Just curious, what would the advantage of having an "Open 4G USB Dongle" be ? Why not just get a Ublox or similar module ?
Even if it's open you still have to pay usage on the carrier's network.
That's going to be a very long list, but of the top of my head:
1. Much easier repairs since all schematics are known in advance.
2. Price. A lot of the price of the modems comes from licensing fees as others have already noted.
3. Integration. Directly embedding the pcb into your project will be much, much easier.
4. Collaboration. Working together in projects that utilize 4G becomes easier too. Many use cases might get revealed without the original creators intending for them.
5. Security. "More eyeballs on a line of code make bugs run away" and all that jazz.
Only disadvantage might be reverse engineer people might get bored not having enough things to RE :-)
Although a 4G module like a ublox is pretty easy to throw on a PCB, most of those things are just a couple chips inside so it just seems like there's not a lot of repairs other than just swap out the module. I've seem those modules in the $20 range, seems like a lot of work to get around the licensing fees on a $20 module?
He reminds me of Scott Adams, Creator of the Dilbert Cartoons started with PacBell way back and got a lot of early inspiration from that experience. Maybe this guy should consider becoming a full time cartoonist as well instead of going to work for another "evil tech giant" ?
Newspapers are dead. They syndicated Adams' comics throughout the 90s and 2000s. There's no compensation and distribution model that can replace it as yet. Probably won't ever be, the future is all video.
Another dumb story from "back in my day". When I was in college way back in 1976, me and my Best friend back then both had graduated early and had to live in the dorm the first year until we were 18. The dorm they made us stay in was 6 stories and had a crappy old elevator. Being a couple of goofy hacker types with nothing better to do on a weekend, we figured out how to get up on top of the elevator and to use the alternate control panel up there. We sat up there and could control it, people would get on, we could listen to them talk, stop the elevator between floors and they would get all scared, we would flicker the lights on and off, make it go to the wrong floor and so forth. Pretty fun stuff for a couple of nerds.
We got bored with that pretty quickly until, 4 gals form the girls floor decided they were going to camp out in there and set the Guinness record for the longest stay in an elevator. Some of the bigger dudes knew that we had hacked the elevator and asked us if we wanted to mess them up. Well... Of course. So we got on top and were listen to them yakkedy yak. Then we took it to between the 6th and 5th floors and locked it in place, then opened the upper doors on the 6th floor where a bunch of guys with big trash cans full of water were waiting.
We thought they were just going to douse them good. So we opened the ceiling trap door to the elevator with the lights off and those gals were screaming and squealing like crazy. Then come dude tossed a string of fire crackers in there followed by two giant Garbage cans of water right after that. Must have been at least a couple hundred gallons of water, who knows.
Then we set the thing to go to the first floor and jumped off. Waiting on the first floor where a bunch of people who were in on it with cameras to capture the whole things as the doors opened it was like the seas parting and flooding out as these poor drenched young ladies came floating out. Picture was on the front page of the school paper "Guinness Elevator Record Attempt Drenched" or something.
They called the cops and all that but no one squealed on us and it was all in good fun but to teach everyone a lesson they shut down the elevators for 3 weeks. Young people don't care, worth a climb of the stairs for all the fun!
BTW, I ended up marrying one of the gals on the elevator and yes I told her I was in on it, later. She loved that for some reason :)
When I was 11 yrs old, me and my best friend who lived about a mile away would stay up late at night yaking on our CB walkie talkies with the lights off in our bedrooms late at night We thought it was the greatest thing ever, our parents could not, or, well, just didn't understand how, to listen in. I guess that was the internet of the say (1970's hehe).
This reminds me of a practical joke a co-worker and I pulled some years back, we made up a new project called the LMNOP project (just letters out of the alphabet). We used a program i wrote based on the old foggy where whenever we would see a good BS line from an email or document we put it in the BS generator DB. We had the program spit out several pages of total BS and some fake but impressive looking diagrams made up of a bunch of boxes with random letters as labels and lines between them. We did put some actual sentences of our own in the beginning and end to hype it.
Then we set the trap and left it on the copy machine half copied and walked off. Within a couple of days, bootleg copies were flying around and someone scanned it in and it was being emailed around. A lot of people in our department and even other departments were asking about it. If someone asked us we would say "sorry I can't discuss it" in a very mysterious way. Then we started hearing other people saying that same phrase when they were asked about it.
