Please, spare me the hysterics - there has been absolutely no harm found in 2nd-hand water-vapour
If it were 100% water vapor, you would be correct. However can you show an independent test of the vapor that comes from an electronic cigarette (or whatever the cool kids are calling them today)? Of course not, because there is no standard for them. There are dozens of different devices out there that create the vapor, and hundreds of different formulas for the juice that they vaporize. Regular cigarettes are more inform right now, and for some reason the peddlers of the e-cigarettes are telling us this is a good thing.
The vapor cloud itself is not easy to test, either. Even if we had a standard testing machine (we have such a thing for cigarettes), capturing the entire cloud to sample all of it would be a very difficult thing to do. We know the mixture is anything but homogeneous by the time it is exhaled.
Don't do this and don't do that. 'Cause we know what's best for you and we're gonna pass laws that make you conform.
That's an overstatement, there. The law isn't telling people they can't do it, rather it is saying that the rest of society has the right to not be exposed to it involuntarily (as is also the case with regular tobacco smoke). You can still smoke it in your private home, or in your private car, or in other private places. Those who are intelligent enough to not smoke this should not be forcibly exposed to the toxic brew that is produces.
That's quite an allegation, there. How is their work creating this "dependency"? If anything, this project itself has a huge profit motive. People from failing schools or who drop out of failing schools have little to no incentive to purchase computers or utilize services that use computers. Gates - even though he is no longer the exec of Microsoft - has plenty of opportunity to expand his wealth by making computers available and attractive to an emerging market.
I don't know how recent your model of Camaro was, but it appears that the newest generation was designed at least in part by the same GM folks who thought the Hummer (later Hummer H1) would be a good road-going car. The H1 has atrocious sight lines in the front, the Camaro has terrible sight lines out the back. Being as the H1 had terrible fuel economy and the top speed of a really good bicycle, the front sight lines were really important. Similarly at the Camaro is overweight and underpowered for it's vehicle class, it is important to have good rear sight lines so you can see the UPS truck that is about to pass you.
I wouldn't take that reply to mean that it is dead or not. This isn't because we're dealing with Apple it's because we're dealing with a company. By comparison if Chevrolet announced this afternoon that they are canceling the Camaro again, Chevy fans would be up in arms over the brand abandoning them. If they instead coyly said they were "committed" to it and then gradually reduced production over the next few years until dropping it entirely by 2020 they could say it was "market pressures" and "consumer demand", without there having been any company plans for it before then.
With all due respect I think we heard that about meta-moderation as well. I'm inclined to say we heard that on other not-really-functional matters around here too. As the active user base continues to dwindle around here some of us are just coming by to see who gets the honor of turning out the lights...
* In our 40's we just want to get shit done -- instead of spending time recompiling our kernels.
I used to recompile my kernel all the time - back when I ran BSD for many things. In Linux I can't recall the last time I recompiled a kernel. However from my vantage point this has as much to do with hardware power as anything; I used to recompile my kernel "back in the day" to get just the features I want (and to minimize the overhead of features I did not need) but now it doesn't really matter. I used to build servers with 16MB of RAM, now I have a laptop with 16GB of RAM. Overhead just isn't as critical.
I'm sure other people have other reasons to compile kernels, but I would wager it is less common now than it used to be.
I haven't confirmed this yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person on the planet who did not find the original iPod wheel to be intuitive or useful.
Not that long ago another company came along that bought out the name and was promising slick little PC setups to be available "soon". Then they evaporated into thin air. Anyone know what happened to them? The Wikipedia entry for Commodore 2.0 is not particularly telling.
Please describe the symptoms you observed after your wife, siblings and parents all stopping using Facebook
You can't make that happen, which is basically my point. I can't make other people stop using it if they think it's a good thing to use. Even if half of the actual facebook users worldwide were to decide today to never use it again, they would still get enough information from the other half to keep on doing what they're doing. Facebook would still know plenty about me and all the other people who have never had an account or signed in.
There's also the much more critical question "Why the fuck are people still using Facebook after all these nightmarish news?"
