Apple have an advantage here because they make both the software and the hardware and can tune both to improve performance.
E.g. in one of Louis Rossman's videos he found out that the trackpad in a Macbook supports both SPI and USB. It runs in USB mode when you run Windows via Bootcamp or are in the EFI shell but SPI when you run macOS.
Intel actually did the same thing in reverse to allow Arm only NDK binaries to run pretty well on x86 Android devices. A lot of games were C/OpenGL applications ported from iOS that ended up being compiled to ARM binaries, not Java and libhoundini got pretty decent performance translating them to x86.
In fact Dec had a translation layer which translated x86 NT binaries to Alpha native binaries. That actually run the code in emulation until it had profiled it and found all the entry points and then did a translation which it cached on disk. So at one point the Dec Alpha was the fastest processor for running x86 binaries.
Of course this sort of thing only really works if you translated code from a low power/low performance chip to a comparatively high power/high performance chip, i.e. x86 to Alpha or ARM to x86. Back when libhoudini was launched the Atom had a bit more native performance than the fastest ARM chips, albeit when consuming much more power when active.
Now the problem with translating something like Photoshop to run on ARM is that people typically run Photoshop on a fairly high end x64 system. A low power ARM implementation like a Snapdragon 835 doesn't have the horsepower to run it well even assuming the translation layer does a perfect job.
The problem the US has is not too few rules. It has a vast number of rules, and each new rule has been subtly altered by interested parties lobbying. And those interested parties are very, very good at gaming the rules that exist and at the same time lobby for subtle changes in any new rules which suit their interests and screw their opponents.
A couple of examples would be the ban on Kinder Surprise eggs.
The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act prohibits confectionery products which contain a "non-nutritive object", unless the non-nutritive object has functional value.[19] Essentially, the Act bans "the sale of any candy that has embedded in it a toy or trinket".[20]
In 1997, the staff of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) examined and issued a recall for some Kinder Surprise illegally brought into the US with foreign labels.[21] The staff determined that the toys within the eggs had small parts. The staff presumed that Kinder Surprise, being a chocolate product, was intended for children of all ages, including those under three years of age. On this basis, the staff took the position that Kinder Surprise was in violation of the small parts regulation and should be banned from importation into the US.[21]
Kinder Surprise eggs are legal in Canada and Mexico, but are illegal to import into the US. In January 2011, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) threatened a Manitoba resident with a $300 (Canadian dollars) fine for carrying one egg across the US border into Minnesota.[22] In June 2012, CBP held two Seattle men for two and a half hours after discovering six Kinder Surprise eggs in their car upon returning to the US from a trip to Vancouver. According to one of the men detained, a border guard quoted the potential fine as US $2,500 per egg.[23]
In 2012, the FDA re-issued their import alert stating "The embedded non-nutritive objects in these confectionery products may pose a public health risk as the consumer may unknowingly choke on the object".[24]
Kinder Surprise bears warnings advising the consumer that the toy is "not suitable for children under three years, due to the presence of small parts", and that "adult supervision is recommended".[25]
Some US cosmetics manufacturer got a ban in for some long forgotten product which now means Kinder Surprise eggs are seized by customs and illicit egg importers fined.
The agency's failure to effectively regulate cigarettes, a mature technology that has been extensively studied since the 1950s, raised doubts about its competence to take on the far more complex questions surrounding e-cigarettes. When the FDA detailed its plans to aggressively regulate e-cigarettes last year by using the same exact regulatory regime it had used for cigarettes, that concern seemed warranted. Per that plan, any vapor products introduced after 2007--essentially all of them--would have to retroactively apply for pre-market approval. Those that failed to receive it could be ordered off the market, potentially sending millions of users back to far more dangerous combustible cigarettes. It looked as if Philip Morris' gamble would pay off more than anyone could have anticipated.
Since the market for e-cigarettes barely existed in 2007, there was no baseline established for the product, meaning e-cig producers couldn't just apply under the substantial equivalence standard that is available to cigarettes. Instead they had to meet a much vaguer standard, convincing FDA regulators that approving their products is "appropriate for the protection of the public health." It's uncertain exactly what that will entail with the FDA's new direction, but we do know
I remember when I got it I chose it because I could add Ram and upgrade the hard disk. And it's a nicely built machine once you put in 16GB and an SSD. Interesting thing is that you still see a lot of them in use.
