I'd like to know what they were smoking when they said the average reader reads 12 books a year. How many people read even one?
I believe she says "the average reader" as distinct from "the average person". The average person - at least, the average person in the USA - barely reads at all. (Hardly surprising, given the American education establishment's devotion to the "whole word" approach to teaching new readers.) The average reader, by contrast, probably does read a book a month. They're the folks the Kindle store was created for.
Of course, half of those books are romance novels - the most popular fiction genre by a long margin. Mysteries are next, then science fiction and fantasy. (And there's not a lot of science in most of what gets categorized as science fiction nowadays, either, so lumping it in with fantasy is not necessarily inappropriate.)
Full disclosure: I'm a writer by trade and these details matter to me, so I pay attention to them. Most people couldn't care less.
FWIW - when I was a kid, I'd consume up to 10 novels a day. I was determinedly unathletic in those days - and still am - so I did little else until I reached puberty. Then my reading consumption dropped pretty steeply...
Movies: Colossal, Dave Made a Maze, Atomic Blonde (despite the critics' naysaying), and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, just for starters. All excellent in their very different ways.
TV: Legion, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (season 2 - or "series 2" in Brit-speak - was even crazier than season 1), Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, Ken Burns' The Vietnam War, Marvel's The Defenders, The Orville (uneven, and it suffers from some pretty lame scriptwriting, but I expect it to improve in future seasons, as Seth Macfarlane shows always do), and BBC's The Alternativity (I've only seen the doc, not the performance that goes with it), off the top of my head. I'm sure I could think of more, if I tried.
Neal Stephenson's The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., and his three-volume masterpiece The Baroque Cycle (not new for 2017, but the best thing he's ever written, IMnsHO). I could go on here, too, but I'm being called away for Xmas brunch.
Cynicism and snarkiness are not nearly as hip - or as entertaining - as you might believe...
Point a camera through the lens and show us what it looks like through the glasses, not a rendered-image slideshow.
So I both looked at the Magic Leap web page - which features the "slideshow" you're complaining about - and read the rather long Rolling Stone article to which TFS points.
Yes, I know. Very un-slashdotty of me. I am obviously "not of the Body".
Reading the article first (including the bit where the author, obviously parroting a recorded statement from the interviews he conducted during his tour, talks about "a ray" of photonic computing structures, which makes it plain that he has no fucking clue about chip design and fabrication) greatly helped me to visualize what ML was trying to present on their home page. The page alone was certainly not at all impressive, but the Rolling Stone reporter's description of his experience with the beta ML1 - and especially the interactive quad sound that tracks virtual objects in the headset wearer's field of view - makes it pretty clear that a video "shot through the goggles" wouldn't necessarily convey that experience a whole lot better than the "slideshow" does. It would, however, put a huge demand on their servers, and probably be laggy as all hell the day they announced their forthcoming product, neither of which would be positives from the perspective of a company that's gone from stealth mode to full visibility on the web in a single announcement.
I do recommend the article, despite its shortcomings (some of which are a consequence of the NDA provisions under which the author labored). The product itself, and the technology ML has created to make it possible, are, in fact, potentially game-changing for interactive computing - albeit probably not in the short term. It's pretty clear that the ML1 will be strictly for developers and rich fucks who can afford to drop the price of a collectable guitar on what will essentially be a toy. The second and third generations are where the real effect on general computing will occur (if at all), after the initial capabilities of the device are seriously enhanced and the price drops from nosebleed territory to something at least marginally affordable to the masses.
That said, it seems like a reasonable bet to wager they'll make it that far. The founder put up a huge amount of his own money to get the company to the point where they had the tech taped down well enough to present it to Google, et al., and they've apparently been pouring cash into ML ever since. It's clearly not a scam, because you don't build a production-level chip fab just to hoodwink the rubes. And ML has constructed such a fab in the basement of their headquarters.
Rainbow's End might not be that far away, after all...
Do people not remember the origin of "The Internet"? It started as a Defense Project to ensure communications in the event of a nuclear war... They opened it up to universities, and then to the public. Back then they did a fairly decent job of being hand-off. It wasn't until they turned over to private corps, that it started to go downhill.
As it turns out, that's a common belief - and it's wrong.
While it's true that a 1962 RAND Corporation white paper authored by Paul Baran theorized that a packet-switched data network could allow military communications to survive a general nuclear war, that was entirely a thought experiment. The Department of Defense filed it away and largely forgot about it.
It wasn't until 1965, after accepting a position at DARPA, that an electrical engineer named Robert W. Taylor first got the idea for what would eventually become first the DARPAnet, then the ARPAnet, and finally the Internet.
As a condition of the DARPA grants that helped fund their experiments, research teams at three different major research centers were required to install remote terminals at DARPA for their - entirely separate and self-contained - multi-user mainframe systems. These were the first computers to operate interactively, rather than in what mainframers call "batch mode", and support multiple, concurrent user sessions via dumb terminals with line printers as their "displays". One of Taylor's assignments was to monitor and liase with the scientists who built and ran this trio of individual experimental systems, and he quickly noticed that something very like what we would think of as newsgroups spontaneously appeared on all three systems. (That is to say that computer scientists who had accounts on all three, separate, not interconnected in any way systems had each decided that something very much like a computer BBS or Usenet-style messaging system would be a useful addition, and had - again, independently - hacked such a tool together for the users of each of these systems to communicate with each other in a way that had some degree of persistence and which was accessible to the entire user community of that particular machine.)
The fact that users on each system had more-or-less-simultaneously decided such a tool was desireable, and had developed code to create it - and we're talking three different sets of code here - without ever communicating with the other two teams greatly interested and excited Taylor. He immediately wondered what would happen if all three systems were physically connected together in a way that would allow their users to communicate not only with each other, but with users on the other two systems, as well. He took that idea to his supervisor, one Charles Herzfeld, who thought it might have merit. Herszfeld asked Taylor to draw up a formal proposal, and committed, sight unseen, to fund it to the tune of a million dollars (which was real money in 1965).