Unfortunately, the choice doesn't really matter anymore. I'm not on facebook, and never have been. However my wife is on there, all my siblings are on there, my parents are on there, and plenty of other people who know me are on there as well. Facebook certainly knows who I am, and I can't do anything about that. Some time ago it went from "you use facebook" to "facebook uses you", and we can't go back. You can't ask them to forget you - and even if they said they had, how would you ever confirm that? For that matter if they said they did, and you believed them, how long would they be obligated to continue "forgetting" you?
You can very easily replace all end-user Windows machines with macOS and use either iOS or Android for everything else.
No, you actually cannot. There are a lot of systems that users - particularly in business (as opposed to home users) - use that are available only in Windows. There are some things that simply don't port to other operating systems, no matter how hard you try. Sure, WINE does a great job of running the Adobe suite, and it runs MS Office pretty well, but there are a lot of programs that businesses can't function without that simply don't run in Linux or MacOS. If the software doesn't work, then it's a non-starter. And good luck selling a small business on the notion that they have something to gain by having a mixed Windows / MacOS / *Nix environment.
First let me state I am anything but a Windows fanboy. I have a school-aged son and the first thing he ever knew about Microsoft was "crash". However I know that I can't escape the claws of Microsoft in much of my existence.
official confirmation that Windows on phones isn't under active development any longer -- security bugs will be fixed, but new features and new hardware aren't on the cards -- isn't a big surprise
So they tried something, and it didn't work out for them. What's the big deal? I don't see people lining up to bash Apple over the Newton.
Last week, Microsoft also announced that it was getting out of the music business, signaling another small retreat from the consumer space
How many people even knew Microsoft was in the music business? The top companies for purchasing music are Apple, Google, and Amazon. It's highly unlikely there could have been space for a fourth.
pointing to Microsoft's continued enterprise strength as evidence that the company's position remains strong
Good job, you found where the money is. They make more money in a month selling licenses for Windows Server than they likely ever made in music.
Windows, though still critical, isn't as essential to people's lives as it was a decade ago -- and risks a similar fate.
You're simply wrong on the notion of it not being as essential. The vast overwhelming majority of all PCs sold at retail come with Windows on them. The vast overwhelming majority of PCs sold to businesses do as well. It is as relevant to the average person as a refrigerator, only with a vastly shorter life span. As long as they get vendors of relevant software to keep pushing users to newer versions of Windows, they're set for the rest of nearly forever.
Dropping consumer ambitions and retreating to the enterprise is a mistake.
This is also ignoring one enormous cash cow for Microsoft - Office. Yeah, for the majority of consumers the free office suites are more than sufficient, but you cannot convince them of that. And now Microsoft, for all intents and purposes, only sells consumer subscriptions to Office, that users have to renew every year. This is absolutely not abandoning consumer for enterprise.
This also is ignoring all the efforts that go in to XBox development. The Microsoft - Sony duopoly has all but killed Nintendo from the most profitable segments of the gaming market. Why would Microsoft retreat from that - especially when they keep telling us how great the next (strangely-named) XBox console will be?
If anyone is really over-represented, its Libertarians, who will sound like right-wingers when a Democrat is in office and like left-wingers when a Republican is in office
I'm not sure which libertarians you've seen posts from here on slashdot, but I have yet to see one that looks like a left-winger when the GOP is in power. Most slashdot self-described libertarians that I come across just don't want to be branded by the GOP, and lean on their copy of Atlas Shrugged as being somehow proof that they are stunning individualists.
well-reasoned arguments will get voted up, and worst-case I get to see what other people with different political beliefs than mine consider a persuasive argument.
That said, I was trying to describe more so the articles that make the front page here than the discussion and the comments in them (and how they are moderated). We've seen a noticeable up-tick in pro-GOP front page articles in recent years and a noticeable down-tick in articles of any other political slant. 2017 has been a slight exception to this, only because we elected a professional internet troll to the white house last November. Prior to that we never made it a week without seeing at least one blatantly anti-Obama article on the front page here while it was rare to see one article that was celebrating him in a month.
When I had trouble was the final stages of the 2016 election. All appearances were that the comment/moderation system here got pwned by Russian trolls, with the result that the stuff that got upvoted bore no relationship whatsoever to the quality of the thoughts
I have a hard time believing that the Russian trolls would have found this site to be worth their efforts, unless they were using it to train bots. Slashdot's user base has been steadily shrinking over the years (in terms of how many users actually comment on anything or partake in any kind of discussion). If the Russian trolls had paid any attention to what makes the front page of this site they would not have found it worth their while either, as they were trying to push the election in favor of Trump and this site was happily touting how awesome he was anyways.
