The Pacific Northwest seems like a reasonably good choice for data centers, at least for serving this corner of the country. Lots of clean, cheap hydro power, near major tech industry in Seattle area, and there's plenty of water for cooling.
It actually took a lot of pushing to make me install an ad-blocker. I had previously just been using noscript because of the danger. One of the final straws, oddly enough, was Amazon's listing of "sponsored results" along with other search results, not to mention the increasing prevalence of malware being delivered, even through prominent sites. Really, Amazon? Fine... uBlock Origin + a few lines of script, and they're gone. And I'm not going to bother changing the other default settings, so nearly all ads are gone along with them.
Now, I'm being tracked less, my web pages are less cluttered and load faster, and I'm much safer while surfing. Tell me, why exactly should I switch the ad-blocker off again? The advertisers will have to do a hell of a lot to get me to turn off ad-blocking at this point.
The blog post mention using "encryption" in ads, but I'm not exactly sure how encryption is supposed to prevent malware. They're still allowing their customers to run arbitrary scripting and arbitrary content (like Flash), which can contain exploits, even if it's served via encrypted connections. The real problem is that they're allowing potentially untrusted content in the first place, not that the connection or content is being hijacked. Flash-based ads and arbitrary scripting have both got to go.
I doubt too many people had a problem with this one, or if they did, I can't remember.
I think if more advertisers focused on either being respectful to viewers, or tried to engage them in a creative, entertaining fashion, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion now. Consider the Super Bowl, and how one of the things people talk about is the interesting and funny ads debuted there. Sure, you can't spend money on ads like that all the time, but I think it shows that most people are not intrinsically opposed to ads... just annoying ads, or too many ads.
Good Lord, no! There are certainly hypothetical downsides to Amazon's model where they manage your books, but the big draw is that you can seamlessly share books across all your devices. For instance, when I'm waiting somewhere unexpectedly, I can pull out my phone and sync automatically to the current page of my current book. After I get home and start reading on my Kindle, it syncs again to the latest page, all completely seamlessly.
In a worst-case scenario, even if Amazon goes under, as long as you've made at least one local backup of your e-books, you can easily strip all the DRM and use them in a different e-reader. Honestly, I think the odds of Amazon going under are quite a bit less than me going under, so it's really not something I worry too much about. For me, at least, the benefits significantly outweigh the downsides, which at the moment don't yet actually exist for me.
Interesting observation (and I share your opinion on The Godfather). I think this is actually the primary difference between critic reviews and user reviews. A critic (hopefully) tries to objectively measure "what is the quality of this film", while a user review is simply "how much did I personally like this film". I'm betting that very few people try to rate like a critic.
Honestly, I think that's fine, since that gives us a few different views of the movies. Also, it presents an interesting measurement of any potential disparity between the reviewer and the general audience member.
I've noticed a lot of people tend to be rather binary in their ratings. If they didn't like the movie, 1 star. If they liked it, 5 stars. I often think user ratings would be better off with a simple thumbs up/down. That is, did you enjoy the movie/game/whatever or not? 1 to 10 scales are particularly bad, because everyone has a different idea about what a value of 7/10 represents. By boiling it down to a binary decision for everyone, you eliminate the ambiguity of how the scale is interpreted.
Yes, I've seen pedestrians who look for all the world like they're heading down the sidewalk for some unknown destination ahead of them, who suddenly turn and step into the crosswalk in just one step.... And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I've seen them step into the crosswalk and then stop while they chat with their friends who are still on the curb. When will they start to cross again? You think you'll see them turn and then start to walk, but some of them actually just start walking backwards into traffic.
I read the title and thought "No kidding! All updates on Windows 10 are mandatory now. This is news?"
Read article. Seriously? Leave it to Microsoft to piss even more of their users off. I swear, sometimes I think they're intentionally running the ship aground.
* See and process information from all directions at once * React in a millisecond to changing conditions * Never get bored, tired, or distracted * Don't drive recklessly for thrills
The notion that humans will actually react better than an automated system in an emergency seems backwards to me. I expect a computer to react much more competently and predictably, if for no other reason than the computer can analyze and react a thousand times faster. It's humans that are *causing* most of the emergencies in the first place by needlessly driving into each other at high speeds.
