Something trivially solved with voiceprints, a several decade old technology.
Very true.
Another thing I was playing with here the other day, was the ability to use the phones ever increasing high resolution cameras as listening devices, when the phones are left on the table, or perhaps in a charging docking station, cameras (or a small addressable area of interest) could be used to record vibration of surrounding objects which can in turn be modulated into sound.
I've been constructing and building so many robotic, listening devices, radio communication devices that I have enough under the belt to tell you that you don't really need to worry TOO much about all of that, at least not for now, here's why:
1) For this to be at all possible, the devices involved must meet a range of technical specifications and capabilities. For example, you have a mobile speaker that is specced to work within 20 hz to 20KHz, most of these will fail above 10KHz anyway, and you don't need them to be better than that, for its purpose, headphones however - is an entirely different case.
2) I've tested numerous microphones so small we're talking 2-3 mm size, and most of these failed to pick up frequencies above 20KHz. As a young person, you could potentially hear up to 24KHz (I could pick up 23KHz sounds when I was 18 and worked in an electronics store, we tested with a Function Generator and a Piezo speaker specced well above 28KHz). Today I can pick up around 16.5-17KHz, which is not bad for my age, but on the plus side, I don't need expensive headphones anymore.
3) We're talking inaudible sounds to the human ears here, therefor we're above the 20KHz range, to be entirely safe - we should be above 25KHz for this, very few phones, televisions, computer speakers and whatnot are capable of vibrating or picking up vibrations at those speeds, therefor this kind of communication in that frequency spectrum would fail drastically.
What you COULD do tho, is that you use the upper audible frequency spectrum of say just above 10KHz and mix it with existing sounds, time it correctly with proper known synchronization (remember the old modems and their sounds? Now imagine a much higher pitch) - and albeit quite slow, it would still be possible to use it to trigger commands, communicate short messages etc. Anything needing more bandwidth than this would be impractical. You wouldn't hear this, albeit the sound technically would be possible to pick up if it was too long, but if just a split second there, in sequence not spaced too close, you'd be able to get away with it, possibly disguised by music or voice, but you'd still need some form of "trigger" sequence to pick it up and start reading, otherwise you'd get timing errors. Kinda like "fast morsecode" if you like.
If you're worried about eavesdropping, you should be far more concerned with your home's windows - those are like giant eardrums, and light hitting those will create a small vibration of the reflected light, this tech has been known for years, you just don't hear about it very often.
Security, as in locked doors, encrypted drives, encrypted mail and digital wallets?
Or...
Security as in personal security (the rights to roam free and pursue our own dreams), free from oppressors, freedom of speech, information freedom. In a time of fake news where it's possible to manipulate another country just by doctoring the news and opinions of the masses, this is certainly not good. Another bad is that if we take away our freedom of speech, we get less say - and the power handed to a privileged few, aka "your" chosen government.
Internet gave us a lot of freedom. We could exchange information faster than ever before, play games with our friends overseas, book travels and earn money no matter were you where in the world.
But it also blinded us, with information this fast, there was no time for peer reviews of the news, what source can you truly trust? "Likes" almost became the new "law". Getting likes was almost like the new religion, and nevermind the reliability of the actual sources, just as long as a bunch of likes came along, and the rest thought "meh...might as well join the crowd", and what crowd? These are just numbers. A very real but dangerous development.
Time to take a step back - and understand that we should keep this technology free, putting too many locks on it also censors our freedom of speech, but security starts with us, we need to educate ourselves and not trust everything blindly. Turn off the net, breathe - go out there, say hi to your neighbor once in a while, talk amongst yourselves.
...doesn't really work out of the box on Linux, not even Mint Linux 18.3.
Yes, you can "could" make Steam VR work, yes, steamVR runs...but when you have the vive connected, it will mess with your xconfig settings or xorg or nvidia settings totally. It will extend the screen to the VR googles, it will not return the settings to normal, it will mess everything up, and you'll end up just unplugging the thing after a while - and yes...this is STILL exactly the same scenario 2 years later.
Steam Linux? Yes - it works, sorta...Certain games works on it. And works just fine, but others like Ark - Survival evolved (which is insanely graphics demanding) will even on a 1080ti - get the "light ray" bug, where there's "rays" of darkness that will overshadow the game, psychedelic rain that will make it impossible to fly - and they all blame Nvidia drivers...which in turn blame bad coding on the game devs, or game engine devs. etc.
