If Apple wants to allow your iPhone to be surreptitiously unlocked by the feds, they have approximately 875 way to accomplish that, which would be less work and less noticeable than by introducing a vulnerability in their face-recognition software.
(OTOH it's not clear how facial recognition would prevent someone who has physical access to your phone from pointing the phone at your face and saying "hey, look at this")
Nonsense, the president of the U.S. is doing exactly that and is world famous for it.
It would be more accurate to say he is attempting to do that. It will be instructive to see how his attempts fail (and they will fail, since, ahem, you can't stop progress). At best he might become known as the president who managed to temporarily retard progress.
REAL Net Neutrality in no way would block deals such as these, nor should it.
We've seen what happens when a product's viability is determined not by the quality of the product, but rather by what partnerships the company can strike with the gatekeepers. It's not pretty. How would the next streaming-video company compete if it has to require customers to pay for bandwidth while entrenched players like Netflix can give them for "free"?
What you want is some kind of horrid dystopia.
Hyperbole, eh? Is our current electric grid a horrid dystopia because the electric company is not allowed to give free unlimited power to people as long as it is used on co-branded appliances? I don't think so.
The thing is, Apple doesn't copy other OS GUI's -- it would never even occur to Apple to look at another OS's GUI, since they don't see any point in imitating some else's mediocre design when they are confident they can come up with something far better in-house.
The fact that this often leads to them re-inventing the wheel several years after some other company first invented it is a price it seems they are willing to pay:)
I'm not sure it matters if anything is actually sueable. If Microsoft felt sufficiently threatened, they could just throw lawyers and claims at this project until its participants went bankrupt, regardless of whether the claims actually held any merit, or not.
The fact that Microsoft hasn't bothered is probably best explained by the hypothesis that they don't think it's worth the effort (or the bad publicity) because they don't see this OS as any kind of real competition. If so, I think they're right about that; OTOH the day that ReactOS did become meaningfully useful would probably also be the day that Microsoft decides to bury it.
Let's say that I had bought (or mined) 200 bitcoin back when they were practically free(*), and now I want to transition from "Bitcoin millionaire" to "actual US dollars millionaire" by selling all my bitcoins at their current value.
How would I realistically go about doing that? Is it really just a matter of going to a Bitcoin exchange site and clicking "sell 200 bitcoins"?
(*) to be clear, this isn't actually the case; if it was, I would probably already be Bitcoin-savvy enough that I wouldn't need to ask
Sadly, "making vehicles look like ICEs because that's what consumers will expect and they'll call anything that doesn't look like that 'ugly' " is probably going to be with us for quite a while.
Well, the good thing (or bad thing, I don't know) about the trucking market is that it driven much more by economics than by aesthetics. If a company can build an electric truck that allows the truck's owner to significantly reduce his operating costs, it probably doesn't matter much how, err, unusual it looks.
It doesn't matter whether China outdoes him or not --- Musk's goal was never to be the One Guy Who Did Everything All By Himself. If China can move hyperloop-style technology forward, great -- and if they can't, well, their failure didn't cost Musk anything, either, and it might provide others with some insight on how not to do it.
So given that China is now (to some extent) working on a hyperloop project on their own dime, whereas without Musk's promotion/evangelizing they wouldn't be, Musk has already succeeded.
From what I've read, people are rightfully afraid of riding on the bullet train. Do you think they'll want to ride on an even faster and less safe version?
That's going to depend a whole lot on how many serious accidents the train suffers in its first months/years of use.
I don't think I'd want to be one of the initial passengers, but in a country of 1.3 billion people, there will be plenty of people willing to ride it; and if it works, more people will deem it "safe enough".
Keep in mind that China is a really large country, with lots of social displacement -- there are millions of people who feel socially obligated to make 24-hour (or longer) train trips every year so that they can celebrate the holidays with their families that live thousands of miles away from where they work. If you offer them something that significantly cuts that travel time and isn't a complete death-trap, they are likely to jump at it.
