> Once we cross the threshold of "I absolutely have to automate everything or it's not viable to use TLS anymore", why do we care about providing anything beyond ~48 hours?
Well you see, they also want to be able to break your automation.
For example, maybe your automation generates a 1024 bit RSA certificate, and they've decided that 2048 bit certificates are the new minimum. That means your automation stops working until you fix it.
Doing this with 2-day expiry would be unpopular as the weekend is 2 days long and a lot of people in tech only work 5 days a week.
When someone hands you a pencil, you don't wonder what variety of tree the wood came from, or what paint chemistry was used for the coating. It's a pencil. You might have broad opinions on whether the one in your hand is comfortable to use, and sharp - but you leave the details to the pencil makers.
About 70% of the population engage with politics the same way: Leave the details to the people who do this stuff for a living.
Do they expect to be disappointed? Sure, but everyone who engages with politics expects to be disappointed.
This pencil was proudly advertised as being comprised of the remains of all that was decent in humanity. The fact that it wrote in blood was gleefully touted and cheered.
You are a pencil company director. A CEO candidate promised to cut expenses by 30% by eliminating waste. People who do this stuff for a living countered wood and graphite exceed 70% of your expenses. The CEO candidate proposed to increase graphite spending. Do you wonder what the CEO would do if hired?
This is exactly the attitude Putin tries to encourage in his population. If enough people don't pay attention or don't think what they do matters, it's easier to subjugate a population.
If people in the US aren't starting to notice what Musk/Trump are doing it will bode very poorly for the future of the US.
Sure, if they wanted to intel could have done what nvidia did with CUDA: Put the tech into everything, even their lowest end consumer devices, and sink hundreds of millions into tooling and developer education given away free of charge.
And maybe it would have lead somewhere. Perhaps. But they didn't.
I wasn't there, but I've always imagined the conversation went something like this:
Intel: Welcome, Altera. We'd like you to integrate your FPGA fabric onto our CPUs.
Altera: Sure thing, boss! Loads of our FPGAs get plugged into PCIe slots, or have hard or soft CPU cores, so we know what we're doing.
Intel: Great! Oh, by the way, we'll need the ability to run multiple FPGA 'programs' independently, at the same time.
Altera: Ummmm
Intel: The programs might belong to different users, they'll need an impenetrable security barrier between them. It needs full OS integration, so multi-user systems can let different users FPGA at the same time. Windows and Linux, naturally. And virtual machine support too, otherwise how will cloud vendors be able to use it?
Altera: Uh
Intel: We'll need run-time scaling, so large chips get fully utilised, but smaller chips still work. And it'll need to be dynamic, so a user can go from using the whole chip for one program to sharing it between two.
Intel: And of course indefinite backwards compatibility, that's the x86 promise. Don't do anything you can't support for at least 20 years.
Intel: Your toolchain must support protecting licensed IP blocks, but also be 100% acceptable to the open source community.
Intel: Also your current toolchain kinda sucks. It needs to be much easier to use. And stop charging for it.
Intel: You'll need a college outreach program. And a Coursera course. Of course students might not have our hardware, so we'll need a cloud offering of some sort, so they can actually do the exercises in the course.
Altera: I guess to start with we
Intel: Are you profitable yet? Why aren't you contributing to our bottom line?
I think they have tried to improve the software for FPGAs--FPGA backends are part of their oneAPI software stack, for example. And when I was in grad school, Intel was definitely doing courses on building for FPGAs using OpenCL (I remember seeing some of their materials, but I don't know much about them otehr than they existed).
As to why it didn't work, well, I'm not plugged into this space to have a high degree of certainty, but my best guess is "FPGAs just aren't that useful for that many things."
Yes, if they actually made the thing available, maybe people would have used it for something. There were several proofs of concept at the time, with some serious gains, ever for the uses that people ended up using CUDA.
But they didn't actually sell it. At least not in any form anybody could buy. So, yeah, we get the OP claiming it was an obvious technological dead-end.