So Taylor wrote a proposal, and with a million bucks to spend on it approached the managers of the three, separate multiuser systems with his idea to interconnect their systems. All three turned him down flat.
Robert W. Taylor was from Texas, where they grow 'em stubborn, so he persisted in pitching his idea to the three managers of different, multiuser mainframe systems, despite their continued objections that each saw no merit in his proposal, and each considered it a potentially major distraction from the purposes for which each of their disparate systems had been created. Eventually, over the course of time, he wore them down to the point where he got two of them to agree to at least test the idea. It took nearly two years from then before all the ducks were duly aligned, the necessary equipment designed and built, and the long-distance, dedicated telephone lines contracted for.
At 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969, the first two nodes of what was dub
Social media sites (including this one) are pretty much what you make them. I joined FB because I'm a writer - and there are readers there. Also other writers. And cover artists. And a whole bunch of useful resources that go with them. I also managed to reconnect with folks I hadn't realized I missed until we stumbled across each other there, which was pure serendipity for me.
I still try (and generally succeed) to limit my FB time to half-an-hour or so a day, unless I decide to post an essay. Then it's longer - but only because I count the time I spend composing essays to post on FB as time spent on FB.
There are a few things I follow tech side (mainly related to home automation). I see allot of useful stuff and comments but it is next to impossible to go back and find the post I was reading to unless I actually respond. And even that seems to disappear. (I miss forums.) It also sorts strangely. It's not by date or number of comments - at least it doesn't appear so.
Two things may help you here:
1. Social Fixer. It's available for Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Firefox, and it lets you change a lot of the default behavior of FB (and other SM sites) in ways that make it a lot more user friendly. (Caution: FB frequently changes its code, sometimes in ways that break some of Social Fixer's functions - most notably CTRL+ENTER to post comments - but Matt Kruse, the developer, usually manages to figure out what happened and get a minor rev out to restore the fubared functionality pretty quickly.)
2. You can use "Save link" from the drop-down menu at the top right corner of each post. That allows you to "save" a copy of the post that you can access by opening the Activity Log page from the drop-down menu that looks like a little upside-down triangle in the FB menu bar (if you have SF installed, it's at the top of your screen, otherwise you have to scroll all the way to the top of the page - or just open a new FB window), then click MORE in the Filters menu on the left side, and, finally, click Saved, at the bottom of the list.
And, no, FB doesn't make it easy - but it IS possible...
We've gotten *very* good at dealing with sick people. But we haven't really made any big progress on making healthy people healthier by slowing the effect of aging. Being in "good health" means entirely different things for a 20yo and an 80yo. I think it's because it's very ethically challenging to experiment on healthy people, like if you got cancer obviously we'll treat that. But if you're "only" getting older, do we really dare mess that up? I'd say the answer is overwhelmingly no, unless there's nothing wrong with you we'll do nothing. Okay eat healthy, exercise but nothing to truly stall the decline.
Actually, almost all of the gains in average human lifespan in the 20th century are directly attributable to antibiotics and widespread vaccination against (mostly) childhood diseases.
Maximum human lifespan has changed little, if at all, since the dawn of recorded history. What changed dramatically in the prior century was average lifespan, which is a very different thing. Prior to the wide availability of penicillin in the mid-1940's, a staggering number of humans died from infections that became easily treatable afterward. As more antibiotics - and especially antibiotics that were effective against infections for which penicillin was useless - were introduced, mortality from infection essentially came to a halt in the developed world.
The advent of immunizations for diseases other than smallpox likewise had an enormous impact on morbidity rates from endemic and epidemic diseases that had theretofore taken a staggering toll among infants and children, such as polio, whooping cough, measles, rubella, and mumps. One of the principal reasons families in the pre-immunization era tended to be large was that approximately 50% of children died before they reached adulthood, and the death of a young child was a commonplace tragedy that most families experienced at least once.
Largely halting those deaths - and the equally common deaths of women from "puerperal fever" as a result of infections acquired during childbirth - accounts for virtually all of the apparent increase in human lifespan in the past century or so. As the number of women who survived childbirth, and their children who survived childhood diseases that were ubiquitous prior to widespread, mandatory immunization as a public health measure rose almost logarythmically, the average age of death also increased, as a direct result of their survival.
The truly frightening thing to me is the prospect that the antibiotics upon which so much of this apparent increase in human lifespan depends are rapidly losing their effectiveness due to overuse. (And, while general practictioners who allow their patients to browbeat them into prescribing antibiotics for viral infections such as colds and flus - against which they are completely ineffective - are major contributors to the trend, the most responsible culprits are livestock growers who use them in incredible quantities, not to treat diseases in their food animals, but as preventatives, which they add to their fodder every freakin' day.) Combine that with the profoundly anti-scientific "anti-vax" movement among parents in the USA, and you have a prescription for a planet-wide return to the same death rates that were the rule for all human populations prior to the 20th century.
If you doubt that; if you consider the threat ludicrously overstated, consider this: penicillin - the miracle drug that began the antibiotic revolution - is no longer prescribed by doctors. That's not because there are "newer and better options available." It's because it no longer works. So many bacteria have evolved strong resistance to penicillin that it has become almost entirely ineffective. And it's not the only one that has lost its power.
Even if you are not using it for fitness, the notification and silent alarm features most trackers have can be really useful.
A couple of years ago I bought a Chinese "smartwatch" that runs the Nucleus OS on Mediatek hardware. It's a piece of wet, stinky shit.
