Australia would be welcome to do something like this... I'm a South African EE student at the moment, I'm working towards an SKA related project, and whether or not South Africa is chosen ultimately, we have our own radio telescope plans, so this would be useful anyway.
The SKA is about international collaboration, AFAIK. It's good for countries to share inventions.
Not necessarily... I look up random diseases all the time, not because I have them but I'm curious. I understand the point that you're trying to illustrate though.
AFAIK, however, that sort of information wouldn't be available to e.g. health insurance companies, because all that companies like Google and Amazon sell is targeted advertising. Wouldn't put it past Facebook to sell the data out though. I stand under correction, though. Anyone have better insight than me?
Just what I was thinking... It's not as though this hasn't been done before, though, isn't this the exact sort of approach that RIM introduced with their first BlackBerries?
The other issue that I have is, ok, so Amazon is collecting data on you, so who really cares? It's not as though someone is sitting there reading it, all it's used for is so that scripts can target adverts at you. Big whooping deal. I don't see how this is a threat to my privacy or anything. If anything, I prefer having better adverts targeted at me, so that I don't get bothered by ones I'm not even remotely interested in.
I wonder about that. I'm busy working on a facial recognition project at the moment, I'm using OpenCV, and I'm doing exactly that, using ratios between facial features. My algorithm is very very simple, but the research I've done suggests that there are much more complex algorithms available. Also, with my hobbyist grade software, changes in lighting and facial position greatly affect the outcomes of the scan. So I still have my doubts as to the absolute usefulness of the system.
Not that I suspect it won't work at all! I was recently amazed by how well Picasa scanned through all my photos and grouped the same faces together, sure it made some mistakes but broadly it was correct. I think the biggest change however was my brother cutting his hair between successive photos, no-one grew a beard or had a nose broken or lost a significant amount of weight or aged significantly in any of the photos. So I think that if one wanted to disguise one's self from the system, one could, quite easily.
You say that in jest, but one wonders how much this facial recognition stuff will be affected by if I for example grow a beard, or shave my beard, or break my nose. Does anyone have any insight into this one?
I think the mental disorder you're looking for is called dissociative identity disorder. Not schizophrenia. There's a slight difference...
Or was the point to try and be funny? I'm never quite sure with Slashdot comments. Perhaps there could be a little sarcasm bar on the side to make it easier for me and others like me to understand?
(I'm only half joking with that one - such a thing would be really cool, I think...)
While we're about making suggestions, something I've just noticed while typing this that I think might be useful would be a couple of buttons to help with formatting the comments, sometimes my HTML escapes me, I always have to think to myself "what's the tag to make a hyperlink again?" or something similar. A button for making it a bit easier / quicker would be nice, not essential I guess, but nice.
I'll believe this when I see it. They also claimed to have made XP boot so much faster compared to 2000, and while the screen for typing your password showed up pretty quick, once you did often things took ages before you could actually do any work. Anyone else remember this? That was one of the primary reasons I switched to a Gentoo box with Fluxbox for my UI. Booted in (what was at the time) an amazingly short time, and I could sit down and work as soon as I saw the picture on the screen.
Maybe Microsoft won't have made the same mistake this time.
FWIW, I'm not a big fan of the interfaces either. The novel picture-password idea is quite a cool one, though, I like that.
Something that was missing from the explorer in Vista / 7 was a nice big "Delete" button... and I'm seeing one in the ribbon in the screenshots from TFA.
I approve.
For what it's worth, I like the ribbon, I generally hate using office software in general, so I didn't really learn the "old" one very well, and I'm finding that when I do need to do something it's generally quite easy to find, the tabs in the ribbon are quite logically labelled and the pictures are nice. Overall I'm fairly impressed.
I'd like to add my voice to this as well... Here in South Africa, unless you shell out quite a bit for an "uncapped" line, you're typically capped at between 3 and 10 GB in a month... quite ridiculous, isn't it?
Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that the purpose of btrfs is to implement many zfs features in Linux which couldn't be previously... Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's for licencing reasons that Linux distros don't ship with zfs?
Linux can actually read NTFS partitions, some don't come with support enabled by default though. Which distro have you got? IIRC, the package that you need is called NTFS-3g. I run Linux Mint, and it works out of the box, so I haven't needed to tinker with it for a while though.
So Linux guys, next time you think everyone should use Linux just think of some of the totally clueless Windows users you've had to deal with and then imagine having to dumb down Linux until they could use it. Scary damned thought ain't it?
Might I just point out that this isn't the case at all... Most of the "dumbing down" that you get in non-technical user oriented distros like Ubuntu is just a fancy cover for what's underneath, which is mostly Debian. Even if the user can screw up his own files, the underlying security of Linux is still there, and he won't be able to mess up the OS or the other users' things. I haven't read anywhere about this exploit gaining root access the way a typical autorun exploit on Windows would.
I used to run Slackware and Gentoo on my machines, because I loved doing things the esoteric way:-) but these days I'm running Mint on all my boxes, for reasons of time and so that my family can also use them, mostly. They work well. They're easy enough for my mother to use, and still have a shell available for me when I want to do something a bit more technical. There's no reason that Linux can't be accessible to users and offer the "Linux guys" all the geekiness that they want at the same time.
When I lived in the UK (I'm back in South Africa now) anyone could use a computer in a public library for free... You had to have a library card (also free to sign up for) and were only allowed an hour per day, but it suited me and it cost me nothing. I frankly don't see why this particular thing is necessary, and I agree with you, tax money could probably be better spent on something else. I reckon if someone doesn't have a computer in the UK these days it's more because they don't want one than because they can't afford one.
One thing you may not have noticed... GM isn't even NEARLY no. 1 when it comes to cars... that spot belongs either to Toyota or Volkswagen.
Nokia have got their top spot for a good reason, and they probably won't move for a while. The reason is that the whole world doesn't really want $500 shiny toys which make you a big target for thieves and a new one that's better is coming out in 6 months. Here in South Africa, for example, you can buy a Nokia 1200 for the equivalent of US$40. They consistently have good, affordable phones which last a long time. I've used Nokias my whole life, I've mostly gotten them after my parents have finished with them, my previous one (an N95) lasted 5 years before it became unuseable, and that was mostly due to it being in my pocket when I was out in the rain... it got soaked... But back to my point, America and Western Europe's obsession with powerful expensive smartphones isn't representative of the rest of the world's needs.
I'm on a prepaid plan, texts cost me 50c (which is around 7 USc, not sure about Kiwi money), I don't know of any plans which give you many / unlimited texts, but then I haven't really looked. It's expensive, the costs mount up if you need to send a lot, which fortunately I don't really do, most of my communication is via the internet. Still, as was pointed out elsewhere, the fact that the carriers can charge anything for a text which essentially costs them nothing is quite ridiculous.
I haven't any experience with AT&T, so I wouldn't be able to say, suffice it to say that I've had some gripes with the local service providers though. I've used both major ones, there are a couple of smaller ones as well that I've been too lazy to try out.
This is how shit is MEANT to work, its Twenty Eleven forgodsake!
FWIW, here in South Africa we've got a similar situation, you can use any phone on any network, just swap out the SIM card. Receiving calls and texts also costs nothing. MAKING calls and SENDING texts on the other hand... is quite expensive. That's another issue though.
That particular decision is STILL a problem here in South Africa to this day. As an example: I'm paying 600 ZAR per month at the moment for internet, (the equivalent of 90 US$) it's supposed to be 1Mbps, but usually during the day it's the equivalent speed of a 384k line, and to top it all off, I have an 8GB cap, that's all the traffic I'm allowed in the month, if I exceed it I get cut off and I have to pay more. With a family of 6, that 8GB sometimes goes fairly quickly...