And if they included it on lower-end chips (the ones they sold just a few years after they brought Altera), we could have basically what the RasPI 2040 is nowadays. Just a decade earlier and controlled by them... On a second thought, maybe this was for the best.
The government just kinda forgot that competition law existed for a few decades.
They were busy doing things like bringing freedom and democracy to Afghanistan, having a financial crisis, stuff like that. Very important stuff. Social media? Oh yes I think my grandson told me about that.
If there are 7 different grocery stores in driving distance of my house and two of them merge, I've still got a choice of 6 stores so there's still reasonable competition.
If there are 3 different grocery stores and two of them merge, though? That's a different matter.
And if 1 of the remaining 2 is the zero-waste organic store that only rich people and hippies use? It might not even be providing all that much competition.
Yeah, but we're talking about 2012. Instagram was small and wasn't making any money, and feature-wise it barely resembled what it is today. Going just by US sites in 2012 Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, and Reddit were all large competing social networks (or social network adjacent sites/apps).
Seems like in your analogy there were plenty of grocery stores left.
People forget that the Android app and the aquisition announcement came out like one week apart. The basic web version didn't come out until half a year later.
My point is it already had a solid rich, influencer-y userbase + was about to become available on more platforms. Aquisition definitely had an impact on the user growth, but the growth itself was already inevitable.
The thing that makes something a competitor is the ability to act as a substitute. That means grocery stores that are 1000 miles away don't count. For photo sharing, what makes something a viable substitute is having a sufficient network effect, so photo sharing services with hundreds of users aren't a substitute for ones with millions.
This implies that mergers between large services that have a network effect should always be prohibited, but why is that even a problem unless your goal is to thwart competition?
It would also create a useful incentive: Federated systems (like email) have a single network that spans entities. If Microsoft wants to buy Hotmail, they're not buying a separate network so you don't have to be worried about it even if they each have 25 million users as long as that's not too large a percentage of the billion people who use email. So then companies would want to participate in federated systems instead of creating silos like modern social networks do, because then they would be as strictly prohibited from doing mergers.
While I've never seen a project killed by dependencies, I've certainly seen projects stuck on treadmill of constant dependency updates.
You know, they import 5 libraries, each of which imports 5 more libraries, each of which imports 5 more libraries, and suddenly they're buried in 'critical' updates because there's a denial-of-service bug in the date parser used by the yaml parser used by the configuration library used by the logging library used by the application.
Broadcast TV modernisation is trapped between a load of enemies.
To the north, competition from a huge installed base of last-gen technology, which is mostly good enough.
To the south, streaming services, youtube and cable. These let people watch whenever they want (nobody has VCRs any more) and they've offered 4k for over a decade.
To the east, the industry's dumb decision to build the 'next gen' technology atop a patent minefield, and load it with DRM. So if you manufacture this tech, you can face huge surprise bills because in implementing the spec you've unknowingly infringed on some nonsense patent.
And to the west, the commercial reality that showing someone an advert in 4K isn't any more profitable than showing the advert in 1080p. If you're a broadcast TV station when you up your quality everything gets more expensive but you don't make any extra money. So why bother?
> If you're a broadcast TV station when you up your quality everything gets more expensive but you don't make any extra money. So why bother?
In a functioning, competitive market, the answer to this is "Customers choose a competing broadcast TV station with higher quality." Unfortunately what we have is far from that.
Perhaps they were just hand-fed to demonstrate accuracy.
If instead of PPS it gave a 10Mhz reference, then there is a pretty good use in keeping nearby systems sample-synchronized. In which case you don't care about 'time' just about frequency accuracy.
Well you see, they also want to be able to break your automation.
For example, maybe your automation generates a 1024 bit RSA certificate, and they've decided that 2048 bit certificates are the new minimum. That means your automation stops working until you fix it.
Doing this with 2-day expiry would be unpopular as the weekend is 2 days long and a lot of people in tech only work 5 days a week.
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