Geez, I want a phone! These manufacturers should stop adding anti-theft/anti-use/anti-whatever features and focus on making it work better as a phone.
This is just going to make cellphones more and more expensive to add in more bells and whistles which some people never use.
Is it not possible to funnel money used for development of things like this into the cellular system? I would like subsidized calling. How about a free cellphone service?
Something like that is actually making progress. Think about it like this: How does this new feature benefit society?
'Paper books are really dead — they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,' he says."
Um, just yesterday I ordered a paper book for myself. About 2 weeks ago I loaned a whole box of books to someone (I'm expecting them back in January) and my university booklist threatens to take the rest of my money.
I don't think paper books are dead at all.
I know someone that has a tablet, and I've fiddled around with it for a while. It's not nearly as good as a physical paper book. I usually spread my books out while reading so that I can compare things, and a tablet would not allow that. The tablet I saw just doesn't have the reading space that my books have. It being smaller and so on. I'm sure there's tons more reasons why paper books are still better than tablets.
Tablets are pretty cool things though. They could replace books one day, but goodness knows they'll get locked down like so many other modern devices. At least I am certain that my physical books will always belong to me, and that I won't get sued for using it in a study group where everyone can see.
This is terrifying.
Nature has a nice balance all set up and we've screwed it. The trees have that rate of sequestering carbon for a very good reason.
What we did is that we put more carbon into the atmosphere, we didn't alter any of the 'regulatory systems', we only put in more carbon.
Now if we were to go and alter trees I'm fairly certain that in the long term, once the carbon goes back to pre-industrial-age levels, the trees will then be the problem. I'm sure that the trees will begin to bring about 'global cooling' and we will have to balance against the trees by releasing carbon.
This is not an ideal situation. Don't go altering nature and creating another problem. What they should do is take the excess carbon out and leave nature in it's nice balance again.
Ok, that's all I have to say.
In my opinion they release new versions too quickly. I know there are a lot of differences between versions, but what I'd like is if they slowed it down by a bit.
That way, they could release each new version as a dramatically different thing than the previous ones. At this rate, Ubuntu 11.x will be roughly the same as Ubuntu 9.x
I don't think it should be like that.
Also, someone up-comments (I figure that's how I refer to someone above me in the list) pointed out the horrible mess that the init scripts are. This is absolutely true.
Someone find them and mod them up, please.
Particulate matter in the air less than 2.5 micrometers is not classified as pollution by them?
I don't fully remember my environmental classes because I'm focusing on electronics for now, but the basic idea I got was that if something is put there by you, and it is not supposed to be there normally, then you should try to take it back out. More importantly, if the stuff you put there is harmful in any way at all, then it is very irresponsible for you to ignore it.
I don't understand the purpose of these regulations at all. What difference does it make how close a tower is to a day care center or place of worship?
Within 1,500 feet of homes? How do they expect to get cellular service at home, then? Hm.
Ah, but I use linux with a tiling window manager. (Which means that I am usually working on one thing at a time, full-screen)
This makes the notepad solution pretty much impossible. Since opening any editor at all will either go full-screen, or take up a large portion of the screen if I resize it.
I often use the search bar at the top as a temporary writing area for transient things, like to craft an URL which I would then paste into something else, or to write out an equation that I happen to see (Sometimes I use the browser to review notes)
It wouldn't be very fun if the page I was looking at suddenly vanished to be replaced by a search page, just because I was trying to crystallize my thoughts for a second. Of course I really should be using a separate editor for transient notes but it seems so convenient this way..
The summary says something about special software to unlock the extra cores etc.
However, everybody knows that special software doesn't run on all operating systems. You see this kind of thing with BIOS-flashing tools.
So if I hypothetically get a machine with a crippled CPU like this and I wanted the full deal, would I have to install windows, download the special software, run it, and then wipe windows to return to my main OS?
It sounds cumbersome.
2010, a space odyssey? Wasn't part of the story about a giant diamond from the star Lucifer that landed on Europa..? This is unrelated but wow, who knew stars actually had diamonds in them!
Let them simulate the milky way. I'm curious as to whether or not they will be able to simulate the genesis of life on Earth. That will be interesting..
Hey, maybe if they let the simulation run long enough, the simulated earthlings will make their own simulation.
Can't they just use dye/ink within/beneath the 'skin'? Like real skin does? (Except it's not dye but is something-or-other-which-I-can't-remember)
I doubt that the dye would disrupt it in any way. According the the summary it's a plastic polymer over something electric-ey, so the plastic bit most probably could be any color/texture you want.
