The miracle of advertising... does Google know anything about targeted advertising? Do you think they could reach customers in their target markets with a message or two promoting their service?
So, why can't we get "Party Lines" where 4 adjacent houses go in together and share the cost of a Google Fiber connection? That would be both cheaper, and better, than Comcast.
But, Comcast has an experienced marketing staff. They set you up first month for free, followed by 6 months or even a year (depending on the market) of "affordable" service, sometimes less than $20/month. Then they start boiling the frog, making you jump through hoops to keep your rate down at $25/month, or $30/month, and, eventually, your only option is $60/month, for the same crappy service.
Sure, I'd rather pay $300 up front and get it for free. Hell, I'd pay $300 per year for Google Fiber level of service, happily. But, I'm not the broader market. The broader market will more readily part with nothing up front, then sign a 2 year agreement that costs them $1800 before they're done.
When they rolled out in underserved markets, did anyone do the analysis of why the market was underserved? Perhaps because there was also a lack of demand?
Besides, I'm more worried about some dillweed Sherriff's deputy's misinterpretations than an NSA super spy.
My experience of local and federal officials has been that there's just as much dillweed at the federal level as the local. You've also got some kickass super-sheriffs out there, probably as many or more than the NSA has "super spies."
Local law enforcement (at an undisclosed location) was hiring sophisticated drone surveillance to pre-scout raids and keep an eye in the sky to help inform as things went down, several years ago. Meanwhile, the federal armed forces were still scratching their heads about how to sign a contract to obtain similar equipment.
You're born: without constant care you will die, you have to be provided with food, shelter and all manner of special care - your head flops around if you aren't held properly.
When we're more mature, we're still not bullet proof, knife proof, or able to withstand a sudden stop in the vehicles we travel in, there's a long list of chemical poisons that can kill, fast or slow, many undetectable - sudden death is a possibility during virtually every hour of every day. All it takes is a bad actor to point a gun, or crossbow, or speeding car in our direction and BOOM, we're dead, or worse, in an instant.
We sleep in houses with glass windows, we congregate in large public gatherings, we invite mass murder and mayhem all the time. A single bad actor can kill hundreds with no special resources or skills.
So, what's so scary about a pacemaker that can "be hacked" by someone with enough time and determination? Is it that they might get away with it untraceably? Hardly likely. With all the time and effort that would go into this sort of hack, you could literally commit "the perfect murder" a dozen different ways - many of them less likely to lead back to the perpetrator. If people start dying of hacked pacemakers, the FBI will start by looking at ex-employees of the company, related companies, and "white hat" outfits like in the article. It's a relatively small group, compared to people who might have access to sodium cyanide, or a handgun and a car.
Having said all that, it is past time for medical device companies to start at least "closing the window" on nefarious hackability of their devices, which is why the FDA released cybersecurity guidance a couple of years back.
Missed a decimal point, I was shooting for 5m of sea level rise, which would take 5000 years at a rate of 0.1cm per year. Maybe by then we'll have cold fusion (or something as good), and landscaping won't be as expensive as it is today - of course, with enough free energy, you can just run a heat-pump in the ocean and push the heat back into the magma.
We only have the capacity to shore up the waterfront if the rise is gradual, like it has been for the last 100 years. If the hockey stick kicks up and we start rising a centimeter a year, lots and lots of coastline will be simply too expensive to preserve, no matter how many "working men" you convince to go dig holes inland to bring dirt out to build up the coast.
Florida already has barrier islands, but they're going to look even funnier than coral atolls if we sustain a gradual sea level rise of something like 0.1cm per year for then next 500 years.
That was Lex Luthor's plan in Superman III (or was it 2, I forget.)
Only works if the entire global economy doesn't go in the toilet - the big comfy economic boom that we're in is the only reason we're not still killing each other at every turn of the decade.
People generally dislike change. They dislike having to abandon their territorial lands, they dislike having to change their diet.
