Actually, my question is: why does an OS have to make that choice for people? Is it not possible to provide more than one video codec on mobile devices? I could perhaps see the point of Google choosing NOT to support a format in which you need pay royalties, but why would Apple NOT choose to support a free format in addition?
The tube can be rapidly re-pressurized in case of emergencies. That's a key safety feature in case of a vehicle hull breach. Oxygen masks would probably still be required, similar to airlines.
As far as propulsion failures, I believe each vehicle has on-board power enough to travel to an emergency exit point. No idea about what would happen if the vehicle gets stuck for some other reason, though, or if on-board propulsion fails. Likely, people experience a very long, uncomfortable wait as emergency workers breach the tube and extract them.
There may be a logical upper cap for bandwidth, though, the same as there was a practical limit for how fast computers needed to be for an average consumer. I'd imagine that practical bandwidth needs may very well cap out at the rate at a 4K stream per person, or 20-25Mbps. There's nothing else that comes even close to requiring as much bandwidth, at least for consumer use. And in practice, few people will be streaming 24/7.
As such, demand for bandwidth probably won't increase indefinitely, except as a function of population. There's little point in increasing resolution beyond 4K, and nearly every other type of app you can imagine won't require anywhere near as much bandwidth as streaming video.
It's a little harder to create disposable shipping addresses. I'm not disputing your assertion on scammers in general (because, yes, shit people), but I'm not so sure this is quite so easy to abuse as you claim.
Yeah, I don't mean to make it sound like regulation is some panacea. Legislation can be just like anything else, good or bad. There's a risk you take in trusting legislation, because it can actually make things *worse* if it's bad, and yes, we've seen a lot of bad legislation. Still, in the case of VW (and colluding partners, allegedly), regulation was only temporarily thwarted, remember.
Generally speaking, I would propose that the best type of legislation is somewhat vague, declaring intent instead of specifics (e.g. "best industry practices"), and perhaps delegates the specifics to a certified third-party, such as UL. We already have a model for doing something like this for electrical safety. Why not delegate the specific rules to experts who can certify individual devices, and then license these companies for this specific purpose?
I'll certainly reserve my judgement on whether this is a good or bad thing depending on whether the legislation is written intelligently or not. But we can't continue as we have, with the wild west approach that's putting an undue burden on the internet infrastructure due to manufacturers obviously not giving a shit whether their devices are secure or not.
It's impractical to prosecute or fine individuals with IoT devices, because all there is is an IP address that's flooding the internet with crap. It's not trivial to prove an IP address belongs to an individual, and the investigatory burden you're imposing with your proposed scheme would be too much for any investigatory system to bear.
I don't think home-built or open-source devices are really an issue. Moreover, this sort of regulation is typically only applied to devices that are *sold* commercially. And it's these commercial IoT devices sold by the millions with shit for security, many of which can't be automatically patched, that's the real issue. The IoT industry had their chance, and they blew it, big time. That means it's time for legislation and regulation to step in to protect common interests. This is how ALL government regulation and oversight comes to pass.
1) New industry emerges 2) Reckless practices in a drive for market dominance 3) Profit! 4) Government steps in to regulate the industry when industry fails to regulate itself
The good news is that by forcing a minimum level of security standards, it forces ALL companies to adhere to these standards if they want access to the lucrative US market, and so it should likely improve safety levels across the entire industry (similar to cars and airliners).
The problem is that those devices are actively harming others on the internet. No one would care as much if it was just inconveniencing the people that bought the shitty devices.
No, I'd say this is more equivalent to a stock split. Since the supply just doubled, you'd expect the currency value to roughly halve. But as I understand it, since people will have both in their wallets (double their current Bitcoin), it shouldn't negatively effect anyone.
I trust your opinion on this matter completely just because of your name.
To be honest, even though I consider myself a competent programmer, I completely suck at the clever little programming challenges a lot of programmers seem to be good at. I think my brain just isn't wired that way. I'm pretty good at doing normal programming work, which typically involves a completely different skill set, in my opinion, along with plenty of time to experiment and reason out how to solve problems that come up. I tend to dread interviews, because they almost always measure and depend upon skill of the former type, and not the latter.
Ah... well, when I said "they" I was talking more about distros, but your point about people using Python 2.7 legacy apps is well taken. They'll just take a snapshot and use it in a VM until the end of time, like a lot of other legacy stuff. Like I mentioned, legacy code has an unbelievable amount of traction, for good reason. The code was written once, at great expense, and currently works. It's hard to make a business case that a massive amount of work needs to be thrown at something for zero new functionality except "now it's version 3 compatible instead of version 2." So it doesn't happen.
