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Comment Re:Bentley to be irrelevant for 10 years - got it (Score 2) 114

by sandoval88419 (#60694316) Attached to: Bentley Will Ditch Internal Combustion Engines By 2030

Like you I think 10 years is too slow. The message is more like saying: "we can't".

Indeed I didn't know before your post that Bentley was owned by VAG and it makes sense: VAG is a manufacturer of low-end, low-performance but cheap vehicles. VW, AUDI, SKODA are all low-end cars.

For decades they've invested billions in marketing to deceptively raise the price instead of in R&D and innovation. For several years now their technological debt in car manufacturing has been blatantly showing.

Any technological evolution is way too complicated for VW to achieve and they won't be able to make EVs.

Comment Re:One good thing... (Score 2) 93

thank you for the informative links. IMHO VW fail way behind their competition. They produce the worst and the most unreliable diesel engines compared to BMW, Mercedes and PSA. That is why they resorted to cheating.

VW is by far very overrated, they manage to sell car thanks to a very aggressive marketing and lots of product placement. They deserve to be forgotten and their management to be jailed.
Earth

Are the Wealthy Plotting To Leave Us Behind? (medium.com) 412

Posted by EditorDavid from the modest-proposals dept.
"The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind," writes Douglas Rushkoff, describing what he learned from a high-paying speaking gig about the future of technology for "five super-wealthy guys...from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world," -- and what it says about perceptions of technology today. The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down. This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader...?

That's when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

There's nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It's less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity.... It's a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride... The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively. This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities... Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor.
The piece -- titled "Survival of the Richest" -- is an interesting read, and ends by suggesting this inspiring counter-philosophy.

"Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It's a team sport."
Microsoft

Microsoft and Canonical Make Custom Linux Kernel (neowin.net) 121

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Billly Gates writes: Microsoft and Canonical's relationship is getting closer besides Ubuntu for Windows. Azure will soon be offering more customized Ubuntu containers with a MS optimized kernel. Uname -r will show 4.11.0-1011-azure for Ubuntu cloud based 16.04 LTS. If you want the non MS kernel you can still use it on Azure by typing:
$ sudo apt install linux-virtual linux-cloud-tools-virtual
$ sudo apt purge linux*azure
$ sudo reboot
The article mentions several benefits over the generic Linux kernel for Azure
The Almighty Buck

Why You Shouldn't Imitate Bill Gates If You Want To Be Rich (bbc.com) 311

Posted by BeauHD from the copy-and-paste dept.
dryriver writes: BBC Capital has an article that debunks the idea of "simply doing what highly successful people have done to get rich," because many of those "outliers" got rich under special circumstances that are not possible to replicate. An excerpt: "Even if you could imitate everything Gates did, you would not be able to replicate his initial good fortune. For example, Gates's upper-class background and private education enabled him to gain extra programming experience when less than 0.01% of his generation then had access to computers. His mother's social connection with IBM's chairman enabled him to gain a contract from the then-leading PC company that was crucial for establishing his software empire. This is important because most customers who used IBM computers were forced to learn how to use Microsoft's software that came along with it. This created an inertia in Microsoft's favor. The next software these customers chose was more likely to be Microsoft's, not because their software was necessarily the best, but because most people were too busy to learn how to use anything else. Microsoft's success and marketshare may differ from the rest by several orders of magnitude but the difference was really enabled by Gate's early fortune, reinforced by a strong success-breeds-success dynamic."
Microsoft

Bill Gates Says He's Sorry About Control-Alt-Delete (qz.com) 320

Posted by BeauHD from the awkward-maneuvers dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: At the Bloomberg Global Business Forum today, Carlyle Group co-founder and CEO David Rubenstein asked Microsoft founder Bill Gates to account for one of the most baffling questions of the digital era: Why does it take three fingers to lock or log in to a PC, and why did Gates ever think that was a good idea? Grimacing slightly, Gates deflected responsibility for the crtl-alt-delete key command, saying, "clearly, the people involved should have put another key on to make that work." Rubenstein pressed him: does he regret the decision? "You can't go back and change the small things in your life without putting the other things at risk," Gates said. But: "Sure. If I could make one small edit I would make that a single key operation." Gates has made the confession before. In 2013, he blamed IBM for the issue, saying, "The guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't want to give us our single button."
United Kingdom

Diesel Cars Contribute To 5,000 Premature Deaths a Year In Europe, Says Study (phys.org) 215