On Linux - gaming is all one big "who'd dunnit" blame game, no one owns any responsibility, and I doubt it'll ever be fixed.
Despite that, I still run Linux 90% of my time at home, because it's a ROCK stable platform for pretty much everything else. And I love the speed and smoothness of the everyday usage, surfing, video, editing, programming - and everything non-game related, it's the bee's knees.
...If Apple want to keep their exclusivity and a niche market, they will have to go on their own, completely.
Today, An Apple computer is nothing different from a glorified designer laptop with a PC (typical Intel based architecture) inside, which means you could basically without too much effort just run Windows or Linux on it.
What Apple has gotten much grief for, is that they often use 2-4 year old hardware, instead of bleeding edge hardware. While this is usually good for "tried and tested", meaning that it will result in a relatively stable, well supported computer - it's offering very little new to its userbase, but who are the Apple userbase, this is what you got to take a closer look at:
The Apple userbase is often designers, musicians, artists, film people and basically people working within the creative industry. They like design, and they're willing to pay for it. It may not be the latest, greatest or best - but it sure looks the part, and it gives them a sense of community as they're not "mainstream", but still like to see themselves as the ones considering the computer just a tool, an accessory - and secondary to their work.
They don't want hassle with updates, compatibility issues, endless drivers - they just want to get about their workday without getting into "the computers" themselves.
Apple GET that, but in order to stay really truly "off" the rest, they have to find their own way again...
> Sadly, because of the draconian laws and orwellian rules bestowed on travelers and tourists to the U.S.
Uh...right. Now I know you're an ignorant blowhard who doesn't read much of what you sign. This doesn't apply to tourists. Idiot.
I have to correct you there.
If you intend to stay more than 3 months during one year, you have to apply for a tourist visa - and then you are an visa applicant. The ESTA is only valid for 3 months per year, and is valid over a 2 year period, for those who are eligible for the ESTA visa waiver program.
But I don't have to like their government, and most of the Americans I know, don't like them very much either, but it's theirs - and right now, all they got, they got to deal with it.
Sadly, because of the draconian laws and orwellian rules bestowed on travelers and tourists to the U.S. I won't be spending my tourist money there either, and that's sad - because I spend a lot. Just the last vacation, I spent roughly 4000$ in just one month, Four thousand dollars may not sound like a lot, but it's still money to some, the year before that I spent nearly 6000$ there.
I still WANT to go, because I love to meet my American friends in person, and they have roots in our countries too (as you may know, most of America consists of immigrants), and a lot of them stem from Scandinavia. But I'm a stickler for freedom - and I believe strongly in my rights, and no way - no how - will anyone force me to give up my entire history, no matter what excuse they hide under.
I remember my last "piracy fix", it was a cd called BOI (best of Internet). After that, I just went opensource for everything.
What piracy? We have Netflix and a dozen other services without ads served for less than 10 bucks a month? I don't get it. And for software, we have TONS of open source equivalents. In fact - I made a good living of Blender 3D (which where an open source alternative to 3D studio Max and Maya) and made a good living of it doing 3D work for some of the bigger companies for years (I just never told them it was made using that software), etc.
The problem is the USA are to dangerous (perceived): * you could be robbed * murdered * kidnapped
You can not walk to the next super market because they only have paper backs, how would you carry your goods home?)
That probably depends on where you are in the U.S. America is big, and the few times I visited (Portland, Oregon)...was pretty big on easy commute, Tri-met (Max) easy to jump on and get around everywhere in the city, buses going to the smaller areas / coastal cities. I walked to Safeway pretty much every day to get my food and lived in a hostel for a month there, heard more gunshots in Sweden than over there.
Yeah, that's kinda presumptuous, even though I gotta admire the guy for his innovative ways to improve everything.
I have an entire 3 story house (all paid for, no mortages...hah..brag brag), but NO CAR. And it's entirely by choice. My train is 10 minutes walk away from me, 3 grocery stores are 600-1000 meters away and takes tops 7-15 minutes to walk to for me.
But sure - cost is also a factor, in Sweden where I live - (and I've owned cars before), it costs us roughly 50K SEK (roughly 6K USD) to own and operate even a second hand car per year, insurance, road tax, gasoline (which is 2$ an liter / roughly 7 dollars and 40 cents per gallon), car maintenance repairs, loss-of-value, etc.
And since everything is just minutes away, if I ever need to have a car to move stuff, I do so many computer favors for friends and neighbors they'll be more than happy to drive stuff for me. 6000$ a year is a LOT of money to save or spend on other stuff. Not to mention how clean this is for the environment.
