Back when I was wee lad, little electronic kits consist of discrete transistors, LEDs, op-amps, etc. You can make little toys with blinking lights and such, and perhaps gain some rudimentary but empirical experience with electronics.
I realize today's a different, whole lot more sophisticated (in terms of technology) era, but what would be the equivalent today?
FPGAs. Instead of programming a chip someone else designed, you make your own circuits, just like in the good old days. Except you don't have to solder much, and you have all sorts of macro programming tricks (e.g. for repeating a circuit block 100 times, each with different parameters) you'd expect from software development.
Why can't tech make having to go to work obsolete?
Why can't we make all the tech stuff, like robots, do all the dumb work for all of us so we can spend the rest of our lives playing, or do the kind of work we really enjoy? Isn't this the frigging thing we should strive to achieve in society? Not create more jobs, but less?
Apparently, it is all about the distribution of goods. Most work isn't about producing something useful for human life, it's there to give the worker a certain status. The higher you are in this scheme, the higher your proportion of the collective wealth. I guess this idea used to work in the past where food and energy were scarce, and you had to work for living in the direct sense. We live in the age of plenty, but this old idea of wealth distribution has stuck.
It would be great if somebody could look at this system as a whole. If you build a machine that does more with less energy, it's supposed to be a good thing. But if you do the same on the scale of a society, it's heresy -- as if the goal were to use energy/people, rather than get something done.
Just before the first Meego phone (N900) launched, Elop took over. It was killed without even given a chance. To answer your question, that is why Meego never competed with Android and the iOS.
Huh? The N900 was released in 2009. The N9 program was launched some time before that, and the device was released, after all, in late 2011.
Also, the N900 runs Maemo which has nothing to do with Intel. Nokia had a line of Maemo tablets since 2005, and N900 was the last of these, finally allowed to include full phone capabilities.
Meego was intended as a merger of Maemo and Intel's Moblin, but it never really appeared anywhere (N9 is pretty much Maemo), and I'm not sure how exactly it was supposed to improve on Maemo. The name is not important, though, it's the idea of a regular GNU/Linux distro running on your phone. Which is why you can pry my N900 from my cold, dead hands, as long as you avoid stepping on my lawn.
Maemo could easily have been adapted to run android apps
It may be a little late, but this is exactly what Jolla has done. Perhaps Nokia will buy them back as the real smartphone division now that the crud has eloped to Redmond.
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, December 2004
Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar <sam@hocevar.net>
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long as the name is changed.
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
I did get myself a Thinkpad earlier this year, and it's worth every penny in many ways. It's just the general trend that worries me, I hope they keep making something like Thinkpads in the future.
with beginning grad students. In papers, they often feel like they have to cite every . last . factual . assertion . and . word . that . they . use, to the point of having paragraphs with 20 citations in them, unreadable. But they're so terrified of "plagiarism" and heard that lecture so many times at the beginning of so many classes that it's hard to talk them out of citing Pythagorus or some writing about him when using the Pythagorean theorem, Perskyi when using the word "television," and so on. Exhausting.
As an analog to this, they often hesitate to say anything new (i.e. anything they can't find a citation for). It's as though they feel like only institutions and the famous have license to make new things in the world, and then be cited. It recalls for me the similar divide between creators/consumers, with a hard territorial border in between the two camps, that RIAA/MPAA/BSA et. al. have tried to inculcate into the cultural consciousness.
This is one of the reasons why I found academic career so off-putting, the idea that research is mainly about citing others, and you can't express anything new by yourself. On the other hand, I haven't thought about this in the anti-piracy context; in research, it's a good idea to check what others have done, precisely so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel - because said wheel is generally freely available scientific knowledge.
However, today you have more and more "scientific" knowledge behind closed doors because of the way the research was sponsored. Of course, businesses are free to conduct their own research if they want to keep quiet, and it's the universities that are supposedly open. But when you have university research groups sponsored by businesses for their own gain, you get into this weird half-open, half-scientific state. And the really open research is somewhere out there, on and offline, done by hobbyists with few credentials but a much healthier attitude towards science.
