When you are already in an uncomfortable state, smaller irritants get to you more easily. Also, different people are different. For some people it is a much bigger irritant than for you.
Once when I was in a hospital, I was alone with a machine that was ticking... and which now and then changed the rate it was ticking. That thing drove me insane. (figuratively)
Sure, their business may be driven by an app and a server "cloud" backend - but so do lots of other businesses. It is nothing special about it - and it is definitely not nerdy.
So please, Slashdot, please stop giving this cheap taxi service more free publicity!
I would not be too worried. Bluetooth radiates about one thousandth of what a cell phone radio does. I would be more worried about those who talk on the phone all day without using a headset, text constantly or stream music over the Internet. Cell phone radios don't usually shut off between each data packet. This means that they will continue to radiate for a while even after you have e.g. received or sent a text, albeit at progressively lower levels. The shut-off delays are in the radio protocols and defined by the cell phone operator - not Apple.
Acer announced their stackable Revo Build about a year ago, around the same concept. Unlike the HP system, the Acer system is user-extendable. Acer was also first (of HP and Acer) with a inductive charging top...
But it is basically like a NUC... with a not very fast CPU, no discrete GPU, no RAM expansion etc.
The Sun SPARCstation IPX was introduced in 1991, and precedes the Acord RISC PC (1994). If you wanted an external SCSI harddrive or CD-ROM or tape-drive, you put it into an external enclosure which had the same footprint and styling as the base unit so that you could put them in a nice stack. You daisy-chained them with SCSI cables, but each unit had its own power supply.
Of course, stacking HiFi components is even older.
Spearfish? Didn't you mean "Superfish"? From what I have been able to find out, Lenovo stopped installing Superfish in new machines back in early 2015. Is this a new malware?
A touch-tablet keyboard that moves the "keys", adjusting to where the user's previous strokes have been. That sounds like one of the features of FingerWorksTouchStream touch-keyboard and I think they had a patent on this. They stopped making products in 2005. FingerWorks together with its patents was then acquired by Apple. I think Lenovo must have someone bought or licensed that patent, or they are about to meet with Apple's lawyers...
Don't dis the Atom processors. I think you must have tried some extraordinarily badly configured Windows system... I now have three Atom-based computer and are all fine. They are perfectly fine for office/productivity tasks and for web and email, even for light software development: The things that most people would use a laptop for.
Just give the laptop a proper battery and a decent keyboard and mouse and it could be very useful device...
I don't understand the reason for going away from "vanilla" Android. Wasn't the point of the Google Nexus line to produce reference implementations of devices for the Android operating system, to show to other brands by competing with them which minimum features and specifications that Google thought that Android devices should have?
There have been reports of Bing's web crawlers not respecting robots.txt - and Bing has a huge user base (whether you like it or not) and that's just at the top of the iceberg.
This would not have been necessary if the radio protocols for mobile/cell phones had included a provision for blocking in the first place.
It would not just be convenient to have in bars and movie theatres; some hospital departments need cell-phones to be off for some very sensitive equipment (MRI, etc.) to work properly. It is not as if illicit cell phone use have not been a problem at hospitals and movie theatres since they first were introduced.
I think having the phone stop transmitting by itself would be a much better solution than a Faraday cage. Then it would still be possible to call emergency services.
Except that it does not work well as a touch-oriented mobile UI either. The first time you need to do something remotely advanced it launches a dialog designed for mouse and keyboard, where everything is very small and hard to tap.
Let's say that you want to do something as basic as open a file in the touch-oriented Reader app, then you are forced to use the regular mouse-and-keyboard oriented file dialog.
Need to disable background downloading on the very limited hotel Wifi or Wifi from a tethered phone? Then you need to get into the mouse-and-keyboard oriented Control Panel.
Move or copy a file? The regular file manager. Good luck trying to select more than one file at once: there are gestures for it, but the gesture recognition is very finicky.
Try to tap a link in the web browser? No, half the times Edge thinks that you want to highlight a word in the link.
And so on...
If my tablet did not stylus support, it would have driven me crazy.
And oh yes.. You'd better not have a high-DPI screen because apps to be written for it if the UI is not going to be minuscule.
Indeed. Movie theatres should deal with getting rid of the bad experiences at the theatre and make sure that the picture and sound quality is top notch. That is what would bring people back - not gimmicks.
There are theatres that will kick you out if you talk too much during the movie or use a cell phone. All theatres should be that way.
Instead we have theatre chain executives who "give up" because "millenials are always on the phone", we get movies projected in 2K -- which is only a little bit more than the five year old "Full HD" TV that I got at home -- but with stutter.
