Posts by Charles 9

Re: This should not be a free for all

So you're saying the same thing is happening with money? With public services like police? At some point you're gonna have to trust SOMETHING because you lack the skills to do it yourself (why "If you want something done right" rarely works for cryptography). If you go full DTA, nothing gets done.

So, pick your poison...or starve...

Re: another crazy idea

Really? My uncle once said it can look like a duck, walk like a duck, even quack like a duck and still really be a goose.

Re: To anyone who desires a slowdown...

But then someone figures out how to use it to make cooler dancing cats suddenly the masses are all "Gimme! Gimme!"

The complaint is that Safari's lagging behind newer standards being implemented by the likes of Chrome.

It's the argument that would've happened if ActiveX had become a web standard.

Re: it's Chrome's insistence that API's it includes should be an industry standard.

Perhaps it's time for something different. Telnet's even older and became obsolete when it could be trivially sniffed.

Re: clearly you don't pay for the developers

"That's not a feature. That's a privacy/security catastrophe in waiting."

Is it? Or would you rather they have to do it three or four times and be three or four times more likely to make a mistake? Seems like you can't win.

Re: No

I think what finally killed it wasn't Apple but increased regulations that mandated that web pages be more accessible to sensory-disabled users. Flash inevitably didn't take the blind and others into consideration and was getting clunky on top of it and too much of an exploit vector. Not so much one big decapitation but several grievous wounds.

Re: To anyone who desires a slowdown...

I cited firsthand experience. I deal with Dave's on a daily basis. These are people who think Facebook is the Internet and can't be convinced otherwise, when told to turn left turn right and when told to turn around spin 360 degrees. They believe their way is the right way and FU! AND they have the money.

This is why I keep saying you MUST fix stupid...before they take the rest of us with them.

Re: Apple ending x86 dominace?

So what happened with the eighth generation, which jumped from the aforementioned PowerPC-based XCPU and Cell BE to x64-based hardware, with as I recall NO support for the back catalogues of either? Both made the jump in spite of this because it opened up more-mainstream hardware support. The ninth generation is more PC-like than console-like at this juncture, but it could still jump the rails with the tenth generation. The only eighth-generation console that was backwards-compatible was Nintendo's Wii U, which became an infamous flop.

Re: Apple ending x86 dominace?

But since the consoles are not as tightly tied to legacy hardware, they may choose to jump to another architecture if it matures enough. Don't forget, all the CPUs of the 7th generation (the Xbox 360's XCPU, the PS3's Cell BE, and the Wii's Broadway) were PowerPC-based. If someone can deliver an ARM-based system with reliable 4K performance, I could see the 10th console generation making a jump, too. Might also dispense with optical discs while they're at it.

Re: Policy shift from whom? The Gods of physics?

You can't use energy density for a substance like hydrogen because it's a diffuse, difficult-to-contain gas at STP. Making it usable requires costly conversion processes. Whereas most hydrocarbons are usable at STP.

Re: Games

But what about non-Steam stuff, including non-gaming? And I've seen plenty of games on my list with Bronze and Borked ratings.

"Would anyone trust Musk, Bezos (or Google) etc. to handle their Internet access?"

Which leads to the secondary question, "Would anyone trust their government to handle their internet access?" And the tertiary one, "WHO would you trust to handle your Internet access?"

At some point, you find you're simply Up Crap Creek.

Re: On paper they are the bee's knees!

But events in London CAN affect things in New York and vice versa. Especially in a cutthroat market like HFT where even the tiniest scoop can mean latency arbitrage and getting that narrow window worth millions. Information is ammunition, timing is everything, and coordination matters.

Here's some grist for the mill (searching for "latency arbitrage" can bring up plenty more):

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/27/latency-arbitrage-trading-costs-investors-5-billion-a-year-study.html

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/outfront-netscape-jim-barksdale-daniel-spivey-wall-street-speed-war.html

Re: On paper they are the bee's knees!

Have a look at this:

https://news.satnews.com/2020/10/14/leo-speed-when-milliseconds-are-worth-millions-an-nsr-insight/

According to this, using inter-satellite linking, you can still get a signal from London to New York some ten milliseconds faster than through fiber due to difference in speed of light. And as noted, high-frequency traders will pay a fortune for a jump on the competition since they could potentially rake in millions from this latency arbitage.

"Still had long distance telephone, didn't it?"

I wouldn't really call it that. It was expensive as hell, too, and often unreliable and unavailable. That should tell you something about the costs involved with laying down that kind of infrastructure.

I don't think your "cover all at once" argument stands: Don't forget it needs more than just satellites zooming overhead"

Sure you need ground transceivers, but it's not like it's new technology. The only new wrinkle is the lower orbit and thus differing logistics: a difference in degree rather than kind versus already-existing technology. Okay, some backhaul would be needed, but you wouldn't need that much, it wouldn't have to be expensive, and by spreading them out, you reduce the amount of backhaul you need at each point, not to mention adding redundancy.

"IMHO much like cell phone, those constellations are meant to primarily cover the well-heeled customers (Caribbean cruises for instance)."

