Slashdot Mirror

Still no mention of the cat though.

Google is your friend, and fuck you NPR.

The Eye of Sauron. Confirmed by C|Net

Also, here are image/article sources showing the same behavior I'm describing (Quick Removal as default) on

Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows 8.x
Windows 10

I was kind of planning to get a new phone this year, but given how the real 5G rollout has gone just now, I am not thinking there will be much point in owning a 5G phone even by winter... maybe at the end of next year the network and the hardware will be stabilized.

On a side-note, if you read that article it has an aside about how they are using a phone that has a separate battery for 5G so it doesn't eat the main battery!!! That is nuts to me.

Sure, after a decade the government said "No, bad company." But there weren't fines issued.

They settled... for $415 million.

Even for google and apple, nearly half a billion dollars is not pocket change. https://www.cnet.com/news/appl...

...Working in tech field, then you probably have NDAs/claims that you are taking their intellectual property. Failing that, remember when Apple, Adobe, Google, etc. agreed not to hire each other's employees?

Yes, but that was challenged and ruled illegal by the U.S. government. That makes a difference: in the US, the government challenges the anticompetitive "gentleman's agreement". In China, the government enforces it.

https://www.cnet.com/news/appl...

https://www.mintz.com/insights...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Still... where are my back wages? Where were the big fines on these companies who were involved in a criminal conspiracy that affected millions of workers.

...Working in tech field, then you probably have NDAs/claims that you are taking their intellectual property. Failing that, remember when Apple, Adobe, Google, etc. agreed not to hire each other's employees?

Yes, but that was challenged and ruled illegal by the U.S. government. That makes a difference: in the US, the government challenges the anticompetitive "gentleman's agreement". In China, the government enforces it.

https://www.cnet.com/news/appl...
https://www.mintz.com/insights...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I have an hp stream box with Win10. I run it in tablet mode and it streams anything, runs Kodi and doesn't make any noise. I got it off craigslist afew years ago and it's discontinued.

Today, I'd go with something like this. It's so much nicer to have a full pc that I can do what I want with.

It's Unbreakable.

https://www.cnet.com/news/face...

You won't need to give your email to sign up for a new account anymore.

After a Twitter user called out the social media giant over the practice on Sunday, Facebook has backtracked on the verification requirement.

The fact that they did at one time is enough to condemn them.

And why isn't there more on LinkedIN's bullshit. I wouldn't sign up because they wanted access to my contacts list for my email. When are we all going to realize that ALL social media platforms and ALL websites that require registration of some sort is going to abuse and pimp our data?

https://www.cnet.com/news/face...

You won't need to give your email to sign up for a new account anymore.

After a Twitter user called out the social media giant over the practice on Sunday, Facebook has backtracked on the verification requirement.

That link takes me to a really hosed up page.

Isn't this a win for consumers, or did I misremember the old Qualcomm antenna woes? Or old news?

https://www.pcmag.com/news/364...

https://www.cnet.com/videos/th...

Part of the cnet conversation:

"Now a recent report from Bloomberg claimed Apple might be throttling Verizon's LTE performance with a Qualcomm modem in order to make it perform similarly to the Intel chip that's in other phones. The Qualcomm hardware is theoretically capable of a maximum 600 megabits per second for download speeds. Compared to the Intel modem that's topped out at 450 megabytes per second."

Can't understand why Apple just doesn't make them run slower: https://www.cnet.com/news/appl...

Password managers are precisely the same technological base that we all use. It's not a special, hardened, gated community.

Use LastPass? Update now to protect your passwords (explainer)

That's very useful, thanks! Another good thing to know:

Right-click on the App - goto properties
In the properties window, look for the "Shortcut Key" field

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/open-programs-with-keyboard-shortcuts-in-windows-10/

Recall "NSA likely targets anybody who's 'Tor-curious'" https://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-... (July 3, 2014)

Posting a software fix for this "very rare" occurrence - that has happened in at least 155 reported instances in New Zealand alone, according to TFS - isn't going to do Lime any good, at this point. It's going to face product liability suits, personal injury suits, and class-action suits (despite the laughable prohibition against filing or participating in class action suits in Section 5.8 of its User Agreement, and other language restricting its users available forum for remedies to binding arbitration, and - rather hilariously, IMnsHO - attempting to limit Lime's maximum financial liability for any injury a user might suffer to a princely $100) that are unquestionably going to be financially ruinous for the company.