According to Anandtech, the GPU is the GP102 which is the same as in the recently announced top-end consumer card "Titan X" (note: not "GTX Titan X".. confusing? yes)
The Titan X has 3584 shader processors while the Quadro P6000 has 3840 and twice the memory. I assume that this means that the Titan X has a lower-binned chip. Previous generation of Nvidia GPUs ("Maxwell" architecture) has a GPU called GTX 980 Ti, which was a lower-binned GTX Titan X with half the memory. Now when the 10-series Titan X is already the lower-binned GPU, I suppose this means that there will not be any "GTX 1080 Ti".
The biggest fallacy of using biometrics for security is that biometric codes can not be changed. Once a biometric code has been cracked then that code is useless forever and you are stuck with it. If a protected resource requires e.g. an iris or finger print but that print is revoked, then you can never use that authentication mechanism every again. If someone successfully guesses your password (or encryption key) then you can rescind it and use another.
Another fallacy is that it is actually not difficult to get hold of biometric keys. Irises can be read at a distance now. You put your fingerprints on everything you touch. Face recognition can be foiled by a mask, etc.
That's how it should work. And yes, the problem is making it easy to create a new profile.
I have long requested that each private browsing window be its own private session, with no sharing of cookies between them. What if we would start with that, and create new "profiles" from "private browsing" sessions: a single button could be used for "saving" a temporary session.
This story was posted on Slashdot when Stockholm and Helsinki were asleep. It is morning here now so not many posts yet..
I don't see how it would be possible to build the tunnel for only 3.3 billion Euros, when a much shorter road or railway tunnel inside Stockholm could easily cost more than that amount. There is not a straight route through the sea from Stockholm towards Finland. Shipping lanes are already squiggly route through the archipelago where there are several nature-preserves. Either straight or following the shipping lanes, the multi-decade construction project of a Hyperloop would be very disruptive both to shipping, to nature and to the people living in the archipelago. It would likely hurt the local, if not national economy, disturb people's lives and would certainly not help property values in the affected areas.
Increased property values... that could only be a short-term benefit, to some and only if would come at no cost, and if the properties are not already overvalued. There is a housing shortage in Stockholm and residential property values are already through the roof. They were considered high a decade ago already and conditions are not expected to change very quickly. There is a lending bubble. Increased property values is not what we need.
The most common way to travel between Stockholm and Helsinki is not by plane, but on a overnight ferry. And these already go from city-centre to city-centre. There are a couple of competing companies providing ferry service, with competition working to keep prices down. You can bring a car on the ferry. Could you bring a car on the Hyperloop? The ferries provide dining, bars, nightclubs and accommodation at several price-points on the same ferry.
I don't see any place in the already congested city centre where a Hyperloop station could be established. There is already very expensive, deep tunnel being constructed only for commuter trains because of congestion in surface traffic between north and south. The only place for a Hyperloop terminus would therefore have to be outside the city, with added travel time to and from the Hyperloop. And then how would that be better than the plane or the ferry?
It is not about the processor architecture, but the amount of RAM. 4 GB is about the threshold of when x86-64's page tables are starting to not cost more than it provides.
There are lots of new low-end machines sold even today with no more than 4GB RAM or even 2GB RAM - and a quarter of that is often going to be dedicated to the integrated graphics. These machines often come with 32-bit Windows preinstalled. If you want a 8" tablet, it is practically only the more expensive high-end models that come with more than 2 GB RAM.
Tom's Hardware tested the power consumption of AMD's reference card and saw that could draw more power from both the motherboard and the 6-pin power connector than the PCI Express specification allows for either of them.
I would wait a while before this issue is resolved. Maybe the issue could be fixed with a driver update, in which case only benchmarks done after the driver update would matter. Maybe a non-reference card will be released with an 8-pin power connector and better power distribution.
A tech that would prevent people from using cell phones in movie theatres is sorely needed. But it would not do any good if it would only prevent filming, and knowing Apple: it would be restricted to Apple devices only... if used at all: Apple has tonnes of patents that they don't use.
It should have been a part of the cell phone radio protocols from the start and mandatory.
A tablet must have only one data port that is also used for charging. A Windows tablet must not act as a USB storage device, only as a USB host or use USB for charging, even if the hardware is capable.
For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on. At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off."
Slashdot Mirror
When you are already in an uncomfortable state, smaller irritants get to you more easily.
Also, different people are different. For some people it is a much bigger irritant than for you.
Once when I was in a hospital, I was alone with a machine that was ticking... and which now and then changed the rate it was ticking. That thing drove me insane. (figuratively)
Uber is not a tech company, whatever they claim.