I don't see mention of how this could possibly connect to human nerves. Is that kind of thing even possible?
If I remember correctly, prosthetics connecting directly to nerves pop up in the news from time to time. There's an article from SingularityHub on something like this. here it is.
That fake limb in the article can feel, it has no skin though. So maybe now that there is electric skin we can put them together and get a cyborg arm.
"secure the internet against internal and external attackers?"
What does external mean here? The first thing that comes to mind would have to be some kind of E.T..
Someone explain what 'external' means in relation to the internet. Unless it's referring to some kind of physical world outside of the internet..!!
Is there a world outside of the internet!!?
Doesn't this mean that if we can make ubuntu look like windows 7, and using wine it can run windows 7 programs..then if wine is fixed up well enough couldn't that mean that theoretically ubuntu would become a sort of 'free implementation of windows 7'? Also bundled with linux features?
I'm sure the people at microsoft should be feeling a little bit disturbed that their operating system can be implemented as a series of layers on top of linux. I've gotten linux to do just about everything else windows can do, so if it looks like windows the transformation is just about complete.
Side note here, this theme won't cause any evil fleets of lawyers to descend upon ubuntu, would it?
When A arrives, he/she quickly pulls out a telescope or some such device, turns around, and watches her own arrival. How can she already be there if she is just arriving?
When the speed of sound is broken by a jet, they could actually fly for quite a while, stop, turn around, and then hear the sound of them arriving. Why should light be any different? I don't understand why light and time are seen together. I think it should be something more akin to a sort of faster version of sound..except it's light.
On ships and so on, they use names and stuff like that to encode words, so that when they speak them out over the radio there's less chance of being misheard. I don't know what that system is called but perhaps somebody else does. Sorry if I explained that badly.
Anyway, the message:
"UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4'"
'naimina' is equivalent to Nikolai Anna Ivan Michael Ivan Nikolai Anna
Also, notice that the '74 14 35 74' is the same as '7 4 1 4 3 5 7 4'. The second half is just to make sure the other person got the message OK, I suppose.
That means the total message is just the first part, which is only:
"93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74"
That's way too short to encode very much more than anything informational. I'll bet it just says "Hey guys, happy birthday" or something.
If they do become more vigilant and the next generation of iphones are even harder to jailbreak then that might allow the people to see iphones for what they really are:
Extremely expensive chunks of hardware that are locked-down into a small set of uses.
Maybe it'd even ignite the movement to something more open.
Hi, I live in a place where the schooling system is slightly different, so I'm not sure what high-school is, and I never bothered to figure it out.
Anyhow, I just got out of a 2-year course in "computer science", and this is how I remember it:
The 'teacher' (if you could call him even that) honestly gave me the impression that he was picked up out of a crowd of random people. We were supposed to be taught programming in C, along with a whole set of stuff about operating systems and so on. For the first 4 months the teacher attempted to give us notes copy-pasted straight from wikipedia, with absolutely no editing whatsoever. Needless to say each student ended up with an *extreme* excess of paper. I swear this guy was going to kill an entire forest. That was actually the entirety of the class by the way, it was something like this:
Spend 20 minutes printing the huge stack of papers.
Spend another 20 minutes sorting and handing them out. (This was all done during class time)
*Read* the papers while we all 'followed' along. Honestly by the second week we had all gotten so bored that half the class was asleep, the other half was playing games and doing..stuff.
Finish reading the papers, tell us to 'do something constructive' until the end of the class.
Note: There was *no* homework or any kind of assignment for the *entire* first year. I don't even know where he got the marks from, because he only actually gave us 3 tests..
Then it got bad. We moved onto the programming part of the syllabus. Within the first class he had made it impossibly clear that he had absolutely no idea what he was teaching. We even jokingly asked him if he knew what he was doing. (After he consulted the textbook for the hundredth time) At least he was honest enough to admit he didn't.
So anyway, I had spent three years before this class devouring a whole set of textbooks on C programming, so I was *fairly* proficient in it by then. I was instantly appointed to 'the guy who wrote the demonstration programs', 'the guy who had to come in at lunch against his will to explain how the code worked' and so on. It was your average 'free and idle class' right up until the point when the head teacher decided that we all had to actively participate in the class. (i.e. Not fall asleep) I spent the classes until then doing my homework and stuff. The instant this new 'pay attention' rule got put in, that was the end of computer science for me. Every class meant hours of sitting there listening to the teacher read a paper. There was no joy. He insisted on reading at snail pace. The rest of the year will be abbreviated for the sake of speed:
1) Almost everyone started skipping the class.