Fatally so, because it's a venture-capital-funded startup, and the lawyers for Uber, Google Ventures, and other firms that have financed it to the tune of more than $300 million thus far are undoubtedly going to advise their respective management teams that it's now time to cut their losses, write off their investment in Lime, and apply the losses to offset taxes on companies they've funded in the past that are now producing actual profits, rather than liabilities.

The thing that gets me is how the idiots running Lime's software development team decided that rolling out untested code to their deployed fleet of vehicles could in any way have been considered a good idea. I mean, it's one thing for Mark Zuckerberg to flog his coders to "move fast and break things." Bugs in Facebook's code have no potential to physically injure or kill its users. Motor vehicles operated by biological humans on non-virtual streets, in real-world traffic conditions. are a completely different matter. They entail a whole different order of risks: both to their riders' lives, physical health, and safety, and to the company's own existence, should it be found legally liable for any injuries suffered by the former due to its employees' negligence.

And it almost certainly will be held liable. All a plaintiff's lawyers have to establish is that the code that caused the brake lock-ups had not been sufficiently-well tested (if, indeed, it was tested at all) before it was rolled out to the fleet of scooters that Lime's customers paid it to rent, and it's "Game over! Thank you for playing," because I can't see any court in any country ruling that the company's attempt to duck liability for its negligence via the ham-handed provisions of its User Agreement as enforceable, or in any way reasonable or fair.

Disclaimer: IANAL. If Lime's broken-ass software has caused you to sustain an injury of any kind, I strongly advise you to consult an actual, admitted-to-practice-before-the-bar-type barrister about it - preferably one who has a long record of winning product liability cases against companies with a history of employing predatory user agreements to try to prevent their customers from holding them responsible for their negligence ...

At least camera maker RED had the guts to make a smartphone with a glasses-free 3D Lightfield screen last year, and a stereo 3D camera in front. ( https://www.cnet.com/news/reds... ) Samsung et al just up the screen resolution, throw in a faster Snapdragon, and that's about it. Also, Samsung's plastic-and-glass flagship phones with non-removable battery appear to be designed to shatter to pieces - drop one without a sturdy protective casing around it, and the phone's kaputt.

Moon cracks...smash becomes.

Personally, I'm more concerned with Facebook's lasers and their new CLO, Chairface Chippendale.

That is sometimes true, but in London (and I suspect other big cities with metro systems like New York, Paris, etc.) it's usually the fastest way from A to B. Even the famous Black Cab with their privileged use of Bus Lanes, and intricate knowledge of the streets can't compete with the speed of a Tube Train through the centre of London.

It's not as bad as you imagine because everyone in London uses the tube, not just those that are downtrodden and smelly. In fact, many of the trains on the network are quite decent in comparison to what springs to mind when the phrase "public transport" is used:

http://www.railtechnologymagaz...
https://londonist.com/london/t...

Then you have the inter-city trains, like the one from London to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam etc. There's no comparison to flying:

https://www.cnet.com/pictures/...

Joe Rogan put it well when interviewing Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay; and discussing where all this shit is coming from:

There's many fields of [grievance] study you can get legitimate degrees in that are absolutely preposterous. Literally filled with nonsense, taught by nonsense people who live in these nonsense bubbles. And then they give these degrees and these people go out in the real world and they infect things; their ridiculousness infects certain, particularly tech industry businesses.

So EA has been fully subsumed and they're paying the price of infection. Their WWII game is full of fictional combat super women, the player base has walked away, and EA is fine with it, going full retard and demeaning their customers.

The silver lining in all this sick fail is that young men — doing their level best to avoid everything (college, women, politics, etc.,) beyond their gaming machine — have had a small taste of this Orwellian bullshit. Their coming for you there as well, you latent rapist oppressors.

AFAIK, the "wall" is supposed to be built outside of official border crossing points. "Official" border crossings have used x-ray or similar scanners since at least 2012; they probably check for radiation too.

https://www.cnet.com/news/dhs-...

I'm not actually in favor of a wall, but Nauseating Nancy Pelosi seems to be discussing an entirely different issue. What's the long-term solution? Fix the broken immigration system, issue an amount of guest-worker permits that's sufficient to meet demand for immigration.

If we're going to build a "wall" along the border, I'm not sure that either a wall or high-tech will do much. Anyone willing to cross a hundred miles of desert isn't going to be fazed by another obstacle that's surmountable. Want to patrol the more rugged parts of the border? First build a road or track along it, then use Border Patrol mounted on horseback combined with drones with IR cameras. The terrain is such that mounted troops are actually more effective than motor vehicles or walls.

