One of the things that caused the Easter Island civilisation to collapse is because they had some new standard for Moai where you could just put on a new top bit instead of buying a whole new Moai every two years.
The result? Cannibalism, civilisation collapse and the eventual extinction of humans on the island.
This proves that you should chuck out your old laptops, phones and tablets every two years and buy a new ones. Unless you want to be EATEN ALIVE by a STARVING, ZOMBIE LIKE MOB.
What if we came up with walkers along the lines of the Star Wars AT-AT, but scaled down for personal transportation? With decent computer control, it could be possible. What kind of road would be best for them, maybe something like the generously spaced apart round stones used for footpaths?
Walking vehicles are a bad idea because of pressure. An M1A1 tank - a heavy tracked vehicle exerts less ground pressure than a family car. I walking tank like an AT-AT - or even a walking car - would exert an enormous down pressure.
The top 25% pay 72.8% of total income tax. The top 10% pay 55.8%. The top 1% pay 24.8. You'd need a serious austerity program to compensate for even the top 1% leaving.
They create most of the jobs too - a rich self employed person is another way of describing a small business. Jobs was a dick but it's not as if Apple would have been anywhere near as profitable or have employed as many people without him. Now you can say that some people are motivated by things other than money. Well no doubt, but what about the ones whose motivation is purely monetary. If they all left or had their property expropriated there's no real sign that the poor would get richer. In fact if you look at the USSR, Belarus, PRC etc the odds are that the poor would get poorer.
Now if you look at Sweden for example - which is really an example of a low inequality society done well - you find that
Up until around the 45th percentile, Sweden does better than the U.S. After this the U.S opens up a substantial advantage. It is clearly better to be poor in Sweden compared to the U.S, and obviously to be rich in America compared to Sweden.
What matters most is that this graph illustrates that it is better to be middle class in America. The 60% in the middle earn 20% more in the U.S than they do in Sweden, even taking government purchases crudely into account. It is a myth that only a few at the top do better in the American system compared to even arguably the most successful of the European welfare states.
I.e. the poorest 45% would be better off in a Swedish style system. Everyone else would be better off in the US. The problem is that the job creators are, by definition, in the top 55%. So you'll find that successful companies - Apple, Google, Microsoft etc - are much more likely to be started in the US than in Sweden. In the long run that means that the number of coins to go round will be more in a laissez faire society than in one where the government seeks to reduce inequality.
If you look here at GDP per capita PPP the US does better than Sweden and has done since the 1960's
Then it is possible to address the next problems: suburban sprawl. Cities should be highly centralized, and built upwards. It is absolutely stupid to build suburbs. Those who want to live in a rural area should be doing so because they farm. Those who aren't farming should be living in dense cities, where public transit can be effectively used. Once that is achieved, cars will not be necessary for the vast majority of people.
Yeah, free will and choice are sort of overrated really. Not to mention fattening.
Now Microsoft have bought it it's likely to get even worse. Which is fine, unless someone finds an exploit in the older versions. Then again, it's unlikely people would write their exploit code in such a way that it works with your particular version of glibc and so on - they'd target Windows and not bother trying to make it portable.
The problem with vendors doing what Skype are doing is that you can't get security fixes without ending up with an app that you need to run on your development machine to get decent performance.
Skype used to run fine on my netbook. It insists on updating itself - there's no way to stay on old versions. It got more and more sluggish with time - it took longer to launch and the video call quality decreased.
Now when I run it it pops up a message saying "Your computer speed is very slow"
Skype used to work fine on machines that were a lot more underpowered than a netbook even on connections that were a lot slower than my current 50Mbit down 8Mbit up DSL.
If you can't get crappy video in CIF-like resolution to work over an 8Mbit uplink given a dual core Atom with SSE at 1.6Ghz, I'd say the word bloated is about right. Especially if, as I suspect in the Skype case, the problem is not that you don't have the CPU horsepower to compress the video but that the app wraps up efficient video codec into a large application such that the video codec bit gets starved out. Of course if you have a fast CPU you probably don't have this problem. Still older versions of Skype actually worked a lot better on the same hardware, and even older versions used to run perfectly with a slower CPU and a slower connection. And it's not like it's impossible to decouple the video codec from the rest of the application and run it at a higher priority.