Posted by BeauHD from the deep-breath dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Emissions from diesel cars rigged to appear eco-friendly may be responsible for 5,000 air pollution deaths per year in Europe alone, according to a study published on Monday. The numbers are in line with previous assessments of deaths due to the so-called "Dieselgate" scandal, which erupted when carmaker Volkswagen admitted in 2015 to cheating on vehicle emissions tests. Many other carmakers have since fallen under suspicion. The researchers from Norway, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands calculated that about 10,000 deaths in Europe per year can be attributed to small particle pollution from light duty diesel vehicles (LDDVs). Almost half of these would have been avoided if emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from diesel cars on the road had matched levels measured in the lab. If diesel cars emitted as little NOx as petrol ones, almost 4,000 of the 5,000 premature deaths would have been avoided, said the authors. The countries with the heaviest burden are Italy, Germany, and France, the team added, "resulting from their large populations and high share of diesel cars in their national fleets." Touted as less polluting, the share of diesel cars in Europe rose fast compared to petrol since the 1990s, and now comprise about half the fleet. There are more than 100 million diesel cars in Europe today, twice as many as in the rest of the world together, said the study authors. Diesel engines emit less planet-warming carbon dioxide than petrol ones, but significantly more NOx. The study has been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Microsoft

Microsoft Confirms Outlook Issues (bbc.com) 41

Posted by msmash from the connectivity-issues dept.
Microsoft has confirmed that some users of its email service Outlook are unable to send email or access their accounts. From a report: Hundreds from around Europe have commented on the website Downdetector that they have been affected by the problem -- many since Monday morning. One common issue seems to be that sent emails remain in the drafts folder and are not being delivered to recipients. On its website, Microsoft says the service dropped "unexpectedly" and it is working on a fix. Not all account holders are affected. "Intermittent connectivity is affecting customers in some European countries, which we are working to resolve as soon as possible," said a Microsoft representative.
Security

Avast's CCleaner Free Windows Application Infected With Malware (bleepingcomputer.com) 156

Posted by msmash from the security-woes dept.
Reader Tinfoil writes: Cisco Talos announces that malware cleaning app, CCleaner, has been infected with malware for the past month. Version 5.33 of the CCleaner app offered for download between August 15 and September 12 was modified to include the Floxif malware, according to a report published by Cisco Talos a few minutes ago. Cisco Talos believes that a threat actor might have compromised Avast's supply chain and used its digital certificate to replace the legitimate CCleaner v5.33 app on its website with one that also contained the Floxif trojan. The company said more 2.27 million had downloaded the compromised version of CCleaner.
Businesses

Is Online Advertising Worthless? (zerohedge.com) 289

Posted by EditorDavid from the click-here-to-find-out dept.
turkeydance shares a story from ZeroHedge: Category 1 storm clouds are gathering over what has traditionally been one of the most lucrative, and perhaps only profitable, sectors to come out of Silicon Valley in decades: online advertising. Two months ago, it was P&G which fired the first shot across the "adtech" bow when not long after it announced it was slashing its digital ad spending because it thought it was not getting the kind of return on investment it desired, it made a striking discovery: "We didn't see a reduction in the growth rate." CFO Jon Moeller said "What that tells me is that that spending that we cut was largely ineffective"...

So fast forward to last week, when during Thursday's Global Retailing Conference organized by Goldman Sachs, Restoration Hardware delightfully colorful CEO, Gary Friedman, divulged the following striking anecdote about the company's online marketing strategy, and the state of online ad spending in general... What Friedman revealed - in brief - was the following: "we've found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we're buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it's the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?"

Stated simply, the vast, vast majority of online ad spending is wasted, chasing clicks that simply are not there....One wonders how long before all retailers - most of whom are notoriously strapped for revenues and profits courtesy of Amazon - and other "power users" of online advertising, do a similar back of the envelope analysis, and find that they, like RH, are getting a bang for only 2% of their buck?
Windows

HP Users Complain About 10-Minute Login Lag During 'Win 10 Update' (theregister.co.uk) 105

Posted by msmash from the call-IT dept.
A number of HP device owners are complaining of seeing black screens for around five to 10 minutes after entering their Windows login information. From a report: They appear to be pointing the finger of blame at Windows 10 updates released September 12 for x64-based systems. One, a quality update called KB4038788, offered a whopping 27 bullet points for general quality improvements and patches, such as an "issue that sometimes causes Windows File Explorer to stop responding and causes the system to stop working." Another, KB4038806, was a "critical" patch for Adobe Flash Player that allowed remote code execution.

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