Any Uber story is relevant to language nerds because they can complain about the company that cannot spell, and in all likelihood cannot pronounce, the German word "über".
I'm not an antisocial nerd, but I'm also not a type-A salesy extrovert either. Talking to people on the phone means uncomfortable small talk, having to manage the conversation, etc. Sending a to-the-point message is much more useful to me. I know extroverts probably love the small talk aspect, but it's something I can live without if I can get my information without it.
I'm fairly asocial, and while I enjoy the occasional social interaction, phone calls are very frustrating to me. Basically, I have to put all my social effort into it, but I'm not getting the full package of IRL presence. Live chats have a similar effect, though not quite as bad. In general, realtime conversations take all of my focus but the information density is really bad, so it feels like a huge waste of time. I feel like a supercomputer that people want to use for playing Minesweeper, though with a serious lack of multitasking.
There's also the obvious issue that people who call you think they have the right to interrupt whatever you're doing, even when the matter is trivial and not urgent. Again, this is probably not so bad for people who can multitask.
A minimum of two cameras are needed to capture 3D images..... Perhaps what we really need first is some means of displaying 3D images (that doesn't require wearing dorky glasses).
If you live in n dimensions of space, you'll only ever see (n-1)-dimensional images, because the ray of light takes up one dimension. Light rays won't give any info about depth along their axes. Of course, with translucent materials you can focus at different depths at a time to capture 2D slices. Perhaps with today's tech you could do this fast enough get decent 3D images at decent framerates. But most of it will be wasted because you'll only see two 2D images at a time.
"I think that would be a good idea", to paraphrase Gandhi.
Since I moved to Linux about 19 years ago, I used to wonder about the term "personal computer", and how "PC == Wintel" to many people. Looking at all of those identical Windows appliances vs. all the fun and interesting setups of Linux enthusiasts. Linux machines ranging from supercomputing clusters to wristwatches around the turn of the millennium. What exactly did the Wintel people mean by "personal"? Something familiar to the average person, or something you personalize to fit your needs and work for you?
Incidentally, today I used and installed Android for the first time. I've been sharing pictures on Instagram using the web extension, but I wanted to set some options that would only be available via the "app" (as if the browser were not an application, vs. the OS), so I tried android-x86. (Why I don't have a phone that runs those things is another topic, but I'm sure many a/.er will resonate.) The question is, why does one need different machines (virtual or actual) for content production and management/consumption? It is yet another frustrating example of the user-developer separation. I guess the real reasons involve something like ad revenue.
The Android experience was refreshing because I keep hearing about "smart"phones as the great consumer control and tracking platform, but it didn't seem realistic until I had a go. Or as mentioned on Wikipedia about its origins: 'Rubin described the Android project as "tremendous potential in developing smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner's location and preferences"'.
I'm not sure Intel is in the position to make the computer great.. erm, personal again -- something I can fully customize and control, and that runs all things computable. But it sure would be a good idea.
Film cameras should not be called "analog", because they are not the analog analogue of digital cameras. For that you need an electronic (still video) camera, and they did exist:
http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Ca...
I have a friend who is heavily into wet plate photography. The group he belongs to even make their own cameras sometimes using old lenses they find all over the place.
Why not grind their own lenses? A lot of amateur astronomers do that.
If you're more into math and art than optimization tricks, check out Bridges.
(I (re)?discovered math art about 3 years ago, and it sort of reminded me of the early 90s demoscene, except this time it's for grownups. I got into Bridges as soon as I heard of it, and it's my third year taking part in some way; there's also an art exhibition and a short film festival for those of us who'd rather just show off what they do instead of giving lectures.)
How does multicast work with authentication and DRM? Or Is business and making a profit idiotic and backwards too?
I think it's more like "hey, we can now track/control/charge for something that was freely broadcast in the past, so obviously we should do it". Most of the streaming I've come across is free as in beer, but I have a hunch that it's all watermarked to discourage further distribution, and they'll always have the option for stronger restrictions. For instance, a lot of our national TV programming is available for streaming for a limited time around the broadcast; of course, anyone can still record the broadcast and do what they like with it. It's weird that they first send out the program in unencrypted radio waves for everyone, and then expect to have any control over it. Naturally, copyright comes into play at some point, but if you're that worried about it, perhaps you shouldn't broadcast it around in the first place.
Yes, but that was a TV broadcast, not concurrent streaming.
This is an entirely different scaling challenge.
It's also idiotic and backwards, especially given that IP networks are capable of multicast/broadcast but those features are never used. Instead, it is considered a great success when a company can send a bazillion identical copies on separate streams.
It is doubly idiotic when done over cell networks -- remember when radio telephony was mainly used in emergencies at remote locations? Radio broadcast stations don't choke if there's a metric shitload of listeners in a small area.
