You're forgetting how good computers are at searching for stuff in big data sets, or in filtering crap from real data. 95% of my e-mails are spam, but the best filters manage to block them them out with incredible accuracy. Also, I take it you're volunteering YOUR bandwidth for generating all that extra data? Most of us don't have unlimited data plans.
Don't pooh-pooh encryption. That turns your data into actual white noise for them, which is why they're scared silly of people actually using it without mandatory government-approved back doors. Soon, privacy-savvy customers are going to demand end-to-end encryption for ALL communication all their devices, including messaging and normal phone calls. You can already see this happening in incremental steps. There's simply no other way to be assured that people aren't listening in on you.
Nowadays, it's very likely someone using somewhat broken English on the internet simply doesn't speak it as a primary language. The way I figure it, I'm pretty sure their command of my language is a heck of a lot more impressive than my command of theirs. If I'm conversing with someone and they apologize for their poor English, I'll often pull out this quip to reassure them that not everyone is so shallow as to nitpick about stuff like that.
Sure, we all laughed at "all your base are belong to us", but there's a difference between chuckling at some examples of Engrish versus some sort of language snobbery. I suppose the Japanese or Chinese version of those sorts of jokes are when Westerners get kanji tattoos that don't quite mean what they thought. I think it's fine as long as it doesn't get mean-spirited or personal.
Also, take note of one of the rare times "looser" is actually used appropriately. Nowadays, my brain makes a nearly audible 'tic' whenever it first spots that word anywhere on the internet, probably because of the tiny mental trauma inflicted on me each time someone misspells "loser".
Given the copious amounts of written language-related pedantry found here (search for "begs/begging the question" and related discussion), this is a surprisingly relevant topic. I wonder if programmers and other tech types tend to get overly hung up on language rules because of their profession. When it comes to computer languages, after all, if you're not borderline pedantic, you're likely to write sloppy or buggy code.
I think one of the problems from management's perspective is that some of these platforms are now incredibly mature. If version + 1 looks and works exactly like version, then it's harder to make the case that the new product is worthy of purchase. That is, you'd actually have to produce real innovation. That's hard to do in a platform like Windows, where your greatest assets are mass market penetration and boring old backwards compatibility with the ancient Win32 API.
UX is a perceived shortcut. It's a fresh coat of paint that the masses can point to and say "look, it's really different". The downside, of course, is that any UX change is incredibly disruptive even in the *best* case. That means you go through mental disruption and re-learning how tasks are performed, but eventually gain some benefits, especially with initial training which doesn't have to "unlearn" old habits. In the *worst* case, you end up causing a lot of pain for people, and end up with a system worse than what you started with. Then, you either undo what you did and cause further pain, or you stubbornly double-down on the new UX and try to incrementally improve it (aka polishing a turd), with the hope that if you polish it long and hard enough, it may turn into a diamond.
If you need to install third-party software to make the basic OS usable or presentable, then the OS makers have failed miserably. Add-ons come with potential penalties as well. You're never sure how long they'll be supported. They may have performance penalties or security implications, they might cause stability issues (since some of them hook into the guts of the OS via undocumented interfaces), or they might interfere with future updates, etc. People are quick to load up their software platforms of choice (Windows, Firefox, Android, etc) with dozens of third-party add-ons, and then they bitch about how how slow, buggy, bloated, etc that platform is.
The entire point of an OS platform is to enable your clients to essentially ignore the OS and simply get their work done. Windows 8 seemed intent on getting in the users face by introducing radical and unnecessary new paradigms, or by shoving ass-ugly new "modern" visual concepts that look like Windows 3.1 rejects. At the very least, Windows 10 is improving on some of the worst aspects of 8 usability, even if it still looks like crap.
You could be right. I hear a lot of people talk about how disorienting this is, though, and I was trying to address that issue. My feeling was that a joystick for movement and actually aiming a physical device might feel more natural with a VR headset on.
I guess we'll probably have to wait a bit and see whether you're correct that a mouse and keyboard will work well enough for first-person games. It could be just a matter of tuning the controls properly for a FPS/VR experience, or of players adapting to it. After all, I remember that it took a bit of time for me to get used to FPS controls both on a PC and then later on consoles.
Things like the Omni strike me as being so expensive and cumbersome that they'll probably not see much adoption. It's the same thing as with motion detection controllers or full body motion detection - it's entertaining for some specific applications or as a novelty, but after a while, you start wishing you could just press a button to trigger the action.
