Allowing a group of centralized elites to control mating opportunities. Gosh, no way that will be misused.
Existing approaches try to make matches between people who (ostensibly) share common interests, which definitely include meeting someone who they'll get along with, possibly for marriage, possibly for hookups. Some of these put an emphasis on raw sexuality, others claim to be about long term stuff, but ultimately each attracts a userbase suited to that behavior. The fact that you have to back up your tinder profile with some game is a feature to the users who are choosing to select someone who is capable of that, not a bug. The fact that you have to put up with endless tests on some sanctimonious religious website is a feature to the other users, not a bug. These tests are designed to weed out the people who do not and can not meet those social standards, physical standards, whatever.
What would putting an AI- even a really good AI- in charge of it, do? What's the goal of the AI? Your goal and the goal of your potential picks might be similar, but why would you assume the AI would have that as its goal? If the AI is trusted, a way to game that trust (and therefore get a potential mate you may not otherwise be able to) would be worth quite a bit to unscrupulous individuals as well. Your BEST case scenario here is that you give a lot of power to some goddamned server room.
A bigger thing is, what's the goal with an AI-driven matchmaking or hookup site? What's the model that pays for everyone at the company? Is it subscription based? Are they literally incentivized to keep you on the website meeting people, instead of being involved in a monogamous relationship with no need for their services, even if that is both your stated and actual preference? "Uh oh, these two would be a perfect match, and therefore we'd lose two customers. Better prevent them from meeting each other through this app!"
I mean, we are talking a shift of like an inch or two. Is that a big deal nowadays somehow? We are in a world with thumb keyboards instead of some chorded trickery that uses all your fingers, which would be faster and more ergonomic, and most people use QWERTY keyboards, which are ludicrously unergonomic and....
> isn't particularly friendly to left-handed people either...isn't particularly friendly to right-handed people, what with almost all the frequent keys being under the left hand.
There's no inherent rule implying that a numpad must be used with the dominant hand, any more than there's a rule implying that your dominant hand should have the E, T, and A keys under it (the three most common letters in English, all under the left hand on those idiotic QWERTY keyboards you continue to use your whole fucking life).
A numpad is only shitty if you never use it. Maybe you never have cause to type in numbers. That's just bizzare to me. I've also never seen anything implying, at any point, that a numpad is easier to use with your dominant hand. Plenty of studies showing that you are using a keyboard that is vastly more likely to cause long term injuries, and no one gives a fuck about that.
I mean, all the laptops I've ever owned, including my two current but now older dudes, have a numpad. I wouldn't personally consider a laptop without one. It really is interesting that it is contentious.
Wait, you don't like numpads? We can have a holy war! I can't deal with anything without a friggin numpad. Feels totally derp to try to enter more than a few numbers without one. I didn't realize there were people who actually don't like the numpad for some heretical reason. EEEEEIIIIIINFIDELLL!!!
Maybe, but probably not. System76 deserves some attention as a top tier integrator for Linux laptops. They appear to be the roughest analogy to Apple in Linux-land. The last time System76 made noise, here on slashdot we mostly shit on them for having such pricy laptops that didn't have a 4K option. Well, now they do. It's clearly of interest to slashdotters, as we chided them on it last time.
System 76 is a pretty good value for the machine you get. Lets go over your choices to build a ~$5000 machine.
> dual 1080 SLI
Yes, that would be expensive. It's SLI on a friggin laptop. The "low end" option is a GTX 1070, which totally blows away what you can get on, say, an Apple. The dual 1080 SLI option adds 1500 bucks to the price. This is what you would expect, and also, not something you would buy unless you were actually sure you wanted it. This is a top end graphics card, and you're talking TWO of them in a laptop. This alone is 30% of the price.
> two 2TB HDDs
Lets be clear here: included in the price is an 256 GB SSD. You are adding two additional 2.5" HDDs to this.
The 5 thousand dollar machine you built has a top of the line (which commands a VAST premium) Nvidia graphics card, then it has A SECOND ONE OF THOSE. It has THREE storage media- an SSD, and two HDDs. That sounds about right.
Note that in raw power, this machine totally blows away anything offered by Apple, which can't progress beyond a middle of the line Radeon, and I'm pretty damned sure it can't do three media. Heck, I think the option on that is just a big SSD (which the Bonobo also offers in the configurator). I can't even get close to these specs on Alienware, where I couldn't find the option to get TWO friggin GTX 1080s, nor THREE media in the rig.