What issues do you have in mind that you have been "mostly correct" on? I might not have seen them, I mostly see you quoting your favorite scriptures, recruiting for your favorite cult, and repeatedly lying about the constant everyday role of your faith in your life. I will give you credit for being consistent, but not for being correct.
Are you one of the 3.7 million Netflix users who still get DVDs sent in the mail? If so, what's keeping you from embracing the digital age and streaming movies via the internet?
DVDs are digital - hell it's right in the acronym Digital versatile disc. Just because someone wants a physical copy for some reason doesn't mean it magically was transformed into analog by the postal service.
That said if we wanted to really entertain the question of why someone would want DVDs by mail - ignoring the stupidity of the way the question was posed in this summary - there is still at least one good reason for it on Netflix. Their DVD library is much larger than their streaming library. If you want to see something that is 2-7 years old, there is a really good chance it is available for streaming. Outside that range, your chances are not very good. There are a lot of really good titles available that you simply can't stream. One great example that is relevant right now is Blade Runner. If you don't own it and you want to see the original version before going to the theatre to see the new one, you can't stream it on Netflix, they don't stream it. You can't buy it today brand new at Best Buy, Target, or Walmart as it was pulled off the shelves by the studio. Some of the retailers claim they could ship it to you next week if you buy it today but there's no guarantee. Netflix will tell you when you'll have it.
Beyond that, the single disc service is only $8 per month. Most Netflix subscribers have a card on file with them that automatically gets billed; I suspect a majority of these people wouldn't notice another $8 from their card every month one way or the other. I know I have weeks where my gas consumption fluctuates by a lot more than $8 and I don't spend much time worrying about it.
Just read through the archives, the stories weren't hard to find. At least once a week there was a front page article featuring a conspiracy about Obama getting ready to shut down the internet, or give away iPhones to homeless people, or increase taxes on Donald Trump, or force us all to drive hybrid cars. This site looked like it was a "tech" spin-off of the drudge report some days. This site was even attracting ads from Townhall, newsmax, and the like as well (the usual "polls" about how soon Hillary should be imprisoned and whatnot).
The front-page volume of conservative noise has likely decreased only because of what a total epic failure Trump has been so far.
In the not-too-distant past the dominant voice on this site took a hard right turn. During the administration of Obama we saw a constant barrage of anti-Obama and anti-Clinton news bits on the front page, while simultaneously seeing articles that championed various right wing causes.
Sure, we see some front page articles now that point out a subset of the failings of the current POTUS, but regardless of how much someone loves him it would be nearly impossible to not have to come to face with his failings on at least a daily basis.
Are there really many 32bit systems being used in general purpose (workstation or similar) settings? I tend to come across 32bit boxes most often now as either embedded systems, mini servers (in low-demand applications), or various novelty / nostalgia applications. All of these could probably be better suited with a more specialized OS than Ubuntu that aims for the general populace. While it can make support a little more tricky (particularly if all your 64bit systems are Ubuntu) it is probably worth the effort. to switch.
I can't for the life of me figure out why I would want to buy this thing. I suppose someone here may have an extra $180 burning a hole in their pocket but I don't have that problem myself.
It initially scared me to think that kids who are young enough to find the xbox 360 to be "natural" would be old enough to be at the helm of billion dollar nuclear armed submarines. Then I realized there are plenty of kids in their 30s who think the xbox 360 is natural even though they are old enough to remember the earliest days of the 8 and 16 bit consoles.
Bats never crash into my dirty windows, apparently I'm doing the bats a favor by giving them rough surfaces that their sonar correctly bounces back off of. Since I happen to love the bats in my area (almost exclusively the insectivorous little brown bat and big brown bat) I see this as win-win.
