The S30 OS, before Nokia collapses, was much better.
Yeah no - you're miss-remembering it. For example you had to delete SMS messages otherwise your mailbox would fill up.
It could only fit 10 messages before it'd run out of space, and once full no messages would be received at all.
Also, the battery life was ten days in standby if you didn't use the phone which was nice but as soon as you started using it... then it only lasted 3 hours. I used to carry two spare batteries in my bag... don't miss those days at all.
Yeah I call bullshit on that. I get why they're investing money in it, but this is a moonshot and I'm sure they don't expect it to succeed.
These data centers can be built almost anywhere in the world. And there are places with very predictable weather patterns making solar/wind/hydro/etc extremely cheap compared to nuclear.
Nuclear power is so expensive, that it makes far more sense to build an entire solar farm and an entire wind farm, both capable of providing enough power to run the data center on their own in overcast conditions or moderate wind.
If you pick a good location, that's lkely to work out to running off your own power 95% of the time and selling power to the grid something like 75% of the time. The 5% when you can't run off your own power... no wind at night is rare in a good location and almost unheard of in thick cloud cover, well you'd just draw power from the grid. Power produced by other data centers that are producing excess solar or wind power right now.
In the extremely rare disruption where power wouldn't be available even from the grid... then you just shift your workload to another continent for an hour or so. Hardly anyone would notice an extra tenth of a second of latency.
Maybe I'm wrong and nuclear power will be 10x cheaper one day. But so far it's heading the other direction, about 10x more expensive than it was just a decade ago, thanks to incidents like Fukushima and that tiny radioactive capsule lost in Western Australia proving current nuclear safety standards, even in some of the safest countries in the world, are just not good enough. Forcing the industry to take additional measures (additional costs) going forward.
need to be somewhat close to important population areas
They really don't. I live in regional Australia - the nearest data center is 1300 miles away. It's perfectly fine. I work in tech and we had a small data center (50 servers) in our office with a data center grade fibre link - got rid of it because it was a waste of money. Even comparing 1300 miles of latency to 20 feet of latency wasn't worth it.
To be clear, having 0.1ms of latency was noticeable for some things. But nothing that really matters. And certainly not AI where you're often waiting 5 seconds or even a full minute.
That eVinci reactor is tiny at only 5MW. You'd need something like a thousand of them to run a single AI data center. It's also horrifically expensive at over $100 million (each! multiply that by a thousand!) and it can only produce that amount of power for eight years, then I'm not sure what you do. Buy a thousand more of them?
For comparison, some wind turbines provide more than twice as much power from just a single turbine. And they cost single digit millions to setup. They're not as reliable and they're also bigger than a micro nuclear reactor. But none of that really matters for a data center, which can draw power from the grid if it needs to.
The only really promising small reactor I've heard of is the NuScale one - but it may have been vapourware. Republicans made a big splash during the 2016 election campaign and committed to paying 1/12th of the cost of a reactor as part of their clean energy "commitment". There was no price tag, just 1/12th.
A couple years later, after they'd won the election, they quietly abandoned that plan and agreed to pay $1.3 billion which they claimed would be 1/4th of the budget. The subtext was the earlier election promise was before a budget had been figured out yet. But going from 1/12th to 1/4th is a pretty big jump.
And then a few years after that... when the company told the government $1.3 billion would not be enough money for the project to be financially viable... and that in order to sell electricity at all they needed the government to subsidise every single watt of power produced by the plant for the entire period that it operated... because it was going to run at a loss... that's when the government pulled all funding (except what had already been spent, which was a lot of money) and the whole project collapsed.
I tried to find references for all of that, but the website for the project is now a "domain for sale" page. All that's left is a few vague news articles which have conflicting information. But I've been following this for decades and the project you linked to was one of the ones that made it crystal clear to me that nuclear doesn't have a future unless something really big changes.
Who knows, perhaps if the government had been really committed to NuScale, they might've pushed through the pain and helped it succeed int order to become cheaper later. But the government wasn't willing to take that risk and apparently nobody else was either.
