When I learned to program (before 9/11) there was a big emphasis on assembly language and using low level interfaces to communicate with other hardware. The idea was that everyone studying computer science should understand every aspect of the CPU down to the register and operation level, and then be able to design logic gates to replicate that functionality if needed.
Now we have CPUs that are fundamentally undocumented, unknowable, and untranslatable. The entire infrastructure of the network, the telecoms, and the cpu design itself has all been subverted to the needs of the national security complex or corporate advertising.
I'm not sure what computer science even means anymore. Everything I learned is completely useless.
It's not useless. FPGAs have plummeted in cost and there are now open-source toolchains for some of them. There's also a Free commercial-grade ISA that you can use in your personal designs (RISC-V). These days, it is not expensive to design your own well-understood computer which can run microcode generated by commercial-grade compilation toolchains such as GCC. Even hardware production is getting cheapER with shared wafer runs like MOSIS, although custom silicon is still out of reach for hobbyists.
Chin up, buddy. The US is not the entire world, and the pendulum of our generations' zeitgeist can still swing back towards the ideals of liberty and equality of access which the mavens of computing once stood for. You can already buy ARM application processors from vendors other than Intel/AMD, and I would be surprised if we lived in a world where every new computer comes with "management engine" spyware in its CPU for much longer.
I love your optimism, I’m not sure if I can see a path towards the public voting for a government that would make the necessary adjustments to reign in the ability of government powers to influence “management engine” code.
X86 was designed way back even before pre-9/11, so "now" is not any different from the past. We all know the rep X86 gets for poor documentation - poor design in general. Claiming that older ISA's were better documented and easier to understand will not get you very far.
Most if not all top computer science / computer engineering programs in the states teach digital logic design, x86 / x86-64, computer architecture, compilers, communication networks in very fundamental detail as required courses. The emphasis is still there.
Yes, after we eliminate all the trucking jobs in the county which are one of the last remaining decent jobs for unprivileged people, then the robberies will really take off. Better come up with a log(n) solution to those dirty poor people with bedsheets before prioritizing anything else, because there will surely be robberies.
Maybe instead of intentionally creating a nightmarish hellscape so we can fix the robbery problem we just take a step back for a minute? What are we actually building? For whom?
The libertarian tech monoculture is the problem, not the solution. If you knew the history of the industry or Kansas over the past 30 years you'd realize you're exactly backwards.
Deere and similar companies got the idea to create this "perfect walled garden monopoly tractor" from Steve Case. AOL was the first to really lay out the pattern so many other industries (and Google and Amazon and Apple and other monopolists) have now emulated.
This isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about consolidation, power and monopoly. There are lots of smart people trying to innovate in Kansas right now, for the most part they are getting absolutely crushed by massive corporate concentration.
What exactly is stopping these farmers from just buying from another vendor like New Holland or Kubota? Every time I read this stuff, it's all about John Deere being the Apple of farm equipment, and there's almost nothing said about their competitors, almost as if they don't exist.
I feel like I see the same thing when people I know complain about Apple: if I try to suggest they switch to Android because it doesn't have those problems, they look at me like I have a 3rd arm. I really wonder how much of this problem with farmers being unable to repair their own equipment is self-inflicted, by absolutely refusing to buy from a different vendor.
To my knowledge, Kubota doesn't produce harvesting equipment. And their largest agricultural tractor does have a lot of software (I assume it's closed source, haven't found anything to indicate otherwise).
As for running RPi or some other open-source or replacement control software, that's not a trivial thing to implement. Even if an entrepreneur releases a replacement control system, it's risky to install it (down time is expensive). Will they support the farmer? Will they be around in a year or two? Etc.
Did you ever notice that as you drive through farm country, you will see long stretches where everyone is using one brand, and then a long stretch where everyone is using another? Dollars-to-donuts it is driven by proximity to a regional parts depot. If you are down during planting or harvesting, and the mechanic can get you running today if you send your kid to a town 20 minutes away to pick up a part, or wait for tomorrows parts delivery, versus parts are two days away, it is an easy choice.
Ok, that made sense decades ago, but today there's two problems with that:
1) Overnight delivery
2) From everything I've read, you cannot go send your kid to town 20 minutes away to pick up a part for a John Deere machine. You have to call and set up an appointment for a service technician to come to your farm to repair the equipment on-site. After all, that's what all this right-to-repair stuff is complaining about: they aren't allowed to repair things themselves any more. And then the big problem here is: what if it's Saturday, and the service technician is off for the weekend, or is booked up all week long? How do you afford to have your operation down all that time because of a failed tractor?