Of course in the long run Apple will kill them off because new OS releases won't run on them, and you'll need those new OS releases to build for iOS. And building for iOS is the only reason I bought an Apple over say Asus who'll sell you a whole range of machines from dirt cheap netbooks, to Apple-like ultrabooks to beefy gaming machines.
I.e. at some point, even if I still need to build stuff for iOS it may well be that running macOS in VirtualBox on a PC is easier than running it on an old Macbook.
I'd be very surprised if Apple go back to making machines with user upgradeable storage and Ram. In fact they seem to be trending to making things like the Wifi card non upgradeable.
The main topics covered by the groups run from Russia were race relations, Texan independence and gun rights. RBC counted 16 groups relating to the Black Lives Matter campaign and other race issues that had a total of 1.2 million subscribers. The biggest group was entitled Blacktivist and reportedly had more than 350,000 likes at its peak.
Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements â" extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."[5]
There's a certain amount of irony that Democrats are complaining about this, given the idea was to sow general discord in the US rather than to make one party win over another. Especially as, during the Cold War, the KGB did want doveish candidates to win over hawkish ones - e.g.
Russian GRU defector Stanislav Lunev said in his autobiography that "the GRU and the KGB helped to fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad," and that during the Vietnam War the USSR gave $1 billion to American anti-war movements, more than it gave to the VietCong,[19] although he does not identify any organisation by name. Lunev described this as a "hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost".[19] The former KGB officer Sergei Tretyakov said that the Soviet Peace Committee funded and organized demonstrations in Europe against US bases.[20] According to Time magazine, a US State Department official estimated that the KGB may have spent $600 million on the peace offensive up to 1983, channeling funds through national Communist parties or the World Peace Council "to a host of new antiwar organizations that would, in many cases, reject the financial help if they knew the source."[13] Richard Felix Staar in his book Foreign Policies of the Soviet Union says that non-communist peace movements without overt ties to the USSR were "virtually controlled" by it. Lord Chalfont claimed that the Soviet Union was giving the European peace movement £100 million a year. The Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) alleged Soviet funding of CND.
U.S. plans in the late 1970s and early 1980s to deploy Pershing II missiles in Western Europe in response to the Soviet SS-20 missiles were contentious, prompting Paul Nitze, the American negotiator, to suggest a compromise plan for nuclear missiles in Europe in the celebrated "walk in the woods" with Soviet negotiator Yuli Kvitsinsky, but the Soviets never responded.[21] Kvitsinsky would later write that, despite his efforts, the Soviet side was not interested in compromise, calculating instead that peace movements in the West would force the Americans to capitulate.[22]
In November 1981, Norway expelled a suspected KGB agent who had offered bribes to Norwegians to get them to write letters to newspapers denouncing the deployment of new NATO missiles.[13]
In 1985 Time magazine noted "the suspicions of some Western scientists that the nuclear winter hypothesis was promoted by Moscow to give antinuclear groups in the U.S. and Europe some fresh ammunition against America's arms buildup."[23] Sergei Tretyakov claimed that the data behind the nuclear winter scenario was faked by the KGB and spread in the west as part of a ca
Who's to say that putting more thought into the design wouldn't have given us the same set of useful features, and more besides?
Worse Is Better is really an explanation of how ad hoc hacks that solve 90% of the problem now have survival characteristics over a more elegant 100% solution which may be later to market, or cost more.
E.g. USB vs FIrewire Unix vs Lisp Windows vs Unix
I.e. it's better to get a 90% solution out fast and cheap and then try to fix the limitations later.
USB is perhaps the best example of this - it was only originally meant for low speed peripherals like mice and keyboards. They were very dumb - the host computer set up a polling schedule, the host controller executed it and HID class devices simply respond when polled. However over the years it has added faster speeds and even things like OTG and USB 3.0's Asynchronous Notification.
USB got popular because it was royalty free to implement ports unlike Firewire, and very easy to implement peripherals. Later revisions added more features and improved efficiency and speed.
He's opinionated, comes up against a lot of interesting situations because he pushes things in ways they weren't meant to be pushed, and, frankly, has enough disposable income after his successes (e.g. being the #2 employee at Tumblr) that he's able to do a lot of firsthand product research on products I am occasionally interested in purchasing.
