions. The OS should serve the computer's owner's needs, not the manufacturer's business interests.
I know, I know... "Use Linux!" When someone can get hardware vendors and software developers to support it, I'll switch to it. I'd love to. I can't.
The larger point of the article is that while we're using tests for planet surface based life, when there's a decent chance for non-surface life. Therefore we need to expand the toolset we use, because we've become biased based on our test data (Earth).
Right, but this does sort of raise the problem that we don't know the boundaries of what life could be, so devising tests to scan for something that we don't know what we're looking for might be... not very productive. If an unknown form of life is living deep under the surface of a planet, we don't know what signs might be exhibited above the surface to indicate life-- or even that there will be any.
Not that I'd oppose a little research into the subject, but it doesn't make sense to me that it warrants much investment-- not unless someone can present a convincing argument. Even if we could detect that there are some microbes living under the surface of a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, I'm struggling to think of what benefit it would gain us. If we could get there and study those microbes, that'd be something, but the mere knowledge of its existence without a means to get there is a bit unimportant.
Maybe that's just because I already assume that there are other microbes on other planets somewhere in the universe.
A vanishingly small number compared to liberal wing nuts.
No, it's not a vanishingly small number. Even if you want to argue that it's not the majority, it's certainly the loudest contingent. Look on Fox News, or any of the Republican "news" outfits. They all still talk like Obama and Clinton are evil incarnate. Even the current president spent years pushing the racist conspiracy theory that Obama wasn't a real American.
This was a product of MASSACHUSETS
Ok, history lesson: Massachusetts isn't the only place that sort of setup has been suggested. Back when Bill Clinton was president, he was pushing for a single-payer system, and the response from Republicans in Congress was to suggest something very similar to what eventually became the Affordable Care Act. Then, when Obama was running for president, he and McCain were both advocating for something like the Affordable Care Act, the big difference being that Obama didn't want to have a mandate that everyone buy insurance, and McCain argued that you needed the mandate or else the requirement to cover pre-existing conditions would be too expensive for insurance companies, thereby driving up prices.
Obama eventually compromises and adopts the Republican plan, at which point the Republicans shift, throw a hissy fit, and claim the whole plan is socialist wealth redistribution. They make a big stink about the mandate, which was something that Republicans wanted in order to protect insurance companies.
My guess is that what's different is they're seeing traction with Azure.
If you can build your infrastructure in Azure and then Microsoft creates a VDI product in Azure that is easy to setup, manage, and use, I could see it working this time. At least working better.
It also might be that they don't see the remote desktop situation as having changed, but just that their position has changed. They don't have the same kind of lock on the desktop OS market that they used to, and they're not charging for upgrades. Instead, they're looking for ways to push it as a subscription. Turning it into an online service by hosting the desktop would accomplish that.
This is why I fucking hate the Democrats. It's not a "good thing" or "bad thing" with them. It's a bad person, and EVERY SINGLE THING HE DOES is resisted and casted in the worst possible light, every time. It gets old.
This isn't really a "Democrat"-specific thing. A lot of Republicans treated Obama like the boogeyman, and everything he did was somehow nefarious. They tried to roadblock everything he did. They spent years hammering the Affordable Care Act-- which was largely a Republican bill, put forward as a compromise.
And not to say that Obama was perfect, but his behavior was, at the very least, much more in line with normal, respectable, Presidential behavior. Trump is a legitimate problem. He's a criminal and a walking disaster who has abused power at every turn.
You say you're not a fan, but I don't believe you. You say you don't care, but then you hope he "crushes them". If you're a Trump fan, at least admit it. Maybe you don't want to because you yourself know that he's a legitimate problem.
Yeah, it's weird because he's sort of saying the same thing, but sort of saying the opposite. And I have no doubt that he knows more about the how these things work, but I think it's possible that this is an issue where technical expertise blinds people to some practical considerations.
And what I mean by that is that he seems to be arguing (as far as I understand) that a lot of our problems come from having operating systems that abstract programming from the hardware, and the solution is to have programmers write things to basically run directly on the hardware. And that's all well and good for the programmers who are happy to handle all of that stuff, but I suspect that an awful lot of programmers need or want the abstraction.
He sort of acknowledges this when he talks about having low friction by having APIs like DirectX and Vulcan. I'm not a genius programmer, so I want the abstraction of APIs and frameworks that let me just think about what I want the software to do rather than how, on a machine level, it's supposed to do it. So I think you need that abstraction.