First of all, although it will sync with my Nexus 6 (which I love and use all the time - principally as an ereader and telephone), it doesn't do it very well. Only a few apps can communicate with it, and it swiftly gets more than a little tiresome holding your wrist up to your mouth to talk on your phone. By contrast, a cheapo Bluetooth earpiece used to work really well - until Google borked Bluetooth volume with Nougat (which they haven't fixed yet - so, never) - and was reasonably convenient to use. Secondly, the touch input on that watch is just horrible. The hot spots are tiny and seemingly not centered on the graphics that represent them at all well. Even inputting a phone number is a tooth-grindingly frustrating exercise. And alphanumeric text? Good luck with that. Also, I kept choosing the least ugly of the three (!) available watch faces - and the watch kept changing it back to the butt-ugly default after a half-dozen presses (you have to press the display button to activate it, to save batteries). The phone app for it kept crashing, the camera is a joke, and, all-in-all, it was just a very uninviting user experience in general.
And it's big and heavy, you can't read the display in anything close to full sunlight, and you have to have your smartphone on your person to use the "fitness" features (so, as several commenters below noted, why not just use your phone?).
Anyway, I just bought a manufactuer-reconditioned, gunmetal-gray ASUS Zenwatch 2 (on eBay for $79.99, shipping included), which runs Android Wear 2, features excellent input capability, has its own watchface editor (and can use a wide variety of freebies available on the Android Wear marketplace), lasts all day on a full charge, and runs a whole host of Wear 1 and 2 apps flawlessly. And those notifications and alarms you mentioned? They work flawlessly with Zenwatches.
And, yes, it's big and heavy, with a basically rectangular face. (The new Zenwatch 3 fixes those problems, but is $180, at a minimum - so, no thanks.) I don't mind that nearly as much as I mind all the other drawbacks that Mediatek-based watches inflict on the user.
So, remind me again, why exactly would I want to buy a "fitness tracker" that costs just as much, is not a general-purpose computing device, and has to be charged just as often - for no real fitness benefit... ?
You can choose politicians, but by and large the party division is a sham and the "real" government marches on regardless. Witness how many federal government departments shut down under Trump: 0
What utter, driveling bullTrump.
Republicans are trying to impose tax "reform" that will benefit the rich and giant corporations at the expense of the poor and middle-class, and small businesses. Every Democrat in the Senate voted against their version, and almost every Democrat in the House voted against their even worse version. The Republican-led FCC is hellbent on repealing the net neutrality rules the Democrat-led version enacted. The Republican president is about to move the U.S. consulate in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which will further inflame anti-U.S. tensions in the region (and is guaranteed to spark a global wave of new terror attacks against U.S. citizens, as well as increase the number of fresh recruits for Daesh, et alia). The Republican-dominated Supreme Court has struck down every attempt Congress has made at campaign finance reform, and has granted corporations free reign to spend as much money as they choose to influence U.S. elections. The Republican head of the Department of Justice is determined to revive the incredibly wasteful and counterproductive "war on drugs" at the exact time that the de-criminalization/legalization of marijuana has gained majority support among voters of both parties. The Republican-led EPA is doing everything in its power to roll back the Clean Air and Clean Water acts (that were enacted under a Republican president).
The list just goes on and on.
"There's no difference between the two major parties" is an outright, boldfaced lie perpetrated by Republican spinmeisters in what has been a remarkably successful, concerted, long-term campaign to persuade prospective Democratic voters to stay away from the polls - while the Republican base reliably turns out to vote against its own best interests (because "conservative values").
Benjamin Disreali noted, "There are three kinds of lie: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Well, "there's no difference between the two major parties," is a damned lie - and you are a damned liar...
ALMOST ALL PUBLICATIONS will take a well-crafted PR statement, make a few changes and publish it as a story.
FTFY. (Having spent years on both sides of the game.)
Sadly, I am out of points, or else I would mod this post +1 Informative.
As a former computer industry writer (my last gig was as a columnist and feature writer for Boardwatch Magazine, before Penton Media first turned it into a low-rent Network World clone, then folded it), I've seen this kind of thing happen all the time. We didn't do it at Boardwatch, but I sure came under considerable pressure to whore myself out when McGraw-Hill ousted Susan Breidenbach as editor in chief at LAN Times and replaced her and her entire editorial staff with ambitious rejects from PC Week.
In fact, it was the new features editor's insistence that I "coordinate content with the front of the book" (industry journo-speak for "lightly re-write press releases from our biggest advertisers - or else") that left me no choice but to resign from LAN Times - and take my @internet column with me to Boardwatch...
(And, now that I actually have mod points, I can't use 'em to upmod your original post, because I already posted a response to it. How's that for irony... ?)
Every time M$ releases a new iteration of Win 10 - even a relatively minor one - it breaks Classic Shell. That has forced him to play a continuous game of whack-a-bug, to the detriment of adding and refining features.
And practically no one (including me) has donated even small amounts of money to him for his effort.
If I wasn't dependent on so many Line6 and Digitech patch editors - none of which run properly under Wine - I'd kick Redmond to the curb without a second thought...
The real question is, how did it fare with hotdog vs. not hotdog?
(FTFY)
But, seriously, somebody with points needs to mod parent +1 Funny, because Silicon Valley's "Not Hotdog" is a real thing - and it's now available for Android, too...
I might be able to agree that social media is not a net benefit to American society. But for entirely different reasons than Ajit Pai.
[snip]
I think it is simply a huge black hole for time that could be productively used for employment, study, personal enrichment, and trolling slashdot. With the additional benefit of avoiding more ads. Don't get me started about TV.
Err... don't look now, but/. actually IS "social media". It's more about discussion and less about narcissism than, say, Zuckerbook (although there's certainly no shortage of narcissism here!), but it's about social interaction, all the same. And there are, in fact, ads aplenty - a goodly proportion of which come poorly disguised as "stories" - but I'm guessing you use an adblocker, so you don't see them.
<snark>I'm also unconvinced that a case can be made for/. as a net benefit to American society...</snark>
Net neutrality is about bandwidth allocations by upstream ISPs. Stop trying to conflate that with platform's own rules for content moderation. Furthermore, you're a bad person for trying to claim this only happens to "leftist" content or that "leftist" is even a thing.