So rich guy with a lot of free time buys a lot of toys, and those toys do not make him happy. My heart bleeds for him, it really does.
It's an example of Worse Is Better. USB was easy to implement for devices because they basically just need to respond to packets in a ping pong manner. It was also covered by a patent pool so if a company joined the USB Implementers Forum it was issues a vendor ID and joined the patent pool.
Later revisions improved the speed and added a bunch of features but they did so on a carefully back compatible way. You can still plug in a USB 1.0 mouse into a USB 3.0 host, and it'll work.
Maybe God is punishing him with signal integrity and standard interpretation issues for founding a cesspool like Tumblr. Maybe it's a lowkey, Millennial version of purgatory he's stuck in.
I don't have any devices with USB-C, but it seems like it works for everyone else.
We're not allowed to use Chinese here because they fear us plotting against the corrupt dictatorship of the modmins in a language they bù huì kàn dông.
Android has a big issue with ad supported software. Because there's not a lot of difference between a sleazy pop up ad library and malware. Both of them make your system run like a dog until you do a firmware reset.
So if you install a bunch of apps you need to firmware reset Android pretty frequently, otherwise your battery life and stability will be terrible.
Google of course don't care about this since a lot of those ads you're getting served are ones they make money off. And the manufacturers would rather you just replaced the handset when it gets slow and the battery life sucks.
The resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty, refers to the paradox that countries with an abundance of natural resources (like fossil fuels and certain minerals), tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources. There are many theories and much academic debate about the reasons for and exceptions to these adverse outcomes. Most experts believe the resource curse is not universal or inevitable, but affects certain types of countries or regions under certain conditions.
I think something similar happens to companies. If they can make a lot of money doing something which doesn't require much innovation - selling ads(Google), getting revenue from pre installed software(Microsoft), getting a cut of software sales(Apple, Google, Valve), or having a large number of hardware customers who are locked in (Every mainframe manufacturer in the 70's and 80's but IBM is the best example, arguably Apple and Samsung now) - it tends to make them not worry so much about innovation.
So in the short term they'll have little innovation but a healthy bottom line. Then the market will change and because they don't innovate they'll be screwed.
It happened to IBM when people moved from mainframes to PCs. It's probably happening to Microsoft now as people move from PCs to phones and tablets. Apple and Samsung might well have problems if people stop upgrading to the latest flagship phone every two years when their mobile network offers it 'free' (aka 'in exchange for continuing to pay $50+ a month for another two years'). If your business is based on significant numbers of people spending $700-1000 on a new phone every two years, you've got problems.
I.e. don't be surprised if Google and Apple end up going the way of Microsoft and IBM. They certainly deserve it for resting on their laurels and trying to convince people to upgrade to a new model with fewer features than the old one.
This is a three paragraph opinion piece on the front page that IÃ(TM)ve now skipped over. I come to/. because it gives a quick glimpse into interesting tech news, not to read some guyÃ(TM)s full opinion about googleÃ(TM)s design capabilities.
Another questionable slashdot UX choice is that when you paste smart quotes, emdashes, endashes etc into a slashdot comment field it displays them as gibberish like Ã(TM) rather than displaying them correctly or automagically converting them to their ASCII safe equivalents : ", - or '.
Now you may say "That's because Slashdot uses UTF-8 rather than some Microsoft proprietary encoding!". Except it doesn't - not much outside ASCII actually works.
You can work around it by pasting your comment here
Why do a company wide drive to have better design when you can give some tech journalist a goody bag in return for him writing an article gushing about how you 'finally get design'?
Right, and that's another way that Trek and similar series are a bit lacking in imagination.
Of course you can handwave it a bit on the ground that special effects are expensive and an actor with some shit glued to their forehead is cheap.
I'm actually more bothered by the fact that aliens act too human in Trek than look to human. It's a strange, Californian view of multiculturalism where everyone at least in the main cast is the same under the forehead bumps and ignoring their dietary preferences.
Of course outside California that's not true at all - human cultures are really different from each other and it's just not true that someone who grew up in Africa is the same as someone who grew up in Syria is the same as someone who grew up in Germany.
For example Germans didn't even have a word for 'taharrush gamea' until Merkel let in those migrants.
