Comcast is totally at fault here. Their policies says "don't lie", but their compensation structure says "lie". Their bills are deliberately misleading consumers. They then try to cover their asses by having policies which tell support staff not to lie to customers, yet it's the staff that breaks those rules, telling lies that reinforce the misrepresentation, which get the bonuses and raises.
This is the same kind of management practices that gave us Wells Fargo opening unauthorized accounts for their customers. No-one ever ordered anyone to do that either. However when Fred sees Johnny get a bonus, and Janey is let go for underperforming, Fred wants to be like Johnny and asks him how he does it. He says "you didn't here it from me, but blah blah blah". Next thing you know, Freddy is just like Johnny, and management never got it's hands dirty. Except they know what's happening, and they know how their compensation structure encourages policy violations.
So, tell me again how this system, intentionally setup to deceive consumers, isn't under their control?
Indoor farming has to replace free and clean solar energy with grid energy ( ie. mostly coal ). Using solar power electricity in this instance would be very inefficient. Convert sun to electricity (loss), transmit over grid (loss), run grow lights (loss), is a horribly lossy system. Maybe 10% or less efficient system? So you replace 10 acres of lettuce farms with 2 acres of lettuce buildings. But you still need 10 acres worth of solar energy and you have to account for the loss. So you replace 10 acres of lettuce with 102 acres of solar and lettuce, but you didn't have to pay any lettuce pickers!
Nuclear is taboo, so it's going to be coal. It's not necessarily all bad though. If this uses less energy versus planting, weeding, and shipping to market, which are also fossil fuel based, then it would be a net improvement. However, it's very hard to capture all the externalities of the two approaches to get an accurate comparison. A grad student is probably writing their thesis on this topic right now.
These rural places also mostly support this kind of laissez faire approach to regulation. Which means they are either getting what they want or what they deserve. Either they'll like the results, in which case neither they or us have anything to complain about, or if they don't maybe they'll decide there is some value to good regulation.
Because line of sight to the tower may be through the caller's head. If you did this, you'd end up with dropped calls/data depending on which way you're facing. Whoops! Don't turn your head that way. Also, that close to the phone's transmitter you'd need the shielding to extend beyond the phone itself.
If you're concerned, you should use wired earbuds; but BT earbuds also offer significantly lower energy exposure. For example, using an iPhone 8 at your head measures ~1.5 W/kg, whereas a pair of AirPods is only 0.46 W/kg ( source google ). So you're exposing you're brain to 1/3 the energy. And if you're still concerned about using wired earbuds, you probably shouldn't have a portable device with a transmitter in it.
I call hogwash on the claim that RISC-V is significantly more power efficient than ARM or Intel. I could not find the summary's claim of "Power efficiency is 40% better than ARM or Intel. " anywhere in the referenced material.
I'm guessing he's misquoting this line "instruction cache access alone dissipated 40% of the energy in a five-stage RISC pipeline." Unless someone has come up with a RISC-V implementation that completely eliminates 100% of i-cache access power, in no way can you interpret that to mean RISC-V is 40% more power efficient than ARM or Intel. The paper does claim "[RISC- V compressed programs] fetch 25% fewer instruction bits than RISC- V programs", but that's comparing 2 different RISC-V ISAs; not RISC-V to ARM or Intel.
I don't know enough about RISC-V to really say if it's ISA is inherently more or less power efficient than ARM or Intel. I'd be surprised if it wasn't better than Intel, and there's certainly room for improvement over ARM, but the only way to be that much better is *magic*.
The real reason ARM is scared of RISC-V isn't some theoretical efficiency advantage that has never been proven out, but the free licensing structure. There's a lot of IOT designs out there that just need a good enough processor. There's also high volume embedded processor applications whose roadmaps don't don't foresee the need for continual processor improvements, so they'd rather not keep paying per CPU royalties to ARM when they don't care about future enhancements. In those markets cost is king, and it's hard to compete with free.
Interestingly, the embedded markets I'm talking about don't use JIT. JIT based solutions require more memory, aka more cost. JIT based systems also have longer boot times, which is undesirable in these applications. Think, storage controller.