So... Python 2.7 is the IE6 of languages, then? Or the new VB6?
Maybe python needs to have some kind of simple version flag in the shebang line.
Well, at that point, it's not much different than explicitly specifying your Python version, right? Ultimately, I think that's the correct answer going forward. Also, one would hope Python doesn't actually have to break backwards compatibility with each new major release going forward. Upgrading the Python interpreter is only a big deal because of the incompatibility between 2 and 3.
Well, not outside an office anyhow. I see this from slashdotters all the time. They have no practical experience outside an office, and so *vastly* overestimate the capabilities of robots and automation, largely because they don't understand industrial or light industrial work sites. There are a LOT of types of work where automation can only go so far, or in bits and pieces, and requires the dexterity and flexibility of human workers to put these products together.
My father ran a light manufacturing operation for many years, and most of his products were one-offs. His business used a lot of high-tech tools, but skilled people were still required to put it all together - certified welders included. Until a robotic welder has both the dexterity of a human AND the intellectual capacity to cope with changing projects and requirements, we're still going to need humans to do the job.
How do they deal with the end-of-life of Python 2.7 in 2020 then? Isn't leaving an unsupported interpreter shipping as the "default" python a bad idea?
Anyhow, it just goes to show you the staying power of legacy systems. Once something is in place and working, it takes a lot of time and effort to get things upgraded. People understandably don't want to have to rewrite perfectly working code just because someone decides to make improvements and break compatibility. I suspect Guido vastly underestimated the detrimental effect splitting the language into incompatible versions would have, and the headaches it would still be causing nearly a decade later.
One trick scummy app authors use is to copy a legitimate game's marketing material and art, then create an app that does nothing but "hang" on the loading screen, in the meantime trying to game the ad system to earn some free money.
Unfortunately, this hurts the reputation of the legitimate game and its developers, as often the malware authors simply steal the name along with the art assets.
Except Amazon also started irritating me off with more and more of their own ads. Apparently, it's not good enough that I'm going there to buy something. They have to try to monetize my eyeballs as well by shoving paid adverts in my search results.
Companies just can't seem to resist the siren's lure of some "free" extra profit (nevermind how it annoys some customers). The web just got ridiculously top-heavy with ads, and worse, they started becoming *dangerous*. That's when I installed an ad-blocker, and no amount of cajoling will get me to lower my shields... not when infected ads even get delivered by mainstream sites, not just the sketchy ones.
Also, one would hope the upgrade process scans for 32-bit-only apps and informs the user "X App" will not function after this OS upgrade. Are you sure you want to proceed?
Undoubtedly, some idiots will still press "Yes" and proceed to bitch afterwards, but that's people for you.
I sort of wish we could call smartphones and tablets "personal computers", and PCs as we know them could be re-designated as "workstations". To me, those monikers actually make a lot more sense. There's no real doubt that the "personal computer" for the modern masses is the smartphone, and the PC has been related to the platform where "work gets done".
Yep, this is what happens when developers insist on using the only tools they know instead of investing the time and effort required to learn and use the most appropriate tools for the actual job at hand.
So, as I understand it, instead of biting the bullet and simply creating an actual native app, web developers created an entire new framework more or less consisting of an entire browser (and one not known for being easy on resources to begin with) and it's Javascript interpreter, all so they could continue to use Javascript and pretend the whole thing is a "native" application.
Yes, that's exactly what Mozilla was thinking. "Obviously, the reason we're losing marketshare is because of our outdated logo."
And of course, they were absolutely right. Firefox's popularity has once again begun to skyrocket upward, now that their company and product logos have been updated and modernized. As it turns out, that was the only significant thing holding them back from unrivaled popularity, and they're well on the way to finally winning the browser war.
FreeBSD need to follow Mozilla's example, obviously. Who the hell drew that silly thing? Why didn't they get someone like John Lasseter to design them something awesome? And Linux.... Don't get me started. If they had abandoned that stupid penguin, it would have been "Year of the Linux" desktop a decade ago, easy.
So basically, you trust Apple, but think all Android phones can't be trusted.
Nope, didn't say that at all. I trust Apple MORE than I trust the Chinese manufacturer. But I actually have an Android phone, because I like the extra control it gives me. My next phone will probably be a Pixel.