So I don't see how having regional parts depots is useful any more.
There's probably some level of acknowledgement that there will always be a subset of repairs requiring the dealer's expertise and tooling. Especially as the machines keep getting more complex.
So you will still buy the locally supported brand.
It's only because Deere is the biggest most well known face of the problem, and because they've been most aggressive baout locking things down.
It's not just their tactic, but stopping them sets the precedent.
Also most news outlets don't have bandwidth for multiple articles about all the other companies doing the same thing, so they are the placeholder for the topic.
Even if one of the other manufacturers in the space doesn't permit an easy self-repair path at the moment, it would seem to be a golden opportunity to expand their market by doing so.
Given the way capitalism works in the US now, though, if someone like Kubota broke out of the pack by doing something like this, something tells me that Deere would find the money to buy them out, and spike the idea.
IMO, the government should be putting a stop to this sort of thing. If you're on this site, then you've seen this happen scores of times in the tech space. But, again, a lot of people on this site are specifically hoping for a buyout like this to make their first couple hundred million, so this is a weird place to complain about a tech monopoly in tractors.
>if someone like Kubota broke out of the pack by doing something like this, something tells me that Deere would find the money to buy them out, and spike the idea.
Kubota is a Japanese company; Deere can't just buy them out on a whim. The Japanese government would most likely block it.
Calling it a "victimless grift" as this writer does is just naive and silly. The thousands of people who got laid off while Adam got billions in golden parachute funds is the very definition of the word victim.
Just because we've grown accustomed to decades of golden parachutes and widening income inequality and excessive equity based compensation to dodge taxes at the high end doesn't mean any of this is normal or victimless. The victims are everyone who isn't an executive.
> The thousands of people who got laid off while Adam got billions in golden parachute funds is the very definition of the word victim.
Not in my book. They got a few years of a cushy job and now move on to something else.
Otherwise this sounds like calling the people who were evicted for not paying their mortgages “victims”. Sure they lost their homes, but they also got to live in the house for a while for free.
Adam Neumann played SoftBank and gave them what they had coming. We need people like Adam to keep the markets from bubbling too much. It’s part of the checks and balances in a healthy capitalist system.
I love this comment which just straight-up comes out and says that lying sociopaths and narcissists are an integral part of a “healthy capitalist system”.
Tankies couldn’t have written a better indictment.
There's some truth to the comment. You can't have people become so complacent that they just trust people on their word. You need somebody to actually verify that what they're doing could actually work.
Take Theranos for example. That whole thing is a huge case is scientific illiteracy. What they were suggesting was essentially impossible to achieve, yet people invested in it anyway. Nobody demanded to even see it working properly as a prototype. There are enormous kickstarter campaigns for things like "self-filling water bottles" or "solar roadways" and people fall for them.
> Nobody demanded to even see it working properly as a prototype.
Quite a few people did and recognized the fraud that it was long before it was public. But there were quite a few vested interests in making sure the price the equity would sell at was more than what they purchased at.
I’m not a psychopath, but it’s just part of human nature. And softbank just wanted to dump a shitty company on the public markets and rip off retail investors. Neither side is good here.
Lying sociopaths and narcissist are always going to be wrong. What keeps them in check are those who know this and value objective truths or measurable metrics rather than prose and charisma.
Everyone is getting tired of the bullshit industrial complex that so many companies seem to tread in. If you have zero plans for profitability, zero plans for sustainability, zero ideas for actually creating a new useful product or service then you shouldn't be forcing a semi-fraudulent IPO through the door that is s transparent cash grab for the stakeholders.
This is a good thing. The number doesn't always need to go up. Especially when it's all bullshit.
But that’s the great thing about the market, there still have to be buyers and the public is getting wise about these “semi-fraudulent” IPOs (see WeWork). This is exactly how the market is suppose to work.
Markets can’t really get smarter over time as they represent all investors. From young teenagers to experienced institutional investors. You just get cycles of people learning the same lessons over again, but that doesn’t last long term just at best a few decades.
You're conflating evolution with education. Education also varies from one generation to the next as the educators learn from their own experience, or are imposed upon by government in curricula and standardisation.
