Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Weaponization of lockouts (Score 1) 66

DVRs were the starting point. The namesake for what you're talking about, tivoization, is Tivo, the DVR that existed way back when TV was still analog and being displayed on CRTs.

It's why the GPLv3 was made: to add clauses to forbid tivoization. Instead, a lot of the open source community moved in the opposite direction, moving to licenses that allowed companies even more freedom to lock up their code.

At some point people have to learn and fight back.

Good luck. This is not a new fight by any means. You could argue that the FSF has been fighting it for almost half a century. People by and large do not care.

Comment Re:Win the battle, lose the war (Score 3, Insightful) 66

More likely they'll separate the OS and the TV code so they can ship the open source OS along with their closed source software

I'd be amazed if this wasn't already the case. We've already been through this with Tivo, it was one of the reasons behind the creation of the GPLv3. Tivo based their DVRs on Linux, and provided downloads of the Linux code. But their DVRs used hardware DRM to ensure that only code signed by Tivo would run, making it so that even with the open source code, you couldn't run changes on the hardware.

From what I can tell, Vizio is doing the same thing, but isn't providing downloads to the kernel code they're using. It's possible that there's some proprietary hardware drivers that they don't want to release code to, but Nvidia has already show how to work around that.

I expect the end result to be like Tivo: a bunch of archives of the open source software used in the TV, but none of the code required to make it useful and no signing key necessary to allow any changes to run on the TV itself.

Comment Re:Federal Bribery and Taxpayer Abuse. (Score 1) 101

Every republican that acts like it's bad, probably voted for it. Every democract that speaks out against it probably voted for it.

You can't count on voting records to mean anything, thanks to the "designated villains:" the politicians whose job it is to tank a law that a party wants to be on record as having voted for, but don't want to pass. We're watching this happen right now with votes on the Iran war. Democrats don't want them to pass. What they want is to be on the record as being against it and want Republicans to be on the record as supporting it, even though there is no chance they'll do anything to stop it if they get the power to do so.

Both sides play games like this, with the end result being that only laws that have the support of large donors having any real chance of passing. Who votes for and who votes against is always carefully calculated to let vulnerable politicians give the appearance of supporting things constituents support, while never needing to support those things in actual fact.

Comment Apple? Screwing over a partner? (Score 1, Insightful) 15

Wow, Apple, screwing over a partner? Who ever could have seen this coming?

I don't understand why anyone would ever partner on Apple on anything. They are notorious for screwing over their partners at this point. There's even a term for it, "Sherlocking." People seem to have forgotten that Apple's "privacy" stance originated as Steve Jobs not wanting to share any of the data "Apple owned" with anyone else.

Comment Re:Why would a faster CPU revive demand? (Score 1) 89

I'm really not sure why they bothered to rev the CPU.

In theory I think it was more energy efficient, giving them a very slightly longer battery life. Plus there were probably supply chain reasons for it too, such as allowing them to stop making the older chip while continuing to make the Vision Pro.

The Vision Pro has always struck me as a device in search of a purpose. I think Apple was hoping someone else would figure out what it was useful for an then swoop in and Sherlock them, but so far, no one really has.

Comment Re:Ideologically fueled insanity. (Score 1) 287

It is a vast majority. The midterms won't go like people on the left expect. There's one group that's hated more than just about anyone else in polls of Americans: Democrats. They manage to be less popular than Trump and less popular than Republicans.

People may not be terribly happy with Trump and the way things are currently going, but it won't take too much to remind them how much worse things were when Democrats were in control.

Despite his current negative approval rating, Trump manages to be one of the most popular politicians in America right now, even with a net negative approval rating. That mostly because Americans just do not like their current politicians than Trump, but ultimately, there's a reason Trump won in a landslide. Americans may not really like Trump, but they loathe the alternatives.

Comment Re:No (Score 2) 62

You missed the #1 gigantic reason that eventually got Microsoft in trouble with antitrust and then they invested in Apple to get out of it. Microsoft made exclusive deals with computer vendors where they could get the OS and later the OS bundled with Word and other products at a huge discount if you didn't sell any competitor's products. I worked for and we sucked at Microsoft's teat. MS is probably half the enemy to consumers Apple is today, but in the 90s, they were the devil. They still have the absolute worst file system. NX isn't horrible, but compared to Linux and Mac offerings, it is a piece of garbage.