The biggest JIT ARM users are actually in the smartphone space, and near term that space has other sticky reasons to stay with ARM. Compiler support ( really only the apps are JIT, everything else is C), debuggers, and lot's of other ARM IP that is bundled with the ARM license. That other ARM IP is not something most people outside of SoC ASIC design are familiar with. So giving up ARM is to give up a whole lot more than just the ARM processor, and isn't so easily replaced.
I could imagine China encouraging Chinese companies to build a complete ecosystem around RISC-V, that could compete in the smartphone space though. That would align well with China's strategic goals, and probably scares the bejesus out of ARM. And if that is beginning to happen, I don't see how ARM could actually stop it. Really, they only can try to delay it.
This, totally this. One would be rightfully scared if someone where suggesting that they modify your DNA using CRISPR. That literally means rewriting the code that makes you, you.
But the fears of GMO foods harming consumers are simply hysteria, no different than the uninformed panic of Y2Kers. By what mechanism could these modified organisms could harm you? There isn't one.
Our bodies are very adept at ripping apart the cells we eat into their constituent elements. So long as the organism isn't producing a protein we can't disassemble or pass through, it won't harm us. And because these modified organisms actually receive any amount of safety testing, means you are far more likely to encounter a harmful natural mutation, than you are a harmful GMO.
That said, GMOs do present a real threat, just not to us directly. Just using old fashion breeding techniques we have become very successful growing large monocultures. Vast fields of very closely related plants and animals. That had already put us at risk. Now GMOs promise to deliver dramatically greater yields. If a single corn trait provides superior yields across the board, it will be deployed everywhere. The result being an increased risk of a corn pest or diseases that targets that trait and causes massive crop failures.
For the safety of our food supply, our food sources need to have broad genetic diversity. That actually can include GMOs, but they have to be deployed carefully to prevent monocultures.
Actually, we should pay congestion pricing. Internet infrastructure is a fixed cost designed to service a maximum load. Service is great until that load is reach, after which performance falls off a cliff fast. Much in the same way traffic on the freeway goes fast until it all of sudden it doesn't.
The problem with congestion pricing is it's unpredictable, so not user friendly. It surges and subsides. And unlike Uber surge pricing, the ISP can't use higher prices to quickly encourage more capacity, so instead the higher prices would need to discourage use. How would that be communicated to the user? Some kind of window that shows the current price? Awful.
Probably the only good answer here is to force ISPs to advertise the guaranteed minimum bandwidth. I don't think there is a need to specify what the bandwidth is, just forcing them to advertise it will help put pressure to keep that at a reasonable level. With 5G home service around the corner, that might provide just enough competition to make that little bit of information leveragable by the consumer.
Why do we have patents and copyright? To reward those who invest a lot of expensive effort find and creating new and better things.
As long as its difficult and expensive to invent a new bacteria that converts plastic back into oil, the resulting engineered bacteria should be patentable.
However, if our understanding of DNA becomes sufficiently advanced that anyone who as a bio-engineering degree can create the same bacteria basically at will, then it should not be patentable. At that point there's no effort or expense to reward. It just becomes a race to file.
The patent office seems to be completely unable to determine if something is "non-obvious", instead maybe they should just measure the rate of similar filings, and when the frequency crosses some ( admittedly arbitrary ) threshold they declare that domain as no longer patentable.
I use the parental controls to limit my kids usage of Xbox, but there is no equivalent for my kids' iDevice usage.
There is some strange psychological difference that goes on. When the Xbox tells them their time is up, they shrug and turn it off. If instead they are watching an iDevice and I tell them to stop, they lose their ever f'ing minds.
Really interesting stuff. Just how complete of a light field are they projecting? A full light field requires a lot more information than a pair of stereoscopic images. Either a lot of bandwidth from some high end graphics hardware would be required, or some serious GPU power would need to be closely attached to the light field display. Of course they probably use a lot of tricks to reduce the information demand. First of which it is it's not full range of view.
Next, they also only need to send field information for the sprites being displayed. If this is the means by which they reduce bandwidth, they might have limitations on how much of the total possible light field can be utilized.
They could send a light field with limited depth information, by tracking your eyes' focal length. Send just enough information that they have time to detect your focus changing and update the field before you've gone out of focus range.
But that last approach could be applied to stereoscopic images too. Which means the question will become, can eye focal length tracking be developed that's fast enough to fake a light field using stereoscopic images. If so, then the reduced processing and power requirements of the stereoscopic approach will likely win out over light fields.