You're right about net neutrality. You're wrong about Ajit Pai.
Pai is a bad person for a plethora of reasons - beginning with the fact that he's a shill for mega-ISPs. His attempt to leverage political division to bolster his bullshit is about 47th on the list...
I'm a bit stunned by a student of Ancient Greek culture applying the modern, Western concept of homosexuality on the period, not to mention skipping over some of the very unfortunate problems caused by the fact that the main sources we have for Spartan history are the Athenians--who cannot be trusted...to be accurate, anyway. To slight and slur the Spartans anytime they think they can get away with it? Hell yes. Some of the differences in values show up, too, because current thought is that Sparta was effectively a matriarchy--which is not something the Athenians saw as at all good, because in their opinion, women weren't really people. Which, incidentally, is also part of why applying modern Western concepts of sexuality is problematic...
[edit]... There isn't even anything involving pederastic relationships within the movie, there's no particular discussion of sexuality, and I would think that as a student of Greco-Roman culture you'd be very, very well aware how illegal it'd be to have included any pederastic relationships since 'beard growing in' at the time would mean 13-14 years old or so.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I was very careful to use the term "homosexual" exclusively in the context of adult male/male relationships. Elsewhere, I deliberately employed the more appropriate word "homophilia/homophiliac".
Your point regarding the absence of specifically Spartan sources in the historical record is not without merit - but we work with the evidence we have, not with the evidence we wish existed, n'est ce pas?
As for the bizzaro notion that Sparta was somehow a matriarchy, despite its kings and ephors being exclusively male (and despite the popular, Aristotlelian notion that women were somehow "incomplete men") - well, that's news to me. I suspect it has little to do with the actual evidence from sources and artifacts, and everything to do with the endless quest for fresh topics for masters' theses.
There is, in fact, a sexual slur directed at the Athenians by the Spartans in both versions of 300. It occurs during the march from the Peloponnese to the Hot Gates (which somehow involves passing near Athens in Millerworld). You apparently missed it. I did not, because it stood out to me as such a vividly gratuitous introjection of Frank Miller's personal prejudices in the graphic novel that I was on the lookout for its reappearance in the movie.
And, of course, there it was, in all its ugly, gratuitous, anachronistic glory...
I assume the "unreliable narrator" to whom you refer is Ephialtes, the hunchbacked shephard
Prompting Stormwatch to explain:
No, the unreliable narrator would be Dilios, the only survivor of Leonidas' crew.
Then my response is even more on-point. Dilios would have been intimately familiar with Spartan culture - most definitely including pederasty as a cultural norm - and sufficiently knowledgeable about other Hellenic city-states' attitudes toward adult-adult homophilia not to have mentioned Leonidas's supposed slur on Athenians. Thebans? Sure. Thebes was well-known for its tolerance of open homosexual behavior. (In fact, several centuries later, the Sacred Band of Thebes, which was composed exclusively of homosexual couples, would defeat the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra, and briefly become the only standing, domestic military unit in the Attic peninsula - before Alexander III of Macedon, leading the Companion cavalry, crushed it at the first Battle of Chaeronea, not quite 40 years later.)
It's certainly conceivable that Dilios would have slandered the Persians, because, believe it or not, the fact that the Persians wore trousers was considered effeminate by the Greeks in general.
I was enjoying this comment till the anti-rural thing came out. Why dirty your post with that?
It's not anti-rural at all. It's anti-iLEC.
Urban iLECs (i.e. - the so-called "Baby Bells") have been forced, kicking and screaming all the way, to upgrade their systems to compete with cable TV MSOs-as-CLECs for the ISP market. Many of them have clueful technical staff at the NOC, and have an actual strategy for physical plant upgrade to compete with the Spectrums, et alia, because they're basically locked into a cage match with the cable bigs. Not so for the majority of the rural iLECs, who continue to enjoy de facto monopolies in their respective service areas, because the MSOs and regional iLECs don't see a sufficient ROI in building out the systems necessary to compete with them. So, they tend to coast - putting just enough investment into their plants to continue to qualify for Federal subsidies. but not enough to provide even the current definition of broadband service to the vast majority of their customers (apart from those who live in sufficiently densified neighborhoods - which is to say "townies" - to make that profitable in the short term). On top of that, they tend to have a lack of qualified tech people in their local talent pool, because those folks get frustrated by the lack of opportunity in very rural areas, and/or get seduced away by the cultural, social, and other advantages of big-city life.
That's not to say there aren't exceptions to that rule, because there most definitely are. (Two I could point to are Jaguar Communications in southern Minnesota, a CLEC which has absorbed all but a handful of the region's rural iLECs, to their customers' great advantage, and SierraTel in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, which has steadily built out its infrastructure, and which has at least one world-class routing wizard at its northern NOC.) But, in the main, it's accurate enough.
(Full disclosure: I used to write a column for CLEC Magazine, back when that was a thing...)
Slashdot Mirror
SuricouRaven theorized:
The only reason I think cinemas exist at all is for people who want to watch new releases rather than wait for them to come out on disc.
Have you actually been to a multiplex recently?
The principal reason for cinemas to exist is to provide a place for teenagers to take their dates.
Sure, there are families who come to see PG stuff on weekends, but otherwise it's adolescents all the way down ...
rock_climbing_guy mused:
I'd like to know what they were smoking when they said the average reader reads 12 books a year. How many people read even one?
I believe she says "the average reader" as distinct from "the average person". The average person - at least, the average person in the USA - barely reads at all. (Hardly surprising, given the American education establishment's devotion to the "whole word" approach to teaching new readers.) The average reader, by contrast, probably does read a book a month. They're the folks the Kindle store was created for.
Of course, half of those books are romance novels - the most popular fiction genre by a long margin. Mysteries are next, then science fiction and fantasy. (And there's not a lot of science in most of what gets categorized as science fiction nowadays, either, so lumping it in with fantasy is not necessarily inappropriate.)
