Yeah OK,/sarcasm tag. But your straw man sucks; Getting into a car with a complete stranger - who thus has de facto control over your life for that time you're riding together - is very different from going into a store.
C'mon Timmy, I know they've got you posting 24/7 but still... Unicode support - we understand it's hard, we can wait. But checking the English is something our new overlords could fix fast..
Well, I'm no Facebook fan, (have been "wasting" my time here for years on/. instead.) That hasn't stopped me holding down a job and delivering value to my clients over those same years. Also, before the interwebs people did crossword puzzles, and other "non productive" stuff. Plenty of people find Facebook a useful marketing tool also; my wife breeds and sells cats, and plenty of contacts have come via fb.
Of Slashdot posts...either the poor lad's working around the clock or Whipslash and the others are posting using the Tim profile. I understand that these things take time, but guys, if you could avoid posting Windows 10 non-stories every 5 minutes that would be an improvement.
The sad thing is that Apple would be uniquely positioned to introduce a whole range of new technologies into the consumer marketplace.
Totally agree; I like nailing things together, and have probably spent too much time and money doing so, but friends and colleagues like stuff that "just works". As I age, I'm coming round to that point of view too... People spend tons of money on high-end AV brands, (my neighbour proudly showed me his new B&O come cinema setup the other day...it was great, but for 50 fucking grand it should be). I'm sure that type of person would be ready to buy an Apple TV, (not the little shitty box, but a real TV) for $insane_amount, especially if it offered seamless integration with other iDevices. Think about it, the IOT could actually become useful instead of being a box of MBA bullshit riddled with security flaws; you're listening to a great track in your car, and as you walk into the house it keeps playing on the home system. The email you were reading or composing gets read out to you, or voice-recognised, as you move from office to the car. Or, you're talking to someone on the hands-free in the car or motorbike helmet, and as you come into the house again it seamlessly hands-over to the house system... I (kinda) have all this today, but it required a LOT of time and cash, (ripping out modern OEM car audio these days while retaining full functionality requires some serious hackery, and that's AFTER you've managed to root and debug the Chinese-made WinCE or Android "compatible" head unit).
And don't get me started on the long-promised "universal inbox and address book"....
So yes, what Apple seemingly lacks is the vision to leverage it's unique closed ecosystem and huge cash pile into a range of devices giving a totally seamless experience, with tight integration between diverse devices. Apple brown and white goods, smart thermostats and home security; yeah could work.
I've worked in "third world" countries, (how I hate that term). On the downside, most things are run into the ground and then thoroughly scavenged for everything possible of value. And then the rubbish dumps are hand-sorted. Because lots of young people plus no money = lots of hungry manpower But I'm sure you can get people interested in your project, and get things of very, very little value for your projects. Because everyone is thirsting for knowledge, (as well as clean water) Get creative! Get the community involved, trade teaching hours for hardware... Cars will yield fuses, voltage regulators, thin wire of little value for copper for the recyclers, switches and - in more moderns ones recently crashed - plenty of tiny electric motors again of zero value to a recycler but fine for your projects. Almost anything can get you started - old TVs are of course the absolute best, just jammed full of stuff! But washing machines are pretty good too, and even an old coffee machine can get you an electric thermostat plus the power supply. Look on the web - there are dozens of sources that will help you turn old stuff into some magnificent steampunk robotics! You don't have to buy an expensive kit of parts to make a robot.
Oh, and by the way, you don't have to buy a Pi either - you can get started by using a washing machine controller as your program control unit. (Sadly now banned in many parts of the world, since they make excellent bomb timers) Not everything has to be digital... Have fun!
This is the kind of tripe that's sinking/. Yesterday, journos spin a "hey maybe there's something interesting here" announcement into an "OMG another planet" gush... Today, we are supposed to click though to the dreadful Forbes site to find out...that more data is required.... Fuck me, who'd have thought it! Of course, the scientific method is so passé these days.
It reminds me of the tabloid that published a story (with picture) about the "amazing discovery of a WW2 bomber found on the Moon" Did the ensuing ridicule and debunking faze them in the slightest? Nope. They followed-up with "WW2 bomber on Moon disappears"...