From Apple's site on privacy:
We also use personal information to help us create, develop, operate, deliver, and improve our products, services, content and advertising, and for loss prevention and anti-fraud purposes.
Is that the "admission"? Apple is up-front about what they do with your data. When I talk about "trust", I mean that I trust them not to abuse that data in a way I wouldn't be comfortable with, such as selling it to a third party. As far as ads, we're probably talking about ads you might see on the App store, which knows which apps you have installed, and so can perhaps show you more relevant ones. I'm actually okay with that. I have no such confidence in any Chinese company, manufacturer or no, to show such restraint.
Because the technology is still relatively primitive, expensive, and doesn't properly cover all use cases. There are many people who have to regularly drive distances further than current e-vehicles practically allow. I'd imagine that by 2040, these issues will have been eliminated. If you can drive 1000km on a single charge (more than most people want to drive in a single day), or if you can provide quick charges in under an hour (not an unreasonable break for long trips), you've eliminated one of the main hurdles to widespread adoption.
Or, if you want to look at things more cynically, 2040 is far enough away that current politicians don't have to do anything at all, yet get the benefit of looking green.
There are lots of valid reasons for an iPhone to communicate with Apple servers, you know. There are a bunch of integrated services, as well as security updates, etc. It would be a bit strange, IMO, if an iPhone actually never talked to Apple. The trick is whether or not you trust a company to slurp up and use your private data in ways you don't approve of.
So, Apple vs Random Chinese Company privacy showdown. In the end, you have to look at things like this pragmatically. Apple is making billions and billions off of iPhone and store sales, and their reputation for protecting privacy is likely worth much more to them than any sort of ad revenue they might get from trying to actively exploit their users' data. Random Chinese Company? Probably operating on very slim margins, and reputation isn't much to them - just price.
But I do agree with the general sentiment. Apple is probably a rarity in the tech world simply due to their current insane profit margins. Hell, even manufacturers of robotic vacuum cleaner are discussing how to monetize the fucking floor plan of your own home. It's beyond absurd at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, my question is: why does an OS have to make that choice for people? Is it not possible to provide more than one video codec on mobile devices? I could perhaps see the point of Google choosing NOT to support a format in which you need pay royalties, but why would Apple NOT choose to support a free format in addition?
The tube can be rapidly re-pressurized in case of emergencies. That's a key safety feature in case of a vehicle hull breach. Oxygen masks would probably still be required, similar to airlines.
As far as propulsion failures, I believe each vehicle has on-board power enough to travel to an emergency exit point. No idea about what would happen if the vehicle gets stuck for some other reason, though, or if on-board propulsion fails. Likely, people experience a very long, uncomfortable wait as emergency workers breach the tube and extract them.
There may be a logical upper cap for bandwidth, though, the same as there was a practical limit for how fast computers needed to be for an average consumer. I'd imagine that practical bandwidth needs may very well cap out at the rate at a 4K stream per person, or 20-25Mbps. There's nothing else that comes even close to requiring as much bandwidth, at least for consumer use. And in practice, few people will be streaming 24/7.
As such, demand for bandwidth probably won't increase indefinitely, except as a function of population. There's little point in increasing resolution beyond 4K, and nearly every other type of app you can imagine won't require anywhere near as much bandwidth as streaming video.
In fairness, that was accurately quoted from the article. A [sic] would have been nice, granted.
Mind you, this woman was old enough that she wouldn't have grown up with cable TV in her home, since it wasn't widely available during her childhood.
I'm not sure why you'd think that. Cable was widely available during the 70's, with millions of subscribers.
Not to say that sort of ignorance isn't rather amazing, but it's very likely that she grew up in a cable-TV household.
It's a little harder to create disposable shipping addresses. I'm not disputing your assertion on scammers in general (because, yes, shit people), but I'm not so sure this is quite so easy to abuse as you claim.
Yeah, I don't mean to make it sound like regulation is some panacea. Legislation can be just like anything else, good or bad. There's a risk you take in trusting legislation, because it can actually make things *worse* if it's bad, and yes, we've seen a lot of bad legislation. Still, in the case of VW (and colluding partners, allegedly), regulation was only temporarily thwarted, remember.
Generally speaking, I would propose that the best type of legislation is somewhat vague, declaring intent instead of specifics (e.g. "best industry practices"), and perhaps delegates the specifics to a certified third-party, such as UL. We already have a model for doing something like this for electrical safety. Why not delegate the specific rules to experts who can certify individual devices, and then license these companies for this specific purpose?
