Sony is also going for portable gaming with this gadget. The playstation hook is a win over iPad. +1 to Sony for that. I'd put money on Microsoft announcing an xbox flavoured portable soon. (hmm I bet they are looking into ways to shoehorn kinect into a portable? Thats the only way they could crush rivals TBH)
Anything but radio. We'd highly unlikely to find ETs broadcasting in the electromagnetic spectrum at all.
If our civilization is anything to go by, the uptake of fibre optics and low-power short range wireless communication means broadcasting high power transmissions was a brief abberation in history.
Obviously Interstellar communication by light is futile. At best a civilization may do in-system communication by high power highly focused laser beams. We may by chance catch a brief flash of coherent light as a misdirected beam is aimed at our system by chance.
Our own communications infrastructure turns ever inward, becomes more focused and less leaky.
To a hypothetical ET observer the earth must slowly falling silent.
Damningly for Apple, Google explicitly asks for your consent and lets you opt out without much disadvantage. Apple gives you no choice and burys it in a 16,000 word EULA.
I've always thought it was horrifically insecure for iTunes to not encrypt device backups by default. Even requiring attaching to a iTunes installation somewhere is extra risk exposure. Access to your machine by default means cleartext access to the most reccent backup of your iThing. Now with this latest security SNAFU it's cleartext access to where you've been. I shudder to think of some of the ways such information could be misused in the hands of law enforcement, your employer or someone out to get you. It's always surprising how seemingly innocent personal information can be used against you, but tracking your movement so finely is purely dangerous information.
Yet another example of how Apple is lax on security, its bad enough for private individuals, but the iPhone/iPad has no place in a corporate environment with any hope of security. How anyone manages to convince an employer an iPhone is necessary let alone cost effective or secure I don't know. The ease of a jailbreak should be evidence enough for a IT security team to reject these gadgets (the original jailbreak was a browser PDF vulnerability) and this is yet more evidence. Indeed I'm aware of a number of IT firms that refuse to approve them for their staff.
Google is upfront about tracking your location on and allows you to opt out on your Android device. They have always been up front about their privacy policy and allow you to opt-out of most of it. Apple's declaration is buried in a EULA that is longer than some Novellas. Corporations know no one reads these things, Google seems to be somewhat honest about that.
All I have yet to see in a "3D" movie or TV despite having viewed something enthusiastically marketted as such, it is a steroscopic trick, by shutter glasses or parallax barrier or some other slightly tricked up version of the red/blue glasses of the 1950s. It's not real 3D, it tricks your brain into seeing depth information, thats it. It's not lightfield recreation nor a genuine volumetric display.
We're a long way off real 3D, which is in my opinion, holographic or nothing, until then it's a expensive gimmick that is more like 2.1D
Considering the (almost) free availabilty of aluminium cans, and the inexpense of sodium hydroxide, and there's a lot of energy locked up in metallic Aluminum, would this be a useful source of hydrogen for some kind of practical DIY purpose that you might need a flammable gas for (power generation, a lamp, cooking, small motor like a lawnmower etc). Does it produce enough gas and assuming cheap NaOH and free aluminum cans, is it a cheap enough energy hack?
Everyone forgets about Kinect. Which outsold iPhones, iPads, iPod touchs, combined. It went on to break the Guiness World Record for the fastest selling consumer gadget of all time. Mod me down as a troll or whatever but: Thats Pretty Fucking Impressive. Frankly Apple's wonderously profitable, despite having nothing like the market share of other players, that is all.
We're all still so besotted with shiny iThings and Microsoft bashing groupthink that we've kind of ignored this revolutionary human computer interface. Things being done with Kinect by hackers are seriously cool and ultimately this is the technology that is going to be the technology that the forthcoming consumer robot revolution will see the world with.
Microsoft is hardly old news, it just isn't a news media and Wall Street darling like Apple. Microsofts been sinking billions into user interface R&D over the last little while, too much criticism, yet they now have something pretty revolutionary and record breaking to show for it.