I'd agree except for the "without lengthy explanations". There's also a pretty big distinction between "sugar coating" and using a bit of diplomacy. Telling someone their code sucks with little explanation both does nothing to really help them and may just create bad feelings and frustration. Why create unnecessary tension in the workplace if you don't have to?
I tend to prefer taking more of a mentor position with programmers on my team if I feel their work needs improvement. This includes not just telling someone how to do something, but listening and finding out *why* they chose to write code the way they did. I think this effort will ultimately make them more productive in the long run, rather than just shuffling them off to another project or another company. If they're not responsive to those efforts over time, either deliberately or because of a lack of talent, then at that point get rid of them or transfer them to a position / place where they're more suited.
This is a bit different than in the FLOSS world, where you really wouldn't have the time or inclination to mentor everyone who submitted code. It's probably more appropriate to be direct and concise in those cases, as otherwise you'd have all your time sucked away.
I think people are too focused on the VR headset and not considering the problem of peripherals enough. When you put on a VR headset, you essentially demand a HOTAS type control system, so your hands never have to wander around searching for where to go, as you're not essentially blind to the world.
I've been thinking a lot about what sort of controller would be optimal for a shooter or other first-person game in which you wanted to be able to look, aim, and move independently. You'd essentially need a movement control for your off hand, and an aiming device for your main hand. It could be a concept similar to the Wii remote with it's attached single-hand joystick - only I'd prefer an aiming device with a proper pistol grip and trigger, and they'd both need to be independent and wireless so you're not getting cables caught on anything. A standard two handed gamepad is just not going to cut it, I think. If this can be cracked, then we'll certainly *may* see shooters and first-person adventure games. If it ends up feeling clumsy, then probably not. It's really hard to say until someone tries it out.
Hell, even if the technology is really only broadly used for flight sims and other "in the cockpit" sort of games, it's still a win. I used to play quite a few flight sims ages ago, and the limited field of view was incredibly frustrating. The prospect of being able to look over my shoulder to track potential targets sounds incredible. Granted, not everyone is going to have a HOTAS system, but for those of us who do, it's going to be awesome.
The penalty for open source is the same as for commercial software - an erosion of their user base. Open source that doesn't get widely used doesn't tend to get a lot of broad developer support either - no one wants to be working on a piece of software that few people are actually using. In the case of Mozilla, their declining userbase directly impacts their ability to earn revenue via search placement deals. Firefox is not developed with volunteer labor.
So, I don't think it's necessarily true that there's no penalty. It's probably more accurate to say it's more of an indirect penalty than with commercial software. Keep in mind that plenty of commercial businesses have failed so badly to deliver a solid, core product that they've gone bankrupt as well. With open source, the "fall" is a bit less dramatic, since the project just quietly stagnates instead of disappearing altogether.
Have you seen videos of Google's car deftly navigating it's way through city streets, pedestrians, bicycles (even recognizing hand signals), railroads, construction zones, and other such obstacles? They're not claiming it's perfect yet, but I think you're underestimating how close these companies are to a real, working solution.
As far as legal issues... yeah, there will be lawsuits, but that's nothing new for the automotive industry. Self-driving is such a massively compelling feature, though, that it's absolutely going to happen.
I guess we'll just have to wait about a decade to see who's right.
I take it you have never worked on any computer vision papers or any teams that have tried vehicle automation? Because even autonomous freeway driving in the USA is far far far off - perhaps 30 years or more.
Keep in mind that cars can and will make use of a variety of sensors besides vision that are much easier and reliable to process. I'm betting the first generation of automated highway driving uses no vision systems at all... just radar, lidar, and sonar, plus GPS for nativation. More to the point, they can use ALL of them at once. Those are more than enough to handle highway driving. Cars today are already using some of these systems for their intelligent cruise control, auto-parking, and collision avoidance systems.
Make no mistake... computers are going to be FAR better drivers than humans. No getting drowsy or falling asleep. No distractions by the passengers in the seat next to you or the rugrats in the back. No rear-ending cars while looking at your cellphone or putting on makeup or one of the ten thousand stupid things humans do every day behind the wheel. Fully autonomous cars can't come fast enough, and they'll likely be coming a hell of a lot faster than you think.