They also need to solve the displaying dark images over bright background problem, a subject the article completely avoids. Who knows? Maybe they've not just invented light rays, but dark rays too! Or they possibly could embed LCDs in the lens that could be activated to block incoming light. But that doesn't sound as cool as dark rays.
If licenseing drives innovation, this is a simple problem to solve. Require all copyright holders to use a license that includes some prescribed fair use clause. Done. Next.
I think we are heading into new territory now. Up until now, automating simple, repetitive tasks has improved the human condition. Thus far, demand for other services has always pulled these people back into the labor force. Just because it has been that way for 30, 300, or even 3,000 years does not mean it will always continue that way.
I think we are on the verge of creating a new category of structural unemployment. No longer will it just be a problem for the 50+, and medically disabled crowed. I think we will be adding people who's only marketable ability is their visual and auditory recognition systems.
Certainly the majority of the work force will be able to adapt. But I'd guess we'll shift at least 5% of the work force into this structurally unemployed group. I doubt we'd see more than 30% of the workforce shift into this group, at least I really hope not. Either way I think it will be large enough to cause major economic shifts, which will in turn lead to political shifts.
Those holding on to the reigns of power who choose to ignore that, will discover they have a spooked team of horses pulling their carriage towards a cliff. They best figure out a system that accommodates this new reality in a palatable way.
I imagine this kid will get what he deserves, but what about the CRA? They should've immediately taken their servers offline until they were patched. Will anyone get any heat for that?
If I use 100GB/month, but only when nobody else is online, I'm not impacting anyone else and I'm only very marginally increasing the ISP's cost. If you want a pricing structure that actually reflects what the market will bear and would adjust buyers habits at the appropriate times, you need congestion based pricing. But I can't think of a good way to implement that, which isn't confusing.
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Comcast is totally at fault here. Their policies says "don't lie", but their compensation structure says "lie". Their bills are deliberately misleading consumers. They then try to cover their asses by having policies which tell support staff not to lie to customers, yet it's the staff that breaks those rules, telling lies that reinforce the misrepresentation, which get the bonuses and raises.
This is the same kind of management practices that gave us Wells Fargo opening unauthorized accounts for their customers. No-one ever ordered anyone to do that either. However when Fred sees Johnny get a bonus, and Janey is let go for underperforming, Fred wants to be like Johnny and asks him how he does it. He says "you didn't here it from me, but blah blah blah". Next thing you know, Freddy is just like Johnny, and management never got it's hands dirty. Except they know what's happening, and they know how their compensation structure encourages policy violations.
So, tell me again how this system, intentionally setup to deceive consumers, isn't under their control?
Indoor farming has to replace free and clean solar energy with grid energy ( ie. mostly coal ). Using solar power electricity in this instance would be very inefficient. Convert sun to electricity (loss), transmit over grid (loss), run grow lights (loss), is a horribly lossy system. Maybe 10% or less efficient system? So you replace 10 acres of lettuce farms with 2 acres of lettuce buildings. But you still need 10 acres worth of solar energy and you have to account for the loss. So you replace 10 acres of lettuce with 102 acres of solar and lettuce, but you didn't have to pay any lettuce pickers!
Nuclear is taboo, so it's going to be coal. It's not necessarily all bad though. If this uses less energy versus planting, weeding, and shipping to market, which are also fossil fuel based, then it would be a net improvement. However, it's very hard to capture all the externalities of the two approaches to get an accurate comparison. A grad student is probably writing their thesis on this topic right now.
These rural places also mostly support this kind of laissez faire approach to regulation. Which means they are either getting what they want or what they deserve. Either they'll like the results, in which case neither they or us have anything to complain about, or if they don't maybe they'll decide there is some value to good regulation.
Because line of sight to the tower may be through the caller's head. If you did this, you'd end up with dropped calls/data depending on which way you're facing. Whoops! Don't turn your head that way. Also, that close to the phone's transmitter you'd need the shielding to extend beyond the phone itself.
If you're concerned, you should use wired earbuds; but BT earbuds also offer significantly lower energy exposure. For example, using an iPhone 8 at your head measures ~1.5 W/kg, whereas a pair of AirPods is only 0.46 W/kg ( source google ). So you're exposing you're brain to 1/3 the energy. And if you're still concerned about using wired earbuds, you probably shouldn't have a portable device with a transmitter in it.
