Reading between the lines what you are saying that Linux is better, but the inertia of older software that was only written for Widows is holding you back.
That's my experience too. But inertia doesn't last forever, and one by one these people are moving away from stuff that ties them to Windows. I think we have Google to thank for that - they turned mail into a fully fledged web application that didn't care what OS you were using, then they did the same thing for office documents, next thing you know most accounting software moved to the web, now it's media players. Most things your typical person does now have webby applications.
The odd thing is difference between Windows and Linux is so big even your average user is noticing. But not in the ways most people here loudly point to. They don't care where the start button is, or how you turn the thing off, what the icons look like, or whether there is systemd or even whether it's called Windows, Ubuntu or Fedora. I did find it surprising they don't care about those things, but I guess the different UI's presented by PC's, phone's, tablets and TV's have forced them to grow comfortable with doing things in lots of different ways.
No, when friends and relatives ask me to move them to Linux, it's always in the same way: "Can you do to my laptop whatever you did to Fred's machine that made it run so fast". Windows can take up to 10 seconds to respond to a click on the start button. Linux is always instantaneous. On these little machines with 32GB SSD's, Windows takes up 26GB. Linux, with an office suite and multiple browsers installed, takes up 8GB. After turning a Windows machine on and seeing it wants to do upgrades the ritual is to get a cup of coffee and then work your way back slowly through the office saying your morning hello's before settling down to wait for the hard disk light to turn off. With Linux you might have just enough time to quickly arrange the pencils on your desk.
In the real word, people just trying to get shit down apparently don't care about the things people on slashdot always seem to point to when they pontificate on why people don't move to Linux - things like eye candy, and religious wars over OS's and systemd. Instead they only seem to care that they can actually do whatever task they are trying to accomplsh, and then how fast they can do it. Who would have thunk it? Unless Windows fixes it's speed, security and reliability issues it's long term fate is sealed.
Python has it's own version of Typescript. It's called Python 3.6. In other words, since 3.6 Python has included the syntax for static type checking as part of the language. It doesn't actually check the types mind you, a separate tool does that: mypi. Still, it's a definite improvement on needing a separate language which is the situation Javascript finds itself in for now.
Much as it pains me to say this, the language that has retrofitted types the best is PHP. If the types are present it does check them. In fact PHP has undergone quite the makeover. The makeover can't hide decades of truly appalling design decisions so it will always remain a clusterfuck, but nonetheless it shows what a team of very bright and well funded software engineers can do, even when given a train wreck as a starting point.
I thought that these vulnerabilities were due to processors not applying memory access controls during speculative execution.
Not really. First of all, Spectre is not about the hardware letting you access memory it thinks you don't have permission to access, so memory access controls aren't relevant here. That variant did exist and has another name: Meltdown. Meltdown was a disaster. An Intel hardware bug meant an unprivileged program you could use the Spectre method to read all of kernel memory, even though the Intel CPU manuals said in black and white the hardware would allow that. However, most CPU's (including most Intel CPU's) didn't have this bug.
Spectre merely allows a program to read it's own memory, which is something every program does and depends on. No hardware I'm aware offers any mechanism for hardware protection inside of what an operating system calls a "process". This is hardly surprising given a process is the finest grain unit of protection offered by both the hardware and operating systems: you can't divide it down any further.
But that doesn't stop programmers from wanting finer grained protection. An all too common example is when a web browser executes javascript. As the browser doesn't trust the javascript, the software effectively emulates a stripped down "virtual computer" that has been completely defanged and executes the javascript in there. Spectre translates to: despite this javascript being executed in a virtual machine it could potentially read all of the browsers memory that isn't protected by hardware access controls. This paper now says that is impossible to write the software emulators to stop this. In reality its so hard pull off no one has done it so far, so what the paper is really saying is despite how hard it looks now we can never offer an iron clad guarantee someone will not find a way to make javascript access all your web pages and passwords the browser knows about in the future.
When I read the Spectre paper my first thought was "this means we are going to add hardware features so software can execute untrusted programs securely". Given I thought that I'm pretty sure most people who read and understood it came to the same conclusion as a few minutes of navel gazing. But it was just a guess. Now someone has put in hard yards and confirmed that guess is right.
There isn't much choice about fixing it. These virtual machines are very common. We depend on them. PHP scripts executing in Apache2, WSGI in a python interpreter, Java apps running in Tomcat, the kernel executing BPF programs, the shell running shell scripts - it's everywhere. The usual approach of the hardware guys is "if it shipped, it's a software problem". The paper is saying: not this time guys.
Since were talking oranges , individually, then you need the cheap method with a centrally authorized set of approver nodes.
Well done - that is exactly what it is. The thing IBM is hyping is called appropriately enough Hyperledger. They call it a "permissioned blockchain", which has about as much in common with the blockchain bitcoin uses as "permissioned rape" has in common with "rape".
To be fair to IBM, it is probably useful thing in this context. As others have pointed out, The Bill Of Lading Electronic Registry Organization (BOLERO) already does something very similar, and it is useful. Hyperledger is just a chained of signed statements (I bought 10 oranges off the batch of 1000 Y had) - but those statements could be about anything, not just bill of ladings.
Because it lacks proof of work it really doesn't have much in common with Bitcoin. It certainly doesn't use a custom "blockchain like" data structure - Hyperledger stores it's state in a conventional database like LevelDB or CouchDB, so it is a conventional database for some definition of conventional.
You do realize this article is in fact an analysis of these materials and their accessible quantities and the determination that THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH OF THEM for the demand required through 2050.
Actually, that's not what the article says. What it in fact says is:
The good news is that, for most metals, enough identified metal reserves are available for the energy transition. However, the lead time for opening new mines is in the range of 10-20 years. Therefore, the ever more pressing question is whether we can make these metals
available in the time that we have left to implement the energy transition: about three decades.
So it's not that there not enough of them. There is in fact more than enough. Instead they are worried that now China has threatened to stop supplying the metals to the rest of the world, other mines won't spring up quickly enough.
I'm not sure they are aware of just how many mining companies are rubbing their hands with glee at the idea of a rare earth shortage. I know that China's actions triggered an explosion in rare earth prospecting in Australia, and now there are announcement of new mines. The usual run of events of a few years of spiralling prices, triggering a over investment in mining resources followed by over production causing a price plunge. I've seen the entire cycle run several times in my life time. The cycle runs in less that 20 years, the idea that it takes 20 years to open a mine is absurd, but then I guess Denmark isn't a power house of mining expertise.
That aside, they do acknowledge you don't need rare earths to make solar panels or wind turbines. In fact wind turbines that don't use rare earths are cheaper. But they are slightly less efficient, as they use some of their power output to generate the magnetic field. I'll grant you this doesn't appear to be well known as I regularly see articles from the fossil fuel industry saying a proposed wind farm isn't green at all because of all these non-renewable rare earths the use. They say this despite modern wind turbines not using rare earths since the China price hike - and yet it's swallowed hook line and sinker by the mass media. But it obviously was known to the authors of the study, yet they still mentioned it as a problem.
They also mentioned Indium, gallium, and selenium are required in LEDs. There, they may have a point. Or may not if the Japanese sea floor discovery pans out.
My wife, a complete computer neophyte, asked me to put Linux on her laptop a few weeks ago. Well, she didn't use those exact works. She actually said, "can you do to my laptop whatever you did to our daughters laptop to make it run fast".
She really didn't have a lot of choice. The laptop she was referring to was a one of those $400 Windows touch screen laptops with a 32GB SSD. HP, Dell, Leveno and others make them and all have a very similar design - so similar it must have come from one source. My guess is this was a "tablet killer" design from Microsoft. Which is kinda sad, because the hardware is fine for the price. What wrecked it (literally) was Windows 10. Turns out 32GB is not enough space for Windows 10 to do it's upgrades, so eventually Microsoft's patches cause the the machine to run out of disk space and kills itself. Windows 10 is also god-awfully slow on such low end hardware - it can take 15 seconds to response to a click on the Start button.