The numbers don't seem all that unrealistic considering karaoke's incredibly popularity in Asian countries (if nothing else, watch the little Japanese girls singing in the video, as it's really adorable).. The typical commercial establishments called "karaoke boxes" feature many tiny rooms suitable for small numbers of guests to sing and eat drinks and snacks in private. These aren't normal bars that do karaoke part-time like western establishments - they're exclusively designed for karaoke, and are suitable for all ages, from children to middle-aged salarymen. These establishments do karaoke all day, and nothing else. A huge number of Japanese families apparently have a karaoke machine at home as well. I'm going to bet the Asian market accounts for at least 90% of the global karaoke market, easy.
Internet of Things and a Kickstarter Slashvertisement combined. For the nitpicky, we can even debate the proper use of "begs the question". All it really needs is something about 3D printing and some angle about getting more women into technology, and it would be perfect. Something for everyone!
Also... wait, did they just describe this as a "platform"? People are going to write apps for this or something?
The drone operator / video poster WAS actually earning money from the ads, even though it was a tiny amount. Generally speaking, in terms of business rules and regulations, there are a lot of exceptions made for people who make under a specific monetary threshold. I'd like to see the FAA formalize this, so that anyone who makes less than, for example, $1000 a year isn't considered "commercial use". If it later becomes a problem, then address those specific problems at that time.
If the drone were flying a banner, I think that would constitute an advertisement, and it would likely be subject to regulation as well.
Scroll up to see the discussion about using war and famine to intentionally kill billions, or at the very least to kill anyone involved with the oil and coal extraction businesses.
According to Intel, this end-of-life behavior generally matches what's supposed to happen. The write errors suggest the 335 Series had entered read-only mode. When the power is cycled in this state, a sort of self-destruct mechanism is triggered, rendering the drive unresponsive. Intel really doesn't want its client SSDs to be used after the flash has exceeded its lifetime spec. The firm's enterprise drives are designed to remain in logical disable mode after the MWI bottoms out, regardless of whether the power is cycled. Those server-focused SSDs will still brick themselves if data integrity can't be verified, though.
SMART functionality is supposed to persist in logical disable mode, so it's unclear what happened to our test subject there. Intel says attempting writes in the read-only state could cause problems, so the fact that Anvil kept trying to push data onto the drive may have been a factor.
All things considered, the 335 Series died in a reasonably graceful, predictable manner. SMART warnings popped up long before write errors occurred, providing plenty of time—and additional write headroom—for users to prepare.
So, it sounds like this is the intended behavior for *enterprise* drives. It may not be the same for *consumer* drives, but that's a bit unclear.
While it may make you feel better if consumer SSD drives would go into a permanent read-only mode, it seems extremely unlikely that a typical consumer would ever actually reach this point in an SSD's life at all. So, I'm not really losing sleep that my own Intel SSD drives are going to brick themselves, when at a typical consumer write volume, this isn't going to happen anytime in the next century (seriously, look at the volume of data that was written). The drive will long be dead because of some electronic component failure long before I reach it's natural end of write life. Moreover, I'd appear to have plenty of warnings and could easily replace them long before that happened.
I don't think they are spun down. That would kill their reliability. The 3 seconds is more likely to be network delays if the data are scattered to far flung locations.
Keeping them spun up for rarely accessed data doesn't make a lot of sense to me. This is the sort of data you're probably not constantly accessing, like backups or other data archives. Keeping the hard drives spinning would also increase their power draw and heat.
Besides which, I don't know of any network that would cause three second lag. You can typically send data halfway around the world in under a few hundred milliseconds. So, I'm not sure what else that delay would be.
This is one of the "hidden" costs of doing business in China. You can pretty much count on the theft and exploitation of your designs. How dare they exploit us back!
However, given the fact that this is a luxury good and status symbol, I don't think Apple is too worried about this, except if consumers are fooled into buying one. No one wants to show off a knock-off status symbol. It defeats the entire purpose.
I'd posit that you tend to see a lot of "crappy" OSS projects partially because there's no financial pressure to cull those products from the "market". As long as someone is motivated enough to keep developing a project, it will continue regardless of whether anyone uses it or not. Even when it's abandoned, it's still available for anyone to use and improve for themselves if they want.