Add to this media companies that want their subscribers to stream every time they want to listen/watch something, instead of keeping local copies. Well, at least it means faster/cheaper Internet for us dinosaurs.
keep the command names the same but rewrite how they function?
Well, keep the syntax too, so old scripts would still work. The old command name could just be a script that calls the new commands under the hood. (Perhaps this is just what you meant, but I thought I'd elaborate.)
Good point, but there's another issue with large insects; they need a higher concentration of oxygen in the air than what we currently have. Insects have no lungs or blood, they breathe directly into every cell, so they are more sensitive to this. O2 concentration also affects other species in different ways, many things will simply burn out with too much of it.
inflation eats away at my income a little every year. I'm being told that addressing climate change would kill jobs and in turn wages....
If you want to do something about climate change you need to fix their economy first.
It's the monetary system that needs fixing. Debt-based money needs ongoing economic growth to work, and we see it in the form of inflation. Seriously, we're depleting our limited real-world resources in order to maintain a fiction of money.
Ironically, Bitcoin proposes a deflationarly solution while it spends a metric shitload of energy. But in comparison, an enormous majority of the world economy only exists to maintain the debt-based fiat money system (via the consumerist culture).
Coal power brought us into the industrial age, which was a huge step forward at the time. Without it, we probably wouldn't have all this nice technology now. At the age of coal, we didn't know any better, but we decided to move forward with the "good enough" instead of searching the best and cleanest tech forever. It's a bit like hacking up an ugly script to get your work done, vs. taking your time to do a clean modular design. Or any other case where the can-do guys get things done.
Of course, while getting things up and running the ugly way, we should keep looking for better solutions. We should have phased out coal a long time ago, instead of letting things like trade unions get in the way of clean air. Progress and discovery means you shouldn't get too attached with one particular tech.
As for the original article, I'm not vouching for Uber, I'm just generally disappointed at all the negative news on new technology -- it's always the death and destruction, rarely about actual progress. For instance, every time the word "algorithm" appears in the headlines, it's always about some evil data mining operation, whereas in reality it might also be about children learning to code.
when the progress of science wasn't hindered by a few statistical accidents. The age of discoveries. The space race, when you could at least pretend mankind had its aim at the stars, even if it was mostly about political bickering between superpowers.
Now it's all about safety and well-being for everyone, no child left behind. If there's any of that sci-fi tech around we used to dream of, we might as well put ourselves in the stasis chamber and be comfortably numb for the rest of eternity.
Just to elaborate, Flac was designed for light/fast encoders at the possible expense of compression ratio. It would decode in software in portable music players that often had hardware decoders for MP3 and AAC. In comparison, other lossless formats at the time such as APE had somewhat better compression ratios, but were much heavier to encode and decode. I guess the prevailing idea was that portable players don't need lossless quality, but Flac changed that.
Of course, Flac is also Free software.
The ability to multicast over IP has been around for years, it's just that no one really wants to use it and the carriers have no interest in configuring their systems to enable it. It is easier to do in IPv6 though.
Good point. I guess content providers want to maintain separate copies for each subscriber for DRM and other control/tracking issues.
Next you'll be telling us Trump doesn't know the difference between Kerberos and Kubernetes.
Simpsons Comic book guy scoffs at Trump!
Because knowing the difference between two computing technologies, either of which would be known by only a minority of IT people, is exactly the same as not knowing the difference between two of the most famous STDs on the planet...
If you ask a civilized person about Kerberos without any IT namespace hints, they'll probably answer something about a mythical three-headed guard dog. On Kubernetes, a surprising number of people might recognize the origin of words "government" and "cybernetics". Fleeting IT projects that can't come up with original names are not a part of old-school Bildung (for the lack of a better English word).
But hey, this is the shiny new 21st Century, where "android" is just a phone, instead of a humanoid servant robot, and "hoverboards" have wheels.
That's really what this boils down to, DAB+ is far more competitive with internet radio when it's in bigger cities and along main roads. More channels, better quality and cheaper vs internet streaming which is personalized but requires a subscription and has quotas.
IMHO, using the current Internet for broadcast content is idiotic, since you need to send a separate copy for every receiver. This is especially bad in case of live events, which are less often time-shifted, and mobile networks with all their constraints.
Slashdot Mirror
Any Uber story is relevant to language nerds because they can complain about the company that cannot spell, and in all likelihood cannot pronounce, the German word "über".
I'm not an antisocial nerd, but I'm also not a type-A salesy extrovert either. Talking to people on the phone means uncomfortable small talk, having to manage the conversation, etc. Sending a to-the-point message is much more useful to me. I know extroverts probably love the small talk aspect, but it's something I can live without if I can get my information without it.