Important news for nerds, ladies and gentlemen, get it while it's hot...
People buying Tesla don't give a damn about depreciation. People buying smaller electric cars (Nissan Leaf etc.) clearly don't care too much about value for money either. Electric cars (pure, not hybrid) could be a great solution for polluted city centres, but unless the Renault-touted replaceable battery pack concept takes off, (it has not so far), I don't see that a cab driver is going to tolerate cutting earnings in half every day while they wait for the car to charge... Finally, pure elec cars have much fewer, and simpler mechanical components, so in theory they should be economically viable to repair for much longer. A more compelling argument would have been: "Have an open Systems architecture that makes hardware and software upgrades trivial." Tesla manages to push software upgrades that add significant function without breaking stuff so it's clearly possible... Also, make the only truly expensive bit of hardware that definitely does wear out - the battery pack - easy to replace.
The trouble is, the "nth party removed" defense has been used and abused so much that activists have got wise. You think a company like Apple does not have incredibly competent buyers, with years of experience and great knowledge of exactly, but exactly, where their stuff comes from, even "n" layers removed? Equally, you think they don't have clauses in their T&Cs specifying that their suppliers' suppliers' suppliers don't boil fairies and castrate unicorns to make the product? Sure they do. And everybody knows it's all bullshit.
So, it's actually worse than you state - are they irresponsible? You decide. For instance, you might argue that the kids are better off digging cobalt than wandering around as part of a child army... Back on topic, do they not know? Sure they do. So blame both customer and supplier if you're going there. While you're at it, you can blame the consumer who knows this too...
There were no words - since their "deeds" appeared (from TFA) to consist of redacting over 300 pages of what he did request, (which was pretty innocuous and non-specific, BTW; he just asked what TOWNS the program had been active in...) They then fill-in with a bunch of boilerplate to look like they had actually complied with the request. Bad-faith bureaucratic stonewalling at its finest.
The main payload in the article is that the dude infers that a program that was declared illegal was simply repackaged and buried deeper, hence the desire to not give away too many details since they'll probably being doing the same old....
I'm happy to pay my taxes to live in a state of law, since democracy cannot exist without it. But I'm increasingly of the impression that I'm getting short changed on both.
Nuclear is pretty clean, and low co2. Yes, it's more expensive than its boosters pretend, but then ago so are most of the other highly-subsidised alternatives. Disposal of the waste is not as difficult as people pretend, and in fact would be simple and cheap if successive generations of politicians not bowed to NIMBY pressure...
Running older reactors can be perfectly safe too; costs a bit more, since you have to model how the materials age and replacement can be tricky, but there are specialists who provide those services. The concern is that some organisations are moving away from the "safety first, money no object" mentality to squeeze more cash out of their already highly-profitable installations.
They are not. Bear in mind that the vast majority of reactors are pretty old; they were built before the Internet existed in its current state. So the original monitoring and control systems were, and sometimes still are, beautifully steampunk, clonky, electromechanical beasts. Ridiculously over-engineered and redundant, they have in many cases been worked far beyond their design lives. Predicable problems being that spares, and people who know how to use them correctly, are getting scarce. So, modern SCADA is getting installed slowly. These systems are never, repeat never, connected to the outside. Whilst of course this does not preclude a STUXNET-type attack, it does make any easy internet attack impossible.
Well, why not the aeronautical equivalent for the bigger ones, at least. Sure, it's easy to mock and say "because California", but this time the boys from the land of nutjob legislation have a point. I impulse-bought a cheap drone I came across in the store to see what the fuss was about; no GPS or fancy self-guidance, just a remote control. Damn, that thing was hard to control at first, and I used to fly jet fighters - albeit a long time ago.
So perhaps this is actually a better suggestion than the FAA "self-registration" scheme. Over a certain weight, you have to produce ID and included in the price is the registration fee and insurance for a year. If I get my head stoved-in by somebody's out of control drone, at least the medical is covered...
We have a winner! I'm a geeky guy with plenty of home automation; but
1. It's all wired by me, and NOT connected to the outside. 2. Critical functions are redundant, with good old electro-mechanical or just plain mechanical backups. The technology for these is proven, easy to understand and implement, reliable and...cheap.