I'm an IT supporter there, and we're currently drowning in migration issues from the old system to o365. Profiles messing up, shared mails not working properly, license issues prohibiting our users from reading the mails and thus working. Literally thousands of calls, hundreds just at my department every day about Outlook o365 migration issues.
...innocent kind of belief they're going with there. Always the same boring, and mindbogglingly stupid argument:
"Those kinds of products in the wrong hands can be used to do bad things."
It would be the same as accusing the other 99% of actual product owners who just want to modify/optimize/better/repair and fix their own stuff to save a few buck, not to mention saving the entire planet - of being the criminals.
And if you own a product - YOU OWN IT! What part is there not to understand? Of course you can't demand warranty if you fiddle with it yourself, that is to be understood. But if it's yours then it's truly YOURS to mess with.
By all means makers - have fun, modify stuff. I'd do that regardless of laws. No law in this world is going to bar me from doing what I want with what I paid for. If there's lawmakers in my country that thinks otherwise, it's about time to ship them out somewhere else.
...but you gotta understand why Apple is still a player:
What alternative do you have today? Android? Pc? If that was left - there's really no competition to drive innovation forward.
Apple appeals to people who wants their technology to be not only functional, but pretty. It's like you're buying a lifestyle choice, you're not only purchasing a computer or yet another phone - you're buying a fashion statement, and you can still do what others do - but with less fuss and less nerding around drivers, updates, viruses etc.
The virus part is partly due to the fact that 90% of the world still owns a PC, so the viruses on Apple die a natural death of starvation...aka...it's not that easy to spread them because they're depending on an infrastructure to support them, which is poor (for them) to say the least. Same with Linux - Linux is as prone to viruses as Apple and PC would ever be, but they're so rare amongst desktop users that this is rarely an issue. Android "linux" however...is an entirely different story.
I work at IT-helpdesk in an organization with 200K+ workers, and we know this by heart, because we support Apple IOS, Android, Windows AND Linux.
...which hides the framework, and lets the user use simple calls or commands to do advanced things like outputting text or graphics to almost any TFT/OLED/LCD screen you can imagine (small form factors usually, we're not talking HDMI screens here).
And it's almost like having a Commodore-64 on a chip, lots of I/O ports, way more forgiving on the inputs/outputs than the 6526 ever was (touch this one and you'd literally say goodbye to an expensive I/O chip), the interface is ugly...but easy to use, it's free aka gratis, it's open, it's got a huge community with tons of drivers for basically any hardware you want drive/throw at it/use with it. I put a complete weather station together in 2 hours, didn't even have to find software for that, as drivers and libraries are available for almost every sensor/screen out there. It's almost like combining a commodore 64 with lego.
I won't count Raspberry PI into this "easy" category, because albeit the raspberry is cheap, it's far from easy for kids to get started with, and if they do - the learning curve is hideous as it's almost as complex (hardware wise/programming) as a PC. With the Arduino range (especially the Nano V3 one's that can be had on ebay for a couple of dollars) are so ridiculously easy to use that your kid (or you) will be up and coding in minutes with actual real life results instead of having to learn endless libraries and code just to actually make an executable that will actually do something useful or meaningful.
And if we look at how many gazillion Arduinos are sold on ebay by random (often totally clueless sellers that have no clue what an arduino actually is), it's literally selling like it's hot - all the time. That's gotta count for something.
Why? Well, most have been mention in this thread, I'm going to summarize those I agree with:
Fear factors:
- Viruses and Bacteria unknown to us. - Increased demand for our resources (which btw, we're running out of, FAST!). - Unknown motives, why did they decide to take contact? This is usually either because of two things, curiosity and the need for new resources. The last one should worry us... A LOT!
Good things:
- New technology (they traveled this far, we didn't manage the opposite so chances are they're technically superior to us, and we can take part of this technology). - Combined technology, ours and theirs - are more likely to increase life quality for both species. - Introduction of new (possibly stronger) genes into our species. - Health technology, food growth technology, there could be infinite possibilities here, we don't know - yet! - A lot of bad things we dealt with on our planet, often "belief" based, can finally be laid to rest, maybe this will cause less stress and agony on our own species, we don't know the effects of this yet, but I'm one of those who think we could totally do without all religions.
As far as I see it, the possibilities of the good outweighs the bad. I'm curious - I welcome the aliens, as long as their intentions are peaceful, for both species.