I'm fairly asocial, and while I enjoy the occasional social interaction, phone calls are very frustrating to me. Basically, I have to put all my social effort into it, but I'm not getting the full package of IRL presence. Live chats have a similar effect, though not quite as bad. In general, realtime conversations take all of my focus but the information density is really bad, so it feels like a huge waste of time. I feel like a supercomputer that people want to use for playing Minesweeper, though with a serious lack of multitasking.
There's also the obvious issue that people who call you think they have the right to interrupt whatever you're doing, even when the matter is trivial and not urgent. Again, this is probably not so bad for people who can multitask.
A minimum of two cameras are needed to capture 3D images. .... Perhaps what we really need first is some means of displaying 3D images (that doesn't require wearing dorky glasses).
If you live in n dimensions of space, you'll only ever see (n-1)-dimensional images, because the ray of light takes up one dimension. Light rays won't give any info about depth along their axes. Of course, with translucent materials you can focus at different depths at a time to capture 2D slices. Perhaps with today's tech you could do this fast enough get decent 3D images at decent framerates. But most of it will be wasted because you'll only see two 2D images at a time.
"I think that would be a good idea", to paraphrase Gandhi.
Since I moved to Linux about 19 years ago, I used to wonder about the term "personal computer", and how "PC == Wintel" to many people. Looking at all of those identical Windows appliances vs. all the fun and interesting setups of Linux enthusiasts. Linux machines ranging from supercomputing clusters to wristwatches around the turn of the millennium. What exactly did the Wintel people mean by "personal"? Something familiar to the average person, or something you personalize to fit your needs and work for you?
Incidentally, today I used and installed Android for the first time. I've been sharing pictures on Instagram using the web extension, but I wanted to set some options that would only be available via the "app" (as if the browser were not an application, vs. the OS), so I tried android-x86. (Why I don't have a phone that runs those things is another topic, but I'm sure many a /.er will resonate.) The question is, why does one need different machines (virtual or actual) for content production and management/consumption? It is yet another frustrating example of the user-developer separation. I guess the real reasons involve something like ad revenue.
The Android experience was refreshing because I keep hearing about "smart"phones as the great consumer control and tracking platform, but it didn't seem realistic until I had a go. Or as mentioned on Wikipedia about its origins: 'Rubin described the Android project as "tremendous potential in developing smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner's location and preferences"'.
I'm not sure Intel is in the position to make the computer great.. erm, personal again -- something I can fully customize and control, and that runs all things computable. But it sure would be a good idea.
Film cameras should not be called "analog", because they are not the analog analogue of digital cameras. For that you need an electronic (still video) camera, and they did exist: http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Ca...
I have a friend who is heavily into wet plate photography. The group he belongs to even make their own cameras sometimes using old lenses they find all over the place.
Why not grind their own lenses? A lot of amateur astronomers do that.
Man, that's a lot of underscores.
Somebody needs to talk to their branding & marketing dept, to stop calling everything the same name. It really makes looking up the specs confusing.
Whoa there, you can always buy a Core or a Pentium if you don't want Optane.
If you're more into math and art than optimization tricks, check out Bridges.
(I (re)?discovered math art about 3 years ago, and it sort of reminded me of the early 90s demoscene, except this time it's for grownups. I got into Bridges as soon as I heard of it, and it's my third year taking part in some way; there's also an art exhibition and a short film festival for those of us who'd rather just show off what they do instead of giving lectures.)
How does multicast work with authentication and DRM? Or Is business and making a profit idiotic and backwards too?
I think it's more like "hey, we can now track/control/charge for something that was freely broadcast in the past, so obviously we should do it". Most of the streaming I've come across is free as in beer, but I have a hunch that it's all watermarked to discourage further distribution, and they'll always have the option for stronger restrictions. For instance, a lot of our national TV programming is available for streaming for a limited time around the broadcast; of course, anyone can still record the broadcast and do what they like with it. It's weird that they first send out the program in unencrypted radio waves for everyone, and then expect to have any control over it. Naturally, copyright comes into play at some point, but if you're that worried about it, perhaps you shouldn't broadcast it around in the first place.
Yes, but that was a TV broadcast, not concurrent streaming. This is an entirely different scaling challenge.
It's also idiotic and backwards, especially given that IP networks are capable of multicast/broadcast but those features are never used. Instead, it is considered a great success when a company can send a bazillion identical copies on separate streams.
It is doubly idiotic when done over cell networks -- remember when radio telephony was mainly used in emergencies at remote locations? Radio broadcast stations don't choke if there's a metric shitload of listeners in a small area.
Add to this media companies that want their subscribers to stream every time they want to listen/watch something, instead of keeping local copies. Well, at least it means faster/cheaper Internet for us dinosaurs.
