...I don't configure my management services to listen on publicly accessible interfaces. Those services should go onto dedicated out-of-band management interfaces. Nobody from an untrusted network should be able to get anywhere near them.
Don't forget that these reactors can be built on an assembly line. That allows for a stable supply chain, a controlled building environment, and the chance for workers to gain experience in assembling the devices. That should dramatically help in stabilizing costs.
I see this less as a product for people wanting to build new systems as it is a product for existing owners who want to rehab their broken systems. That may change as enhanced versions are released, but who knows with retro computing fans.
I have a dead A3000 in my basement. If the price was right, I wouldn't mind bringing it back to life. But to be honest, I'd probably still use UAE for 99% of the time just because it is faster and easier to use.
The Achilles heel of this advice is that an officer could claim to smell an unlawful substance. I imagine that would open the "probable cause" door. If nothing is found, what recourse do you have? My understanding is that no state has instituted a maximum false-positive rate for either officers or anti-narcotics animals, so with shield laws what they are, it would be difficult to combat this tactic.
They shouldn't be trusted. Just look at how Facebook excluded "service providers" from their definition of "third parties". They bend the truth to the extent that public outrage allows in order to maximize profits.
I was a recent user of the Stylish plugin that mined private URL data from browsers. During the many dozens of upgrades, they supposed slipped in a change to their multi-page user agreement that authorized such behavior. So now I am simply going to ratchet up my paranoia and limit my use of third party software to an even greater extent just because I don't have the time or desire deal with this crap.
As long as older games still work under current versions of Windows, I don't see a huge amount of anger over this change. But if Microsoft ever decides to clean up their API by removing depreciated functions or by dropping older compatibility sandboxes, I could see some real push-back since older games would eventually become unplayable unless Steam continues supporting older OS versions. As the AC above notes, this is what pushes people to pirate from abandonware sites.
I can understand the desire to not have to support the older operating systems. But, why completely stop in from running? Why not just say, "if it breaks too bad" and let people risk it if they want to?
If the next release of the Steam Client requires a higher minimum API level in order to run, it may simply fail to work. It isn't that it may fail, but that it would fail. As to allowing older versions of the client to still connect to their network, that may fail the first time they change something on their end that causes communications to break.
I disagree. Every new version of Windows introduces a new API level with a host of new functions. Those functions may be more efficient, more secure, or offer more functionality. Even if a program doesn't intend to add any new functionality itself, it may benefit from using those new functions. Having to write a path that either emulates that functionality or uses an older inferior version has a cost.
This is actually an edge case of a much larger problem. Apple's iPhone UI makes it too easy to inadvertently dial emergency services. I'm guessing that the phones are password locked and that during transport within the factory, something rubs the screens in such a way to bring up the unlock screen and then hit the dial 911 button at the bottom of the unlock screen.
My old Nokia brick phone had a simple solution: you actually had to type in 911 in order to dial 911, even if the phone was still password locked. That made pocket dialing emergency services incredibly unlikely.
This article takes the noble assumption that people actually want the truth instead of the warm, comforting embrace of the self-reaffirming echo chamber. I know more than a few people who turn to questionable news because they don't want their view of the world challenged. As long as these people exist, there will be a market for this sort of information.
You don't really need self-awareness for AI to be dangerous. You just need it to be sufficiently better at tasks than humans. While there is much talk of killbots, there are other dangers that might seem more mundane. What happens to our economy when AI allows automation to cheaply replace humans in large numbers? Economic revolutions in the past have been incredibly disruptive during the transitionary period.
I see a huge wave of older smartphones making their way to the trash heap as wireless networks start to reallocate spectrum currently used by 2G and 3G protocols for newer 4G and 5G protocols. I also suspect that many people are in for a surprise when they discover that their supposed 4G phones only support LTE data and not LTE voice.
As example, I have a Galaxy S5 Neo released in late 2015 that supports LTE-A. But as an unbranded member of the GS5 series, Samsung never enabled voice-over-LTE, so it uses 3G UMTS to place voice calls. Unless Samsung has a change of heart or my carrier pushes a voice-over-IP solution that I can use with LTE data networks, my phone will stop working in a couple years.
Even if wireless networks keep a few MHz of spectrum around for M2M devices (ie, home security cellular backups), don't expect it to be on better frequency bands.
