63 countries with a combined population of 4.5 billion people
Yeah, I'm sure some Bolivian dirt farmer is going to miss the traffic report on his new iPad.
Apple knows damned well who their customer base is. And I bet it isn't in those 63 countries. Those are countries where people are buying $45 android tablets. You think Apple gives a shit about spending extra to keep up with subways and traffic there? Give me a break.
Not that there is any point in feeding this troll, but sure I will bite. International markets are eating up Apple devices, to the tune of 3 out of 4 of them going overseas instead of being sold in the US (in the first quarter of 2012). Sure, the market overall is a smaller slice of each of those countries, given their relatively lower per capita income, but it is a very strong demand that has no sign of slowing down.
You presumably don't have to upgrade to iOS 6 immediately. Or are they removing Google apps across all versions of iOS?
If they are going to remove it altogether then do the obvious thing and either crack your iDevice, or buy an Android tablet instead of putting up with that shit.
No, only if you want to keep using iTunes, iCloud, etc (basically the things that make apple devices worth having) do you need to upgrade. So go ahead and keep iOS 5!
On your phone you are more or less just going to check your email, and browse a few pages. On your PC or Laptop, you will be doing hours of browsing and watching movies, and other activities.
But why does it matter if I already paid for the data i'm going to consume?
Because up until recently, all networks offered an unlimited plan which they hoped would see only 1-2 GB of usage, max. This makes it cost-effective for them to simply let you use as much as you want, since the power users that really cram data down onto a smartphone are few and far between. Basically, they were over-subscribed but didn't actually have bandwidth contention (on most days). You paid for the service of using as much data *on your handset* and the carriers were keen on making you keep up your end of the deal (that was spelled out in your contract).
Now, few providers offer unlimited service so yes, users are paying per GB they use. And coincidentally, tethering is now free (without coercion) under the Verizon "share everything" plans, and according to this it's"free" to other users as well, even begrudgingly to the users still in possession of an unlimited plan.
Farmers don't need iPads. They need to have the government stop screwing up the markets and inadvertently creating monopolies like Monsanto. They created genetically altered seeds that, when they blow into neighboring fields, they sue those farmers, forcing them into bankrupcy, and thus getting a cheap new addition to their mega farm.
Not that manipulating the food market always turns out well... but to say that they "created monsanto" is a stretch... Plus, the farmer they sued in the incident you mentioned, he sprayed roundup on his *own* non roundup-ready field, waited for the untainted corn to die, then harvested the tainted corn so he could have the monsanto genes to plant with the next year. Sure, genetic IP is a sketchy domain, but the guy really did willfully infringe.
The North American and Japanese versions do have a dual core (higher clocked) vs the quad core available in the "international" Europe version (non LTE). The NA/JP versions also are the ones with 2GB of ram, vs 1GB in the international. Although, demonstrating how more cores/GHz/RAM actually makes the phone faster has been elusive.
Has it always been? I quite liked it when it first started up. It was a decent way to pay for things online, knowing fairly well you wouldn't get completely screwed either way. The issue with them is really their more recent actions.
Paypal is a company that wants to act like a bank (handling deposits, exchanges, etc) but doesn't want to be regulated like a bank (in all the bad ways). This has been controversial from pretty much the start, but yes things have been escalating since Ebay bought the company from Musk and Thiel. One particularly contentious issue has always been their somewhat capricious handling of fraud (or what they constitute as fraud) and their refusal to allow appeals or arbitration, effectively setting their own rules on when they can decide to perpetually keep money that has been deposited to them.
Paypal made a lot of money, which he has spent in interesting ways.
OK, so none of his enviable ventures have made money... I think PayPal could be one of the most universally loathed name in the tech community. Probably why it didn't show up in the summary, a good bit of/. would be trolling for "he's building rockets with money he stole from me" quips.