[Obligatory meta-commentary on the predictable trajectory of every Slashdot thread] [Obligatory meta-meta-commentary on that commentary] [...] [Stack overflow -- core dumped]
Is HFS+ really all that crappy? I recognize that HFS+ is ancient technology (by computing standards) and doesn't support a lot of new features, but OTOH for me it has always done its job and not caused me any problems -- my files are always where I left them in the morning.
It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.
Cool, but then you have to figure out how to power those machines. Presumably you'd need to use renewable (or at least nuclear) power for them, since otherwise they'd be putting more CO2 into the air, likely at a faster rate than they were taking it out of the air. How much power would such a machine require to remove a given amount of CO2? Are we currently capable of creating a CO2-removing machine that is more power-efficient than a tree? I have my doubts about that.
how exactly do you 'assasinate' someone with an anti-lock brake system?
Ideally by remapping the accelerator pedal to the brakes, and the brake pedal to the throttle. (Note that Toyota may claim prior art regarding this technique)
Why would you allow on the fly updates to something as critical as your car?
Well, you wouldn't -- you'd download the update automatically, perhaps, but you'd get the user's explicit permission before applying the update. That way the user can decide when or if applying the update is worthwhile (e.g. do it after an important trip, rather than before).
Pretty much the same way it is done with cell phones and MacOS/X OS updates, no?
(Outside of deciding the break the law in the first place, of course)
... was going back for more. If you're going to rig a lottery, rig just one lottery, one whose prize will be big enough so you don't have to go back for more later. Then delete all traces of your hackery and never do anything illegal again. Otherwise a pattern starts to develop, leading to you getting caught.
Release a version with a battery you can easily replace!
Apple to Earth: We're happy with the performance of our current business model, thank you very much. If you think your proposed model is better, by all means run with it.
It's not a full solution by any stretch of the imagination, but if you wanted an entertaining introduction to programming, you could do worse than having them play Human Resources Machine for a while.
It's cute, it's entertaining, and it teaches a simplified version of assembly language (!) programming in such a way that even non-programmers can see how the program's source code interacts with the computer to produce desired (or not-so-desired) behavior.
Certainly it would be better if it degraded less, and I hope they can improve things, but it's not necessarily a showstopper as it is, either.
Consider that in many use cases, a battery is almost never fully cycled. For example, my cell phone rarely gets below 30% charged, simply because I plug it in every night. If the 10%/60 figure is for full discharge/recharge cycles, then the battery's real-world longevity might be significantly better than that. (and that's not even counting the fact that charge indicators often lie to you, saying that the device is at 0% charge when it actually has some charge left, precisely to avoid reducing the battery life by doing a literal full discharge)
The ergonomic keyboards Microsoft sells these days may well be fragile; I wouldn't know because the two Microsoft ergonomic keyboards I use every day (one at home, one at work) have both been working fine since I bought them (in ~2003 and ~2010, respectively. The latter purchase was a replacement for an identical Microsoft ergonomic keyboard whose return key started to get intermittent after some soda was spilled into it -- but I'm not going to count that against the keyboard)
Why didn't the dinosaurs? There could have been intelligent life (in the sense of tool use, construction etc.) a quarter billion years ago, but as far as we can tell there wasn't.
Was there much evolutionary pressure on the dinosaurs to develop intelligence? Perhaps sharp teeth, impressive sizes, and/or thick skin was sufficient to keep them reproducing (up until their extinction, anyway). Evolution doesn't seem to care much about optimizing any further than "good enough to reproduce".
Slashdot Mirror
"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." -- Steve Jobs
(OTOH it's unclear whether a Jobs-less Apple still has the ability to predict what people will want after having been shown it. Time will tell)
If Apple wants to allow your iPhone to be surreptitiously unlocked by the feds, they have approximately 875 way to accomplish that, which would be less work and less noticeable than by introducing a vulnerability in their face-recognition software.