I assume that such filters will be computer generated with little to no human review. The article specially mentions ContentID. Given the number of bogus DCMA takedowns that Yahoo receives each day due to these substandard checks, I don't see this being much better.
Any of these suggestions will yield better results than having the government interfere & probably end up making things worse. I realize though it's easier for some people to get someone else to force others to do what they want.
Not necessarily. Some of your recommendations can introduce issues of their own. Depending on a person's requirements, location, or income, they might not be feasible choices at all.
I'm sure there were butchers that sold top quality meat in 1905 before Congress and Teddy Roosevelt passed the Meat Inspection Act. But how many of them operated in poor urban neighborhoods? What was the price premium due to their boutique nature and loss of economies of scale? How could you be sure that they sold person X the same product as person Y? The free market is not an infallible system.
There is a workable balance between regulation and free market solutions. It is naive to state that one is automatically inferior to the other. One has to weigh the pros and cons of each. I look to history and some of the crazy stuff that is happening in China to be glad that our regulation system has attained the balance that it has, even if it isn't perfect.
"You should start your own cattle farm and slaughtering plant if you don't like antibiotics, growth hormones, rat feces, and rat poison in your meat." "You should start your own automobile company if you don't like cars designed to fail at 150,000 Km." "You should start your own pharmaceutical company if you don't like drugs with undisclosed side effects." "You should start your own power company if you don't like the current rate structure or the polluting generation methods they use." "You should write your own mobile and desktop OS if you don't like what's on the market today."
Sure, let me dig up a few billion dollars in loose change so I can go out and create those alternatives. Oh wait, I don't have that.
I've noticed that the annoyances under Windows 7 are starting to drift upward. My W7 desktop woke up from sleep mode late last night to install some system updates. Even though both Excel and Notepad++ know how to gracefully close when a shutdown signal is received, when I logged in this morning, neither app restored their previous state. So a couple hours of work went up in smoke. I can only guess at how those apps were killed to cause that behavior.
I used regedit to add a key that disables automatic WU reboots. Hopefully another update doesn't delete it.
The main issue here is that there are few repercussions for Microsoft doing this. With no suitable alternative in the marketplace for running Windows binaries (WINE is very hit or miss, OS/2 eComStation hasn't seen improvements in years), you're stuck eating whatever Microsoft wants to feed you.
We really need to update our consumer protection laws so that we can opt-out of shovelware. Even better, require us to opt-in. I've lost track of how many hours I've spent over the years removing sketchy apps from laptops and smartphones. Not to mention the extraordinary efforts I've sometimes been forced to take to do so.
Not true. The WinAPI (as it is now called) gained numerous new functions with Windows 7, 8, and 10. What it hasn't done much of is depreciate functions. My programs can still call unsafe array and string functions under Windows 10. The only issue I ever encounter is a MSVC compiler warning if I use them in my code.
I typically program using Windows 7 as my minimum WinAPI compatibility level (WINVER 0x601). I have come across a couple of functions that were only available for higher API levels that would have been nice to use, but I've been able to work around them. I imagine that as time goes by, that will be harder to do.
Try looking at some WinAPI documentation sometime. It isn't as static as you make it out to be.
Even in desktop mode, the start menu for Windows 10 is significantly different than that of Windows XP or 7. If you do not like the new start menu, Classic Shell is still a must.
Except that the developer for Classic Shell recently stated that they are giving up on the project because Microsoft developers keep changing the low-level hooks that the program relies on. Also, Classic Shell may not be available in a workplace environment where security and licensing are major issues.
A third of my complaints about Windows 10 would disappear if Microsoft offered different system themes that mimic other environments and a more consistent theme for system settings. Given the level of configurability that X/Win desktop managers offer, it is incredibly frustrating.
It isn't just photo editing software. Almost all of my commercial software programs are only available for Windows or Mac. Very few have ports for GNU/Linux or *BSD and that's a problem. It keeps me tied to a software ecosystem.
WINE does a so-so job allowing me to run Windows app under Linux and BSD, but it seems to be a half-baked solution full of quirks and strange user experiences. If I try to move my software packages over, I may have to suffer with a degraded experience.