Apparently, it's to hook a tyre (filled with a bit of petrol) around the elbow in the camera pylon, and then light it ablaze causing enough heat on the camera box that it will self-destruct. At least thats what this site suggests: http://www.speedcam.co.uk/gatso2.htm
I somehow doubt people are using hunting rifles on speed traps, I further doubt that they would do that in america, but maybe I put too much faith in my fellow americans.. Now I would *not* be surprised to hear about this happening in the types of country where everyone walks around carrying high powered rifles all the time, but those countries have much larger troubles than speed traps anyways.
You mean, like Switzerland? Yes, I agree, they do have bigger problems than speedsters, leiderhosen wedgies are horrible!
Fans of famous rapper, actor, and ride-pimper Xzibit? Wow they are nicer people than I thought! Or, are they hoping that by watching out for these speed cameras, Xzibit will grace them with a pimped out ride?
Not to be a hater, but it seems like/. has a story about somebody sending a balloon to the upper atmosphere once a week. This one does have an education angle, but really most of them do. That said, I would love to do it myself sometime, but I wouldn't expect/. to cover it.
And why not? It seems like a pretty easy way to get slashdotted. Heck, put a 4g phone on your balloon, and see if your project can be *literally* slashdotted. You know, for science.
Highly advanced cyber-thieves discover method to steal cars with a coat hanger and a screw driver! Everyone cower in terror!
Not that this isn't dumb security on BMW's part, but the thing keeping people from stealing your car is their conscience and the police, not your hyper-powerful super-locks. They might keep some dumb teenagers out of your car, but not car thieves who buy blank keys on the black market and learn to reprogram them.
The seemingly odd thing is that there are other implementations that work the same way (I have seen this done to Honda cars many many times) but don't suffer from this kind of attack, since the car computer purposefully responds very very slowly to the reprogram command. Leave it to those hyper-efficient Germans to think that reducing the time required was a good thing.
So, you would rather see more submissions like this one? (18 comments after 24 hours) Come on, trolls are a part of the internet, so they might as well be a part of slashdot submissions (god knows we see enough of them in the comments section). Be open to a little fun!
What I came to say. I can't imagine a qr code being able to stack overflow anything, there aren't enough bits.
Maybe if the QR code was a URL. But you'd have to be stupid to do that too.
A QR code that was a hash of the batch, the release series the serial number and a salt, sure. This could be awesome. Otherwise? Not so much.
Quite right. I suspect near the beginning of the forgery algorithm there lies something to the effect of "if scanned_code.urlCheck == true { forgeryAlert(scanned_code) }" and certainly not "if scanned_code.urlCheck == true { browser(scanned_code.text) }". Just a five minute observation though, someone might have a better way to do that.
They're stupid enough to execute code formed from non-executable input.
* FIX OVER
Yes, let's go ahead and presume that the institutions that figuratively and in some cases literally built the first world nations we sit on our asses in have no idea how to sandbox and bound check a code read from a scanner in order to stop an "infection" from taking over... Why, there is no way every single bank, even the podunk credit unions that dot the land near and far, can figure out how to run a completely public banking portal without getting completely pwned on their first day and having their vaults emptied. Wait, no, I have that backwards. Good security IS possible, it's just hard for most slashpundits to imagine since it is completely beyond them.
The problem is more complex than that: Mobile devices lack CPU grunt to do things which are easier to do on a desktop systems. Because of this the mobile OS builders concentrate what little CPU they do have to make sure their apps run the best as they can at the cost of anything else you may wish to run on top of that. In fact I think they even cripple Javascript on iOS to make sure the OS keeps ticking nicely, for example native scroll events take precendence over Javascript scroll events. I think the main reason that flash was killed in iOS was because it was a closed source CPU hog that they couldn't cripple.
The only thing that will change this for mobile development is more CPU power, which is difficult if we don't want to have personal hand warmers in our pockets. I don't have a problem with JS for application GUI development as long as there is enough juice to run it.
I suppose that *is* a problem, but really the big thing that Facebook has screwed up in mobile is not having the infrastructure (server side) to push all content as updates to the app. Instead, each time a user wants to browse their wall, they have to download the whole flogging thing again. The absolute biggest threat to mobile experience is the actual content download itself, it requires the user to stand around and wait, and it eats battery like crazy. Twitter got this right, partly because that's the entire model of their service, but if you look at how well their app runs on mobile you kind of get tired of even tolerating Facebook at all.
