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Comment Wireless is the future inside homes, not fiber. (Score 1) 97

A 3 band wifi 7 mesh system that is incredibly easy to setup is currently fast enough that 99% of customers wouldn't notice a difference with fiber straight to their device. Fiber to the home is great technology. Spreading from there, wireless has achieved "good enough" status for just about everyone. The wires are going away for good reason.

Comment Cocaine makes this story better (Score 2, Funny) 73

Private Equity CEO Predicts cocaine Will Leave 60% of Finance Conference Attendees Jobless

Robert F. Smith, CEO of Vista Equity Partners, told attendees at the SuperReturn International 2025 conference in Berlin last week that 60% of the 5,500 finance professionals present will be "looking for work" next year due to cocaine disruption.

Smith predicted that while 40% of attendees will adopt cocaine agents -- programs that autonomously perform complex, multi-step tasks -- the remaining majority will need to find new employment as cocaine transforms the sector. "All of the jobs currently carried out by one billion knowledge workers today would change due to cocaine," Smith said, clarifying that while jobs won't disappear entirely, they will fundamentally transform.

Comment This all started with stupid laws (Score 1) 120

A long time ago before the laws got stupid one simple thing was obvious: if you make hacking illegal, the only hackers will be criminals.

Well, now this is the world we live in. Hacking was freakishly stupidly made illegal and now most bugs are found by foreign hacking gangs running crypto extortion schemes. It's completely stupid. Your laws aren't making these computer systems more secure, they are making them less secure. Let the local nerds have a crack at it where using extortion would be illegal so all they can do is mess with you a bit. Make white hat hacking not only legal, but legally protected. If you want software to be secure, then there should be the assumption that from day 1 there will be nerds poking at it.

Apple

Apple is Bringing Sideloading and Alternate App Stores To the iPhone (theverge.com) 104

The iPhone's app ecosystem is about to go through its biggest shake-up since the App Store launched in 2008. Today, Apple announced how it plans to change the rules for developers releasing iOS software in the European Union in response to the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA) coming into force in March. The big news is that third-party app stores will be allowed on iOS for the first time, breaking the Apple App Store's position as the sole distributor of iPhone apps. The changes will arrive with iOS 17.4 in March. From a report: Here's how the new "alternative app marketplaces," as Apple called them, will work. Users in the EU and on iOS 17.4 will be able to download a marketplace from that marketplace's website. In order to be used on an iPhone, those marketplaces have to go through Apple's approval process, and once you download one, you have to explicitly give it permission to download apps to your device. But once the marketplace is approved and on your device, you can download anything you want -- including apps that violate App Store guidelines. You can even set a non-App Store marketplace as the default on your device.

Developers, meanwhile, can choose whether to use Apple's payment services and in-app purchases or integrate a third-party system for payments without paying an additional fee to Apple. If the developer wants to stick with Apple's existing in-app payment system, there's an additional 3 percent processing fee. Apple still plans to keep a close eye on the app distribution process. All apps must be "notarized" by Apple, and distribution through third-party marketplaces is still managed by Apple's systems. Developers will only be allowed to distribute a single version of their app across different app stores, and they'll still have to abide by some basic platform requirements, like getting scanned for malware.
Apple says that anyone looking to develop an alternative app marketplace will have to provide evidence that it can financially "guarantee support for developers and customers." Apple wants "a stand-by letter of credit from an A-rated (or equivalent by S&P, Fitch, or Moody's) financial Institution of 1 million Euro prior to receiving the entitlement. It will need to be auto-renewed on a yearly basis."

Comment they are that way for a reason (Score 1) 46

Chromebooks are the only laptop you can actually secure against kids who take them home. There is nothing else on the market. They are made for a market where they are given to kids who smash them for fun and they are only expected to function for a few years and barely function at that. They suck, but there are legitimate reasons they are the way they are and there aren't better options for what they are used for.

Comment Clinging to old ideas ignoring new data (Score 1) 501

This is such a pervasive problem. Here we are years later and we have yet another scientist clinging to old data when they have been proven wrong.

I think part of early science education needs to be the concept that you can never prove theories right, only ever prove them wrong and that's it's ok that things are that way. People hate this concept, because they like building rigid belief systems where they know for sure the things they believe are right and never have to consider alternate possibilities. It's ok to do that, as long as you know how to spot cases when you are wrong and are willing to re-think things when they occur. Some people are unwilling to do even that.

The prime example of this should be Newtonian physics' most basic formula, Force = Mass * Acceleration. It's been tested and experimentally verified for hundreds of years by millions of people, and it's wrong. It always was, and always will be wrong. It is so close to right it is still used extensively, but only when we know the margin of error it introduces is negligible, and we know how to calculate that margin of error now so we know when it will be small enough to ignore and when it won't. There is no proving things right, there is only knowing that things have been right so far. The second the real world proves you wrong, you are wrong.