In Star Trek series it's like, at least for the main cast, everyone is present day middle class American but they've got parents from the old country with some odd ideas. Meanwhile outside the main cast all aliens behave in the way stereotypical of their species.
For the moment at least, Intel is out of the SoC side of the smartphone market. This will allow ARM architecture based SoCs to absorb the remaining market share they didn't have already.
What's less clear at the moment is whether this will also impact the low-cost/non-premium tablet market, as embodied by products such as the Surface 3. In their updated statement, Intel has told us that Broxton is cancelled for both "phones and tablets." Our current understanding is that Broxton is the SoC at the heart of the Willow Trail platform - the successor to the widely used Cherry Trail-T - but at this time Intel has not explicitly confirmed whether this is in fact Willow Trail, or if Broxton's tablet variation represented another platform altogether. Though regardless of what happens with traditional tablets, we'll continue see Intel in more premium tablet-like devices such as 2-in-1s (e.g. Surface Pro) via Apollo Lake and the Core processor lineup, as Intel has previously identified convertable devices as a growth market for the company.
Update 5/02: In a newer statement, Intel has confirmed that Apollo Lake will be offered to tablet manufacturers. At this point it's not clear what the tradeoffs are for that versus Willow Trail, and whether Apollo Lake is suitable for all types of devices that the current-generation Cherry Trail has been used in. But this does mean we will see tablets using the Goldmont CPU core, while Intel Intel will flesh out the rest of their tablet SoCs with Core-based parts. Intel will also "continue to support" their tablet customers with Bay Trail, Cherry Trail, and SoFIA parts.
Also not discussed in greater detail is Intel's future plans for their overall Atom lineup. With Apollo Lake announced just earlier this month, it's clear that Intel's Atom efforts have not been cancelled entirely. We will still see the new 14nm Goldmont cores appear in low-cost PCs under Apollo Lake, most likely in several 11-to-13 inch high volume devices. However for the moment there is not an Atom core on Intel's roadmap beyond Goldmont.
Is it cancelled? Yeah, kinda. On the other hand I bet if Apple said "Hey Intel, we'd like to launch a phone with an Apollo Lake successor in it" I'm sure they could uncancel it.
The problem was that the Asus business wasn't really a business because Intel didn't make any money out of it. So in the absence of a real customer I think they'll keep launching Atom microarchitectures but only produce SKUs for the markets that make money.
E.g. I bet they sell embedded/low end netbook/low power server Atom SoCs.
The odd thing is is Microsoft hadn't fucked up mobile/desktop convergence you could have had a device like the Nokia Communicator running a version of Windows based on the desktop kernel. So you'd able to unfold the clamshell and run desktop apps. Or keep it closed and press buttons on the cover to phone people.
E.g. imagine a device like this that could run desktop apps
Sadly of course Windows Mobile couldn't run desktop applications. In fact it couldn't even run Win32 applications cross compiled for Arm (i.e. WIndows Mobile ones) but only Metro Apps. Which no one wrote.
So we all ended up running Android. Of course now the value of desktop Windows applications has pretty much ceased for most people - they can do most things on other OSs.
An Intel inside iPhone would be an interesting development.
Asus made Atom based phones for a while and they were really cheap, mainly because Intel had a complicated deal where Intel paid various expenses to offset the cost of the chips. So the net cost of an Atom chip to Asus was low and may even have been negative (I've heard -$40 per device).
Asus didn't sell many phones and switched over to Qualcomm. And still don't sell many phones.
Atom has come on quite a bit since then - out of order execution for example. And Intel have lower power chips. And of course an Arm licence.
I could see Intel doing some extensive efforts to get Apple to use their devices - a custom core perhaps and very extensive co-branding and co-marketing.
It's basically the opposite version of the rumour that Apple would do an Arm based laptop. Actually they didn't, but the iPad Pro is Arm based and you can buy an external keyboard for it.
I reckon Apple are doing well enough with their A10X that they wouldn't want to use a third party application CPU, though they'll use third party modems.
I could see them releasing a low end laptop with a low power Intel chip though. Something thinner and less power hungry than the Macbook Air.
But a phone based on an Intel x64 or ARM chip? I'm sceptical. I think they'd be more likely to do an AMD CPU and GPU laptop. Or an Intel/NVidia one.