That company is rotten to the core. They have far too much power over our lives and very near zero accountability for how they handle that power. Allowing those hacks to decide how credit worthy someone is could be one of the worst ideas of the 20th century, and we have unfortunately held on to that terrible idea into the 21st century as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, spare me the hysterics - there has been absolutely no harm found in 2nd-hand water-vapour
If it were 100% water vapor, you would be correct. However can you show an independent test of the vapor that comes from an electronic cigarette (or whatever the cool kids are calling them today)? Of course not, because there is no standard for them. There are dozens of different devices out there that create the vapor, and hundreds of different formulas for the juice that they vaporize. Regular cigarettes are more inform right now, and for some reason the peddlers of the e-cigarettes are telling us this is a good thing.
The vapor cloud itself is not easy to test, either. Even if we had a standard testing machine (we have such a thing for cigarettes), capturing the entire cloud to sample all of it would be a very difficult thing to do. We know the mixture is anything but homogeneous by the time it is exhaled.
Don't do this and don't do that. 'Cause we know what's best for you and we're gonna pass laws that make you conform.
That's an overstatement, there. The law isn't telling people they can't do it, rather it is saying that the rest of society has the right to not be exposed to it involuntarily (as is also the case with regular tobacco smoke). You can still smoke it in your private home, or in your private car, or in other private places. Those who are intelligent enough to not smoke this should not be forcibly exposed to the toxic brew that is produces.
he is creating a dependency on a handout.
That's quite an allegation, there. How is their work creating this "dependency"? If anything, this project itself has a huge profit motive. People from failing schools or who drop out of failing schools have little to no incentive to purchase computers or utilize services that use computers. Gates - even though he is no longer the exec of Microsoft - has plenty of opportunity to expand his wealth by making computers available and attractive to an emerging market.
I don't know how recent your model of Camaro was, but it appears that the newest generation was designed at least in part by the same GM folks who thought the Hummer (later Hummer H1) would be a good road-going car. The H1 has atrocious sight lines in the front, the Camaro has terrible sight lines out the back. Being as the H1 had terrible fuel economy and the top speed of a really good bicycle, the front sight lines were really important. Similarly at the Camaro is overweight and underpowered for it's vehicle class, it is important to have good rear sight lines so you can see the UPS truck that is about to pass you.
I wouldn't take that reply to mean that it is dead or not. This isn't because we're dealing with Apple it's because we're dealing with a company. By comparison if Chevrolet announced this afternoon that they are canceling the Camaro again, Chevy fans would be up in arms over the brand abandoning them. If they instead coyly said they were "committed" to it and then gradually reduced production over the next few years until dropping it entirely by 2020 they could say it was "market pressures" and "consumer demand", without there having been any company plans for it before then.
we are committed to doing it.
With all due respect I think we heard that about meta-moderation as well. I'm inclined to say we heard that on other not-really-functional matters around here too. As the active user base continues to dwindle around here some of us are just coming by to see who gets the honor of turning out the lights...
* In our 40's we just want to get shit done -- instead of spending time recompiling our kernels.
I used to recompile my kernel all the time - back when I ran BSD for many things. In Linux I can't recall the last time I recompiled a kernel. However from my vantage point this has as much to do with hardware power as anything; I used to recompile my kernel "back in the day" to get just the features I want (and to minimize the overhead of features I did not need) but now it doesn't really matter. I used to build servers with 16MB of RAM, now I have a laptop with 16GB of RAM. Overhead just isn't as critical.
I'm sure other people have other reasons to compile kernels, but I would wager it is less common now than it used to be.
I haven't confirmed this yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person on the planet who did not find the original iPod wheel to be intuitive or useful.
Well, still no proper unicode support. Maybe in another 20 years?
Not that long ago another company came along that bought out the name and was promising slick little PC setups to be available "soon". Then they evaporated into thin air. Anyone know what happened to them? The Wikipedia entry for Commodore 2.0 is not particularly telling.
Please describe the symptoms you observed after your wife, siblings and parents all stopping using Facebook
You can't make that happen, which is basically my point. I can't make other people stop using it if they think it's a good thing to use. Even if half of the actual facebook users worldwide were to decide today to never use it again, they would still get enough information from the other half to keep on doing what they're doing. Facebook would still know plenty about me and all the other people who have never had an account or signed in.
There's also the much more critical question "Why the fuck are people still using Facebook after all these nightmarish news?"