Yes, Qwest (the telecom, formerly US West) resisted and fought tooth and nail to not cooperate.
Their CEO was prosecuted to hell and back for daring to do this, and the company was forced to sell to a competitor. Nobody even remembers his name anymore, few people even remember Qwest.
His name is Joseph Nacchio. If this story is true (and it has been around for many years), he is a hero for standing up for transparent governance, and the privacy of Qwest's customers.
I don't know anything about it, but I think there may still be related litigation going on.
Edit: maybe not. Wikipedia says he was convicted in 2007.
However, I was given an NDA regarding something that sounded related at some point after that, so...
You skipped the part where he acquired a competitor under false accounting, contributing to monopolization, as dumping his stock with irregular sales while to profit from value NSA contracts before the public knew they were canceled. Should a CEO make a fortune selling stock while the company loses 90% of its market cap?
Yeah it's funny how he was the only corrupt CEO in all of corporate America during that time. So weird how nobody else besides him and Martha Stewart ever got prosecuted for insider trading despite it happening ALL THE TIME EVERY DAY EVERYWHERE.
> Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, alleged in appeal documents that the NSA requested that Qwest participate in its wiretapping program more than six months before September 11, 2001. Nacchio recalls the meeting as occurring on February 27, 2001. Nacchio further claims that the NSA cancelled a lucrative contract with Qwest as a result of Qwest's refusal to participate in the wiretapping program. Nacchio surrendered April 14, 2009 to a federal prison camp in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania to begin serving a six-year sentence for an insider trading conviction. The United States Supreme Court denied bail pending appeal the same day.
He was happy to get paid hundreds of millions of dollars for spying on his customers, but didn't want to spy on his customers? What did he think those contracts were for?
I don't know what the lesson is after reading his wikipedia page. His refusal to cooperate with the NSA seems like a non-sequitur as a response to the whole insider trading and fraud thing. I mean, if the prosecution was revenge, well, ok, but I can't connect the dots to how that makes him not guilty.
It's kind of hilarious that they still spend money on the PR team to push these stories about how important and sanctimonious cash is while at the same time printing billions of dollars every night and just transferring to any bank or hedge fund that wants it in the overnight repo market.
A whole set of theatrics for the commoners who still use cash, meanwhile we just press some buttons and poof a billion dollars appears out of thin air in your account (if you're rich enough).
You're right, it's much better to use payment methods that track my wants, needs, desires, habits, location, companions, financial status, political and religious preferences; and then weaponizes it against me. Stupid commoners and their freedom.
Whatever the merits of the parent comment, I think you're misinterpreting their intent.
Their stance is that the average citizen is made to jump through hoops to get their cash replaced, while major players are handed money freely. The "commoners" appellation is sarcastic.
This is like 99% off topic, but my understanding of the repo market is that the loans are:
Short term, often overnight, but some are 7 days
Fully collaterialized, with good collateral like treasury bills
Interest bearing
So it seems to me like risk free money is to be made here, and sure, there's a market failure if there aren't enough private lenders, but why is it a problem for the government to step in?
Not to mention that it was normal to do repos in the US before the post crisis money market moved to the floor system (IOER), and currently is normal for most money markets around the world.
The grandparent has a point but he's barking at the wrong tree. It's all about the artificially low interest rates, world wide. Money supply is a prisoner of rates. Let's see how this setup unwinds...
>A whole set of theatrics for the commoners who still use cash, meanwhile we just press some buttons and poof a billion dollars appears out of thin air in your account (if you're rich enough).
It does seem as if an identical-ish puff piece finds its way through the aggregators at least quarterly. I think the actual content of the story is irrelevant enough and I have some misgivings about attributing nefarious motives to this participial puff piece, but I do take issue with the kinds of non-story this article represents, and the collection distraction that journalism as infotainment represents (being neither truly informative, nor particularly entertaining).
I don't think that this article is uninformative. Many citizens are unaware of this program and it could come in handy some day (hopefully not, but it's a good thing to know). More useful than reading something dumb a politician said today.
Now we have CPUs that are fundamentally undocumented, unknowable, and untranslatable. The entire infrastructure of the network, the telecoms, and the cpu design itself has all been subverted to the needs of the national security complex or corporate advertising.
I'm not sure what computer science even means anymore. Everything I learned is completely useless.