BTW, the local parastatal telecom unit is called "Telkom". There have in recent years come along some competitors, but at present they're even worse.
I agree with you there. Another point to consider though, is "piracy" really doing anything to the economy?
This sort of thing has been going on for many years and yet music still sells. Think Taylor Swift's new album, Michael Jackson's new album, and a few more have sold record amounts...
The other thing is, the culprits of REALLY ruining America's economy (i.e. the recent Credit Crunch saga) have nothing to do with "piracy" AFAIK, and then there's the government's enormous spending of what it doesn't have. Those are more likely candidates to my mind for the title of Thing That's Ruining The Economy.
Do you mean on the carrier side or on the consumer side?
From TFA:
Wireless carriers are under tremendous pressure to upgrade their networks to
handle the traffic generated by a new generation of smartphone applications
and the increasing consumer consumption of multimedia files downloaded or
streamed to a growing multitude of devices.
So... I'm guessing for the consumer it will only be a matter of when you buy your next smartphone from AT&T it will have the ability built into it to use these spectrums, along with whatever services AT&T decide to offer here. Maybe it will just use it to separate smartphone internet traffic from the other stuff?
Although, with a $650 price tag, I wouldn't be replacing my phone "every year or two", either:)
True. I'm used to much cheaper phones though, as I said elsewhere, my phone at the moment is about $120 worth, so I won't mind replacing it sooner than you will your $650 one. I hardly use a phone except for phoning, the one fancy feature that I do have is GPS for in case I get lost, so I don't really see myself spending lots and lots of money on a device that I hardly use, although I need to have it. Hence, replacing it more frequently isn't such a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Australia would be welcome to do something like this... I'm a South African EE student at the moment, I'm working towards an SKA related project, and whether or not South Africa is chosen ultimately, we have our own radio telescope plans, so this would be useful anyway.
The SKA is about international collaboration, AFAIK. It's good for countries to share inventions.
There were some jokes about 1.21 jiggawats though. Give them some credit.
Ah, but the question is, can it get to 88mph?? 125 is irrelevant IMO.
Not necessarily... I look up random diseases all the time, not because I have them but I'm curious. I understand the point that you're trying to illustrate though.
AFAIK, however, that sort of information wouldn't be available to e.g. health insurance companies, because all that companies like Google and Amazon sell is targeted advertising. Wouldn't put it past Facebook to sell the data out though. I stand under correction, though. Anyone have better insight than me?
Just what I was thinking... It's not as though this hasn't been done before, though, isn't this the exact sort of approach that RIM introduced with their first BlackBerries?
The other issue that I have is, ok, so Amazon is collecting data on you, so who really cares? It's not as though someone is sitting there reading it, all it's used for is so that scripts can target adverts at you. Big whooping deal. I don't see how this is a threat to my privacy or anything. If anything, I prefer having better adverts targeted at me, so that I don't get bothered by ones I'm not even remotely interested in.
I wonder about that. I'm busy working on a facial recognition project at the moment, I'm using OpenCV, and I'm doing exactly that, using ratios between facial features. My algorithm is very very simple, but the research I've done suggests that there are much more complex algorithms available. Also, with my hobbyist grade software, changes in lighting and facial position greatly affect the outcomes of the scan. So I still have my doubts as to the absolute usefulness of the system.
Not that I suspect it won't work at all! I was recently amazed by how well Picasa scanned through all my photos and grouped the same faces together, sure it made some mistakes but broadly it was correct. I think the biggest change however was my brother cutting his hair between successive photos, no-one grew a beard or had a nose broken or lost a significant amount of weight or aged significantly in any of the photos. So I think that if one wanted to disguise one's self from the system, one could, quite easily.
Just my 2c.
You say that in jest, but one wonders how much this facial recognition stuff will be affected by if I for example grow a beard, or shave my beard, or break my nose. Does anyone have any insight into this one?