It’s a mind-numbing boring task. How does one stay alert when most of the stimulus is gone? It’s like a real-life version of Desert Bus, the worst video game ever.
Agreed. I don't see any chance humans will be continuously supervising trucks except as some sort of quality assurance system. And there's no reason for the driver to be in the truck for that - let them watch via a video feed so you can have multiple people supervising and give them regular breaks/etc.
Human skills will deteriorate with lack of practice. Drivers won’t have an intuitive sense for how the truck behaves, and when called upon to intervene, they will probably respond late or overreact. Even worse, the AI will call on the human to intervene only for the most complex and dangerous situations. That was a major contributing factor to the crash of Air France 447: the junior pilots were so used to pushing buttons, they had no stick-handling skills for when the automation shut off, and no intuition to help them diagnose why they were losing altitude. We would like to have Captain Sullys everywhere, but AI will lead to the opposite.
I don't see that happening at all. An passenger jet is a special case of nasty where if you slow down or stop, you die. With a truck in the rare occasion you encounter something unexpected, just have the human go slow. Also seriously it's just not that difficult. Right pedal to go forward, left pedal to go backward, steering wheel to turn and if you screw up, well maybe you'll damage some panels.
The AI will shut off before an impending accident just to transfer the blame onto the human. The human is there to serve as the “moral crumple zone” to absolve the AI of liability. That sounds like a terrible thing for society.
So you're thinking a truck sees that it's about to run a red light, and transfers control to a human who wasn't paying attention? Yeah I don't see that happening. The truck will just slam on the brakes. And it will do it with a faster reaction time than any human driver.
With a fleet of inexperienced drivers, if an event such as a snowstorm deactivates AI on a lot of trucks, the chaos would be worse than it is today.
Hard disagree. A snowstorm is a lot less problematic when there's no human in the truck who needs to get home somehow. An AI truck will just park until the road is safe. If that means two days stuck in the breakdown lane of a freeway, who cares.
Historically, anything that reduces cost of transporting goods has advanced extremely quickly. The best comparison, I think, is the shipping container.
It took about ten years for shipping containers to go from an invention nobody had heard of to one that was being used in every major seaport in the world and about another ten years for virtually all shipping used that method.
The New York docks for example, dramatically increased activity (as in, handled several times more cargo per day) while also reducing the workforce by two thirds. I think self driving trucks will do the same thing - companies/cities/highways that adopt AI will grow rapidly and any company/city/highway that doesn't support self driving trucks will suddenly stop being used almost entirely.
Shipping containers were not a simple transition. New ships and new docks had to be built to take advantage of it. A lot of new trucks and trains were also built. Just 20 years to replace nearly all the infrastructure in one of the biggest and most important industries in the world.
inspect the inside and outside of the truck before and after each trip.
This could easily be a full time job for a team of people who working an ordinary 9-5 job inspecting one truck after another all day, basically the way taxis and other car fleets are maintained.
I'd argue that's an improvement over driving a truck. Truck mechanics are paid slightly better than truck drivers, and they work far better hours.
Many of them can fix blown tire or a failed spark plug
Trucks have 18 wheels. A tire doesn't have to be fixed immediately. And I can't remember the last time I encountered a failed spark plug... but even if it were to happen one cylinder being out of action will just reduce your horsepower by 12%. You'd fix it after delivering the cargo.
But again, roadside mechanics are a thing. And they're paid even better than workshop mechanics.
deter theft and vandalism by often sleeping in the truck
Human truck drivers are only allowed to drive 60 hours a week. Which means for at least 108 hours a week, the truck is parked somewhere. A self driving truck would have no such limit, and would almost always park at a safe location.
the google cars few years ago had the boot occupied by big computers
But those were prototypes. These days you can get an NVIDIA H100 - several inches long, a few inches wide, one inch thick. It has 80GB of memory running at 3.5TB/s and 26 teraflops of compute (for comparison, Tesla autopilot runs on a 2 teraflop GPU).
