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  1. Re:$1.37/day on Ask Slashdot: Why Would Anyone Want To Spend $1,000 on a Smartphone? · · Score: 1

    I used the two-year cycle as what is probably average, as many people are in that habit from when phone prices were built into the contract prices, and there were no discounts for having a paid-off phone. Obviously you can save money by replacing your phone less frequently.

    Though in my case, my 2-year service contract/data plan is free. :) (It's a company phone, and I can get a new phone every two years, but they just changed to a "N-1" policy, so the new phone is always last year's phone.)

  2. $1.37/day on Ask Slashdot: Why Would Anyone Want To Spend $1,000 on a Smartphone? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    For people who use their smartphones extensively every day, upgrading can make sense. Put your money where you put your time. If you're on a two-year cycle, then the cost of the new $1000 phone works out to $1.37/day over the two-year lifespan, which isn't crazy.

    Of course, there are less expensive options, and if they work for you, go for it. Just don't be a jerk and tell everyone else that they're wrong to buy something just because it's not right for you.

  3. Galaxy S7 still on 3.18.31 on Linux LTS Kernels To Now Be Maintained For Six Years (phoronix.com) · · Score: 1

    Mine is on 3.18.31. I just checked, and I had a system software update pending, so I installed it, but it didn't change kernels. A quick search indicates that 3.18.48 was the last kernel in that series, and that support has ended, so they should certainly update to .48, and probably migrate to a newer kernel.

  4. Re:why the editorializing last ship? on Star Trek: Discovery Nearly Cracks Pirate Bay's Top 10 In Less Than 24 Hours (ew.com) · · Score: 1

    I'll admit to watching The Last Ship, but I can't call it great television. It reminds me of "24" in so many ways, and like "24," it doesn't hang together the same after the first season or two. Also like "24," I have no interest in starting a season until I have the whole thing recorded with commercials cut (thanks, MythTV).

    I would think the downloading audience for it would be mainly people who have DVR failures, though there is certainly a sizable crowd of cord cutters and "Pirate Bay is my ad blocker" folks downloading. If I were in that boat, I would probably wait for my library to get the DVDs.

  5. I wonder if this is a case of an angry employee trying to take it out on the bank?

  6. Re: Lack of Awareness on Intel Cuts Cord On Its Current Cord-Cutting WiGig Products (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Perhaps, though I haven't used it, so I can't say for sure. There's no Android support, so it's not a real solution yet, and it looks like it's trying to do a lot more than simply manage projectors wirelessly.

    I'm thinking of something dead simple almost like pairing Bluetooth, only for video displays. For example, you might have an app on your phone, and you would click, "find displays." It would then show you the names of any displays (like "Conference Room 7 projector"). You click on a display, and it would say something like, "Press the green button on the projector to take control," or, "This projector is being used by another device, press the red button on the projector to disconnect it."

    When you pair with the display, it wouldn't automatically mirror your main display--for Presentations, for example, the projector might show the slide show, while your device might show the current and next slides or something else.

    Build this, and everyone will want it.

  7. Re:Watching Harry Potter on a portable DVD player on 'Operational Limitations' In Tesla Model S Played a 'Major Role' In Autopilot Crash, Says NTSB (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Yup, everyone knows that Voldemort kills muggles.

  8. Lack of Awareness on Intel Cuts Cord On Its Current Cord-Cutting WiGig Products (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    This sounds like a good idea if it could be used along with wireless power, and if it can really provide sufficient bandwidth.

    If I could have a pad that I could set my laptop on, and suddenly be able to use an external monitor, keyboard, and wired ethernet, all while charging the laptop, that would be a big win. Especially if it's a widely supported standard, so the docking pad won't become obsolete when I buy a new laptop.

    But what should really sell is a good wireless standard for conference room projectors, especially one that would let people display presentations from phones, and one that really just worked all the time. Companies would buy them by the truckload with just a hint of marketing effort.

  9. Too Slow on Google Details Plan To Distrust Symantec Certificates (tomshardware.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    They should have done this much faster. Once they decided there was a problem, tell people they have 90 days to get a new certificate. What's the big deal? For most purposes, a free one from Let's Encrypt is good enough (it shows up in the browser as trusted--what more do you want?).

    There was no reason to give Verisign enough time to salvage their business and sell it off instead of just killing them the way they should have been.

  10. Re:Opportunity for hacks? on Tesla Temporarily Boosts Battery Capacity For Hurricane Irma (sfgate.com) · · Score: 1

    They've done this on certain models from time to time. When they do it, they're usually quite clear at the time of purchase that you're getting a larger battery, but only paying to unlock some portion of it, with the option to pay the difference later.

    So they're entirely up front about it.

    Yes, you probably could hack it, but since the cars talk to Tesla on a regular basis (and you get lots of cool features through that), Tesla will notice that you've hacked it.

  11. Re:Issue New SSNs on Ask Slashdot: What's a Practical Response To the Equifax Breach? · · Score: 1

    Well, Equifax's market cap before this was about $20B, so that's the number I would look at.

  12. Issue New SSNs on Ask Slashdot: What's a Practical Response To the Equifax Breach? · · Score: 1

    The government should issue everyone a new Social Security Number. And when they do so, they should add a digit so that we don't run out anytime soon (or start using a mix of letters and numbers). This is a great time to think about what a good replacement would be. For example, there could be a short form of the number that is sufficient for tax reporting, with four random additional digits that are used when applying for credit. If there is ever evidence of fraud, you would receive a new random four digits. (This would be a bit like having a credit freeze for everyone.) I'm sure other people will come up with new and interesting ideas.