I think the mental disorder you're looking for is called dissociative identity disorder. Not schizophrenia. There's a slight difference...
Or was the point to try and be funny? I'm never quite sure with Slashdot comments. Perhaps there could be a little sarcasm bar on the side to make it easier for me and others like me to understand?
(I'm only half joking with that one - such a thing would be really cool, I think...)
While we're about making suggestions, something I've just noticed while typing this that I think might be useful would be a couple of buttons to help with formatting the comments, sometimes my HTML escapes me, I always have to think to myself "what's the tag to make a hyperlink again?" or something similar. A button for making it a bit easier / quicker would be nice, not essential I guess, but nice.
I'll believe this when I see it. They also claimed to have made XP boot so much faster compared to 2000, and while the screen for typing your password showed up pretty quick, once you did often things took ages before you could actually do any work. Anyone else remember this? That was one of the primary reasons I switched to a Gentoo box with Fluxbox for my UI. Booted in (what was at the time) an amazingly short time, and I could sit down and work as soon as I saw the picture on the screen.
Maybe Microsoft won't have made the same mistake this time.
FWIW, I'm not a big fan of the interfaces either. The novel picture-password idea is quite a cool one, though, I like that.
Something that was missing from the explorer in Vista / 7 was a nice big "Delete" button... and I'm seeing one in the ribbon in the screenshots from TFA.
I approve.
For what it's worth, I like the ribbon, I generally hate using office software in general, so I didn't really learn the "old" one very well, and I'm finding that when I do need to do something it's generally quite easy to find, the tabs in the ribbon are quite logically labelled and the pictures are nice. Overall I'm fairly impressed.
I'd like to add my voice to this as well... Here in South Africa, unless you shell out quite a bit for an "uncapped" line, you're typically capped at between 3 and 10 GB in a month... quite ridiculous, isn't it?
Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that the purpose of btrfs is to implement many zfs features in Linux which couldn't be previously... Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's for licencing reasons that Linux distros don't ship with zfs?
Um... No, it's not a read-only solution. I've got full read/write on my NTFS. No horses or their respective shit within sight.
here is even a link to get you started. I wish you all the best.
Linux can actually read NTFS partitions, some don't come with support enabled by default though. Which distro have you got? IIRC, the package that you need is called NTFS-3g. I run Linux Mint, and it works out of the box, so I haven't needed to tinker with it for a while though.
So Linux guys, next time you think everyone should use Linux just think of some of the totally clueless Windows users you've had to deal with and then imagine having to dumb down Linux until they could use it. Scary damned thought ain't it?
Might I just point out that this isn't the case at all... Most of the "dumbing down" that you get in non-technical user oriented distros like Ubuntu is just a fancy cover for what's underneath, which is mostly Debian. Even if the user can screw up his own files, the underlying security of Linux is still there, and he won't be able to mess up the OS or the other users' things. I haven't read anywhere about this exploit gaining root access the way a typical autorun exploit on Windows would.
I used to run Slackware and Gentoo on my machines, because I loved doing things the esoteric way :-) but these days I'm running Mint on all my boxes, for reasons of time and so that my family can also use them, mostly. They work well. They're easy enough for my mother to use, and still have a shell available for me when I want to do something a bit more technical. There's no reason that Linux can't be accessible to users and offer the "Linux guys" all the geekiness that they want at the same time.
When I lived in the UK (I'm back in South Africa now) anyone could use a computer in a public library for free... You had to have a library card (also free to sign up for) and were only allowed an hour per day, but it suited me and it cost me nothing. I frankly don't see why this particular thing is necessary, and I agree with you, tax money could probably be better spent on something else. I reckon if someone doesn't have a computer in the UK these days it's more because they don't want one than because they can't afford one.
I must admit, when I saw previews of the new N8 I was pretty much drooling... It has much more appeal to me than any Android or iOS device.
That's just my personal preference though.
One thing you may not have noticed... GM isn't even NEARLY no. 1 when it comes to cars... that spot belongs either to Toyota or Volkswagen.
