dryriver writes: BitChute is a video-hosting website like YouTube, except that it states its mission as being "anti-censorship" and is Peer-To-Peer, WebTorrent based. "It is based on the peer-to-peer WebTorrent system, a JavaScript torrenting program that can run in a web browser," according to Wikipedia. "Users who watch a video also seed it. BitChute does not rely on advertising, and users can send payments to video creators directly. In November 2018 BitChute was banned from PayPal." So it seems that you don't need huge datacenters to build something like YouTube -- Bitchute effectively relies on its users to act as a distributed P2P datacenter. Is this the future of internet video? Will more and more people flock to P2P video-hosting sites as/when more mainstream services like YouTube fall prey to various forms of censorship?

dryriver writes: For the benefit of those who are not much into 3D technologies, as far back as the year 2000 and even earlier, there was excitement about "Web3D" -- interactive 3D content embedded in HTML webpages, using technologies like VRML and ShockWave 3D. 2D vector-based Flash and Flash animation was a big deal back then. Very popular with internet users. The more powerful but less installed ShockWave browser plugin -- also made by Macromedia -- got a fairly capable DirectX 7/OpenGL-based realtime 3D engine developed by Intel Labs around 2001 that could put 3D games, 3D product configurators and VR-style building/environment walkthroughs into an HTML page, and also go full-screen on demand. There were significant problems on the hardware side -- 20 years ago, not every PC or Mac connected to the internet had a decently capable 3D GPU by a long shot. But the 3D software technology was there, it was promising even then, and somehow it died -- ShockWave3D was neglected and killed off by Adobe shortly after they bought Macromedia, and VRML died pretty much on its own.

Now we are in 2019. Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, PCs/Macs as well as Game Consoles have powerful 3D GPUs in them that could render great interactive 3D experiences in a web browser. The hardware is there, but 99% of the internet today is in flat 2D. Why is this? Why do tens of millions of gamers spend hours in 3D game worlds every day, and even the websites that cater to this "3D loving" demographic use nothing but text, 2D JPEGs and 2D YouTube videos on their webpages? Everything 3D -- 3D software, 3D hardware, 3D programming and scripting languages -- is far more evolved than it was around 2000. And yet there appears to be very little interest in putting interactive 3D anything into webpages. What causes this? Do people want to go into the 2020s with a 2D-based internet? Is the future of the internet text, 2D images, and streaming 2D videos?

Here's an interesting thought exercise from Slashdot reader dryriver : What is likely to be so different about living in 2039 that it makes our current present in 2019 feel badly dated in many ways? And can we learn lessons about what we are not doing particularly well today in 2019 -- in the technology field for example -- by imagining ourselves looking back at a long bygone 2019 from 20 years in the future...?

Will everything from our current clothing, 4K 2D TVs and film VFX to our computer games, Internet, cars, medical care options and tech gadgets look "terribly dated" to them? Will people in 2039 look at us from their present and think "why couldn't they do X, Y, Z better in 2019?", just as we tend to look 20 years back and wonder "why couldn't they do X, Y, Z better in 1999?"
The original submission argues that "If we could understand today how we look 'from 20 years in the future', including the mistakes we are making compared to how things are (possibly) done in 2039, we might get a better understanding of how we should be doing things today."

So leave your own thoughts in the comments. How will 2019 look to people 20 years from now?

Slashdot reader dryriver asks a scary what-if question about the detailed digital profiles of our online and offline lives that are being created by "hundreds of privately owned, profit-driven companies operating with no meaningful oversight." Digital profiles are just a collection of 1s and 0s and are wide open to digital tampering or digital distortion. You could easily be made to appear to have done just about anything from visiting questionnable websites on the dark web, to buying things that you never actually bought or would have an interest in buying, to being in places in the physical world at given dates and times that you would never actually visit in real life. In other words, your digital profile(s) may make you appear to be a completely different person, doing completely different things, from who you objectively are in actuality.

For now, these digital profiles mostly sit in data centers around the world, and try to serve ads to you. But what happens if someday your digital profile is weaponized against you?

What happens in a situation where you need to prove that you are a morally upright, law-abiding person, and your digital profile(s) are accessed, and claim that you are anything but a moral, law-abiding person? What happens if these digital profiles are someday routinely examined by courts of law to determine whether you are a person of good character or not?

