They have yet to learn the lesson that Apple mastered years ago in the 80's -- use off the shelf commodity parts!!
You're kidding me, right? In the 80's you couldn't even open a Mac without special tools. Every screw and every connector was non-standard or somehow modified.
Absolutely. There's no reason to have a conference be that secure.
I can confirm that security is usually not very tight, but I'm not so sure whether I agree with your suggestion that this is also not needed.
A long time ago I once worked at the IFA for a big telco company---not as a promoter or salesman but as the guy who cleans LCD screens. (They weren't touch screens but apparently people still love to touch them with greasy fat fingers.) There was no security at all. As long as you were wearing a T-shirt with the right logo on it, you could do just about anything and go just about anywhere. Nobody ever checked our security cards and at the time we arrived everything was wide open.
I'm an honest person but other people stole just about anything from bumber stickers, over watches, to several expensive laptops. They also had this bar were you could have a drink mixed by staff hired from the best and most expensive bar in Berlin. After work everybody went there and the guys continued to mix anything you wanted for hours. The head of the marketing agency responsible for the event was not amused when they found out what was going on near the end of the show. As it turned out, every single drink was billed and the marketing company blew their budget by something like 30000 Euro in drinks only. Still, nobody really cared. The only consequence was that the bar was closed earlier during the two days and there was a sign somewhere saying "Take care -- deconstruction crew is stealing laptops."
Anyway, what's the point of news like that when you cannot buy any of these devices. For anyone not living in Japan or the USA these news are nothing but vaporware; if we're lucky we may get something similar for twice the price two years later.
But the big problem is that we send humans at all. It's a terrible waste of resources.
I couldn't disagree more. Some day humans will have to and will want to leave earth and live on space stations and/or other planets, and the knowledge we collect now about how the human body can survive in such environments will be vital. This might happen soon or in many hundred years from now, but it will happen. Perhaps we will also have artificial gravity, better medical support, and all kinds of other things that make life in space easier until then but in the end all of these gimmicks will build upon prior research including the research we do now.
In the long run learning how to put humans into space is much more important than running experiments that could be automatized.
I think you confuse military cooperation with the possibility of industrial espionage. The two issues have nothing to do with each other. Just because you trust a network to handle shared military information doesn't mean you can or should trust the same network to handle trade secrets, financial information, or military state secrets.
Not only that, they also have to worry about elves. The hidden people are generally friendly but they do not like being disturbed. If the data center is build in one of their areas, they might curse the data. Perhaps they already have...think about Iceland's recent economic breakdown...
As an academic early in his "career" (postdoc) I'm skeptical about absolute publication quotas. While it is true that in Southern Europe, where I live, many academics are lazy, it is my impression that in certain domains, especially in the humanities, many of the people that publish a lot are mediocre to say the least. The peer reviewing system in the humanities already gives a huge advantage to people publishing intellectually modest to plain stupid papers, as it is much easier to get an uncontroversial paper that only makes minor points past the reviewers than a controversial paper with new ideas. (This is probably not such a problem in natural sciences, because they have better evaluation criteria.)
Sure, the top people in the field almost always publish a lot -- 4 or more papers a year is quite common -- but I claim that in the middle field this measure does not work. Too much publication pressure primarily encourages people not to strife for substantial results, but in the end its these rare gems that drive research.
That being said, 4 papers in 3 years is a very low demand, as long as we're not talking about indexed papers in A-tier journals. At least people should be able to demonstrate that they have written something even if they don't get all of it published in time. But perhaps there should also be an upper limit---no more than 3 papers a year.
Web apps will never be the future, because they would in the end destroy the "application barrier" that has been carefully nursed by Microsoft and Apple over the past 20 years. In other words, you are and will be able to develop mediocre/limited web apps but as far as proprietary OSes are concerned these are unlikely to ever make use of a device's full potential and all of its technologies.
What's different from trusting the browser to store your passwords?