A stock Debian install with LXDE on the other hand occupies 4GB of the 32GB SSD, and responds to a click on the start button instantaneously, every time. That 4GB includes all the crap people usually use on a desktop, like PDF viewer, picture viewer, browser, email client, and something that Windows doesn't come with - Libre Office. It doesn't suffer from flaky WiFi (apparently a Windows driver problem), and the mouse and touch screen worked out of the box. The touch pad was glitchy out of the box on Windows - it needed an updated touch pad driver.
No questions were asked after the transition. I guess a decade or so ago, the different place for the shutdown button or the different styling would have been jarring. But Microsoft fixed that issue for us by re-arranging everything from XP to Vista to Windows 10. LXDE manages to be closer to the familiar XP interface than Windows 10 is, so it was actually a return to more familiar territory.
To me it looks to be over. Linux has been faster (by no small margin), smaller, more reliable and has a better chance of "just working" on more platforms than Windows for some time now. The issue was all those proprietary.exe programs people used. But Google solved problem for us when they won the battle to move applications from the desktop to the cloud. To wit: my wife uses this laptop when she is away from her desktop to run her book keeping business. Not so long ago that would have required you to run a Windows only MYOB or something similar. She uses several accounting packages now - all are software as a service running in a web browser.
It's a bit difficult to predict what will eventually happen to the desktop. Everyone running a traditional Linux+GNU free distribution seems unlikely. But Windows still being around seems even less likely. It's being displaced on all fronts - on the server even Azure runs more Linux than windows, Linux is already the dominant "User" OS - more people use Android than anything else, and in the embedded space Windows CE has already been driven to extinction. It turns of if you do build a better mouse trap the people will come - if you have the stamina to wait long enough.
All that has to happen is that smartphone makers (Apple I'm looking at you) need to stop the obsession with making every device thinner than the last one
Maybe that is "all" for you. I have a far longer list of demands. Firstly, they can stop with what must be the dumbest marketing idea in the history of smart phones - rounded, convex screens. They absolutely guarantee you will fat palm the screen when you pick it up. Instead do the reverse - a slightly raised edge that tries to prevent touching the wrong thing.
Secondly, they can stop with the choice of materials based on looks alone. A glass back phone is indeed very shiny - but shatters. A aluminium case looks lovely but blocks phone signal and dents when you drop it. What is wrong with plastic? Its RF transparent, light, durable, and shock absorbent.
And how about a replaceable battery, or at least interference fit and screws instead of glue? I really, really don't care about the 20 micrometers saved by the glue f it means I can replace the battery and screen (the two things most likely to break) and keep my phone for 5 years. And for the love of $DIETY, can we introduce some standardised battery sizes so I can actually buy a freshly made battery in 3 years time? Surely a suite of 20 or so battery sizes would get you to within a few cubic mm?
And speaking of battery, perhaps we could introduce some smart charging settings like we find in laptops now? Charging to only 80% increase the battery lifetime by several years, and most of the time I'm be perfectly happy with that. (I know that, because I use AccuBattery do it manualy now.) For the rest of the time, charge to 100% for the next N days would cover it.
And while we are at it, can we have security releases for a least 5 years please? Security patches are essentially a consumable for software, and asking the manufacturer to keep consumables available for the devices they sell for the expected lifetime isn't usually considered a big ask.
The really sad bit is - low end phones often have most of these things. If you willing to put up with a dog slow CPU, bugger all internal flash, useless speakers and bad camera, you too can have a robust plastic phone with an easily replaceable parts. But if you willing to actually to pay for these features forget it - they aren't for sale.
The reason kids get such a distorted view of sex is because it's restricted.
In Australia has had a boom in Labiaplasty. Being surgery Labiaplasty comes with risks, one of those risks being labia do serve a purpose so if you are too aggressive all sorts of problems arise. One reason women often give for wanting Labiaplasty is protruding labia causes discomfort, especially during activities like bike riding. That's downright perplexing to males who have much bigger and more sensitive things between their legs.
Another reason by given in well over 50% of women who have had a Labiaplasty is cosmetic. That has caused some head scratching in the sisterhood - why have cosmetic surgery for something hardly anyone sees? So the sisterhood have come up with a theory. (I'm using a bit of poetic licence here - but is is female academics who been studying this.)
Australia's porn censorship rules labia's were considered obscene. You could publish pictures of a vula, but the labia could not be visible. As a consequence there were lots of pictures of vulva everywhere including teenage girls magazines, but any labia were air brushed out. So just about every vulva a girl saw except her own had no visible labia.
I'm not sure what the censorship rules are in other countries, but if you look at that Wikipedia article Australiais the epicentreof this phenomenon. If this weird perspective on female anatomy is mostly restricted to us the girls might be onto something.
Isn't it also ignorant to assume that terrorist groups and organized criminals are going to stop using encrypted communications just because somebody passed a law?
Yep, it would be ignorant to assume that. Which is why they aren't assuming it.
The bill doesn't allow them to ask Apple to break encryption. It allows them to force Apple to write some spyware for them, download via auto upgrades to any device they nominate, force Apple to make said spyware undetectable to the user or virus scanners, and says the spyware must send back all data in the device in realtime while it's unencrypted (which it must be when the user sees it). This isn't just the data the user has encrypted - it's additional data the user things completely safe because he didn't know it was being recorded - like his voice, keystrokes, and GPS position.
So my friend, they are not ignorant. Criminally reckless and power hungry perhaps - but not ignorant or stupid.
Actually, there is a third option: unbreakable and useless. And that is the one the Australian Government is going for. They don't want Apple to break encryption. The bill allows the government to force Apple to download spyware to the phone via the autoupgrades, so said spyware can send the data back while it's unencrypted.
The only mystery is why Apple says the bill is ambiguous. It outright says the expect to be able to silently download the app, they expect Apple to provide them with the mechanism will hide it from the user (and that includes up to and including writing the app for them), they expect the app will send whatever data it collects (keystrokes, phone calls, GPS position, photos) silently and in real time back to the cops offices. And it doesn't just cover phones - it covers all devices like Apple TV's, Macbooks, and watches. This is all laid out in relatively simple terms in the explanatory notes they released with the bill.
If Apple thinks it's ambiguous and could somehow be worse, I've love to know what could be worse than what they have already asked for.
where it is safe to identify you gender as Dragon, but not safe to identify as a conservative.
As an Australian looking on a US politics, this is something I don't quite get. It's not that we don't have a similar right wing crazy politicians in Australia. We do. It's not that these loud right wing crazies aren't members of our version of your Republican party (who confusingly for Amercians call themselves the Liberals, but it's in reference to the John Stuart Mill definition of liberal). Most right wing crazies are members of the Liberals.
It's despite that, we don't write off every member of the Liberal are as a right wing crazy. Someone proudly declaring themselves to be a Liberal party voter is of course going to immediately cause you ears to pick up, and listen to what they say next. If they say something like climate change is a conspiracy or "lets pray the gay away" run a mile, but they probably won't. Instead they will probably say something like "the government regulations on garbage disposal have gone over the up, there are so many rules on what I can and can't put in my bin I feel like taking it to the tip myself", and they will probably have a point.
In the US, it used to be that among academia there was a reasonable split between Republicans and Democrats. Since both should be just outside of centre, that's what you would expect, and it is what happens in Australia now. But in the US that was then. Now by contrast, almost all academics have given up Republican party. People who sit naturally on the right because they like John Stuart Mill, believe strongly in personal free freedoms, prefer free enterprise over government types simply can't abide the climate change is crap, evolution is crap, start a trade war with the entire word, what about the emails stench that's coming out of the Republican party now.