You can make a case for Trek being very racist. All Vulcans are logical and inscrutable and a bit uptight. All Klingons are aggressive and warlike.
Ferengi look and act like a Nazi caricature of Jews.
I.e. in each case races have a well defined trait and all examples of that race seem to share. So I could see why someone who thinks that racial traits dominate over individual ones would like Trek even if Roddenberry would have been appalled by this.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple have an advantage here because they make both the software and the hardware and can tune both to improve performance.
E.g. in one of Louis Rossman's videos he found out that the trackpad in a Macbook supports both SPI and USB. It runs in USB mode when you run Windows via Bootcamp or are in the EFI shell but SPI when you run macOS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
SPI is obviously a lower power bus, but of course it's easier to add support for HID over SPI to an OS you control than it to one you don't.
So Apple have a special mode to save power by running the trackpad in SPI mode rather than USB.
Neat.
Intel actually did the same thing in reverse to allow Arm only NDK binaries to run pretty well on x86 Android devices. A lot of games were C/OpenGL applications ported from iOS that ended up being compiled to ARM binaries, not Java and libhoundini got pretty decent performance translating them to x86.
http://android-x86.sceners.org...
In fact Dec had a translation layer which translated x86 NT binaries to Alpha native binaries. That actually run the code in emulation until it had profiled it and found all the entry points and then did a translation which it cached on disk. So at one point the Dec Alpha was the fastest processor for running x86 binaries.
Of course this sort of thing only really works if you translated code from a low power/low performance chip to a comparatively high power/high performance chip, i.e. x86 to Alpha or ARM to x86. Back when libhoudini was launched the Atom had a bit more native performance than the fastest ARM chips, albeit when consuming much more power when active.
Now the problem with translating something like Photoshop to run on ARM is that people typically run Photoshop on a fairly high end x64 system. A low power ARM implementation like a Snapdragon 835 doesn't have the horsepower to run it well even assuming the translation layer does a perfect job.
Or it could be that Mensa members are hypochondriacs who manage to get themselves diagnosed with mental illness.
It's another social sciences study which confirms a popularly held belief and thus brings fame and funding to the institution which did it.
The problem the US has is not too few rules. It has a vast number of rules, and each new rule has been subtly altered by interested parties lobbying. And those interested parties are very, very good at gaming the rules that exist and at the same time lobby for subtle changes in any new rules which suit their interests and screw their opponents.
A couple of examples would be the ban on Kinder Surprise eggs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act prohibits confectionery products which contain a "non-nutritive object", unless the non-nutritive object has functional value.[19] Essentially, the Act bans "the sale of any candy that has embedded in it a toy or trinket".[20]
In 1997, the staff of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) examined and issued a recall for some Kinder Surprise illegally brought into the US with foreign labels.[21] The staff determined that the toys within the eggs had small parts. The staff presumed that Kinder Surprise, being a chocolate product, was intended for children of all ages, including those under three years of age. On this basis, the staff took the position that Kinder Surprise was in violation of the small parts regulation and should be banned from importation into the US.[21]
Kinder Surprise eggs are legal in Canada and Mexico, but are illegal to import into the US. In January 2011, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) threatened a Manitoba resident with a $300 (Canadian dollars) fine for carrying one egg across the US border into Minnesota.[22] In June 2012, CBP held two Seattle men for two and a half hours after discovering six Kinder Surprise eggs in their car upon returning to the US from a trip to Vancouver. According to one of the men detained, a border guard quoted the potential fine as US $2,500 per egg.[23]
In 2012, the FDA re-issued their import alert stating "The embedded non-nutritive objects in these confectionery products may pose a public health risk as the consumer may unknowingly choke on the object".[24]
Kinder Surprise bears warnings advising the consumer that the toy is "not suitable for children under three years, due to the presence of small parts", and that "adult supervision is recommended".[25]
Some US cosmetics manufacturer got a ban in for some long forgotten product which now means Kinder Surprise eggs are seized by customs and illicit egg importers fined.
Or look at this
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
The agency's failure to effectively regulate cigarettes, a mature technology that has been extensively studied since the 1950s, raised doubts about its competence to take on the far more complex questions surrounding e-cigarettes. When the FDA detailed its plans to aggressively regulate e-cigarettes last year by using the same exact regulatory regime it had used for cigarettes, that concern seemed warranted. Per that plan, any vapor products introduced after 2007--essentially all of them--would have to retroactively apply for pre-market approval. Those that failed to receive it could be ordered off the market, potentially sending millions of users back to far more dangerous combustible cigarettes. It looked as if Philip Morris' gamble would pay off more than anyone could have anticipated.