Full disclosure: I'm a writer by trade and these details matter to me, so I pay attention to them. Most people couldn't care less.
FWIW - when I was a kid, I'd consume up to 10 novels a day. I was determinedly unathletic in those days - and still am - so I did little else until I reached puberty. Then my reading consumption dropped pretty steeply ...
CaptainDork snorted:
... try me again next year.
Movies: Colossal, Dave Made a Maze, Atomic Blonde (despite the critics' naysaying), and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, just for starters. All excellent in their very different ways.
TV: Legion, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (season 2 - or "series 2" in Brit-speak - was even crazier than season 1), Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, Ken Burns' The Vietnam War, Marvel's The Defenders, The Orville (uneven, and it suffers from some pretty lame scriptwriting, but I expect it to improve in future seasons, as Seth Macfarlane shows always do), and BBC's The Alternativity (I've only seen the doc, not the performance that goes with it), off the top of my head. I'm sure I could think of more, if I tried.
Neal Stephenson's The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., and his three-volume masterpiece The Baroque Cycle (not new for 2017, but the best thing he's ever written, IMnsHO). I could go on here, too, but I'm being called away for Xmas brunch.
Cynicism and snarkiness are not nearly as hip - or as entertaining - as you might believe ...
Tomahawk demanded:
Point a camera through the lens and show us what it looks like through the glasses, not a rendered-image slideshow.
So I both looked at the Magic Leap web page - which features the "slideshow" you're complaining about - and read the rather long Rolling Stone article to which TFS points.
Yes, I know. Very un-slashdotty of me. I am obviously "not of the Body".
Reading the article first (including the bit where the author, obviously parroting a recorded statement from the interviews he conducted during his tour, talks about "a ray" of photonic computing structures, which makes it plain that he has no fucking clue about chip design and fabrication) greatly helped me to visualize what ML was trying to present on their home page. The page alone was certainly not at all impressive, but the Rolling Stone reporter's description of his experience with the beta ML1 - and especially the interactive quad sound that tracks virtual objects in the headset wearer's field of view - makes it pretty clear that a video "shot through the goggles" wouldn't necessarily convey that experience a whole lot better than the "slideshow" does. It would, however, put a huge demand on their servers, and probably be laggy as all hell the day they announced their forthcoming product, neither of which would be positives from the perspective of a company that's gone from stealth mode to full visibility on the web in a single announcement.
I do recommend the article, despite its shortcomings (some of which are a consequence of the NDA provisions under which the author labored). The product itself, and the technology ML has created to make it possible, are, in fact, potentially game-changing for interactive computing - albeit probably not in the short term. It's pretty clear that the ML1 will be strictly for developers and rich fucks who can afford to drop the price of a collectable guitar on what will essentially be a toy. The second and third generations are where the real effect on general computing will occur (if at all), after the initial capabilities of the device are seriously enhanced and the price drops from nosebleed territory to something at least marginally affordable to the masses.
That said, it seems like a reasonable bet to wager they'll make it that far. The founder put up a huge amount of his own money to get the company to the point where they had the tech taped down well enough to present it to Google, et al., and they've apparently been pouring cash into ML ever since. It's clearly not a scam, because you don't build a production-level chip fab just to hoodwink the rubes. And ML has constructed such a fab in the basement of their headquarters.
Rainbow's End might not be that far away, after all ...
ImprovOmega opined:,/p>
That was a profoundly interesting read. Thank you for the background information.
You are entirely welcome. Thank you for the compliment!
IMightB inquired:
Do people not remember the origin of "The Internet"? It started as a Defense Project to ensure communications in the event of a nuclear war... They opened it up to universities, and then to the public. Back then they did a fairly decent job of being hand-off. It wasn't until they turned over to private corps, that it started to go downhill.
As it turns out, that's a common belief - and it's wrong.
While it's true that a 1962 RAND Corporation white paper authored by Paul Baran theorized that a packet-switched data network could allow military communications to survive a general nuclear war, that was entirely a thought experiment. The Department of Defense filed it away and largely forgot about it.
It wasn't until 1965, after accepting a position at DARPA, that an electrical engineer named Robert W. Taylor first got the idea for what would eventually become first the DARPAnet, then the ARPAnet, and finally the Internet.
As a condition of the DARPA grants that helped fund their experiments, research teams at three different major research centers were required to install remote terminals at DARPA for their - entirely separate and self-contained - multi-user mainframe systems. These were the first computers to operate interactively, rather than in what mainframers call "batch mode", and support multiple, concurrent user sessions via dumb terminals with line printers as their "displays". One of Taylor's assignments was to monitor and liase with the scientists who built and ran this trio of individual experimental systems, and he quickly noticed that something very like what we would think of as newsgroups spontaneously appeared on all three systems. (That is to say that computer scientists who had accounts on all three, separate, not interconnected in any way systems had each decided that something very much like a computer BBS or Usenet-style messaging system would be a useful addition, and had - again, independently - hacked such a tool together for the users of each of these systems to communicate with each other in a way that had some degree of persistence and which was accessible to the entire user community of that particular machine.)
The fact that users on each system had more-or-less-simultaneously decided such a tool was desireable, and had developed code to create it - and we're talking three different sets of code here - without ever communicating with the other two teams greatly interested and excited Taylor. He immediately wondered what would happen if all three systems were physically connected together in a way that would allow their users to communicate not only with each other, but with users on the other two systems, as well. He took that idea to his supervisor, one Charles Herzfeld, who thought it might have merit. Herszfeld asked Taylor to draw up a formal proposal, and committed, sight unseen, to fund it to the tune of a million dollars (which was real money in 1965).
So Taylor wrote a proposal, and with a million bucks to spend on it approached the managers of the three, separate multiuser systems with his idea to interconnect their systems. All three turned him down flat.