It's more correct to say it's the fastest on the list, than the fastest in the world. There are any number of metrics you can use to compare supercomputers. Top 500 just uses the most popular metric. Another machine could easily be the fastest on a different list, like http://www.graph500.org/.
The other specific consideration is that the list is ONLY for those that volunteer to run the Linpack benchmark and wish to publicize the results. It is presumed that governments with classified computing facilities withhold this information, for obvious reasons, so there are likely many "supercomputers" (perhaps even a "fastest") that will never be part of the Top 500. The US NSA, for example, is widely believed to operate facilities at or near the top of the list, but they are nowhere in sight for obvious reasons.
1)Too many versions too quickly. 2 major releases (3.0 and 4.0) in too short a timespan
3.0 was released as a tablet-specific OS. The next handset OS after 2.3 (gingerbread) as 4.0 (ice cream sandwich). Talking about the "problem" with no real knowledge of it, is um, a PROBLEM.
most of us are driving 70-80mph anyways when the limits are 55-65mph...and arbitrarily enforced. Why not just make the limits 85mph and enforce it strictly? Far less ambiguity and stress for the driver. And no need to negotiate down tickets or argue when pulled over.
Oh, I dunno, maybe the same reason they dont make them 75, or 65, or 55 and enforce them strictly? Current enforcement methods (radar, laser, airborne measurement, etc) are highly selective, and relatively imprecise (enough to confuse 80mph for 85mph, for example). There is no such thing as strict enforcement when it comes to speed, without "violating privacy" in order for the enforcers to be constantly aware of speed, or "violating freedom" by making/mandating cars that simply cannot exceed the speed.
it's not darwinism, it's evolution. And stop assuming the driving reckless if a genetic mutation that removing a person from the gene pool fixes.
I will go ahead and assume you meant something like "and stop assuming that driving recklessly is a genetic mutation that will be fixed by removing that person from the gene pool"...
The key here is that if you are sufficiently adept at judging risk you will avoid situations like that and therefore preserve your genes for later generations. There are obviously no genes to make a good driver (as cars have been around for such a short period of time) so if one can use the other genes they have (the ones that make certain parts of the brain more/less effective) to properly react to risk by avoiding this threat to life, then yes that is natural selection at work.
And no, I fully accept that a race of superbly risk-aware humans will not arise from the happenings on this one toll road. But I can dream.
The sad fact is that its not speed that kills, its differential speed. Unfortunately our drivers training here is not really up to the standards it should be with modern machines. If you look at Germany they take drivers ed a lot more seriously, as well as licencing, with 6 month courses costing thousands of dollars being the norm. As well the rules of the Autobahn are strictly enforced, if you're going slow in the left lane you WILL be pulled over, just as quick if not quicker than you would for "speeding". Same with sudden lane changes, and just general bad driving. Speed doesnt kill, dumb drivers do.
The high barrier to entry also means that there are fewer drivers, and those that drive are the ones self-selected to be very serious about it. Add that to the extensive amount of training, and you end up with a system that is blissfully safe compared to what is common in the US... A population where every adult is expected to have a (simple to obtain) drivers license (and use it), and about 70% of drivers insist that they are above average, even though most have no evidence to base that on.
It's like comparing aviation fatalities among extremely trained commercial pilots, to basically any other pilot in the sky. The commercial pilots are, by virtue of self-selection (as part of a competitive process) and training, many many times safer.
Slashdot Mirror
63 countries with a combined population of 4.5 billion people
Yeah, I'm sure some Bolivian dirt farmer is going to miss the traffic report on his new iPad.
Apple knows damned well who their customer base is. And I bet it isn't in those 63 countries. Those are countries where people are buying $45 android tablets. You think Apple gives a shit about spending extra to keep up with subways and traffic there? Give me a break.