That everybody who is not prepared to flush their brain down the toilet for the sake of partisanship is being pushed to the left side of politics in the US is just plain weird. Seriously weird. It's not like we haven't had some towering intellectual giants on the right over the decades, or some complete morons on the left. So to have the right held is such disdain at Google that saying "I'm a Republician" puts you in the same basket as Obama birthers is just wrong. At least it is to the rest of the world.
They merely have to legally mandate back doors in devices before your laws of mathematics get hold of the data.
The federal government in Australia (I'm Australian) has a bill on the table ready to be passed by parliament. And yes, you have pretty much nailed it - they want legally mandated back doors. They make a token effort to hide by wrapping it in in thousands of words and using includes:
This includes accessing communications at points where it is not encrypted.
They know to get at the data they will need to download bugs (as in listening devices - but if they weren't from the government they would be called malware or viruses) to the phone or whatever. They also know those bugs will be detected pretty quickly by Apple, Google and friends, so to work around that the bill includes a provision to legally force them to provide Technical Assistance. The definition Technical Assistance it left conveniently open end, so it includes everything up to and including writing the bug for them.
But writing the bug is not scary bit. The bill includes specifically says technical assistances includes:
installing, maintaining, testing or using software or equipment as an act or thing that may be specified in a technical assistance request.... The Bill will allow law enforcement agencies to collect evidence from electronic devices under an overt warrant remotely.
So they explicitly saying they can demand the manufacturer install their bug remotely. In case it isn't obvious: what they are planning is to hijack the auto install / upgrade feature of phones, TV's, routers, WiFi camera, robot vacuum's and so on so they can press a button and a bug will be downloaded to all of them. The bug will be undetectable because the manufacturer will be forced to collude with them to hide it. All data will be available on the device because it is unlocked: and yes that includes stuff stored in Apples secure enclave because you can replace it's firmware too. The bug could also do active snooping, like switching on the GPS, microphone and cameras.
This is going to make the sort of world portrayed by tv shows like Person of Interest a reality. They must almost be wetting themselves with excitement over how wonderful it will all be. The lives of all citizens will be an open books to their governments - all they have to do is push a hidden button in a dark room somewhere, and data will start flowing from anywhere.
They don't have a clue about the monster they are creating. I'm sure they will tell us that central button will be most of the most heavily guarded things on the planet. But in that button they have created the one key to rule us all: banking passwords, stock holdings, emails discussing billion dollar takeovers all become amenable to creating silent copies. Corrupt just a few people, and the $100M Russian banking heists will look like peanuts. That key will unlock the wallets of entire nations.
That's not what they are proposing. The article got it completely wrong - the bill isn't targeting end users at all. I guess that's not entirely surprising given the articles rush to have the First Post on the department of Home Affairs explanatory document for the Assistance and Access Bill 2018. The ironic thing is, in their rush to get the most click baity article the could think out out, the managed to understate what the government is planning. By a lot. This isn't a bill to get your PIN out of you. The goal of this bill is to ensure they don't need your PIN.
Here are some extracts from the above explanatory document, followed by the de-spinned translation:
accessing communications at points where it is not encrypted.
What the are actually thinking: With the advent of the internet we thought we had it all. The Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 (TIA) allows us to compel phone companies to install taps on any phone line. Back then of course that involved the Telecom company creating a work order, the work order winding it's way down levels of management until a work was directed to install a listening device in a pit somewhere. Then a marvellous thing happened: the profit driven Telecom companies automated the process, so that instead of someone having to physically do something they just needed to press a button and the telephone exchange would start sending a copy of of all data flowing through the target device to our office in Canberra. Then an even more marvellous thing happen: everybody started sending everything over the internet - letters became emails, photos, signed documents, even short personal messages. The TIA gave us the power to direct the Telecom companies to direct all of it to us! By the time the NBN came along no one raised an eye brow and we asked for provision for LEA Racks (Law Enforcement Agency Racks) to be installed into every NBN POI (point of interconnect).
Then, disaster. The NSA was sprung snooping Googles international links. The tech companies got the shits with us, and started encrypted everything. Unbelievably the pricks managed to convince the entire world to start using HTTPS. Suddenly the TIA goldmine became useless!
We tried to get encrypted banned, then tried to plant crypto backdoors, but no go. Those bloody tech companies raised the spectre of us spying everyones banking passwords and dick picks to turn the world against us. But there is a work around - extend the existing TIA act so we can bug the devices used to access the data when it's unencrypted. It's just extending a existing capability, so hopefully it will look innocuous enough to get under their radar.
317E(1)(c) provides installing, maintaining, testing or using software or equipment as an act or thing that may be specified in a technical assistance request, technical assistance notice or technical capability notice. Assistance of a kind contemplated by 317E(1)(c) includes installing, maintain, testing or using software or equipment given to a provider by, or on behalf, of an agency. The deployment of agency procured or developed software or equipment within an existing network owned or operated by a provider can achieve law enforcement objectives without requiring providers to develop technology secondary to their core business.
Translation: But this is going to be hard, real hard. We are trying to install a virus on stuff controlled by the the biggest tech companies on the planet. They employ the best and brightest people, and their internet security is second to none. North Korea may have taken out Sony after they hired a top security expert from the CIA, but no one has put a serious dent in these guys. We are gonna have to force them to cooperate, but shit, we don't ev
The problem isn't the hardware, it's worse - it's Windows. Windows users don't seem to notice it, because they haven't seen anything else run on the same hardware. But geeze, once you've used a Chromebook or Linux for a while then load Windows on the same machine, it's infuriating. Particularly on the slower stuff (that still works perfectly well running something else), Windows is like moving through molasses. I've seen it take 10 seconds to response to a click on the start menu. Microsoft has gone to huge lengths to make Windows login screen appear fairly promptly after boot - but the machine remains near unusable for minutes afterwards. Nothing else suffers from this - only Windows. Phones with a 1W power budget and a similar number of pixels to push on the screen run faster.
The article from a day or two ago, making a unfaltering comparison between between Windows and Chromebook's is spot on. Windows is slow, large, insecure and the systems built on it are unreliable. The unreliability is not just a case of shitty WiFi drivers from manufactures dropping out and needing re-installing. Those recent cheapie touch screen machines with 2G of RAM, 32GB SSD are an excellent illustration of the problem. They have so little resources is you just sit them in a corner and don't touch them, they become utterly unusable. I don't mean slow. I mean they run out of disk space, and things stop running - as in literally unusable even though no one has touched them. What's happened is the Windows update cycle takes more SSD than these things have got.
Now I'm sure some people will argue that you can't expect Windows to run on such an underpowered machine. There are two problems with that. Firstly, Chromebooks and Linux running perfectly fine on such machines. And secondly, this hardware was designed by Microsoft! That is why you seen so many near identical variants from Dell, HP, Acer and the like - Microsoft published a off the shelf design (touch screen, SSD, $300) for a machine running Windows that could compete with tablets running iOS and Android.
Microsoft has done a wonderful job of making successive Windows releases backwards compatible. But to do that it's been patch upon patch, adding new layers rather than ripping the stack out and rebuilding it. Now they are arriving at the pointy end of the stick. The mess is getting beyond the ability of their software engineers to maintain it. And I have no doubt given Microsoft's financial strength this isn't because they have bad software engineers - I'm sure they are some of the best on the planet. The problem is there is always a point when the technical debt grows beyond the ability of any one or any thing to repay it. And it looks to me like Windows is nearly at that point.
Chromebooks suffer from lack of experience period. They are the most neutered of computers, you can't actually do anything with them.
We roll out hundreds of PC's to our staff, Most are Windows machines, some are Chromebooks. Google's approach is the browser is the "standardised" computer. It mostly works - it does have access to local storage, can take photos, capture signatures and the other stuff we do, so it's not a bad approximation. To use it efficiently you have to rebuild your infrastructure from scratch re-writing the front end in javascript, but in return you get a platform that works over low bandwidth high latency links, which extends your reach greatly.