The whole things started to take on a life of it's own, we joked about how it was like a Dilbert come true and there would be an entire team headed by a director with a budget running a program that was fake.
Of course that never happened, our director called me in and had a copy of the fake document, and said "this looks like something you may have had something to do with ?". I laughed and said just having a bit of fun. She sent out a blast email telling everyone that it was a practical joke gone viral and for everyone to ignore it.
Even so, for a long time people kept coming up with conspiracy theories that was a cover story.
It just shows how people like believing stupid stuff.
You've inspired me... here is what GPT-3 has to say about Infinidash (prompt (including first newline) in italics, first take):
Introducing AWS Infinidash
InfiniDASH is a container-based, serverless, infinitely scalable, high-performance, low latency event stream processing platform built on top of AWS Lambda, Kinesis, and Amazon DynamoDB.
Applications built with InfiniDASH can handle millions of events per second with sub-millisecond latency.
InfiniDASH is currently in developer preview, so you can try it out for free.
To learn more about InfiniDASH, visit the product page.
To see a live demo of InfiniDASH at re:Invent, register for a hands-on lab.
That's hilarious. I think Jeff has an account here.
Just tried with GPT-J posted here yesterday(?) Prompt in italics as well. Seems like it wants to tweak the name:
Introducing AWS Infinidashboard
What is AWS Infinidashboard?
AWS Infinidashboard is the end-to-end tool that automates dashboards generation for your AWS infrastructure.
How does it work?
1. Dashboard Model Definition
To make dashboards flexible and scalable, Dashboards defined by the user using Infinidashboard specify a logical layout with templates, graphs and widgets (common dashboard elements). It enables user-driven dashboard customization by storing templates for common dashboard elements.
Infinidashboard extracts a definition of templates, graphs and widgets from the defined dashboards and applies this template when processing a new dashboard.
You can define your own templates using the AWS Dashboards Customizable Templates.
2. Dashboard Generation
A dashboard can be defined using a set of metadata (template, graphs and widgets) and a set of metadata describing the data source(s). An abstract description of data sources (CRUD operations, security groups and subnets) is shared as a common model that ensures consistent behavior. When processing data from the corresponding data sources, the user-provided templates, graphs and widgets are automatically applied to the specified data and the resulting dashboard is saved into an Amazon S3 location.
An Abstract Data Source Model (or ADSM) is a common metadata model that describes a data source. The user creates an ADSM to describe the infrastructure and other metadata associated with the data source (security groups, subnets, RDS instance, Lambda functions, Kinesis stream) that drives the dashboard.
3. Dashboard Security
Infinidashboard uses the IAM model to ensure users' data access control and permission policies are properly applied.
Hahaha. I bet it was a shock to see your name pop up in GPT-3.
That feeling when you don't know whether you're famous enough that you were included in the training set and successfully influenced the bot, or the bot simply used a pretty common American name.
You know, I cannot tell you how many inventions I have been involved with that started out as a few of us just joking around. I bet there is a cool theory or name for this, but sometimes, humor has a way of sort of shaking loose peoples imaginations.
hahaha, you never know :)
It would be hilarious if you guys end up with something cool from it. Shug.
Reminds me of how a few places I’ve worked momentarily embraced Tableu with open arms after seeing a US revenue heat map built by dragging and dropping (carefully groomed data).
Ya, we had a VP who somehow some sales guy got to and showed him a "magical" Network Management system by showing a carefully staged demo. It took forever to talk him down.
The earlies version I saw of this was way back in my Bell Lab days, there was a program called foggy (I think it actually came with early versions of UNIX), I actually still have the original source someplace I think. It was very basic, lead ins, transitions, objects then randomness. Mine was based on that with some tweaks. But these new ones out there are AMAZING.
I worked for Bell Labs in the 70's (78 - 81) it was really cool and fun. I was a recent masters college grad and they moved me around the country working on a bunch of interesting special projects, from swapping out cord board systems, recording data on cross bar systems, taking interesting data on old IMTS (old wireless) to get data for HC-MTS (later became AMPS wireless, 1G for the uninitiated). It was super fun. But I was working on a special project in Seattle and simply fell in love with the area and requested a transfer to the local company and never left. But, thank you Bell Labs, I think some newer companies like Google try to replicate what was happening back then. But it was pretty special. I hope someone does, not sure Google or others have quite captured it. Anyhow, thanks for the fun pics.