Since the market for e-cigarettes barely existed in 2007, there was no baseline established for the product, meaning e-cig producers couldn't just apply under the substantial equivalence standard that is available to cigarettes. Instead they had to meet a much vaguer standard, convincing FDA regulators that approving their products is "appropriate for the protection of the public health." It's uncertain exactly what that will entail with the FDA's new direction, but we do know
I've got one of these.
I remember when I got it I chose it because I could add Ram and upgrade the hard disk. And it's a nicely built machine once you put in 16GB and an SSD. Interesting thing is that you still see a lot of them in use.
Of course in the long run Apple will kill them off because new OS releases won't run on them, and you'll need those new OS releases to build for iOS. And building for iOS is the only reason I bought an Apple over say Asus who'll sell you a whole range of machines from dirt cheap netbooks, to Apple-like ultrabooks to beefy gaming machines.
I.e. at some point, even if I still need to build stuff for iOS it may well be that running macOS in VirtualBox on a PC is easier than running it on an old Macbook.
I'd be very surprised if Apple go back to making machines with user upgradeable storage and Ram. In fact they seem to be trending to making things like the Wifi card non upgradeable.
From TFA
The main topics covered by the groups run from Russia were race relations, Texan independence and gun rights. RBC counted 16 groups relating to the Black Lives Matter campaign and other race issues that had a total of 1.2 million subscribers. The biggest group was entitled Blacktivist and reportedly had more than 350,000 likes at its peak.
From Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements â" extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."[5]
There's a certain amount of irony that Democrats are complaining about this, given the idea was to sow general discord in the US rather than to make one party win over another. Especially as, during the Cold War, the KGB did want doveish candidates to win over hawkish ones - e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Russian GRU defector Stanislav Lunev said in his autobiography that "the GRU and the KGB helped to fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad," and that during the Vietnam War the USSR gave $1 billion to American anti-war movements, more than it gave to the VietCong,[19] although he does not identify any organisation by name. Lunev described this as a "hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost".[19] The former KGB officer Sergei Tretyakov said that the Soviet Peace Committee funded and organized demonstrations in Europe against US bases.[20] According to Time magazine, a US State Department official estimated that the KGB may have spent $600 million on the peace offensive up to 1983, channeling funds through national Communist parties or the World Peace Council "to a host of new antiwar organizations that would, in many cases, reject the financial help if they knew the source."[13] Richard Felix Staar in his book Foreign Policies of the Soviet Union says that non-communist peace movements without overt ties to the USSR were "virtually controlled" by it. Lord Chalfont claimed that the Soviet Union was giving the European peace movement £100 million a year. The Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) alleged Soviet funding of CND.
U.S. plans in the late 1970s and early 1980s to deploy Pershing II missiles in Western Europe in response to the Soviet SS-20 missiles were contentious, prompting Paul Nitze, the American negotiator, to suggest a compromise plan for nuclear missiles in Europe in the celebrated "walk in the woods" with Soviet negotiator Yuli Kvitsinsky, but the Soviets never responded.[21] Kvitsinsky would later write that, despite his efforts, the Soviet side was not interested in compromise, calculating instead that peace movements in the West would force the Americans to capitulate.[22]
In November 1981, Norway expelled a suspected KGB agent who had offered bribes to Norwegians to get them to write letters to newspapers denouncing the deployment of new NATO missiles.[13]
In 1985 Time magazine noted "the suspicions of some Western scientists that the nuclear winter hypothesis was promoted by Moscow to give antinuclear groups in the U.S. and Europe some fresh ammunition against America's arms buildup."[23] Sergei Tretyakov claimed that the data behind the nuclear winter scenario was faked by the KGB and spread in the west as part of a ca
Worse Is Better is really an explanation of how ad hoc hacks that solve 90% of the problem now have survival characteristics over a more elegant 100% solution which may be later to market, or cost more.
E.g.
USB vs FIrewire
Unix vs Lisp
Windows vs Unix
I.e. it's better to get a 90% solution out fast and cheap and then try to fix the limitations later.