Robert W. Taylor was from Texas, where they grow 'em stubborn, so he persisted in pitching his idea to the three managers of different, multiuser mainframe systems, despite their continued objections that each saw no merit in his proposal, and each considered it a potentially major distraction from the purposes for which each of their disparate systems had been created. Eventually, over the course of time, he wore them down to the point where he got two of them to agree to at least test the idea. It took nearly two years from then before all the ducks were duly aligned, the necessary equipment designed and built, and the long-distance, dedicated telephone lines contracted for.
At 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969, the first two nodes of what was dub
Mod parent +1 Informative, please. This is exactly the kind of post /. needs more of ...
Mod parent +1 Informative, please ...
GrumpySteen observed:
Don't worry. Trump has assured everyone that he'll make the Martians pay for it.
A mod point! A mod point! My kingdom for a mod point ... !
Mod parent +1 Instightful, please.
Social media sites (including this one) are pretty much what you make them. I joined FB because I'm a writer - and there are readers there. Also other writers. And cover artists. And a whole bunch of useful resources that go with them. I also managed to reconnect with folks I hadn't realized I missed until we stumbled across each other there, which was pure serendipity for me.
I still try (and generally succeed) to limit my FB time to half-an-hour or so a day, unless I decide to post an essay. Then it's longer - but only because I count the time I spend composing essays to post on FB as time spent on FB.
For instance, there's this one ...
JackieBrown complained:
There are a few things I follow tech side (mainly related to home automation). I see allot of useful stuff and comments but it is next to impossible to go back and find the post I was reading to unless I actually respond. And even that seems to disappear. (I miss forums.) It also sorts strangely. It's not by date or number of comments - at least it doesn't appear so.
Two things may help you here:
1. Social Fixer. It's available for Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Firefox, and it lets you change a lot of the default behavior of FB (and other SM sites) in ways that make it a lot more user friendly. (Caution: FB frequently changes its code, sometimes in ways that break some of Social Fixer's functions - most notably CTRL+ENTER to post comments - but Matt Kruse, the developer, usually manages to figure out what happened and get a minor rev out to restore the fubared functionality pretty quickly.)
2. You can use "Save link" from the drop-down menu at the top right corner of each post. That allows you to "save" a copy of the post that you can access by opening the Activity Log page from the drop-down menu that looks like a little upside-down triangle in the FB menu bar (if you have SF installed, it's at the top of your screen, otherwise you have to scroll all the way to the top of the page - or just open a new FB window), then click MORE in the Filters menu on the left side, and, finally, click Saved, at the bottom of the list.
And, no, FB doesn't make it easy - but it IS possible ...
DontBeAMoran confessed:
I mean, faggots don't look appetizing to me but I'm sure there's people out there who likes them.
But at least they're liable to be high in fiber ...
Kjella opined:
We've gotten *very* good at dealing with sick people. But we haven't really made any big progress on making healthy people healthier by slowing the effect of aging. Being in "good health" means entirely different things for a 20yo and an 80yo. I think it's because it's very ethically challenging to experiment on healthy people, like if you got cancer obviously we'll treat that. But if you're "only" getting older, do we really dare mess that up? I'd say the answer is overwhelmingly no, unless there's nothing wrong with you we'll do nothing. Okay eat healthy, exercise but nothing to truly stall the decline.
Actually, almost all of the gains in average human lifespan in the 20th century are directly attributable to antibiotics and widespread vaccination against (mostly) childhood diseases.
Maximum human lifespan has changed little, if at all, since the dawn of recorded history. What changed dramatically in the prior century was average lifespan, which is a very different thing. Prior to the wide availability of penicillin in the mid-1940's, a staggering number of humans died from infections that became easily treatable afterward. As more antibiotics - and especially antibiotics that were effective against infections for which penicillin was useless - were introduced, mortality from infection essentially came to a halt in the developed world.
The advent of immunizations for diseases other than smallpox likewise had an enormous impact on morbidity rates from endemic and epidemic diseases that had theretofore taken a staggering toll among infants and children, such as polio, whooping cough, measles, rubella, and mumps. One of the principal reasons families in the pre-immunization era tended to be large was that approximately 50% of children died before they reached adulthood, and the death of a young child was a commonplace tragedy that most families experienced at least once.
Largely halting those deaths - and the equally common deaths of women from "puerperal fever" as a result of infections acquired during childbirth - accounts for virtually all of the apparent increase in human lifespan in the past century or so. As the number of women who survived childbirth, and their children who survived childhood diseases that were ubiquitous prior to widespread, mandatory immunization as a public health measure rose almost logarythmically, the average age of death also increased, as a direct result of their survival.
The truly frightening thing to me is the prospect that the antibiotics upon which so much of this apparent increase in human lifespan depends are rapidly losing their effectiveness due to overuse. (And, while general practictioners who allow their patients to browbeat them into prescribing antibiotics for viral infections such as colds and flus - against which they are completely ineffective - are major contributors to the trend, the most responsible culprits are livestock growers who use them in incredible quantities, not to treat diseases in their food animals, but as preventatives, which they add to their fodder every freakin' day.) Combine that with the profoundly anti-scientific "anti-vax" movement among parents in the USA, and you have a prescription for a planet-wide return to the same death rates that were the rule for all human populations prior to the 20th century.
If you doubt that; if you consider the threat ludicrously overstated, consider this: penicillin - the miracle drug that began the antibiotic revolution - is no longer prescribed by doctors. That's not because there are "newer and better options available." It's because it no longer works. So many bacteria have evolved strong resistance to penicillin that it has become almost entirely ineffective. And it's not the only one that has lost its power.
It's just the first one ...
GuB-42 observed:
Even if you are not using it for fitness, the notification and silent alarm features most trackers have can be really useful.
A couple of years ago I bought a Chinese "smartwatch" that runs the Nucleus OS on Mediatek hardware. It's a piece of wet, stinky shit.