The issues mentioned in the video are not exaggerations - they are perennial problem with the WIndows machines we experience on a daily basis. Their WiFi drivers drop out for no apparent reason, they occasionally get stuck in upgrade loops, staff install crap on them (including malware). All this creates work for IT, work that simply vanishes when you use Chromebooks. Or mostly. Google and their suppliers still manage to have the occasional bug that kills us by downloading huge amounts of data over the mobile phone network. The proximate cause varies - it might be Chrome attempting to validate certificates, or a keyboard loading a dictionary. But underneath the bug is always the same - they hit a URL they expect to work, it doesn't work, so they retry immediately. But Windows does the same thing for different reasons. Overall, Chromebooks are a hugely attractive proposition.
Hugely attractive that is, until you discover device ownership and authentication must be managed by Google. Managing all these separate identities, and looking after people who change them, forget them, or otherwise screw them up is a nightmare. Google does have some EMM thing that allows you to do it centrally, but the put an impossibly high bar on joining it.
The end result is despite everything the video says being true, maintaining a fleet of Chromebooks is more work than doing the same for Windows machines. It's a remarkably perverse outcome for something they put so much effort into.
In that case the smart users won't have Samsung phones either, as the S8 does exactly the same thing. I installed Google SMS app, replacing Samsung's. It took me ages to figure out why SMS's were going missing. Turned out Samsung was killing it. They whitelist their own SMS app, of course.
And this is slashdot, whose summaries are always complete, concise and accurate. There is zero reason to read the article.
Speaking of the article, it said this:
The negative reviews are a result of Huawei’s aggressive battery management and tendency to kill background apps, which directly affects VLC’s background audio playback feature.
Mostly I agree with you. Google insisting Android ships with a certain look and feel seems entirely appropriate to me, especially since they are very liberal about letting the end user change it. But this is a different level or arsehattery:
3. has prevented manufacturers wishing to pre-install Google apps from selling even a single smart mobile device running on alternative versions of Android that were not approved by Google (so-called "Android forks").
Abusing the monopolistic position to cement it by threatening their customers if they even try to use something else is of a worthy $5 Billion fine on it's own. About my only criticism is it took soooo long to happen.
If millions of dollars are on the line, you should be running your own systems.
Apparently Netflix and friends (who use these services) don't agree. Neither do I.
Running your own system doesn't fix anything. Yes, you won't go down because someone forgot to renew the credit card, but you will go down because of a faulty RAM chip, or an air-conditioner going out, or a ISP getting a route wrong, or a backhoe going through a cable. None of those failures are likely to take out Google as they will just move you to new working hardware in a working location - both of which they have in abundance along with well tested procedures to do the move. In fact it will probably happen automatically without you having to raise a finger.
Comments like this betray something that appears common in the industry - people have absolutely no idea what engineer tradeoffs using the cloud involves. For example rented cloud computing resources are far more expensive per CPU cycle (perhaps an order of magnitude so) then a machine lying on the bedroom floor at home. Yet you will hear people say they use the cloud because it's cheaper. Then later you will hear them complain bitterly about how their cloud bills are breaking them.
I don't know why they are surprised. It's not like the cloud provider has some magic cookie jar they can pull unlimited CPU cycles from. They, like you, had to buy the servers, pay for the power, pay for building it's in, pay the highly redundant internet connection they provide, and pay for people who keep the things running, pay for the accountants, tax, and all those other business overheads. They also have to make a profit. Anybody thinks that could do this and still sell you those CPU cycles for cheaper than you can make them yourself must be smoking something. The flip side of course is they are really good at doing it, you don't have to concern yourself with replacing dead disk drives, swapping out power supplies you have (hopefully) top notch staff at your disposal you didn't have to train, and don't have to pay.
Regardless, the cloud is cheaper in the sense that it's cheaper to stay in a $500/night hotel room for a night than it is to buy an apartment for the overnight stay, but those CPU cycles aren't "cheap". But they are cheap in the sense that can't buy 1/2 an apartment and nor can you buy 1/2 a server, but you can rent a room and buy a VM that shares a machine with 1000 other VM's.
The moral of this story isn't "he should be running his own systems". It's that if you want really high uptimes you have to design a system that wouldn't die because of a single point of failure, be that CPU, internet, power, or administrative control (ie, what happened here - someone has the power to flip the switch). But doing that is currently hard. As in you need the top software engineers on the planet type hard. And the sad bit is you can't just "buy it from Google (or some other cloud provider)" as he apparently thinks he should be able to, because that, as he had discovered, opens you up to a single point of failure when that provider flips the switch. Which makes the problem is so hard an MBA can't solve it by solve it by waving a money wand, he has to build and maintain a team of top flight software engineers. So we aren't talking just hard, we are talking really, really, really hard.
Mind was even more blow when I look it up on Wikipedia, and discovered Rye was once a weed that did Vavilovian of wheat, and imitated it so well it became a food crop itself. And that isn't the only food crop that came about like that. Amazing.
A better strategy might be to use a tiny blade and cut the weed off just below the soil level.
This isn't exactly a new idea. Attach the blade to a stick, and it's called a hoe. Here is a picture of one used 2000 years ago. The idea was used prior to that with wooden blades.
A few 100 years ago we automated hoe by dragging a blade through the soil behind a cow or horse. The blade changed it's name to a "plough". In modern times we've changed to using a tractor instead of a horse.
TFA is mostly click bait. There is nothing new using image recognition to selectively weeds. Here is one that's been around for a while: Weedseeker. But an automated selective hoe that works - that would be new. It would solve the issues associated with ploughing - soil compaction, erosion and a big fuel bill.
In most ways it's not different. All these "entanglements" are just the basic laws of physics in action. So for example spin is conserved, so if two photons are created and speed away in opposite directions the laws of physics their spins must add up to 0. Therefore you measure the spin of one as 1, the spin of the other must be -1.
The issue as the physicists see it is a quantum variable is doesn't exist until it's measured, where "doesn't exist" means can have no effect on the universe. Although instead of "doesn't exist or has no value" they like to say it is a superposition of all possible values. Another way of saying the same thing is the particle has no idea what it's quantum values are because if it did it would behave differently. The classic example is the double slit experiment, where a photon very confused about where it is and forms an interference pattern. But if you measure where it is before it gets to the slits so it (and you) know the values of quantum variables, the pattern disappears.
The point is, before you measured it the spin on your photon didn't have a value. And that's true for it's entanglements partner too. Then you measure it and now you know. But it's entangled particular also knows its spin at the same instant, and starts behaving like it does. (Because if it didn't the laws of the universe would break down, eg charge or momentum wouldn't be conserved.) But if it's outside the light cone how could it know what the value it must take on to so the laws of universe aren't broken? It can't, so it must be spooky action at a distance.
The term "local hidden variable" is an explanation for how this happened. It means the photon knew all along what's spin was, but it was cleverly hiding it in this hidden variable. The key point here is it's value was computed at the moment of entanglement. It was hidden from then on until you measure it, but the value was agreed upon when the particles were entangled, and entanglement always happens when they are together, communicating. Global hidden variable is another explanation - it means the whole universe knew, which when you think about is means there is communication fast than light, because otherwise how could it be "global"?.
The local hidden variable sounds like the simplest explanation. The original reason said they said is doesn't work is Bells inequality. It may be still only be Bells inequality - I don't know if anybody has actually seen the double slit effect disappear for an entangled photon when it's mate is measured. I hope there is something more convincing now, because Bells inequality is a subtle argument.