Skype for whatever reason just decided to put up a passive aggressive warning was easier than making their software work on netbooks when they found the issue during testing (why else was the warning code put in?). Even though realistically a lot more people are going to run Skype on a netbook than on a developer class laptop.
It's actually typical of modern Microsoft that they've bought something like Skype long after it has passed its prime. Skype a decade ago worked very well indeed. Modern Skype seems to be getting worse and worse. Still I'm sure the WinRT rewrite will solve all these issues, because one thing modern Microsoft APIs are known for is reducing bloat and making code run well on low end hardware.
Now there is a more nasty implication of the horse-doesn't-need-United-Steel argument. If a new colony can economically utilize horses, they can also economically utilize slaves. Or indentured servitude or debt bondage, with the hapless people theoretically capable of buying their freedom, but in reality they will perpetually owe their soul to the company store.
What kind of civilization is in need for automatic rifles? The kind "harvesting" neighboring states. No thanks.
You realise if your state says "No thanks" and the one next door decides it's a good idea, your civilisation is going to end up Helots working for their Spartans.
It seems that a lot of the greats go downhill quite quickly. Peter Molyneaux used to be a god, not anymore. The other Elite programmer now has nothing to do with computers any more. Hell, even the Romero's and Carmack's of this world were in decline decades ago.
You've always got a free erase unit, because at least one is reserved for wear levelling. It's easy to invent an algorithm that moves that free unit around the the disk by garbage collecting from a full unit to an empty one.
There are papers on this sort of thing. Look at the patents M Systems filed for example, or the documentation on TrueFFS. I've worked with embedded systems that used that and one of the first things we did after we got a socket driver working was to hammer a full disk and check that the wear levelling really did what it was supposed to.
And, sure enough if you log unit erases overnight they are evenly spread.
[checks articles]....ugh. Is that seriously it?Three months?
Wear retention on flash is kind of a bummer for time capsules and Stargate style ancient repositories of knowledge. An old school PC with a bios in mask rom should be able to boot up given power in hundreds of years time, assuming the hard disks don't have some sort of failure mode that happens when they are un-powered.
A modern machine has firmware in flash and also a flash drive. Both of which would end up blank in a few years to a few decades depending on technology with more recent being worse.
If I were rich I'd pay for some mask Roms of Wikipedia and bury them around the world. That way if the shit hits the fan and we end up in a dark age people could dig them up when civilisation is rebooting.
If the industry standard specification of BLERmax less than or equal to 220 had been used as the end-of-life criteria, then this same analysis would predict that with 95% confidence, 95% of the population of Kodak Writable CD discs will have a data life of greater than 12,000 years.
Then again a masked Rom in one of those wikipedia readers seems like you have the advantage of not needing to find or build a working CD Rom drive. Mind you, whoever digs it up is still going to have to work out how to build a display because I don't see any display technology lasting for 12,000 years underground.
(unless the supply a utility which moves data from least-used cells to most-used...)
All SSDs do wear levelling, otherwise they'd die after a couple of days. That happens beneath the LBA address layer - i.e. LBA's are mapped to physical addresses and the mapping changes each time an LBA is written.
So you don't need to do wear levelling at the file system level. In fact the only thing you need to do there is to have a TRIM command which tells the SSD that a range of LBAs no longer contain useful data. That means the SSD can mark them as obsolete which gives the wear levelling a bit more elbow room.
. Consumers are fickle. iOS is growing old, and people are becoming bored with it. Android might be popular (hey, the devices are cheap), but a lot of people with those devices aren't really enthralled with them.
My PCs run Windows and my phones run Android? Does that mean I'm 'enthralled' by the OSs? Not at all, the reason I use them is because there are a lot of software and hardware vendors that are committed to the platform. That means I've got a good choice of devices when I buy new one and good choice of applications to run on it. I.e. it doesn't really matter if the OS is a bit ugly or slow, because you can always buy a faster device and you spend time looking at applications, not the OS.