The H100 is designed to be run in clusters, with eight GPUs on a single server, but I don't think you'd need that much compute. You'd have two or maybe three servers, with one GPU each, and they'd be doing the same workload (for redundancy).
They're not cheap... you couldn't afford to put one in a Tesla that only drives 1 or 2 hours a day. But a car/truck that drives 20 hours a day? Yeah that's affordable.
“[Razer] falsely claimed, in the midst of a global pandemic, that their face mask was the equivalent of an N95 certified respirator,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement....
Here in Australia it's standard practice to use "how much profit did you make" as the basis for a fine against a corporation.
Except we normally multiply that number by 3x or 5x in order to make it properly punitive.
The upside is companies tend to obey the law. The downside is every now and then an honest mistake ends in bankruptcy. And in fact, most people fined are making a mistake, because why would any corporation take on that much risk intentionally?
I'm OK with all the fines being a bit unfair. If you're incompetent then GTFO of the market and allow someone who does a better job to replace you.
They're usually small but these days some carry 15 tons and you just grab them by a handle and start walking. Often there's a lifting function (to load cargo onto/off of tall shelves/etc).
You're not always limited to walking speed, some of them have a platform the operator can stand on to increase the speed.
I could totally see those increasing in size, to the size of a full size shipping container maybe, and having a wireless control system instead of needing to stand right next to it (which could be dangerous). It'd have sensors prevent the operator from running into anything and the control would just be a pair of joysticks. Outside of the loading dock of a building, they'd be able to drive autonomously.
The job of "driver" would be replaced by just a team of people who load / unload the cargo and plan/supervise the truck. And I don't think it's far away at all - we're already seeing it with smaller cargo loads (is 15 ton all that small?).
But on the flip side, you also have to consider how much cheaper, well, literally everything, will be when it doesn't cost $30 an hour to move a product from one place to another?
Everything will cost so much less that Universal Basic Income wouldn't need to be anywhere near as high as it is right now to be "living wage".
Like it or not - self driving trucks are coming. We need to find a way to adjust to that. The timeline for when is probably not "when will the tech be ready" but rather "when will society be ready". I'm pretty sure if you deployed self driving trucks today, pitchforks would come out and those trucks would be blocked by civil disobedience.
Slow it down too much though, and you'll put your whole economy at a global disadvantage. A first would country could easily become a third world one by refusing to allow autonomous trucks. Autonomous trucks already exist and not just on pristine highways — for example they're used on mine sites with no roads at all — https://thewest.com.au/business/mining/bhp-autonomous-trucks-collide-at-jimblebar-iron-ore-mine-in-pilbara-ng-b881139676z
In less than two years, the rechargeable lithium-ion battery found in your AirPods is due to die an untimely death.
Bullshit. I got four years out of each of my pairs and I used them several hours a day. Also replacing the battery when it does wear out is is something like 50 bucks. Sure, you can't do it yourself but Apple will give you a refurbished pair, and they will recycle your old battery.
And they provide free recycling for all their products — you're basically paying for it to be recycled when you buy AirPods and any that go into landfill that's entirely the customer's fault.
No wired headphones I've ever owned lasted even close to that long - the cable eventually fails with several hours per day of swinging around and being packed tightly into your pocket.
That said, I've switched to bone conduction headphones now, and will probably never own another pair of airpods unless they go down the same path.
A new report has shown that Amazon's "Just Walk Out" AI checkout process is actually processed by 1,000 staff in India.Tech companies are under pressure to d...
Nobody should be surprised by this, and I don't see how it's "fake" at all.
Systems like this are extremely error prone. There's no way you can get an acceptable level of accuracy without extensive human review. Doesn't mean there's no AI — there is. It's just the AI is merely to help those humans do their job.
This is a Windows vulnerability and Rust is simply the first set of tools to implement a workaround - since Microsoft can't do it without breaking backwards compatibility.