So we're stuck with a chicken and egg situation. Some people like to advocate software alternatives that do exist for Linux, but now you're asking users to adopt an even larger change while flushing the time and money they spent acquiring their existing packages. That's a hard sell.
Or the critics could be in a different place than you were. I loved SW:ANH as a child and as a young adult. Now that I am older, I can see how cheesy the dialog was and how campy the good vs. evil aspect of the film was. Same goes for Princess Bride and a few other films from my youth. There is still a strong nostalgic bond, but I wouldn't really call either very good these days.
For desktop or server use, sure. But the 486 series was quite popular for embedded, industrial, and aerospace hardware use. Intel didn't halt production of the 486 until 2007. I remember using a number of 486 industrial devices running BSD or DOS well into the mid-2000s.
And while early ISA-based 486 systems were incredibly slow, later PCI-based 486 systems were much better, especially when paired with processors like the AMD 5x86/133.
I can't speak for OpenBSD, but both FreeBSD and NetBSD support numerous ISA network cards, including the NE1000/2000, EtherExpress Pro/10, and DEC 3C50x series cards. You should still be able to use those OSes on early pre-VLB 486 systems.
The article says that Intel is releasing patches for processors up to five years old. That would suggest that they're going as far back as Haswell. It would have been nice if they were a little more specific as to where the line is drawn.
I assume these patches are being released in the form of microcode updates that will be pushed out to end-users in the form of system BIOS updates. My worry is that we're going to see the Android-effect where older motherboard manufacturers will simply refuse to provide updates, even though Intel is handing them the code. As example, my H97 motherboard from Gigabyte hasn't seen a BIOS update since Q3-2015. I'm not holding my breath that I'll see a fix.
California had a wet winter this year, with some parts receiving near record amounts of precipitation. That contributed to a very green spring, which inevitably leads to a fierce wildfire season. As to the degree that climate change contributed to it is debatable.
California is also suffering from the spread of invasive, highly flammable non-native grasses. These grasses are often the first to recover after a burn, so less flammable native plants get pushed out. This is contributing to more frequent, more intense wildfires. Add in increased development in remote areas and you get a one-two-three punch of destructive wildfires.
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...I don't configure my management services to listen on publicly accessible interfaces. Those services should go onto dedicated out-of-band management interfaces. Nobody from an untrusted network should be able to get anywhere near them.
Don't forget that these reactors can be built on an assembly line. That allows for a stable supply chain, a controlled building environment, and the chance for workers to gain experience in assembling the devices. That should dramatically help in stabilizing costs.
I see this less as a product for people wanting to build new systems as it is a product for existing owners who want to rehab their broken systems. That may change as enhanced versions are released, but who knows with retro computing fans.
I have a dead A3000 in my basement. If the price was right, I wouldn't mind bringing it back to life. But to be honest, I'd probably still use UAE for 99% of the time just because it is faster and easier to use.
The Achilles heel of this advice is that an officer could claim to smell an unlawful substance. I imagine that would open the "probable cause" door. If nothing is found, what recourse do you have? My understanding is that no state has instituted a maximum false-positive rate for either officers or anti-narcotics animals, so with shield laws what they are, it would be difficult to combat this tactic.
They shouldn't be trusted. Just look at how Facebook excluded "service providers" from their definition of "third parties". They bend the truth to the extent that public outrage allows in order to maximize profits.
I was a recent user of the Stylish plugin that mined private URL data from browsers. During the many dozens of upgrades, they supposed slipped in a change to their multi-page user agreement that authorized such behavior. So now I am simply going to ratchet up my paranoia and limit my use of third party software to an even greater extent just because I don't have the time or desire deal with this crap.
As long as older games still work under current versions of Windows, I don't see a huge amount of anger over this change. But if Microsoft ever decides to clean up their API by removing depreciated functions or by dropping older compatibility sandboxes, I could see some real push-back since older games would eventually become unplayable unless Steam continues supporting older OS versions. As the AC above notes, this is what pushes people to pirate from abandonware sites.
I can understand the desire to not have to support the older operating systems. But, why completely stop in from running? Why not just say, "if it breaks too bad" and let people risk it if they want to?
If the next release of the Steam Client requires a higher minimum API level in order to run, it may simply fail to work. It isn't that it may fail, but that it would fail. As to allowing older versions of the client to still connect to their network, that may fail the first time they change something on their end that causes communications to break.