It arises because quantum values are distinctly weird. Take spin for example. In the classic worked, you can look at something spinning and see what axis it is spinning around. In quantum world you can't do that. All you can do is point a ruler in a direction, compare the axis the photon spinning around to the direction this ruler is pointing. (You have to adopt an convention that describes the direction of spin - say ruler pointing up means spinning clockwise, down means counter clockwise on the same axis.) Worse when you point the ruler and ask the question, you force the photons spin to align with the ruler - so the measurement changes the thing being measured. But you do get something out of it - you are told whether the spin now (after it was changed by you observing it) agrees with the direction your ruler is pointing (up or down). So you get a single boolean answer, and that's all you get. But your measure is real and repeatable in the sense that if you do it again with the ruler aligned in the same way, you will get the same answer every time (because remember the spin is now aligned with your ruler). And if you measure it a again with the ruler pointed in the opposite direction (eg up instead of down), you will get the reverse answer every time. This sounds intuitively correct, and it's also somewhat intuitive that if you ruler isn't parallel it isn't entirely obvious
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Reading between the lines what you are saying that Linux is better, but the inertia of older software that was only written for Widows is holding you back.
That's my experience too. But inertia doesn't last forever, and one by one these people are moving away from stuff that ties them to Windows. I think we have Google to thank for that - they turned mail into a fully fledged web application that didn't care what OS you were using, then they did the same thing for office documents, next thing you know most accounting software moved to the web, now it's media players. Most things your typical person does now have webby applications.
The odd thing is difference between Windows and Linux is so big even your average user is noticing. But not in the ways most people here loudly point to. They don't care where the start button is, or how you turn the thing off, what the icons look like, or whether there is systemd or even whether it's called Windows, Ubuntu or Fedora. I did find it surprising they don't care about those things, but I guess the different UI's presented by PC's, phone's, tablets and TV's have forced them to grow comfortable with doing things in lots of different ways.
No, when friends and relatives ask me to move them to Linux, it's always in the same way: "Can you do to my laptop whatever you did to Fred's machine that made it run so fast". Windows can take up to 10 seconds to respond to a click on the start button. Linux is always instantaneous. On these little machines with 32GB SSD's, Windows takes up 26GB. Linux, with an office suite and multiple browsers installed, takes up 8GB. After turning a Windows machine on and seeing it wants to do upgrades the ritual is to get a cup of coffee and then work your way back slowly through the office saying your morning hello's before settling down to wait for the hard disk light to turn off. With Linux you might have just enough time to quickly arrange the pencils on your desk.
In the real word, people just trying to get shit down apparently don't care about the things people on slashdot always seem to point to when they pontificate on why people don't move to Linux - things like eye candy, and religious wars over OS's and systemd. Instead they only seem to care that they can actually do whatever task they are trying to accomplsh, and then how fast they can do it. Who would have thunk it? Unless Windows fixes it's speed, security and reliability issues it's long term fate is sealed.
Python has it's own version of Typescript. It's called Python 3.6. In other words, since 3.6 Python has included the syntax for static type checking as part of the language. It doesn't actually check the types mind you, a separate tool does that: mypi. Still, it's a definite improvement on needing a separate language which is the situation Javascript finds itself in for now.
Much as it pains me to say this, the language that has retrofitted types the best is PHP. If the types are present it does check them. In fact PHP has undergone quite the makeover. The makeover can't hide decades of truly appalling design decisions so it will always remain a clusterfuck, but nonetheless it shows what a team of very bright and well funded software engineers can do, even when given a train wreck as a starting point.
Not really. First of all, Spectre is not about the hardware letting you access memory it thinks you don't have permission to access, so memory access controls aren't relevant here. That variant did exist and has another name: Meltdown. Meltdown was a disaster. An Intel hardware bug meant an unprivileged program you could use the Spectre method to read all of kernel memory, even though the Intel CPU manuals said in black and white the hardware would allow that. However, most CPU's (including most Intel CPU's) didn't have this bug.
Spectre merely allows a program to read it's own memory, which is something every program does and depends on. No hardware I'm aware offers any mechanism for hardware protection inside of what an operating system calls a "process". This is hardly surprising given a process is the finest grain unit of protection offered by both the hardware and operating systems: you can't divide it down any further.
But that doesn't stop programmers from wanting finer grained protection. An all too common example is when a web browser executes javascript. As the browser doesn't trust the javascript, the software effectively emulates a stripped down "virtual computer" that has been completely defanged and executes the javascript in there. Spectre translates to: despite this javascript being executed in a virtual machine it could potentially read all of the browsers memory that isn't protected by hardware access controls. This paper now says that is impossible to write the software emulators to stop this. In reality its so hard pull off no one has done it so far, so what the paper is really saying is despite how hard it looks now we can never offer an iron clad guarantee someone will not find a way to make javascript access all your web pages and passwords the browser knows about in the future.
When I read the Spectre paper my first thought was "this means we are going to add hardware features so software can execute untrusted programs securely". Given I thought that I'm pretty sure most people who read and understood it came to the same conclusion as a few minutes of navel gazing. But it was just a guess. Now someone has put in hard yards and confirmed that guess is right.
There isn't much choice about fixing it. These virtual machines are very common. We depend on them. PHP scripts executing in Apache2, WSGI in a python interpreter, Java apps running in Tomcat, the kernel executing BPF programs, the shell running shell scripts - it's everywhere. The usual approach of the hardware guys is "if it shipped, it's a software problem". The paper is saying: not this time guys.
Since were talking oranges , individually, then you need the cheap method with a centrally authorized set of approver nodes.
Well done - that is exactly what it is. The thing IBM is hyping is called appropriately enough Hyperledger. They call it a "permissioned blockchain", which has about as much in common with the blockchain bitcoin uses as "permissioned rape" has in common with "rape".
To be fair to IBM, it is probably useful thing in this context. As others have pointed out, The Bill Of Lading Electronic Registry Organization (BOLERO) already does something very similar, and it is useful. Hyperledger is just a chained of signed statements (I bought 10 oranges off the batch of 1000 Y had) - but those statements could be about anything, not just bill of ladings.
Because it lacks proof of work it really doesn't have much in common with Bitcoin. It certainly doesn't use a custom "blockchain like" data structure - Hyperledger stores it's state in a conventional database like LevelDB or CouchDB, so it is a conventional database for some definition of conventional.
Actually, that's not what the article says. What it in fact says is:
So it's not that there not enough of them. There is in fact more than enough. Instead they are worried that now China has threatened to stop supplying the metals to the rest of the world, other mines won't spring up quickly enough.
I'm not sure they are aware of just how many mining companies are rubbing their hands with glee at the idea of a rare earth shortage. I know that China's actions triggered an explosion in rare earth prospecting in Australia, and now there are announcement of new mines. The usual run of events of a few years of spiralling prices, triggering a over investment in mining resources followed by over production causing a price plunge. I've seen the entire cycle run several times in my life time. The cycle runs in less that 20 years, the idea that it takes 20 years to open a mine is absurd, but then I guess Denmark isn't a power house of mining expertise.
That aside, they do acknowledge you don't need rare earths to make solar panels or wind turbines. In fact wind turbines that don't use rare earths are cheaper. But they are slightly less efficient, as they use some of their power output to generate the magnetic field. I'll grant you this doesn't appear to be well known as I regularly see articles from the fossil fuel industry saying a proposed wind farm isn't green at all because of all these non-renewable rare earths the use. They say this despite modern wind turbines not using rare earths since the China price hike - and yet it's swallowed hook line and sinker by the mass media. But it obviously was known to the authors of the study, yet they still mentioned it as a problem.
They also mentioned Indium, gallium, and selenium are required in LEDs. There, they may have a point. Or may not if the Japanese sea floor discovery pans out.
My wife, a complete computer neophyte, asked me to put Linux on her laptop a few weeks ago. Well, she didn't use those exact works. She actually said, "can you do to my laptop whatever you did to our daughters laptop to make it run fast".