Sure, their business may be driven by an app and a server "cloud" backend - but so do lots of other businesses. It is nothing special about it - and it is definitely not nerdy.
So please, Slashdot, please stop giving this cheap taxi service more free publicity!
I would not be too worried. Bluetooth radiates about one thousandth of what a cell phone radio does.
I would be more worried about those who talk on the phone all day without using a headset, text constantly or stream music over the Internet.
Cell phone radios don't usually shut off between each data packet. This means that they will continue to radiate for a while even after you have e.g. received or sent a text, albeit at progressively lower levels. The shut-off delays are in the radio protocols and defined by the cell phone operator - not Apple.
How typical that a laptop with a touchscreen-keyboard should win "Best of show" ...
I would win in hacking olympics.
My skills with the hacksaw are exemplary!
Acer announced their stackable Revo Build about a year ago, around the same concept.
Unlike the HP system, the Acer system is user-extendable.
Acer was also first (of HP and Acer) with a inductive charging top...
But it is basically like a NUC... with a not very fast CPU, no discrete GPU, no RAM expansion etc.
The Sun SPARCstation IPX was introduced in 1991, and precedes the Acord RISC PC (1994).
If you wanted an external SCSI harddrive or CD-ROM or tape-drive, you put it into an external enclosure which had the same footprint and styling as the base unit so that you could put them in a nice stack.
You daisy-chained them with SCSI cables, but each unit had its own power supply.
Of course, stacking HiFi components is even older.
Spearfish? Didn't you mean "Superfish"?
From what I have been able to find out, Lenovo stopped installing Superfish in new machines back in early 2015.
Is this a new malware?
A touch-tablet keyboard that moves the "keys", adjusting to where the user's previous strokes have been. ...
That sounds like one of the features of FingerWorks TouchStream touch-keyboard and I think they had a patent on this.
They stopped making products in 2005. FingerWorks together with its patents was then acquired by Apple.
I think Lenovo must have someone bought or licensed that patent, or they are about to meet with Apple's lawyers
Don't dis the Atom processors. I think you must have tried some extraordinarily badly configured Windows system ...
I now have three Atom-based computer and are all fine.
They are perfectly fine for office/productivity tasks and for web and email, even for light software development: The things that most people would use a laptop for.
Just give the laptop a proper battery and a decent keyboard and mouse and it could be very useful device ...
I don't understand the reason for going away from "vanilla" Android.
Wasn't the point of the Google Nexus line to produce reference implementations of devices for the Android operating system, to show to other brands by competing with them which minimum features and specifications that Google thought that Android devices should have?
Because robots.txt is only a standard, not a law.
There have been reports of Bing's web crawlers not respecting robots.txt - and Bing has a huge user base (whether you like it or not) and that's just at the top of the iceberg.
This would not have been necessary if the radio protocols for mobile/cell phones had included a provision for blocking in the first place.
It would not just be convenient to have in bars and movie theatres; some hospital departments need cell-phones to be off for some very sensitive equipment (MRI, etc.) to work properly.
It is not as if illicit cell phone use have not been a problem at hospitals and movie theatres since they first were introduced.
I think having the phone stop transmitting by itself would be a much better solution than a Faraday cage. Then it would still be possible to call emergency services.
Except that it does not work well as a touch-oriented mobile UI either.
The first time you need to do something remotely advanced it launches a dialog designed for mouse and keyboard, where everything is very small and hard to tap.
Let's say that you want to do something as basic as open a file in the touch-oriented Reader app, then you are forced to use the regular mouse-and-keyboard oriented file dialog.
Need to disable background downloading on the very limited hotel Wifi or Wifi from a tethered phone? Then you need to get into the mouse-and-keyboard oriented Control Panel.
Move or copy a file? The regular file manager. Good luck trying to select more than one file at once: there are gestures for it, but the gesture recognition is very finicky.
Try to tap a link in the web browser? No, half the times Edge thinks that you want to highlight a word in the link.
And so on ...
If my tablet did not stylus support, it would have driven me crazy.
And oh yes.. You'd better not have a high-DPI screen because apps to be written for it if the UI is not going to be minuscule.
Indeed. Movie theatres should deal with getting rid of the bad experiences at the theatre and make sure that the picture and sound quality is top notch.
That is what would bring people back - not gimmicks.
There are theatres that will kick you out if you talk too much during the movie or use a cell phone.
All theatres should be that way.
Instead we have theatre chain executives who "give up" because "millenials are always on the phone", we get movies projected in 2K -- which is only a little bit more than the five year old "Full HD" TV that I got at home -- but with stutter.