I maybe we're saying the same sort of thing, but I might not really "get it". I just don't really understand, for example, why printer drivers are still such a problem. There should be a standard set of instructions that the OS can send to the printer to say, "This is what I want to print," and then the printer should know enough to know how to print it. I feel like it's kind of the same thing with keyboards, mice, hard drive controllers, network interfaces, wifi chipsets, etc. Like why can't the OS tell the NIC, "I want you to send this information out according to this protocol, or whatever, and have the NIC know what it needs to do to send that data out? Why can't the OS tell the storage device, "I want you to store this data" and the storage device know how to do that?
So in that sense, it seems to me that, instead of having programmers more involved in the nitty-gritty of hardware, the hardware should already present a pretty abstract interface to the OS, and the hardware should hard firmware and whatnot to optimize those requests without the OS needing to know much about the nitty-gritty of what's going on in hardware. And then the OS should basically be responsible for abstracting all of that hardware stuff, to the point of providing libraries, APIs, and frameworks for app developers, so applications can be made easily without knowing much about what's going on in the OS or hardware.
Because I feel like this guy is a super-nerd (I'm saying that in an admiring way, not derogatory) who wants to deal with all the hardware stuff so he can get games running as fast as possible. From my point of view, I'm much closer to a layman and I care less about games and I don't have a huge problem with performance. I just want to make things simple, and for things to work without problems. It seems to me that the solution is try to try make things modular, and push the nuts-and-bolts optimization close to the hardware, done by only a few really amazing programmers who really know what they're doing. And then assume we're going to have a bunch of dumb programmers who don't know what they're doing, but just know what they want their program to do.
I'm not sure I understand, but I don't really see the point in having individual applications be bootable on hardware. If anything, it'd make more sense to me to push more stuff from the OS into the firmware so that the firmware would present a standard set of APIs/protocols and the OS wouldn't need to worry about drivers. And then, in turn, standardize APIs across operating systems so that cross-platform apps would be easier.
Either way, good luck getting any meaningful change out of the computing industry. There are too many powerful entrenched players who aren't interested in playing well with others.
Please don't take offense, but the only thing making you work the extra time ... is YOU.... why would any sane person keep working for a company that is willing to lie so blatantly to you?
I don't know why you're making this about me personally. The point of my story is that this has become the norm. Yeah, anyone who objects to this sort of thing can just quit their job and then... not have a job, or get another job that's going to be equally abusive. There's this fiction out there that there's just an endless supply of awesome jobs for anyone, and everyone can just quit their job and find a better one, no problem. For most people, even during a good economy, it's just not that simple.
But actually, this doesn't apply to me specifically. The story I told was from my past. I did quit that job, found another that was worse, and then quit that job. At my current company, I'm high enough up the food chain that I've been able to insist that employees get a lunch break, and that they can leave at the end of the day. I'm fine. But my story isn't going to work for everyone, and I'm pretty sure the "9 to 5" work day is just gone from our cultural consciousness. We seem to have convinced ourselves that it was always 9 to 6.
She pushes random buttons until the weird prompt(s) go away. Congratulations grandma, you've set an unknown password and effectively bricked your new TV. Who is going to unbrick it? How?
First, devices often have some method to reset the password. They hold a button a 'reset' button while they reboot the device, and the password gets reset. So the TV doesn't need to be bricked.
Second, when talking about the various dangers of internet connected devices, it's this kind of unknowing user that make this default password such a big problem. A lot of grandmothers (and other people), instead of pressing random buttons to get past the prompts, will just leave all the default settings, leaving their devices completely exposed. It's often going to be better that they lock themselves in than if they leave the device completely open.
Well that's the sort of thing you hear about, but... well, first, in order to see that the database is in plaintext, you have to get access first. It's not uncommon for people to get into the systems because of password reuse or weak passwords or default passwords.
Also, you don't hear much about the compromises that are due to default passwords because it's not a big scary unexpected security flaw. It's written off as, "Yeah, that guy's dumb for leaving the default password." But I think when you're designing these things, you have to kind of assume that the guy setting it up is going to be stupid, and therefore make some effort to make the defaults secure.
So yes, the whole "default password" thing is a genuine problem. In fact, you might go as far as to say, the whole "password" thing is a problem, but it's not clear what the solution is, and it doesn't look like anyone is going to fix it.
How does having a secure operating system help when the web frontend developer doesn't understand how to correctly validate passwords.
Well the IoT manufacturer also has to do their job in building whatever web interface they build, but it certainly helps to start from a secure OS.
While having the source code available is helpful to see if there are security issues, that doesn't mean they will be found. Open source doesn't provide for greater security though.