Nokia have got their top spot for a good reason, and they probably won't move for a while. The reason is that the whole world doesn't really want $500 shiny toys which make you a big target for thieves and a new one that's better is coming out in 6 months. Here in South Africa, for example, you can buy a Nokia 1200 for the equivalent of US$40. They consistently have good, affordable phones which last a long time. I've used Nokias my whole life, I've mostly gotten them after my parents have finished with them, my previous one (an N95) lasted 5 years before it became unuseable, and that was mostly due to it being in my pocket when I was out in the rain... it got soaked... But back to my point, America and Western Europe's obsession with powerful expensive smartphones isn't representative of the rest of the world's needs.
Ja, similar sort of thing here.
I'm on a prepaid plan, texts cost me 50c (which is around 7 USc, not sure about Kiwi money), I don't know of any plans which give you many / unlimited texts, but then I haven't really looked. It's expensive, the costs mount up if you need to send a lot, which fortunately I don't really do, most of my communication is via the internet. Still, as was pointed out elsewhere, the fact that the carriers can charge anything for a text which essentially costs them nothing is quite ridiculous.
I haven't any experience with AT&T, so I wouldn't be able to say, suffice it to say that I've had some gripes with the local service providers though. I've used both major ones, there are a couple of smaller ones as well that I've been too lazy to try out.
This is how shit is MEANT to work, its Twenty Eleven forgodsake!
FWIW, here in South Africa we've got a similar situation, you can use any phone on any network, just swap out the SIM card. Receiving calls and texts also costs nothing. MAKING calls and SENDING texts on the other hand... is quite expensive. That's another issue though.
That particular decision is STILL a problem here in South Africa to this day. As an example: I'm paying 600 ZAR per month at the moment for internet, (the equivalent of 90 US$) it's supposed to be 1Mbps, but usually during the day it's the equivalent speed of a 384k line, and to top it all off, I have an 8GB cap, that's all the traffic I'm allowed in the month, if I exceed it I get cut off and I have to pay more. With a family of 6, that 8GB sometimes goes fairly quickly...
BTW, the local parastatal telecom unit is called "Telkom". There have in recent years come along some competitors, but at present they're even worse.
I agree with you there. Another point to consider though, is "piracy" really doing anything to the economy?
This sort of thing has been going on for many years and yet music still sells. Think Taylor Swift's new album, Michael Jackson's new album, and a few more have sold record amounts...
The other thing is, the culprits of REALLY ruining America's economy (i.e. the recent Credit Crunch saga) have nothing to do with "piracy" AFAIK, and then there's the government's enormous spending of what it doesn't have. Those are more likely candidates to my mind for the title of Thing That's Ruining The Economy.
Do you mean on the carrier side or on the consumer side?
From TFA:
Wireless carriers are under tremendous pressure to upgrade their networks to handle the traffic generated by a new generation of smartphone applications and the increasing consumer consumption of multimedia files downloaded or streamed to a growing multitude of devices.
So... I'm guessing for the consumer it will only be a matter of when you buy your next smartphone from AT&T it will have the ability built into it to use these spectrums, along with whatever services AT&T decide to offer here. Maybe it will just use it to separate smartphone internet traffic from the other stuff?
Although, with a $650 price tag, I wouldn't be replacing my phone "every year or two", either :)
True. I'm used to much cheaper phones though, as I said elsewhere, my phone at the moment is about $120 worth, so I won't mind replacing it sooner than you will your $650 one. I hardly use a phone except for phoning, the one fancy feature that I do have is GPS for in case I get lost, so I don't really see myself spending lots and lots of money on a device that I hardly use, although I need to have it. Hence, replacing it more frequently isn't such a problem.
Ok, I'll concede that point, as I've done already when someone made a similar statement.
Think about how quickly you'd replace each of those things though. A PC will typically be in use much longer than any phone.