Yeah, that's the rub. The premise of this story, that "average" computer users probably have little clue about many technical details, is no doubt true, but the question Intel is really interested in is "how much information can we hide from the buyer, using the excuse that they aren't interested."
This affects slashdotters a lot, as many of us can usefully use such information, but still mostly buy the same hardware that all the mouth-breathers do. So if Intel starts a campaign of obfuscation under the guise of helping the clueless, we're the ones that suffer...
[and of course the other reason Intel is probably muttering about this is that currently AMD has a lead in "lots of cores at low prices"... and Intel really really wants to say "oh but that doesn't matter!"]
... and in fact there are many motherboards these days with very respectable integrated GPUs (in particular the integrated radeon GPUs on AMD MBs). I'd say most consumers don't need any cards at all.
There are plenty of FB groups/fan-pages like "free tibet", pro falun-gong, etc (and stuff like "free the monks in burma" which is not directly related to China, but which nonetheless likely makes the chinese government nervous), and those may be what they're whining about.
It's very unclear whether such groups make any actual difference in practice, even if they have many members, but they do help to keep such issues an active subject of popular discussion, and of course the chinese government royally freaks out at even a mention of many of these topics (I don't know why they do, exactly, other than an institutional proclivity to freak out at even the slightest loss of control over information).
The e-books readers will never understand the precision offered by the keyboard-mouse combination. I find reading on the e-books without the keyboard and mouse to be like a cliff notes or graphic novel version.
Yes, because the keyboard and mouse have an effect on the actual content of the book./SARCASM.
I think he was making a joke about typical PC gamer anti-console arguments...
I think Google is seen as being a bit too successful and there are a lot of companies that would like to see Page & Brin taken down a notch. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find Microsoft's hand behind some of this.
Also this is seen as a chance for easy political grand-standing by politicians who haven't the faintest clue what actually happened, but can see how to spin it into a "probe" to make it look like they're doing something... and once one politician starts blathering cluelessly about it, the rest are eager to jump on the bandwagon.
But that is most laptops today. If you really need a larger screen, you can use an external monitor. When you go to a fixed working location, you can have mice and keyboards and whatever all set up... the one thing you don't really need, is a great big CPU box.
... unless, of course, you actually want a powerful CPU, tons of memory, and tons of disk, at a reasonable price. Your average "browse the web and run itunes" users may not need those things, of course, but for those that do, laptops are still a very poor choice.
And if 10% can't see in 3D (which is obviously not true - they can see in 3D, they're simply not fooled by current displays)
Not entirely sure what you intended to say, but I have no stereo depth perception, even in the real world. I can still perceive depth to some degree, somewhat more indirectly, by means of other visual cues, e.g. focus changes or moving my head/body and observing the relative motion of objects, but "stereo faux 3D" ala avatar is completely useless for me.
I'm a bit skeptical whether it's worth the cost, even for people that can perceive stereo 3D correctly, but I really don't have a good basis on which to make that judgment.
But if you browse youtube, I think you'll find it takes quite a lot of searching to find really well made video that could be considered high art.
Sooo, pretty much the same as any medium then?
[As an aside, I've never understood the whining by the MPAA that "youtube is all our stuff! (waaahhh)". The best stuff on youtube, by far, is original work, much of it by amateurs (something which no doubt makes the MPAA's blood run cold...).]
Re:It's about time someone starts thinking clearly
on
Washington's IT Guy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I got a $200 fine for walking ACROSS a railroad track behind my house, there were no trains within sight I should add. I didn't have to climb or open anything to walk across the tracks to the main road, there are no signs either. These cocksuckers have the nerve to run trains by my house at all hours, horns and all, and expect me not to cut across the tracks to save 30 minutes of my trip to work.
Note that a large part of the reason they impose such fines and over-use train horns is because of the insane over-litigatiousness of American society.
People do really stupid things, and get themselves (and in many cases their friends/family) squashed/crushed/roasted by trains. Then their surviving family turns around and sues the railroad. "How could my honey-buns have known there might might trains on the railroad track! He was sleeping! The train clearly should have sounded its horn just in case there was somebody sleeping on the track!" And wins. So the railroad adopts whatever practices it can to defend itself against such societal stupidity, and yeah unfortunately there's a negative impact on that small portion of society which isn't stupid.