Given the potential user base size difference, I'd say at least an order of magnitude more. I'm not even kidding. Would you pay that?
I call hogwash on the claim that RISC-V is significantly more power efficient than ARM or Intel. I could not find the summary's claim of "Power efficiency is 40% better than ARM or Intel. " anywhere in the referenced material.
I'm guessing he's misquoting this line "instruction cache access alone dissipated 40% of the energy in a five-stage RISC pipeline."
Unless someone has come up with a RISC-V implementation that completely eliminates 100% of i-cache access power, in no way can you interpret that to mean RISC-V is 40% more power efficient than ARM or Intel. The paper does claim "[RISC- V compressed programs] fetch 25% fewer instruction bits than RISC- V programs", but that's comparing 2 different RISC-V ISAs; not RISC-V to ARM or Intel.
I don't know enough about RISC-V to really say if it's ISA is inherently more or less power efficient than ARM or Intel. I'd be surprised if it wasn't better than Intel, and there's certainly room for improvement over ARM, but the only way to be that much better is *magic*.
The real reason ARM is scared of RISC-V isn't some theoretical efficiency advantage that has never been proven out, but the free licensing structure. There's a lot of IOT designs out there that just need a good enough processor. There's also high volume embedded processor applications whose roadmaps don't don't foresee the need for continual processor improvements, so they'd rather not keep paying per CPU royalties to ARM when they don't care about future enhancements. In those markets cost is king, and it's hard to compete with free.
Interestingly, the embedded markets I'm talking about don't use JIT. JIT based solutions require more memory, aka more cost. JIT based systems also have longer boot times, which is undesirable in these applications. Think, storage controller.
The biggest JIT ARM users are actually in the smartphone space, and near term that space has other sticky reasons to stay with ARM. Compiler support ( really only the apps are JIT, everything else is C), debuggers, and lot's of other ARM IP that is bundled with the ARM license. That other ARM IP is not something most people outside of SoC ASIC design are familiar with. So giving up ARM is to give up a whole lot more than just the ARM processor, and isn't so easily replaced.
I could imagine China encouraging Chinese companies to build a complete ecosystem around RISC-V, that could compete in the smartphone space though. That would align well with China's strategic goals, and probably scares the bejesus out of ARM. And if that is beginning to happen, I don't see how ARM could actually stop it. Really, they only can try to delay it.
Market Cap : Net Income
INTC: 235.5B : 4,450M
AMD: 14B : 81M
This, totally this. One would be rightfully scared if someone where suggesting that they modify your DNA using CRISPR. That literally means rewriting the code that makes you, you.
But the fears of GMO foods harming consumers are simply hysteria, no different than the uninformed panic of Y2Kers. By what mechanism could these modified organisms could harm you? There isn't one.
Our bodies are very adept at ripping apart the cells we eat into their constituent elements. So long as the organism isn't producing a protein we can't disassemble or pass through, it won't harm us. And because these modified organisms actually receive any amount of safety testing, means you are far more likely to encounter a harmful natural mutation, than you are a harmful GMO.
That said, GMOs do present a real threat, just not to us directly. Just using old fashion breeding techniques we have become very successful growing large monocultures. Vast fields of very closely related plants and animals. That had already put us at risk. Now GMOs promise to deliver dramatically greater yields. If a single corn trait provides superior yields across the board, it will be deployed everywhere. The result being an increased risk of a corn pest or diseases that targets that trait and causes massive crop failures.
For the safety of our food supply, our food sources need to have broad genetic diversity. That actually can include GMOs, but they have to be deployed carefully to prevent monocultures.
Not before I eat them.
Actually, we should pay congestion pricing. Internet infrastructure is a fixed cost designed to service a maximum load. Service is great until that load is reach, after which performance falls off a cliff fast. Much in the same way traffic on the freeway goes fast until it all of sudden it doesn't.
The problem with congestion pricing is it's unpredictable, so not user friendly. It surges and subsides. And unlike Uber surge pricing, the ISP can't use higher prices to quickly encourage more capacity, so instead the higher prices would need to discourage use. How would that be communicated to the user? Some kind of window that shows the current price? Awful.