Even though _some_ lands will ultimately be "improved" by global warming, sea level rise will trump all of this by pushing the majority of human population off of the current coastlines inland, to wherever the new coastlines end up being. The fact that (only recently) coastal property is the most highly valued real-estate should tell you something about what people will think of having their once precious homes submerged for millenia to come.
Oh, but we're "better than that now" - we have a New World Order, which I thought was a platitude promulgated by a relatively recent Republican administration, but a quick Google search shows it to be a conspiracy theory about a totalitarian global government. United under one set of invisible rulers, we no longer kill each other in mass numbers, we're focused on killing the whole planet instead.
Having conquered basic survival, and politically advanced to a point where the majority of people have not been directly involved in a killing war during their lifetimes, the economic success that this has brought will be our ultimate undoing.
Apparently, he can't give it away fast enough. That's a problem with philanthropic efforts, if the Gates foundation had a goal to utilize $45B in the next 15 years, it would take a massive operation to administer that - average $3B per year, average 1 FTE overseeing each 10 million dollars per year project, that's full time employment for 300 people for the next 15 years.
Preaching to the choir, and no aggression meant on my side, either.
We're presently developing a product with a MS interface on it, 5% because we'll need printer drivers and they come easier in the Windows world than anywhere else... the other 95% is because "the team" is more comfortable in their Visual Studio environment with their.net derivative languages... I pitched Qt, they wouldn't even swing at it. I watch them spend hours per week chasing license issues, waiting for absurd update install download times (combination of MS and our IT's fault on that), and shake my head whenever I see something that takes tons of un-necessary time just because it's Microsoft based, but they're more "comfortable" there, and you know in the US, all you need to do is fear for your life and you can shoot to kill anyone who is making you fearful, so I suppose by extension in the corporate world all you have to do is be less comfortable with another tool and you can kill it too.
I suspect those IT departments using Outlook are "more comfortable" with it, too... I never have heard a rational explanation of what all those license fees do for them.
WebKit doesn't have to be used on the web to be useful. It's an easy and fast way to make GUIs for people who are used to the web, and every single graphical library has one.
Now I think we're talking about two different things: custom applications vs. end-user desktop. WebKit can be great for custom applications, but it is losing touch with the wider web, and that hurts the end-user desktop experience.
I have no idea how useful Kontact is with Exchange or compared to Google, and I don't care since a home user doesn't have access to either.
Perhaps Kontact can be used with exchange, I wouldn't know - and certainly my IT department isn't going to support it. It matters to probably a few hundred million people around the world who have no choice but to use Exchange at least some of the time.
I don't know that maintaining a web browser in the face of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and the rest makes any sense?
Konqueror is just a shell for qt's web rendering engine, which is needed if you want html email or easy to make apps with qtquick.
WebKit is pretty good, but there are places on the web where javascript (and other things) are slowly walking away from it... pages that render in Chrome that just don't in a WebKit based browser like Konqueror. This will always be the case with diverse rendering engines (Explorer-Mozilla, etc.), but it's getting worse with Chrome-WebKit since the split a couple of years ago.
Also, a standalone mail client? I haven't used one of those in nearly 5 years now. So, do I care that it hasn't updated? Do its users want it to become more like Outlook? I think probably not.
Use Kontact, it syncs email, contacts, agenda...
The ONLY reason I use outlook is to sync to the corporate outlook server, get my company mail and calendar items. Before getting bought out, my last company used Google office solutions - they really do work better. If you're worried about security, then use something secure - e-mail in outlook in a company with 100K employees, I doubt that's any more "in control" than a Google solution, they'll both screw up at some point - the only difference is that you can fire the in-house people who accidentally leak your internal e-mails, while Google will have some kind of limited liability clause...
There's easy, then there's zero effort. Sure, I know how to configure mail clients, but do I really want to be doing that everywhere I go? In the last 5 years, I have probably read/written my e-mail on 50 or more different machines, that's 50 install and configure processes I didn't have to go through, on several different operating systems, some of which don't support Thunderbird...
Back when I had two computers, and they only "cycled" once every 3-5 years, Eudora - and later Thunderbird, made perfect sense. As my IT responsibilities have grown, I really appreciate the time savings of web based solutions.