USB is perhaps the best example of this - it was only originally meant for low speed peripherals like mice and keyboards. They were very dumb - the host computer set up a polling schedule, the host controller executed it and HID class devices simply respond when polled. However over the years it has added faster speeds and even things like OTG and USB 3.0's Asynchronous Notification.
USB got popular because it was royalty free to implement ports unlike Firewire, and very easy to implement peripherals. Later revisions added more features and improved efficiency and speed.
So rich guy with a lot of free time buys a lot of toys, and those toys do not make him happy. My heart bleeds for him, it really does.
It's an example of Worse Is Better. USB was easy to implement for devices because they basically just need to respond to packets in a ping pong manner. It was also covered by a patent pool so if a company joined the USB Implementers Forum it was issues a vendor ID and joined the patent pool.
Later revisions improved the speed and added a bunch of features but they did so on a carefully back compatible way. You can still plug in a USB 1.0 mouse into a USB 3.0 host, and it'll work.
https://www.dreamsongs.com/Ris...
Maybe God is punishing him with signal integrity and standard interpretation issues for founding a cesspool like Tumblr. Maybe it's a lowkey, Millennial version of purgatory he's stuck in.
I don't have any devices with USB-C, but it seems like it works for everyone else.
We're not allowed to use Chinese here because they fear us plotting against the corrupt dictatorship of the modmins in a language they bù huì kàn dông.
This is a trolling effort worthy of the legendary posters of yore!
+5 Inciteful
Android has a big issue with ad supported software. Because there's not a lot of difference between a sleazy pop up ad library and malware. Both of them make your system run like a dog until you do a firmware reset.
So if you install a bunch of apps you need to firmware reset Android pretty frequently, otherwise your battery life and stability will be terrible.
Google of course don't care about this since a lot of those ads you're getting served are ones they make money off. And the manufacturers would rather you just replaced the handset when it gets slow and the battery life sucks.
Are you doing the retard thing and including phones, tablets, watches and any other thing you can throw in to try and make the numbers look worse?
Even if you do that it's still ~40%, level with Android
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-m...
If you could just desktop systems it's ~90%
https://www.netmarketshare.com...
Courts and other state institutions have power over you because they have a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence.
Some solar powered technology to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into a valuable building material.
Even better it should be self replicating - it would produce seeds which, when planted, would grow into copies of itself.
That way humans could plant the seeds in fertile soil to get the process going and then just leave it.
Sigh. Such a shame such a technology doesn't exactly grow on trees...
With countries there's something called the Resource Curse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I think something similar happens to companies. If they can make a lot of money doing something which doesn't require much innovation - selling ads(Google), getting revenue from pre installed software(Microsoft), getting a cut of software sales(Apple, Google, Valve), or having a large number of hardware customers who are locked in (Every mainframe manufacturer in the 70's and 80's but IBM is the best example, arguably Apple and Samsung now) - it tends to make them not worry so much about innovation.
So in the short term they'll have little innovation but a healthy bottom line. Then the market will change and because they don't innovate they'll be screwed.
It happened to IBM when people moved from mainframes to PCs. It's probably happening to Microsoft now as people move from PCs to phones and tablets. Apple and Samsung might well have problems if people stop upgrading to the latest flagship phone every two years when their mobile network offers it 'free' (aka 'in exchange for continuing to pay $50+ a month for another two years'). If your business is based on significant numbers of people spending $700-1000 on a new phone every two years, you've got problems.
I.e. don't be surprised if Google and Apple end up going the way of Microsoft and IBM. They certainly deserve it for resting on their laurels and trying to convince people to upgrade to a new model with fewer features than the old one.
This is a three paragraph opinion piece on the front page that IÃ(TM)ve now skipped over. I come to /. because it gives a quick glimpse into interesting tech news, not to read some guyÃ(TM)s full opinion about googleÃ(TM)s design capabilities.
Another questionable slashdot UX choice is that when you paste smart quotes, emdashes, endashes etc into a slashdot comment field it displays them as gibberish like Ã(TM) rather than displaying them correctly or automagically converting them to their ASCII safe equivalents : ", - or '.
Now you may say "That's because Slashdot uses UTF-8 rather than some Microsoft proprietary encoding!". Except it doesn't - not much outside ASCII actually works.