Comment Ridiculous radiation paranoia continues. (Score 5, Informative) 60

The ocean has uranium 235 spread all through it. It always has. It's fine in there. The best place for things that emit radiation is in water. It absorbs basically everything that can harm people. Fukushima is harmless compared to the massive devastation caused by Deepwater Horizon yet we keep talking about all these non-events and non danger situations as if they matter because "nuclear is scary". It's just not. The coal power plant down the road from me releases more radiation into the environment than Fukushima ever will.and you've never even heard of it.

Comment Re:Treating humans like sewage (Score 1) 267

Exactly. People do not look at the roads and think, man.. I don't need to go anywhere but the road isn't clogged so I guess I've gotta go hop in my car and drive around. People needing to get places causes traffic. People not wanting to deal with traffic pushes that usage back, and it's a bad thing.

The effect is called latent demand, it's well known and well understood and it does not mean increasing road capacity is impossible, futile or worthless. Latent demand is demand that exists but is suppressed by the inability of the system to handle it. Once additional capacity is added the demand materializes as actual usage.

Comment Fix the law (Score -1) 748

Driving correctly should not be illegal.

This is one of the reasons I have been looking forward to AI driving. It forces us to have a real discussion about traffic laws that creates a motivation to fix lazy legislators leaving laws in place that people are forced to routinely break to make traffic work well. I'm tired of the speed limit being 10 MPH slower than the average speed of traffic, and I look forward to people finally standing up and demanding that speed limits be *higher* than the speed traffic naturally flows. Roads should have a recommended speed, that both AI and human drivers should aim for, and a legal limit that police can and should stop you if you exceed. We currently have de-facto versions of that with the recommended speed being the speed limit, and the legal limit being about 15 over, but in working that way, we're technically routinely breaking the law, and that's not how laws should work.

Comment Balmer has the vision of a blind man in the fog... (Score 1) 121

Android apps start fast and have a low memory footprint because they use shared memory to share code with the software that runs the phone. You can't do that unless the phone uses java for it's internal functionality, which Windows phones would not, so app's startup time and memory footprint would be much worse than on real Android.

Balmer understands markets, but he doesn't understand tech, or design. His reign at Microsoft showed a complete squandering of technical talent in a series of boondoggles that someone with better knowledge of the underlying technology would have foreseen, and this took Microsoft from a dominant position to near collapse. Satya Nadella has had little to praise or criticise, but so far I feel his steps have been more strategically sound. Balmer needs to remain silent, because all he's accomplishing now is removing all doubt.

Comment Re:Security vs Productivity (Score 1) 227

Security is needed, but so is productivity. Neither is valuable without the other.

I worked for a company that got breached and had stuff stolen. Their security was overblown and cumbersome, and not layered properly. They tried to secure their entire network, instead of properly layering things, and thus a hack that should have been trivial was not. Had they properly layered their network so the general employee work could happen fluidly, and people could get their jobs done without giving away the keys to the kingdom they would have been much better off. After the breach came mandatory drive encryption (with no password) which brought their largely aging laptop population to its knees. So much wasted time and horrible frustration, all to implement basically worthless security policies.

Comment Re:Threat? (Score 1) 227

> security is a huge threat to productivity.

Exactly this. I've seen so many companies waste time and money on ineffective overblown security measures that they should be spending actually getting the job done. Layer your security so that it stays out of the way as much as possible while still protecting what is actually important.

Comment Who is harmed? (Score 1) 165

You say the goal is "to cut costs", but what costs?

If the cost-savings comes from undermining a union, they probably would have sued already, so I'm guessing it's not that.

This shouldn't be a tax dodge, because 1099s should end up paying roughly the same federal and state tax, so it must be a reduction in actual compensation. Assuming that's the case, those being harmed look to be the 1099 employees themselves. As such, it would seem like a class action suit would be the appropriate course of action. If the state itself isn't willing to abide by the rule, it shouldn't expect others to either. The state should either follow the rule or repeal it.

Comment Re:Windows without a SSD isn't worth it (Score 1) 517

I used to load my machines up with RAM to speed them up. It's not useless, but it makes a tiny fraction of the difference an SSD makes. It simply isn't worth it. Window's caching is terrible, it tends to thrash your disks at inopportune times, and it's filesystems end up a slow tangled mess so quickly that without an SSD, it's just painful. Combine that with the high failure rate of spinning disks in a laptop, the extra-slow speed of laptop drives, and the reduced battery life from their high power usage and you'll be much happier with an SSD based laptop. When SSDs hit the $1/gig barrier it became time to start phasing spinning disks out of all but the lowest-performing laptops. Now that they're pushing down to about 1/3rd that, I'd avoid any laptop maker who doesn't, because they're not very good at what they do.

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