It has allowed me to move on and use other desktops than KDE... I used to truly believe it was the best environment, if you could live with the limitations like no AutoCad, etc. 4K screens killed it for me, and looking back now, it hasn't really improved since I left.
And Outlook has always failed on the search function... but I'm stuck with it for work mail/calendaring.
GMail does allow a number of separate email accounts to funnel into one inbox, I don't know the cap, personally I've tried to simplify my life and reduce the number of e-mail addresses that come to my inbox.
Choice is good, but I don't see open source devs choosing to compete with Chrome much anymore. I do wish that Webkit would stay current enough to keep up with Chrome, last time I tried doing something with Webkit, I discovered that the website I was trying to use wouldn't render in _any_ Webkit/Qt based browser...
Last I used KDE was on 1080p screens, and it was awesome, I loved it.
I've never had much of a problem with KDE and Gnome "playing together" - I usually end up with most of both installed after a few years, regardless of which I set up the system with. I know everybody bitches about KDE bloat, and it only gets worse if you add Gnome to it, but, seriously folks, are you trying to use a Raspberry Pi as your primary desktop machine? Any decent $200 and up computer from the last 10 years can handle both KDE and Gnome simultaneously without having anything approaching resource issues, with space left over to run Windows 10 in VirtualBox (not that that's a "good" windows experience, I suppose not that there's a "good" windows experience anywhere, but in VB it gets even worse.)
Five years ago I was using Thunderbird, and my wife Eudora, but they really were a PITA, after letting them go and just using gmail, life is a bit simpler - quite a bit simpler when using multiple machines. For me, the dedicated mail client kind of fell apart when I started using a half dozen or more computers on a weekly basis (cell phone, home desktop, home work laptop, home entertainment center, work desktop, work dev box (which gets re-imaged from scratch often), jumping over onto wife's new laptop, occasionally using wife's old laptop, kid's PC, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
News for NERDS, you're supposed to be chained to a desktop PC - mobile is far too hip to be square.
The miracle of advertising... does Google know anything about targeted advertising? Do you think they could reach customers in their target markets with a message or two promoting their service?
Isn't the Google self-flying spacecraft supposed to have evacuated the planet by 2456?
So, why can't we get "Party Lines" where 4 adjacent houses go in together and share the cost of a Google Fiber connection? That would be both cheaper, and better, than Comcast.
But, Comcast has an experienced marketing staff. They set you up first month for free, followed by 6 months or even a year (depending on the market) of "affordable" service, sometimes less than $20/month. Then they start boiling the frog, making you jump through hoops to keep your rate down at $25/month, or $30/month, and, eventually, your only option is $60/month, for the same crappy service.
Sure, I'd rather pay $300 up front and get it for free. Hell, I'd pay $300 per year for Google Fiber level of service, happily. But, I'm not the broader market. The broader market will more readily part with nothing up front, then sign a 2 year agreement that costs them $1800 before they're done.
When they rolled out in underserved markets, did anyone do the analysis of why the market was underserved? Perhaps because there was also a lack of demand?
Lower your sights, Western Nebraska is going to be within reach considerably before the whole state of Kansas.
Besides, I'm more worried about some dillweed Sherriff's deputy's misinterpretations than an NSA super spy.
My experience of local and federal officials has been that there's just as much dillweed at the federal level as the local. You've also got some kickass super-sheriffs out there, probably as many or more than the NSA has "super spies."
Local law enforcement (at an undisclosed location) was hiring sophisticated drone surveillance to pre-scout raids and keep an eye in the sky to help inform as things went down, several years ago. Meanwhile, the federal armed forces were still scratching their heads about how to sign a contract to obtain similar equipment.
You're born: without constant care you will die, you have to be provided with food, shelter and all manner of special care - your head flops around if you aren't held properly.
When we're more mature, we're still not bullet proof, knife proof, or able to withstand a sudden stop in the vehicles we travel in, there's a long list of chemical poisons that can kill, fast or slow, many undetectable - sudden death is a possibility during virtually every hour of every day. All it takes is a bad actor to point a gun, or crossbow, or speeding car in our direction and BOOM, we're dead, or worse, in an instant.
