After years of its on and off interest in smartphones, Google today produces some of the best phones on the planet. The Pixel 3 and the 3 XL take better pictures than most smartphones -- certainly any phone that predates them. But the whole idea of Google making handsets -- being also the company that maintains Android and has relationship with hundreds of OEM partners that themselves make and sell Android handsets -- has also been peculiar. Additionally, Google itself has an alarmingly long track record of losing interest in things, including hardware projects -- and especially when they finally appear to have courted a large following. Richard Windsor, director of research firm Radio Free Mobile, adds: While the wires are already speculating on the form factor of the Google Pixel 4 due to be launched in Q4, I am wondering whether this will be the last smartphone that Google makes. Ever since it wasted $12.5bn of shareholder's money on Motorola Mobility in 2012, Google has had a bad condition of what I refer to as engineering disease (see here and here and here). I diagnose engineering disease as a condition where engineers often get so excited about whether they can develop something that they forget to ask whether they should develop that something. Engineering disease almost always ends in financial disaster and I calculate that Google's hardware business has done nothing but burn cash since the day it was created. Worst of all, I can find no logical rhyme or reason why Google needs to make hardware other than a foolhardy attempt to take on Apple.

This it will never be able to do unless it takes Android fully proprietary so that it can control the experience from end to end and it has been unable and unwilling to do this to date. Furthermore, Samsung has done a much better job at taking on Apple given its scale, brand, distribution and the fact that its core competence is to take the innovations of others and make them smaller, better and cheaper. [...] This is why I have argued that Samsung and Google should stop wasting money on each other's core competence and throw their lot in together. The problem for Google hardware is that the days of under-performing businesses hiding under the skirts of the giant search cash machine are coming to an end. We have already seen this as in March, the Pixel Slate and Pixelbook team was cut back due to the lackluster sales of the product. The three versions of the Google Pixel have sold in paltry volumes with market share never reliably exceeding 0.3% with 4.5m units sold in 2018. Given the low volume, I would estimate the gross margin of this product is around 20% in the best instance which after product development costs and marketing leaves very little if anything left over.

This is not the kind of performance that Google is used to which combined with an apparent inability to really get the hardware right (see here) means that Dr. Ruth Porat (CFO of Alphabet) will be asking some very hard questions of this division this year. Consequently, I think that Google needs to see a significant step up in performance with the Pixel 4, otherwise, it too may fall under the surgeon's knife. [...] The time to pull the stops out is now as failure is likely to result in there being no Pixel 5. How long do you think Google would keep funding the Pixel phones project?

Slashdot reader stevent1965 writes: The costs of running the International Space Station are a burden for NASA's budget. It has cost over $100 billion to construct and annual operating expenses run between $3 and $4 billion per year, representing a substantial percentage [about half] of NASA's manned space exploration budget. What to do, what to do?

A potential solution is to turn over operations (if not ownership) to private enterprise (Elon, are you listening?) Commercialization of space exploration may be anathema to some, but there is ample precedent for the government ceding control of publicly-funded endeavors to private enterprises. The Internet is the obvious example.

Why not give corporations control of the ISS? Are there drawbacks? Benefits? Which will prevail? Let's hear your opinions.
Sunday NPR noted that a few weeks ago NASA held a press event at Nasdaq's MarketSite to announce and promote "the commercialization of low Earth orbit," with astronaut Christina Koch beaming down a video from space to say that the crew was "so excited" to be a part of NASA "as our home and laboratory in space transitions into being accessible to expanded commercial and marketing opportunities" (as well as to "private astronauts.")

But there are big logistical and financial hurdles. (Even NASA admits to NPR that revenue-generating opportunities first "need to be cultivated by the creative and entrepreneurial private sector.") So leave your own best thoughts in the comments -- the how, why, what if, or why not.

Should the International Space Station go commercial?

dryriver writes: If anybody remembers the good old Commodore 64, one thing stood out about this once popular 8-bit computer -- as soon as you turned it on, you could type in BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) and run it. You didn't have to install a programming language, an IDE and all that jazz. You could simply start punching code in, and the C64 would execute it. Now that we live in a time where coding is even more important and bankable than it was back in the 1980s, shouldn't operating systems like Windows 10 or Android also come with precisely this kind of feature? An easy-to-learn programming language like the old BASIC that greets you right after you boot up the computer, and gives you unfettered access to all of the computer's hardware and capabilities, just like was possible on the C64 decades ago? Everybody talks about "getting more people to learn coding" these days. Well, why not go the old C64 route and have modern OSs boot you straight into a usable, yet powerful, coding environment? Why shouldn't my Android phone or tablet come out of its box with a CLI BASIC prompt I can type code into right after I buy it from a store?

Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino is your typical Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) developer, and writes that "in recent years Docker has been the hottest thing since sliced bread." You are expected to "dockerize" your setups and be able to launch a whole string of processes to boot up various containers with databases and your primary PHP monolith with the launch of a single script. All fine and dandy this far.

However, I can't shake the notion that much of this -- especially in the context of LAMP -- seems overkill. If Apache, MariaDB/MySQL and PHP are running, getting your project or multiple projects to run is trivial. The benefits of having Docker seem negilible, especially having each project lug its own setup along. Yes, you can have your entire compiler and Continuous Integration stack with SASS, Gulp, Babel, Webpack and whatnot in one neat bundle, but that doesn't seem to dimish the usual problems with the recent bloat in frontend tooling, to the contrary....

But shouldn't tooling be standardised anyway? And shouldn't Docker then just be an option, who couldn't be bothered to have (L)AMP on their bare metal? I'm still skeptical of this Dockerization fad. I get it makes sense if you need to scale microsevices easy and fast in production, but for 'traditional' development and traditional setups, it just doesn't seem to fit all that well.

What are your experiences with using Docker in a development environment? Is Dockerization a fad or something really useful? And should I put up with the effort to make Docker a standard for my development and deployment setups?
The original submission ends with "Educated Slashdot opinions requested." So leave your best answers in the comments.

Is Dockerization a fad?

united_notions writes: Last year, The Guardian ran an opinion article arguing that everyone should be allocated "an air mile allowance -- say enough for one long-haul return flight a year, or three short-haul flights. [...] If you don't want to use your allowance, you could sell it off in a government-regulated online marketplace. If you're keen to do a holiday a month, you'll have to buy your allowance from someone else." But despite continuing concerns over the environmental harm caused by air travel, this idea has not found much subsequent support. Instead, serious air time is given to meager plans like weighing passengers. Do Slashdotters think rationing would work? Could serious coordinated inter-governmental restrictions on air travel change our behavior? Might it just spur corporations into finishing up carbon-neutral passenger planes?

Here's what dryriver wondered after hearing that the oldest Porsche T64 in the world -- built in 1939 -- was going to be auctioned: What stands out about this nearly 80 year old car is how curved and aerodynamically shaped it is. If you then Google 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s car images, you find that they are nowhere near as aerodynamic in shape. It took a while before production cars started to appear en masse that had a nicely-curved aerodynamic body, and before Bezier curves were invented, which allowed early CAD software to produce precisely curved designs.

Why did it take so long for cars to become more curved if aircraft of that time already had aerodynamic curves and the benefits of an aerodynamically shaped land vehicle were also known? Was it an issue with actually manufacturing curved cars in great numbers below a certain cost level, or did the automotive industry simply not care about the aerodynamics of their vehicles for a long time?
Long-time Slashdot reader MightyYar blames cheap gas, arguing that "When gas was nearly free, there was little incentive to make vehicles aerodynamic." (He also complains that "When they did go aerodynamic, they all started to look the same -- as there is an optimal aerodynamic design for a box on wheels so every designer with the same cost constraints and design tools will converge on that.") Z00L00K adds that "Until the 1930's aerodynamic drag wasn't really an issue for vehicles because the top speed wasn't that high and the roads didn't really permit high speeds either."

Long-time Slashdot reader Martin S. believes "Styling for public tastes beat aerodynamics except for outright race cars. Fuel efficiency has only become the primary driver with the rising number of cars, pollution levels in our cities and climate change." But are there other pieces to the story?