Unfortunately, the choice doesn't really matter anymore. I'm not on facebook, and never have been. However my wife is on there, all my siblings are on there, my parents are on there, and plenty of other people who know me are on there as well. Facebook certainly knows who I am, and I can't do anything about that. Some time ago it went from "you use facebook" to "facebook uses you", and we can't go back. You can't ask them to forget you - and even if they said they had, how would you ever confirm that? For that matter if they said they did, and you believed them, how long would they be obligated to continue "forgetting" you?
How Facebook Outs Sex Workers
You can very easily replace all end-user Windows machines with macOS and use either iOS or Android for everything else.
No, you actually cannot. There are a lot of systems that users - particularly in business (as opposed to home users) - use that are available only in Windows. There are some things that simply don't port to other operating systems, no matter how hard you try. Sure, WINE does a great job of running the Adobe suite, and it runs MS Office pretty well, but there are a lot of programs that businesses can't function without that simply don't run in Linux or MacOS. If the software doesn't work, then it's a non-starter. And good luck selling a small business on the notion that they have something to gain by having a mixed Windows / MacOS / *Nix environment.
official confirmation that Windows on phones isn't under active development any longer -- security bugs will be fixed, but new features and new hardware aren't on the cards -- isn't a big surprise
So they tried something, and it didn't work out for them. What's the big deal? I don't see people lining up to bash Apple over the Newton.
Last week, Microsoft also announced that it was getting out of the music business, signaling another small retreat from the consumer space
How many people even knew Microsoft was in the music business? The top companies for purchasing music are Apple, Google, and Amazon. It's highly unlikely there could have been space for a fourth.
pointing to Microsoft's continued enterprise strength as evidence that the company's position remains strong
Good job, you found where the money is. They make more money in a month selling licenses for Windows Server than they likely ever made in music.
Windows, though still critical, isn't as essential to people's lives as it was a decade ago -- and risks a similar fate.
You're simply wrong on the notion of it not being as essential. The vast overwhelming majority of all PCs sold at retail come with Windows on them. The vast overwhelming majority of PCs sold to businesses do as well. It is as relevant to the average person as a refrigerator, only with a vastly shorter life span. As long as they get vendors of relevant software to keep pushing users to newer versions of Windows, they're set for the rest of nearly forever.
Dropping consumer ambitions and retreating to the enterprise is a mistake.
This is also ignoring one enormous cash cow for Microsoft - Office. Yeah, for the majority of consumers the free office suites are more than sufficient, but you cannot convince them of that. And now Microsoft, for all intents and purposes, only sells consumer subscriptions to Office, that users have to renew every year. This is absolutely not abandoning consumer for enterprise.
This also is ignoring all the efforts that go in to XBox development. The Microsoft - Sony duopoly has all but killed Nintendo from the most profitable segments of the gaming market. Why would Microsoft retreat from that - especially when they keep telling us how great the next (strangely-named) XBox console will be?
If anyone is really over-represented, its Libertarians, who will sound like right-wingers when a Democrat is in office and like left-wingers when a Republican is in office
I'm not sure which libertarians you've seen posts from here on slashdot, but I have yet to see one that looks like a left-winger when the GOP is in power. Most slashdot self-described libertarians that I come across just don't want to be branded by the GOP, and lean on their copy of Atlas Shrugged as being somehow proof that they are stunning individualists.
well-reasoned arguments will get voted up, and worst-case I get to see what other people with different political beliefs than mine consider a persuasive argument.
That said, I was trying to describe more so the articles that make the front page here than the discussion and the comments in them (and how they are moderated). We've seen a noticeable up-tick in pro-GOP front page articles in recent years and a noticeable down-tick in articles of any other political slant. 2017 has been a slight exception to this, only because we elected a professional internet troll to the white house last November. Prior to that we never made it a week without seeing at least one blatantly anti-Obama article on the front page here while it was rare to see one article that was celebrating him in a month.