2) Almost everyone got in trouble, daily
3) The complaints to the head teacher went completely unnoticed.
4) The students who were worried formed a study group and tried to learn 2 years worth of lessons in a few months, once it became apparent that we were doomed.
5) The finals came and passed, these were the results: 2 people passed. The class had in maybe 20-somebody people. (I almost failed, I wasn't surprised)
6) We finally got to leave. Most of us took computer science because we didn't have any better options, and because it looked easy.
Now I start computer science at the university in about 20 days or so, I was so terrified of this happening again that I only chose computer science as a major because of a coin flip, and because I'm fairly certain that I'll need whatever diploma I'm gonna get this time to get a decent job out here.
Now, the reason I'm so terrified? Simple: We've heard even worse stories from the other schools out here.
Sorry for such a long post but as you can imagine I'm pretty upset about this guy single-handedly ruining my last years of school and I wanted to tell my story.
There really isn't a moral..just a story.
Achievements are fun as long as they don't get too extreme. There's a roguelike game called Nethack see here and to make the game more fun people came up with 'achievements', i.e. ascending (winning) without reading (illiterate). Eating only plant-based foods (vegetarian/vegan). Completely ignoring the gods. (atheist). Attacking indirectly only (pacifist) etc.
It's actually a lot of fun to watch someone else play when they're going for an achievement. It adds replayability in this case, because each one encourages you to play the game differently. However achievements that are like 'kill 20 gazillion locusts' (ok maybe not) don't add replayability at all! They just add a grind job to the game.
Most importantly though, these achievements actually take skill to get. Roguelikes are so punishing that beating them with any kind of special ruleset is extremely challenging and therefore it's more fun. What part of grinding to kill a gazillion _insert monster name here_ requires extreme skill?
The achievements as they are set up today don't show off your skill, they show off your free time.
I don't like this idea though. While playing games I usually would have my girlfriend present to cheer me on.
Every so often she would cheer for someone else who had the highest kill streak at the time.
With this system though, she'd have to switch glasses every few seconds. How would she scan each viewpoint to find the one most worth watching? This is only OK for the gamers..the spectators lose out a lot from this.
I'm not 100% sure but I think that facebook makes some changes to pictures you upload, compresses them and so forth.
That seems to be the case when I upload a large photo directly from my camera, and on facebook it has been scaled down.
So I guess it would work as long as the data doesn't get corrupted.
Slashdot Mirror
Geez, I want a phone! These manufacturers should stop adding anti-theft/anti-use/anti-whatever features and focus on making it work better as a phone.
This is just going to make cellphones more and more expensive to add in more bells and whistles which some people never use.
Is it not possible to funnel money used for development of things like this into the cellular system? I would like subsidized calling. How about a free cellphone service?
Something like that is actually making progress. Think about it like this: How does this new feature benefit society?
That's a nifty idea but geez, that idea will wipe out an entire forest..
'Paper books are really dead — they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,' he says."
Um, just yesterday I ordered a paper book for myself. About 2 weeks ago I loaned a whole box of books to someone (I'm expecting them back in January) and my university booklist threatens to take the rest of my money.
I don't think paper books are dead at all.
I know someone that has a tablet, and I've fiddled around with it for a while. It's not nearly as good as a physical paper book. I usually spread my books out while reading so that I can compare things, and a tablet would not allow that. The tablet I saw just doesn't have the reading space that my books have. It being smaller and so on. I'm sure there's tons more reasons why paper books are still better than tablets.
Tablets are pretty cool things though. They could replace books one day, but goodness knows they'll get locked down like so many other modern devices. At least I am certain that my physical books will always belong to me, and that I won't get sued for using it in a study group where everyone can see.
This is terrifying.
Nature has a nice balance all set up and we've screwed it. The trees have that rate of sequestering carbon for a very good reason.
What we did is that we put more carbon into the atmosphere, we didn't alter any of the 'regulatory systems', we only put in more carbon.
Now if we were to go and alter trees I'm fairly certain that in the long term, once the carbon goes back to pre-industrial-age levels, the trees will then be the problem. I'm sure that the trees will begin to bring about 'global cooling' and we will have to balance against the trees by releasing carbon.
This is not an ideal situation. Don't go altering nature and creating another problem. What they should do is take the excess carbon out and leave nature in it's nice balance again.
Ok, that's all I have to say.
In my opinion they release new versions too quickly. I know there are a lot of differences between versions, but what I'd like is if they slowed it down by a bit.