She really didn't have a lot of choice. The laptop she was referring to was a one of those $400 Windows touch screen laptops with a 32GB SSD. HP, Dell, Leveno and others make them and all have a very similar design - so similar it must have come from one source. My guess is this was a "tablet killer" design from Microsoft. Which is kinda sad, because the hardware is fine for the price. What wrecked it (literally) was Windows 10. Turns out 32GB is not enough space for Windows 10 to do it's upgrades, so eventually Microsoft's patches cause the the machine to run out of disk space and kills itself. Windows 10 is also god-awfully slow on such low end hardware - it can take 15 seconds to response to a click on the Start button.
A stock Debian install with LXDE on the other hand occupies 4GB of the 32GB SSD, and responds to a click on the start button instantaneously, every time. That 4GB includes all the crap people usually use on a desktop, like PDF viewer, picture viewer, browser, email client, and something that Windows doesn't come with - Libre Office. It doesn't suffer from flaky WiFi (apparently a Windows driver problem), and the mouse and touch screen worked out of the box. The touch pad was glitchy out of the box on Windows - it needed an updated touch pad driver.
No questions were asked after the transition. I guess a decade or so ago, the different place for the shutdown button or the different styling would have been jarring. But Microsoft fixed that issue for us by re-arranging everything from XP to Vista to Windows 10. LXDE manages to be closer to the familiar XP interface than Windows 10 is, so it was actually a return to more familiar territory.
To me it looks to be over. Linux has been faster (by no small margin), smaller, more reliable and has a better chance of "just working" on more platforms than Windows for some time now. The issue was all those proprietary .exe programs people used. But Google solved problem for us when they won the battle to move applications from the desktop to the cloud. To wit: my wife uses this laptop when she is away from her desktop to run her book keeping business. Not so long ago that would have required you to run a Windows only MYOB or something similar. She uses several accounting packages now - all are software as a service running in a web browser.
It's a bit difficult to predict what will eventually happen to the desktop. Everyone running a traditional Linux+GNU free distribution seems unlikely. But Windows still being around seems even less likely. It's being displaced on all fronts - on the server even Azure runs more Linux than windows, Linux is already the dominant "User" OS - more people use Android than anything else, and in the embedded space Windows CE has already been driven to extinction. It turns of if you do build a better mouse trap the people will come - if you have the stamina to wait long enough.
Maybe that is "all" for you. I have a far longer list of demands. Firstly, they can stop with what must be the dumbest marketing idea in the history of smart phones - rounded, convex screens. They absolutely guarantee you will fat palm the screen when you pick it up. Instead do the reverse - a slightly raised edge that tries to prevent touching the wrong thing.
Secondly, they can stop with the choice of materials based on looks alone. A glass back phone is indeed very shiny - but shatters. A aluminium case looks lovely but blocks phone signal and dents when you drop it. What is wrong with plastic? Its RF transparent, light, durable, and shock absorbent.
And how about a replaceable battery, or at least interference fit and screws instead of glue? I really, really don't care about the 20 micrometers saved by the glue f it means I can replace the battery and screen (the two things most likely to break) and keep my phone for 5 years. And for the love of $DIETY, can we introduce some standardised battery sizes so I can actually buy a freshly made battery in 3 years time? Surely a suite of 20 or so battery sizes would get you to within a few cubic mm?
And speaking of battery, perhaps we could introduce some smart charging settings like we find in laptops now? Charging to only 80% increase the battery lifetime by several years, and most of the time I'm be perfectly happy with that. (I know that, because I use AccuBattery do it manualy now.) For the rest of the time, charge to 100% for the next N days would cover it.
And while we are at it, can we have security releases for a least 5 years please? Security patches are essentially a consumable for software, and asking the manufacturer to keep consumables available for the devices they sell for the expected lifetime isn't usually considered a big ask.
The really sad bit is - low end phones often have most of these things. If you willing to put up with a dog slow CPU, bugger all internal flash, useless speakers and bad camera, you too can have a robust plastic phone with an easily replaceable parts. But if you willing to actually to pay for these features forget it - they aren't for sale.
In Australia has had a boom in Labiaplasty. Being surgery Labiaplasty comes with risks, one of those risks being labia do serve a purpose so if you are too aggressive all sorts of problems arise. One reason women often give for wanting Labiaplasty is protruding labia causes discomfort, especially during activities like bike riding. That's downright perplexing to males who have much bigger and more sensitive things between their legs.
Another reason by given in well over 50% of women who have had a Labiaplasty is cosmetic. That has caused some head scratching in the sisterhood - why have cosmetic surgery for something hardly anyone sees? So the sisterhood have come up with a theory. (I'm using a bit of poetic licence here - but is is female academics who been studying this.)
Australia's porn censorship rules labia's were considered obscene. You could publish pictures of a vula, but the labia could not be visible. As a consequence there were lots of pictures of vulva everywhere including teenage girls magazines, but any labia were air brushed out. So just about every vulva a girl saw except her own had no visible labia.
I'm not sure what the censorship rules are in other countries, but if you look at that Wikipedia article Australia is the epicentre of this phenomenon. If this weird perspective on female anatomy is mostly restricted to us the girls might be onto something.
I tried to type a response, but didn't have time.
Yep, it would be ignorant to assume that. Which is why they aren't assuming it.
The bill doesn't allow them to ask Apple to break encryption. It allows them to force Apple to write some spyware for them, download via auto upgrades to any device they nominate, force Apple to make said spyware undetectable to the user or virus scanners, and says the spyware must send back all data in the device in realtime while it's unencrypted (which it must be when the user sees it). This isn't just the data the user has encrypted - it's additional data the user things completely safe because he didn't know it was being recorded - like his voice, keystrokes, and GPS position.
So my friend, they are not ignorant. Criminally reckless and power hungry perhaps - but not ignorant or stupid.
Actually, there is a third option: unbreakable and useless. And that is the one the Australian Government is going for. They don't want Apple to break encryption. The bill allows the government to force Apple to download spyware to the phone via the autoupgrades, so said spyware can send the data back while it's unencrypted.
The only mystery is why Apple says the bill is ambiguous. It outright says the expect to be able to silently download the app, they expect Apple to provide them with the mechanism will hide it from the user (and that includes up to and including writing the app for them), they expect the app will send whatever data it collects (keystrokes, phone calls, GPS position, photos) silently and in real time back to the cops offices. And it doesn't just cover phones - it covers all devices like Apple TV's, Macbooks, and watches. This is all laid out in relatively simple terms in the explanatory notes they released with the bill.
If Apple thinks it's ambiguous and could somehow be worse, I've love to know what could be worse than what they have already asked for.
Of course it's right. Clearly we can't rely on a physicist is resolve it, and cats are well known for having a definite opinion on everything.
As an Australian looking on a US politics, this is something I don't quite get. It's not that we don't have a similar right wing crazy politicians in Australia. We do. It's not that these loud right wing crazies aren't members of our version of your Republican party (who confusingly for Amercians call themselves the Liberals, but it's in reference to the John Stuart Mill definition of liberal). Most right wing crazies are members of the Liberals.
It's despite that, we don't write off every member of the Liberal are as a right wing crazy. Someone proudly declaring themselves to be a Liberal party voter is of course going to immediately cause you ears to pick up, and listen to what they say next. If they say something like climate change is a conspiracy or "lets pray the gay away" run a mile, but they probably won't. Instead they will probably say something like "the government regulations on garbage disposal have gone over the up, there are so many rules on what I can and can't put in my bin I feel like taking it to the tip myself", and they will probably have a point.
In the US, it used to be that among academia there was a reasonable split between Republicans and Democrats. Since both should be just outside of centre, that's what you would expect, and it is what happens in Australia now. But in the US that was then. Now by contrast, almost all academics have given up Republican party. People who sit naturally on the right because they like John Stuart Mill, believe strongly in personal free freedoms, prefer free enterprise over government types simply can't abide the climate change is crap, evolution is crap, start a trade war with the entire word, what about the emails stench that's coming out of the Republican party now.