Not that there is any point in feeding this troll, but sure I will bite. International markets are eating up Apple devices, to the tune of 3 out of 4 of them going overseas instead of being sold in the US (in the first quarter of 2012). Sure, the market overall is a smaller slice of each of those countries, given their relatively lower per capita income, but it is a very strong demand that has no sign of slowing down.
You presumably don't have to upgrade to iOS 6 immediately. Or are they removing Google apps across all versions of iOS?
If they are going to remove it altogether then do the obvious thing and either crack your iDevice, or buy an Android tablet instead of putting up with that shit.
No, only if you want to keep using iTunes, iCloud, etc (basically the things that make apple devices worth having) do you need to upgrade. So go ahead and keep iOS 5!
On your phone you are more or less just going to check your email, and browse a few pages. On your PC or Laptop, you will be doing hours of browsing and watching movies, and other activities.
But why does it matter if I already paid for the data i'm going to consume?
Because up until recently, all networks offered an unlimited plan which they hoped would see only 1-2 GB of usage, max. This makes it cost-effective for them to simply let you use as much as you want, since the power users that really cram data down onto a smartphone are few and far between. Basically, they were over-subscribed but didn't actually have bandwidth contention (on most days). You paid for the service of using as much data *on your handset* and the carriers were keen on making you keep up your end of the deal (that was spelled out in your contract).
Now, few providers offer unlimited service so yes, users are paying per GB they use. And coincidentally, tethering is now free (without coercion) under the Verizon "share everything" plans, and according to this it's"free" to other users as well, even begrudgingly to the users still in possession of an unlimited plan.
Farmers don't need iPads. They need to have the government stop screwing up the markets and inadvertently creating monopolies like Monsanto. They created genetically altered seeds that, when they blow into neighboring fields, they sue those farmers, forcing them into bankrupcy, and thus getting a cheap new addition to their mega farm.
Not that manipulating the food market always turns out well... but to say that they "created monsanto" is a stretch... Plus, the farmer they sued in the incident you mentioned, he sprayed roundup on his *own* non roundup-ready field, waited for the untainted corn to die, then harvested the tainted corn so he could have the monsanto genes to plant with the next year. Sure, genetic IP is a sketchy domain, but the guy really did willfully infringe.
China Unveils Yet Another Stealth Fighter
Seems they _____ quite get the idea of stealth!
Yet your use of the word "don't" does indeed elude any attempts at detection...
The North American and Japanese versions do have a dual core (higher clocked) vs the quad core available in the "international" Europe version (non LTE). The NA/JP versions also are the ones with 2GB of ram, vs 1GB in the international. Although, demonstrating how more cores/GHz/RAM actually makes the phone faster has been elusive.
Has it always been? I quite liked it when it first started up. It was a decent way to pay for things online, knowing fairly well you wouldn't get completely screwed either way. The issue with them is really their more recent actions.
Paypal is a company that wants to act like a bank (handling deposits, exchanges, etc) but doesn't want to be regulated like a bank (in all the bad ways). This has been controversial from pretty much the start, but yes things have been escalating since Ebay bought the company from Musk and Thiel. One particularly contentious issue has always been their somewhat capricious handling of fraud (or what they constitute as fraud) and their refusal to allow appeals or arbitration, effectively setting their own rules on when they can decide to perpetually keep money that has been deposited to them.
Paypal made a lot of money, which he has spent in interesting ways.
OK, so none of his enviable ventures have made money... I think PayPal could be one of the most universally loathed name in the tech community. Probably why it didn't show up in the summary, a good bit of /. would be trolling for "he's building rockets with money he stole from me" quips.
Bloomberg Businessweek spent a few days with Musk and got a look inside his insane factories in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles.
They're manufacturing insanity in America now? That explains a lot.
AND we're exporting it. Get ready, world!
Oh, shit, I actually didn't think of that... Woosh for me, I clearly need to spend more time studying knowyourmeme.com
I hear in the UK paintball guns are the norm.