Windows never gives me even one hurdle of an issue - most likely because I took the time to learn how to work with it, and given the fact that around 95% of desktop end-users also use Windows, I think you are an outlier.
My spell-checker didn't get the word "outlier" and neither did I (I'm not natively English).
But besides that, I'm actually a windows supporter. We've recently rolled out Windows 10 in our organization, and I challenge your windows fancy any day of the year.:p
But the thing is - Mint never let me down. I use Win 10 at work, and I even have a win 10 partition on a separate drive...which does get bluescreened once in a blue moon, but Mint? Never happens. I can turn Mint on every night, and it never fails me - ever!
I'm a pragmatic person at my age now, I'm in my 50's. I remember my days compiling Slack to my preferences, and not to forget...lazing off with Mandrake and Red Hat linux, ah - those where the days. But Mint (Ubuntu essentially) has won me over, because I'm now too old for "shit that don't work". I just wanna come home, be comfortable, watch my shitty netflix series, play my steam games...and surf my silly youtube videos and whatnot...Arduino comes to mind (yes I use that....semi daily)
The thing is - Mint made everything work out of the box, no permission shit, no endless nerding around like I was 20 again......And still - it works SOOOO much better than any windows OS I remember messing around with for the last 25+ years.
Thanks Mint + Ubuntu + Linux people for your tireless efforts, you truly are the kings amongst men.
Could be, your link wasn't available in my country, but the title and description seemed right. And it was probably licensed to one of our national / public channels.
There was a documentary about this on TV, not sure what channel, but I saw it just a few days ago, about how the size of the actually grew on those learning to sharpen their memory like this. Scans where taken before and after, and the results where quite astonishing.
I kinda believe it too, I got a job at a huge corporation, where I was set to do an almost seemingly impossible task - namely learn 25K pages of information about their infrastructure so I could properly map and redirect requests to where it was needed + solve IT solution tasks on the spot if possible instead of redirecting, the answer where all in these 25K pages. At first it was like, I'm never ever gonna be able to do this, after a month I was - I can't believe I can actually remember this much, now I actually believe it can be done, I still have to console the 25K pages manual - but it's rarer and rarer, and my problem solving rate is up to 96% correct now.
What's even more interesting, is that this job has had a profound effect on my private life as well. I've done much more to clean up my life, making sure important things like personal pension, insurance, savings, purchases are done correctly instead of wasting it on "oh, I don't care". My gaming life is amazing in comparison to before, I've reached levels I couldn't even dream of later.
... is because they feel the threat. And it's very real.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is a nightmare for the powers that be - especially Goldman Sachs who's used to being in control of your money for ages. Sure you can ridicule the cryptocurrencies for being a rollercoaster of the smart outsmarts the lesser, but at least those who are not in "power" stand a chance at the big bucks for a small time, if done right - and understood correctly.
Goldman is nervous as HELL about this, we're talking big bucks - and they want to be in control of it, and they're not.
I'm not young either, almost in my 50's - and still got hired in IT.
What surprises me though, is that our company have a habit of not hiring experienced staff, because they want to do the training and teaching themselves. We have a "teacher/mentor" culture in our offices meaning that when a new batch arrives, possibly with no knowledge of our infrastructure whatsoever - we train them meticulously. We have a high tolerance for failure (yes, most people will make mistakes, often quite expensive mistakes such as rebooting a server that has 100's of cash machines connected to it), but once they do that only ONCE - they'll likely never do it again. It's surprisingly effective. Also cost effective, as they get to be highly specialized and focused on our business and our customers.
The hardest ones to train, is the "experts". Completely age unrelated. Experts "knows so much" forehand, it becomes an uphill battle to explain to them everything. Some of them get offended that we imply that they "didn't know that" and it's almost like a mine-field trying to explain anything to people who know it all.
Fresh from the street - is the new IT gold. (And this comes from an almost 50 year 30+ in the IT business guy, me...who is as surprised as you probably are reading this), but it's quite true - I work in one of the biggest companies there is. I can't reveal who I work for as it's in my NDA, but if you work in a similar corporate, you'll totally get this.
Slashdot Mirror
Something trivially solved with voiceprints, a several decade old technology.
Very true.
Another thing I was playing with here the other day, was the ability to use the phones ever increasing high resolution cameras as listening devices, when the phones are left on the table, or perhaps in a charging docking station, cameras (or a small addressable area of interest) could be used to record vibration of surrounding objects which can in turn be modulated into sound.
Hi, former technician here.