I disagree. Every new version of Windows introduces a new API level with a host of new functions. Those functions may be more efficient, more secure, or offer more functionality. Even if a program doesn't intend to add any new functionality itself, it may benefit from using those new functions. Having to write a path that either emulates that functionality or uses an older inferior version has a cost.
This is actually an edge case of a much larger problem. Apple's iPhone UI makes it too easy to inadvertently dial emergency services. I'm guessing that the phones are password locked and that during transport within the factory, something rubs the screens in such a way to bring up the unlock screen and then hit the dial 911 button at the bottom of the unlock screen.
My old Nokia brick phone had a simple solution: you actually had to type in 911 in order to dial 911, even if the phone was still password locked. That made pocket dialing emergency services incredibly unlikely.
This article takes the noble assumption that people actually want the truth instead of the warm, comforting embrace of the self-reaffirming echo chamber. I know more than a few people who turn to questionable news because they don't want their view of the world challenged. As long as these people exist, there will be a market for this sort of information.
You don't really need self-awareness for AI to be dangerous. You just need it to be sufficiently better at tasks than humans. While there is much talk of killbots, there are other dangers that might seem more mundane. What happens to our economy when AI allows automation to cheaply replace humans in large numbers? Economic revolutions in the past have been incredibly disruptive during the transitionary period.
I see a huge wave of older smartphones making their way to the trash heap as wireless networks start to reallocate spectrum currently used by 2G and 3G protocols for newer 4G and 5G protocols. I also suspect that many people are in for a surprise when they discover that their supposed 4G phones only support LTE data and not LTE voice.
As example, I have a Galaxy S5 Neo released in late 2015 that supports LTE-A. But as an unbranded member of the GS5 series, Samsung never enabled voice-over-LTE, so it uses 3G UMTS to place voice calls. Unless Samsung has a change of heart or my carrier pushes a voice-over-IP solution that I can use with LTE data networks, my phone will stop working in a couple years.
Even if wireless networks keep a few MHz of spectrum around for M2M devices (ie, home security cellular backups), don't expect it to be on better frequency bands.
I assume that such filters will be computer generated with little to no human review. The article specially mentions ContentID. Given the number of bogus DCMA takedowns that Yahoo receives each day due to these substandard checks, I don't see this being much better.
This could cause a stifling effect upon fair use.
Any of these suggestions will yield better results than having the government interfere & probably end up making things worse. I realize though it's easier for some people to get someone else to force others to do what they want.
Not necessarily. Some of your recommendations can introduce issues of their own. Depending on a person's requirements, location, or income, they might not be feasible choices at all.
I'm sure there were butchers that sold top quality meat in 1905 before Congress and Teddy Roosevelt passed the Meat Inspection Act. But how many of them operated in poor urban neighborhoods? What was the price premium due to their boutique nature and loss of economies of scale? How could you be sure that they sold person X the same product as person Y? The free market is not an infallible system.
There is a workable balance between regulation and free market solutions. It is naive to state that one is automatically inferior to the other. One has to weigh the pros and cons of each. I look to history and some of the crazy stuff that is happening in China to be glad that our regulation system has attained the balance that it has, even if it isn't perfect.
"You should start your own cattle farm and slaughtering plant if you don't like antibiotics, growth hormones, rat feces, and rat poison in your meat."
"You should start your own automobile company if you don't like cars designed to fail at 150,000 Km."
"You should start your own pharmaceutical company if you don't like drugs with undisclosed side effects."
"You should start your own power company if you don't like the current rate structure or the polluting generation methods they use."
"You should write your own mobile and desktop OS if you don't like what's on the market today."
Sure, let me dig up a few billion dollars in loose change so I can go out and create those alternatives. Oh wait, I don't have that.
[libertarian-lifeguard-on-duty-swimmers-facedown.jpg]
I've noticed that the annoyances under Windows 7 are starting to drift upward. My W7 desktop woke up from sleep mode late last night to install some system updates. Even though both Excel and Notepad++ know how to gracefully close when a shutdown signal is received, when I logged in this morning, neither app restored their previous state. So a couple hours of work went up in smoke. I can only guess at how those apps were killed to cause that behavior.
I used regedit to add a key that disables automatic WU reboots. Hopefully another update doesn't delete it.