Commercial products, by nature, have to be good enough for people to actually pay for them, since you're paying expensive programmers to work on it. Once a product is abandoned, it typically isn't sold anymore, because the company doesn't want to incur any support costs. That's a brutally Darwinian culling process, and as a result, you're typically left with best-in-class software that compete either on features and/or price.
Software longevity is actually one of the strengths of FOSS, not a weakness, because it means someone always has a chance to branch or continue development from someone else's original work. And there's a lot of stuff out there that isn't easily monetized that FOSS covers. It does have the downside that there's a lot of abandoned crap out there, of course.
For me, personally, I'm glad that both exist. The competition between the two philosophies makes for better software all around, and each tend to fill niches that the other doesn't bother with.
I originally thought that the AAA would support linux before the more indie tittles would, supporting multiple platforms require a lot more QA and I thought the AAA would be the only ones with enough money and time to do it.
Small business are often the first to take advantage of niche markets, because fairly small numbers of sales is still worthwhile to them. AAA games require a huge investment in engineering time, especially if they use their own engine or have heavily modified a commercial engine. As such, the much smaller market share of Linux makes less financial sense for them. I'd guess most AAA games that come out on Linux are using an engine that supports Linux natively. If that weren't the case, there's almost no way they could justify it financially.
Adults tend to get nervous about insanely popular trends or hobbies with kids that they don't exactly understand. They're banning it because it's so stupidly popular with kids, not because it's violent. The problem is that it's such an inherently non-violent game that they end up looking rather silly describing it as such, essentially proving the point that they have no idea what the game actually plays like.
Of course, they'd look even more foolish if they told the truth, which is "We don't know exactly what this Minecraft thing is that our kids are spending all day playing. So, we decided to ban it just to be safe."
Here's a link I found that gives approximate timelines to various features. Nothing is set in stone of course, because it's difficult to predict what sort of issues may come up that would prevent timely adoption. The committee has a tendency to just drop a particular proposal rather than letting it slow down the whole process.
Slashdot Mirror
You're forgetting how good computers are at searching for stuff in big data sets, or in filtering crap from real data. 95% of my e-mails are spam, but the best filters manage to block them them out with incredible accuracy. Also, I take it you're volunteering YOUR bandwidth for generating all that extra data? Most of us don't have unlimited data plans.
Don't pooh-pooh encryption. That turns your data into actual white noise for them, which is why they're scared silly of people actually using it without mandatory government-approved back doors. Soon, privacy-savvy customers are going to demand end-to-end encryption for ALL communication all their devices, including messaging and normal phone calls. You can already see this happening in incremental steps. There's simply no other way to be assured that people aren't listening in on you.
Oh bugger off.
unreadable rubbish is produced by a lazy, uneducated American
Bloody Americans who don't know the difference between their, there and they're never apologize for it.
So being lazy and using improper English is impolite to the extreme
I see... It's impolite, is it? I'll certainly keep that in mind. We wouldn't want to be impolite now, would we?
Nowadays, it's very likely someone using somewhat broken English on the internet simply doesn't speak it as a primary language. The way I figure it, I'm pretty sure their command of my language is a heck of a lot more impressive than my command of theirs. If I'm conversing with someone and they apologize for their poor English, I'll often pull out this quip to reassure them that not everyone is so shallow as to nitpick about stuff like that.
Sure, we all laughed at "all your base are belong to us", but there's a difference between chuckling at some examples of Engrish versus some sort of language snobbery. I suppose the Japanese or Chinese version of those sorts of jokes are when Westerners get kanji tattoos that don't quite mean what they thought. I think it's fine as long as it doesn't get mean-spirited or personal.
Also, take note of one of the rare times "looser" is actually used appropriately. Nowadays, my brain makes a nearly audible 'tic' whenever it first spots that word anywhere on the internet, probably because of the tiny mental trauma inflicted on me each time someone misspells "loser".
Given the copious amounts of written language-related pedantry found here (search for "begs/begging the question" and related discussion), this is a surprisingly relevant topic. I wonder if programmers and other tech types tend to get overly hung up on language rules because of their profession. When it comes to computer languages, after all, if you're not borderline pedantic, you're likely to write sloppy or buggy code.
I think one of the problems from management's perspective is that some of these platforms are now incredibly mature. If version + 1 looks and works exactly like version, then it's harder to make the case that the new product is worthy of purchase. That is, you'd actually have to produce real innovation. That's hard to do in a platform like Windows, where your greatest assets are mass market penetration and boring old backwards compatibility with the ancient Win32 API.