Before Android the most common OS was Symbian. Like Android it was widely supported by phone manufacturers. That tells me that if you want to take over from Android you need a similarly open platform. Windows Phone and iOS are not that platform. In fact Windows Phone has most of the downsides of iOS - a locked down environment - without the upsides - Apple customers slavish loyalty to Apple.
Killing off support for Windows Mobile applications meant that all their natural customers bought an Android or iOS device. Almost all of the independent software vendors that used to develop for Windows Mobile moved to Android and iOS too. So that means that they are dependent on the sort of people who are 'enthralled' by OS's. I.e. people that are sufficiently distracted by 'buttery smooth UIs' to not notice that they can't run the applications that run on Android and iOS. Idiot tech bloggers basically. It's actually funny how common the phrase 'buttery smooth' UI was in reviews of Windows Phone 7. Almost like Microsoft's PR people had said "if you use the phrase 'buttery smooth UI' in your review, we'll give you a free phone" or something.
Unfortunately these people are not a replacement for the people that used to buy Windows Mobile phones because they were dependent on a couple of apps, and those people have all moved to Android. No matter how butter smooth the UI is on Windows Phone, these people are not going to give up their apps to move back.
Also all the people who bought a Windows Phone 7 device got screwed when Windows Phone 8 came out because Windows Phone 8 applications will not run on WP7 and WP7 devices will not get an upgrade. Hardly the sort of thing you want to do if you're trying to promote Windows Phone as a premium platform with Apple like customer loyalty.
I.e. I'm not saying it is impossible that some platform will dethrone Android as the mainstream platform in the same way that Android dethroned Symbian. What I am saying is that that platform is not Windows Phone or iOS. My guess is that iOS will end up taking up the high margin/high end part of the phone market, rather like Macs do with the PC market. Android will take the rest. Windows Phone will struggle along with a couple of percent and the Windows Phone OEMs will bitch and need to be paid off regularly by Microsoft to stay on board. Or maybe Microsoft will make it's own phone and ditch Nokia, Samsung and HTC.
Chief executive officer Steve Ballmer introduced the latest version of Windows Phone software, available on devices including Nokia's Lumia 920 and the HTC 8X, to help his company win back share lost to competitors such as Apple. Microsoft has already demonstrated a willingness to build hardware, even if it means competing with long-time partners, through the creation of Surface, a tablet that runs Windows software.
"We are big believers in our hardware partners and together we're focused on bringing Windows Phone 8 to market with them," Redmond, Was
Windows Phone is just beginning. In one week it had 40,000 apps, 2 weeks later 50,000 apps, and another 2 weeks later, 60,000 apps! Apple and Android market place has more apps but I'm pretty sire it didn't grow this fast in their beginnings.
That's because all the employees, interns and so on at Microsoft are 'encouraged' to write a Windows Phone app by firing the ones that do not unless they have a note from their line manager excusing them. Also they MS bloggers, astroturfers etc have to mention the next Halo game - "Halo 5 - Flogging a dead Warthog", which will probably be a "Windows Phone 9" aka "XBox portable" exclusive the way things are going.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey! He read the TFA! We'll have to keep and eye on him and put a bullet in his brain when he turns
One of the things that caused the Easter Island civilisation to collapse is because they had some new standard for Moai where you could just put on a new top bit instead of buying a whole new Moai every two years.
The result? Cannibalism, civilisation collapse and the eventual extinction of humans on the island.
This proves that you should chuck out your old laptops, phones and tablets every two years and buy a new ones. Unless you want to be EATEN ALIVE by a STARVING, ZOMBIE LIKE MOB.
Yeah, you could bottle the virginity here and sell it to the rich and sexually jaded.
What if we came up with walkers along the lines of the Star Wars AT-AT, but scaled down for personal transportation? With decent computer control, it could be possible. What kind of road would be best for them, maybe something like the generously spaced apart round stones used for footpaths?