That way, they could release each new version as a dramatically different thing than the previous ones. At this rate, Ubuntu 11.x will be roughly the same as Ubuntu 9.x
I don't think it should be like that. Also, someone up-comments (I figure that's how I refer to someone above me in the list) pointed out the horrible mess that the init scripts are. This is absolutely true.
Someone find them and mod them up, please.
Particulate matter in the air less than 2.5 micrometers is not classified as pollution by them?
I don't fully remember my environmental classes because I'm focusing on electronics for now, but the basic idea I got was that if something is put there by you, and it is not supposed to be there normally, then you should try to take it back out. More importantly, if the stuff you put there is harmful in any way at all, then it is very irresponsible for you to ignore it.
I don't understand the purpose of these regulations at all. What difference does it make how close a tower is to a day care center or place of worship?
Within 1,500 feet of homes? How do they expect to get cellular service at home, then? Hm.
Ah, but I use linux with a tiling window manager. (Which means that I am usually working on one thing at a time, full-screen)
This makes the notepad solution pretty much impossible. Since opening any editor at all will either go full-screen, or take up a large portion of the screen if I resize it.
I often use the search bar at the top as a temporary writing area for transient things, like to craft an URL which I would then paste into something else, or to write out an equation that I happen to see (Sometimes I use the browser to review notes)
It wouldn't be very fun if the page I was looking at suddenly vanished to be replaced by a search page, just because I was trying to crystallize my thoughts for a second. Of course I really should be using a separate editor for transient notes but it seems so convenient this way..
The summary says something about special software to unlock the extra cores etc.
However, everybody knows that special software doesn't run on all operating systems. You see this kind of thing with BIOS-flashing tools.
So if I hypothetically get a machine with a crippled CPU like this and I wanted the full deal, would I have to install windows, download the special software, run it, and then wipe windows to return to my main OS?
It sounds cumbersome.
2010, a space odyssey? Wasn't part of the story about a giant diamond from the star Lucifer that landed on Europa..? This is unrelated but wow, who knew stars actually had diamonds in them!
Let them simulate the milky way. I'm curious as to whether or not they will be able to simulate the genesis of life on Earth. That will be interesting..
Hey, maybe if they let the simulation run long enough, the simulated earthlings will make their own simulation.
Can't they just use dye/ink within/beneath the 'skin'? Like real skin does? (Except it's not dye but is something-or-other-which-I-can't-remember)
I doubt that the dye would disrupt it in any way. According the the summary it's a plastic polymer over something electric-ey, so the plastic bit most probably could be any color/texture you want.
I don't see mention of how this could possibly connect to human nerves. Is that kind of thing even possible?
If I remember correctly, prosthetics connecting directly to nerves pop up in the news from time to time. There's an article from SingularityHub on something like this. here it is.
That fake limb in the article can feel, it has no skin though. So maybe now that there is electric skin we can put them together and get a cyborg arm.
"secure the internet against internal and external attackers?"
What does external mean here? The first thing that comes to mind would have to be some kind of E.T..
Someone explain what 'external' means in relation to the internet. Unless it's referring to some kind of physical world outside of the internet..!!
Is there a world outside of the internet!!?
Doesn't this mean that if we can make ubuntu look like windows 7, and using wine it can run windows 7 programs..then if wine is fixed up well enough couldn't that mean that theoretically ubuntu would become a sort of 'free implementation of windows 7'? Also bundled with linux features?
I'm sure the people at microsoft should be feeling a little bit disturbed that their operating system can be implemented as a series of layers on top of linux. I've gotten linux to do just about everything else windows can do, so if it looks like windows the transformation is just about complete.
Side note here, this theme won't cause any evil fleets of lawyers to descend upon ubuntu, would it?
When A arrives, he/she quickly pulls out a telescope or some such device, turns around, and watches her own arrival. How can she already be there if she is just arriving?
When the speed of sound is broken by a jet, they could actually fly for quite a while, stop, turn around, and then hear the sound of them arriving. Why should light be any different? I don't understand why light and time are seen together. I think it should be something more akin to a sort of faster version of sound..except it's light.
Ah yes that's it! Thanks, I was wondering how I would find what this was called. NATO alphabet.
On ships and so on, they use names and stuff like that to encode words, so that when they speak them out over the radio there's less chance of being misheard. I don't know what that system is called but perhaps somebody else does. Sorry if I explained that badly.
Anyway, the message:
"UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4'"
'naimina' is equivalent to Nikolai Anna Ivan Michael Ivan Nikolai Anna
Also, notice that the '74 14 35 74' is the same as '7 4 1 4 3 5 7 4'. The second half is just to make sure the other person got the message OK, I suppose. That means the total message is just the first part, which is only:
"93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74"
That's way too short to encode very much more than anything informational. I'll bet it just says "Hey guys, happy birthday" or something.