My view: If you need the hardware you selected, this is a good deal for it, and you'd be hard pressed to find it at most mainstream shops, because the options chosen are wildly excessive for most users. The main name brands don't even offer this sort of stuff, it's super packed with metal.
Typing is slower than talking. Talking is slower than thought.
But by how much? This question was relevant to designers of old pen and paper RPGs (who needed to be concerned about how much could be communicated in a combat round, with magical aids such as telepathy and other such things that the game rules allowed), but I've never seen it discussed by like, scientists.
But that seems to mostly cover the latency, not the bandwidth.
Is the bandwidth actually that important? Musk is probably using it as a standin for other things, but I really think we'd need some evidence to see that it is. Even this far into knowledge of cognition, we don't know which cognition tasks are actually difficult, versus which ones are difficult for humans. We also don't know how thoughts work in general, even if we have a pretty good idea about how some specific tasks are solved by humans.
Outgoing bandwidth seems like it might be a problem for a billionaire, or a president, or a teacher. But in general, is it really? In the time since I saw this article to when I clicked refresh, there's been quite a few responses. I've read some of them. I could read them all, given time. But the available data in this comment section will, before the discussion is archived, add up to several minutes of reading for someone who reads fast. Consideration of input bandwidth (and there, reading is much faster than typing, and I'm pretty sure it is faster than speech) seems pretty important, especially to the majority of communication which has to inform, express, and persuade rather than command and instruct.
Telling a computer what to do in little time or effort has been a pretty big push in most computing industries for years now, and somehow voice instruction ends up being lame compared to typing (despite its superior bandwidth), and giving detailed instructions, such as that needed when programming, seems to be very slow indeed when compared with more abstract communications.
So overall I disagree that output bandwidth is going to be the limiter here. There's already more discussion than you can effortlessly input on any topic, and the speed of deeper thinking seems to be pretty slow on a lot of measures anyway.
I mean, that's just an assumption about what Linux users do with their systems. Microsoft has great data on what their users use their systems for- timestamps of executable programs, all data typed by keyboard, which ads are most likely to lead to sales, etc. Until someone starts tracking everything done by Linux users in the same manner Microsoft tracks all Windows users, I'm afraid your assertion is likely to remain unproven...
> It's probably based in a fear of accidental mass data corruption/deletion
Wait, so the one part of your ios device- which may store documents you need professionally, financially relevant documents, or even irreplaceable personal stuff- that gets this special "deleted just means moved to a special hidden place" treatment is YOUR BROWSER HISTORY?
Lets be real here, there's no way that's possible. And this is a backup copy of USER DELETED items, mind you.
When Intel struggled to get Broadwell out, their die shrink to 14nm using the architecture that they made in Haswell, you knew that they were having at least some issues. When it turned out that Haswells almost exclusively didn't properly support the new "transaction memory", to the effect that the opcodes had to be patched out, that was also kinda depressing. Skylake, their next in line, and the newest architecture update, was the last time they have even vaguely been on schedule.
Right after skylake, they announced that, instead of a die shrink to 10nm, they would add a new "optimization" step, and continue to tweak skylake instead of shrinking it. This is kabylake, which just came out in desktop and laptop properly (Xeons lag behind normally: the full suite of Skylake Xeons should be launching in a few months). They redid all their slides to show a full new arrow, giving them effectively another year to do the die shrink. Now that we are getting close to seeing what would be the next guy ("cannon lake"), who properly should be launching later this year on 10nm, we first heard that they were going to insert a "coffee lake", which would be another optimization at 14nm, for desktop, and that only laptop and low power chips would actually be on the 10m "cannon lake". And now, we find out that the first 10nm will be out for datacenter, which means an even further push back.
Summary: their older slides used to show around a summer 2016 launch for their 10nm process. Then it became a summer 2017 launch, then that became only a partial launch, and now it is looking like a spring 2018 launch. The words change, but the message is the same: "We aren't close to having 10nm be actually profitable, or possibly even all that functional".
Yes, of course. You'll be able to download some program from someone that will add colors back, add a border back, etc. It will work intermittently and eventually the developer will leave on a ship and take the straight road to Aman, joining the other elves.