What happens if one of your digital profiles is purposely leaked into the public realm someday, and your "digital mirror image" did all sorts of crappy things that you, in real life, would never do?

mrwireless writes: YouTube channel Real Engineering has posted a great video on the potential (and downsides) of geothermal power. I think it would be great to discuss this video on Slashdot, since in discussions about climate change, geothermal rarely comes up as a viable alternative.

The video mentions things like:
- Could power our needs twice over
- New technology makes it possible in more locations
- Works night and day
- Could be cost competitive (according to an MIT study)
- Workers from the oil drilling industry could find new jobs in this sector

So: why isn't geo-thermal energy getting as much attention as solar and wind?

"If you're anything like me, you've got a slew of devices with lithium-based batteries in them," write long-time Slashdot reader weilawei: The conventional wisdom is to cycle them between 20 and 80% for a good compromise between usability and battery life. How then, do you automate the process to avoid over- or undercharging...? Do you remove and store your laptop battery at a medium charge when you run the laptop off an AC adapter?
You can keep checking your battery icon until it hits 80% -- but it seems like there should be an automated solution. The original submission notes TLP Linux Advance Power Management project -- but what solutions are Slashdot's readers using? Leave your best thoughts in the comments.

How can you limit the charging range of your batteries?

dryriver writes: Growing up in the 1980s/90s I don't remember being embroiled in many "heated arguments" with youths my own age. There were small differences of opinion on various things -- whether a band is a great or not, whether a book is worth reading or whatever -- but nothing anywhere near the heated opinion battles that can be seen in every corner of the Internet today. It doesn't matter what the topic is -- music, games, films, religion, tech, history, science, politics -- people are battling each other on the internet.

And today's youth don't live in little "go to school, then go back home to your parents" cocoons anymore. You can watch them bashing each other over the head on the Internet in every computer games, software, pop culture, gaming hardware or other forum on the Internet. So the question is, when these kids grow into adults someday, will the Internet have given them the intellectual tools to understand others, and respect differences of opinions with others? Or are we looking at adults in the year 2040 or so who are very much still in "Internet combat mode" in their real world interactions?

To pose the question more bluntly: Will the Internet generation growing up today become "Generation Tolerance" or "Generation Fight", and how will the world change if the latter comes true?

dryriver writes: The Amiga was a remarkable machine at the time it was released -- 1985. It had a multitasking capable GUI-driven OS and a mouse. It had a number of cleverly designed custom chips that gave the Amiga amazing graphics and sound capabilities far beyond the typical IBM/DOS PCs of its time. The Amiga was the multimedia beast of its time -- you could create animated and still 2D or 3D graphics on it, compose sophisticated electronic music, develop 2D or 3D 16-Bit games, edit and process digital video (using Video Toaster), and of course, play some amazing games. And after the Amiga -- as well as the Atari ST, Archimedes and so on -- died, everybody pretty much had to migrate to either the PC or Mac platforms. If Commodore and the Amiga had survived and thrived, there might have been four major desktop platforms in use today: Windows, OSX, AmigaOS and Linux. And who knows what the custom chips (ASICs? FPGAs?) of an Amiga in 2019 might have been capable of -- Amiga could possibly have been the platform that makes nearly life-like games and VR/AR a reality, and given Nvidia and AMD's GPUs a run for their money.

What do you think the computing landscape in 2019 would have looked like if the Amiga and AmigaOS as a platform had survived? Would Macs be as popular with digital content creators as they are today? Would AAA games target Windows 7/8/10 by default or tilt more towards the Amiga? Could there have been an Amiga hardware-based game console? Might AmigaOS and Linux have had a symbiotic existence of sorts, with AmigOS co-existing with Linux on many enthusiast's Amigas, or even becoming compatible with each other over time?

thegarbz writes: It seems not a day goes by without yet another story reflecting poorly on major browsers. Not uncommon are stories that are mixed with a degree of bloat, either discussing rarely used features or directly criticizing memory consumption of major browsers. Unfortunately memory consumption is quite often the result of complete feature implementation of technologies used on the web, including DRM for streaming services and WebRTC. Other times it's the result of security measures, feature creep, or poor coding.

So in 2019 for those of us with slower tablets, what browser do you use as an alternative to the big two? How well does it work with the modern HTML5 internet? Are websites frequently broken does the simplicity of other browsers largely go unnoticed?