    Of course, this means changing all the financial software that has the SSN format hard-coded. I'm fine with that. It would be a bit like Y2K all over again for developers.

    And make Equifax pay for the expense of issuing the new numbers (which probably means forcing it into bankruptcy, doing a new IPO, with the government receiving all the proceeds from the stock sale).

  13. Re:Still no monitor connect/disconnect events! on Linux Kernel 4.13 Officially Released (softpedia.com) · · Score: 1

    I want an event when a monitor is connected or disconnected. I have to poll in /sys to find when that happens.

  14. Re:Still no mount events! on Linux Kernel 4.13 Officially Released (softpedia.com) · · Score: 1

    Nope. The files in /proc and /sys are virtual, so they aren't generated until they're read. That means they don't change without polling, so inotify doesn't help.

  15. Push other Cards to 2% on PayPal Debuts a Credit Card That Offers 2% Cash Back (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 2

    With any luck, this will get enough attention to push other cards to 2% on all purchases. Many will do up to 5% on purchases of selected types (typically gas and restaurants), but are 1% in general. Perhaps this will push them to 2%? I sure hope so!

    Remember, credit cards used to give you nothing. Then there were air miles cards and Discover offered cash, which eventually led to other cards also giving cash. So despite all of them essentially using the same back end (Visa/MasterCard), there's a lot of competition between card issuers, so I'm optimistic.

  16. BASIC on Ask Slashdot: How Can You Teach Programming To Schoolchildren? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I learned BASIC on an Apple II back in 6th grade. They bussed us across town to the one school that had them for one segment of the Gifted & Talented program. That was the best thing the school district ever did for me.

    I'm not sure what the right answer is for today, but certainly it's a good idea to expose kids to the concept in elementary school. Some of the kids will latch on to it and run with it to be the next generation of developers.

    Maybe something that kids can take and go on with themselves would be best, but I don't think the language really matters. Teach kids to program, and the ones that it clicks with will go on to grab whatever works for them.

    And for those that say the schools should focus on more core curriculum aspects, I disagree. Yes, you can't neglect those, but you also need a variety of other topics so that kids find the topics that inspire them. For the kids who click with coding, the programming will drive their advancement in algebra and other areas of math.

  17. Re:Not your Granddaddy's Atari... on Kit Kat Accused of Copying Atari Game Breakout (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    When Atari split into two companies in 1984, I would think that Breakout would have gone with the arcade portion of the company, Atari Games. Wikipedia reports that it was eventually acquired by Midway, which was sold back to Warner Brothers, so in a sense it's back to where it was. It should have nothing to do with the French Atari company (the result of several sales of the home Atari company), which is the only company using the Atari name now.

    The article is a bit vague on details, but it sounds like it's the French company because they're calling themselves Atari, not Warner Bros. Perhaps I'm confused as to the ownership of the arcade games developed before the 1984 split.

  18. I would love to have this technology for video. Anything to turn off those annoying network bugs while watching TV would be nice. Even if this can't be done in real time right now, having it in MythTV to clean up recordings would be really nice.

    At least they don't put the stupid bugs on the video on DVDs. (How long until they try that?)

  19. I'm guessing that while it obviously won't work with the business model as publicised, they have plans to make it work. I can see two ways that this would work for them:

    Partner with theater chains for a lower ticket price. The only part of this that is difficult is that there's no motivation to partner if they get full price if they don't, and members don't want to only have access to certain chains. Perhaps if they gain a significant share of the market, they could force it.

    Partner with the studios to get them to subsidize it. They're getting most of the money back from the theaters, so they'll still make more money if they get more people in the seats.

  20. So is Intel also selling the raw components? In the past, they've been a neutral vendor. With this move, they could be making a huge jump into the storage industry, competing directly with HPE, Hitachi, and DellEMC.

  21. No. This is in 1U of rack space. That's incredible density.

  22. Re:Traveling salesman problem on MIT Team's School-Bus Algorithm Could Save $5M and 1M Bus Miles (wsj.com) · · Score: 2

    What? You want to have high school students and kindergarten kids on the same bus? And you completely defeat the advantage of delaying the high school start time if you make them get up early to spend an hour due to a two-stage bussing plan.

    I agree that having the younger kids start earlier is an obvious choice, but optimizing the bussing can work regardless of the ordering.

  23. Re:Traveling salesman problem on MIT Team's School-Bus Algorithm Could Save $5M and 1M Bus Miles (wsj.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    Right. There are even polynomial-time approximation algorithms that guarantee to be within a fixed percentage of optimal. And don't forget that NP-complete doesn't mean it's impossible, only that it takes a long time as the problem size increases. For smaller problem sizes, solving the problem outright isn't impractical. In this case, they have a variation on the classic problem where there's a limit to the number of kids on each bus and a limit to how long (in time) each bus route can be. But if the stops are fixed and the school to which they have to deliver the kids is fixed, then it breaks down the problem to separate problems for each school, and solving each small NP-complete problem is entirely practical. If the destination school isn't fixed, then run an approximation algorithm on the whole thing, then use the school assignments from that algorithm and re-run using the full solution.

  24. Re:Google "How Much Do Vasectomies Cost" on Why We Can't Have the Male Pill (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 2

    Yes, but currently they're not 100% reversible. So they're not a good option for people who aren't done having kids.

  25. Re:Missing a few features... on Atari Is Back In the Hardware Business, Unveils Ataribox (hothardware.com) · · Score: 1

    I agree. The only reason I can think of to have that many USB ports is if they intend to use them for controllers. Using wired controllers is so retro, so I guess it's appropriate. I wonder if it keeps the cost down, or if the cables and ports are more expensive than the Bluetooth chips? Probably including rechargeable batteries makes wires cheaper.