Hybrid trains were tested some time ago, and interest has been significantly renewed of late as you might imagine. Bombardier is building precisely the kind of thing you're talking about for a test program in Germany.

The company I work for is all in on Google apps. The standard for email is GMail, we use Google Calendar, we use Google Drive to share files, we use Google apps for collaborating on spreadsheets or word processor documents, and most people use Google Slides for presenting. For remote meetings we use Google Hangouts. We also use web-based software such as Slack and an issue tracker.

Because of all this, a Chromebook is an excellent solution for many people in our company.

The best thing about a Chromebook is that it Just Works. It's locked-down nature means you really don't need to worry about malware, and it automatically downloads security updates. (Unlike Windows 10, ChromeOS never forces you to take an update while you are in the middle of a meeting or presentation.)

Also, if you are using "cloud" storage apps like the Google apps, then if anything happens to the Chromebook, the data will all be backed up. Your employee would be able to just get a new Chromebook and could get sorted out and back to work very quickly.

Because your business is too small to have a dedicated IT department, using all Google apps would have significant advantages. And those apps are IMHO about as easy to use as Microsoft apps or MacOS apps.

As a bonus, if you standardize on Google apps, then your employee has the option of installing some of the apps on her phone (maybe just GMail). I have everything installed on my phone, including Google Hangouts, and I can deal with a lot of possible emergencies with just my phone. I like that.

The one question mark I have is whether bibliography software is available for a Chromebook. A Chromebook does have Linux app support now, plus Android app support, and there are web-based bibliography systems, so... maybe?

Also, some people strongly disapprove of Google, feeling that Google track too much about what you do with their software. If you have a philosophical objection to Google you may not want a Chromebook solution.

I agree with all the people saying not to skimp but to get something nice. If you do this, I'd recommend one of Google's own branded products... the top of the line would be a Google Pixelbook which gets very favorable reviews.

P.S. I personally own a Samsung Chromebook Plus with a non-Intel CPU (a hexa-core OP1 running ARM instructions). I've been happy with it... IMHO it looks a lot like an Apple product but it has a much better keyboard. It's half the cost of a Pixelbook but not as fancy. Like the Pixelbook it's just a touch over 1 kg and has long battery life. It does come with a stylus and it has a storage silo for the stylus.

Yes, plenty. Which means psergiu's point is correct and your response to it is nonsense.

Smart watches can monitor the heart rate constantly, which are tied to the smart phones. As much as I HATE apple, https://www.cnet.com/news/appl.... Others will follow.
Myself, nope. I like my Citizens watch, so I will most likely stay with it. I know they also have a smart watch. Maybe someday.
Just saying. Everyone has their phone with them. More and more people are buying the watch(god, please don't let me give in). They offer everything a fit and other health gadgets have.

Well, it certainly was either incompetence or malice. Google were (actually are) using a non-standard "Shadow DOM v0" model that was only implemented in the Google Chrome browser. On non-chrome, a "polyfill" or pure javascript implementation of that DOM engine was used instead.

And it's not just Microsoft that are complaining here.

That's right, all you anti-microsoft blinkered people out there, Mozilla has the same complaint about Google.

YouTube basically uses an experimental version ("v0") of the shadow DOM API that is officially oboslete before it really got any traction (it's been superceeded by other versions). It was so obsolete that only Chrome implements. it is officially "depcreated" by Google, but we'll see what happens in April 2019.

Bluetooth has a history of security holes. Here's just one link https://www.cnet.com/news/blue...

They already forced a vote to show who was and wasn't in favor of it. We learned two things from that

a. it's an almost completely partisan issue

b. There's not enough votes to overcome a veto.

so I don't think it's a good way to spend political capital.

and understands why it's important. So does Liz Warren. And Ro Khanna.

Here's a list of Senators and how they voted on NN. Notice all the "D"s when it comes to "for" and all the "Rs" when it comes to against? I know partisanship isn't popular on /., but at a certain point it really is a partisan issue. 3 Republicans voted for NN out of 52. Not a single Dem voted against it. We've got another election in 2020, so now's the time to decide if NN is really something important to you or not...

Facebook employees and tech companies in general have moved hard left. You can't wipe away the number 2 position at Facebook's email to Hillary's campaign manager just because once upon a time Thiel was brought on in 2005 and they haven't yet fired him. As I said, it's non-trivial to remove a board member.

You can't wipe away internal reports of just how intolerantly left Facebook's culture is -- even Zuckerberg admitted Silicon Valley is an "extremely left-leaning place" in testimony before Congress.