> Second, when are you going to fix the spying?
The spying was mostly fixed a few months ago, when they made it much harder for most of their users looking to disable it. Right now, the spying is working pretty well, because even stuff like Spybot Anti Beacon can't quite get everything. Microsoft will eventually fix the spying by making it so that something critical to your use case is indistinguishable from, and transmitted with, all the telemetry. Then the users will never break it again!
> Will this be another multi-gigabyte update that opens hundreds of simultaneous connections to download, not only making Windows 10 unusable, but shutting down your entire network and making every other device on it unusable?
I mean, why should they answer that? Windows users will put up with it either way. This update takes away useful borders on applications and text boxes, makes all icons mostly indistinguishable and black-and-white, and generally makes it harder to know where anything is, what it does, or what it is doing. Its clearly there to screw with users who can't opt out, which is plenty of them.
> The ALWAYS release numbers if the numbers are good
They actually don't always. They release spin points when they are favorably ("one billion iPhones sold to date!"), but most of their product sales are estimates done by analysts, based in part on financials. The numbers I referenced at are just those folks doing that guesswork for Apple Watch. I'm saying, those numbers are by no means a failure, just because they don't approach iPhone numbers.
> You can get a new motorcycle or a used car for $3k--both of which will get you from point A to point B.
Not comfortably, reliably, and quickly. The car analogy works, you just have to up the price of the car beyond that point, and to something like 40k, beyond which you are undoubtedly paying for fashion or something akin to fashion.
Anyone selling watches is a fashion company. If the computer revolution had happened before President Kennedy, everyone would have smart hats. It's a profitable division of Apple that gets to reuse aspects of their tech side, and interface with their role as a technology company. But it is absolutely a fashion accessory, because that is what watches are. If you need a functional watch, you can get one for a few dollars, or probably just get a used one for free or almost free.
Apple has sold millions of watches. They don't release numbers, but estimates were 12 million in the first year. So there are like at least 20 million watches, probably. Apple sells like 50-80 million iPhones a year, so by that standard, they are a failure. And as you say, you probably know plenty of people with an iPhone, and only a few (or even none) with an Apple Watch.
The thing is, the Apple Watch NEVER had to match or even approach the iPhone in order to be a success. The iPhone is a such a success story it is a goddamned joke. The iPhone is close to half of Apple in most years, and this is for a company that nominally will sell you a server or monitor, actually will sell you a notebook, a laptop, a tablet, a goofy gameboy desktop, a variety of mice, the aforementioned watch, a bunch of almost entirely profit accessories (now with more dongles!), a music subscription service, and takes a cut off of everything they have a hand in selling, and not a small cut either.
The 8 bit Nintendo sold like 60 million units total. You probably knew someone with one of those, but for different reasons. There are entire companies with less units shipped than Apple Watch, and that will remain the case indefinitely. If your standard for success is "everyone in the civilized world will either own one of these or feel its absence day by day", then the Apple Watch is a failure. But if it is anything sane, it is not. It is clear that the Apple Watch, as a project, is quite profitable for Apple. Each Watch costs Apple much less to make than it sells for, and they sell millions.
No, you and your friends won't feel obligated to own and operate an Apple Watch. That doesn't make it a failure, any more than an Xbone or PS4 is a failure just because most people own neither.
> You guys let me know when I can run Rhino, Zbrush, A few different rendering systems, the entire Adobe suite, etc on a Linux platform
You can use all those with a VM, and some of them with Wine.
> without resorting to a VM
Oh you got conditions
Look, if your statement is, "when can I run every Windows-only software on Linux", then you are a Windows user who will ultimately put up with anything. Because of that, enjoy your Windows bullshit, blocking them at the router (which they could solve, by the way, by forcing a checkup or refusing to let you do X Y and Z without being fully updated, etc., but currently choose not too because that might actually drive you away). You'll check a bunch of boxes in a binary registry, run a bunch of twenty step script procedures, create macros for your router or whatever to regain control (which ironically means you are already a Linux user, and explicitly to get your freedom of action back). You'll put up with ANYTHING. And everything Microsoft throws at you is exactly what you deserve at this point.
I'm just saying- you want to play Microsoft games, you're gonna ultimately win Microsoft prizes. And I got no sympathy for it!