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo is having trouble finding a monitor that's good for writing code: The 16:10 aspect ratio, which allows for some extra vertical space that is extremely handy when viewing source code, is basically dead as far as I can tell. Dell still sell a few older models but there no 4k+ monitors with this aspect ratio.

Speaking of 4k, at 27" it's about the same PPI (pixels per inch) as my 2012 laptop with a 15" 1080p display, only bigger (around 160 PPI). It feels a bit awkward, not quite high enough to hide the pixels or render "perfect" looking fonts. 5k would be better (200 PPI), but every 5k monitor seems to have been discontinued except for one Iiyama model that seems to have quality problems.

Everyone seems to be obsessing over gaming and photography monitors now. Is there anything left for developers who don't care about 240Hz and calibrated colour, but do care about aspect ratio and text rendering quality?
Leave your suggestions in the comments. What's the best monitor for development work?

"Another coder and I are exploring the possibility of having a video-processing algorithm written in C turned into an ASIC ("Application Specific Integrated Circuit") hardware chip that could go inside various consumer electronics devices," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. The problem? There seems to be very little good information on how much a 20Kb, or 50Kb or indeed a 150Kb algorithm written in the C language would cost to turn in an ASIC or "Custom Chip".

We've been told that "the chip-design engineering fees alone would likely start at around $500,000." We've been told "the cost per ASIC will fluctuate wildly depending on whether you are having 50,000 ASICS manufactured or 5 million ASICs manufactured." Is there some rough way to calculate from the source code size of an algorithm -- lets say 100 Kilobytes of C code, or 1000 lines of code -- a rough per-unit estimate of how much the ASIC hardware equivalent might cost to make?

Why do we need this? Because we want to pitch our video processing tech to a company that makes consumer products, and they will likely ask us, "So... how many dollars of extra cost will this new video processing chip of yours add to our existing products?"
There were some interesting suggestions on the original submission, including the possibility of C to HDL converters or a system on a chip (SoC). But are there any other good alternatives? Leave your own thoughts here in the comments.

How do you estimate the cost of an algorithm turned into an ASIC?

dvda247 writes: Since there's the Nintendo Switch and previously there was the Sony PSP (Playstation Portable), should Microsoft make an Xbox Phone? There are already 'gaming phones' like the ASUS ROG Phone 2, but should Microsoft jump back into the smartphone game to make a phone running Android that is focused primarily on playing Xbox One games? Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere would be huge selling points to make an Xbox Phone. What are your thoughts?

New submitter dvda247 writes: A discussion of if people turn off their Windows 10 PCs anymore? Newer hardware and operating system changes make PCs work differently. Do you shut off your Windows 10 PC anymore? Or do you put it in sleep or hibernate mode? We are broadening the discussion to include desktop computers and laptops that are running Linux-based operating systems, or macOS, or ChromeOS. Additionally, how often do you restart your computer?

dryriver writes: Thousands of charmingly old-fashioned computer and console games from the 8-bit, 16-bit, MS-DOS era are easily re-playable today in a web browser -- many Abandonware websites now feature play-in-browser emulated games. Here is a video of 101 charming old MS-DOS games, most of which can be re-played on Abandonware websites across the internet in seconds.

But what about today's cloud-linked, DRM crippled games, which won't even work without Steam/Origin/UPlay, and many of which don't even allow you to host your own multiplayer servers anymore? How will we play them 20 years from now -- on what may be Android, Linux or other OSs -- when they are tethered into the cloud? And is writing a fully-working emulator for today's complex Windows/DirectX games even feasible?

How will Abandonware work 20 years from now?

dryriver writes: Almost everything in computing appears to be tainted by profits-driven decisionmaking today, from the privacy catastrophe of using personal electronic devices to forced SaaS software licensing. If Big Oil or Big Tobacco ran the computing sector, things probably wouldn't be much worse than they are today. So here's the question: Is a return to idealism possible in computing? Can we go back to the days when computing was about smart nerds building cool shit for other nerds? Or is computing so far gone now that things simply cannot get better anymore?

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen remembers the days of one-time software purchases, before companies began nudging customers to a subscription-based "software as a service" model: New bugs and security vulnerabilities keep being discovered, which means the product cannot EVER be regarded as completed. Whatever the original cost, no matter what the software was supposed to do, it needs unending support. Right now I'm unable to see any other solution than SaaS!