Nothing, both are insecure. You really should not store your passwords in the browser if you care for security. Use an external password manager you trust. I have written one for myself but there are also good open source password managers.
These were absolutely essential for my scientific work, because I'm living in a very poor country and (if at all) academic publishers only allow authors to put papers and book drafts on their web page that cannot be used for quoting.
Now I'm really, really getting angry! As if Springer books priced at $150 or even $240 plus months of complicated ordering by the university to our library weren't already painful enough.
Thanks a lot, all you IP-property assholes. Eat shit and die!!!
(And yes, I have also published books including typesetting them in their entirety in LaTeX because the publisher was too lazy/saves costs/rips off academics. And no, I haven't seen a dime for any of this work...)
WTF is wrong with US election campaigns? Are voters really that dumb to base their decisions on single cases like Joe the Plumber?
If this continues, there will soon only be professional actors at campaign events and the candidate that has most money to pay for actors will be the one who wins.
I really liked the little Basic book and 10-line games. Unfortunately, my 16K memory expansion had this annoying feature that it would reset the machine when you knocked on the table -- not so nice when you had entered a long program and it happened before you had saved it to cassette tape.:-)
What I don't understand is why some people in the Ubuntu dev team think there is something wrong with traditional Desktops.
Last time I checked, my traditional desktop OS, which happens to be Ubuntu 10.04 with Xfce, worked just fine and I'm as productive with it as I can be... given that I read and post on/....
Just as a side note, C++ is not fast because of the language itself, quite the contrary. It is fast because existing C/C++ have been optimized extensively -- more than any other compilers. There are in fact many ways to break type-safety in C++ that hinder optimization a lot.
You have a point if the app is a commercial product developed by a company with several employees, UI designers, and the resources to maintain different source trees. However, for individual developers being locked into platforms (and platform-specific languages as in iOS) is more than just a minor nuisance -- don't forget that for many applications most of the development time nowadays is spent on GUI and packaging instead of the actual functionality.
Consider it that way: If it were possible to do real cross-platform development for mobile OSs then you'd have many more apps to choose from and more of them would be cheaper or free.
Of course, large companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft really do not want this to happen. They want to lock in their customers forever and prefer to sue each other for years to come. Just don't tell me this is to the benefit of the end consumer.
Out of curiosity, I'm wondering whether it would be possible to hook a Raspberry Pi up to a 10'' LCD display and make it solar powered? There is a lot of sun where I live.
How large would the solar panels have to be to provide the power on an ordinary sunny day?
If you have a google account, you already have personalized search.
That's why I always make sure I'm not logged into Google when searching. Frankly speaking, 'personalized search' is not a very good idea. It has the potential to boost your cognitive biases until you have a completely distorted view of reality. Hopefully not too many people fall into this trap.
Seriously, there's no real reason to hate on Facebook [...]. As for the users, there's no reason to hate on them at all just because they use Facebook.
Oh well, just as there was no reason to hate aol users in the 90ies...
99% of the population would not understand what you are talking about.
However, most users are able to download and click on an installer. It will only take one smart guy who wraps the software in a foolproof one-click "fire and forget" installer for Windows and suddenly the p2p darknet whatever software will be everywhere. The technology is already there, it only has to be made more convenient for the end user. Not so hard, really.
It's unfortunate...That the americans of today are not the americans of over 200 years ago. The ones today really aren't prepared to fight for what is important.
You mean fundamentalist Christian settlers from Europe that committed the largest genocide ever recorded in history?
Slashdot Mirror
They have yet to learn the lesson that Apple mastered years ago in the 80's -- use off the shelf commodity parts!!
You're kidding me, right? In the 80's you couldn't even open a Mac without special tools. Every screw and every connector was non-standard or somehow modified.
What's the alternative?
Using Windows for gaming only and Linux for everything else on a dual boot system works fine for me. What's the problem?