I'll certainly reserve my judgement on whether this is a good or bad thing depending on whether the legislation is written intelligently or not. But we can't continue as we have, with the wild west approach that's putting an undue burden on the internet infrastructure due to manufacturers obviously not giving a shit whether their devices are secure or not.
It's impractical to prosecute or fine individuals with IoT devices, because all there is is an IP address that's flooding the internet with crap. It's not trivial to prove an IP address belongs to an individual, and the investigatory burden you're imposing with your proposed scheme would be too much for any investigatory system to bear.
I don't think home-built or open-source devices are really an issue. Moreover, this sort of regulation is typically only applied to devices that are *sold* commercially. And it's these commercial IoT devices sold by the millions with shit for security, many of which can't be automatically patched, that's the real issue. The IoT industry had their chance, and they blew it, big time. That means it's time for legislation and regulation to step in to protect common interests. This is how ALL government regulation and oversight comes to pass.
1) New industry emerges
2) Reckless practices in a drive for market dominance
3) Profit!
4) Government steps in to regulate the industry when industry fails to regulate itself
The good news is that by forcing a minimum level of security standards, it forces ALL companies to adhere to these standards if they want access to the lucrative US market, and so it should likely improve safety levels across the entire industry (similar to cars and airliners).
The problem is that those devices are actively harming others on the internet. No one would care as much if it was just inconveniencing the people that bought the shitty devices.
No, I'd say this is more equivalent to a stock split. Since the supply just doubled, you'd expect the currency value to roughly halve. But as I understand it, since people will have both in their wallets (double their current Bitcoin), it shouldn't negatively effect anyone.
I'd guess its marketing, not UX designers. UX designers are the ones who make our software's interface pretty and less usable.
I trust your opinion on this matter completely just because of your name.
To be honest, even though I consider myself a competent programmer, I completely suck at the clever little programming challenges a lot of programmers seem to be good at. I think my brain just isn't wired that way. I'm pretty good at doing normal programming work, which typically involves a completely different skill set, in my opinion, along with plenty of time to experiment and reason out how to solve problems that come up. I tend to dread interviews, because they almost always measure and depend upon skill of the former type, and not the latter.
Ah... well, when I said "they" I was talking more about distros, but your point about people using Python 2.7 legacy apps is well taken. They'll just take a snapshot and use it in a VM until the end of time, like a lot of other legacy stuff. Like I mentioned, legacy code has an unbelievable amount of traction, for good reason. The code was written once, at great expense, and currently works. It's hard to make a business case that a massive amount of work needs to be thrown at something for zero new functionality except "now it's version 3 compatible instead of version 2." So it doesn't happen.
So... Python 2.7 is the IE6 of languages, then? Or the new VB6?
Maybe python needs to have some kind of simple version flag in the shebang line.
Well, at that point, it's not much different than explicitly specifying your Python version, right? Ultimately, I think that's the correct answer going forward. Also, one would hope Python doesn't actually have to break backwards compatibility with each new major release going forward. Upgrading the Python interpreter is only a big deal because of the incompatibility between 2 and 3.
Clearly you have never worked a day in your life.
Well, not outside an office anyhow. I see this from slashdotters all the time. They have no practical experience outside an office, and so *vastly* overestimate the capabilities of robots and automation, largely because they don't understand industrial or light industrial work sites. There are a LOT of types of work where automation can only go so far, or in bits and pieces, and requires the dexterity and flexibility of human workers to put these products together.
My father ran a light manufacturing operation for many years, and most of his products were one-offs. His business used a lot of high-tech tools, but skilled people were still required to put it all together - certified welders included. Until a robotic welder has both the dexterity of a human AND the intellectual capacity to cope with changing projects and requirements, we're still going to need humans to do the job.
How do they deal with the end-of-life of Python 2.7 in 2020 then? Isn't leaving an unsupported interpreter shipping as the "default" python a bad idea?
Anyhow, it just goes to show you the staying power of legacy systems. Once something is in place and working, it takes a lot of time and effort to get things upgraded. People understandably don't want to have to rewrite perfectly working code just because someone decides to make improvements and break compatibility. I suspect Guido vastly underestimated the detrimental effect splitting the language into incompatible versions would have, and the headaches it would still be causing nearly a decade later.
One trick scummy app authors use is to copy a legitimate game's marketing material and art, then create an app that does nothing but "hang" on the loading screen, in the meantime trying to game the ad system to earn some free money.
Unfortunately, this hurts the reputation of the legitimate game and its developers, as often the malware authors simply steal the name along with the art assets.