UX is a perceived shortcut. It's a fresh coat of paint that the masses can point to and say "look, it's really different". The downside, of course, is that any UX change is incredibly disruptive even in the *best* case. That means you go through mental disruption and re-learning how tasks are performed, but eventually gain some benefits, especially with initial training which doesn't have to "unlearn" old habits. In the *worst* case, you end up causing a lot of pain for people, and end up with a system worse than what you started with. Then, you either undo what you did and cause further pain, or you stubbornly double-down on the new UX and try to incrementally improve it (aka polishing a turd), with the hope that if you polish it long and hard enough, it may turn into a diamond.
If you need to install third-party software to make the basic OS usable or presentable, then the OS makers have failed miserably. Add-ons come with potential penalties as well. You're never sure how long they'll be supported. They may have performance penalties or security implications, they might cause stability issues (since some of them hook into the guts of the OS via undocumented interfaces), or they might interfere with future updates, etc. People are quick to load up their software platforms of choice (Windows, Firefox, Android, etc) with dozens of third-party add-ons, and then they bitch about how how slow, buggy, bloated, etc that platform is.
The entire point of an OS platform is to enable your clients to essentially ignore the OS and simply get their work done. Windows 8 seemed intent on getting in the users face by introducing radical and unnecessary new paradigms, or by shoving ass-ugly new "modern" visual concepts that look like Windows 3.1 rejects. At the very least, Windows 10 is improving on some of the worst aspects of 8 usability, even if it still looks like crap.
You could be right. I hear a lot of people talk about how disorienting this is, though, and I was trying to address that issue. My feeling was that a joystick for movement and actually aiming a physical device might feel more natural with a VR headset on.
I guess we'll probably have to wait a bit and see whether you're correct that a mouse and keyboard will work well enough for first-person games. It could be just a matter of tuning the controls properly for a FPS/VR experience, or of players adapting to it. After all, I remember that it took a bit of time for me to get used to FPS controls both on a PC and then later on consoles.
Things like the Omni strike me as being so expensive and cumbersome that they'll probably not see much adoption. It's the same thing as with motion detection controllers or full body motion detection - it's entertaining for some specific applications or as a novelty, but after a while, you start wishing you could just press a button to trigger the action.
I'd agree except for the "without lengthy explanations". There's also a pretty big distinction between "sugar coating" and using a bit of diplomacy. Telling someone their code sucks with little explanation both does nothing to really help them and may just create bad feelings and frustration. Why create unnecessary tension in the workplace if you don't have to?
I tend to prefer taking more of a mentor position with programmers on my team if I feel their work needs improvement. This includes not just telling someone how to do something, but listening and finding out *why* they chose to write code the way they did. I think this effort will ultimately make them more productive in the long run, rather than just shuffling them off to another project or another company. If they're not responsive to those efforts over time, either deliberately or because of a lack of talent, then at that point get rid of them or transfer them to a position / place where they're more suited.
This is a bit different than in the FLOSS world, where you really wouldn't have the time or inclination to mentor everyone who submitted code. It's probably more appropriate to be direct and concise in those cases, as otherwise you'd have all your time sucked away.
I think people are too focused on the VR headset and not considering the problem of peripherals enough. When you put on a VR headset, you essentially demand a HOTAS type control system, so your hands never have to wander around searching for where to go, as you're not essentially blind to the world.
I've been thinking a lot about what sort of controller would be optimal for a shooter or other first-person game in which you wanted to be able to look, aim, and move independently. You'd essentially need a movement control for your off hand, and an aiming device for your main hand. It could be a concept similar to the Wii remote with it's attached single-hand joystick - only I'd prefer an aiming device with a proper pistol grip and trigger, and they'd both need to be independent and wireless so you're not getting cables caught on anything. A standard two handed gamepad is just not going to cut it, I think. If this can be cracked, then we'll certainly *may* see shooters and first-person adventure games. If it ends up feeling clumsy, then probably not. It's really hard to say until someone tries it out.
Hell, even if the technology is really only broadly used for flight sims and other "in the cockpit" sort of games, it's still a win. I used to play quite a few flight sims ages ago, and the limited field of view was incredibly frustrating. The prospect of being able to look over my shoulder to track potential targets sounds incredible. Granted, not everyone is going to have a HOTAS system, but for those of us who do, it's going to be awesome.