Well it doesn't inherently completely make for better security. It does have some advantages, though. There's the obvious fact that there are generally more eyes on an open source project, so security problems may be more likely to be noticed. Also, frankly, security is hard to do well, and having a bunch of random developers coming up with their own solution will result in a lot of those developers doing it wrong. If you can create a coherent security standard that everyone can work from, then a lot of people have a vested interest in doing it well, and it'll probably be done well.
Obviously there are also downsides. The fact that there are a lot of eyes on the source also might make it easier for someone malicious to find an opening. Also, everyone standardizing on one security standard (or one OS) makes a monoculture. It means there's one big target to exploit, and if you can exploit it, you can get access to pretty much everything.
On the whole, I think it is smart for IoT manufacturers to use an established open source OS, both to save themselves money and to start from a point of relative security... but I think they already do that. AFAIK, a lot of those things are somehow built on Linux or a BSD. I don't think we need a singe OS, but I do think we need to figure out some security standards that establish what constitutes an acceptable level of security for an internet connected device.
I also think that, for consumer protection reasons, there should be some kind of push to open source the software computerized devices and appliances. Manufacturers can too easily stop updating things and drop support, leaving the people who owned it with no options but to replace the device.
Yeah, but I thought the point of the thought experiment was to point out the problematic nature of quantum mechanics-- because the cat isn't actually be both alive and dead at the same time.
Whether the cat is alive or dead is a problem of incomplete knowledge, not of an uncertain quantum state. The box is sealed so we don't know whether the cat is alive or dead, but it is either alive or dead. If the geiger counter is measuring the decay of an atom, that counts as a measurement. We can put other equipment in the box to record when the geiger counter was triggered and when the cat was killed. We still won't know whether the cat is alive or dead while it's sealed, but we can go back to the recording and determine whether it was alive at a given moment.
This is in contrast to theories about quantum mechanics which state that there actually is no outcome until it's measured. It's not just that you don't know where the photon is until you detect it, but the photon doesn't exist in an exact location until it's detected.
At least, that was my understanding of the thought experiment.
I'm also not understanding the modified version of the thought experiment proposed in the article. It says that Alice can, "using her knowledge of quantum physics — prepare a quantum message to send to the other friend". What is a quantum message in this context? Then it says:
I don't understand that, since it says that the information would be transmitted in a "quantum message". But apparently you need to know the "quantum properties" of the person in the other box?
Maybe not if you're being paid hourly, but in the traditional "8 hour work day" for salaried employees, those 8 hours were 9-5. The any breaks you took were included in those 8 hours.
I agree that there's a question about the reliability of the data if they're gathering it from online quizzes, but that's not even the first thing that comes to mind. What I always wonder when they have these kinds of personality tests is, how are they even coming up with these things?
These personality tests always seem suspect to me. They question will be something like, "Consider the statement, 'I care deeply about other people's emotions.' Do you strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, somewhat agree, or strongly agree?" To what extent to they take the response at face value? Maybe the test-taker will lie because they want a particular outcome on the test. Maybe they'll just answer with whatever answer they think they're supposed to. Maybe they think they care deeply about other people's emotions, but actually they're very inconsiderate people. There might even be a sort of Dunning–Kruger effect, where the most emotionally tuned-in people are more likely to understand the extent to which they don't consider other people's feelings, and score themselves lower than those who are completely inconsiderate.
And I'm not even sure I buy the "Big Five" traits as particularly worthwhile. Even though there's been some attempt to arrive at them scientifically, that kind of narrowing is always going to be somewhat arbitrary and subject to existing philosophical assumptions.
Maybe these scientists are really brilliant and have carefully crafted these tests to account for all this, and I just don't understand psychology enough. However, I suspect that it's just not very scientific. And that makes it particularly dangerous when scientists try to make claims like, "This is the sort of person who should be in charge of things." That just seems like a statement outside of the scope of a scientific study.
Yeah, it's... almost baffling how this happened. I remember having a 9-5 job a few decades ago. One day, I interviewed for a new job which I'd been told was a "standard 8 hour work day." When I started the job, I was told the hours were 9-6. I said, "I thought you said this was a standard 8 hour work day. If I work 9-6, that's 9 hours." I was told no, that's still 8 hours. I got a 1 hour lunch break, and that didn't count.
But the lunch hour always counted before. For decades of people working 9-5, the lunch break counted. And then, after working there for a few days, I realized that I didn't, in fact, get a 1 hour lunch break anyway. I could leave my desk for maybe 20 minutes before my boss got upset that I'd just disappeared in the middle of the day.