No way I'm coming home to a frozen, flooded or on-fire house because of a "firmware update".
World leaders continued to queue up to lead trade delegations to China to grab more business. Once there, they will make brief, carefully stage-managed comments about "human rights" before getting right back down to business. Back home, they might meet the Dali Lama in between negotiations about selling-off the latest piece of the nation's infrastructure. What a cynical pantomime.
Meanwhile, our "friends" in China continue to prop-up the North Korean regime, and are so emboldened by Western inaction that they are now snatching dissidents off the street in Hong Kong and taking them to the mainland for *ahem* "questioning". So much for the "one country, two systems" promises. No wonder the Taiwanese just kicked-out the KMT (who lost power for the first time EVER) for being too pro-China and "reunification". The voters have seen the end of that film in Tibet and HK...
Oh yeah, and financed by us shipping all our manufacturing base and jobs out there, they're now constructing their own aircraft carrier, that's in addition to building and fortifying artificial islands in the South China Sea. No red flags!
So yes, let's continue to make a buck and help them out!
Bonus points for overuse of the word "protocol". By the way, the "much longer range" (debatable)...that's a function of the wavelength guys, not the protocol.
Anyway, dupe. Was widely discussed here the other day; can be bothered to find TFA. Was a nice nerdy conversation about range vs. antenna design vs. signals stomping all over each other... More info on 11ah here; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Don't see how this will bring any more - or less -security. If, and it's a big if, people learn from the mistakes of the past, then our previous experiences with wifi should make people more aware of the design risks and take proper steps to secure stuff. Of course, with all of the continuing revelations about hard-coded passwords, crap firmware and backdoors in everything from routers (both pro and consumer grade), "smart" meters and "smart house security solutions" *cough* the betting is probably that cheapo IoT devices will be as insecure as hell. But that's hardly the fault of the standard...
Interestingly, he has no Wikipedia article; I'm off out to dinner with friends, but if some kind soul could kick things off, let me know and I'll contribute tomorrow. Deserves a link to/from the "Enigma" page at least.
- USA presidential, house and senate politics will continue to be the despair of all USAians and the rest of the "free" world"; as a consequence silly posturing will continue instead of the visionary, brave and useful policy-making - The sames goes for Europe (or at least, most of the EU) - Despite obscene amounts of spending on the military by both of the above, their weapons systems and military "solutions" remain half-functional and useless to combat the - Various nutjob "terrerist" groups who will remain well-financed by their "allies" in the Middle East; jury awards for hypocrisy will continue to go to Turkey and Saudi Arabia (and its satellite Princedoms), with Israel, Pakistan and Egypt again qualifying for special awards in the category "biting the hands that feed them", - Putin will continue riding his kleptocratic tiger, and thus will stick to page one of the "Dictator's playbook", i.e. randomly invading places and/or supporting whackjobs, justifying his actions by saying "for years the West has done the same"... - For China, see Putin (above) - All of the above ensuring that poor people everywhere (and especially Middle East and Africa) will continue to get royally fucked-over
Now, technology: - Linux (yes, I know it's just the fucking kernel) nerds will continue to scream about SystemD; BSD nerds will continue to smirk into their neckbeards - Google and Apple will continue to plug their respective languages and platforms, since they have lots more money than ideas, hence - Their core business models and technology platforms will continue to stagnate, and most interest will revolve around how much money they can hide from the taxman in order to pay it back as ransom to bored but venal shareholders - Meanwhile, clueless tech-hipsters will continue to bore us fartless by comparing the relative benefits of the above "revolutionary" languages and platforms - Self-driving cars, powered by cheap, safe, nuclear fusion, will be available "real soon now" - Everyone with a brain, and a decent experience of IS/IT in the real world, will continue to despise the cunts at Oracle
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah OK, /sarcasm tag.
But your straw man sucks;
Getting into a car with a complete stranger - who thus has de facto control over your life for that time you're riding together - is very different from going into a store.
Well said.
Oblig. Winston Churchill quote, "A bigot is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject"
C'mon Timmy, I know they've got you posting 24/7 but still...
Unicode support - we understand it's hard, we can wait.