If they do become more vigilant and the next generation of iphones are even harder to jailbreak then that might allow the people to see iphones for what they really are:
Extremely expensive chunks of hardware that are locked-down into a small set of uses.
Maybe it'd even ignite the movement to something more open.
Anyhow, I just got out of a 2-year course in "computer science", and this is how I remember it:
The 'teacher' (if you could call him even that) honestly gave me the impression that he was picked up out of a crowd of random people. We were supposed to be taught programming in C, along with a whole set of stuff about operating systems and so on. For the first 4 months the teacher attempted to give us notes copy-pasted straight from wikipedia, with absolutely no editing whatsoever. Needless to say each student ended up with an *extreme* excess of paper. I swear this guy was going to kill an entire forest. That was actually the entirety of the class by the way, it was something like this:
Note: There was *no* homework or any kind of assignment for the *entire* first year. I don't even know where he got the marks from, because he only actually gave us 3 tests..
Then it got bad. We moved onto the programming part of the syllabus. Within the first class he had made it impossibly clear that he had absolutely no idea what he was teaching. We even jokingly asked him if he knew what he was doing. (After he consulted the textbook for the hundredth time) At least he was honest enough to admit he didn't.
So anyway, I had spent three years before this class devouring a whole set of textbooks on C programming, so I was *fairly* proficient in it by then. I was instantly appointed to 'the guy who wrote the demonstration programs', 'the guy who had to come in at lunch against his will to explain how the code worked' and so on. It was your average 'free and idle class' right up until the point when the head teacher decided that we all had to actively participate in the class. (i.e. Not fall asleep) I spent the classes until then doing my homework and stuff. The instant this new 'pay attention' rule got put in, that was the end of computer science for me. Every class meant hours of sitting there listening to the teacher read a paper. There was no joy. He insisted on reading at snail pace. The rest of the year will be abbreviated for the sake of speed:
1) Almost everyone started skipping the class.
2) Almost everyone got in trouble, daily
3) The complaints to the head teacher went completely unnoticed.
4) The students who were worried formed a study group and tried to learn 2 years worth of lessons in a few months, once it became apparent that we were doomed.
5) The finals came and passed, these were the results: 2 people passed. The class had in maybe 20-somebody people. (I almost failed, I wasn't surprised)
6) We finally got to leave. Most of us took computer science because we didn't have any better options, and because it looked easy.
Now I start computer science at the university in about 20 days or so, I was so terrified of this happening again that I only chose computer science as a major because of a coin flip, and because I'm fairly certain that I'll need whatever diploma I'm gonna get this time to get a decent job out here.
Now, the reason I'm so terrified? Simple: We've heard even worse stories from the other schools out here.
Sorry for such a long post but as you can imagine I'm pretty upset about this guy single-handedly ruining my last years of school and I wanted to tell my story.
There really isn't a moral..just a story.
Achievements are fun as long as they don't get too extreme. There's a roguelike game called Nethack see here and to make the game more fun people came up with 'achievements', i.e. ascending (winning) without reading (illiterate). Eating only plant-based foods (vegetarian/vegan). Completely ignoring the gods. (atheist). Attacking indirectly only (pacifist) etc.
It's actually a lot of fun to watch someone else play when they're going for an achievement. It adds replayability in this case, because each one encourages you to play the game differently. However achievements that are like 'kill 20 gazillion locusts' (ok maybe not) don't add replayability at all! They just add a grind job to the game.
Most importantly though, these achievements actually take skill to get. Roguelikes are so punishing that beating them with any kind of special ruleset is extremely challenging and therefore it's more fun. What part of grinding to kill a gazillion _insert monster name here_ requires extreme skill?
The achievements as they are set up today don't show off your skill, they show off your free time.
I don't like this idea though. While playing games I usually would have my girlfriend present to cheer me on.
Every so often she would cheer for someone else who had the highest kill streak at the time.
With this system though, she'd have to switch glasses every few seconds. How would she scan each viewpoint to find the one most worth watching? This is only OK for the gamers..the spectators lose out a lot from this.
You don't hire them.
You start a project on Sourceforge requesting help.
I'm not 100% sure but I think that facebook makes some changes to pictures you upload, compresses them and so forth.
That seems to be the case when I upload a large photo directly from my camera, and on facebook it has been scaled down.
So I guess it would work as long as the data doesn't get corrupted.