Everything you mentioned is defeated by a simple TLS connection. You don't patch with a simple FTP connection, right? You use public-private key crypto via TLS to securely connect to a legitimate server and initiate the transfer. Even if you re-direct traffic, there's no way to authorize it without that private key. This is the fundamental underpinning of the entire secure web.
I know you're technically literate, so I'm a little surprised you don't seem to understand how this works. ???
Secure auto-patching has been a solved problem for a while now. That is, unless you've got some inside scoop that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netscape, and a few dozen other major tech companies don't know about.
I think consumers are going to need to start demanding that ALL internet-facing devices come with the ability to auto-patch themselves, and this option should default to ON. There's no way you can expect a normal consumer to be able to flash their own devices. Hell, how do they even know if they're vulnerable and *should* flash their device? We've seen what a disaster unpatched servers and PCs have been, and now we're seeing it with unpatched Android devices. Routers are starting to become prime targets for malware, because there's millions of them out there facing the internet, and very few of them ever get patched. IoT devices will simply be next on the list.
Do we really have to make the same damned mistakes with each class of devices we attach to the internet?
I wonder how many of these people would also inject themselves with a syringe filled with glowing green goo they happened to find labeled "Super-serum"?
Microsoft has set an unfortunate precedent with this sort of thing with their Xbox consoles. I own a 360, and about 2/3 of the real estate is taken up by advertisements, and they're even shoving ads during listings and search results in-between things you're trying to find. It's sort of disgusting. Honestly, it's one of the reasons I'm still not on the next gen consoles, and am leaning more towards a PS4 first, even though I vastly prefer the Xbox controller.
I'm using Windows 10 right now, but I'm keeping a very close eye on things. I'm a Windows developer, so I don't really have a choice if I want to develop and test on the latest OS. Still, other than the privacy issues (you fortunately can turn most of that off), it's actually a pretty decent OS, and I'm a little better off with the pro version. My feeling is that the PC market is precarious enough as is, so they probably aren't keen to piss their users off too much with this, but never underestimate Microsoft's eternal arrogance with this sort of thing - demonstrated aptly by the Windows 8 debacle.
Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop
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KDE Turns 19
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· Score: 2
People keep misinterpreting the decline of the PC as a fall toward inevitable death. It's simply finding a new niche as a higher-powered computing device among the computing device spectrum. Think of the PC as the pickup trucks and full sized utility vans of the automotive world. Most people don't need them, but there's really no substitute for them with specific types of work. A smartphone, tablet, or netbook is never going to replace laptop and desktop PCs in the office, nor for anyone who actually creates content. Supplement certainly, but not replace.
Also, these days, aren't most workstations really just high-end PCs? There used to be a real difference (SGI, Sun, etc), but nowadays I think it's more of a semantic difference, other than some hardware choices, like Xenon processors, ECC memory, etc.
Since 2003, 33 UK citizens (including some with dual citizenship) have been extradited to the US, while 7 US citizens have been extradited to the US.
Not exactly equal numbers, but yeah, it actually does go both ways. It's not really too surprising that more criminals would be extradited to the US than from. This can be explained by the fact that the US is probably the world's biggest target, both economically and politically. For instance, there are many foreigners (and in fact, foreign countries) who counterfeit US banknotes. There's less motivation for US citizens to target foreign nationals or corporations than vice versa.
Or, I suppose you could chalk it up to some nefarious reason why the US government would want to harbor suspected US criminals, though I can't for the life of me figure out why they would want to do so.
It's called an extradition treaty, and it works both ways. Also, I'm going to take a wild guess and say that attempting to frame someone for possession of heroin and botnet-related crimes are illegal both in the US and in Ukraine.
I think the $25K figure is per battery, not per building, as 100 kWh doesn't seem liket nearly enough to offset power usage for any decent sized commercial building. So, each building will likely have multiple batteries, from what I could see in the images shown. I'd bet on that $30 million figure being accurate.
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The Pacific Northwest seems like a reasonably good choice for data centers, at least for serving this corner of the country. Lots of clean, cheap hydro power, near major tech industry in Seattle area, and there's plenty of water for cooling.
It actually took a lot of pushing to make me install an ad-blocker. I had previously just been using noscript because of the danger. One of the final straws, oddly enough, was Amazon's listing of "sponsored results" along with other search results, not to mention the increasing prevalence of malware being delivered, even through prominent sites. Really, Amazon? Fine... uBlock Origin + a few lines of script, and they're gone. And I'm not going to bother changing the other default settings, so nearly all ads are gone along with them.