But checking the English is something our new overlords could fix fast..
Well, I'm no Facebook fan, (have been "wasting" my time here for years on /. instead.)
That hasn't stopped me holding down a job and delivering value to my clients over those same years.
Also, before the interwebs people did crossword puzzles, and other "non productive" stuff.
Plenty of people find Facebook a useful marketing tool also; my wife breeds and sells cats, and plenty of contacts have come via fb.
Of Slashdot posts...either the poor lad's working around the clock or Whipslash and the others are posting using the Tim profile.
I understand that these things take time, but guys, if you could avoid posting Windows 10 non-stories every 5 minutes that would be an improvement.
The sad thing is that Apple would be uniquely positioned to introduce a whole range of new technologies into the consumer marketplace.
Totally agree; I like nailing things together, and have probably spent too much time and money doing so, but friends and colleagues like stuff that "just works".
As I age, I'm coming round to that point of view too...
People spend tons of money on high-end AV brands, (my neighbour proudly showed me his new B&O come cinema setup the other day...it was great, but for 50 fucking grand it should be).
I'm sure that type of person would be ready to buy an Apple TV, (not the little shitty box, but a real TV) for $insane_amount, especially if it offered seamless integration with other iDevices.
Think about it, the IOT could actually become useful instead of being a box of MBA bullshit riddled with security flaws; you're listening to a great track in your car, and as you walk into the house it keeps playing on the home system. The email you were reading or composing gets read out to you, or voice-recognised, as you move from office to the car.
Or, you're talking to someone on the hands-free in the car or motorbike helmet, and as you come into the house again it seamlessly hands-over to the house system...
I (kinda) have all this today, but it required a LOT of time and cash, (ripping out modern OEM car audio these days while retaining full functionality requires some serious hackery, and that's AFTER you've managed to root and debug the Chinese-made WinCE or Android "compatible" head unit).
And don't get me started on the long-promised "universal inbox and address book"....
So yes, what Apple seemingly lacks is the vision to leverage it's unique closed ecosystem and huge cash pile into a range of devices giving a totally seamless experience, with tight integration between diverse devices. Apple brown and white goods, smart thermostats and home security; yeah could work.
I've worked in "third world" countries, (how I hate that term).
On the downside, most things are run into the ground and then thoroughly scavenged for everything possible of value.
And then the rubbish dumps are hand-sorted. Because lots of young people plus no money = lots of hungry manpower
But I'm sure you can get people interested in your project, and get things of very, very little value for your projects.
Because everyone is thirsting for knowledge, (as well as clean water)
Get creative! Get the community involved, trade teaching hours for hardware...
Cars will yield fuses, voltage regulators, thin wire of little value for copper for the recyclers, switches and - in more moderns ones recently crashed - plenty of tiny electric motors again of zero value to a recycler but fine for your projects.
Almost anything can get you started - old TVs are of course the absolute best, just jammed full of stuff!
But washing machines are pretty good too, and even an old coffee machine can get you an electric thermostat plus the power supply.
Look on the web - there are dozens of sources that will help you turn old stuff into some magnificent steampunk robotics!
You don't have to buy an expensive kit of parts to make a robot.
Oh, and by the way, you don't have to buy a Pi either - you can get started by using a washing machine controller as your program control unit.
(Sadly now banned in many parts of the world, since they make excellent bomb timers)
Not everything has to be digital...
Have fun!
Well, not sure we're there yet for computers.
We sure as hell are not for politicians...
After all, what can they do about a semi "driven" by a drunk or exhausted guy ploughing into you at speed?
This is the kind of tripe that's sinking /.
Yesterday, journos spin a "hey maybe there's something interesting here" announcement into an "OMG another planet" gush...
Today, we are supposed to click though to the dreadful Forbes site to find out...that more data is required....
Fuck me, who'd have thought it! Of course, the scientific method is so passé these days.
It reminds me of the tabloid that published a story (with picture) about the "amazing discovery of a WW2 bomber found on the Moon"
Did the ensuing ridicule and debunking faze them in the slightest? Nope.
They followed-up with "WW2 bomber on Moon disappears"...
Important news for nerds, ladies and gentlemen, get it while it's hot...