I've been constructing and building so many robotic, listening devices, radio communication devices that I have enough under the belt to tell you that you don't really need to worry TOO much about all of that, at least not for now, here's why:
1) For this to be at all possible, the devices involved must meet a range of technical specifications and capabilities. For example, you have a mobile speaker that is specced to work within 20 hz to 20KHz, most of these will fail above 10KHz anyway, and you don't need them to be better than that, for its purpose, headphones however - is an entirely different case.
2) I've tested numerous microphones so small we're talking 2-3 mm size, and most of these failed to pick up frequencies above 20KHz. As a young person, you could potentially hear up to 24KHz (I could pick up 23KHz sounds when I was 18 and worked in an electronics store, we tested with a Function Generator and a Piezo speaker specced well above 28KHz). Today I can pick up around 16.5-17KHz, which is not bad for my age, but on the plus side, I don't need expensive headphones anymore.
3) We're talking inaudible sounds to the human ears here, therefor we're above the 20KHz range, to be entirely safe - we should be above 25KHz for this, very few phones, televisions, computer speakers and whatnot are capable of vibrating or picking up vibrations at those speeds, therefor this kind of communication in that frequency spectrum would fail drastically.
What you COULD do tho, is that you use the upper audible frequency spectrum of say just above 10KHz and mix it with existing sounds, time it correctly with proper known synchronization (remember the old modems and their sounds? Now imagine a much higher pitch) - and albeit quite slow, it would still be possible to use it to trigger commands, communicate short messages etc. Anything needing more bandwidth than this would be impractical. You wouldn't hear this, albeit the sound technically would be possible to pick up if it was too long, but if just a split second there, in sequence not spaced too close, you'd be able to get away with it, possibly disguised by music or voice, but you'd still need some form of "trigger" sequence to pick it up and start reading, otherwise you'd get timing errors. Kinda like "fast morsecode" if you like.
If you're worried about eavesdropping, you should be far more concerned with your home's windows - those are like giant eardrums, and light hitting those will create a small vibration of the reflected light, this tech has been known for years, you just don't hear about it very often.
First we have to ask ourselves, what is security?
Security, as in locked doors, encrypted drives, encrypted mail and digital wallets?
Or...
Security as in personal security (the rights to roam free and pursue our own dreams), free from oppressors, freedom of speech, information freedom.
In a time of fake news where it's possible to manipulate another country just by doctoring the news and opinions of the masses, this is certainly not good.
Another bad is that if we take away our freedom of speech, we get less say - and the power handed to a privileged few, aka "your" chosen government.
Internet gave us a lot of freedom. We could exchange information faster than ever before, play games with our friends overseas, book travels and earn money no matter were you where in the world.
But it also blinded us, with information this fast, there was no time for peer reviews of the news, what source can you truly trust? "Likes" almost became the new "law". Getting likes was almost like the new religion, and nevermind the reliability of the actual sources, just as long as a bunch of likes came along, and the rest thought "meh...might as well join the crowd", and what crowd? These are just numbers. A very real but dangerous development.
Time to take a step back - and understand that we should keep this technology free, putting too many locks on it also censors our freedom of speech, but security starts with us, we need to educate ourselves and not trust everything blindly. Turn off the net, breathe - go out there, say hi to your neighbor once in a while, talk amongst yourselves.
...doesn't really work out of the box on Linux, not even Mint Linux 18.3.
Yes, you can "could" make Steam VR work, yes, steamVR runs...but when you have the vive connected, it will mess with your xconfig settings or xorg or nvidia settings totally. It will extend the screen to the VR googles, it will not return the settings to normal, it will mess everything up, and you'll end up just unplugging the thing after a while - and yes...this is STILL exactly the same scenario 2 years later.
Steam Linux? Yes - it works, sorta...Certain games works on it. And works just fine, but others like Ark - Survival evolved (which is insanely graphics demanding) will even on a 1080ti - get the "light ray" bug, where there's "rays" of darkness that will overshadow the game, psychedelic rain that will make it impossible to fly - and they all blame Nvidia drivers...which in turn blame bad coding on the game devs, or game engine devs. etc.
On Linux - gaming is all one big "who'd dunnit" blame game, no one owns any responsibility, and I doubt it'll ever be fixed.
Despite that, I still run Linux 90% of my time at home, because it's a ROCK stable platform for pretty much everything else. And I love the speed and smoothness of the everyday usage, surfing, video, editing, programming - and everything non-game related, it's the bee's knees.