Now, I'm being tracked less, my web pages are less cluttered and load faster, and I'm much safer while surfing. Tell me, why exactly should I switch the ad-blocker off again? The advertisers will have to do a hell of a lot to get me to turn off ad-blocking at this point.
The blog post mention using "encryption" in ads, but I'm not exactly sure how encryption is supposed to prevent malware. They're still allowing their customers to run arbitrary scripting and arbitrary content (like Flash), which can contain exploits, even if it's served via encrypted connections. The real problem is that they're allowing potentially untrusted content in the first place, not that the connection or content is being hijacked. Flash-based ads and arbitrary scripting have both got to go.
I doubt too many people had a problem with this one, or if they did, I can't remember.
I think if more advertisers focused on either being respectful to viewers, or tried to engage them in a creative, entertaining fashion, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion now. Consider the Super Bowl, and how one of the things people talk about is the interesting and funny ads debuted there. Sure, you can't spend money on ads like that all the time, but I think it shows that most people are not intrinsically opposed to ads... just annoying ads, or too many ads.
Good Lord, no! There are certainly hypothetical downsides to Amazon's model where they manage your books, but the big draw is that you can seamlessly share books across all your devices. For instance, when I'm waiting somewhere unexpectedly, I can pull out my phone and sync automatically to the current page of my current book. After I get home and start reading on my Kindle, it syncs again to the latest page, all completely seamlessly.
In a worst-case scenario, even if Amazon goes under, as long as you've made at least one local backup of your e-books, you can easily strip all the DRM and use them in a different e-reader. Honestly, I think the odds of Amazon going under are quite a bit less than me going under, so it's really not something I worry too much about. For me, at least, the benefits significantly outweigh the downsides, which at the moment don't yet actually exist for me.
Interesting observation (and I share your opinion on The Godfather). I think this is actually the primary difference between critic reviews and user reviews. A critic (hopefully) tries to objectively measure "what is the quality of this film", while a user review is simply "how much did I personally like this film". I'm betting that very few people try to rate like a critic.
Honestly, I think that's fine, since that gives us a few different views of the movies. Also, it presents an interesting measurement of any potential disparity between the reviewer and the general audience member.
I've noticed a lot of people tend to be rather binary in their ratings. If they didn't like the movie, 1 star. If they liked it, 5 stars. I often think user ratings would be better off with a simple thumbs up/down. That is, did you enjoy the movie/game/whatever or not? 1 to 10 scales are particularly bad, because everyone has a different idea about what a value of 7/10 represents. By boiling it down to a binary decision for everyone, you eliminate the ambiguity of how the scale is interpreted.
You missed a few clickbait terms: Windows 10, Systemd, Women in Tech, SJW, Gamergate, 3D Printing, NSA, Network Neutrality, Comcast, Drones...
I should probably be modded down -1 Flamebait just for the sheer volatility of combining all these terms into one sentence.
Yes, I've seen pedestrians who look for all the world like they're heading down the sidewalk for some unknown destination ahead of them, who suddenly turn and step into the crosswalk in just one step. ... And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I've seen them step into the crosswalk and then stop while they chat with their friends who are still on the curb. When will they start to cross again? You think you'll see them turn and then start to walk, but some of them actually just start walking backwards into traffic.
I consider this to be a self-correcting problem.
I read the title and thought "No kidding! All updates on Windows 10 are mandatory now. This is news?"
Read article. Seriously? Leave it to Microsoft to piss even more of their users off. I swear, sometimes I think they're intentionally running the ship aground.
Computers:
* See and process information from all directions at once
* React in a millisecond to changing conditions
* Never get bored, tired, or distracted
* Don't drive recklessly for thrills
The notion that humans will actually react better than an automated system in an emergency seems backwards to me. I expect a computer to react much more competently and predictably, if for no other reason than the computer can analyze and react a thousand times faster. It's humans that are *causing* most of the emergencies in the first place by needlessly driving into each other at high speeds.