Is that something like the "la-ser"? Will it help me get my "one million dollars"?
keep the command names the same but rewrite how they function?
Well, keep the syntax too, so old scripts would still work. The old command name could just be a script that calls the new commands under the hood. (Perhaps this is just what you meant, but I thought I'd elaborate.)
It's originally a play on the words more vs. less. I like having multiple levels of meaning.
Good point, but there's another issue with large insects; they need a higher concentration of oxygen in the air than what we currently have. Insects have no lungs or blood, they breathe directly into every cell, so they are more sensitive to this. O2 concentration also affects other species in different ways, many things will simply burn out with too much of it.
Our customers need greater transparency and optics
Oh, they are laying fiber now?
Is that a euphemism for a healthy poop?
inflation eats away at my income a little every year. I'm being told that addressing climate change would kill jobs and in turn wages.... If you want to do something about climate change you need to fix their economy first.
It's the monetary system that needs fixing. Debt-based money needs ongoing economic growth to work, and we see it in the form of inflation. Seriously, we're depleting our limited real-world resources in order to maintain a fiction of money.
Ironically, Bitcoin proposes a deflationarly solution while it spends a metric shitload of energy. But in comparison, an enormous majority of the world economy only exists to maintain the debt-based fiat money system (via the consumerist culture).
Heading to the patent office to get a jump on the itsy-bitsy teeny-weenie mellow cockroach milk machiney
FTFY.
Coal power brought us into the industrial age, which was a huge step forward at the time. Without it, we probably wouldn't have all this nice technology now. At the age of coal, we didn't know any better, but we decided to move forward with the "good enough" instead of searching the best and cleanest tech forever. It's a bit like hacking up an ugly script to get your work done, vs. taking your time to do a clean modular design. Or any other case where the can-do guys get things done.
Of course, while getting things up and running the ugly way, we should keep looking for better solutions. We should have phased out coal a long time ago, instead of letting things like trade unions get in the way of clean air. Progress and discovery means you shouldn't get too attached with one particular tech.
As for the original article, I'm not vouching for Uber, I'm just generally disappointed at all the negative news on new technology -- it's always the death and destruction, rarely about actual progress. For instance, every time the word "algorithm" appears in the headlines, it's always about some evil data mining operation, whereas in reality it might also be about children learning to code.
when the progress of science wasn't hindered by a few statistical accidents. The age of discoveries. The space race, when you could at least pretend mankind had its aim at the stars, even if it was mostly about political bickering between superpowers.
Now it's all about safety and well-being for everyone, no child left behind. If there's any of that sci-fi tech around we used to dream of, we might as well put ourselves in the stasis chamber and be comfortably numb for the rest of eternity.
I can't afford to fly to NYC's Central Park, so is that no longer a public space because I cannot get there? Get out of here.
I can't afford to get out of here, you insensitive clod!
Flac is lossless, it's full quality.
Flac is fast to encode and decode.
Just to elaborate, Flac was designed for light/fast encoders at the possible expense of compression ratio. It would decode in software in portable music players that often had hardware decoders for MP3 and AAC. In comparison, other lossless formats at the time such as APE had somewhat better compression ratios, but were much heavier to encode and decode. I guess the prevailing idea was that portable players don't need lossless quality, but Flac changed that. Of course, Flac is also Free software.
The ability to multicast over IP has been around for years, it's just that no one really wants to use it and the carriers have no interest in configuring their systems to enable it. It is easier to do in IPv6 though.
Good point. I guess content providers want to maintain separate copies for each subscriber for DRM and other control/tracking issues.
Next you'll be telling us Trump doesn't know the difference between Kerberos and Kubernetes.
Simpsons Comic book guy scoffs at Trump!
Because knowing the difference between two computing technologies, either of which would be known by only a minority of IT people, is exactly the same as not knowing the difference between two of the most famous STDs on the planet...
If you ask a civilized person about Kerberos without any IT namespace hints, they'll probably answer something about a mythical three-headed guard dog. On Kubernetes, a surprising number of people might recognize the origin of words "government" and "cybernetics". Fleeting IT projects that can't come up with original names are not a part of old-school Bildung (for the lack of a better English word).
But hey, this is the shiny new 21st Century, where "android" is just a phone, instead of a humanoid servant robot, and "hoverboards" have wheels.
That's really what this boils down to, DAB+ is far more competitive with internet radio when it's in bigger cities and along main roads. More channels, better quality and cheaper vs internet streaming which is personalized but requires a subscription and has quotas.
IMHO, using the current Internet for broadcast content is idiotic, since you need to send a separate copy for every receiver. This is especially bad in case of live events, which are less often time-shifted, and mobile networks with all their constraints.