Of course then the people that just recently bought a new house near the railroad tracks (which have been there for 150 years) turns around and sues the railroad because it's sounding horns too often...
Did you ever notice how many of our great physicists were running from the Nazis? Einstein, Szilard, Teller, probably dozens of lesser scientists
Ah, so clearly if we really want to advance the state of physics, we should be putting the bulk of our science budget into nazi cloning research, not puffery like the LHC!
In these parts pretty much every coffee joint offers free Wifi, plus much better coffee than Starbucks.
I don't think sbux is really competing on quality or value though. They're trying to be the "good enough" ubiquitous choice. Locals and those in the know may go to delicious and funky local coffee-shops with free wifi, but there's always a lot of people who don't know, or just don't care, and if there's a sbux every 5m, all of which offer products and atmosphere you're already familiar with...
[I think this sort of "comfortable homogenization" is sort of depressing, but it's clearly a business strategy that works. And I admit, when I want a quick coffee, given the choice between a 10 minute walk to a nice local cafe and the sbux right in front of me, I'll often choose the latter... my bad I suppose:( ]
Please bring this to Japan. It is impossible to find free wifi here. SBC used to have it but they seem to have completely folded.
There are still SBC shops in Japan (e.g., there's one near shinjuku stn), but yeah, many fewer than there were 10 years ago... a shame since they generally seemed seemed nicer than sbux, with better coffee too.
Yeah, I definetly noticed it too in all of my CS classes.
Hell if I know why people like these things though, all of the Apple kids look so uncomfortable trying to prop their ipads up with one arm while "1 finger pecking" at a software keyboard with the other.
The ipad does make sense as a "couch computer" you use to browse slashdot while vegging out and half-dozing, but yeah, it seems horrible if you're doing actual work on an actual table...
I suppose it's yet another case of fashion trumping comfort.
rail can scale, if done well, in appropriate circumstances.
That isn't scaling. That's niche.
Whether something "scales" is a measure of how well it performs in larger numbers, not how flexible it is to varied circumstances.
Anyway, the same caveat is of course true of all modes of transportation -- they only work well in appropriate circumstances. Cars, for instances are very appropriate for low-density rural locations, but their drawbacks become painfully obvious in dense urban contexts, where they are inherently limited by the vast amount of space they require. In such circumstances, rail scales far better, because it works better with density.
As I mentioned, you simply can't decide on a single mode of transportation and expect it to work well in all circumstances, because none do. You need to think of the system.
The difference is that we trust Google. They promised us not to be evil. They control the flow of our information. We have a certain expectation that they will not use our personal information for some nefarious purpose. And when they do they should (in my opinion) be held accountable for it.
Er, but this was neither evil nor was it "using personal information for some nefarious purpose."
Regardless of whether they actually did anything wrong, of course, it's clear that enough people didn't like it that the most sensible course of action for them is to stop doing it (and be more careful in the future), if for no other reason than good PR.
[Indeed, the reaction -- whiny histrionics and political grandstanding -- is arguably more evil, as many of those people are actually abusing the system for personal gain.]
I'm amazed that I seem to be the first one to say anything about minority report...
Assuming us arrogant bastards in the USA don't want to give up our cars (likely) and you can convince us to simply give up DRIVING our cars (NOT likely, perceived lack of control is one of the main reasons cited by people nervous of flying) such a system really would be the ideal. We'd likely have to black out all the windows though, because people tend to get nervous seeing other cars cross traffic with mere inches to spare while traveling at high rates of speed.
Of course, for any of that to work, the vehicles must have very reliable and predictable behavior, which seems very unlikely if everybody's responsible for maintaining their own vehicles....
I use Berlin U bahn, S bahn and RE trains just about every day... One of the best, most efficient and comprehensive mass transit systems in the world. But they only carry a fraction of the journeys (about 5%) which are made in the areas they service (Berlin/Brandenburg). They simply could not cope with a 20 fold increase in usage and there's no realistic way they could be made to cope.
Take a look at Germany's passengerkm stats per mode of transport to see just how the different modes compare.
There are major population centers where rail transport accounts for a majority of travel (e.g., Tokyo), so clearly rail can scale, if done well, in appropriate circumstances.
Rail works fine for cases where it's suited (medium distances in areas with dense travel patterns), and allows greater density and efficiency, but there are clearly circumstances where it's not suited (rural mountain-top villages, sprawling American-style suburban wastelands).