...If Apple want to keep their exclusivity and a niche market, they will have to go on their own, completely.
Today, An Apple computer is nothing different from a glorified designer laptop with a PC (typical Intel based architecture) inside, which means you could basically without too much effort just run Windows or Linux on it.
What Apple has gotten much grief for, is that they often use 2-4 year old hardware, instead of bleeding edge hardware. While this is usually good for "tried and tested", meaning that it will result in a relatively stable, well supported computer - it's offering very little new to its userbase, but who are the Apple userbase, this is what you got to take a closer look at:
The Apple userbase is often designers, musicians, artists, film people and basically people working within the creative industry. They like design, and they're willing to pay for it. It may not be the latest, greatest or best - but it sure looks the part, and it gives them a sense of community as they're not "mainstream", but still like to see themselves as the ones considering the computer just a tool, an accessory - and secondary to their work.
They don't want hassle with updates, compatibility issues, endless drivers - they just want to get about their workday without getting into "the computers" themselves.
Apple GET that, but in order to stay really truly "off" the rest, they have to find their own way again...
> Sadly, because of the draconian laws and orwellian rules bestowed on travelers and tourists to the U.S.
Uh...right. Now I know you're an ignorant blowhard who doesn't read much of what you sign. This doesn't apply to tourists. Idiot.
I have to correct you there.
If you intend to stay more than 3 months during one year, you have to apply for a tourist visa - and then you are an visa applicant.
The ESTA is only valid for 3 months per year, and is valid over a 2 year period, for those who are eligible for the ESTA visa waiver program.
...I always have, and I always will.
But I don't have to like their government, and most of the Americans I know, don't like them very much either, but it's theirs - and right now, all they got, they got to deal with it.
Sadly, because of the draconian laws and orwellian rules bestowed on travelers and tourists to the U.S. I won't be spending my tourist money there either, and that's sad - because I spend a lot. Just the last vacation, I spent roughly 4000$ in just one month, Four thousand dollars may not sound like a lot, but it's still money to some, the year before that I spent nearly 6000$ there.
I still WANT to go, because I love to meet my American friends in person, and they have roots in our countries too (as you may know, most of America consists of immigrants), and a lot of them stem from Scandinavia. But I'm a stickler for freedom - and I believe strongly in my rights, and no way - no how - will anyone force me to give up my entire history, no matter what excuse they hide under.
I remember my last "piracy fix", it was a cd called BOI (best of Internet). After that, I just went opensource for everything.
What piracy? We have Netflix and a dozen other services without ads served for less than 10 bucks a month? I don't get it. And for software, we have TONS of open source equivalents. In fact - I made a good living of Blender 3D (which where an open source alternative to 3D studio Max and Maya) and made a good living of it doing 3D work for some of the bigger companies for years (I just never told them it was made using that software), etc.
Piracy...so quaint and old fashioned now.
The problem is the USA are to dangerous (perceived):
* you could be robbed
* murdered
* kidnapped
You can not walk to the next super market because they only have paper backs, how would you carry your goods home?)
That probably depends on where you are in the U.S. America is big, and the few times I visited (Portland, Oregon)...was pretty big on easy commute, Tri-met (Max) easy to jump on and get around everywhere in the city, buses going to the smaller areas / coastal cities. I walked to Safeway pretty much every day to get my food and lived in a hostel for a month there, heard more gunshots in Sweden than over there.
Yeah, that's kinda presumptuous, even though I gotta admire the guy for his innovative ways to improve everything.
I have an entire 3 story house (all paid for, no mortages...hah..brag brag), but NO CAR. And it's entirely by choice. My train is 10 minutes walk away from me, 3 grocery stores are 600-1000 meters away and takes tops 7-15 minutes to walk to for me.
But sure - cost is also a factor, in Sweden where I live - (and I've owned cars before), it costs us roughly 50K SEK (roughly 6K USD) to own and operate even a second hand car per year, insurance, road tax, gasoline (which is 2$ an liter / roughly 7 dollars and 40 cents per gallon), car maintenance repairs, loss-of-value, etc.
And since everything is just minutes away, if I ever need to have a car to move stuff, I do so many computer favors for friends and neighbors they'll be more than happy to drive stuff for me. 6000$ a year is a LOT of money to save or spend on other stuff. Not to mention how clean this is for the environment.
...at one of the biggest companies in the world.
I'm an IT supporter there, and we're currently drowning in migration issues from the old system to o365. Profiles messing up, shared mails not working properly, license issues prohibiting our users from reading the mails and thus working. Literally thousands of calls, hundreds just at my department every day about Outlook o365 migration issues.