According to Anandtech, the GPU is the GP102 which is the same as in the recently announced top-end consumer card "Titan X" (note: not "GTX Titan X".. confusing? yes)
The Titan X has 3584 shader processors while the Quadro P6000 has 3840 and twice the memory. I assume that this means that the Titan X has a lower-binned chip.
Previous generation of Nvidia GPUs ("Maxwell" architecture) has a GPU called GTX 980 Ti, which was a lower-binned GTX Titan X with half the memory. Now when the 10-series Titan X is already the lower-binned GPU, I suppose this means that there will not be any "GTX 1080 Ti".
The biggest fallacy of using biometrics for security is that biometric codes can not be changed.
Once a biometric code has been cracked then that code is useless forever and you are stuck with it. If a protected resource requires e.g. an iris or finger print but that print is revoked, then you can never use that authentication mechanism every again.
If someone successfully guesses your password (or encryption key) then you can rescind it and use another.
Another fallacy is that it is actually not difficult to get hold of biometric keys. Irises can be read at a distance now. You put your fingerprints on everything you touch. Face recognition can be foiled by a mask, etc.
That's how it should work. And yes, the problem is making it easy to create a new profile.
I have long requested that each private browsing window be its own private session, with no sharing of cookies between them.
What if we would start with that, and create new "profiles" from "private browsing" sessions: a single button could be used for "saving" a temporary session.
This story was posted on Slashdot when Stockholm and Helsinki were asleep. It is morning here now so not many posts yet..
I don't see how it would be possible to build the tunnel for only 3.3 billion Euros, when a much shorter road or railway tunnel inside Stockholm could easily cost more than that amount. There is not a straight route through the sea from Stockholm towards Finland. Shipping lanes are already squiggly route through the archipelago where there are several nature-preserves. Either straight or following the shipping lanes, the multi-decade construction project of a Hyperloop would be very disruptive both to shipping, to nature and to the people living in the archipelago. It would likely hurt the local, if not national economy, disturb people's lives and would certainly not help property values in the affected areas.
Increased property values... that could only be a short-term benefit, to some and only if would come at no cost, and if the properties are not already overvalued.
There is a housing shortage in Stockholm and residential property values are already through the roof. They were considered high a decade ago already and conditions are not expected to change very quickly. There is a lending bubble. Increased property values is not what we need.
The most common way to travel between Stockholm and Helsinki is not by plane, but on a overnight ferry. And these already go from city-centre to city-centre. There are a couple of competing companies providing ferry service, with competition working to keep prices down.
You can bring a car on the ferry. Could you bring a car on the Hyperloop? The ferries provide dining, bars, nightclubs and accommodation at several price-points on the same ferry.
I don't see any place in the already congested city centre where a Hyperloop station could be established. There is already very expensive, deep tunnel being constructed only for commuter trains because of congestion in surface traffic between north and south.
The only place for a Hyperloop terminus would therefore have to be outside the city, with added travel time to and from the Hyperloop. And then how would that be better than the plane or the ferry?
It is not about the processor architecture, but the amount of RAM.
4 GB is about the threshold of when x86-64's page tables are starting to not cost more than it provides.
There are lots of new low-end machines sold even today with no more than 4GB RAM or even 2GB RAM - and a quarter of that is often going to be dedicated to the integrated graphics. These machines often come with 32-bit Windows preinstalled.
If you want a 8" tablet, it is practically only the more expensive high-end models that come with more than 2 GB RAM.
Tom's Hardware tested the power consumption of AMD's reference card and saw that could draw more power from both the motherboard and the 6-pin power connector than the PCI Express specification allows for either of them.
I would wait a while before this issue is resolved. Maybe the issue could be fixed with a driver update, in which case only benchmarks done after the driver update would matter.
Maybe a non-reference card will be released with an 8-pin power connector and better power distribution.
A tech that would prevent people from using cell phones in movie theatres is sorely needed. ... if used at all: Apple has tonnes of patents that they don't use.
But it would not do any good if it would only prevent filming, and knowing Apple: it would be restricted to Apple devices only
It should have been a part of the cell phone radio protocols from the start and mandatory.
A tablet must have only one data port that is also used for charging.
A Windows tablet must not act as a USB storage device, only as a USB host or use USB for charging, even if the hardware is capable.
I would think that Zuckerberg hates Google+ so much that he does not have any account there.
The account on Google+ named "Mark Zuckerberg" is an imposter. That is quite evident if you check the posts made from that account.
An oldie from many years ago, copied from http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pnw...
For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on. At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue.
For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off."