But even for rail-friendly locations, transportation is a always mixture -- even if you take the train for many journeys, you walk to the corner store, bicycle to the local shopping street, and use a car or taxi if you're carrying a huge amount of luggage. If the transportation infrastructure is well-designed, these different modes will be well-integrated (stations designed for quick bus/train/subway transfers, taxi ranks, bicycle parking, etc.)
It's the average car, like you said yourself. And look at the Tesla, the Tango and the ebikes, the hybrids. Advanced cars > transit.
Of course, you should apply the same technology level -- the technology used in U.S. transit is typically far worse than what's used in other advanced countries, and much more poorly run (especially in cities just dabbling cluelessly in transit, which tend to be the ones that choose "light rail") -- and the equation may flip again: "Advanced Transit > Advanced Cars"
But of course you can't just measure things with BTUs as if transportation was a computer game. For instance, one of the biggest problems with cars is that they used an insane amount of space for a given amount of transportation -- and this just gets worse and worse if you follow the "just build more lanes baby!" rants. That's fine in rural areas (which is where there's a dearth of transit as well), but it simply doesn't work very well in a dense urban setting, and it has corrosive effects on the entire character of a city, resulting in sprawling landscapes of pavement whose entire focus seems to be cars and not people. The resulting push for more space drives sprawl and increases distances (which is the last thing you want if transportation efficiency is some kind of goal).
Really you want a well-integrated hierarchy of multiple travel modes -- walking for very short distances, bicycle for local travel, rail/bus/taxi/car for medium distances (depending on density and circumstance), high-speed rail for inter-city use, and air for very long distance. [Yes if you're moving a refrigerator, you probably want to use a car (or hired vehicle), but most people don't spend much time moving refrigerators...]
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's the rub. The premise of this story, that "average" computer users probably have little clue about many technical details, is no doubt true, but the question Intel is really interested in is "how much information can we hide from the buyer, using the excuse that they aren't interested."
This affects slashdotters a lot, as many of us can usefully use such information, but still mostly buy the same hardware that all the mouth-breathers do. So if Intel starts a campaign of obfuscation under the guise of helping the clueless, we're the ones that suffer...
[and of course the other reason Intel is probably muttering about this is that currently AMD has a lead in "lots of cores at low prices"... and Intel really really wants to say "oh but that doesn't matter!"]
... and in fact there are many motherboards these days with very respectable integrated GPUs (in particular the integrated radeon GPUs on AMD MBs). I'd say most consumers don't need any cards at all.
AFAIK, it's not reallllly Google, rather it's a company that Google bought.
When downloading sketchup it also tries to trick you into downloading "sketchup pro" instead.
It looks like even if they were bought by Google, they're still trying to operate as a proprietary software company.
"Rich mobile communications"?
Would that be "rich" as in "fecund" as in ... (well you get the point) ?
There are plenty of FB groups/fan-pages like "free tibet", pro falun-gong, etc (and stuff like "free the monks in burma" which is not directly related to China, but which nonetheless likely makes the chinese government nervous), and those may be what they're whining about.
It's very unclear whether such groups make any actual difference in practice, even if they have many members, but they do help to keep such issues an active subject of popular discussion, and of course the chinese government royally freaks out at even a mention of many of these topics (I don't know why they do, exactly, other than an institutional proclivity to freak out at even the slightest loss of control over information).
I dunno, reading that story made me like Prince more.
He may be an insane freak, but he definitely has style (something which you can't say of most pop stars, however desperately they try...).
The e-books readers will never understand the precision offered by the keyboard-mouse combination. I find reading on the e-books without the keyboard and mouse to be like a cliff notes or graphic novel version.
Yes, because the keyboard and mouse have an effect on the actual content of the book. /SARCASM.
I think he was making a joke about typical PC gamer anti-console arguments...
Wow, I'm surprised he managed to make to the end of that rant without drowning in his own spittle!
I swear slashdot needs a "-1 you're a bloody nuisance" mod option.
I dunno, I think he deserves at least a little credit for the phrase "AWESOME STEAMING HOT MARXISM!!!"
Is that guy carrying a lunchbox?
Why this is being given such legal scrutiny.
I think Google is seen as being a bit too successful and there are a lot of companies that would like to see Page & Brin taken down a notch. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find Microsoft's hand behind some of this.