As soon as they stick Kinect in a smartphone they'll have a hit on their hands.
""It's a matter of opinion which company makes the better operating system or is likely to grow its smartphone market share. But numbers don't lie â" or exaggerate."
Yeah numbers don't lie - Apple still has a niche desktop install base, and a smaller market share of mobiles than Android, and growth has plateaued in each area. Tablets are where Apple will inevitably dethroned, but I'd bet they hold out longer since their lead in this area is bigger. Historically Apple having any kind of lead has been a temporary thing.
Re:Because RTFA is too much...
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 1
It all shows very strong correlation, but that of course isn't causation
But a lack of correlation would be evidence against causation?
I personally hate the arguement "correlation is not causation". Correlation is most certainly evidence for causation.
When you have a metric ass load of correlation from independant studies on different population groups, at what point to you say, oh alright then lets call it causation. The case of the canadian iniuit people having skyrocketting rates of heart disease, diabetes and cancer, after changing to a more western diet, to me thats cause cause and effect.
Whats damning is there just isn't evidence to the contrary. Frankly IMHO the evidence is overwhelming and cause and effect has been demostrated at a population level. That's good enough for me, but as for the actual mechanisms and details, of which there is a lot of science left to do.
Twitter has been widely embraced by narccistitic celebrities, comedians and legions of hot headed wannabes. It hasn't been embraced by the more reasoned and learned among us.
Wider problem? This may explain why my Android devices get kicked off various WiFi networks I frequent. Presumably the device is trying to use an IP that's since been leased to another device.
As a person with mild fructose malabsorbtion I can say it's packaging that makes a difference too. I can eat fruit without a problem, but the same ammount of fructose in something like HFCS brings on my symptoms.
It's possible to have code that looks and even functions innocently but does something nasty. You can bet this is the technique used. If discovered, it just looks like a regular vulnerability - a coding mistake.
What I like about the current mess of different usernames and passwords for different sites, entrust card, RSA tokens etc is that any identity theft is likely to be rather limited. With a Internet ID plan it makes it possible for someone to take an entire identity in one hit, along with all your money and likely better lock you out of getting it back.
This is going become prime target for identity theft, I can tell by the lack of language even acknoledging security issues let alone addressing how it may be kept safe.
Example is the dedicated 'back' button on an Android device. For example, you open an email app, then an email, then an attachment, tapping the back button takes you back each step of what you just did. Smart. Wish I had this for PCs where total control of app switching means you miss out on this elegance.
I find my Ipod touch at a disavantage without a 'back' feature that is as TFA states, sometimes there or sometimes not.
Frankly Unity has (or had) some promise - I've seen many people move their taskbar or dock to the left hand side of the screen, and they all swear by it. I do this now myself for heavy multitasking.
It is an easier more natural way to switch apps than the universal default of the bottom of the screen.
As someone who spends a lot of time on a linux desktop, unity is pretty awful, it just can't do the obvious functional things that other interfaces can, ignoring stablity, it's just no where near well sorted KDE/Gnome + docks app of your choice, or even but OSX dock or the Windows 7 taskbar. Unity seems to have been designed without a good look at how of how the other paradigms do their thing.
Gnome has it's flaws, but it works pretty well, and if dropped for this garbage Canonical may have a problem.
They could buy one major and lead by example. It'd probably be all that's needed to drag them all into the 21th century. I'm not sure I'd trust Google not to use the opportunity to take a low blow at Apple though and that's one thing the industry does need.
There, fixed that for you. Right now the music industry is Steve Job's bitch, and he gets to take a big cut of everything they sell. Apple has pwnership of 70% of the digital music industry, and Google is thinking a few steps ahead and doesn't like the future it sees, an Appleverse which it can't monetize. This is it's reason for Android, making sure Apple isn't a monopoly that can shut it out of a market on a whim. It doesn't like the potential threat to it's future profits if Apple retains it's control of digital music, this is the point of Google's music service IMHO.