In fucking space!!!!
Where do I sign?
People buying Tesla don't give a damn about depreciation.
People buying smaller electric cars (Nissan Leaf etc.) clearly don't care too much about value for money either.
Electric cars (pure, not hybrid) could be a great solution for polluted city centres, but unless the Renault-touted replaceable battery pack concept takes off, (it has not so far), I don't see that a cab driver is going to tolerate cutting earnings in half every day while they wait for the car to charge...
Finally, pure elec cars have much fewer, and simpler mechanical components, so in theory they should be economically viable to repair for much longer.
A more compelling argument would have been:
"Have an open Systems architecture that makes hardware and software upgrades trivial."
Tesla manages to push software upgrades that add significant function without breaking stuff so it's clearly possible...
Also, make the only truly expensive bit of hardware that definitely does wear out - the battery pack - easy to replace.
Could it do anything for Trump's linguistics?
The trouble is, the "nth party removed" defense has been used and abused so much that activists have got wise.
You think a company like Apple does not have incredibly competent buyers, with years of experience and great knowledge of exactly, but exactly, where their stuff comes from, even "n" layers removed?
Equally, you think they don't have clauses in their T&Cs specifying that their suppliers' suppliers' suppliers don't boil fairies and castrate unicorns to make the product?
Sure they do.
And everybody knows it's all bullshit.
So, it's actually worse than you state - are they irresponsible? You decide.
For instance, you might argue that the kids are better off digging cobalt than wandering around as part of a child army...
Back on topic, do they not know? Sure they do. So blame both customer and supplier if you're going there.
While you're at it, you can blame the consumer who knows this too...
There were no words - since their "deeds" appeared (from TFA) to consist of redacting over 300 pages of what he did request, (which was pretty innocuous and non-specific, BTW; he just asked what TOWNS the program had been active in...)
They then fill-in with a bunch of boilerplate to look like they had actually complied with the request.
Bad-faith bureaucratic stonewalling at its finest.
The main payload in the article is that the dude infers that a program that was declared illegal was simply repackaged and buried deeper, hence the desire to not give away too many details since they'll probably being doing the same old....
I'm happy to pay my taxes to live in a state of law, since democracy cannot exist without it.
But I'm increasingly of the impression that I'm getting short changed on both.
Nuclear is pretty clean, and low co2. Yes, it's more expensive than its boosters pretend, but then ago so are most of the other highly-subsidised alternatives. Disposal of the waste is not as difficult as people pretend, and in fact would be simple and cheap if successive generations of politicians not bowed to NIMBY pressure...
Running older reactors can be perfectly safe too; costs a bit more, since you have to model how the materials age and replacement can be tricky, but there are specialists who provide those services. The concern is that some organisations are moving away from the "safety first, money no object" mentality to squeeze more cash out of their already highly-profitable installations.
They are not.
Bear in mind that the vast majority of reactors are pretty old; they were built before the Internet existed in its current state.
So the original monitoring and control systems were, and sometimes still are, beautifully steampunk, clonky, electromechanical beasts.
Ridiculously over-engineered and redundant, they have in many cases been worked far beyond their design lives.
Predicable problems being that spares, and people who know how to use them correctly, are getting scarce.
So, modern SCADA is getting installed slowly. These systems are never, repeat never, connected to the outside.
Whilst of course this does not preclude a STUXNET-type attack, it does make any easy internet attack impossible.
Well, why not the aeronautical equivalent for the bigger ones, at least.
Sure, it's easy to mock and say "because California", but this time the boys from the land of nutjob legislation have a point.
I impulse-bought a cheap drone I came across in the store to see what the fuss was about; no GPS or fancy self-guidance, just a remote control.
Damn, that thing was hard to control at first, and I used to fly jet fighters - albeit a long time ago.
So perhaps this is actually a better suggestion than the FAA "self-registration" scheme.
Over a certain weight, you have to produce ID and included in the price is the registration fee and insurance for a year.
If I get my head stoved-in by somebody's out of control drone, at least the medical is covered...
We have a winner!