Apparently, it's to hook a tyre (filled with a bit of petrol) around the elbow in the camera pylon, and then light it ablaze causing enough heat on the camera box that it will self-destruct. At least thats what this site suggests: http://www.speedcam.co.uk/gatso2.htm
I somehow doubt people are using hunting rifles on speed traps, I further doubt that they would do that in america, but maybe I put too much faith in my fellow americans.. Now I would *not* be surprised to hear about this happening in the types of country where everyone walks around carrying high powered rifles all the time, but those countries have much larger troubles than speed traps anyways.
You mean, like Switzerland? Yes, I agree, they do have bigger problems than speedsters, leiderhosen wedgies are horrible!
Voyeurs and Xzibitionists.
Fans of famous rapper, actor, and ride-pimper Xzibit? Wow they are nicer people than I thought! Or, are they hoping that by watching out for these speed cameras, Xzibit will grace them with a pimped out ride?
I'm not sure why it is inconceivable that both cameras are in each others' field of view, so that they watch *each other*...
Not that it is necessarily the case, nor do I think this is a good idea... I'm just sayin...
Not to be a hater, but it seems like /. has a story about somebody sending a balloon to the upper atmosphere once a week. This one does have an education angle, but really most of them do. That said, I would love to do it myself sometime, but I wouldn't expect /. to cover it.
And why not? It seems like a pretty easy way to get slashdotted. Heck, put a 4g phone on your balloon, and see if your project can be *literally* slashdotted. You know, for science.
Highly advanced cyber-thieves discover method to steal cars with a coat hanger and a screw driver! Everyone cower in terror!
Not that this isn't dumb security on BMW's part, but the thing keeping people from stealing your car is their conscience and the police, not your hyper-powerful super-locks. They might keep some dumb teenagers out of your car, but not car thieves who buy blank keys on the black market and learn to reprogram them.
The seemingly odd thing is that there are other implementations that work the same way (I have seen this done to Honda cars many many times) but don't suffer from this kind of attack, since the car computer purposefully responds very very slowly to the reprogram command. Leave it to those hyper-efficient Germans to think that reducing the time required was a good thing.
So, you would rather see more submissions like this one? (18 comments after 24 hours) Come on, trolls are a part of the internet, so they might as well be a part of slashdot submissions (god knows we see enough of them in the comments section). Be open to a little fun!
What I came to say. I can't imagine a qr code being able to stack overflow anything, there aren't enough bits.
Maybe if the QR code was a URL. But you'd have to be stupid to do that too.
A QR code that was a hash of the batch, the release series the serial number and a salt, sure. This could be awesome. Otherwise? Not so much.
Quite right. I suspect near the beginning of the forgery algorithm there lies something to the effect of "if scanned_code.urlCheck == true { forgeryAlert(scanned_code) }" and certainly not "if scanned_code.urlCheck == true { browser(scanned_code.text) }". Just a five minute observation though, someone might have a better way to do that.
* FIX
They're stupid enough to execute code formed from non-executable input.
* FIX OVER
Yes, let's go ahead and presume that the institutions that figuratively and in some cases literally built the first world nations we sit on our asses in have no idea how to sandbox and bound check a code read from a scanner in order to stop an "infection" from taking over... Why, there is no way every single bank, even the podunk credit unions that dot the land near and far, can figure out how to run a completely public banking portal without getting completely pwned on their first day and having their vaults emptied. Wait, no, I have that backwards. Good security IS possible, it's just hard for most slashpundits to imagine since it is completely beyond them.
The problem is more complex than that: Mobile devices lack CPU grunt to do things which are easier to do on a desktop systems.
Because of this the mobile OS builders concentrate what little CPU they do have to make sure their apps run the best as they can at the cost of anything else you may wish to run on top of that. In fact I think they even cripple Javascript on iOS to make sure the OS keeps ticking nicely, for example native scroll events take precendence over Javascript scroll events. I think the main reason that flash was killed in iOS was because it was a closed source CPU hog that they couldn't cripple.
The only thing that will change this for mobile development is more CPU power, which is difficult if we don't want to have personal hand warmers in our pockets.