Walking vehicles are a bad idea because of pressure. An M1A1 tank - a heavy tracked vehicle exerts less ground pressure than a family car. I walking tank like an AT-AT - or even a walking car - would exert an enormous down pressure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_pressure
That's a very odd thing to say. The rich people are the ones who pay most of the taxes
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/income_tax/table2-4.pdf
The top 25% pay 72.8% of total income tax. The top 10% pay 55.8%. The top 1% pay 24.8. You'd need a serious austerity program to compensate for even the top 1% leaving.
They create most of the jobs too - a rich self employed person is another way of describing a small business. Jobs was a dick but it's not as if Apple would have been anywhere near as profitable or have employed as many people without him. Now you can say that some people are motivated by things other than money. Well no doubt, but what about the ones whose motivation is purely monetary. If they all left or had their property expropriated there's no real sign that the poor would get richer. In fact if you look at the USSR, Belarus, PRC etc the odds are that the poor would get poorer.
Now if you look at Sweden for example - which is really an example of a low inequality society done well - you find that
http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/income-distribution-in-us-and-sweden.html
Up until around the 45th percentile, Sweden does better than the U.S. After this the U.S opens up a substantial advantage. It is clearly better to be poor in Sweden compared to the U.S, and obviously to be rich in America compared to Sweden.
What matters most is that this graph illustrates that it is better to be middle class in America. The 60% in the middle earn 20% more in the U.S than they do in Sweden, even taking government purchases crudely into account. It is a myth that only a few at the top do better in the American system compared to even arguably the most successful of the European welfare states.
I.e. the poorest 45% would be better off in a Swedish style system. Everyone else would be better off in the US. The problem is that the job creators are, by definition, in the top 55%. So you'll find that successful companies - Apple, Google, Microsoft etc - are much more likely to be started in the US than in Sweden. In the long run that means that the number of coins to go round will be more in a laissez faire society than in one where the government seeks to reduce inequality.
If you look here at GDP per capita PPP the US does better than Sweden and has done since the 1960's
http://www.bls.gov/fls/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.pdf
Then it is possible to address the next problems: suburban sprawl. Cities should be highly centralized, and built upwards. It is absolutely stupid to build suburbs. Those who want to live in a rural area should be doing so because they farm. Those who aren't farming should be living in dense cities, where public transit can be effectively used. Once that is achieved, cars will not be necessary for the vast majority of people.
Yeah, free will and choice are sort of overrated really. Not to mention fattening.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWkWQ-39KLo&t=1m36s
And if I go back to 4.2.0.187 Secunia PSI flags it as vulnerable - e.g.
http://secunia.com/advisories/47856/
It's not clear if this vulnerability only affects 5.x or if the 4.x code is vulnerable too. Plus it still complains about the machine being slow.
Now Microsoft have bought it it's likely to get even worse. Which is fine, unless someone finds an exploit in the older versions. Then again, it's unlikely people would write their exploit code in such a way that it works with your particular version of glibc and so on - they'd target Windows and not bother trying to make it portable.
The problem with vendors doing what Skype are doing is that you can't get security fixes without ending up with an app that you need to run on your development machine to get decent performance.
Skype used to run fine on my netbook. It insists on updating itself - there's no way to stay on old versions. It got more and more sluggish with time - it took longer to launch and the video call quality decreased.
Now when I run it it pops up a message saying "Your computer speed is very slow"
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/Your-computer-speed-is-very-slow/td-p/385505
Skype used to work fine on machines that were a lot more underpowered than a netbook even on connections that were a lot slower than my current 50Mbit down 8Mbit up DSL.
If you can't get crappy video in CIF-like resolution to work over an 8Mbit uplink given a dual core Atom with SSE at 1.6Ghz, I'd say the word bloated is about right. Especially if, as I suspect in the Skype case, the problem is not that you don't have the CPU horsepower to compress the video but that the app wraps up efficient video codec into a large application such that the video codec bit gets starved out. Of course if you have a fast CPU you probably don't have this problem. Still older versions of Skype actually worked a lot better on the same hardware, and even older versions used to run perfectly with a slower CPU and a slower connection. And it's not like it's impossible to decouple the video codec from the rest of the application and run it at a higher priority.