I too highlight words all the time. Constantly. Not only to keep track of where I am, but just to fidget.
I'm genuinely interested to hear that. I do it too. Glad I'm not alone on this one.
Me too:-P
Back on topic, though, I remember explaining this feature of Linux to someone, and they immediately mentioned this sort of highlighting/fidgeting behaviour. I just don't see the problem. Do people actually ever copy something, then go on reading/., and only then paste the data somewhere they want? I generally don't trust the copy-paste buffer to stay intact very long, though admittedly that is partly due to the highlight-to-copy mechanics.
Many modern mouses make it hard to click the middle button without scrolling a notch with the wheel at the same time. Incredibly annoying.
I remember this effect the first few times I used a wheel mouse. It didn't take long to learn to press in a certain way (angle) so there's no scrolling. Is there something in more recent mice that makes this harder?
<rant>Every year, we seem to have fewer keys on the keyboard and more widgets on the mouse. For example, on most laptops we've lost PgUp/Dn keys and the arrow keys keep shrinking, probably because a wheel mouse is supposed to do the same thing. I predict that some day they don't sell keyboards any more, but a typical mouse will have 102 buttons.</rant>
Just a thought, could Archimedes Law apply here, but instead of water, the medium is the ambiant air?
That is exactly how hot-air and helium balloons, blimps etc. work. It is left as an exercise to the student to work out why that would not work with a spider and/or its thread.
It's NSA that created Bitcoin in the first place. This is obviously true from the pseudonym, which in Japan would be written in the order Nakamoto SAtoshi.
Slashdot Mirror
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" -- Albert Einstein
The whole story is covered in duct tape.
Great, another government cover-up. Not that I actually wanted to read it anyway...
Back when I was wee lad, little electronic kits consist of discrete transistors, LEDs, op-amps, etc. You can make little toys with blinking lights and such, and perhaps gain some rudimentary but empirical experience with electronics.
I realize today's a different, whole lot more sophisticated (in terms of technology) era, but what would be the equivalent today?
FPGAs. Instead of programming a chip someone else designed, you make your own circuits, just like in the good old days. Except you don't have to solder much, and you have all sorts of macro programming tricks (e.g. for repeating a circuit block 100 times, each with different parameters) you'd expect from software development.
Why can't tech make having to go to work obsolete?
Why can't we make all the tech stuff, like robots, do all the dumb work for all of us so we can spend the rest of our lives playing, or do the kind of work we really enjoy? Isn't this the frigging thing we should strive to achieve in society? Not create more jobs, but less?
Apparently, it is all about the distribution of goods. Most work isn't about producing something useful for human life, it's there to give the worker a certain status. The higher you are in this scheme, the higher your proportion of the collective wealth. I guess this idea used to work in the past where food and energy were scarce, and you had to work for living in the direct sense. We live in the age of plenty, but this old idea of wealth distribution has stuck.
It would be great if somebody could look at this system as a whole. If you build a machine that does more with less energy, it's supposed to be a good thing. But if you do the same on the scale of a society, it's heresy -- as if the goal were to use energy/people, rather than get something done.
For all intestinal purposes, this thread makes me [sic]
WE don't have high energy portable power sources.
We really need to figure out an iron many style reactor to power the next generation of cool toys that we can dream but not really use.
Also, it should be able to operate in frickin' saltwater. In fact, the frickin' buoyancy might even help with the frickin' portability.
I say we just trust Schneier unconditionally, because he's the good guy.
ALL HAIL CRYPTOTOAD!
I would have driven their company into the ground for a mere fraction of what Elop was paid or squandered. Yet, they never called me.
100000000000000000000000000000000000000000/1 is a fraction. $\forall x \in \N: x \in \Q$
Just before the first Meego phone (N900) launched, Elop took over. It was killed without even given a chance. To answer your question, that is why Meego never competed with Android and the iOS.
Huh? The N900 was released in 2009. The N9 program was launched some time before that, and the device was released, after all, in late 2011.
Also, the N900 runs Maemo which has nothing to do with Intel. Nokia had a line of Maemo tablets since 2005, and N900 was the last of these, finally allowed to include full phone capabilities.