(OTOH it's not clear how facial recognition would prevent someone who has physical access to your phone from pointing the phone at your face and saying "hey, look at this")
Nonsense, the president of the U.S. is doing exactly that and is world famous for it.
It would be more accurate to say he is attempting to do that. It will be instructive to see how his attempts fail (and they will fail, since, ahem, you can't stop progress). At best he might become known as the president who managed to temporarily retard progress.
REAL Net Neutrality in no way would block deals such as these, nor should it.
We've seen what happens when a product's viability is determined not by the quality of the product, but rather by what partnerships the company can strike with the gatekeepers. It's not pretty. How would the next streaming-video company compete if it has to require customers to pay for bandwidth while entrenched players like Netflix can give them for "free"?
What you want is some kind of horrid dystopia.
Hyperbole, eh? Is our current electric grid a horrid dystopia because the electric company is not allowed to give free unlimited power to people as long as it is used on co-branded appliances? I don't think so.
As customers flock to these new offerings, companies have to hire more people.
s/hire more people/buy more robots/g
The thing is, Apple doesn't copy other OS GUI's -- it would never even occur to Apple to look at another OS's GUI, since they don't see any point in imitating some else's mediocre design when they are confident they can come up with something far better in-house.
The fact that this often leads to them re-inventing the wheel several years after some other company first invented it is a price it seems they are willing to pay :)
Not sure what is sueable here
I'm not sure it matters if anything is actually sueable. If Microsoft felt sufficiently threatened, they could just throw lawyers and claims at this project until its participants went bankrupt, regardless of whether the claims actually held any merit, or not.
The fact that Microsoft hasn't bothered is probably best explained by the hypothesis that they don't think it's worth the effort (or the bad publicity) because they don't see this OS as any kind of real competition. If so, I think they're right about that; OTOH the day that ReactOS did become meaningfully useful would probably also be the day that Microsoft decides to bury it.
If you know what you're doing, you don't lose period.
... and its contrapositive: if you lost, then you didn't know what you were doing.
Therefore every investor knows what they are doing, right up until the moment when they don't.
Let's say that I had bought (or mined) 200 bitcoin back when they were practically free(*), and now I want to transition from "Bitcoin millionaire" to "actual US dollars millionaire" by selling all my bitcoins at their current value.
How would I realistically go about doing that? Is it really just a matter of going to a Bitcoin exchange site and clicking "sell 200 bitcoins"?
(*) to be clear, this isn't actually the case; if it was, I would probably already be Bitcoin-savvy enough that I wouldn't need to ask
Sadly, "making vehicles look like ICEs because that's what consumers will expect and they'll call anything that doesn't look like that 'ugly' " is probably going to be with us for quite a while.
Well, the good thing (or bad thing, I don't know) about the trucking market is that it driven much more by economics than by aesthetics. If a company can build an electric truck that allows the truck's owner to significantly reduce his operating costs, it probably doesn't matter much how, err, unusual it looks.
Wow, there are Teslas doing taxi duty in harsh climates?
Apparently, yes.
Can I request a Tesla for my next Uber ride?
I don't think so; but you might get lucky via UberX?
So, I am quite sure that China will outdo him.
It doesn't matter whether China outdoes him or not --- Musk's goal was never to be the One Guy Who Did Everything All By Himself. If China can move hyperloop-style technology forward, great -- and if they can't, well, their failure didn't cost Musk anything, either, and it might provide others with some insight on how not to do it.
So given that China is now (to some extent) working on a hyperloop project on their own dime, whereas without Musk's promotion/evangelizing they wouldn't be, Musk has already succeeded.
From what I've read, people are rightfully afraid of riding on the bullet train. Do you think they'll want to ride on an even faster and less safe version?
That's going to depend a whole lot on how many serious accidents the train suffers in its first months/years of use.
I don't think I'd want to be one of the initial passengers, but in a country of 1.3 billion people, there will be plenty of people willing to ride it; and if it works, more people will deem it "safe enough".