Get it working before you brag!
...innocent kind of belief they're going with there. Always the same boring, and mindbogglingly stupid argument:
"Those kinds of products in the wrong hands can be used to do bad things."
It would be the same as accusing the other 99% of actual product owners who just want to modify/optimize/better/repair and fix their own stuff to save a few buck, not to mention saving the entire planet - of being the criminals.
And if you own a product - YOU OWN IT! What part is there not to understand? Of course you can't demand warranty if you fiddle with it yourself, that is to be understood. But if it's yours then it's truly YOURS to mess with.
By all means makers - have fun, modify stuff. I'd do that regardless of laws. No law in this world is going to bar me from doing what I want with what I paid for. If there's lawmakers in my country that thinks otherwise, it's about time to ship them out somewhere else.
...but you gotta understand why Apple is still a player:
What alternative do you have today? Android? Pc? If that was left - there's really no competition to drive innovation forward.
Apple appeals to people who wants their technology to be not only functional, but pretty. It's like you're buying a lifestyle choice, you're not only purchasing a computer or yet another phone - you're buying a fashion statement, and you can still do what others do - but with less fuss and less nerding around drivers, updates, viruses etc.
The virus part is partly due to the fact that 90% of the world still owns a PC, so the viruses on Apple die a natural death of starvation...aka...it's not that easy to spread them because they're depending on an infrastructure to support them, which is poor (for them) to say the least. Same with Linux - Linux is as prone to viruses as Apple and PC would ever be, but they're so rare amongst desktop users that this is rarely an issue. Android "linux" however ...is an entirely different story.
I work at IT-helpdesk in an organization with 200K+ workers, and we know this by heart, because we support Apple IOS, Android, Windows AND Linux.
...which hides the framework, and lets the user use simple calls or commands to do advanced things like outputting text or graphics to almost any TFT/OLED/LCD screen you can imagine (small form factors usually, we're not talking HDMI screens here).
And it's almost like having a Commodore-64 on a chip, lots of I/O ports, way more forgiving on the inputs/outputs than the 6526 ever was (touch this one and you'd literally say goodbye to an expensive I/O chip), the interface is ugly...but easy to use, it's free aka gratis, it's open, it's got a huge community with tons of drivers for basically any hardware you want drive/throw at it/use with it. I put a complete weather station together in 2 hours, didn't even have to find software for that, as drivers and libraries are available for almost every sensor/screen out there. It's almost like combining a commodore 64 with lego.
I won't count Raspberry PI into this "easy" category, because albeit the raspberry is cheap, it's far from easy for kids to get started with, and if they do - the learning curve is hideous as it's almost as complex (hardware wise/programming) as a PC. With the Arduino range (especially the Nano V3 one's that can be had on ebay for a couple of dollars) are so ridiculously easy to use that your kid (or you) will be up and coding in minutes with actual real life results instead of having to learn endless libraries and code just to actually make an executable that will actually do something useful or meaningful.
And if we look at how many gazillion Arduinos are sold on ebay by random (often totally clueless sellers that have no clue what an arduino actually is), it's literally selling like it's hot - all the time. That's gotta count for something.
...rejoice!
Why? Well, most have been mention in this thread, I'm going to summarize those I agree with:
Fear factors:
- Viruses and Bacteria unknown to us.
- Increased demand for our resources (which btw, we're running out of, FAST!).
- Unknown motives, why did they decide to take contact? This is usually either because of two things, curiosity and the need for new resources. The last one should worry us... A LOT!
Good things:
- New technology (they traveled this far, we didn't manage the opposite so chances are they're technically superior to us, and we can take part of this technology).
- Combined technology, ours and theirs - are more likely to increase life quality for both species.
- Introduction of new (possibly stronger) genes into our species.
- Health technology, food growth technology, there could be infinite possibilities here, we don't know - yet!
- A lot of bad things we dealt with on our planet, often "belief" based, can finally be laid to rest, maybe this will cause less stress and agony on our own species, we don't know the effects of this yet, but I'm one of those who think we could totally do without all religions.
As far as I see it, the possibilities of the good outweighs the bad. I'm curious - I welcome the aliens, as long as their intentions are peaceful, for both species.
Windows 10 gives me hurdles of issues.
Windows never gives me even one hurdle of an issue - most likely because I took the time to learn how to work with it, and given the fact that around 95% of desktop end-users also use Windows, I think you are an outlier.
