MS would take a brand new factory image with no other apps installed and run its battery of QA tests. Fix reported bugs. Lather, rinse and repeat.
As long as you use it that way, no other apps, factory image, perfect network connections, it would work well.
But the one you buy is preloaded up to the brink with nagware, malware, adware and "exciting apps" from the vendors, and all sort of crapware. Their main purpose is to degrade the user experience so bad they would buy the damned App.
Every damned app wants to phone home and look for updates all at the same time all at boot time. Unless MS picks of tablets that were in use for six months to one year, find defects and fixes them, it is not going to go anywhere. MS execs will show fantastic reliability metrics. Users will still see crap.
We can cashier pretty much all actors and actresses. Already synthesized voice singer robot is grammy award winner quality. Saw the post about the singing robots of Japan? We can just use CGI actors.
Finally people who were lucky enough to have some good looking features will stop hogging the limelight, yup limelight. The real creative people, the script writers, directors and cinematographers will get their due share. While these CGI characters who work 24/7 for a pittance without any pesky contract renegotiation issues will be used.
It will last till AI gets good enough to replace the directors and script writers too. Then... all of us will have tons and tons of time to watch TV. But not much of money to buy anything advertised. Is this going to be the entropy death of the visual entertainment universe? Well, it will form a good plot to a good script writer. May be,.
With data consolidation all your public information can be collected and sold, for whatever reason.
Already credit reporting agencies do it.
Already all the arrest records and court filings are available for search
Already people are posting so much about their personal lives in twitter, facebook and other media.
Already companies are collecting tons of these information and collating them and are willing to sell them.
So far banks planning lend money and advertisers looking to find customers were the big customers. Corporate HR recruiting and retention is definitely in the market for info. Insurance fraud detectors, bail bondsman, debt collectors and alimoney deadbeat trackers all use these services to some degree or the other. Welcome to the brave new world, folks. Privacy is dead.
The problem is not finding something unique about someone. That is not the only purpose of authentication. The purpose is to prevent third parties from faking it.
No matter what it is, fingerprints, voice prints, retinal scans, finger vibrations, deep alpha waves of the brain, characteristic whorls in your scalp, the unique biota of bacteria living in your colon... it does not matter what it is. It gets digitized and gets transmitted. If the digitized data is compromised, then there is no way for the user to change these things. They make particularly bad authentication tokens. Governments and spy agencies would love such unalterable tags on people. But it does not solve the problem of authentication.
What we need is a true two factor authentication. Something I have physically. Something I can change if it is compromised. I use an RSA id key fob I have to login to Schwab. If they discover a flaw, and the randmoizer seed was hard wired, something leaked, some employee was bribed to sell some key info about it to random criminals... We can change the key fob. How am I going to change my fingerprint or voice print or thumb vibrations, if that authentication mechanism was compromised?
From the evolution point of view, suicidal thoughts would be selected against. Organisms that encourage suicidal behavior would go extinct. Why/how thoughts and actions contrary to propagation of the species persist in the gene pool?
It is easy to explain the suicidal nature of bees and ants. They are genetically identical to their queen, who is their sister. So any child of the queen is the child of the worker, so she (all workers are females) is willing to die for her queen.
In some sense an insect colony is a distributed individual. A worker defending her colony suicidally is same as a porcupine willing to lose quills in defense.
But, a mammal, primate like us still having suicidal thoughts in our gene pool is inexplicable.
Did you see the part where I said, "dirty coal is more expensive than natural gas" ? Yes, right now natural gas is beating coal out. It is the "drill baby drill" that opened the spigots of natural gas through fracking, killing the coal mines.
For new installations wind and solar are cheaper than natural gas, (already, under certain circumstances, for some interest rates, in certain places etc etc). Natural gas is not going to get any cheaper. Already they are burning off natural gas because cost of installing pipelines or compressing and storing is more that its market price. Solar and wind continue to get cheaper.
Just 10 years ago, coal mines still had some buyers left, vulture capitalists who know the local conditions and undervalued assets not related to coal mining not known to distant owners. Now the market has collapsed completely. There are no takers for any coal mines in Charleroi, Mononghehela, Finnlyville, PA43 corridor, at any price. The entire western PA, West Virginia, Ohio area coal mine market has collapsed.
Put money where your mouth is. I dare you to buy a mine that was valued at 1 million dollars in 2007 for 10,000$ today, in southwestern PA. Double dare. Triple dare. Triple dog dare.