The main issue here is that there are few repercussions for Microsoft doing this. With no suitable alternative in the marketplace for running Windows binaries (WINE is very hit or miss, OS/2 eComStation hasn't seen improvements in years), you're stuck eating whatever Microsoft wants to feed you.
We really need to update our consumer protection laws so that we can opt-out of shovelware. Even better, require us to opt-in. I've lost track of how many hours I've spent over the years removing sketchy apps from laptops and smartphones. Not to mention the extraordinary efforts I've sometimes been forced to take to do so.
Not true. The WinAPI (as it is now called) gained numerous new functions with Windows 7, 8, and 10. What it hasn't done much of is depreciate functions. My programs can still call unsafe array and string functions under Windows 10. The only issue I ever encounter is a MSVC compiler warning if I use them in my code.
I typically program using Windows 7 as my minimum WinAPI compatibility level (WINVER 0x601). I have come across a couple of functions that were only available for higher API levels that would have been nice to use, but I've been able to work around them. I imagine that as time goes by, that will be harder to do.
Try looking at some WinAPI documentation sometime. It isn't as static as you make it out to be.
Even in desktop mode, the start menu for Windows 10 is significantly different than that of Windows XP or 7. If you do not like the new start menu, Classic Shell is still a must.
Except that the developer for Classic Shell recently stated that they are giving up on the project because Microsoft developers keep changing the low-level hooks that the program relies on. Also, Classic Shell may not be available in a workplace environment where security and licensing are major issues.
A third of my complaints about Windows 10 would disappear if Microsoft offered different system themes that mimic other environments and a more consistent theme for system settings. Given the level of configurability that X/Win desktop managers offer, it is incredibly frustrating.
It isn't just photo editing software. Almost all of my commercial software programs are only available for Windows or Mac. Very few have ports for GNU/Linux or *BSD and that's a problem. It keeps me tied to a software ecosystem.
WINE does a so-so job allowing me to run Windows app under Linux and BSD, but it seems to be a half-baked solution full of quirks and strange user experiences. If I try to move my software packages over, I may have to suffer with a degraded experience.
So we're stuck with a chicken and egg situation. Some people like to advocate software alternatives that do exist for Linux, but now you're asking users to adopt an even larger change while flushing the time and money they spent acquiring their existing packages. That's a hard sell.
Or the critics could be in a different place than you were. I loved SW:ANH as a child and as a young adult. Now that I am older, I can see how cheesy the dialog was and how campy the good vs. evil aspect of the film was. Same goes for Princess Bride and a few other films from my youth. There is still a strong nostalgic bond, but I wouldn't really call either very good these days.
For desktop or server use, sure. But the 486 series was quite popular for embedded, industrial, and aerospace hardware use. Intel didn't halt production of the 486 until 2007. I remember using a number of 486 industrial devices running BSD or DOS well into the mid-2000s.
And while early ISA-based 486 systems were incredibly slow, later PCI-based 486 systems were much better, especially when paired with processors like the AMD 5x86/133.
I can't speak for OpenBSD, but both FreeBSD and NetBSD support numerous ISA network cards, including the NE1000/2000, EtherExpress Pro/10, and DEC 3C50x series cards. You should still be able to use those OSes on early pre-VLB 486 systems.
The article says that Intel is releasing patches for processors up to five years old. That would suggest that they're going as far back as Haswell. It would have been nice if they were a little more specific as to where the line is drawn.
I assume these patches are being released in the form of microcode updates that will be pushed out to end-users in the form of system BIOS updates. My worry is that we're going to see the Android-effect where older motherboard manufacturers will simply refuse to provide updates, even though Intel is handing them the code. As example, my H97 motherboard from Gigabyte hasn't seen a BIOS update since Q3-2015. I'm not holding my breath that I'll see a fix.
California had a wet winter this year, with some parts receiving near record amounts of precipitation. That contributed to a very green spring, which inevitably leads to a fierce wildfire season. As to the degree that climate change contributed to it is debatable.
California is also suffering from the spread of invasive, highly flammable non-native grasses. These grasses are often the first to recover after a burn, so less flammable native plants get pushed out. This is contributing to more frequent, more intense wildfires.
Add in increased development in remote areas and you get a one-two-three punch of destructive wildfires.