Melissa Lee is just the National Party's token Asian, and after a by election shambles has probably risen about as far in the party as she is ever going to. She is not very smart, and every time she opens her mouth in public she proves it again. She is however quite nice looking, and probably brings a bunch of Asian votes.
You also just described most of the National party and a good fraction of the opposition. John Key is not stupid like most of them although most of his intelligence is devoted to corralling a bunch of idiots to prevent a dangerously stupid but useful government from falling on it's face too hard.
The depth and magnitude of the asshattery that incumbent political party manifests beggars belief. It's been a government by photo oppurtunity riding a trojan horse crisis all the way to the next election.
"Dumbing down" is what you do when you can't make an interface good, but desperately need to make it usable. I've seen plenty of good interfaces that are discoverable for a newbie, but all the advanced features you could want are intact and not hidden away. Lord knows pro's even need help sometimes, we can't remember everything and usually it's something critically important. A newbie will lose interest and go do something else, we've got workt to do.
This current govt has been leveraging the crisis following the earthquake in christchurch to ram through a wish-list of dodgy legislation it wouldn't have had a hard time passing without a crisis. What outstanding luck. They'll be riding this trojan horse to the next election.
Something dangerous has subverted NZ politics. Why the urgency in parliment at all? Japan is in a far worse situation and is doing nothing of the sort. Kobe and San Francisco didn't need what ammounted to draconian laws and suspension of demorcracy to rebuild, why is it happening here?
It seems a fairly agile and first-world democracy has developed an auto-immune disorder and is wrecking itself. Hey.. that sounds familar...
Now KDE has successfully konquered the desktop with 0.43% desktop UI market share, they are going on to tablets, smartphones and whatever else. It's always struck me that many Linux has been an OS without users, it's just not used much at all outside of an enthusiast/developer base and this fate befalls many Linux based open source projects which can persist as long as someone wants to develop even if nobody wants to use it. Without much 3rd party adoption, anything of that sort is a no-go, it just doesn't take off. Despite this, many cross-platform open source efforts have epic success, such as Firefox, then again some don't like Gimp.
How about getting things right on the desktop first and actually getting real users to use KDE? Plasma to me, doesn't feel finished even. It was easy because OSX was a niche and Windows is easy to improve on. They're going up against iOS and Android. That's going to be hard.
*totally made up but based on on linux having 2% at most of the desktop market and gnome being the most popular.
It isn't the frame rate that's going to be the problem with The Hobbit, it's Peter Jackson's altering Tolkien's story and characters.
Lets face it, if it was true to the book then people would have walked out of the cinema in the first 20 minutes.
The real problem was Tolkien was not actually a good writer by many definitions and had a head full of wierd catholic patriachal moral absolutism which showed in his writing amongst it's many flaws. In fact in places his writing is rather cringeworthy (when I first read his work I had to struggle not to throw the book accross the room) and he has been easy pickings for many a literary critic over the years. What worked however was his world building was epic. Peter Jackson had to do a carefully considered rework of the dialog, plot, characters to make anything near an acceptable 21st century story, and to have a hope in hell of keeping people seated for 3 hours. He even included actual females, the gender Tolkien didn't seem to acknowledge existed let alone could have anything to do with events in his world. Tolkien fans will mod me down, go right ahead, but many won't, many knew PJ did what he had to do.
They can't handle a division that does too well and is too profitable, even in the face of competition (HD recording smartphones). They couldn't set it up to fail, so they have to disband a sucessful department. They will instead be re-focusing on more managable mediocore products.
Don't forget resistance to malware - if you real must torrent pirated stuff, Linux is the way to go, also is blessed with plenty of great tools for the job. I often check out cracks etc in Linux before I put them over on my Windows x64 gaming rig (only really used for gaming / blu-ray, Windows Media Centre is hard to beat).