We have the technology to move away from 100-year-old energy sources, why not use it?
We will. We will definitely move to renewable energy. But first, the people in power and the rich have too much of their wealth tied to fossil fuels. They need to divest, dump it into the market while they exit. They use all the propaganda to make sure the market does not suddenly collapse for them. Once the rich have fully divested, and all these chumps who trust their leaders shouting "drill, baby drill", "dig, baby dig" own the stocks, that market will collapse.
Already in the coal mines, all those companies that were planning to mine for decades have sold out to shorter term companies. They raided the pension funds, rights of way, railroad rolling stock etc, and cashed out. The next round of buyers picked the bones more. Waterway access, scenic lodges, etc were stripped out. The next round of owners decided to sacrifice all maintenance and safety and expansion, use local tax abatements and other tax payer supported incentives milk them all dry. They see no new coal fired power plant is opening, dirty coal is more expensive than natural gas, which is getting to be more expensive than wind and solar for new installations. They are dumping coal companies.
The coal miners and their communities that deserve to be taken care of by rest of the nation are being abandoned. They bite the hand that reaches out to them, and they trust the people who stab them in their back. Very sorry for them.
So eventually, in twenty or thirty years, when history books are written the descendants of these coal miners will read how their grand parents were taken for a ride.
Tech company papers, lost because the company that sells millions of scanners did not scan its own historical documents...
With incompetence this bad, does it really need a Carly to finish it off? Any run of the mill CEO could have run it to ground, you don't need the extra stupid.
I thought it was just my imagination seeing lions, mermaids, dogs and cats in the clouds. Once I even spotted Saraswati, Goddess of Learning and Knowledge in the morning toast and I aced the test on that day too. Coincidence? I think not. (BTW I am not Descartes, so I would not vanish)
It might come as a big surprise to you young whipper snappers, but yes, there was a time, the keyboard did not have type ahead buffer. You press a key, and till the computer finishes processing that input it you can not enter the next key. M.u.s.t.t.y.p.e. very slowly.
Then an 8 character type ahead buffer was introduced, probably in the DOS 3.0 time frame.
It was not universally appreciated. Jerry Pournelle, the Byte Magazine columnist went on a rant about how this type-ahead-buffer will lead to all sorts of disasters. ( cumbersome I keystrokes into one key without specifying and planning anything in advance.... You type this repeatedly Could not find a good readable link)
In India there is no standard universal ID that could be used to track you and find you. If you don't look like a foreigner you can disappear into the crowds and acquire an Indian identity and passport. So many people from Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Burma have done that. Government is trying to create something called Aadhar (meaning proof) to create a nationwide id system. Lots of opposition to Aadhar.
Government wants the cell phones to be tied to Aadhar. To combat terrorism, they say. Some states are opposing this.
This requirement could drag down phone sales and market size. Or a scramble to acquire more burner phones before the Aadhar tie up is completed.
And the floor would be so uneven, only three legged stools could be used as chairs.
Saw falling water. My friend commented, "It is a once in a lifetime experience to visit Falling Water. I mean I would never come here again, so help ne God!"
It was particularly bad for me. Friends and family and random strangers pumped up my ego since leaving high school, using terms like, "creme-de-la-creme" "got through JEE? life is made man!". Then ended up in a PhD program in hypersonic flow when that baldie with a blotchy birthmark pulled perestroika and glasnost out of a hat and dissolved USSR. Having defeated the enemy USA cashed in its peace dividend, which essentially meant all those PhDs in hypersonic rocket science are totally surplus. People with 10 and 20 year experience in hypersonic CFD were coming around begging for temp positions. People whose papers I used to read with great reverence and admiration were standing in line ahead of me fighting for a 12 month post doc position.
Visa running out, with a baby, all those non creme-de-la-creme were all on great jobs and career path... never felt more depressed.
Then, finally, the waves of economic growth finally lapped up on that isolated island I was marooned in. Feb 1994. Worst month in life. March 1994. Had three job offers, three count them, one, two, three! Purely lucked into taking up an offer from a startup just on the verge of take off and IPO.
But, it was luck. Not perseverance, not hard work, not impossibly high IQ, not my careful career choices. Bad luck followed by good luck. That is all it was. L.U.C.K.
If they used the sky high valuations created by these faked numbers and sell out to any publicly traded company, then we should chase these owners and throw them in jail.