We sleep in houses with glass windows, we congregate in large public gatherings, we invite mass murder and mayhem all the time. A single bad actor can kill hundreds with no special resources or skills.
So, what's so scary about a pacemaker that can "be hacked" by someone with enough time and determination? Is it that they might get away with it untraceably? Hardly likely. With all the time and effort that would go into this sort of hack, you could literally commit "the perfect murder" a dozen different ways - many of them less likely to lead back to the perpetrator. If people start dying of hacked pacemakers, the FBI will start by looking at ex-employees of the company, related companies, and "white hat" outfits like in the article. It's a relatively small group, compared to people who might have access to sodium cyanide, or a handgun and a car.
Having said all that, it is past time for medical device companies to start at least "closing the window" on nefarious hackability of their devices, which is why the FDA released cybersecurity guidance a couple of years back.
Missed a decimal point, I was shooting for 5m of sea level rise, which would take 5000 years at a rate of 0.1cm per year. Maybe by then we'll have cold fusion (or something as good), and landscaping won't be as expensive as it is today - of course, with enough free energy, you can just run a heat-pump in the ocean and push the heat back into the magma.
We only have the capacity to shore up the waterfront if the rise is gradual, like it has been for the last 100 years. If the hockey stick kicks up and we start rising a centimeter a year, lots and lots of coastline will be simply too expensive to preserve, no matter how many "working men" you convince to go dig holes inland to bring dirt out to build up the coast.
Florida already has barrier islands, but they're going to look even funnier than coral atolls if we sustain a gradual sea level rise of something like 0.1cm per year for then next 500 years.
That was Lex Luthor's plan in Superman III (or was it 2, I forget.)
Only works if the entire global economy doesn't go in the toilet - the big comfy economic boom that we're in is the only reason we're not still killing each other at every turn of the decade.
Bigger beaches never seem to bother anyone.
People generally dislike change. They dislike having to abandon their territorial lands, they dislike having to change their diet.
Even though _some_ lands will ultimately be "improved" by global warming, sea level rise will trump all of this by pushing the majority of human population off of the current coastlines inland, to wherever the new coastlines end up being. The fact that (only recently) coastal property is the most highly valued real-estate should tell you something about what people will think of having their once precious homes submerged for millenia to come.
Oh, but we're "better than that now" - we have a New World Order, which I thought was a platitude promulgated by a relatively recent Republican administration, but a quick Google search shows it to be a conspiracy theory about a totalitarian global government. United under one set of invisible rulers, we no longer kill each other in mass numbers, we're focused on killing the whole planet instead.
Having conquered basic survival, and politically advanced to a point where the majority of people have not been directly involved in a killing war during their lifetimes, the economic success that this has brought will be our ultimate undoing.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org...
Currently giving away ~$4B / year against a ~$40B endowment, with 1376 employees (no clear statement of employee commitment hours per year).
Apparently, he can't give it away fast enough. That's a problem with philanthropic efforts, if the Gates foundation had a goal to utilize $45B in the next 15 years, it would take a massive operation to administer that - average $3B per year, average 1 FTE overseeing each 10 million dollars per year project, that's full time employment for 300 people for the next 15 years.
Preaching to the choir, and no aggression meant on my side, either.
We're presently developing a product with a MS interface on it, 5% because we'll need printer drivers and they come easier in the Windows world than anywhere else... the other 95% is because "the team" is more comfortable in their Visual Studio environment with their .net derivative languages... I pitched Qt, they wouldn't even swing at it. I watch them spend hours per week chasing license issues, waiting for absurd update install download times (combination of MS and our IT's fault on that), and shake my head whenever I see something that takes tons of un-necessary time just because it's Microsoft based, but they're more "comfortable" there, and you know in the US, all you need to do is fear for your life and you can shoot to kill anyone who is making you fearful, so I suppose by extension in the corporate world all you have to do is be less comfortable with another tool and you can kill it too.