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot:
Nintendo DSI
Nintendo 3DS
Sony is also going for portable gaming with this gadget. The playstation hook is a win over iPad. +1 to Sony for that. I'd put money on Microsoft announcing an xbox flavoured portable soon. (hmm I bet they are looking into ways to shoehorn kinect into a portable? Thats the only way they could crush rivals TBH)
Anything but radio. We'd highly unlikely to find ETs broadcasting in the electromagnetic spectrum at all.
If our civilization is anything to go by, the uptake of fibre optics and low-power short range wireless communication means broadcasting high power transmissions was a brief abberation in history.
Obviously Interstellar communication by light is futile. At best a civilization may do in-system communication by high power highly focused laser beams. We may by chance catch a brief flash of coherent light as a misdirected beam is aimed at our system by chance.
Our own communications infrastructure turns ever inward, becomes more focused and less leaky. To a hypothetical ET observer the earth must slowly falling silent.
Damningly for Apple, Google explicitly asks for your consent and lets you opt out without much disadvantage. Apple gives you no choice and burys it in a 16,000 word EULA.
I'm siding with Google on this one.
I've always thought it was horrifically insecure for iTunes to not encrypt device backups by default. Even requiring attaching to a iTunes installation somewhere is extra risk exposure. Access to your machine by default means cleartext access to the most reccent backup of your iThing. Now with this latest security SNAFU it's cleartext access to where you've been. I shudder to think of some of the ways such information could be misused in the hands of law enforcement, your employer or someone out to get you. It's always surprising how seemingly innocent personal information can be used against you, but tracking your movement so finely is purely dangerous information.
Yet another example of how Apple is lax on security, its bad enough for private individuals, but the iPhone/iPad has no place in a corporate environment with any hope of security. How anyone manages to convince an employer an iPhone is necessary let alone cost effective or secure I don't know. The ease of a jailbreak should be evidence enough for a IT security team to reject these gadgets (the original jailbreak was a browser PDF vulnerability) and this is yet more evidence. Indeed I'm aware of a number of IT firms that refuse to approve them for their staff.
Google is upfront about tracking your location on and allows you to opt out on your Android device. They have always been up front about their privacy policy and allow you to opt-out of most of it. Apple's declaration is buried in a EULA that is longer than some Novellas. Corporations know no one reads these things, Google seems to be somewhat honest about that.
All I have yet to see in a "3D" movie or TV despite having viewed something enthusiastically marketted as such, it is a steroscopic trick, by shutter glasses or parallax barrier or some other slightly tricked up version of the red/blue glasses of the 1950s. It's not real 3D, it tricks your brain into seeing depth information, thats it. It's not lightfield recreation nor a genuine volumetric display.
We're a long way off real 3D, which is in my opinion, holographic or nothing, until then it's a expensive gimmick that is more like 2.1D
Considering the (almost) free availabilty of aluminium cans, and the inexpense of sodium hydroxide, and there's a lot of energy locked up in metallic Aluminum, would this be a useful source of hydrogen for some kind of practical DIY purpose that you might need a flammable gas for (power generation, a lamp, cooking, small motor like a lawnmower etc). Does it produce enough gas and assuming cheap NaOH and free aluminum cans, is it a cheap enough energy hack?
Everyone forgets about Kinect. Which outsold iPhones, iPads, iPod touchs, combined. It went on to break the Guiness World Record for the fastest selling consumer gadget of all time. Mod me down as a troll or whatever but: Thats Pretty Fucking Impressive. Frankly Apple's wonderously profitable, despite having nothing like the market share of other players, that is all.
We're all still so besotted with shiny iThings and Microsoft bashing groupthink that we've kind of ignored this revolutionary human computer interface. Things being done with Kinect by hackers are seriously cool and ultimately this is the technology that is going to be the technology that the forthcoming consumer robot revolution will see the world with.
Microsoft is hardly old news, it just isn't a news media and Wall Street darling like Apple. Microsofts been sinking billions into user interface R&D over the last little while, too much criticism, yet they now have something pretty revolutionary and record breaking to show for it.
As soon as they stick Kinect in a smartphone they'll have a hit on their hands.