Probably the only good answer here is to force ISPs to advertise the guaranteed minimum bandwidth. I don't think there is a need to specify what the bandwidth is, just forcing them to advertise it will help put pressure to keep that at a reasonable level. With 5G home service around the corner, that might provide just enough competition to make that little bit of information leveragable by the consumer.
Why do we have patents and copyright? To reward those who invest a lot of expensive effort find and creating new and better things.
As long as its difficult and expensive to invent a new bacteria that converts plastic back into oil, the resulting engineered bacteria should be patentable.
However, if our understanding of DNA becomes sufficiently advanced that anyone who as a bio-engineering degree can create the same bacteria basically at will, then it should not be patentable. At that point there's no effort or expense to reward. It just becomes a race to file.
The patent office seems to be completely unable to determine if something is "non-obvious", instead maybe they should just measure the rate of similar filings, and when the frequency crosses some ( admittedly arbitrary ) threshold they declare that domain as no longer patentable.
They don't "sell or give away" your information, they merely "share it [sic]" ( with companies that pay them ) . See, that's clearly different. /s
I use the parental controls to limit my kids usage of Xbox, but there is no equivalent for my kids' iDevice usage.
There is some strange psychological difference that goes on. When the Xbox tells them their time is up, they shrug and turn it off. If instead they are watching an iDevice and I tell them to stop, they lose their ever f'ing minds.
Heh. "CAUTION: Enabling display of dark objects can only be used one time and is irreversible."
Really interesting stuff. Just how complete of a light field are they projecting? A full light field requires a lot more information than a pair of stereoscopic images. Either a lot of bandwidth from some high end graphics hardware would be required, or some serious GPU power would need to be closely attached to the light field display. Of course they probably use a lot of tricks to reduce the information demand. First of which it is it's not full range of view.
Next, they also only need to send field information for the sprites being displayed. If this is the means by which they reduce bandwidth, they might have limitations on how much of the total possible light field can be utilized.
They could send a light field with limited depth information, by tracking your eyes' focal length. Send just enough information that they have time to detect your focus changing and update the field before you've gone out of focus range.
But that last approach could be applied to stereoscopic images too. Which means the question will become, can eye focal length tracking be developed that's fast enough to fake a light field using stereoscopic images. If so, then the reduced processing and power requirements of the stereoscopic approach will likely win out over light fields.
They also need to solve the displaying dark images over bright background problem, a subject the article completely avoids. Who knows? Maybe they've not just invented light rays, but dark rays too! Or they possibly could embed LCDs in the lens that could be activated to block incoming light. But that doesn't sound as cool as dark rays.
He should've only donated 640k, it's all anyone would ever need.
If licenseing drives innovation, this is a simple problem to solve. Require all copyright holders to use a license that includes some prescribed fair use clause. Done. Next.
I think we are heading into new territory now. Up until now, automating simple, repetitive tasks has improved the human condition. Thus far, demand for other services has always pulled these people back into the labor force. Just because it has been that way for 30, 300, or even 3,000 years does not mean it will always continue that way.
I think we are on the verge of creating a new category of structural unemployment. No longer will it just be a problem for the 50+, and medically disabled crowed. I think we will be adding people who's only marketable ability is their visual and auditory recognition systems.
Certainly the majority of the work force will be able to adapt. But I'd guess we'll shift at least 5% of the work force into this structurally unemployed group. I doubt we'd see more than 30% of the workforce shift into this group, at least I really hope not. Either way I think it will be large enough to cause major economic shifts, which will in turn lead to political shifts.
Those holding on to the reigns of power who choose to ignore that, will discover they have a spooked team of horses pulling their carriage towards a cliff. They best figure out a system that accommodates this new reality in a palatable way.
This.
You obviously aren't paying your required rent to your politicians.
I imagine this kid will get what he deserves, but what about the CRA? They should've immediately taken their servers offline until they were patched. Will anyone get any heat for that?
If I use 100GB/month, but only when nobody else is online, I'm not impacting anyone else and I'm only very marginally increasing the ISP's cost. If you want a pricing structure that actually reflects what the market will bear and would adjust buyers habits at the appropriate times, you need congestion based pricing. But I can't think of a good way to implement that, which isn't confusing.
Err, typo. Simple, add $199 for a copy of Windows, and you have an equivalent Windows machine, duh.
Simple, add $199 for a copy of Windows, and you have an equivalent Apple machine, duh.
If you had as much money as Google, you could too.