The limited liability corporation idea has run amok. Now the courts are giving private corporations rights of real citizens, like freedom of speech, spending money = speech, religious beliefs etc, it is high time we reverse the trend and throw a few bastards in jail to reign them in.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as you use it that way, no other apps, factory image, perfect network connections, it would work well.
But the one you buy is preloaded up to the brink with nagware, malware, adware and "exciting apps" from the vendors, and all sort of crapware. Their main purpose is to degrade the user experience so bad they would buy the damned App.
Every damned app wants to phone home and look for updates all at the same time all at boot time. Unless MS picks of tablets that were in use for six months to one year, find defects and fixes them, it is not going to go anywhere. MS execs will show fantastic reliability metrics. Users will still see crap.
Yes, they can. Haven't you heard of VR porn and its accessory devices?
Dont worry about Univs losing Artificial Intelligence experts. They have a lock on Natural Stupidity.
We can cashier pretty much all actors and actresses. Already synthesized voice singer robot is grammy award winner quality. Saw the post about the singing robots of Japan? We can just use CGI actors.
Finally people who were lucky enough to have some good looking features will stop hogging the limelight, yup limelight. The real creative people, the script writers, directors and cinematographers will get their due share. While these CGI characters who work 24/7 for a pittance without any pesky contract renegotiation issues will be used.
It will last till AI gets good enough to replace the directors and script writers too. Then... all of us will have tons and tons of time to watch TV. But not much of money to buy anything advertised. Is this going to be the entropy death of the visual entertainment universe? Well, it will form a good plot to a good script writer. May be,.
Already credit reporting agencies do it.
Already all the arrest records and court filings are available for search
Already people are posting so much about their personal lives in twitter, facebook and other media.
Already companies are collecting tons of these information and collating them and are willing to sell them.
So far banks planning lend money and advertisers looking to find customers were the big customers. Corporate HR recruiting and retention is definitely in the market for info. Insurance fraud detectors, bail bondsman, debt collectors and alimoney deadbeat trackers all use these services to some degree or the other. Welcome to the brave new world, folks. Privacy is dead.
No matter what it is, fingerprints, voice prints, retinal scans, finger vibrations, deep alpha waves of the brain, characteristic whorls in your scalp, the unique biota of bacteria living in your colon... it does not matter what it is. It gets digitized and gets transmitted. If the digitized data is compromised, then there is no way for the user to change these things. They make particularly bad authentication tokens. Governments and spy agencies would love such unalterable tags on people. But it does not solve the problem of authentication.
What we need is a true two factor authentication. Something I have physically. Something I can change if it is compromised. I use an RSA id key fob I have to login to Schwab. If they discover a flaw, and the randmoizer seed was hard wired, something leaked, some employee was bribed to sell some key info about it to random criminals... We can change the key fob. How am I going to change my fingerprint or voice print or thumb vibrations, if that authentication mechanism was compromised?
Now cloud, which is actually water vapor, is all the rage and everyone and his brother wants to put their stuff in the cloud.
There is no reason to continue this anachronism any more.
Steven Pinker last book The better angels of our nature talks about how much the cost of artificial light has fallen in the last three hundred years.
It is high time we get rid of it.
It is easy to explain the suicidal nature of bees and ants. They are genetically identical to their queen, who is their sister. So any child of the queen is the child of the worker, so she (all workers are females) is willing to die for her queen.
In some sense an insect colony is a distributed individual. A worker defending her colony suicidally is same as a porcupine willing to lose quills in defense.
But, a mammal, primate like us still having suicidal thoughts in our gene pool is inexplicable.
For new installations wind and solar are cheaper than natural gas, (already, under certain circumstances, for some interest rates, in certain places etc etc). Natural gas is not going to get any cheaper. Already they are burning off natural gas because cost of installing pipelines or compressing and storing is more that its market price. Solar and wind continue to get cheaper.
Just 10 years ago, coal mines still had some buyers left, vulture capitalists who know the local conditions and undervalued assets not related to coal mining not known to distant owners. Now the market has collapsed completely. There are no takers for any coal mines in Charleroi, Mononghehela, Finnlyville, PA43 corridor, at any price. The entire western PA, West Virginia, Ohio area coal mine market has collapsed.
Put money where your mouth is. I dare you to buy a mine that was valued at 1 million dollars in 2007 for 10,000$ today, in southwestern PA. Double dare. Triple dare. Triple dog dare.
, and there's no evidence anyone else found the bugs and exploited them.