""It's a matter of opinion which company makes the better operating system or is likely to grow its smartphone market share. But numbers don't lie â" or exaggerate."
Yeah numbers don't lie - Apple still has a niche desktop install base, and a smaller market share of mobiles than Android, and growth has plateaued in each area. Tablets are where Apple will inevitably dethroned, but I'd bet they hold out longer since their lead in this area is bigger. Historically Apple having any kind of lead has been a temporary thing.
It all shows very strong correlation, but that of course isn't causation
But a lack of correlation would be evidence against causation?
I personally hate the arguement "correlation is not causation". Correlation is most certainly evidence for causation.
When you have a metric ass load of correlation from independant studies on different population groups, at what point to you say, oh alright then lets call it causation. The case of the canadian iniuit people having skyrocketting rates of heart disease, diabetes and cancer, after changing to a more western diet, to me thats cause cause and effect.
Whats damning is there just isn't evidence to the contrary. Frankly IMHO the evidence is overwhelming and cause and effect has been demostrated at a population level. That's good enough for me, but as for the actual mechanisms and details, of which there is a lot of science left to do.
Twitter has been widely embraced by narccistitic celebrities, comedians and legions of hot headed wannabes. It hasn't been embraced by the more reasoned and learned among us.
Wider problem? This may explain why my Android devices get kicked off various WiFi networks I frequent. Presumably the device is trying to use an IP that's since been leased to another device.
As a person with mild fructose malabsorbtion I can say it's packaging that makes a difference too. I can eat fruit without a problem, but the same ammount of fructose in something like HFCS brings on my symptoms.
Insane yes. Prior art: Any touchscreen desktop monitor fits that description (which have been around a long time).
But it's so easy to hide a backdoor in plain sight you might as well not called it plain sight.
http://underhanded.xcott.com/
It's possible to have code that looks and even functions innocently but does something nasty. You can bet this is the technique used. If discovered, it just looks like a regular vulnerability - a coding mistake.
What I like about the current mess of different usernames and passwords for different sites, entrust card, RSA tokens etc is that any identity theft is likely to be rather limited. With a Internet ID plan it makes it possible for someone to take an entire identity in one hit, along with all your money and likely better lock you out of getting it back.
This is going become prime target for identity theft, I can tell by the lack of language even acknoledging security issues let alone addressing how it may be kept safe.
Example is the dedicated 'back' button on an Android device. For example, you open an email app, then an email, then an attachment, tapping the back button takes you back each step of what you just did. Smart. Wish I had this for PCs where total control of app switching means you miss out on this elegance.
I find my Ipod touch at a disavantage without a 'back' feature that is as TFA states, sometimes there or sometimes not.
Frankly Unity has (or had) some promise - I've seen many people move their taskbar or dock to the left hand side of the screen, and they all swear by it. I do this now myself for heavy multitasking. It is an easier more natural way to switch apps than the universal default of the bottom of the screen.
As someone who spends a lot of time on a linux desktop, unity is pretty awful, it just can't do the obvious functional things that other interfaces can, ignoring stablity, it's just no where near well sorted KDE/Gnome + docks app of your choice, or even but OSX dock or the Windows 7 taskbar. Unity seems to have been designed without a good look at how of how the other paradigms do their thing.
Gnome has it's flaws, but it works pretty well, and if dropped for this garbage Canonical may have a problem.
They could buy one major and lead by example. It'd probably be all that's needed to drag them all into the 21th century. I'm not sure I'd trust Google not to use the opportunity to take a low blow at Apple though and that's one thing the industry does need.
There, fixed that for you. Right now the music industry is Steve Job's bitch, and he gets to take a big cut of everything they sell. Apple has pwnership of 70% of the digital music industry, and Google is thinking a few steps ahead and doesn't like the future it sees, an Appleverse which it can't monetize. This is it's reason for Android, making sure Apple isn't a monopoly that can shut it out of a market on a whim. It doesn't like the potential threat to it's future profits if Apple retains it's control of digital music, this is the point of Google's music service IMHO.