And I thought, "Wow, this boss is being abusive." I started talking to friends about it, and they told me, no, that's normal now. Nobody counts the lunch hour, and a "standard 8 hour work day" is 9am to 6pm. Also, in spite of the 1 hour lunch break not counting towards the "8 hours", it was also normal that you didn't actually get that lunch break, and worked through lunch at your desk. Nobody could account for how or why or even when this happened. It was as though all the companies got together and just decided to pretend that things have always been that way.
And yeah, I've started hearing places that will say they have a "normal 40 hour work week" where people are expected to work 8-6 or 9-7. They've dropped the excuse that the lunch hour doesn't count. They just act like you're stupid if you expected a 40 hour work week to be literally 40 hours.
Those are the mythical academics who sit posh furnished college offices and debate the abstract idea of the day.
Yeah, I like my academics sitting in unfurnished offices!</sarcasm>
Sorry, I'm not trying to make a real argument there, but I don't really agree with you very much. I mean, yes, education needs to have some eventual application to the real world in order to be useful, but that doesn't mean that education should simply be vocational. Some of the effects on the worlds are indirect and take time, but that doesn't make them useless.
I don't even think that the goal of educators should be to "improve human kind". It's enough if they improve the life and the mind of the students. Let the students then "improve human kind", for whatever that means. And in that sense, K-8 isn't "worthless". It's not enough to get a very good job all on its own, but most kids leave 8th grade better, more informed people than if they hadn't gone to school.
My point is that it's nonsense to complain that the government should stay out of regulate the pharmaceutical industry because the "free market" will sort things out. Since the industry relies so heavily on patents and trademarks, it's inherently a non-free market already, due to government intervention. That's before we even start talking about the FDA.
In fairness, there's still not much fragmentation among iPhones/iPads. The big difference is basically just screen resolution, and the event yesterday suggests they're pushing toward 3 sizes of the same aspect ratio. It's not even clear you need to worry much about the difference between the iPhone X and the iPhone XR, since the XR seems to be similar in size but lower resolution. Your UI elements can just be displayed at a lower resolution.
But more importantly, there's basically 1 iOS. There are 50 different vendors struggling to differentiate their own version of iOS. While Android vendors often don't let users upgrade to the latest version of Android, Apple's pretty good at pushing people to keep their devices update, so developers can mostly focus on making sure their app runs on the latest version of iOS.
And when you complain about the "iPhone Xs Max SE Plus Rose Gold Special Edition", I don't know why the color matters at all.
There's still things to complain about with Apple, but it still doesn't seem very fragmented, compared to Android at least.
User deletes content from their device thinking it will be available on iCloud for restoring.
I suspect that you think this is an important point, implying that the person purchased it, downloaded it, deleted it, and was foolish for expecting that they could download it again. It's not quite that simple.
Here's the thing: Apple encourages users to think that the "purchase" includes hosting for re-downloads. It's part of the service they provide. I've had dealings with their customer support where they say, "Oh, just delete it and redownload it." If you buy it on your Apple TV, you can't really download it to the Apple TV for storage. If you buy it on an iOS device, you can download it to the device, but can't then transfer it off the device. If you download it to your computer, you can back it up and all of that, but it still has DRM. You continue to need access to Apple's servers in order to watch the movie.
Personally I make copies of my content and crack the DRM...
Ok, that's nice and all, but the companies "selling" this content actively discourage this behavior. My point was basically that companies should be legally required to allow this. If they're losing distribution rights, fine, but provide warning to people who are relying on your streaming service. Give them an opportunity to download a DRM-free copy.
Markets can't correct this behavior because drugs are effectively a monopoly situation.
Not only that, but the reason they're effectively a monopoly is because of patents-- which is already a form of government regulation. The idea that the pharmaceuticals industry is a "free market" is absurd. It's a highly regulated market, but it's a very poorly regulated market. It probably needs to be highly regulated, but the regulations could be modernized and improved.
Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to pass sensible regulation because so many people are so strongly unsophisticatedly pro-business that they're anti-government, anti-consumer, anti-evironment, and opposed to any form of economic or scientific expertise.
This is why we need stronger consumer protection. This isn't a weird, difficult, complex issue. In my mind, there's a very simple solution to this:
Make it illegal for digital media stores to remove access to anything that has been purchased. If, for some reason, they're unable to continue hosting it for streaming, they should be legally required to provide you with a DRM-free download.