When I was in college back in 1978, a friend of mine who was studying Environmental Science explained it to me, calling it the greenhouse effect. He said that within 40 to 50 years it would cause severe environmental events, droughts, fires, heat waves and so on. I thought, well, 40 to 50 years, we have a lot of time, we won't have to worry about that for a long time. Funny how fast 50 years goes by.
I would say, everyone should listen to the environmental scientists.
Yeah in the 1978s you could say that climate scientists were pretty sure this would happen, not fully understood yet, by the mid 80s it was certain. All of the typical objections you hear from friends or see in articles or think tank pieces are issues that were sorted out in the 1980s. ("it's the sun!, it is natural cycles!, it is happening but not because of humans!") all of that, reasonable questions in the 1970s, figured out by the mid 1980s, still tossed around today by people who think or pretend to be seriously thinking about this.
I never see those objections, instead I see the objections "I literally cannot afford the cheapest electric car and will be homeless and starving without a vehicle", "I need to heat my home to keep it habitable in sub zero temperatures in the winter", "I want to eat and not starve to death", "I want to cook food", etc.
i.e. people still need energy, and the renewable options have only very recently been viable for an individual to use, and only in some places, and often at great cost.
The objection to global warming isn't that it isn't real, it's that without fossil fuels most of us will die sooner than the worst case climate change effects ever will and so we have no choice.
> "I literally cannot afford the cheapest electric car and will be homeless and starving without a vehicle", "I need to heat my home to keep it habitable in sub zero temperatures in the winter", "I want to eat and not starve to death", "I want to cook food", etc.
Obviously we talk to different people but I've actually never heard anyone use this as a justification for our behavior. It's either non-acceptance of environment-scientific facts or acceptance.
> The objection to global warming isn't that it isn't real, it's that without fossil fuels most of us will die sooner than the worst case climate change effects ever will and so we have no choice.
The political debates I'm following, North America and Europe make me believe that actual climate change denial is very much a real thing. More so the more rural and/or the more dependent on the oil and gas industry you get.
>> Obviously we talk to different people but I've actually never heard anyone use this as a justification for our behavior. It's either non-acceptance of environment-scientific facts or acceptance.
There was a poll done recently that asked people about whether they though climate change was a problem, and also how much they would be willing to spend to help solve it:
"A strong majority of respondents said they were somewhat or very concerned about the issue of climate change. However, one of the most interesting follow-up questions was this: “How much of your own money would you be willing to personally spend each month to reduce the impact of climate change?”
The vast majority of voters were only willing to make very minimal financial sacrifices.
About 35 percent said they wouldn’t be willing to spend anything, with another 15 percent saying they’d only sacrifice $1-$10. Another 6 percent were willing to give up $11-$20, while 5 percent said they’d sacrifice $21-$30. In all, a whopping 75 percent of respondents were not willing to pay more than $50 a month."
That doesn't sound at all like "non-acceptance of environment-scientific facts or acceptance". That sounds like people think it is real but have other priorities for their money, which is what the parent poster was saying (a bit histrionically).
"Online survey among 1,200 registered voters nationwide conducted April 15 – 18, 2021. Respondents were selected randomly from optin panel participants. Sampling controls were used to ensure that a proportional and representative number of respondents were
interviewed from such demographic groups as age, gender, race, and geographic region.
Gender breakdown: 48% men – 52% women
±2.83% overall margin of error at the 95% confidence interval for overall survey. M.O.E.s for subgroups are larger."
You can find other polls that find the same results:
People agree that climate change is an issue. Most of them are willing to pay taxes to do something about it. They're just not willing to pay very much.
You'll get a budget of maybe $10 a month per taxpayer if you want majority approval.
I reject your framing entirely. Not dealing with climate change is the more expensive option.
This is the same absurd tactic that is used against some kind of sane medical system. "It'll cost 10 Billion" say the headlines. We can't afford that say the pundits. The report says, continuing on with the status quo will cost 12 Billion, but somehow we can afford that?
It's not my framing, it's the opinion of the electorate. You don't need to convince me, you need to convince them.
My framing would be that if you look at the consensus opinion of scientists on the effects of climate change, it's going to cost a few percentage points of GDP by 2100 over what we would otherwise have. Which is nothing to get hysterical about, but it would be worth doing something about it to lessen the risks of worst case scenarios. That something would be a carbon tax with the proceeds used to scrub CO2 and to do similar actions to mitigate the effects of climate change.