Share your own thoughts in the comments. Why did it take so long for cars to become aerodynamically shaped?

dryriver writes: For capitalism to work for consumers in a beneficial way, the big players have to compete hard against each other and innovate courageously. What appears to be happening instead, however, is that every year almost everybody is making roughly the same product at roughly the same price point. Most 4K TVs at the same price point have the same features -- there is little to distinguish manufacturer A from manufacturer B. Ditto for smartphones -- nobody suddenly puts a 3D scanning capable lightfield camera, shake-the-phone-to-charge-it or something similarly innovative into their next phone. Ditto for game consoles -- Xbox and Playstation are not very different from each other at all. Nintendo does "different," but underpowers its hardware. Ditto for laptops -- the only major difference I see in laptops is the quality of the screen panel used and of the cooling system. The last laptop with an auto stereoscopic 3D screen I have seen is the long-discontinued Toshiba Satellite 3D. Ditto for CPUs and GPUs -- it doesn't really matter whether you buy Intel, AMD, or Nvidia. There is nothing so "different" or "distinct" in any of the electronics they make that it makes you go "wow, that is truly groundbreaking." Ditto for sports action cameras, DSLRs, portable storage and just about everything else "tech." So where precisely -- besides pricing and build-quality differences -- is the competition in what these companies are doing? Shouldn't somebody be trying to "pull far ahead of the pack" or "ahead of the curve" with some crazy new feature that nobody else has? Or is true innovation in tech simply dead now?

CaptainDork writes: I'm a retired IT guy and ransomware was not a huge thing 3-5 years ago (at least few victims were self-reporting) and I'm very curious about protection schemes.

In my, now ancient, world we did not encrypt anything -- anywhere. Seems to me the trick would be to mark certain places as "unencryptable," similar to long-time attributes like "hidden," "system," "read-only," etc.

Do solutions exist that would mark local data folders and backup drives as "unencryptable," and if not, do you think it could be done? If so, how?
Leave your best thoughts and suggestions in the comments. Could we fight ransomware with 'unencryptable' folders?

"It has become too easy to take Linux and FOSS for granted," warns a Linux Journal editorial by Doc Searls, complaining, for example, that today "We collaborate inside proprietary environments, such as Slack and Google Hangouts."

Long-time Slashdot reader whh3 wants to live differently -- and to model a different set values: After reading the recent Doc Searls article in Linux Journal, I realized that I need to get back to my roots. The first step will be to build/setup/run my own email server for my vanity domain.

The problem is, I haven't run my own email server since the 90s. It was easy back then -- there was much less SPAM and self-hosted email servers didn't have to jump through hoops to make sure that they weren't blacklisted as senders.

So, I am reaching out to this great community to find out if there are any good tutorials on modern-day best-practices for self hosting an email server. Any tips/tricks/pointers would be great appreciated!
A lot's changed in 20 years -- but for such a basic form of online communication, is it still possible to roll your own? Or are we trapped in a world where private conversations about valuing open source software take place inside Google's proprietary Gmail client.

Leave your own suggestions in the comments. How would you host your own email server?

schwit1 shares a report: At least eight studies in the last seven years have looked at what happens specifically in a room accumulating carbon dioxide, a main ingredient in our exhalations. While the results are inconsistent, they are also intriguing. They suggest that while the kinds of air pollution known to cause cancer and asthma remain much more pressing as public health concerns, there may also be pollutants whose most detrimental effects are on the mind, rather than the body.

So can you trust the decisions made in small rooms? How much does the quality of air indoors affect your cognitive abilities? And as our knowledge of indoor air's effects grows, do we need to revise how we design and use our buildings? Buildings in the United States have grown better sealed in the last 50 years, helping reduce energy used in heating and cooling. That's also made it easier for gasses and other substances released by humans and our belongings to build up inside. Although indoor air quality is not as well monitored as the air outdoors, scientists and ventilation professionals have extensively monitored carbon dioxide indoors. Higher CO2 levels -- say, above 1,200 parts per million (ppm) -- often indicate a low ventilation rate. Worrisome substances emitted by new furniture, office supplies and carpets could be accumulating in the air.

dryriver asks a philosophical question: The producer of a tech product -- thanks to internet data mining -- may know all sorts of things about me, the buyer of a product. Gender, age, income level, education level, profession, geolocation, what I read online, who my social media friends are, what interests me intellectually, which way I swing politically, and more. For a few dollars spent, I am no "mystery" to the producer of this tech product.