The penalty for open source is the same as for commercial software - an erosion of their user base. Open source that doesn't get widely used doesn't tend to get a lot of broad developer support either - no one wants to be working on a piece of software that few people are actually using. In the case of Mozilla, their declining userbase directly impacts their ability to earn revenue via search placement deals. Firefox is not developed with volunteer labor.
So, I don't think it's necessarily true that there's no penalty. It's probably more accurate to say it's more of an indirect penalty than with commercial software. Keep in mind that plenty of commercial businesses have failed so badly to deliver a solid, core product that they've gone bankrupt as well. With open source, the "fall" is a bit less dramatic, since the project just quietly stagnates instead of disappearing altogether.
Have you seen videos of Google's car deftly navigating it's way through city streets, pedestrians, bicycles (even recognizing hand signals), railroads, construction zones, and other such obstacles? They're not claiming it's perfect yet, but I think you're underestimating how close these companies are to a real, working solution.
As far as legal issues... yeah, there will be lawsuits, but that's nothing new for the automotive industry. Self-driving is such a massively compelling feature, though, that it's absolutely going to happen.
I guess we'll just have to wait about a decade to see who's right.
I take it you have never worked on any computer vision papers or any teams that have tried vehicle automation? Because even autonomous freeway driving in the USA is far far far off - perhaps 30 years or more.
Cars with autonomous freeway driving will be out in just a couple of years, according to automotive manufacturers. Nearly all the major players are predicting fully autonomous cars will be a solved problem sometime between 2020 and 2025.
Keep in mind that cars can and will make use of a variety of sensors besides vision that are much easier and reliable to process. I'm betting the first generation of automated highway driving uses no vision systems at all... just radar, lidar, and sonar, plus GPS for nativation. More to the point, they can use ALL of them at once. Those are more than enough to handle highway driving. Cars today are already using some of these systems for their intelligent cruise control, auto-parking, and collision avoidance systems.
Make no mistake... computers are going to be FAR better drivers than humans. No getting drowsy or falling asleep. No distractions by the passengers in the seat next to you or the rugrats in the back. No rear-ending cars while looking at your cellphone or putting on makeup or one of the ten thousand stupid things humans do every day behind the wheel. Fully autonomous cars can't come fast enough, and they'll likely be coming a hell of a lot faster than you think.
The numbers don't seem all that unrealistic considering karaoke's incredibly popularity in Asian countries (if nothing else, watch the little Japanese girls singing in the video, as it's really adorable).. The typical commercial establishments called "karaoke boxes" feature many tiny rooms suitable for small numbers of guests to sing and eat drinks and snacks in private. These aren't normal bars that do karaoke part-time like western establishments - they're exclusively designed for karaoke, and are suitable for all ages, from children to middle-aged salarymen. These establishments do karaoke all day, and nothing else. A huge number of Japanese families apparently have a karaoke machine at home as well. I'm going to bet the Asian market accounts for at least 90% of the global karaoke market, easy.
The more you know...
Internet of Things and a Kickstarter Slashvertisement combined. For the nitpicky, we can even debate the proper use of "begs the question". All it really needs is something about 3D printing and some angle about getting more women into technology, and it would be perfect. Something for everyone!
Also... wait, did they just describe this as a "platform"? People are going to write apps for this or something?
The drone operator / video poster WAS actually earning money from the ads, even though it was a tiny amount. Generally speaking, in terms of business rules and regulations, there are a lot of exceptions made for people who make under a specific monetary threshold. I'd like to see the FAA formalize this, so that anyone who makes less than, for example, $1000 a year isn't considered "commercial use". If it later becomes a problem, then address those specific problems at that time.
If the drone were flying a banner, I think that would constitute an advertisement, and it would likely be subject to regulation as well.
Scroll up to see the discussion about using war and famine to intentionally kill billions, or at the very least to kill anyone involved with the oil and coal extraction businesses.
For someone who's so deeply invested in managing the Network Time Protocol, this dude really doesn't seem to be able to manage his time very well.
Some additional info from an earlier article:
According to Intel, this end-of-life behavior generally matches what's supposed to happen. The write errors suggest the 335 Series had entered read-only mode. When the power is cycled in this state, a sort of self-destruct mechanism is triggered, rendering the drive unresponsive. Intel really doesn't want its client SSDs to be used after the flash has exceeded its lifetime spec. The firm's enterprise drives are designed to remain in logical disable mode after the MWI bottoms out, regardless of whether the power is cycled. Those server-focused SSDs will still brick themselves if data integrity can't be verified, though.