First of all, although it will sync with my Nexus 6 (which I love and use all the time - principally as an ereader and telephone), it doesn't do it very well. Only a few apps can communicate with it, and it swiftly gets more than a little tiresome holding your wrist up to your mouth to talk on your phone. By contrast, a cheapo Bluetooth earpiece used to work really well - until Google borked Bluetooth volume with Nougat (which they haven't fixed yet - so, never) - and was reasonably convenient to use. Secondly, the touch input on that watch is just horrible. The hot spots are tiny and seemingly not centered on the graphics that represent them at all well. Even inputting a phone number is a tooth-grindingly frustrating exercise. And alphanumeric text? Good luck with that. Also, I kept choosing the least ugly of the three (!) available watch faces - and the watch kept changing it back to the butt-ugly default after a half-dozen presses (you have to press the display button to activate it, to save batteries). The phone app for it kept crashing, the camera is a joke, and, all-in-all, it was just a very uninviting user experience in general.
And it's big and heavy, you can't read the display in anything close to full sunlight, and you have to have your smartphone on your person to use the "fitness" features (so, as several commenters below noted, why not just use your phone?).
Anyway, I just bought a manufactuer-reconditioned, gunmetal-gray ASUS Zenwatch 2 (on eBay for $79.99, shipping included), which runs Android Wear 2, features excellent input capability, has its own watchface editor (and can use a wide variety of freebies available on the Android Wear marketplace), lasts all day on a full charge, and runs a whole host of Wear 1 and 2 apps flawlessly. And those notifications and alarms you mentioned? They work flawlessly with Zenwatches.
And, yes, it's big and heavy, with a basically rectangular face. (The new Zenwatch 3 fixes those problems, but is $180, at a minimum - so, no thanks.) I don't mind that nearly as much as I mind all the other drawbacks that Mediatek-based watches inflict on the user.
So, remind me again, why exactly would I want to buy a "fitness tracker" that costs just as much, is not a general-purpose computing device, and has to be charged just as often - for no real fitness benefit ... ?
SuperKendall blathered:
You can choose politicians, but by and large the party division is a sham and the "real" government marches on regardless. Witness how many federal government departments shut down under Trump: 0
What utter, driveling bullTrump.
Republicans are trying to impose tax "reform" that will benefit the rich and giant corporations at the expense of the poor and middle-class, and small businesses. Every Democrat in the Senate voted against their version, and almost every Democrat in the House voted against their even worse version. The Republican-led FCC is hellbent on repealing the net neutrality rules the Democrat-led version enacted. The Republican president is about to move the U.S. consulate in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which will further inflame anti-U.S. tensions in the region (and is guaranteed to spark a global wave of new terror attacks against U.S. citizens, as well as increase the number of fresh recruits for Daesh, et alia). The Republican-dominated Supreme Court has struck down every attempt Congress has made at campaign finance reform, and has granted corporations free reign to spend as much money as they choose to influence U.S. elections. The Republican head of the Department of Justice is determined to revive the incredibly wasteful and counterproductive "war on drugs" at the exact time that the de-criminalization/legalization of marijuana has gained majority support among voters of both parties. The Republican-led EPA is doing everything in its power to roll back the Clean Air and Clean Water acts (that were enacted under a Republican president).
The list just goes on and on.
"There's no difference between the two major parties" is an outright, boldfaced lie perpetrated by Republican spinmeisters in what has been a remarkably successful, concerted, long-term campaign to persuade prospective Democratic voters to stay away from the polls - while the Republican base reliably turns out to vote against its own best interests (because "conservative values").
Benjamin Disreali noted, "There are three kinds of lie: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Well, "there's no difference between the two major parties," is a damned lie - and you are a damned liar ...
xxxJonBoyxxx corrected:
ALMOST ALL PUBLICATIONS will take a well-crafted PR statement, make a few changes and publish it as a story.
FTFY. (Having spent years on both sides of the game.)
Sadly, I am out of points, or else I would mod this post +1 Informative.
As a former computer industry writer (my last gig was as a columnist and feature writer for Boardwatch Magazine, before Penton Media first turned it into a low-rent Network World clone, then folded it), I've seen this kind of thing happen all the time. We didn't do it at Boardwatch, but I sure came under considerable pressure to whore myself out when McGraw-Hill ousted Susan Breidenbach as editor in chief at LAN Times and replaced her and her entire editorial staff with ambitious rejects from PC Week.
In fact, it was the new features editor's insistence that I "coordinate content with the front of the book" (industry journo-speak for "lightly re-write press releases from our biggest advertisers - or else") that left me no choice but to resign from LAN Times - and take my @internet column with me to Boardwatch ...
carbs77 confessed:
Sorry, brain broken
No worries. It's still funny.
(And, now that I actually have mod points, I can't use 'em to upmod your original post, because I already posted a response to it. How's that for irony ... ?)
I fully understand the guy's frustration.
Every time M$ releases a new iteration of Win 10 - even a relatively minor one - it breaks Classic Shell. That has forced him to play a continuous game of whack-a-bug, to the detriment of adding and refining features.
And practically no one (including me) has donated even small amounts of money to him for his effort.
If I wasn't dependent on so many Line6 and Digitech patch editors - none of which run properly under Wine - I'd kick Redmond to the curb without a second thought ...
https://slashdot.org/~carbs77 inquired:
The real question is, how did it fare with hotdog vs. not hotdog?
(FTFY)
But, seriously, somebody with points needs to mod parent +1 Funny, because Silicon Valley's "Not Hotdog" is a real thing - and it's now available for Android, too ...
DickBreath argued:
I might be able to agree that social media is not a net benefit to American society. But for entirely different reasons than Ajit Pai.
[snip]
I think it is simply a huge black hole for time that could be productively used for employment, study, personal enrichment, and trolling slashdot. With the additional benefit of avoiding more ads. Don't get me started about TV.