But if I were to ask the producer of the product simple questions like "How much did the GPU component in this laptop you are selling me cost you?" or "What portion of the final asking price of this product is profit that goes to you?" I likely wouldn't get an answer. Information asymmetry is at play now -- the producing party in the buying transaction knows far, far more about me than I can possibly know about the producing party. And unlike the producing party, I cannot simply open my wallet and purchase "data mined information" about the producing party. Company secrets are company secrets. The "info buying" works in one direction only.

Is it a good thing for consumers that this "information asymmetry" exists in the first place? That pretty much any tech producer can learn about me with a few bucks spent, but I cannot get simple information like "How much did the Nvidia 1060 Mobile GPU in this 1,200 Dollar notebook cost the producer"?
Anyone have an answer? Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Is this information asymmetry between producers and consumers good?

"People tend to think that the crazy amount of personal data gathering happening on the Internet is 'because companies otherwise wouldn't know who to target where with what product and at what price," writes Slashdot reader dryriver.

"But there are two problems with this reasoning..." 1) Experienced marketers already know how to sell products successfully to various demographics without needing trillions of data points on tens of millions of random internet users. They were able to pull off this feat long before the Internet even came into existence. They are not dumber or more incompetent today than they were 20 years ago. Internet data is not the only tool in their marketing toolbox.

2) Most products are not being improved significantly based on the data collected -- almost everything sold has obvious weakness, flaws, deficiencies and sometimes outright annoyances baked in that any good product designer would spot quite easily before the product is manufactured and shipped out. So you 1) already know how to target my demographic and 2) do not listen to my feedback even when I send it to you directly and really are not trying to improve your product to genuinely satisfy my needs.

Why all the crazy data gathering at all? Why do you need to know what news articles I read, what I type into a search engine, what I post in a comments section or whether I know "Bobby K. from back in high-school" on Facebook? Do you really need hundreds of Internet data points on me to design a decent laptop, TV, electric screwdriver, running shoe or lawnmower for my use?
We hear people saying big data is the new gold rush -- but can anyone explain in layman's terms what exactly it is that they're up to?

Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Why do companies need all that personal data they're collecting?

dryriver writes: A lot of people seem to believe that computers somehow need polygons, NURBS surfaces, voxels or point clouds "to be able to define and render 3D models to the screen at all." This isn't really true. All a computer needs to light, shade, and display a 3D model is to know the answer to the question "is there a surface point at coordinate XYZ or not." Many different mathematical structures or descriptors can be dreamed up that can tell a computer whether there is indeed a 3D model surface point at coordinate XYZ or behind a given screen pixel XY. Polygons/triangles are a very old approach to 3D graphics that was primarily designed not to overstress the very limited CPU and RAM resources of the first computers capable of displaying raster 3D graphics. The brains who invented the technique back in the late 1960s probably figured that by the 1990s at the latest, their method would be replaced by something better and more clever. Yet here we are in 2019 buying pricey Nvidia, AMD, and other GPUs that are primarily polygon/triangle accelerators.

Why is this? Creating good-looking polygon models is still a slow, difficult, iterative and money intensive task in 2019. A good chunk of the $60 you pay for an AAA PC or console game is the sheer amount of time, manpower and effort required to make everything in a 15-hour-long game experience using unwieldy triangles and polygons. So why still use polygons at all? Why not dream up a completely new "there is a surface point here" technique that makes good 3D models easier to create and may render much, much faster than polygons/triangles on modern hardware to boot? Why use a 50-year-old approach to 3D graphics when new, better approaches can be pioneered?

In the not-so-distant future, pending regulatory approvals, self-driving cars will be everywhere. A handful of top companies are working to improve the reliability of their autonomous vehicles as we speak. But what about their design?

What are some changes that you think could be made to the exterior and interior of a self-driving car? If someone is not required to steer the wheel, do they even need to look ahead? One can argue that seats in the car should be rearchitected to face each other. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk suggested this week that in two years, his automaker firm could explore cars "with no steering wheels or pedals." What would you like to see in a self-driving car?

AmiMoJo writes: It's time to buy a new chair so I'm turning to Slashdot for recommendations. The Herman Miller Aeron seems to be the go-to, much like the Model M for keyboards, but I've heard that there are some other good options on the market.