My spell-checker didn't get the word "outlier" and neither did I (I'm not natively English).
But besides that, I'm actually a windows supporter. We've recently rolled out Windows 10 in our organization, and I challenge your windows fancy any day of the year. :p
Windows 10 isn't so bad actually.
But the thing is - Mint never let me down. I use Win 10 at work, and I even have a win 10 partition on a separate drive...which does get bluescreened once in a blue moon, but Mint? Never happens. I can turn Mint on every night, and it never fails me - ever!
I'm a pragmatic person at my age now, I'm in my 50's. I remember my days compiling Slack to my preferences, and not to forget ...lazing off with Mandrake and Red Hat linux, ah - those where the days. But Mint (Ubuntu essentially) has won me over, because I'm now too old for "shit that don't work". I just wanna come home, be comfortable, watch my shitty netflix series, play my steam games...and surf my silly youtube videos and whatnot...Arduino comes to mind (yes I use that....semi daily)
The thing is - Mint made everything work out of the box, no permission shit, no endless nerding around like I was 20 again... ...And still - it works SOOOO much better than any windows OS I remember messing around with for the last 25+ years.
Thanks Mint + Ubuntu + Linux people for your tireless efforts, you truly are the kings amongst men.
...After Mint I never looked back.
Windows 10 gives me hurdles of issues.
Mint Linux? Works, and works - and works. Love it.
That's actually surprisingly high for a country that is not a major exporter of manufactured goods.
Is it? *cough* Sex Robots *cough*...
Could be, your link wasn't available in my country, but the title and description seemed right. And it was probably licensed to one of our national / public channels.
...I really need that 1 minute edit button in here.
Insert "Hippocampus" between the and actually (about how the size of the hippocampus actually grew....)
There was a documentary about this on TV, not sure what channel, but I saw it just a few days ago, about how the size of the actually grew on those learning to sharpen their memory like this. Scans where taken before and after, and the results where quite astonishing.
I kinda believe it too, I got a job at a huge corporation, where I was set to do an almost seemingly impossible task - namely learn 25K pages of information about their infrastructure so I could properly map and redirect requests to where it was needed + solve IT solution tasks on the spot if possible instead of redirecting, the answer where all in these 25K pages. At first it was like, I'm never ever gonna be able to do this, after a month I was - I can't believe I can actually remember this much, now I actually believe it can be done, I still have to console the 25K pages manual - but it's rarer and rarer, and my problem solving rate is up to 96% correct now.
What's even more interesting, is that this job has had a profound effect on my private life as well. I've done much more to clean up my life, making sure important things like personal pension, insurance, savings, purchases are done correctly instead of wasting it on "oh, I don't care". My gaming life is amazing in comparison to before, I've reached levels I couldn't even dream of later.
So there's something to this!
You're so cute sometimes.
IKR? At least hugs are free!
... is because they feel the threat. And it's very real.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is a nightmare for the powers that be - especially Goldman Sachs who's used to being in control of your money for ages. Sure you can ridicule the cryptocurrencies for being a rollercoaster of the smart outsmarts the lesser, but at least those who are not in "power" stand a chance at the big bucks for a small time, if done right - and understood correctly.
Goldman is nervous as HELL about this, we're talking big bucks - and they want to be in control of it, and they're not.
...are the most difficult hires.
I'm not young either, almost in my 50's - and still got hired in IT.
What surprises me though, is that our company have a habit of not hiring experienced staff, because they want to do the training and teaching themselves. We have a "teacher/mentor" culture in our offices meaning that when a new batch arrives, possibly with no knowledge of our infrastructure whatsoever - we train them meticulously. We have a high tolerance for failure (yes, most people will make mistakes, often quite expensive mistakes such as rebooting a server that has 100's of cash machines connected to it), but once they do that only ONCE - they'll likely never do it again. It's surprisingly effective. Also cost effective, as they get to be highly specialized and focused on our business and our customers.
The hardest ones to train, is the "experts". Completely age unrelated. Experts "knows so much" forehand, it becomes an uphill battle to explain to them everything. Some of them get offended that we imply that they "didn't know that" and it's almost like a mine-field trying to explain anything to people who know it all.
Fresh from the street - is the new IT gold. (And this comes from an almost 50 year 30+ in the IT business guy, me...who is as surprised as you probably are reading this), but it's quite true - I work in one of the biggest companies there is. I can't reveal who I work for as it's in my NDA, but if you work in a similar corporate, you'll totally get this.