Skype for whatever reason just decided to put up a passive aggressive warning was easier than making their software work on netbooks when they found the issue during testing (why else was the warning code put in?). Even though realistically a lot more people are going to run Skype on a netbook than on a developer class laptop.
It's actually typical of modern Microsoft that they've bought something like Skype long after it has passed its prime. Skype a decade ago worked very well indeed. Modern Skype seems to be getting worse and worse. Still I'm sure the WinRT rewrite will solve all these issues, because one thing modern Microsoft APIs are known for is reducing bloat and making code run well on low end hardware.
A video is making the rounds of a touchscreen voting machine registering a vote for Mitt Romney when Barack Obama was selected.
Oh, wait. Sorry. I thought it was the other way around.
The better specialized postapocalyptech for earthmoving is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ox but for more general usage the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse design is widely preferred.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/stellarcolony.php#id--Growing_a_Colony--The_Economics_of_Slaves
Now there is a more nasty implication of the horse-doesn't-need-United-Steel argument. If a new colony can economically utilize horses, they can also economically utilize slaves. Or indentured servitude or debt bondage, with the hapless people theoretically capable of buying their freedom, but in reality they will perpetually owe their soul to the company store.
Let's enslave this guy
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3231995&cid=41884829
What kind of civilization is in need for automatic rifles? The kind "harvesting" neighboring states. No thanks.
You realise if your state says "No thanks" and the one next door decides it's a good idea, your civilisation is going to end up Helots working for their Spartans.
I bet he's got his one click patent carved onto stone tablets somewhere.
It seems that a lot of the greats go downhill quite quickly. Peter Molyneaux used to be a god, not anymore. The other Elite programmer now has nothing to do with computers any more. Hell, even the Romero's and Carmack's of this world were in decline decades ago.
Gabe Newell is still Jesus, God and Richard Dawkins all rolled into one though
ObFatjoke.goes here
Even DadHacker got roped in writing WP apps. That means the interns probably wear their little fingers down to the knuckle.
You've always got a free erase unit, because at least one is reserved for wear levelling. It's easy to invent an algorithm that moves that free unit around the the disk by garbage collecting from a full unit to an empty one.
There are papers on this sort of thing. Look at the patents M Systems filed for example, or the documentation on TrueFFS. I've worked with embedded systems that used that and one of the first things we did after we got a socket driver working was to hammer a full disk and check that the wear levelling really did what it was supposed to.
And, sure enough if you log unit erases overnight they are evenly spread.
[checks articles] ....ugh. Is that seriously it?Three months?
Wear retention on flash is kind of a bummer for time capsules and Stargate style ancient repositories of knowledge. An old school PC with a bios in mask rom should be able to boot up given power in hundreds of years time, assuming the hard disks don't have some sort of failure mode that happens when they are un-powered.
A modern machine has firmware in flash and also a flash drive. Both of which would end up blank in a few years to a few decades depending on technology with more recent being worse.
If I were rich I'd pay for some mask Roms of Wikipedia and bury them around the world. That way if the shit hits the fan and we end up in a dark age people could dig them up when civilisation is rebooting.
The other option would be some optical disks.
http://www.cd-info.com/archiving/kodak/index.html
If the industry standard specification of BLERmax less than or equal to 220 had been used as the end-of-life criteria, then this same analysis would predict that with 95% confidence, 95% of the population of Kodak Writable CD discs will have a data life of greater than 12,000 years.
Aw yeah! 12,000 years is about the time from neolithic revolution to now.
Then again a masked Rom in one of those wikipedia readers seems like you have the advantage of not needing to find or build a working CD Rom drive. Mind you, whoever digs it up is still going to have to work out how to build a display because I don't see any display technology lasting for 12,000 years underground.
(unless the supply a utility which moves data from least-used cells to most-used...)
All SSDs do wear levelling, otherwise they'd die after a couple of days. That happens beneath the LBA address layer - i.e. LBA's are mapped to physical addresses and the mapping changes each time an LBA is written.
So you don't need to do wear levelling at the file system level. In fact the only thing you need to do there is to have a TRIM command which tells the SSD that a range of LBAs no longer contain useful data. That means the SSD can mark them as obsolete which gives the wear levelling a bit more elbow room.