I suspect those IT departments using Outlook are "more comfortable" with it, too... I never have heard a rational explanation of what all those license fees do for them.
WebKit doesn't have to be used on the web to be useful. It's an easy and fast way to make GUIs for people who are used to the web, and every single graphical library has one.
Now I think we're talking about two different things: custom applications vs. end-user desktop. WebKit can be great for custom applications, but it is losing touch with the wider web, and that hurts the end-user desktop experience.
I have no idea how useful Kontact is with Exchange or compared to Google, and I don't care since a home user doesn't have access to either.
Perhaps Kontact can be used with exchange, I wouldn't know - and certainly my IT department isn't going to support it. It matters to probably a few hundred million people around the world who have no choice but to use Exchange at least some of the time.
Konqueror is just a shell for qt's web rendering engine, which is needed if you want html email or easy to make apps with qtquick.
WebKit is pretty good, but there are places on the web where javascript (and other things) are slowly walking away from it... pages that render in Chrome that just don't in a WebKit based browser like Konqueror. This will always be the case with diverse rendering engines (Explorer-Mozilla, etc.), but it's getting worse with Chrome-WebKit since the split a couple of years ago.
Use Kontact, it syncs email, contacts, agenda...
The ONLY reason I use outlook is to sync to the corporate outlook server, get my company mail and calendar items. Before getting bought out, my last company used Google office solutions - they really do work better. If you're worried about security, then use something secure - e-mail in outlook in a company with 100K employees, I doubt that's any more "in control" than a Google solution, they'll both screw up at some point - the only difference is that you can fire the in-house people who accidentally leak your internal e-mails, while Google will have some kind of limited liability clause...
There's easy, then there's zero effort. Sure, I know how to configure mail clients, but do I really want to be doing that everywhere I go? In the last 5 years, I have probably read/written my e-mail on 50 or more different machines, that's 50 install and configure processes I didn't have to go through, on several different operating systems, some of which don't support Thunderbird...
Back when I had two computers, and they only "cycled" once every 3-5 years, Eudora - and later Thunderbird, made perfect sense. As my IT responsibilities have grown, I really appreciate the time savings of web based solutions.
It has allowed me to move on and use other desktops than KDE... I used to truly believe it was the best environment, if you could live with the limitations like no AutoCad, etc. 4K screens killed it for me, and looking back now, it hasn't really improved since I left.
And Outlook has always failed on the search function... but I'm stuck with it for work mail/calendaring.
GMail does allow a number of separate email accounts to funnel into one inbox, I don't know the cap, personally I've tried to simplify my life and reduce the number of e-mail addresses that come to my inbox.
Choice is good, but I don't see open source devs choosing to compete with Chrome much anymore. I do wish that Webkit would stay current enough to keep up with Chrome, last time I tried doing something with Webkit, I discovered that the website I was trying to use wouldn't render in _any_ Webkit/Qt based browser...
Last I used KDE was on 1080p screens, and it was awesome, I loved it.
I've never had much of a problem with KDE and Gnome "playing together" - I usually end up with most of both installed after a few years, regardless of which I set up the system with. I know everybody bitches about KDE bloat, and it only gets worse if you add Gnome to it, but, seriously folks, are you trying to use a Raspberry Pi as your primary desktop machine? Any decent $200 and up computer from the last 10 years can handle both KDE and Gnome simultaneously without having anything approaching resource issues, with space left over to run Windows 10 in VirtualBox (not that that's a "good" windows experience, I suppose not that there's a "good" windows experience anywhere, but in VB it gets even worse.)
Five years ago I was using Thunderbird, and my wife Eudora, but they really were a PITA, after letting them go and just using gmail, life is a bit simpler - quite a bit simpler when using multiple machines. For me, the dedicated mail client kind of fell apart when I started using a half dozen or more computers on a weekly basis (cell phone, home desktop, home work laptop, home entertainment center, work desktop, work dev box (which gets re-imaged from scratch often), jumping over onto wife's new laptop, occasionally using wife's old laptop, kid's PC, etc.)