Or else, they should be barred from using words like "buy" or "purchase". They can offer "long term rentals" with clear and explicit wording that access may be revoked at any time. Those disclaimers should not be buried in a EULA or terms of service. It should be legally required to be displayed obviously each time the long-term rental is offered.
You could debate some of the details, but the basic gist should be clear: Either provide people with what they "bought", or make it clear that they're not buying it.
with net neutrality, content publishers and distributors get to peer directly with an isp and flood their network with whatever data the content provider wants.
No, that's not how that works. Content publishers' ISPs get to peer with other ISPs because that's how the Internet works. Without peering, there's just a bunch of unconnected networks, of "walled gardens", and not the Internet. You want to go back to the days of AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe? Fine. Go start that business and see how it goes. Meanwhile, the rest of us want access to the Internet.
And content providers don't "flood their networks". That shows another fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. This is not a broadcast network. A company like Netflix isn't just sending out all their video, all the time, to everyone. Their users request the video, and then the request goes over the ISP's network, over to Netflix's ISP, to Netflix's server, and Netflix allows the download. Verizon is trying to charge Netflix for Netflix allowing Verizon customers to download something.
Without net neutrality, content publishers... have an incentive to keep spurious traffic low
They have an incentive to keep their traffic low regardless. Again using Netflix as an example, they already pay a boatload of money for internet access. They have to move massive amounts of information very quickly, and that's expensive. If they could cut their bandwidth needs by 20%, they'd save a bunch of money. They'd do it if they could.
... and pass on the costs to the consumer.
This is another one of those fundamental misunderstandings of how things work. While it's true that when a company has to pay more, they sometimes "pass on the cost to consumers," that's not necessarily how that works. That economic model imagines a world where businesses set their prices by figuring out their costs and just adding a set percentage to everything. Businesses don't set prices that way!
Let's say you were paying $100 for a product last year, and this year the price is increased to $110. Was that because prices went up somewhere in the supply chain and the product now costs $10 more to produce?
Probably not. Yes, it's possible that the product costs $85 to bring to market, and the cost went up to $95, and they increased their price to account for the difference. Or it might be that it costs $70 to bring to market, and the price went up to $90, but they decided that they could only get away with raising the price by $10. Or it might even be that the price went down from $85 to $75, but they raised the price anyway because demand was high and they thought people would still buy it at the higher price.
Companies don't just transparently pass costs on to consumers. They set the price based on supply and demand, with varying levels of profit margin.
Well reading your post only leads me back around to this question: Why are these VPN services writing their own client anyway?
I understand that a VPN client should theoretically not be doing anything terribly complicated and so shouldn't be too hard to write. At the same time, why are they writing their own clients at all? After decades of dealing with VPN, how is it that we still don't have a simple, open, trouble-free VPN system built into the OS?
As far I can can tell, the biggest problem is the same problem that we're having throughout computing: nobody wants to invest in standards. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft and Cisco will only spend money to develop and secure a solution where they then have a lock on their own proprietary protocols and formats, in order to prevent real competition. If someone else comes up with an open standard, you get some kind of NIH syndrome which explained by another older xkcd comic.
We need to create standards again, instead of each tech company trying to build their own little walled garden. I know having open standards or even FOSS doesn't prevent there from being security issues, but at least it allows interested parties to work together on them.
Yeah, it's actually very bad for Valve for platforms to be locked down. Steam is an alternate distribution method that's in competition with Apple's and Microsoft's app stores. If alternate distribution methods are shut down, they lose a big chunk of their business.
Yeah, I think part of the reason this is happening is that most people don't understand URLs. The different parts seem meaningless and arbitrary, and so they might imagine that they can be omitted without consequence. For example, that part that says, "http://"? It's meaningless and ugly and it's always "http://", so why not just leave it out? And why have the "www." as the beginning part of the name when all websites start with "www." and you could just leave it off?
But that's not true. The "http://" could be "https://" or "ftp://" or any number of other things. And it's not really that the "name of the website" is "www.slashdot.org". ORG is a domain. SLASHDOT is one of many subdomains of ORG. WWW is one of many subdomain of SLASHDOT. You could in turn have any number of subdomains of WWW. Each subdomain can have different information associated with it. It can have it's own A record, MX records, TXT records. The subdomains can be used for any number of things, and not just websites.
And sure, I think it's likely that most of the time, the WWW domain points to all the same stuff as @, but that's not always the case. I'd argue that this move by Google doesn't make things less confusing, but rather makes it more confusing. It means their browser will be displaying incorrect information.