That everybody who is not prepared to flush their brain down the toilet for the sake of partisanship is being pushed to the left side of politics in the US is just plain weird. Seriously weird. It's not like we haven't had some towering intellectual giants on the right over the decades, or some complete morons on the left. So to have the right held is such disdain at Google that saying "I'm a Republician" puts you in the same basket as Obama birthers is just wrong. At least it is to the rest of the world.
The federal government in Australia (I'm Australian) has a bill on the table ready to be passed by parliament. And yes, you have pretty much nailed it - they want legally mandated back doors. They make a token effort to hide by wrapping it in in thousands of words and using includes :
They know to get at the data they will need to download bugs (as in listening devices - but if they weren't from the government they would be called malware or viruses) to the phone or whatever. They also know those bugs will be detected pretty quickly by Apple, Google and friends, so to work around that the bill includes a provision to legally force them to provide Technical Assistance. The definition Technical Assistance it left conveniently open end, so it includes everything up to and including writing the bug for them.
But writing the bug is not scary bit. The bill includes specifically says technical assistances includes:
So they explicitly saying they can demand the manufacturer install their bug remotely. In case it isn't obvious: what they are planning is to hijack the auto install / upgrade feature of phones, TV's, routers, WiFi camera, robot vacuum's and so on so they can press a button and a bug will be downloaded to all of them. The bug will be undetectable because the manufacturer will be forced to collude with them to hide it. All data will be available on the device because it is unlocked: and yes that includes stuff stored in Apples secure enclave because you can replace it's firmware too. The bug could also do active snooping, like switching on the GPS, microphone and cameras.
This is going to make the sort of world portrayed by tv shows like Person of Interest a reality. They must almost be wetting themselves with excitement over how wonderful it will all be. The lives of all citizens will be an open books to their governments - all they have to do is push a hidden button in a dark room somewhere, and data will start flowing from anywhere.
They don't have a clue about the monster they are creating. I'm sure they will tell us that central button will be most of the most heavily guarded things on the planet. But in that button they have created the one key to rule us all: banking passwords, stock holdings, emails discussing billion dollar takeovers all become amenable to creating silent copies. Corrupt just a few people, and the $100M Russian banking heists will look like peanuts. That key will unlock the wallets of entire nations.
That's not what they are proposing. The article got it completely wrong - the bill isn't targeting end users at all. I guess that's not entirely surprising given the articles rush to have the First Post on the department of Home Affairs explanatory document for the Assistance and Access Bill 2018 . The ironic thing is, in their rush to get the most click baity article the could think out out, the managed to understate what the government is planning. By a lot. This isn't a bill to get your PIN out of you. The goal of this bill is to ensure they don't need your PIN.
Here are some extracts from the above explanatory document, followed by the de-spinned translation:
What the are actually thinking: With the advent of the internet we thought we had it all. The Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 (TIA) allows us to compel phone companies to install taps on any phone line. Back then of course that involved the Telecom company creating a work order, the work order winding it's way down levels of management until a work was directed to install a listening device in a pit somewhere. Then a marvellous thing happened: the profit driven Telecom companies automated the process, so that instead of someone having to physically do something they just needed to press a button and the telephone exchange would start sending a copy of of all data flowing through the target device to our office in Canberra. Then an even more marvellous thing happen: everybody started sending everything over the internet - letters became emails, photos, signed documents, even short personal messages. The TIA gave us the power to direct the Telecom companies to direct all of it to us! By the time the NBN came along no one raised an eye brow and we asked for provision for LEA Racks (Law Enforcement Agency Racks) to be installed into every NBN POI (point of interconnect).
Then, disaster. The NSA was sprung snooping Googles international links. The tech companies got the shits with us, and started encrypted everything. Unbelievably the pricks managed to convince the entire world to start using HTTPS. Suddenly the TIA goldmine became useless!
We tried to get encrypted banned, then tried to plant crypto backdoors, but no go. Those bloody tech companies raised the spectre of us spying everyones banking passwords and dick picks to turn the world against us. But there is a work around - extend the existing TIA act so we can bug the devices used to access the data when it's unencrypted. It's just extending a existing capability, so hopefully it will look innocuous enough to get under their radar.
Translation: But this is going to be hard, real hard. We are trying to install a virus on stuff controlled by the the biggest tech companies on the planet. They employ the best and brightest people, and their internet security is second to none. North Korea may have taken out Sony after they hired a top security expert from the CIA, but no one has put a serious dent in these guys. We are gonna have to force them to cooperate, but shit, we don't ev
The problem isn't the hardware, it's worse - it's Windows. Windows users don't seem to notice it, because they haven't seen anything else run on the same hardware. But geeze, once you've used a Chromebook or Linux for a while then load Windows on the same machine, it's infuriating. Particularly on the slower stuff (that still works perfectly well running something else), Windows is like moving through molasses. I've seen it take 10 seconds to response to a click on the start menu. Microsoft has gone to huge lengths to make Windows login screen appear fairly promptly after boot - but the machine remains near unusable for minutes afterwards. Nothing else suffers from this - only Windows. Phones with a 1W power budget and a similar number of pixels to push on the screen run faster.
The article from a day or two ago, making a unfaltering comparison between between Windows and Chromebook's is spot on. Windows is slow, large, insecure and the systems built on it are unreliable. The unreliability is not just a case of shitty WiFi drivers from manufactures dropping out and needing re-installing. Those recent cheapie touch screen machines with 2G of RAM, 32GB SSD are an excellent illustration of the problem. They have so little resources is you just sit them in a corner and don't touch them, they become utterly unusable. I don't mean slow. I mean they run out of disk space, and things stop running - as in literally unusable even though no one has touched them. What's happened is the Windows update cycle takes more SSD than these things have got.
Now I'm sure some people will argue that you can't expect Windows to run on such an underpowered machine. There are two problems with that. Firstly, Chromebooks and Linux running perfectly fine on such machines. And secondly, this hardware was designed by Microsoft! That is why you seen so many near identical variants from Dell, HP, Acer and the like - Microsoft published a off the shelf design (touch screen, SSD, $300) for a machine running Windows that could compete with tablets running iOS and Android.
Microsoft has done a wonderful job of making successive Windows releases backwards compatible. But to do that it's been patch upon patch, adding new layers rather than ripping the stack out and rebuilding it. Now they are arriving at the pointy end of the stick. The mess is getting beyond the ability of their software engineers to maintain it. And I have no doubt given Microsoft's financial strength this isn't because they have bad software engineers - I'm sure they are some of the best on the planet. The problem is there is always a point when the technical debt grows beyond the ability of any one or any thing to repay it. And it looks to me like Windows is nearly at that point.
We roll out hundreds of PC's to our staff, Most are Windows machines, some are Chromebooks. Google's approach is the browser is the "standardised" computer. It mostly works - it does have access to local storage, can take photos, capture signatures and the other stuff we do, so it's not a bad approximation. To use it efficiently you have to rebuild your infrastructure from scratch re-writing the front end in javascript, but in return you get a platform that works over low bandwidth high latency links, which extends your reach greatly.
The issues mentioned in the video are not exaggerations - they are perennial problem with the WIndows machines we experience on a daily basis. Their WiFi drivers drop out for no apparent reason, they occasionally get stuck in upgrade loops, staff install crap on them (including malware). All this creates work for IT, work that simply vanishes when you use Chromebooks. Or mostly. Google and their suppliers still manage to have the occasional bug that kills us by downloading huge amounts of data over the mobile phone network. The proximate cause varies - it might be Chrome attempting to validate certificates, or a keyboard loading a dictionary. But underneath the bug is always the same - they hit a URL they expect to work, it doesn't work, so they retry immediately. But Windows does the same thing for different reasons. Overall, Chromebooks are a hugely attractive proposition.