Not limited to Microsoft, of course. Perhaps Apple was the original source of the approach... Slashdot reader dryriver sees a dire trend: Current computing younglings may never know a future where you can actually run software locally on a PC you own, and/or not pay for it as SaaS. All perpetual software licenses may go away in the next six years. Autodesk and Adobe have already moved to SaaS-only.
But is there a case to made for ongoing payments to fund ongoing support? Or is SaaS just an exploitative business model that's bad for customers but good for software vendors? Share your own thoughts in the comments.

And do you prefer one-time purchases or SaaS subscriptions?

A while back some "bored developers and designers" started uploading their ideas for the worst volume control interface in the world. But now Slashdot reader dryriver asks a more serious question: You follow a news story on CNN or BBC or FoxNews or Reuters. The frontpage of the news site changes so frequently that you wish there was a "News Timeline" UI element at the top of the page, letting you scrub back and forward in time (by hours, days, weeks, years) so you can see previous states of the frontpage and get a better sense of how the story developed over time. How many major news websites have this scrubbable Timeline UI element? Currently none do.

Or you go on Youtube. Hundreds of millions of videos for you to browse. Except that there are only 3 basic UI elements you can use -- keyword search, automated recommendations panel on the right, or a sortable list of a specific channel's uploaded videos.

- There is no visual network or node-diagram UI that would let you browse videos by association.

- There is no browsing by category (e.g. sports > soccer > amateurs > kids ) or by alphabetic order.

- There is no master index or master list of videos -- like a phonebook -- that you can call up to find videos you haven't come across yet.

And yet these UI elements are not very difficult to put in the user's hands at all. Why do websites with tens of millions of daily visitors and massive web development resources do so little to allow more sophisticated browsing for those users who desire it?
"Is there a cogent reason to restrict website navigation to 'simple, limited and dumb'," asks the original submission, "or do these websites simply not care enough or bother enough to put more sophisticated UIs into place?" Share your own thoughts in the comments.

Why do popular web sites have bad UI navigation?

simpz writes: Does anyone know of a fairly inexpensive webcam that doesn't depend on a cloud service? A few years ago, you could buy a cheap webcam (with the usual pan/tilt and IR) for about $50 that was fully manageable from a web browser. Nowadays the web interfaces are limited in functionality (or non-existent), or you need a phone app that doesn't work well (maybe only working through a cloud service). I've even seen a few cheap ones that still need ActiveX to view the video in a web browser, really people!

I'd like to avoid a cloud service for privacy and to allow this to operate on the LAN with no internet connection present. Even a webcam where you can disable the cloud connection outbound would be fine and allow you to use it fully locally. I guess the issue is this has become a niche thing that the ease of a cloud service connection probably wins for most people, and other considerations don't really matter to them.

I had a brief look at a Raspberry Pi solution, but didn't see anything like a small webcam form factor (with pan/tilt etc). Alternatively, are there any third-party firmwares for commercial webcams (sort of a OpenWRT-, DD-WRT-, or LineageOS-style project for webcams) that could provide direct local access only via a web browser (and things like RTSP)?

dryriver writes: People who are only mildly tech- or engineering-literate tend to think that innovation is really difficult and expensive, takes years to achieve/discover, and that when something "amazing" is actually discovered, the innovative tech is integrated into products like smartphones or PCs "as soon as is technically possible".

More tech and engineering literate people I talk to frequently tell me the exact opposite of this, namely that companies often discover an innovative method or technique in their R&D labs, are capable of packaging said method or technique into a product as soon as the next fiscal year, but choose instead to sit on the innovation for several years, bringing it to market only when competitors force them to, or sales of existing-paradigm products start to become lacklustre...at the exact point in time where the sales and profit numbers from selling the innovation are maximized.

One tech market, two very different opinions on how it actually works. So here's the question. Do we typically get innovation in products "shortly after the necessary techniques are discovered and mastered", or do we rather get cool innovation handed to us "in a planned fashion" -- at a deliberately delayed future date when the manufacturer thinks it will achieve the greatest finanical return from selling the innovation to the end user?

tripleevenfall writes: At numerous points during my career in the tech industry, my workplaces have been affected by the suicide of an employee. Usually beginning with the receipt of a vague email that management has been "saddened" that someone had "passed away" recently, the truth soon becomes known and the questions begin circulating again. Why does suicide seem to be more common among tech workers? Is it due to lifestyle choices commonly associated with tech workers that lead to isolation? Are the personality types that choose tech work more prone to mental illnesses?