But a carbon tax has a 0.0% chance of being enacted. It has no political support, and if it costs the public more than a few dollars a month, they vote no.
Carbon taxes or policies that are basically equivalent have already been used in a variety of political systems across the world in various contexts and have worked well and are popular. Usually, it becomes quickly obvious that simply not emitting the CO2 in the first place is the cheapest option.
while I ma be histrionic, the only time I ever encounter any climate science denial is when it is brought up as an insult in a "oh those people who beleive this nonsense" way. I have never encountered it "in the wild", so to speak. Not once.
This is why I am sceptical that it is anything other than a fictional bogeyman to obfuscate rich climate change believers unwillingness to sacrifice luxuries, and poor climate change believers inability to live above absolute crushing poverty [without fossil fuels].
A poll conducted on behalf of an advocacy group with unpublished actual question format that conveniently aligns rather exactly with the preexisting position of the advocacy group can't safely be assumed to be a anything other than a push poll.
“Global warming is real but I cannot personally afford to be carbon-neutral in the society as it is set up” is a fine position to take, but folks making that objection should be aiming to see large-scale structural changes to the society so their descendants don’t end up living through the end of civilization. The problematic part is “... but I like how things are going and nothing should change even though it is grossly unsustainable.”
Personally I have not heard this per se. Everyone I know who is opposed to climate science / energy policy changes is a wealthy person living in material excess, largely for social signaling purposes (e.g. buying more and larger houses and cars than they need for any practical purpose), and their denials are fed by right-wing propaganda and self-serving delusion.
I don't know those people. I would like to own a car and maybe a house one day so perhaps that influences my own perspective. I would rather my descendants were able to inherit property in an industrial society with a severe climate crisis, than have them be property-less peasants with no prospects and utterly dependant on their socioeconomic "betters" for handouts in a world with diminishing global warming.
> The objection to global warming isn't that it isn't real
No, that's usually the objection. There's a reason "climate denier" is a phrase.
I don't think anyone would mind a purely technical discussion of how to provide power, mitigate impact to the poor, etc. Instead you get claims the scientists are part of some global conspiracy.
I see or hear all of those objections regularly. Facebook, Twitter, Conservative or Republican politicians. Literally on this very thread there are people claiming global warming isn't real.
The objection was absolutely "global warming isn't real" for literally decades. Only more recently, now that that the evidence is too overwhelming for those with even the slightest shred of integrity to ignore, has the argument shifted to "okay fine, it's real, but it's too late and/or we can't afford to do anything about it anyway."
> I would say, everyone should listen to the environmental scientists.
I am fascinated by the people who claim, “well those scientists are just saying that for the money”. They plainly have no idea what the financial life of a research scientist is like.
Or how they can't see how much oil companies would be willing to spend if they could prove them wrong.
Or how the basic problem is so simple physics, you'd have to bribe either a significant percentage of the population or actual laws physics to succeed in this conspiracy.
I think this just shows that for most of these guys, the dollars are a way of score keeping, they don't actually care about the trappings of wealth other than making rockets or whatever, which is just another score card, who gets to go in orbit first etc.
So, crazy idea here, what if we set up a way that they can actually give their money to people who actually need it while they get to keep their "dick measuring points".
In other words, here is the score card for each super rich guy, Bezos, Musk, Gates, etc. etc. you keep your points, so you have your bragging rights or whatever, but people who are in need of help get the actual dollars which you obviously can never spend, cannot possibly need etc. etc. You give it to people who need it but keep your dumbass "karma points" just like the dummies on Hacker News who care about that or whatever.
It sounds like you don't understand how wealth works and you're having some sort of emotional reaction towards "rich people".
I just did a quick search for the breakdown, but essential 81% of Elon's wealth is Tesla stock and 14% is SpaceX. The remaining 5% is a combination of assets. The important point is that 95%+ of his wealth is being actively used by other people for things like salaries, research and manufacturing. That's how investing works: you give your money to other people in exchange for some well defined privileges. We talk about those privileges as being worth a certain $x but that's not at all the same as having $x.
There is no Uncle Scrooge style vault with cash. Other people are using that money.
are bit coins a measure of value ?
are karma points a measure of anything ?
what is money ?
what is value ?
what is a measure ?
maybe points are points ?