I don't have a problem with JS for application GUI development as long as there is enough juice to run it.
I suppose that *is* a problem, but really the big thing that Facebook has screwed up in mobile is not having the infrastructure (server side) to push all content as updates to the app. Instead, each time a user wants to browse their wall, they have to download the whole flogging thing again. The absolute biggest threat to mobile experience is the actual content download itself, it requires the user to stand around and wait, and it eats battery like crazy. Twitter got this right, partly because that's the entire model of their service, but if you look at how well their app runs on mobile you kind of get tired of even tolerating Facebook at all.
The Top 500 is a specific list: http://top500.org/
It's more correct to say it's the fastest on the list, than the fastest in the world. There are any number of metrics you can use to compare supercomputers. Top 500 just uses the most popular metric. Another machine could easily be the fastest on a different list, like http://www.graph500.org/.
The other specific consideration is that the list is ONLY for those that volunteer to run the Linpack benchmark and wish to publicize the results. It is presumed that governments with classified computing facilities withhold this information, for obvious reasons, so there are likely many "supercomputers" (perhaps even a "fastest") that will never be part of the Top 500. The US NSA, for example, is widely believed to operate facilities at or near the top of the list, but they are nowhere in sight for obvious reasons.
It's a combination of problems.
1)Too many versions too quickly. 2 major releases (3.0 and 4.0) in too short a timespan
3.0 was released as a tablet-specific OS. The next handset OS after 2.3 (gingerbread) as 4.0 (ice cream sandwich). Talking about the "problem" with no real knowledge of it, is um, a PROBLEM.
most of us are driving 70-80mph anyways when the limits are 55-65mph...and arbitrarily enforced. Why not just make the limits 85mph and enforce it strictly? Far less ambiguity and stress for the driver. And no need to negotiate down tickets or argue when pulled over.
Oh, I dunno, maybe the same reason they dont make them 75, or 65, or 55 and enforce them strictly? Current enforcement methods (radar, laser, airborne measurement, etc) are highly selective, and relatively imprecise (enough to confuse 80mph for 85mph, for example). There is no such thing as strict enforcement when it comes to speed, without "violating privacy" in order for the enforcers to be constantly aware of speed, or "violating freedom" by making/mandating cars that simply cannot exceed the speed.
it's not darwinism, it's evolution.
And stop assuming the driving reckless if a genetic mutation that removing a person from the gene pool fixes.
I will go ahead and assume you meant something like "and stop assuming that driving recklessly is a genetic mutation that will be fixed by removing that person from the gene pool"...
The key here is that if you are sufficiently adept at judging risk you will avoid situations like that and therefore preserve your genes for later generations. There are obviously no genes to make a good driver (as cars have been around for such a short period of time) so if one can use the other genes they have (the ones that make certain parts of the brain more/less effective) to properly react to risk by avoiding this threat to life, then yes that is natural selection at work.
And no, I fully accept that a race of superbly risk-aware humans will not arise from the happenings on this one toll road. But I can dream.
The sad fact is that its not speed that kills, its differential speed. Unfortunately our drivers training here is not really up to the standards it should be with modern machines. If you look at Germany they take drivers ed a lot more seriously, as well as licencing, with 6 month courses costing thousands of dollars being the norm. As well the rules of the Autobahn are strictly enforced, if you're going slow in the left lane you WILL be pulled over, just as quick if not quicker than you would for "speeding". Same with sudden lane changes, and just general bad driving. Speed doesnt kill, dumb drivers do.
The high barrier to entry also means that there are fewer drivers, and those that drive are the ones self-selected to be very serious about it. Add that to the extensive amount of training, and you end up with a system that is blissfully safe compared to what is common in the US... A population where every adult is expected to have a (simple to obtain) drivers license (and use it), and about 70% of drivers insist that they are above average, even though most have no evidence to base that on.
It's like comparing aviation fatalities among extremely trained commercial pilots, to basically any other pilot in the sky. The commercial pilots are, by virtue of self-selection (as part of a competitive process) and training, many many times safer.