Yep, rockets are tricky.

Sure! I'm glad you asked.

Here.
Here.
Here.

They did signal VR and even put a lot of development effort into it. It's only recently that they decided against it:

https://www.cnet.com/news/here...

Oh to be an ignorant apple user
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/find-out-what-data-apple-has-on-you/

The German government has already stepped in and compelled facebook to police hate speech, and facebook is complying: https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-weve-removed-hundreds-of-posts-under-german-hate-speech-law/

But you're probably focused on the USA. Facebook's CEO was recently on capital hill though, so we've got some scary quotes:

"Feinstein raised that threat explicitly after complaining about the industry's inability to thwart Russia's effort to influence the 2016 election, saying, “You bear this responsibility. You've created these platforms. And now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it. Or we will.”" Of course that's voting interference and not hate speech. But once they're policing speech, hate/politics tomayto/tomawto.

I like Randall Munroe, he's a smart guy and pretty funny. But he misses the larger picture in that comic. He conflates free speech with the first amendment. Freedom of speech is a larger issue that's older than the US government. It was born out of the age of enlightenment and is a foundation of western civilization and liberalism. Free Speech is fundamental to a functional democracy, and many nations have laws giving people legal rights to that regard. But allowing others to use your severs as a platform for speech is a moral issue. You, as the owner, can choose to do whatever you want with your property. You can shut the server down, you can selectively purge, you can block people, whatever. Slashdot and Reddit are owned by companies and they can do so as they please. But I am free to simply abstain from them if they act like tyrannical fascist censoring jack-boot thugs. These are the modern-age public squares that so much of our laws are built around. It'd be nice we we could have some place where we could easily and quickly make public comment, but these are privately owned. Luckily the Internet makes dissent easy and if you don't like the level of censorship in a given forum, there are plenty out there to choose from. If these places start throwing people out the door based on ideological discrimination, (past a reasonable threshold, I mean, I'm not crazy) then I'll simply exit on my own. I feel no need to support immoral actions.

That's what I was thinking. Read this to see what Bill's true feelings towards Paul Allen was.

It appears that the invisible hand of the market is comfortable holding a larger phone.

Will it be legal to shoot them down, like drones - if they fly over your property? :D

As your lovely nubile teenage daughter and her friends sunbathe semi nude in your backyard - you can't forget that part of the rationale.

https://www.cnet.com/news/judg...

CNET's take is "No, half of The Last Jedi haters were not Russian trolls". They're position is that it's a lot more complicated: the sample set was only 1k tweets directed at Rian Johnson, and so missed all the others (eg: those to Mark Hamill, who has way more followers); the researcher manually "cleaned" the tweets, removing ones he didn't think applied; he decided himself what was a negative vs positive vs neutral, leaving it open to argument; and the media reporting is distorting the numbers and conclusions.

Physicists said the Em Drive was "Impossible" then NASA tested it and it worked.

https://www.cnet.com/news/theo...

https://www.space.com/40682-em...

You are using old data. Here: https://www.sciencealert.com/i...

You can read thrust in any direction you want, perhaps in two opposite directions at the same time. And the amount of energy it takes to get that omnidirectional "thrust" is pretty impressive. Personally, I think it is heating effects, and perhaps the magnetic field of the earth interfering. And that's as good a guess as QI. The EM drive will now live on as youtube videos for the perpetual motion crowd, and the people who believe that you can heat your entire house with a tea candle and a clay pot.

Physicists said the Em Drive was "Impossible" then NASA tested it and it worked.

https://www.cnet.com/news/theo...

https://www.space.com/40682-em...

It's completely unenforceable. Even if the State could locate and identify the boots, they can't do anything about it if they aren't in California.

No but a certain prominent company headquartered in California just demonstrated such technoloy and they certainly could be held accountable. Frankly just about any company that matters has a presence in Silicon Valley and that gives the State of California leverage. It's similar to how the State of New York has outsized leverage in financial regulation because of the fact that NYC also happens to be a major financial center where all the major players do business.

Except the 5th amendment means you don't have to give up your passcode since you would be self-incriminating.

Biometrics are different which is why disabling it quickly is a good idea.

https://www.cnet.com/news/face...

Huawei's Watch 2 claims two days of battery life under normal use. That's 2.5 times better than Apple. And the Huawei looks good with its round body, unlike Apple's clunky/ugly phone-on-a-wrist. No wonder Huawei got such a big chunk of the market already. And they are said to be bring out a product with a full week of battery life. There you go, Huawei concentrates on what's important for a watch. Apple brags about more bits.