Keep in mind that China is a really large country, with lots of social displacement -- there are millions of people who feel socially obligated to make 24-hour (or longer) train trips every year so that they can celebrate the holidays with their families that live thousands of miles away from where they work. If you offer them something that significantly cuts that travel time and isn't a complete death-trap, they are likely to jump at it.
Are we done now?
Almost -- we just need:
[Obligatory meta-commentary on the predictable trajectory of every Slashdot thread]
[Obligatory meta-meta-commentary on that commentary]
[...]
[Stack overflow -- core dumped]
the incredibly crappy HFS+
Is HFS+ really all that crappy? I recognize that HFS+ is ancient technology (by computing standards) and doesn't support a lot of new features, but OTOH for me it has always done its job and not caused me any problems -- my files are always where I left them in the morning.
It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.
Cool, but then you have to figure out how to power those machines. Presumably you'd need to use renewable (or at least nuclear) power for them, since otherwise they'd be putting more CO2 into the air, likely at a faster rate than they were taking it out of the air. How much power would such a machine require to remove a given amount of CO2? Are we currently capable of creating a CO2-removing machine that is more power-efficient than a tree? I have my doubts about that.
how exactly do you 'assasinate' someone with an anti-lock brake system?
Ideally by remapping the accelerator pedal to the brakes, and the brake pedal to the throttle. (Note that Toyota may claim prior art regarding this technique)
Why would you allow on the fly updates to something as critical as your car?
Well, you wouldn't -- you'd download the update automatically, perhaps, but you'd get the user's explicit permission before applying the update. That way the user can decide when or if applying the update is worthwhile (e.g. do it after an important trip, rather than before).
Pretty much the same way it is done with cell phones and MacOS/X OS updates, no?
(Outside of deciding the break the law in the first place, of course)
Release a version with a battery you can easily replace!
Apple to Earth: We're happy with the performance of our current business model, thank you very much. If you think your proposed model is better, by all means run with it.
It's not a full solution by any stretch of the imagination, but if you wanted an entertaining introduction to programming, you could do worse than having them play Human Resources Machine for a while.
It's cute, it's entertaining, and it teaches a simplified version of assembly language (!) programming in such a way that even non-programmers can see how the program's source code interacts with the computer to produce desired (or not-so-desired) behavior.
While I agree that he doesn't have it as bad as GP stated, you have to admit that he has the worst conditions ever without a major war.
You know who believes otherwise? Donald Trump.
10% drop over 60 charges? That's not good.
Certainly it would be better if it degraded less, and I hope they can improve things, but it's not necessarily a showstopper as it is, either.
Consider that in many use cases, a battery is almost never fully cycled. For example, my cell phone rarely gets below 30% charged, simply because I plug it in every night. If the 10%/60 figure is for full discharge/recharge cycles, then the battery's real-world longevity might be significantly better than that. (and that's not even counting the fact that charge indicators often lie to you, saying that the device is at 0% charge when it actually has some charge left, precisely to avoid reducing the battery life by doing a literal full discharge)
When was that? Ergo keyboard is fragile.
The ergonomic keyboards Microsoft sells these days may well be fragile; I wouldn't know because the two Microsoft ergonomic keyboards I use every day (one at home, one at work) have both been working fine since I bought them (in ~2003 and ~2010, respectively. The latter purchase was a replacement for an identical Microsoft ergonomic keyboard whose return key started to get intermittent after some soda was spilled into it -- but I'm not going to count that against the keyboard)
Why didn't the dinosaurs? There could have been intelligent life (in the sense of tool use, construction etc.) a quarter billion years ago, but as far as we can tell there wasn't.
Was there much evolutionary pressure on the dinosaurs to develop intelligence? Perhaps sharp teeth, impressive sizes, and/or thick skin was sufficient to keep them reproducing (up until their extinction, anyway). Evolution doesn't seem to care much about optimizing any further than "good enough to reproduce".