Meego was intended as a merger of Maemo and Intel's Moblin, but it never really appeared anywhere (N9 is pretty much Maemo), and I'm not sure how exactly it was supposed to improve on Maemo. The name is not important, though, it's the idea of a regular GNU/Linux distro running on your phone. Which is why you can pry my N900 from my cold, dead hands, as long as you avoid stepping on my lawn.
Maemo could easily have been adapted to run android apps
It may be a little late, but this is exactly what Jolla has done. Perhaps Nokia will buy them back as the real smartphone division now that the crud has eloped to Redmond.
Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!
Big pile of mud ->
Stuff that splatters -> an insensitive clod.
I did get myself a Thinkpad earlier this year, and it's worth every penny in many ways. It's just the general trend that worries me, I hope they keep making something like Thinkpads in the future.
with beginning grad students. In papers, they often feel like they have to cite every . last . factual . assertion . and . word . that . they . use, to the point of having paragraphs with 20 citations in them, unreadable. But they're so terrified of "plagiarism" and heard that lecture so many times at the beginning of so many classes that it's hard to talk them out of citing Pythagorus or some writing about him when using the Pythagorean theorem, Perskyi when using the word "television," and so on. Exhausting.
As an analog to this, they often hesitate to say anything new (i.e. anything they can't find a citation for). It's as though they feel like only institutions and the famous have license to make new things in the world, and then be cited. It recalls for me the similar divide between creators/consumers, with a hard territorial border in between the two camps, that RIAA/MPAA/BSA et. al. have tried to inculcate into the cultural consciousness.
This is one of the reasons why I found academic career so off-putting, the idea that research is mainly about citing others, and you can't express anything new by yourself. On the other hand, I haven't thought about this in the anti-piracy context; in research, it's a good idea to check what others have done, precisely so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel - because said wheel is generally freely available scientific knowledge.
However, today you have more and more "scientific" knowledge behind closed doors because of the way the research was sponsored. Of course, businesses are free to conduct their own research if they want to keep quiet, and it's the universities that are supposedly open. But when you have university research groups sponsored by businesses for their own gain, you get into this weird half-open, half-scientific state. And the really open research is somewhere out there, on and offline, done by hobbyists with few credentials but a much healthier attitude towards science.
I too highlight words all the time. Constantly. Not only to keep track of where I am, but just to fidget.
I'm genuinely interested to hear that. I do it too. Glad I'm not alone on this one.
Me too :-P
Back on topic, though, I remember explaining this feature of Linux to someone, and they immediately mentioned this sort of highlighting/fidgeting behaviour. I just don't see the problem. Do people actually ever copy something, then go on reading /., and only then paste the data somewhere they want? I generally don't trust the copy-paste buffer to stay intact very long, though admittedly that is partly due to the highlight-to-copy mechanics.
Many modern mouses make it hard to click the middle button without scrolling a notch with the wheel at the same time. Incredibly annoying.
I remember this effect the first few times I used a wheel mouse. It didn't take long to learn to press in a certain way (angle) so there's no scrolling. Is there something in more recent mice that makes this harder?
<rant>Every year, we seem to have fewer keys on the keyboard and more widgets on the mouse. For example, on most laptops we've lost PgUp/Dn keys and the arrow keys keep shrinking, probably because a wheel mouse is supposed to do the same thing. I predict that some day they don't sell keyboards any more, but a typical mouse will have 102 buttons.</rant>
Real men chase their prey down and beat them to death with their bear hands.
This.
O_o
Just a thought, could Archimedes Law apply here, but instead of water, the medium is the ambiant air?
That is exactly how hot-air and helium balloons, blimps etc. work. It is left as an exercise to the student to work out why that would not work with a spider and/or its thread.
Oh, snap!
What's really scary here, is that when you throw a bit of quick pseudocode to explain your idea, you end up writing perfect Python.
Surely you mean reavers?
It's NSA that created Bitcoin in the first place. This is obviously true from the pseudonym, which in Japan would be written in the order Nakamoto SAtoshi.
better to just run windows and not wine+other os
I guess the world's energy problems can also be solved with a big WHOOSH next to a wind turbine.