What is offtopic about that?

Well it came from a stupid nígger for starters.

Huawei's Watch 2 claims two days of battery life under normal use. That's 2.5 times better than Apple. And the Huawei looks good with its round body, unlike Apple's clunky/ugly phone-on-a-wrist. No wonder Huawei got such a big chunk of the market already. And they are said to be bring out a product with a full week of battery life. There you go, Huawei concentrates on what's important for a watch. Apple brags about more bits.

What is offtopic about that?

Huawei's Watch 2 claims two days of battery life under normal use. That's 2.5 times better than Apple. And the Huawei looks good with its round body, unlike Apple's clunky/ugly phone-on-a-wrist. No wonder Huawei got such a big chunk of the market already. And they are said to be bring out a product with a full week of battery life. There you go, Huawei concentrates on what's important for a watch. Apple brags about more bits.

>>preaching to the converted

Casting zealotry stones in a glass house, are we?

This only happened with apple iconography:

digitaltrends.com/apple/apple-causes-religious-reaction-in-brains-of-fans-say-neuroscientists/
https://www.digitaltrends.com/...

cnet.com/news/scientists-apple-makes-your-brain-go-all-religious/
https://www.cnet.com/news/scie...

disinfo.com/2011/06/apple-products-trigger-the-same-parts-of-the-brain-as-religion
https://www.disinfo.com/2011/0...

geek.com/apple/apple-fanaticism-similar-to-religious-devotion-according-to-scientists-1381035/
https://www.geek.com/apple/app...

cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/05/19/apple.religion/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/g...

WHATEVA, ANDROYD CULTZ has always been a shitty deflection, sorry. They're not the ones circlejerking.

• The first phone with an on-screen keyboard was the LG Prada (introduced a few months before the iPhone). In fact it was the first capacitive touchscreen phone, not the iPhone as widely believed.
• Here's pinch to zoom in 1988.
• Android had whole device search before Apple. But Apple was first to file for, and got the patent (Google apparently didn't think the idea was patentable). Google removed it from Android when Apple began using the patent to sue.
• Digital cameras had an orientation sensor to detect if a photo was taken in portrait or landscape mode, and would display the photo as such (which creates the annoying problem where you take a photo in portrait mode, but want to view it in landscape mode - the device won't let you do it because it keeps flipping the photo's playback orientation).
• While Apple pushed screens past 300 PPI, Android was actually the one which started the high-res craze. The original iPhone was only 163 PPI. The first Galaxy S was 233 PPI. And things began climbing from there. So picking 300 PPI as a threshold is extremely arbitrary. Apple was constrained to doubling the screen resolution (163 PPI to 326 PPI) due to limitations in iOS' design. Android's design allows variable screen size to resolution ratios, so its PPI climbed gradually as manufacturers pushed out higher and higher res screens.
• Spell checkers are far, far older than phones. I remember seeing the squiggly line underneath spelling errors in the late 1990s.
• Not sure why Apple is credited with multitasking cards. iOS multitasking initially wasn't true multitasking - only certain functions (like music playback) were allowed to continue running when an app was in the foreground. Outside of those functions, iOS would basically task-switch, not multi-task (continue to run the program in the background). Android had true multitasking from the get-go, killing tasks in FIFO order as the device ran out of RAM.
• Cut, copy, paste is credited to Android in the list. But Apple introduced those concepts with the original Macintosh in the 1980s (though they probably lifted the idea from Xerox PARC).
• The dock was introduced with NextSTEP way back in 19888. Though to be fair, Jobs was a co-founder of the company (probably some low-rank grunt developer came up with the idea).
• Portrait photos (using two lenses to determine distance and blurring the background) was something I predicted way back in the 1990s when digital point and shoot cameras first began coming out. I'm sure I wasn't the first one to think of it either. It's an obvious idea if you understand how an interferometer works. You realize you don't need an entire circular lens to create the blur, you can simulate it with just two physical points on opposite sides of a virtual lens.
• Pay-by-phone was available in Korea (primarily with Samsung's phones since they had NFC first) way back in 2011. Apple was just the first to introduce the function in the U.S.
• You could do WiFi calls on both devices using a SIP app long before they began adding the capability to your phone's dailer. In particular, Sprint partnered with Google Voice in 2011 - your Sprint number became your Google Voice number, allowing you to make and receive calls from your phone number over cellular, WiFi, or cellular data. This was years before the 2014 "innovation" date listed in the spreadsheet.
• Voicemail