Absolutely. There's no reason to have a conference be that secure.
I can confirm that security is usually not very tight, but I'm not so sure whether I agree with your suggestion that this is also not needed.
A long time ago I once worked at the IFA for a big telco company---not as a promoter or salesman but as the guy who cleans LCD screens. (They weren't touch screens but apparently people still love to touch them with greasy fat fingers.) There was no security at all. As long as you were wearing a T-shirt with the right logo on it, you could do just about anything and go just about anywhere. Nobody ever checked our security cards and at the time we arrived everything was wide open.
I'm an honest person but other people stole just about anything from bumber stickers, over watches, to several expensive laptops. They also had this bar were you could have a drink mixed by staff hired from the best and most expensive bar in Berlin. After work everybody went there and the guys continued to mix anything you wanted for hours. The head of the marketing agency responsible for the event was not amused when they found out what was going on near the end of the show. As it turned out, every single drink was billed and the marketing company blew their budget by something like 30000 Euro in drinks only. Still, nobody really cared. The only consequence was that the bar was closed earlier during the two days and there was a sign somewhere saying "Take care -- deconstruction crew is stealing laptops."
Hey, did you know that you can save even more battery life by shutting down all cores---just don't use the device at all!
Anyway, what's the point of news like that when you cannot buy any of these devices. For anyone not living in Japan or the USA these news are nothing but vaporware; if we're lucky we may get something similar for twice the price two years later.
But the big problem is that we send humans at all. It's a terrible waste of resources.
I couldn't disagree more. Some day humans will have to and will want to leave earth and live on space stations and/or other planets, and the knowledge we collect now about how the human body can survive in such environments will be vital. This might happen soon or in many hundred years from now, but it will happen. Perhaps we will also have artificial gravity, better medical support, and all kinds of other things that make life in space easier until then but in the end all of these gimmicks will build upon prior research including the research we do now.
In the long run learning how to put humans into space is much more important than running experiments that could be automatized.
I think you confuse military cooperation with the possibility of industrial espionage. The two issues have nothing to do with each other. Just because you trust a network to handle shared military information doesn't mean you can or should trust the same network to handle trade secrets, financial information, or military state secrets.
Not only that, they also have to worry about elves. The hidden people are generally friendly but they do not like being disturbed. If the data center is build in one of their areas, they might curse the data. Perhaps they already have...think about Iceland's recent economic breakdown...
As an academic early in his "career" (postdoc) I'm skeptical about absolute publication quotas. While it is true that in Southern Europe, where I live, many academics are lazy, it is my impression that in certain domains, especially in the humanities, many of the people that publish a lot are mediocre to say the least. The peer reviewing system in the humanities already gives a huge advantage to people publishing intellectually modest to plain stupid papers, as it is much easier to get an uncontroversial paper that only makes minor points past the reviewers than a controversial paper with new ideas. (This is probably not such a problem in natural sciences, because they have better evaluation criteria.)
Sure, the top people in the field almost always publish a lot -- 4 or more papers a year is quite common -- but I claim that in the middle field this measure does not work. Too much publication pressure primarily encourages people not to strife for substantial results, but in the end its these rare gems that drive research.
That being said, 4 papers in 3 years is a very low demand, as long as we're not talking about indexed papers in A-tier journals. At least people should be able to demonstrate that they have written something even if they don't get all of it published in time. But perhaps there should also be an upper limit---no more than 3 papers a year.
Web apps will never be the future, because they would in the end destroy the "application barrier" that has been carefully nursed by Microsoft and Apple over the past 20 years. In other words, you are and will be able to develop mediocre/limited web apps but as far as proprietary OSes are concerned these are unlikely to ever make use of a device's full potential and all of its technologies.
What's different from trusting the browser to store your passwords?
Nothing, both are insecure. You really should not store your passwords in the browser if you care for security. Use an external password manager you trust. I have written one for myself but there are also good open source password managers.