Somehow the narrative has turned into negative PR for Rust when in fact they are handling this vulnerability better than anyone else in the industry.
Because people already had a server to run Exchange, which is actually pretty good, and if you're already paying a fortune for Windows, why not use it?
Linux is definitely not free, you need to hire staff who know how it works and you probably also need to pay a support contract for someone even more qualified where necessary (e.g. Red Hat, who can patch the kernel if that's what it takes to fix your problem).
Since you're already paying for both of those with your Exchange server, it was cheaper to use IIS as well. These days Linux is a lot lower maintenance and support contracts are cheaper, so it's less of a concern.
I know “best” is subjective, but as someone who’s entrenched in the Apple ecosystem I always used to use the stock apps: Reminders, Calendar, Mail, Podcasts and, of course, Safari....
I've done iOS/Mac app development — Apple doesn't "sell" data to me, but they absolutely provide me with extensive user tracking data for free (well, for $99 per year, but that's effectively free). As far as I know they also provide data to other third parties, such as in the news app But app developers is the big one.
The data is anonymised, but I assure you it's very detailed. Detailed enough that some companies probably cross reference it with other tracking and are able to link the data they get from Apple to real people.
Thankfully the tracking is opt-in, but users are forced to make a choice and encouraged to enable tracking and I'd argue they really aren't being educated properly on what they're handing over before making a decision. I can't really blame Apple for that, who wants to spend hours learning how Apple's tracking methods work? But it is a fact that Apple does collect a lot of data and they do share it.
Personally I have spent hours doing that research and I'm not OK with what they track — I opt out. And while my own software does have some tracking, it's a lot less detailed than the tracking Apple does. It's just basic analytics (roughly how many users do I have and what country are they from?) and crash reporting which is (thankfully) rare with my software and therefore useless for any invasive tracking. The vast majority of people using my apps never experience a crash (and that's only possible because I track crashes).
They took the open source WebKit to develop Chrome and Chromium.
How did that turn out?
Perfectly? Web browsers are way better now than they ever have been.
Google wants to own images. Doesn’t matter if they made the licensing whatever. They make webp. They have a personal vested interest in control.
WebP is a little better than PNG/JPEG and way better than GIF. That's all that really matters.
You trust Google???
Hell no. I reluctantly watch a bit of content that's exclusively available on YouTube. Don't use anything else of theirs and I'd drop YouTube in a heartbeat if I could find that content elsewhere.
The retro Nokia phone everyone owned 25 years ago will get a reboot soon – and yes, it has Snake ( www.techradar.com )
Why data centers want to have their own nuclear reactors ( english.elpais.com )
Will self driving trucks hit the roads with nobody on board or will they keep a human supervisor?
According to the news self driving trucks are about to hit the road with no driver on board....
FTC fines Razer for every cent made selling bogus “N95 grade” RGB masks ( arstechnica.com )
“[Razer] falsely claimed, in the midst of a global pandemic, that their face mask was the equivalent of an N95 certified respirator,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement....
Tractor-trailers with no one aboard? The future is near for self-driving trucks on US roads ( apnews.com )
Apple AirPods are designed to die: Here’s what you should know ( pirg.org )
Big Tech Is Faking AI ( www.youtube.com )
A new report has shown that Amazon's "Just Walk Out" AI checkout process is actually processed by 1,000 staff in India.Tech companies are under pressure to d...
Critical 'BatBadBut' Rust Vulnerability Exposes Windows Systems to Attacks ( thehackernews.com )
Microsoft's Collapse in the Web Server Space Continued This Month ( techrights.org )
"Best" Mac browser: Your view
I know “best” is subjective, but as someone who’s entrenched in the Apple ecosystem I always used to use the stock apps: Reminders, Calendar, Mail, Podcasts and, of course, Safari....
Chrome, Firefox and other browsers affected by critical WebP vulnerability ( siliconangle.com )