So are we arguing the absence of evidence is evidence of absence?
We have the technology to move away from 100-year-old energy sources, why not use it?
We will. We will definitely move to renewable energy. But first, the people in power and the rich have too much of their wealth tied to fossil fuels. They need to divest, dump it into the market while they exit. They use all the propaganda to make sure the market does not suddenly collapse for them. Once the rich have fully divested, and all these chumps who trust their leaders shouting "drill, baby drill", "dig, baby dig" own the stocks, that market will collapse.
Already in the coal mines, all those companies that were planning to mine for decades have sold out to shorter term companies. They raided the pension funds, rights of way, railroad rolling stock etc, and cashed out. The next round of buyers picked the bones more. Waterway access, scenic lodges, etc were stripped out. The next round of owners decided to sacrifice all maintenance and safety and expansion, use local tax abatements and other tax payer supported incentives milk them all dry. They see no new coal fired power plant is opening, dirty coal is more expensive than natural gas, which is getting to be more expensive than wind and solar for new installations. They are dumping coal companies.
The coal miners and their communities that deserve to be taken care of by rest of the nation are being abandoned. They bite the hand that reaches out to them, and they trust the people who stab them in their back. Very sorry for them.
So eventually, in twenty or thirty years, when history books are written the descendants of these coal miners will read how their grand parents were taken for a ride.
Already a few hundred paid soldiers fought and won an election.
With incompetence this bad, does it really need a Carly to finish it off? Any run of the mill CEO could have run it to ground, you don't need the extra stupid.
I thought it was just my imagination seeing lions, mermaids, dogs and cats in the clouds. Once I even spotted Saraswati, Goddess of Learning and Knowledge in the morning toast and I aced the test on that day too. Coincidence? I think not. (BTW I am not Descartes, so I would not vanish)
If people are apathetic and are misinformed there is no real solution.
Then an 8 character type ahead buffer was introduced, probably in the DOS 3.0 time frame.
It was not universally appreciated. Jerry Pournelle, the Byte Magazine columnist went on a rant about how this type-ahead-buffer will lead to all sorts of disasters. ( cumbersome I keystrokes into one key without specifying and planning anything in advance. ... You type this repeatedly Could not find a good readable link)
They stole the election, and the presidency. Stole all the secrets from NSA.
All those people were just typing the numbers wrong.
Government wants the cell phones to be tied to Aadhar. To combat terrorism, they say. Some states are opposing this.
This requirement could drag down phone sales and market size. Or a scramble to acquire more burner phones before the Aadhar tie up is completed.
Saw falling water. My friend commented, "It is a once in a lifetime experience to visit Falling Water. I mean I would never come here again, so help ne God!"
It was particularly bad for me. Friends and family and random strangers pumped up my ego since leaving high school, using terms like, "creme-de-la-creme" "got through JEE? life is made man!". Then ended up in a PhD program in hypersonic flow when that baldie with a blotchy birthmark pulled perestroika and glasnost out of a hat and dissolved USSR. Having defeated the enemy USA cashed in its peace dividend, which essentially meant all those PhDs in hypersonic rocket science are totally surplus. People with 10 and 20 year experience in hypersonic CFD were coming around begging for temp positions. People whose papers I used to read with great reverence and admiration were standing in line ahead of me fighting for a 12 month post doc position.
Visa running out, with a baby, all those non creme-de-la-creme were all on great jobs and career path ... never felt more depressed.
Then, finally, the waves of economic growth finally lapped up on that isolated island I was marooned in. Feb 1994. Worst month in life. March 1994. Had three job offers, three count them, one, two, three! Purely lucked into taking up an offer from a startup just on the verge of take off and IPO.
But, it was luck. Not perseverance, not hard work, not impossibly high IQ, not my careful career choices. Bad luck followed by good luck. That is all it was. L.U.C.K.
If they used the sky high valuations created by these faked numbers and sell out to any publicly traded company, then we should chase these owners and throw them in jail.
The limited liability corporation idea has run amok. Now the courts are giving private corporations rights of real citizens, like freedom of speech, spending money = speech, religious beliefs etc, it is high time we reverse the trend and throw a few bastards in jail to reign them in.
Atman is Brahman. Advaita ftw.
What! Sacrilege! Blashpghemy! All Davitees of the world unite! Fight the Advaitees!
If the warning was anything other than, "Danger CEO your stock options are under peril", they would pay no attention to it.