Any Linux native game can NOT be played under Windows, under any circumstance. The only reason Windows users don't care about this is that effectively EVERY game gets a Windows version. That's my point- if you wanted to play the Linux version of an intense 3D game on Windows, you are shit outta luck. WINE is a long term push to be able to run Windows games on Linux- the Windows solution is to hope that there's NEVER EVER EVEN ONE that exists on Linux but not Windows. That's my point, and that's absurd. What a ludicrous monopoly.
DX12 is mostly just there to keep Microsoft from falling behind Vulkan, and maybe also for some of that tasty incompatibility that they love so much. Expecting Wine to keep pace with Windows- when Microsoft has money to fuck with that whole thing- is not very great.
Linux of course supports all the latest and greatest cards, if the dev can be arsed to actually develop for it. Meanwhile, you can't play any Linux native games in Windows at all. Come on Windows, what's taking so long!
Windows users will put up with ANYTHING. They'll bitch and moan, but they'll never change anything. A small number will switch to Macs, which are expensive, but actually still behave like computers. As punishment, they'll have to deal with all the programs that are Windows only, of which there's usually one that just won't work right on a Mac to bother everyone. An even smaller number will switch to Linux, which can be a hassle, and has quite a few programs whose programmers are absolutely dedicated to the cause of preventing them from running on Linux.
But it is this absolute unwillingness to switch which has empowered Microsoft to be so shit in the first place. And of course, you CAN disable Windows updates if you are smart enough and desperate enough- even if you run out of ways (and Microsoft has nuked plenty of them), you can always block the bastards at the router. That escape hatch keeps enough of the top tier techies willing to put up with Windows on their personal machines.
Windows 10 is an absolute shitshow. And every Windows 10 user deserves every shitty minute.
Slashdot Mirror
Allowing a group of centralized elites to control mating opportunities. Gosh, no way that will be misused.
Existing approaches try to make matches between people who (ostensibly) share common interests, which definitely include meeting someone who they'll get along with, possibly for marriage, possibly for hookups. Some of these put an emphasis on raw sexuality, others claim to be about long term stuff, but ultimately each attracts a userbase suited to that behavior. The fact that you have to back up your tinder profile with some game is a feature to the users who are choosing to select someone who is capable of that, not a bug. The fact that you have to put up with endless tests on some sanctimonious religious website is a feature to the other users, not a bug. These tests are designed to weed out the people who do not and can not meet those social standards, physical standards, whatever.
What would putting an AI- even a really good AI- in charge of it, do? What's the goal of the AI? Your goal and the goal of your potential picks might be similar, but why would you assume the AI would have that as its goal? If the AI is trusted, a way to game that trust (and therefore get a potential mate you may not otherwise be able to) would be worth quite a bit to unscrupulous individuals as well. Your BEST case scenario here is that you give a lot of power to some goddamned server room.
A bigger thing is, what's the goal with an AI-driven matchmaking or hookup site? What's the model that pays for everyone at the company? Is it subscription based? Are they literally incentivized to keep you on the website meeting people, instead of being involved in a monogamous relationship with no need for their services, even if that is both your stated and actual preference? "Uh oh, these two would be a perfect match, and therefore we'd lose two customers. Better prevent them from meeting each other through this app!"
Amazon Echo is not "disguised", I think.
> Ergonomics be damned?
I mean, we are talking a shift of like an inch or two. Is that a big deal nowadays somehow? We are in a world with thumb keyboards instead of some chorded trickery that uses all your fingers, which would be faster and more ergonomic, and most people use QWERTY keyboards, which are ludicrously unergonomic and....
> isn't particularly friendly to left-handed people either ...isn't particularly friendly to right-handed people, what with almost all the frequent keys being under the left hand.
There's no inherent rule implying that a numpad must be used with the dominant hand, any more than there's a rule implying that your dominant hand should have the E, T, and A keys under it (the three most common letters in English, all under the left hand on those idiotic QWERTY keyboards you continue to use your whole fucking life).
A numpad is only shitty if you never use it. Maybe you never have cause to type in numbers. That's just bizzare to me. I've also never seen anything implying, at any point, that a numpad is easier to use with your dominant hand. Plenty of studies showing that you are using a keyboard that is vastly more likely to cause long term injuries, and no one gives a fuck about that.