When I had trouble was the final stages of the 2016 election. All appearances were that the comment/moderation system here got pwned by Russian trolls, with the result that the stuff that got upvoted bore no relationship whatsoever to the quality of the thoughts
I have a hard time believing that the Russian trolls would have found this site to be worth their efforts, unless they were using it to train bots. Slashdot's user base has been steadily shrinking over the years (in terms of how many users actually comment on anything or partake in any kind of discussion). If the Russian trolls had paid any attention to what makes the front page of this site they would not have found it worth their while either, as they were trying to push the election in favor of Trump and this site was happily touting how awesome he was anyways.
because I am mostly correct on issues
What issues do you have in mind that you have been "mostly correct" on? I might not have seen them, I mostly see you quoting your favorite scriptures, recruiting for your favorite cult, and repeatedly lying about the constant everyday role of your faith in your life. I will give you credit for being consistent, but not for being correct.
Are you one of the 3.7 million Netflix users who still get DVDs sent in the mail? If so, what's keeping you from embracing the digital age and streaming movies via the internet?
DVDs are digital - hell it's right in the acronym Digital versatile disc. Just because someone wants a physical copy for some reason doesn't mean it magically was transformed into analog by the postal service.
That said if we wanted to really entertain the question of why someone would want DVDs by mail - ignoring the stupidity of the way the question was posed in this summary - there is still at least one good reason for it on Netflix. Their DVD library is much larger than their streaming library. If you want to see something that is 2-7 years old, there is a really good chance it is available for streaming. Outside that range, your chances are not very good. There are a lot of really good titles available that you simply can't stream. One great example that is relevant right now is Blade Runner. If you don't own it and you want to see the original version before going to the theatre to see the new one, you can't stream it on Netflix, they don't stream it. You can't buy it today brand new at Best Buy, Target, or Walmart as it was pulled off the shelves by the studio. Some of the retailers claim they could ship it to you next week if you buy it today but there's no guarantee. Netflix will tell you when you'll have it.
Beyond that, the single disc service is only $8 per month. Most Netflix subscribers have a card on file with them that automatically gets billed; I suspect a majority of these people wouldn't notice another $8 from their card every month one way or the other. I know I have weeks where my gas consumption fluctuates by a lot more than $8 and I don't spend much time worrying about it.
Just read through the archives, the stories weren't hard to find. At least once a week there was a front page article featuring a conspiracy about Obama getting ready to shut down the internet, or give away iPhones to homeless people, or increase taxes on Donald Trump, or force us all to drive hybrid cars. This site looked like it was a "tech" spin-off of the drudge report some days. This site was even attracting ads from Townhall, newsmax, and the like as well (the usual "polls" about how soon Hillary should be imprisoned and whatnot).
The front-page volume of conservative noise has likely decreased only because of what a total epic failure Trump has been so far.
In the not-too-distant past the dominant voice on this site took a hard right turn. During the administration of Obama we saw a constant barrage of anti-Obama and anti-Clinton news bits on the front page, while simultaneously seeing articles that championed various right wing causes.
Sure, we see some front page articles now that point out a subset of the failings of the current POTUS, but regardless of how much someone loves him it would be nearly impossible to not have to come to face with his failings on at least a daily basis.
Are there really many 32bit systems being used in general purpose (workstation or similar) settings? I tend to come across 32bit boxes most often now as either embedded systems, mini servers (in low-demand applications), or various novelty / nostalgia applications. All of these could probably be better suited with a more specialized OS than Ubuntu that aims for the general populace. While it can make support a little more tricky (particularly if all your 64bit systems are Ubuntu) it is probably worth the effort. to switch.
I can't for the life of me figure out why I would want to buy this thing. I suppose someone here may have an extra $180 burning a hole in their pocket but I don't have that problem myself.
It initially scared me to think that kids who are young enough to find the xbox 360 to be "natural" would be old enough to be at the helm of billion dollar nuclear armed submarines. Then I realized there are plenty of kids in their 30s who think the xbox 360 is natural even though they are old enough to remember the earliest days of the 8 and 16 bit consoles.
Bats never crash into my dirty windows, apparently I'm doing the bats a favor by giving them rough surfaces that their sonar correctly bounces back off of. Since I happen to love the bats in my area (almost exclusively the insectivorous little brown bat and big brown bat) I see this as win-win.
That company is rotten to the core. They have far too much power over our lives and very near zero accountability for how they handle that power. Allowing those hacks to decide how credit worthy someone is could be one of the worst ideas of the 20th century, and we have unfortunately held on to that terrible idea into the 21st century as well.