SMART functionality is supposed to persist in logical disable mode, so it's unclear what happened to our test subject there. Intel says attempting writes in the read-only state could cause problems, so the fact that Anvil kept trying to push data onto the drive may have been a factor.
All things considered, the 335 Series died in a reasonably graceful, predictable manner. SMART warnings popped up long before write errors occurred, providing plenty of time—and additional write headroom—for users to prepare.
So, it sounds like this is the intended behavior for *enterprise* drives. It may not be the same for *consumer* drives, but that's a bit unclear.
While it may make you feel better if consumer SSD drives would go into a permanent read-only mode, it seems extremely unlikely that a typical consumer would ever actually reach this point in an SSD's life at all. So, I'm not really losing sleep that my own Intel SSD drives are going to brick themselves, when at a typical consumer write volume, this isn't going to happen anytime in the next century (seriously, look at the volume of data that was written). The drive will long be dead because of some electronic component failure long before I reach it's natural end of write life. Moreover, I'd appear to have plenty of warnings and could easily replace them long before that happened.
I don't think they are spun down. That would kill their reliability. The 3 seconds is more likely to be network delays if the data are scattered to far flung locations.
Keeping them spun up for rarely accessed data doesn't make a lot of sense to me. This is the sort of data you're probably not constantly accessing, like backups or other data archives. Keeping the hard drives spinning would also increase their power draw and heat.
Besides which, I don't know of any network that would cause three second lag. You can typically send data halfway around the world in under a few hundred milliseconds. So, I'm not sure what else that delay would be.
This is one of the "hidden" costs of doing business in China. You can pretty much count on the theft and exploitation of your designs. How dare they exploit us back!
However, given the fact that this is a luxury good and status symbol, I don't think Apple is too worried about this, except if consumers are fooled into buying one. No one wants to show off a knock-off status symbol. It defeats the entire purpose.
I'd posit that you tend to see a lot of "crappy" OSS projects partially because there's no financial pressure to cull those products from the "market". As long as someone is motivated enough to keep developing a project, it will continue regardless of whether anyone uses it or not. Even when it's abandoned, it's still available for anyone to use and improve for themselves if they want.
Commercial products, by nature, have to be good enough for people to actually pay for them, since you're paying expensive programmers to work on it. Once a product is abandoned, it typically isn't sold anymore, because the company doesn't want to incur any support costs. That's a brutally Darwinian culling process, and as a result, you're typically left with best-in-class software that compete either on features and/or price.
Software longevity is actually one of the strengths of FOSS, not a weakness, because it means someone always has a chance to branch or continue development from someone else's original work. And there's a lot of stuff out there that isn't easily monetized that FOSS covers. It does have the downside that there's a lot of abandoned crap out there, of course.
For me, personally, I'm glad that both exist. The competition between the two philosophies makes for better software all around, and each tend to fill niches that the other doesn't bother with.
I originally thought that the AAA would support linux before the more indie tittles would, supporting multiple platforms require a lot more QA and I thought the AAA would be the only ones with enough money and time to do it.
Small business are often the first to take advantage of niche markets, because fairly small numbers of sales is still worthwhile to them. AAA games require a huge investment in engineering time, especially if they use their own engine or have heavily modified a commercial engine. As such, the much smaller market share of Linux makes less financial sense for them. I'd guess most AAA games that come out on Linux are using an engine that supports Linux natively. If that weren't the case, there's almost no way they could justify it financially.
Adults tend to get nervous about insanely popular trends or hobbies with kids that they don't exactly understand. They're banning it because it's so stupidly popular with kids, not because it's violent. The problem is that it's such an inherently non-violent game that they end up looking rather silly describing it as such, essentially proving the point that they have no idea what the game actually plays like.
Of course, they'd look even more foolish if they told the truth, which is "We don't know exactly what this Minecraft thing is that our kids are spending all day playing. So, we decided to ban it just to be safe."
Here's a link I found that gives approximate timelines to various features. Nothing is set in stone of course, because it's difficult to predict what sort of issues may come up that would prevent timely adoption. The committee has a tendency to just drop a particular proposal rather than letting it slow down the whole process.