I'm a geeky guy with plenty of home automation; but
1. It's all wired by me, and NOT connected to the outside.
2. Critical functions are redundant, with good old electro-mechanical or just plain mechanical backups. The technology for these is proven, easy to understand and implement, reliable and...cheap.
No way I'm coming home to a frozen, flooded or on-fire house because of a "firmware update".
When the NSA spied on our enemies, not on us.
World leaders continued to queue up to lead trade delegations to China to grab more business.
Once there, they will make brief, carefully stage-managed comments about "human rights" before getting right back down to business.
Back home, they might meet the Dali Lama in between negotiations about selling-off the latest piece of the nation's infrastructure.
What a cynical pantomime.
Meanwhile, our "friends" in China continue to prop-up the North Korean regime, and are so emboldened by Western inaction that they are now snatching dissidents off the street in Hong Kong and taking them to the mainland for *ahem* "questioning". So much for the "one country, two systems" promises.
No wonder the Taiwanese just kicked-out the KMT (who lost power for the first time EVER) for being too pro-China and "reunification".
The voters have seen the end of that film in Tibet and HK...
Oh yeah, and financed by us shipping all our manufacturing base and jobs out there, they're now constructing their own aircraft carrier, that's in addition to building and fortifying artificial islands in the South China Sea. No red flags!
So yes, let's continue to make a buck and help them out!
Bonus points for overuse of the word "protocol".
By the way, the "much longer range" (debatable)...that's a function of the wavelength guys, not the protocol.
Anyway, dupe. Was widely discussed here the other day; can be bothered to find TFA.
Was a nice nerdy conversation about range vs. antenna design vs. signals stomping all over each other...
More info on 11ah here;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Don't see how this will bring any more - or less -security. If, and it's a big if, people learn from the mistakes of the past, then our previous experiences with wifi should make people more aware of the design risks and take proper steps to secure stuff.
Of course, with all of the continuing revelations about hard-coded passwords, crap firmware and backdoors in everything from routers (both pro and consumer grade), "smart" meters and "smart house security solutions" *cough* the betting is probably that cheapo IoT devices will be as insecure as hell.
But that's hardly the fault of the standard...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
Interestingly, he has no Wikipedia article; I'm off out to dinner with friends, but if some kind soul could kick things off, let me know and I'll contribute tomorrow.
Deserves a link to/from the "Enigma" page at least.
Hey, Dice and HughPickens.com, what's with all the posts linking to "The Grauniad"?
By category, let's start with geopolitics:
- USA presidential, house and senate politics will continue to be the despair of all USAians and the rest of the "free" world"; as a consequence silly posturing will continue instead of the visionary, brave and useful policy-making
- The sames goes for Europe (or at least, most of the EU)
- Despite obscene amounts of spending on the military by both of the above, their weapons systems and military "solutions" remain half-functional and useless to combat the
- Various nutjob "terrerist" groups who will remain well-financed by their "allies" in the Middle East; jury awards for hypocrisy will continue to go to Turkey and Saudi Arabia (and its satellite Princedoms), with Israel, Pakistan and Egypt again qualifying for special awards in the category "biting the hands that feed them",
- Putin will continue riding his kleptocratic tiger, and thus will stick to page one of the "Dictator's playbook", i.e. randomly invading places and/or supporting whackjobs, justifying his actions by saying "for years the West has done the same"...
- For China, see Putin (above)
- All of the above ensuring that poor people everywhere (and especially Middle East and Africa) will continue to get royally fucked-over
Now, technology:
- Linux (yes, I know it's just the fucking kernel) nerds will continue to scream about SystemD; BSD nerds will continue to smirk into their neckbeards
- Google and Apple will continue to plug their respective languages and platforms, since they have lots more money than ideas, hence
- Their core business models and technology platforms will continue to stagnate, and most interest will revolve around how much money they can hide from the taxman in order to pay it back as ransom to bored but venal shareholders
- Meanwhile, clueless tech-hipsters will continue to bore us fartless by comparing the relative benefits of the above "revolutionary" languages and platforms
- Self-driving cars, powered by cheap, safe, nuclear fusion, will be available "real soon now"
- Everyone with a brain, and a decent experience of IS/IT in the real world, will continue to despise the cunts at Oracle