I mean, all the laptops I've ever owned, including my two current but now older dudes, have a numpad. I wouldn't personally consider a laptop without one. It really is interesting that it is contentious.
The bonobo is 17" and has the 4K monitor, but is hella expensive. In fairness, Apple also does not offer a 4K in 17" :P
Maybe Alienware? System76 is kinda special in the Linux world, right? It is sorta comparable to Apple, broadly.
Wait, you don't like numpads? We can have a holy war! I can't deal with anything without a friggin numpad. Feels totally derp to try to enter more than a few numbers without one. I didn't realize there were people who actually don't like the numpad for some heretical reason. EEEEEIIIIIINFIDELLL!!!
Maybe, but probably not. System76 deserves some attention as a top tier integrator for Linux laptops. They appear to be the roughest analogy to Apple in Linux-land. The last time System76 made noise, here on slashdot we mostly shit on them for having such pricy laptops that didn't have a 4K option. Well, now they do. It's clearly of interest to slashdotters, as we chided them on it last time.
System 76 is a pretty good value for the machine you get. Lets go over your choices to build a ~$5000 machine.
> dual 1080 SLI
Yes, that would be expensive. It's SLI on a friggin laptop. The "low end" option is a GTX 1070, which totally blows away what you can get on, say, an Apple. The dual 1080 SLI option adds 1500 bucks to the price. This is what you would expect, and also, not something you would buy unless you were actually sure you wanted it. This is a top end graphics card, and you're talking TWO of them in a laptop. This alone is 30% of the price.
> two 2TB HDDs
Lets be clear here: included in the price is an 256 GB SSD. You are adding two additional 2.5" HDDs to this.
The 5 thousand dollar machine you built has a top of the line (which commands a VAST premium) Nvidia graphics card, then it has A SECOND ONE OF THOSE. It has THREE storage media- an SSD, and two HDDs. That sounds about right.
Note that in raw power, this machine totally blows away anything offered by Apple, which can't progress beyond a middle of the line Radeon, and I'm pretty damned sure it can't do three media. Heck, I think the option on that is just a big SSD (which the Bonobo also offers in the configurator). I can't even get close to these specs on Alienware, where I couldn't find the option to get TWO friggin GTX 1080s, nor THREE media in the rig.
My view: If you need the hardware you selected, this is a good deal for it, and you'd be hard pressed to find it at most mainstream shops, because the options chosen are wildly excessive for most users. The main name brands don't even offer this sort of stuff, it's super packed with metal.
Typing is slower than talking.
Talking is slower than thought.
But by how much? This question was relevant to designers of old pen and paper RPGs (who needed to be concerned about how much could be communicated in a combat round, with magical aids such as telepathy and other such things that the game rules allowed), but I've never seen it discussed by like, scientists.
So I googled it.
http://www.livescience.com/578...
But that seems to mostly cover the latency, not the bandwidth.
Is the bandwidth actually that important? Musk is probably using it as a standin for other things, but I really think we'd need some evidence to see that it is. Even this far into knowledge of cognition, we don't know which cognition tasks are actually difficult, versus which ones are difficult for humans. We also don't know how thoughts work in general, even if we have a pretty good idea about how some specific tasks are solved by humans.
Outgoing bandwidth seems like it might be a problem for a billionaire, or a president, or a teacher. But in general, is it really? In the time since I saw this article to when I clicked refresh, there's been quite a few responses. I've read some of them. I could read them all, given time. But the available data in this comment section will, before the discussion is archived, add up to several minutes of reading for someone who reads fast. Consideration of input bandwidth (and there, reading is much faster than typing, and I'm pretty sure it is faster than speech) seems pretty important, especially to the majority of communication which has to inform, express, and persuade rather than command and instruct.
Telling a computer what to do in little time or effort has been a pretty big push in most computing industries for years now, and somehow voice instruction ends up being lame compared to typing (despite its superior bandwidth), and giving detailed instructions, such as that needed when programming, seems to be very slow indeed when compared with more abstract communications.
So overall I disagree that output bandwidth is going to be the limiter here. There's already more discussion than you can effortlessly input on any topic, and the speed of deeper thinking seems to be pretty slow on a lot of measures anyway.