Why not both if the incremental costs are low enough? You hook the rich customers first to cover your costs. Once that's done, all the rest is gravy.

"I'm quite sure the only reason all those constellations cover the whole earth is because those darn birds won't stay put. The profitable parts they are interested in covering are quite localized, but well, LEO satellites have that irrepressible need to orbit..."

Sure, but why not turn a bug into a feature...?

Laying some fibers, yes, but laying enough to connect all of them at once? That's the key with the satellites: it's a "blanket" approach able to cover all those rural and isolated communities in one shot. This also helps solve the cost issue. Running cabling to each individual community for little return (not enough customers) adds up, thus the sticks stay in the dark. A blanket approach is easier to spread the costs to all the communities (not to mention the ships and airplanes, which you did not address and are impossible to wire up because they move).

And look, I lived on an island once: Guam, a dinky little speck of land the size of DC in the middle of the blankin' Pacific Ocean, where the nearest major city is a several-hour flight away (and isn't in the US) . The power plant was local using shipped-in bunker fuel and the water was either shipped in, collected from the rain, or desalinated (using more power). None of them required trenches. Undersea cables are a major undertaking in themselves. At least with places like Hawaii and Guam they have the excuse of military presence to justify government outlaw for undersea communications cables. The rest? They're in the same boat as everyone in the sticks.

"Space vs ground is like Consoles vs Pcs. In particular, bigger mirrors and better technology eventually eclipses that which is launchable on a rocket."

But anything terrestrial has to contend with atmospheric interference, doesn't it?

What if the community is in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mountains (secluded valley) or even ocean (islands)?

Worse, what if the community in question is moving, like an airliner in flight or a ship out at sea?

Lastly, who's going to pay for all that cabling and installation? Why isn't rural America wired up? There's your reason right there.

Re: "you're also paying to be part of Samsung's global TV advertising network"

Why do you think the TVs are so cheap these days?

As for opting out, it's becoming less of an option, as some TVs will constantly nag you without a connection. What next, whispernets? Internal ads in the ROMs so they can pester you offline, too?

Re: If Metaverse flops what happens to the name?

"Of course a prerequisite is that the glasses can be worn comfortably for extended periods without headaches or causing degraded vision. And that's not at all a given."

I suspect that is physically impossible as even before VR goggles, people were suffering from simulation sickness. Apparently, the brain is a lot easier to fool than anyone realized.

The problem with the B Ark idea is that you'd probably get something like a Captain Peter Peachfuzz on board who can find his way to the nonexistent controls, mess with it, and redirect it INTO the A Ark (or the Earth in this case, likely into Yellowstone, setting off the supervolcano there).

Re: "If this is the future you want to see..."

I'm reminded of Ronald Reagan's famous quote, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."

I wish I was alive then to reply, "Then if disaster strikes and you've lost everything, who would you rather come to save you: the government or the Really Big Corporation of America?"

Re: I predict

"I don't think you can get away from the store and forward model of email as not all end user devices are going to be "online" 24/7. So there has to be some service that receives and stores the email to await pickup by the client."

Why not the sender? Cut out the middlemen and it becomes easier to know when or if the recipient is in a position to receive.The sender can just store the message itself and keep trying until it succeeds or until enough time passes that it can come back, "No can do."

"Then what about browser based email? So many people only use the browser interface to interact with email, or just their phone. I certainly cannot have my gmail account completely downloaded to my phone."

The e-mail can be a computer owned by the end-user instead. Your e-mail, your business. It doesn't take much to house the average person's e-mail or run a small web-based portal for the purpose. This is what I'm saying. End-user computing power is reaching the point that increasing amounts of stuff that used to be done on servers can be moved to the end-user, much like how peer-to-peer protocols had a boom a while back.

Re: That's okay for the earrth...

So TL;DR, unless we break all the laws of physics as we know them and find a way to pass information faster than the speed of light, interplanetary communication is a non-starter.

Re: I predict

Perhaps as consumer-level computing capability continues to improve, more and more stuff accessed via server will be kept at the user's end. E-mail is one possibility: being addressed directly to you instead of to a server you access: with portability and privacy implications.

Re: "Because we can"? No!

"The problem (for both) is processing the information: See the brilliant results of "smart advertising", where you get suggestions for stuff you've just bought (which might work for consumables, but definitely not for household appliances or cars!)... I'm sure the government doesn't have much better processing capacities. Yes, of course they have a number of crack analysts, but they definitely won't waste them on trivial and most likely pointless background noise, they will set them on high value targets/tasks."

You've never been to the data center in Utah, have you? And there's no telling what may be under it, either. It would be the perfect place for a black-project working quantum computer.

Re: "Because we can"? No!

You're wrong. Governments want all the dirt on you, too, for the whole "six lines" business. Private companies provide the means without the direct outlay plus a degree of separation for plausible deniability purposes.

Governments want control, too, and one of the best ways to do that is to give everyone a Sword of Damocles.

Re: "Because we can"? No!

"There is a difference between government and commercial spying."

Is there? Or have government and big-big-business have become so buddy-buddy that the distinction has become too blurry?