Except Amazon also started irritating me off with more and more of their own ads. Apparently, it's not good enough that I'm going there to buy something. They have to try to monetize my eyeballs as well by shoving paid adverts in my search results.
Companies just can't seem to resist the siren's lure of some "free" extra profit (nevermind how it annoys some customers). The web just got ridiculously top-heavy with ads, and worse, they started becoming *dangerous*. That's when I installed an ad-blocker, and no amount of cajoling will get me to lower my shields... not when infected ads even get delivered by mainstream sites, not just the sketchy ones.
Also, one would hope the upgrade process scans for 32-bit-only apps and informs the user "X App" will not function after this OS upgrade. Are you sure you want to proceed?
Undoubtedly, some idiots will still press "Yes" and proceed to bitch afterwards, but that's people for you.
I sort of wish we could call smartphones and tablets "personal computers", and PCs as we know them could be re-designated as "workstations". To me, those monikers actually make a lot more sense. There's no real doubt that the "personal computer" for the modern masses is the smartphone, and the PC has been related to the platform where "work gets done".
Yep, this is what happens when developers insist on using the only tools they know instead of investing the time and effort required to learn and use the most appropriate tools for the actual job at hand.
So, as I understand it, instead of biting the bullet and simply creating an actual native app, web developers created an entire new framework more or less consisting of an entire browser (and one not known for being easy on resources to begin with) and it's Javascript interpreter, all so they could continue to use Javascript and pretend the whole thing is a "native" application.
Insanity.
Yes, that's exactly what Mozilla was thinking. "Obviously, the reason we're losing marketshare is because of our outdated logo."
And of course, they were absolutely right. Firefox's popularity has once again begun to skyrocket upward, now that their company and product logos have been updated and modernized. As it turns out, that was the only significant thing holding them back from unrivaled popularity, and they're well on the way to finally winning the browser war.
FreeBSD need to follow Mozilla's example, obviously. Who the hell drew that silly thing? Why didn't they get someone like John Lasseter to design them something awesome? And Linux.... Don't get me started. If they had abandoned that stupid penguin, it would have been "Year of the Linux" desktop a decade ago, easy.
So basically, you trust Apple, but think all Android phones can't be trusted.
Nope, didn't say that at all. I trust Apple MORE than I trust the Chinese manufacturer. But I actually have an Android phone, because I like the extra control it gives me. My next phone will probably be a Pixel.
From Apple's site on privacy:
We also use personal information to help us create, develop, operate, deliver, and improve our products, services, content and advertising, and for loss prevention and anti-fraud purposes.
Is that the "admission"? Apple is up-front about what they do with your data. When I talk about "trust", I mean that I trust them not to abuse that data in a way I wouldn't be comfortable with, such as selling it to a third party. As far as ads, we're probably talking about ads you might see on the App store, which knows which apps you have installed, and so can perhaps show you more relevant ones. I'm actually okay with that. I have no such confidence in any Chinese company, manufacturer or no, to show such restraint.
Because the technology is still relatively primitive, expensive, and doesn't properly cover all use cases. There are many people who have to regularly drive distances further than current e-vehicles practically allow. I'd imagine that by 2040, these issues will have been eliminated. If you can drive 1000km on a single charge (more than most people want to drive in a single day), or if you can provide quick charges in under an hour (not an unreasonable break for long trips), you've eliminated one of the main hurdles to widespread adoption.
Or, if you want to look at things more cynically, 2040 is far enough away that current politicians don't have to do anything at all, yet get the benefit of looking green.
There are lots of valid reasons for an iPhone to communicate with Apple servers, you know. There are a bunch of integrated services, as well as security updates, etc. It would be a bit strange, IMO, if an iPhone actually never talked to Apple. The trick is whether or not you trust a company to slurp up and use your private data in ways you don't approve of.
So, Apple vs Random Chinese Company privacy showdown. In the end, you have to look at things like this pragmatically. Apple is making billions and billions off of iPhone and store sales, and their reputation for protecting privacy is likely worth much more to them than any sort of ad revenue they might get from trying to actively exploit their users' data. Random Chinese Company? Probably operating on very slim margins, and reputation isn't much to them - just price.
But I do agree with the general sentiment. Apple is probably a rarity in the tech world simply due to their current insane profit margins. Hell, even manufacturers of robotic vacuum cleaner are discussing how to monetize the fucking floor plan of your own home. It's beyond absurd at this point.