You can work around it by pasting your comment here
https://dan.hersam.com/tools/s...
Yeah, but they're great at PR.
Why do a company wide drive to have better design when you can give some tech journalist a goody bag in return for him writing an article gushing about how you 'finally get design'?
Right, and that's another way that Trek and similar series are a bit lacking in imagination.
Of course you can handwave it a bit on the ground that special effects are expensive and an actor with some shit glued to their forehead is cheap.
I'm actually more bothered by the fact that aliens act too human in Trek than look to human. It's a strange, Californian view of multiculturalism where everyone at least in the main cast is the same under the forehead bumps and ignoring their dietary preferences.
Of course outside California that's not true at all - human cultures are really different from each other and it's just not true that someone who grew up in Africa is the same as someone who grew up in Syria is the same as someone who grew up in Germany.
For example Germans didn't even have a word for 'taharrush gamea' until Merkel let in those migrants.
In Star Trek series it's like, at least for the main cast, everyone is present day middle class American but they've got parents from the old country with some odd ideas. Meanwhile outside the main cast all aliens behave in the way stereotypical of their species.
"Alien race" is a pretty common expression, even if it makes taxonomists twitch.
It really is too bad that Intel has killed Atom line.
They've killed off the name 'Atom' for netbooks and I'm not sure they're launching any more phone SKUs, but the Atom microarchitecture lives on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.anandtech.com/show...
Is it cancelled? Yeah, kinda. On the other hand I bet if Apple said "Hey Intel, we'd like to launch a phone with an Apollo Lake successor in it" I'm sure they could uncancel it.
The problem was that the Asus business wasn't really a business because Intel didn't make any money out of it. So in the absence of a real customer I think they'll keep launching Atom microarchitectures but only produce SKUs for the markets that make money.
E.g. I bet they sell embedded/low end netbook/low power server Atom SoCs.
The odd thing is is Microsoft hadn't fucked up mobile/desktop convergence you could have had a device like the Nokia Communicator running a version of Windows based on the desktop kernel. So you'd able to unfold the clamshell and run desktop apps. Or keep it closed and press buttons on the cover to phone people.
E.g. imagine a device like this that could run desktop apps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And was based on a Goldmont core.
I'd have bought one.
Sadly of course Windows Mobile couldn't run desktop applications. In fact it couldn't even run Win32 applications cross compiled for Arm (i.e. WIndows Mobile ones) but only Metro Apps. Which no one wrote.
So we all ended up running Android. Of course now the value of desktop Windows applications has pretty much ceased for most people - they can do most things on other OSs.
An Intel inside iPhone would be an interesting development.
Asus made Atom based phones for a while and they were really cheap, mainly because Intel had a complicated deal where Intel paid various expenses to offset the cost of the chips. So the net cost of an Atom chip to Asus was low and may even have been negative (I've heard -$40 per device).
Asus didn't sell many phones and switched over to Qualcomm. And still don't sell many phones.
Atom has come on quite a bit since then - out of order execution for example. And Intel have lower power chips. And of course an Arm licence.
I could see Intel doing some extensive efforts to get Apple to use their devices - a custom core perhaps and very extensive co-branding and co-marketing.
It's basically the opposite version of the rumour that Apple would do an Arm based laptop. Actually they didn't, but the iPad Pro is Arm based and you can buy an external keyboard for it.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy...
I reckon Apple are doing well enough with their A10X that they wouldn't want to use a third party application CPU, though they'll use third party modems.
I could see them releasing a low end laptop with a low power Intel chip though. Something thinner and less power hungry than the Macbook Air.
But a phone based on an Intel x64 or ARM chip? I'm sceptical. I think they'd be more likely to do an AMD CPU and GPU laptop. Or an Intel/NVidia one.
Oh I dunno.
You can make a case for Trek being very racist. All Vulcans are logical and inscrutable and a bit uptight. All Klingons are aggressive and warlike.
Ferengi look and act like a Nazi caricature of Jews.
I.e. in each case races have a well defined trait and all examples of that race seem to share. So I could see why someone who thinks that racial traits dominate over individual ones would like Trek even if Roddenberry would have been appalled by this.
Most of them are made by the Taiwanese at TSMC, not the Chinese. China is a generation or more behind Taiwan when it comes to fab technology.