Melissa Lee is just the National Party's token Asian, and after a by election shambles has probably risen about as far in the party as she is ever going to. She is not very smart, and every time she opens her mouth in public she proves it again. She is however quite nice looking, and probably brings a bunch of Asian votes.
You also just described most of the National party and a good fraction of the opposition. John Key is not stupid like most of them although most of his intelligence is devoted to corralling a bunch of idiots to prevent a dangerously stupid but useful government from falling on it's face too hard.
The depth and magnitude of the asshattery that incumbent political party manifests beggars belief. It's been a government by photo oppurtunity riding a trojan horse crisis all the way to the next election.
"Dumbing down" is what you do when you can't make an interface good, but desperately need to make it usable. I've seen plenty of good interfaces that are discoverable for a newbie, but all the advanced features you could want are intact and not hidden away. Lord knows pro's even need help sometimes, we can't remember everything and usually it's something critically important. A newbie will lose interest and go do something else, we've got workt to do.
It's an open source project you shouldn't expect it to be usable, the point is in developing it, not using it.
This current govt has been leveraging the crisis following the earthquake in christchurch to ram through a wish-list of dodgy legislation it wouldn't have had a hard time passing without a crisis. What outstanding luck. They'll be riding this trojan horse to the next election.
Something dangerous has subverted NZ politics. Why the urgency in parliment at all? Japan is in a far worse situation and is doing nothing of the sort. Kobe and San Francisco didn't need what ammounted to draconian laws and suspension of demorcracy to rebuild, why is it happening here?
It seems a fairly agile and first-world democracy has developed an auto-immune disorder and is wrecking itself. Hey.. that sounds familar...
Now KDE has successfully konquered the desktop with 0.43% desktop UI market share, they are going on to tablets, smartphones and whatever else. It's always struck me that many Linux has been an OS without users, it's just not used much at all outside of an enthusiast/developer base and this fate befalls many Linux based open source projects which can persist as long as someone wants to develop even if nobody wants to use it. Without much 3rd party adoption, anything of that sort is a no-go, it just doesn't take off. Despite this, many cross-platform open source efforts have epic success, such as Firefox, then again some don't like Gimp.
How about getting things right on the desktop first and actually getting real users to use KDE? Plasma to me, doesn't feel finished even. It was easy because OSX was a niche and Windows is easy to improve on. They're going up against iOS and Android. That's going to be hard.
*totally made up but based on on linux having 2% at most of the desktop market and gnome being the most popular.
It isn't the frame rate that's going to be the problem with The Hobbit, it's Peter Jackson's altering Tolkien's story and characters.
Lets face it, if it was true to the book then people would have walked out of the cinema in the first 20 minutes.
The real problem was Tolkien was not actually a good writer by many definitions and had a head full of wierd catholic patriachal moral absolutism which showed in his writing amongst it's many flaws. In fact in places his writing is rather cringeworthy (when I first read his work I had to struggle not to throw the book accross the room) and he has been easy pickings for many a literary critic over the years. What worked however was his world building was epic. Peter Jackson had to do a carefully considered rework of the dialog, plot, characters to make anything near an acceptable 21st century story, and to have a hope in hell of keeping people seated for 3 hours. He even included actual females, the gender Tolkien didn't seem to acknowledge existed let alone could have anything to do with events in his world. Tolkien fans will mod me down, go right ahead, but many won't, many knew PJ did what he had to do.
They can't handle a division that does too well and is too profitable, even in the face of competition (HD recording smartphones). They couldn't set it up to fail, so they have to disband a sucessful department. They will instead be re-focusing on more managable mediocore products.
Don't forget resistance to malware - if you real must torrent pirated stuff, Linux is the way to go, also is blessed with plenty of great tools for the job. I often check out cracks etc in Linux before I put them over on my Windows x64 gaming rig (only really used for gaming / blu-ray, Windows Media Centre is hard to beat).