Also this is seen as a chance for easy political grand-standing by politicians who haven't the faintest clue what actually happened, but can see how to spin it into a "probe" to make it look like they're doing something... and once one politician starts blathering cluelessly about it, the rest are eager to jump on the bandwagon.
But that is most laptops today. If you really need a larger screen, you can use an external monitor. When you go to a fixed working location, you can have mice and keyboards and whatever all set up... the one thing you don't really need, is a great big CPU box.
... unless, of course, you actually want a powerful CPU, tons of memory, and tons of disk, at a reasonable price. Your average "browse the web and run itunes" users may not need those things, of course, but for those that do, laptops are still a very poor choice.
Blood for the blood god. Data for the data gods.
Turtlenecks for the turtleneck god?
And if 10% can't see in 3D (which is obviously not true - they can see in 3D, they're simply not fooled by current displays)
Not entirely sure what you intended to say, but I have no stereo depth perception, even in the real world. I can still perceive depth to some degree, somewhat more indirectly, by means of other visual cues, e.g. focus changes or moving my head/body and observing the relative motion of objects, but "stereo faux 3D" ala avatar is completely useless for me.
I'm a bit skeptical whether it's worth the cost, even for people that can perceive stereo 3D correctly, but I really don't have a good basis on which to make that judgment.
But if you browse youtube, I think you'll find it takes quite a lot of searching to find really well made video that could be considered high art.
Sooo, pretty much the same as any medium then?
[As an aside, I've never understood the whining by the MPAA that "youtube is all our stuff! (waaahhh)". The best stuff on youtube, by far, is original work, much of it by amateurs (something which no doubt makes the MPAA's blood run cold...).]
I got a $200 fine for walking ACROSS a railroad track behind my house, there were no trains within sight I should add. I didn't have to climb or open anything to walk across the tracks to the main road, there are no signs either. These cocksuckers have the nerve to run trains by my house at all hours, horns and all, and expect me not to cut across the tracks to save 30 minutes of my trip to work.
Note that a large part of the reason they impose such fines and over-use train horns is because of the insane over-litigatiousness of American society.
People do really stupid things, and get themselves (and in many cases their friends/family) squashed/crushed/roasted by trains. Then their surviving family turns around and sues the railroad. "How could my honey-buns have known there might might trains on the railroad track! He was sleeping! The train clearly should have sounded its horn just in case there was somebody sleeping on the track!" And wins. So the railroad adopts whatever practices it can to defend itself against such societal stupidity, and yeah unfortunately there's a negative impact on that small portion of society which isn't stupid.
Of course then the people that just recently bought a new house near the railroad tracks (which have been there for 150 years) turns around and sues the railroad because it's sounding horns too often...
Did you ever notice how many of our great physicists were running from the Nazis? Einstein, Szilard, Teller, probably dozens of lesser scientists
Ah, so clearly if we really want to advance the state of physics, we should be putting the bulk of our science budget into nazi cloning research, not puffery like the LHC!
In these parts pretty much every coffee joint offers free Wifi, plus much better coffee than Starbucks.
I don't think sbux is really competing on quality or value though. They're trying to be the "good enough" ubiquitous choice. Locals and those in the know may go to delicious and funky local coffee-shops with free wifi, but there's always a lot of people who don't know, or just don't care, and if there's a sbux every 5m, all of which offer products and atmosphere you're already familiar with...
[I think this sort of "comfortable homogenization" is sort of depressing, but it's clearly a business strategy that works. And I admit, when I want a quick coffee, given the choice between a 10 minute walk to a nice local cafe and the sbux right in front of me, I'll often choose the latter... my bad I suppose:( ]
Please bring this to Japan. It is impossible to find free wifi here. SBC used to have it but they seem to have completely folded.
There are still SBC shops in Japan (e.g., there's one near shinjuku stn), but yeah, many fewer than there were 10 years ago... a shame since they generally seemed seemed nicer than sbux, with better coffee too.
Yeah, I definetly noticed it too in all of my CS classes.
Hell if I know why people like these things though, all of the Apple kids look so uncomfortable trying to prop their ipads up with one arm while "1 finger pecking" at a software keyboard with the other.
The ipad does make sense as a "couch computer" you use to browse slashdot while vegging out and half-dozing, but yeah, it seems horrible if you're doing actual work on an actual table...