Hugely attractive that is, until you discover device ownership and authentication must be managed by Google. Managing all these separate identities, and looking after people who change them, forget them, or otherwise screw them up is a nightmare. Google does have some EMM thing that allows you to do it centrally, but the put an impossibly high bar on joining it.
The end result is despite everything the video says being true, maintaining a fleet of Chromebooks is more work than doing the same for Windows machines. It's a remarkably perverse outcome for something they put so much effort into.
nope.
In that case the smart users won't have Samsung phones either, as the S8 does exactly the same thing. I installed Google SMS app, replacing Samsung's. It took me ages to figure out why SMS's were going missing. Turned out Samsung was killing it. They whitelist their own SMS app, of course.
And this is slashdot, whose summaries are always complete, concise and accurate. There is zero reason to read the article.
Speaking of the article, it said this:
Mostly I agree with you. Google insisting Android ships with a certain look and feel seems entirely appropriate to me, especially since they are very liberal about letting the end user change it. But this is a different level or arsehattery:
Abusing the monopolistic position to cement it by threatening their customers if they even try to use something else is of a worthy $5 Billion fine on it's own. About my only criticism is it took soooo long to happen.
Apparently Netflix and friends (who use these services) don't agree. Neither do I.
Running your own system doesn't fix anything. Yes, you won't go down because someone forgot to renew the credit card, but you will go down because of a faulty RAM chip, or an air-conditioner going out, or a ISP getting a route wrong, or a backhoe going through a cable. None of those failures are likely to take out Google as they will just move you to new working hardware in a working location - both of which they have in abundance along with well tested procedures to do the move. In fact it will probably happen automatically without you having to raise a finger.
Comments like this betray something that appears common in the industry - people have absolutely no idea what engineer tradeoffs using the cloud involves. For example rented cloud computing resources are far more expensive per CPU cycle (perhaps an order of magnitude so) then a machine lying on the bedroom floor at home. Yet you will hear people say they use the cloud because it's cheaper. Then later you will hear them complain bitterly about how their cloud bills are breaking them.
I don't know why they are surprised. It's not like the cloud provider has some magic cookie jar they can pull unlimited CPU cycles from. They, like you, had to buy the servers, pay for the power, pay for building it's in, pay the highly redundant internet connection they provide, and pay for people who keep the things running, pay for the accountants, tax, and all those other business overheads. They also have to make a profit. Anybody thinks that could do this and still sell you those CPU cycles for cheaper than you can make them yourself must be smoking something. The flip side of course is they are really good at doing it, you don't have to concern yourself with replacing dead disk drives, swapping out power supplies you have (hopefully) top notch staff at your disposal you didn't have to train, and don't have to pay.
Regardless, the cloud is cheaper in the sense that it's cheaper to stay in a $500/night hotel room for a night than it is to buy an apartment for the overnight stay, but those CPU cycles aren't "cheap". But they are cheap in the sense that can't buy 1/2 an apartment and nor can you buy 1/2 a server, but you can rent a room and buy a VM that shares a machine with 1000 other VM's.
The moral of this story isn't "he should be running his own systems". It's that if you want really high uptimes you have to design a system that wouldn't die because of a single point of failure, be that CPU, internet, power, or administrative control (ie, what happened here - someone has the power to flip the switch). But doing that is currently hard. As in you need the top software engineers on the planet type hard. And the sad bit is you can't just "buy it from Google (or some other cloud provider)" as he apparently thinks he should be able to, because that, as he had discovered, opens you up to a single point of failure when that provider flips the switch. Which makes the problem is so hard an MBA can't solve it by solve it by waving a money wand, he has to build and maintain a team of top flight software engineers. So we aren't talking just hard, we are talking really, really, really hard.
+1, excellent post.
Mind was even more blow when I look it up on Wikipedia, and discovered Rye was once a weed that did Vavilovian of wheat, and imitated it so well it became a food crop itself. And that isn't the only food crop that came about like that. Amazing.
This isn't exactly a new idea. Attach the blade to a stick, and it's called a hoe. Here is a picture of one used 2000 years ago. The idea was used prior to that with wooden blades.
A few 100 years ago we automated hoe by dragging a blade through the soil behind a cow or horse. The blade changed it's name to a "plough". In modern times we've changed to using a tractor instead of a horse.
The technique of cutting a weed's root system below the ground has been used for 1000's of years because it is a remarkably effective way of killing weeds. Even Kudzu, mention above, is killed instantly if you cut sever it's root system an a inch or so below the soil.
TFA is mostly click bait. There is nothing new using image recognition to selectively weeds. Here is one that's been around for a while: Weedseeker. But an automated selective hoe that works - that would be new. It would solve the issues associated with ploughing - soil compaction, erosion and a big fuel bill.
In most ways it's not different. All these "entanglements" are just the basic laws of physics in action. So for example spin is conserved, so if two photons are created and speed away in opposite directions the laws of physics their spins must add up to 0. Therefore you measure the spin of one as 1, the spin of the other must be -1.
The issue as the physicists see it is a quantum variable is doesn't exist until it's measured, where "doesn't exist" means can have no effect on the universe. Although instead of "doesn't exist or has no value" they like to say it is a superposition of all possible values. Another way of saying the same thing is the particle has no idea what it's quantum values are because if it did it would behave differently. The classic example is the double slit experiment, where a photon very confused about where it is and forms an interference pattern. But if you measure where it is before it gets to the slits so it (and you) know the values of quantum variables, the pattern disappears.
The point is, before you measured it the spin on your photon didn't have a value. And that's true for it's entanglements partner too. Then you measure it and now you know. But it's entangled particular also knows its spin at the same instant, and starts behaving like it does. (Because if it didn't the laws of the universe would break down, eg charge or momentum wouldn't be conserved.) But if it's outside the light cone how could it know what the value it must take on to so the laws of universe aren't broken? It can't, so it must be spooky action at a distance.
The term "local hidden variable" is an explanation for how this happened. It means the photon knew all along what's spin was, but it was cleverly hiding it in this hidden variable. The key point here is it's value was computed at the moment of entanglement. It was hidden from then on until you measure it, but the value was agreed upon when the particles were entangled, and entanglement always happens when they are together, communicating. Global hidden variable is another explanation - it means the whole universe knew, which when you think about is means there is communication fast than light, because otherwise how could it be "global"?.
The local hidden variable sounds like the simplest explanation. The original reason said they said is doesn't work is Bells inequality. It may be still only be Bells inequality - I don't know if anybody has actually seen the double slit effect disappear for an entangled photon when it's mate is measured. I hope there is something more convincing now, because Bells inequality is a subtle argument.
It arises because quantum values are distinctly weird. Take spin for example. In the classic worked, you can look at something spinning and see what axis it is spinning around. In quantum world you can't do that. All you can do is point a ruler in a direction, compare the axis the photon spinning around to the direction this ruler is pointing. (You have to adopt an convention that describes the direction of spin - say ruler pointing up means spinning clockwise, down means counter clockwise on the same axis.) Worse when you point the ruler and ask the question, you force the photons spin to align with the ruler - so the measurement changes the thing being measured. But you do get something out of it - you are told whether the spin now (after it was changed by you observing it) agrees with the direction your ruler is pointing (up or down). So you get a single boolean answer, and that's all you get. But your measure is real and repeatable in the sense that if you do it again with the ruler aligned in the same way, you will get the same answer every time (because remember the spin is now aligned with your ruler). And if you measure it a again with the ruler pointed in the opposite direction (eg up instead of down), you will get the reverse answer every time. This sounds intuitively correct, and it's also somewhat intuitive that if you ruler isn't parallel it isn't entirely obvious