Err ... don't look now, but /. actually IS "social media". It's more about discussion and less about narcissism than, say, Zuckerbook (although there's certainly no shortage of narcissism here!), but it's about social interaction, all the same. And there are, in fact, ads aplenty - a goodly proportion of which come poorly disguised as "stories" - but I'm guessing you use an adblocker, so you don't see them.
<snark>I'm also unconvinced that a case can be made for /. as a net benefit to American society ...</snark>
Narcocide stated:
Net neutrality is about bandwidth allocations by upstream ISPs. Stop trying to conflate that with platform's own rules for content moderation. Furthermore, you're a bad person for trying to claim this only happens to "leftist" content or that "leftist" is even a thing.
You're right about net neutrality. You're wrong about Ajit Pai.
Pai is a bad person for a plethora of reasons - beginning with the fact that he's a shill for mega-ISPs. His attempt to leverage political division to bolster his bullshit is about 47th on the list ...
https://slashdot.org/~Cinnamon+Beige criticized:
I'm a bit stunned by a student of Ancient Greek culture applying the modern, Western concept of homosexuality on the period, not to mention skipping over some of the very unfortunate problems caused by the fact that the main sources we have for Spartan history are the Athenians--who cannot be trusted...to be accurate, anyway. To slight and slur the Spartans anytime they think they can get away with it? Hell yes. Some of the differences in values show up, too, because current thought is that Sparta was effectively a matriarchy--which is not something the Athenians saw as at all good, because in their opinion, women weren't really people. Which, incidentally, is also part of why applying modern Western concepts of sexuality is problematic...
[edit] ... There isn't even anything involving pederastic relationships within the movie, there's no particular discussion of sexuality, and I would think that as a student of Greco-Roman culture you'd be very, very well aware how illegal it'd be to have included any pederastic relationships since 'beard growing in' at the time would mean 13-14 years old or so.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I was very careful to use the term "homosexual" exclusively in the context of adult male/male relationships. Elsewhere, I deliberately employed the more appropriate word "homophilia/homophiliac".
Your point regarding the absence of specifically Spartan sources in the historical record is not without merit - but we work with the evidence we have, not with the evidence we wish existed, n'est ce pas?
As for the bizzaro notion that Sparta was somehow a matriarchy, despite its kings and ephors being exclusively male (and despite the popular, Aristotlelian notion that women were somehow "incomplete men") - well, that's news to me. I suspect it has little to do with the actual evidence from sources and artifacts, and everything to do with the endless quest for fresh topics for masters' theses.
There is, in fact, a sexual slur directed at the Athenians by the Spartans in both versions of 300. It occurs during the march from the Peloponnese to the Hot Gates (which somehow involves passing near Athens in Millerworld). You apparently missed it. I did not, because it stood out to me as such a vividly gratuitous introjection of Frank Miller's personal prejudices in the graphic novel that I was on the lookout for its reappearance in the movie.
And, of course, there it was, in all its ugly, gratuitous, anachronistic glory ...
cayenne8 asked the musical question:
Exactly what brand of crack has this guy been smoking????
Comcast brand, of course.
Now available in refreshing menthol blue ... !
I inquired:
I assume the "unreliable narrator" to whom you refer is Ephialtes, the hunchbacked shephard
Prompting Stormwatch to explain:
No, the unreliable narrator would be Dilios, the only survivor of Leonidas' crew.
Then my response is even more on-point. Dilios would have been intimately familiar with Spartan culture - most definitely including pederasty as a cultural norm - and sufficiently knowledgeable about other Hellenic city-states' attitudes toward adult-adult homophilia not to have mentioned Leonidas's supposed slur on Athenians. Thebans? Sure. Thebes was well-known for its tolerance of open homosexual behavior. (In fact, several centuries later, the Sacred Band of Thebes, which was composed exclusively of homosexual couples, would defeat the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra, and briefly become the only standing, domestic military unit in the Attic peninsula - before Alexander III of Macedon, leading the Companion cavalry, crushed it at the first Battle of Chaeronea, not quite 40 years later.)
It's certainly conceivable that Dilios would have slandered the Persians, because, believe it or not, the fact that the Persians wore trousers was considered effeminate by the Greeks in general.
I know - crazy, huh ... ?
omfglearntoplay commented:
I was enjoying this comment till the anti-rural thing came out. Why dirty your post with that?
It's not anti-rural at all. It's anti-iLEC.
Urban iLECs (i.e. - the so-called "Baby Bells") have been forced, kicking and screaming all the way, to upgrade their systems to compete with cable TV MSOs-as-CLECs for the ISP market. Many of them have clueful technical staff at the NOC, and have an actual strategy for physical plant upgrade to compete with the Spectrums, et alia, because they're basically locked into a cage match with the cable bigs. Not so for the majority of the rural iLECs, who continue to enjoy de facto monopolies in their respective service areas, because the MSOs and regional iLECs don't see a sufficient ROI in building out the systems necessary to compete with them. So, they tend to coast - putting just enough investment into their plants to continue to qualify for Federal subsidies. but not enough to provide even the current definition of broadband service to the vast majority of their customers (apart from those who live in sufficiently densified neighborhoods - which is to say "townies" - to make that profitable in the short term). On top of that, they tend to have a lack of qualified tech people in their local talent pool, because those folks get frustrated by the lack of opportunity in very rural areas, and/or get seduced away by the cultural, social, and other advantages of big-city life.
That's not to say there aren't exceptions to that rule, because there most definitely are. (Two I could point to are Jaguar Communications in southern Minnesota, a CLEC which has absorbed all but a handful of the region's rural iLECs, to their customers' great advantage, and SierraTel in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, which has steadily built out its infrastructure, and which has at least one world-class routing wizard at its northern NOC.) But, in the main, it's accurate enough.
(Full disclosure: I used to write a column for CLEC Magazine, back when that was a thing ...)