I suppose it's yet another case of fashion trumping comfort.
rail can scale, if done well, in appropriate circumstances.
That isn't scaling. That's niche.
Whether something "scales" is a measure of how well it performs in larger numbers, not how flexible it is to varied circumstances.
Anyway, the same caveat is of course true of all modes of transportation -- they only work well in appropriate circumstances. Cars, for instances are very appropriate for low-density rural locations, but their drawbacks become painfully obvious in dense urban contexts, where they are inherently limited by the vast amount of space they require. In such circumstances, rail scales far better, because it works better with density.
As I mentioned, you simply can't decide on a single mode of transportation and expect it to work well in all circumstances, because none do. You need to think of the system.
The difference is that we trust Google. They promised us not to be evil. They control the flow of our information. We have a certain expectation that they will not use our personal information for some nefarious purpose. And when they do they should (in my opinion) be held accountable for it.
Er, but this was neither evil nor was it "using personal information for some nefarious purpose."
Regardless of whether they actually did anything wrong, of course, it's clear that enough people didn't like it that the most sensible course of action for them is to stop doing it (and be more careful in the future), if for no other reason than good PR.
[Indeed, the reaction -- whiny histrionics and political grandstanding -- is arguably more evil, as many of those people are actually abusing the system for personal gain.]
I'm amazed that I seem to be the first one to say anything about minority report...
Assuming us arrogant bastards in the USA don't want to give up our cars (likely) and you can convince us to simply give up DRIVING our cars (NOT likely, perceived lack of control is one of the main reasons cited by people nervous of flying) such a system really would be the ideal. We'd likely have to black out all the windows though, because people tend to get nervous seeing other cars cross traffic with mere inches to spare while traveling at high rates of speed.
Of course, for any of that to work, the vehicles must have very reliable and predictable behavior, which seems very unlikely if everybody's responsible for maintaining their own vehicles....
I use Berlin U bahn, S bahn and RE trains just about every day... One of the best, most efficient and comprehensive mass transit systems in the world. But they only carry a fraction of the journeys (about 5%) which are made in the areas they service (Berlin/Brandenburg). They simply could not cope with a 20 fold increase in usage and there's no realistic way they could be made to cope.
Take a look at Germany's passengerkm stats per mode of transport to see just how the different modes compare.
There are major population centers where rail transport accounts for a majority of travel (e.g., Tokyo), so clearly rail can scale, if done well, in appropriate circumstances.
Rail works fine for cases where it's suited (medium distances in areas with dense travel patterns), and allows greater density and efficiency, but there are clearly circumstances where it's not suited (rural mountain-top villages, sprawling American-style suburban wastelands).
But even for rail-friendly locations, transportation is a always mixture -- even if you take the train for many journeys, you walk to the corner store, bicycle to the local shopping street, and use a car or taxi if you're carrying a huge amount of luggage. If the transportation infrastructure is well-designed, these different modes will be well-integrated (stations designed for quick bus/train/subway transfers, taxi ranks, bicycle parking, etc.)
It's the average car, like you said yourself. And look at the Tesla, the Tango and the ebikes, the hybrids. Advanced cars > transit.
Of course, you should apply the same technology level -- the technology used in U.S. transit is typically far worse than what's used in other advanced countries, and much more poorly run (especially in cities just dabbling cluelessly in transit, which tend to be the ones that choose "light rail") -- and the equation may flip again: "Advanced Transit > Advanced Cars"
But of course you can't just measure things with BTUs as if transportation was a computer game. For instance, one of the biggest problems with cars is that they used an insane amount of space for a given amount of transportation -- and this just gets worse and worse if you follow the "just build more lanes baby!" rants. That's fine in rural areas (which is where there's a dearth of transit as well), but it simply doesn't work very well in a dense urban setting, and it has corrosive effects on the entire character of a city, resulting in sprawling landscapes of pavement whose entire focus seems to be cars and not people. The resulting push for more space drives sprawl and increases distances (which is the last thing you want if transportation efficiency is some kind of goal).
Really you want a well-integrated hierarchy of multiple travel modes -- walking for very short distances, bicycle for local travel, rail/bus/taxi/car for medium distances (depending on density and circumstance), high-speed rail for inter-city use, and air for very long distance. [Yes if you're moving a refrigerator, you probably want to use a car (or hired vehicle), but most people don't spend much time moving refrigerators...]