fr0styMatt2

There's a bit of a 'reboot' as such (I forget what it's generally referred to) that contributes to this. By that I'm referring to the way that microcomputers reset progress in software.

When low-power microcomputers hit the masses, the advances that had happened in software in the minicomputer / mainframe world couldn't follow along. So in the first instance you had computers that could only barely run BASIC programs and where you were programming in assembly close to the bare metal if you really wanted to do much more advanced things with the machine.

Now, the kids growing up on these computers in the 70s and 80s (I'm an 80s kid myself) had no idea about things like GUIs or the latest in virtualization technology on minicomputers or all the many problems that had been solved in big-mainframe world but were yet to hit consumer devices. One factor is that consumer hardware of the time wouldn't have run the software efficiently anyway; another one is that there was no Internet where you could just Google anything and find out.

So many of us then grew up in this era and became software engineers that would go on to write operating systems and software of the 90s and beyond. We'd never seen or heard of, for example, Lisp Machines or what they could do. Which is I think why you end up with this weird generational gap, almost like a chasm of knowledge born in the 80s and 90s.

Whenever I watch an Alan Kay video I'm blown away by how much was possible 'back then'. My mental map of technological progress starts with 8-bit micros in the 1980s, which we all thought were 'cutting edge technology' except that they weren't, in the broadest scheme of things. It's this amazement that I think leads to the feeling of a 'Golden Lost Age'.

Remember when Windows 95 touted preemptive multitasking as a groundbreaking new feature? Or when DMA for hard disks was a 'new' thing? (except that the Mother Of All Demos basically showed the concept, from what I vaguely remember from watching it many years back).

We see the same cycle in mobile computing - phones were once close-to-the-metal devices; now they're running full mutli-tasking basically desktop-class operating systems. The difference these days is that we have the Internet and we have the lessons of history actually available to us.

The funny thing about that is that my MacBook Pro boots in a few seconds to a full desktop OS, just as my Windows 10 machine does. The cold-boot time of Android is pretty terrible. Admittedly the devices are pretty slow that it boots on, but still.

I've never understood the point of Chrome OS's existence as a separate thing from Android. So I'm glad it's an Android device.

People don't quite get it until they've tried it. The most surprising thing is the way that the 3D stereoscopy of the environment combined with the head tracking in VR conveys scale. The movie theater actually looks AS BIG AS A MOVIE THEATER SCREEN. It's not "strap this thing on your face and get kind of an illusion of a 3D movie floating in front of you", it's "Strap this thing on your face and see a massive screen in front of you that couldn't physically fit in the room you're currently sitting in". Not to mention that you'll ideally get virtual theater surround through headphones that is fixed in space, such that turning your head keeps the sounds coming from their respective speaker positions relative to your head rather than staying the same.

As for 3D stereoscopy in movies; that's an inherently limited format (it's limited because of the fixed viewer viewpoint and the edges of the screen). 3D stereo and VR are not comparable by any means. About the only thing that they have in common is that you use two eyes to view them. Here though, the VR cinema adds an advantage - 3D stereoscopic content can be shown perfectly without any cross-talk between images, which helps with the integrity of the effect. Note effect. IMHO 3D on a fixed movie screen is strictly a special effect. When used in such a way, it's great. When overused or used improperly, it sucks.

TL;DR: '3D movies' and VR shouldn't be uttered in the same sentence.

This is excellent. I know many people for whom this would be cheap enough to just add on to their next phone contract, who otherwise wouldn't have dipped their toes in it.

As an aside, I really wish Google and Oculus could get together and work out how to allow Cardboard apps to take advantage of the extra hardware from the Gear VR if it's available. Using a Gear VR and then trying Cardboard shows how woefully inadequate Cardboard is; but there are some cool Cardboard apps that I'd really love to be able to try with the much much better tracking of my Gear VR.

I'm curious about this, because I read your response but think I'm missing something.

Non-techy people routinely consume digital content on YouTube or on their Facebook feeds. Most new 'smart' TVs stream YouTube at least as a minimum.

Which part is difficult? Are you talking more about the tech from the content distributor's side (as opposed to the consumer)?

I wonder if part of it is that some techies who aspire to management do so because they don't actually like developing software.

As an individual contributor I can't imagine giving up my day-to-day coding for a management position. Management responsibilities, sure. I'd wager that most software developers who are given enough autonomy are doing a lot of micro-project management anyway.

Giving up on researching new technology and playing around with stuff? Not a chance.

What do they mean by "....with the government and with each other" (emphasis on the 'with each other' part)?

The one I can understand - companies being compelled to share with the government. However is this act also giving these companies to share with each other?

That doesn't really explain anything.

I had a read of the article that was linked to from that Quora answer and I still couldn't glean 'evil' from that -- potential to become evil, yes; actively intending to do evil, not so much.

Exactly this in the opposite way too - I don't see how Shred Video could hurt Smule. The way I see it there's no problem with them both coexisting, it's not like it's a tiny market or anything. Just seems so unnecessary on the part of Smule and just seems vindictive and pointless. Smule could just, you know, compete with their products if they felt threatened. Isn't that what a market is?

I was also a huge Smule fan and would recommend their apps to people looking for interesting music making tools. Not anymore. Will be doing quite the opposite actually.

Can this be a problem on mobile?

I have a long master passphrase - too long to type on a touchscreen keyboard in any convenient amount of time and where there's a non-trivial risk that somebody peering over my shoulder (think - using it on the bus) could spy it. So in that case I resort to using the fingerprint-unlock feature (which I assume is the security equivalent of 'save master passphrase' or at least token).

I am aware that this might open me up to other attacks - an adversary dusting my fingerprints off my tablet, etc. Curious though as to whether this is an attack vector for the same or a similar type of process to what the authors are describing (haven't read their blog post, just the Black Hat description).

For those 'hard to reproduce' issues, it's about knowing what debugging and forensics tools are out there and making sure that the systems you deploy support postmortem debugging and issue analysis. Things like creating crash dump files, then giving your field technicians or customers an easy way to get this data to you with an incident report (or even having the system do it automatically if applicable); logging systems that can be left switched on all the time and dynamically reconfigured (so that there's less chance of the damn thing being off when an issue does occur).

Also awareness of things like tools that analyze or try and provoke race conditions, etc.

It works really well if you only type on the right side of the keyboard?