. Consumers are fickle. iOS is growing old, and people are becoming bored with it. Android might be popular (hey, the devices are cheap), but a lot of people with those devices aren't really enthralled with them.
My PCs run Windows and my phones run Android? Does that mean I'm 'enthralled' by the OSs? Not at all, the reason I use them is because there are a lot of software and hardware vendors that are committed to the platform. That means I've got a good choice of devices when I buy new one and good choice of applications to run on it. I.e. it doesn't really matter if the OS is a bit ugly or slow, because you can always buy a faster device and you spend time looking at applications, not the OS.
Before Android the most common OS was Symbian. Like Android it was widely supported by phone manufacturers. That tells me that if you want to take over from Android you need a similarly open platform. Windows Phone and iOS are not that platform. In fact Windows Phone has most of the downsides of iOS - a locked down environment - without the upsides - Apple customers slavish loyalty to Apple.
Killing off support for Windows Mobile applications meant that all their natural customers bought an Android or iOS device. Almost all of the independent software vendors that used to develop for Windows Mobile moved to Android and iOS too. So that means that they are dependent on the sort of people who are 'enthralled' by OS's. I.e. people that are sufficiently distracted by 'buttery smooth UIs' to not notice that they can't run the applications that run on Android and iOS. Idiot tech bloggers basically. It's actually funny how common the phrase 'buttery smooth' UI was in reviews of Windows Phone 7. Almost like Microsoft's PR people had said "if you use the phrase 'buttery smooth UI' in your review, we'll give you a free phone" or something.
Unfortunately these people are not a replacement for the people that used to buy Windows Mobile phones because they were dependent on a couple of apps, and those people have all moved to Android. No matter how butter smooth the UI is on Windows Phone, these people are not going to give up their apps to move back.
Also all the people who bought a Windows Phone 7 device got screwed when Windows Phone 8 came out because Windows Phone 8 applications will not run on WP7 and WP7 devices will not get an upgrade. Hardly the sort of thing you want to do if you're trying to promote Windows Phone as a premium platform with Apple like customer loyalty.
I.e. I'm not saying it is impossible that some platform will dethrone Android as the mainstream platform in the same way that Android dethroned Symbian. What I am saying is that that platform is not Windows Phone or iOS. My guess is that iOS will end up taking up the high margin/high end part of the phone market, rather like Macs do with the PC market. Android will take the rest. Windows Phone will struggle along with a couple of percent and the Windows Phone OEMs will bitch and need to be paid off regularly by Microsoft to stay on board. Or maybe Microsoft will make it's own phone and ditch Nokia, Samsung and HTC.
Something they've already discussed
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/gadgets/7907888/Microsoft-plans-to-make-own-smartphone-sources
Chief executive officer Steve Ballmer introduced the latest version of Windows Phone software, available on devices including Nokia's Lumia 920 and the HTC 8X, to help his company win back share lost to competitors such as Apple. Microsoft has already demonstrated a willingness to build hardware, even if it means competing with long-time partners, through the creation of Surface, a tablet that runs Windows software.
"We are big believers in our hardware partners and together we're focused on bringing Windows Phone 8 to market with them," Redmond, Was
Windows Phone is just beginning. In one week it had 40,000 apps, 2 weeks later 50,000 apps, and another 2 weeks later, 60,000 apps! Apple and Android market place has more apps but I'm pretty sire it didn't grow this fast in their beginnings.
That's because all the employees, interns and so on at Microsoft are 'encouraged' to write a Windows Phone app by firing the ones that do not unless they have a note from their line manager excusing them. Also they MS bloggers, astroturfers etc have to mention the next Halo game - "Halo 5 - Flogging a dead Warthog", which will probably be a "Windows Phone 9" aka "XBox portable" exclusive the way things are going.
I am the LAW of the English language. You are crime.
Well at least they didn't go all Deliverance on your ass.
It sounds a bit heterophobic to me.
Computer janitors like you should be WHIPPED when they peep through windows at their betters, rather like servants were in the Middle Ages.