Of course there are always those that want to blink and animate and visually scream at you in order to capture your attention.
We used to have a BLINK tag but in most browsers nowadays it no longer works :(
Luckily, with Google Chrome and the latest HTML 5 technology I should be able to implement my own BLINK tag in Dart again! :)
These were absolutely essential for my scientific work, because I'm living in a very poor country and (if at all) academic publishers only allow authors to put papers and book drafts on their web page that cannot be used for quoting.
Now I'm really, really getting angry! As if Springer books priced at $150 or even $240 plus months of complicated ordering by the university to our library weren't already painful enough.
Thanks a lot, all you IP-property assholes. Eat shit and die!!!
(And yes, I have also published books including typesetting them in their entirety in LaTeX because the publisher was too lazy/saves costs/rips off academics. And no, I haven't seen a dime for any of this work...)
Oh wait ... that's that computer company manager, right?
Now who the fuck is Eddy Cue?
Europe's new privacy law could cost Google up to 2 percent of their income, which obviously threatens online free speech.
WTF is wrong with US election campaigns? Are voters really that dumb to base their decisions on single cases like Joe the Plumber?
If this continues, there will soon only be professional actors at campaign events and the candidate that has most money to pay for actors will be the one who wins.
The ZX-81 was my first computer, too.
I really liked the little Basic book and 10-line games. Unfortunately, my 16K memory expansion had this annoying feature that it would reset the machine when you knocked on the table -- not so nice when you had entered a long program and it happened before you had saved it to cassette tape. :-)
And yeah, the keyboard really sucked.
What I don't understand is why some people in the Ubuntu dev team think there is something wrong with traditional Desktops.
Last time I checked, my traditional desktop OS, which happens to be Ubuntu 10.04 with Xfce, worked just fine and I'm as productive with it as I can be ... given that I read and post on /. ...
Just as a side note, C++ is not fast because of the language itself, quite the contrary. It is fast because existing C/C++ have been optimized extensively -- more than any other compilers. There are in fact many ways to break type-safety in C++ that hinder optimization a lot.
You have a point if the app is a commercial product developed by a company with several employees, UI designers, and the resources to maintain different source trees. However, for individual developers being locked into platforms (and platform-specific languages as in iOS) is more than just a minor nuisance -- don't forget that for many applications most of the development time nowadays is spent on GUI and packaging instead of the actual functionality.
Consider it that way: If it were possible to do real cross-platform development for mobile OSs then you'd have many more apps to choose from and more of them would be cheaper or free.
Of course, large companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft really do not want this to happen. They want to lock in their customers forever and prefer to sue each other for years to come. Just don't tell me this is to the benefit of the end consumer.
Out of curiosity, I'm wondering whether it would be possible to hook a Raspberry Pi up to a 10'' LCD display and make it solar powered? There is a lot of sun where I live.
How large would the solar panels have to be to provide the power on an ordinary sunny day?
If you have a google account, you already have personalized search.
That's why I always make sure I'm not logged into Google when searching. Frankly speaking, 'personalized search' is not a very good idea. It has the potential to boost your cognitive biases until you have a completely distorted view of reality. Hopefully not too many people fall into this trap.
Seriously, there's no real reason to hate on Facebook [...]. As for the users, there's no reason to hate on them at all just because they use Facebook.
Oh well, just as there was no reason to hate aol users in the 90ies...
99% of the population would not understand what you are talking about.
However, most users are able to download and click on an installer. It will only take one smart guy who wraps the software in a foolproof one-click "fire and forget" installer for Windows and suddenly the p2p darknet whatever software will be everywhere. The technology is already there, it only has to be made more convenient for the end user. Not so hard, really.
It's unfortunate...That the americans of today are not the americans of over 200 years ago. The ones today really aren't prepared to fight for what is important.
You mean fundamentalist Christian settlers from Europe that committed the largest genocide ever recorded in history?