I mean, that's just an assumption about what Linux users do with their systems. Microsoft has great data on what their users use their systems for- timestamps of executable programs, all data typed by keyboard, which ads are most likely to lead to sales, etc. Until someone starts tracking everything done by Linux users in the same manner Microsoft tracks all Windows users, I'm afraid your assertion is likely to remain unproven...
> It's probably based in a fear of accidental mass data corruption/deletion
Wait, so the one part of your ios device- which may store documents you need professionally, financially relevant documents, or even irreplaceable personal stuff- that gets this special "deleted just means moved to a special hidden place" treatment is YOUR BROWSER HISTORY?
Lets be real here, there's no way that's possible. And this is a backup copy of USER DELETED items, mind you.
When Intel struggled to get Broadwell out, their die shrink to 14nm using the architecture that they made in Haswell, you knew that they were having at least some issues. When it turned out that Haswells almost exclusively didn't properly support the new "transaction memory", to the effect that the opcodes had to be patched out, that was also kinda depressing. Skylake, their next in line, and the newest architecture update, was the last time they have even vaguely been on schedule.
Right after skylake, they announced that, instead of a die shrink to 10nm, they would add a new "optimization" step, and continue to tweak skylake instead of shrinking it. This is kabylake, which just came out in desktop and laptop properly (Xeons lag behind normally: the full suite of Skylake Xeons should be launching in a few months). They redid all their slides to show a full new arrow, giving them effectively another year to do the die shrink. Now that we are getting close to seeing what would be the next guy ("cannon lake"), who properly should be launching later this year on 10nm, we first heard that they were going to insert a "coffee lake", which would be another optimization at 14nm, for desktop, and that only laptop and low power chips would actually be on the 10m "cannon lake". And now, we find out that the first 10nm will be out for datacenter, which means an even further push back.
Summary: their older slides used to show around a summer 2016 launch for their 10nm process. Then it became a summer 2017 launch, then that became only a partial launch, and now it is looking like a spring 2018 launch. The words change, but the message is the same: "We aren't close to having 10nm be actually profitable, or possibly even all that functional".
> First, can it be disabled?
Yes, of course. You'll be able to download some program from someone that will add colors back, add a border back, etc. It will work intermittently and eventually the developer will leave on a ship and take the straight road to Aman, joining the other elves.
> Second, when are you going to fix the spying?
The spying was mostly fixed a few months ago, when they made it much harder for most of their users looking to disable it. Right now, the spying is working pretty well, because even stuff like Spybot Anti Beacon can't quite get everything. Microsoft will eventually fix the spying by making it so that something critical to your use case is indistinguishable from, and transmitted with, all the telemetry. Then the users will never break it again!
> Will this be another multi-gigabyte update that opens hundreds of simultaneous connections to download, not only making Windows 10 unusable, but shutting down your entire network and making every other device on it unusable?
I mean, why should they answer that? Windows users will put up with it either way. This update takes away useful borders on applications and text boxes, makes all icons mostly indistinguishable and black-and-white, and generally makes it harder to know where anything is, what it does, or what it is doing. Its clearly there to screw with users who can't opt out, which is plenty of them.
You've been using it for backup/restore, it looks like you'll be able to actually play games off of it once this patch hits for real.
> The ALWAYS release numbers if the numbers are good
They actually don't always. They release spin points when they are favorably ("one billion iPhones sold to date!"), but most of their product sales are estimates done by analysts, based in part on financials. The numbers I referenced at are just those folks doing that guesswork for Apple Watch. I'm saying, those numbers are by no means a failure, just because they don't approach iPhone numbers.
> You can get a new motorcycle or a used car for $3k--both of which will get you from point A to point B.
Not comfortably, reliably, and quickly. The car analogy works, you just have to up the price of the car beyond that point, and to something like 40k, beyond which you are undoubtedly paying for fashion or something akin to fashion.
Anyone selling watches is a fashion company. If the computer revolution had happened before President Kennedy, everyone would have smart hats. It's a profitable division of Apple that gets to reuse aspects of their tech side, and interface with their role as a technology company. But it is absolutely a fashion accessory, because that is what watches are. If you need a functional watch, you can get one for a few dollars, or probably just get a used one for free or almost free.
> Is there one or a few "killer apps" that are driving people ot them or is it a big mix?