I need something that is comfortable and durable -- too many chairs get squeaky and loose because I can't sit still and keep shifting my weight around. Many are difficult to maintain as well, e.g. the screws attacking the back are often under plastic attached with very stiff clips so you can't easily give them a quick tighten. What does Slashdot recommend for my posterior? It's been more than a decade since readers sought recommendations for a quality chair for desktop coding, or back-friendly chairs. In fact, it's been almost two decades since a user inquired about the perfect computer chair. Hopefully office chairs have improved in quality/design since then...

Slashdot reader shanen poses the question: if you had to give a TED Talk, what would you talk about? They write: Mostly based on my experiences at TEDx events, though of course I've seen a lot of TED videos. Nick Hanauer's censored TED Talk is still my all-time favorite, though you couldn't see it on the TED website. Proximate trigger for this question was actually looking at the coming TEDx events in the neighborhood... In my own case, I think you'd need to put a gun to my head as motivation, but maybe my sig would be worth a laugh or two? What would your TED Talk be about? How does this idea resonate with you? Feel free to explain in as little as one sentence...

For example: "The inequality of opportunity and how the stereotypical success is a function of where one is born."

"On April 2nd, your Google+ account and any Google+ pages you created will be shut down and we will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts," Google has been warning since January.

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes "it's been grating on me for a while," asking "But is there any real harm here? Do you feel damaged?" On the one hand, my trust in the Google has certainly been damaged by profit-driven directional changes. On such grounds you could argue that the people who most trusted the Google may feel most victimized....

What is the value of IP? Do you feel you expressed or even created any interesting ideas through your use of Google+ as a discussion channel? If so, maybe you feel damaged because it's going away? (Yes, the Archive team wants to preserve it, but IP has to grow to be alive, and the archives aren't easy to search, to boot...)

I'm pretty sure that I started using Google+ a long time ago, back when my own sentiments towards the Google were much more positive. My negative framing of the question could be projection, so maybe your response may explain why it's really a good thing when the Google kills certain ideas?
The original submission also includes the bitter observation that "Innovation is supposed to be important to the Google. Isn't the Google giving us mixed signals here?" But how do Slashdot's readers feel?

Leave your own thoughts in the comments. How do you feel about the end of Google+ ?

New submitter pecosdave writes: I need suggestions for commercially-made ARM systems that will work in temperature ranges from -35F to 140F (-37C to 60C) for an engineering project. These things are going to be in metal boxes on the side of Texas Highways. The existing Intel systems we're using in other areas are all fan-less, but I'm not going to rule out systems with fans. Considering the extremes of Texas temperatures I'm actually contemplating putting fans on top of our fan-less systems anyways. Almost everything I can find pre-made with ARM is a bare board, or something not nearly as temperature tolerant as some Intel systems I can find. The very nature of an ARM processor should be more tolerant simply because they produce less heat, but I can't seem to find any manufacturers exploiting that fact. Slashdot reader pecosdave added more details in a comment: "It's more closely related to speed cameras, but it's not a speed camera. It's for a toll road, and its main job is to take pictures of a sign at about 10 FPS, though less is probably fine, with a time-stamp so if someone runs the toll we have a separate picture of the current price. If there's a problem with the sign it shows up as well. They just want something local to store it I guess in case the fiber link goes down. We're going to run it rather low-res too to keep the CPU and storage overhead low. I figure 640x480@10FPS is reasonable, but that's not set in stone."

You asked, he answered!

Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of social networking site Minds.com, has answered more than a dozen questions that Slashdot readers sent his way. Ottman has addressed a wide-range of queries surrounding how Minds.com makes use of tokens; how many users the platform has; and, who is Minds.com aimed for. You can read his answers below. For those of you who are going to give Minds.com a try, you can find Slashdot there.

Long-time Slashdot reader dryriver sees it like this: Lets say that I follow a person named John D. around for days without permission, make note of what John D. does and where he buys with timestamps accurate to the second without John D. knowing it is happening, analyze what kind of personality traits John D. has, enter that data into an electronic database where it is stored forever, and also make the data purchaseable to any third party who is interested.

Would I be breaking the law if John D. has not given me explicit permission to do this? Very likely. If this is the case for "meatspace data gathering", how can websites justify gathering information about visitors, and selling that information to third parties?
How would you answer this question? Attempt your own best explantions in the comments. How is your country balancing the need for online privacy with actual laws governing what can and can't be collected?

How is it even legal for web sites to gather and sell users' data?