Everything you mentioned is defeated by a simple TLS connection. You don't patch with a simple FTP connection, right? You use public-private key crypto via TLS to securely connect to a legitimate server and initiate the transfer. Even if you re-direct traffic, there's no way to authorize it without that private key. This is the fundamental underpinning of the entire secure web.
I know you're technically literate, so I'm a little surprised you don't seem to understand how this works. ???
Secure auto-patching has been a solved problem for a while now. That is, unless you've got some inside scoop that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netscape, and a few dozen other major tech companies don't know about.
I think consumers are going to need to start demanding that ALL internet-facing devices come with the ability to auto-patch themselves, and this option should default to ON. There's no way you can expect a normal consumer to be able to flash their own devices. Hell, how do they even know if they're vulnerable and *should* flash their device? We've seen what a disaster unpatched servers and PCs have been, and now we're seeing it with unpatched Android devices. Routers are starting to become prime targets for malware, because there's millions of them out there facing the internet, and very few of them ever get patched. IoT devices will simply be next on the list.
Do we really have to make the same damned mistakes with each class of devices we attach to the internet?
I wonder how many of these people would also inject themselves with a syringe filled with glowing green goo they happened to find labeled "Super-serum"?
Microsoft has set an unfortunate precedent with this sort of thing with their Xbox consoles. I own a 360, and about 2/3 of the real estate is taken up by advertisements, and they're even shoving ads during listings and search results in-between things you're trying to find. It's sort of disgusting. Honestly, it's one of the reasons I'm still not on the next gen consoles, and am leaning more towards a PS4 first, even though I vastly prefer the Xbox controller.
I'm using Windows 10 right now, but I'm keeping a very close eye on things. I'm a Windows developer, so I don't really have a choice if I want to develop and test on the latest OS. Still, other than the privacy issues (you fortunately can turn most of that off), it's actually a pretty decent OS, and I'm a little better off with the pro version. My feeling is that the PC market is precarious enough as is, so they probably aren't keen to piss their users off too much with this, but never underestimate Microsoft's eternal arrogance with this sort of thing - demonstrated aptly by the Windows 8 debacle.
People keep misinterpreting the decline of the PC as a fall toward inevitable death. It's simply finding a new niche as a higher-powered computing device among the computing device spectrum. Think of the PC as the pickup trucks and full sized utility vans of the automotive world. Most people don't need them, but there's really no substitute for them with specific types of work. A smartphone, tablet, or netbook is never going to replace laptop and desktop PCs in the office, nor for anyone who actually creates content. Supplement certainly, but not replace.
Also, these days, aren't most workstations really just high-end PCs? There used to be a real difference (SGI, Sun, etc), but nowadays I think it's more of a semantic difference, other than some hardware choices, like Xenon processors, ECC memory, etc.
Oops, I meant to type "while 7 US citizens have been extradited to the UK".
I'll give you one example I could find:
Since 2003, 33 UK citizens (including some with dual citizenship) have been extradited to the US, while 7 US citizens have been extradited to the US.
Not exactly equal numbers, but yeah, it actually does go both ways. It's not really too surprising that more criminals would be extradited to the US than from. This can be explained by the fact that the US is probably the world's biggest target, both economically and politically. For instance, there are many foreigners (and in fact, foreign countries) who counterfeit US banknotes. There's less motivation for US citizens to target foreign nationals or corporations than vice versa.
Or, I suppose you could chalk it up to some nefarious reason why the US government would want to harbor suspected US criminals, though I can't for the life of me figure out why they would want to do so.
It's called an extradition treaty, and it works both ways. Also, I'm going to take a wild guess and say that attempting to frame someone for possession of heroin and botnet-related crimes are illegal both in the US and in Ukraine.
I think the $25K figure is per battery, not per building, as 100 kWh doesn't seem liket nearly enough to offset power usage for any decent sized commercial building. So, each building will likely have multiple batteries, from what I could see in the images shown. I'd bet on that $30 million figure being accurate.
Small to medium sized animals will have sense enough to stay the hell away from things like that. People... not so much. And maybe hawks.
"Think of the children... ban toddlers!"
I like it.
As a videogame developer, I care about 1000x more if it's "fun" than if it's "art".
I was agreeing with you until you mentioned Star Wars. Anything touched by George Lucas should not be given credit for any positive cultural impact.
Star Wars music is not George Lucas. Star Wars music is John Williams.
Heathen.
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