It's jewelry, dude. It also has a computer inside.
Totally absurd.
Apple has sold millions of watches. They don't release numbers, but estimates were 12 million in the first year. So there are like at least 20 million watches, probably. Apple sells like 50-80 million iPhones a year, so by that standard, they are a failure. And as you say, you probably know plenty of people with an iPhone, and only a few (or even none) with an Apple Watch.
The thing is, the Apple Watch NEVER had to match or even approach the iPhone in order to be a success. The iPhone is a such a success story it is a goddamned joke. The iPhone is close to half of Apple in most years, and this is for a company that nominally will sell you a server or monitor, actually will sell you a notebook, a laptop, a tablet, a goofy gameboy desktop, a variety of mice, the aforementioned watch, a bunch of almost entirely profit accessories (now with more dongles!), a music subscription service, and takes a cut off of everything they have a hand in selling, and not a small cut either.
The 8 bit Nintendo sold like 60 million units total. You probably knew someone with one of those, but for different reasons. There are entire companies with less units shipped than Apple Watch, and that will remain the case indefinitely. If your standard for success is "everyone in the civilized world will either own one of these or feel its absence day by day", then the Apple Watch is a failure. But if it is anything sane, it is not. It is clear that the Apple Watch, as a project, is quite profitable for Apple. Each Watch costs Apple much less to make than it sells for, and they sell millions.
No, you and your friends won't feel obligated to own and operate an Apple Watch. That doesn't make it a failure, any more than an Xbone or PS4 is a failure just because most people own neither.
> You guys let me know when I can run Rhino, Zbrush, A few different rendering systems, the entire Adobe suite, etc on a Linux platform
You can use all those with a VM, and some of them with Wine.
> without resorting to a VM
Oh you got conditions
Look, if your statement is, "when can I run every Windows-only software on Linux", then you are a Windows user who will ultimately put up with anything. Because of that, enjoy your Windows bullshit, blocking them at the router (which they could solve, by the way, by forcing a checkup or refusing to let you do X Y and Z without being fully updated, etc., but currently choose not too because that might actually drive you away). You'll check a bunch of boxes in a binary registry, run a bunch of twenty step script procedures, create macros for your router or whatever to regain control (which ironically means you are already a Linux user, and explicitly to get your freedom of action back). You'll put up with ANYTHING. And everything Microsoft throws at you is exactly what you deserve at this point.
I'm just saying- you want to play Microsoft games, you're gonna ultimately win Microsoft prizes. And I got no sympathy for it!
Any Linux native game can NOT be played under Windows, under any circumstance. The only reason Windows users don't care about this is that effectively EVERY game gets a Windows version. That's my point- if you wanted to play the Linux version of an intense 3D game on Windows, you are shit outta luck. WINE is a long term push to be able to run Windows games on Linux- the Windows solution is to hope that there's NEVER EVER EVEN ONE that exists on Linux but not Windows. That's my point, and that's absurd. What a ludicrous monopoly.
DX12 is mostly just there to keep Microsoft from falling behind Vulkan, and maybe also for some of that tasty incompatibility that they love so much. Expecting Wine to keep pace with Windows- when Microsoft has money to fuck with that whole thing- is not very great.
Linux of course supports all the latest and greatest cards, if the dev can be arsed to actually develop for it. Meanwhile, you can't play any Linux native games in Windows at all. Come on Windows, what's taking so long!
Windows users will put up with ANYTHING. They'll bitch and moan, but they'll never change anything. A small number will switch to Macs, which are expensive, but actually still behave like computers. As punishment, they'll have to deal with all the programs that are Windows only, of which there's usually one that just won't work right on a Mac to bother everyone. An even smaller number will switch to Linux, which can be a hassle, and has quite a few programs whose programmers are absolutely dedicated to the cause of preventing them from running on Linux.
But it is this absolute unwillingness to switch which has empowered Microsoft to be so shit in the first place. And of course, you CAN disable Windows updates if you are smart enough and desperate enough- even if you run out of ways (and Microsoft has nuked plenty of them), you can always block the bastards at the router. That escape hatch keeps enough of the top tier techies willing to put up with Windows on their personal machines.
Windows 10 is an absolute shitshow. And every Windows 10 user deserves every shitty minute.