I don't hate Microsoft, I think they should win competitively, and in gaming lately, they are losing, from what I've read and seen. When I helped porting some (freeware) games from Windows to Linux and Mac, they were beating the Windows version by 5-6FPS (same as the Linux version). That was DX vs Vulkan. I want to try something with, say, Unreal Engine. This was all custom stuff and maybe we were just better at optimizing.

Comment Re:A "logging issue" (Score 1) 34

Won't happen, in fact, Apple was probably given a short timeline to fix it. Why? Because Signal is an approved application for contractors to communicate with government employees, including Secret and Top Secret.calls as long as everyone on the call is approved. I've been on some of these calls. Not that anything that needed to be classifeid was ever discussed.

Comment Re:Competitors (Score 1) 47

Yeah, what competitors, lol.

Everyone I know in farming today (and I'm a descendant of farmers) owns John Deere everything. There is no other choice. They pay $200000+ (1 Mil+, I'm giving you low end) for combines because the choice is... that or IH or some other brand that has no presence where they live and zero maintenance or parts. Hey, those farmers sit in the cab and make money doing nothing, my cousin reads books, so it kind of pays for itself - laws require drivers, but everything is automated.

Comment Re:Empathy??? (Score 1) 107

Not to mention that the first thing any gamer does when they get a game is turn all that artistic crap off, both to get a better framerate, but also to make the game easier to see. The fewer "artistic effects" on the screen, the easier it is to see what's happening. The idea that gamers care about "artistic intent" is hilarious if you've ever seen any gamer community.

Comment Re:really need an union! and OT pay for crunch tim (Score 1) 76

I miss just blaming Bobby Kotick for this...

Worst. Boss. Ever.

Actually, that's not true, I like blaming Bobby, but the dot com bust was worse (after I worked for and left Activision). I kept my job, but I saw 88% collective layoffs (multiple rounds). We joked the floggings would stop when morale improved. The guy that told me that joke was laid off.

And 10 years later I was laid off... and got a job paying more than twice as much. Wish I'd been laid off sooner, lol. No unions involved.

Comment Re: Sounds nice, but... (Score 2) 26

Totally. You have 9000 deprecated functions and 1006067 obsolete functions you need to update (that were installed before I got there). These will be removed in the next 3 days. I didn't f***** create the code, I don't have 9 years to update the goddamn code you deprecate or obsolete as abandonware daily, I need like 15 support people to keep up. I hated Node.js when I first tried it (same issues) and it is 1000x worse now.

Comment Re:Man selling UBI overstates the need for it (Score 1) 85

There's a reason I phrased it "appearance of working" - you're assuming that enough people will be able to tell the difference between "working right" and "not working right." As long as it looks to be working properly for the majority of use cases, that's good enough. For most of these tasks, it isn't a simple binary between "doesn't work" and "does work," there's a whole spectrum.

In fact, I would argue this ultimately makes AI more dangerous, because it does a very good job of appearing to work while failing in ways a human doesn't.

maybe int he short term some businesses will be fooled and will make radical moves, but if it doesnt work and it doesnt produce profits it will absolutely be ousted and humans will replace it.

Sure, probably, assuming it fails badly enough, which it might. But you're assuming "short term" won't be years, and that it fails in ways that make it clear profit was lost. It's pretty easy to assume that if a computer made a mistake, a human would have as well, especially if you're the one who put the computer in charge.

Comment Re:Man selling UBI overstates the need for it (Score 1) 85

But that's the thing: AI doesn't have to work particularly well to displace hundreds of thousands of white collar jobs. It just has to create the appearance of working, while being cheaper.

It's already there in places where, even at minimum wage, it wouldn't be cost-effective to have a person perform the task, but an AI can do it cheaply enough. Even if it doesn't do it particularly well. That it can do it at all is enough.

Jobs are going to be given to AI, even if the AI does a worse job of it, simply because it's cheaper. The assumption will be that AIs will only ever get cheaper and more productive. The same assumption isn't being made of humans.

Slashdot Top Deals

Last yeer I kudn't spel Engineer. Now I are won.

Working...