I don't think the average user knows how much, but I also think the average user doesn't care enough to go find out. However, I don't believe that is any fault on Google's part. Without getting into whether Google should collect as much as it does, what it collects and where to find it is available as long as the user actually pays attention and/or cares to find it. They're not hiding it.
Sure there's lots of controls... but probably not a very convenient global "off" switch nor any way to set the default for new options. At least that's been my impression with other data mining products and services, not giving you the choice at all would be bad PR but it's a game of attrition and you're often asked for broad or permanent permissions when you'd really like to make a narrow exception. Google doesn't really want to make opt-out easy and effective, but as the CEO you can't say that out loud. You have to pretend that they are in control and use their lack of altering the defaults as permission, it probably works in the legal sense because it was buried down in an EULA but if you actually started reading the logs back at them I think a lot more people would be concerned.
2020 is for consumer UHDTV, is what UHD content will be mastered for, and so is most applicable to this discussion.
Standard-wise that's true, but it requires them to do a separate color grade for UHD compared to the cinema release. I was under the impression that many would reuse that, it'd be in a Rec. 2020 format but the actual color would be within DCI P3 as that's a strict subset and pretty wide already. Though my info on that may be outdated, I've not done any actual tests.
While its valid to ask why these aren't promoted in TV specs, "dynamic range" is a completely different spec item.
That's not really true, when you combine color space and brightness you get color volume because most TVs can display fewer colors when it's really bright. Like it can show extremely bright white sunlight but vibrant reds and greens and blues were much harder. It's one of the things they've made good progress on in recent years, they've now "filled out" the box bounded by the gamut and dynamic range.
Because video is ultimately encoded as YCrCb, wide gamut is compared against Rec. 2020, and you're not looking at the right review sites
Or against DCI P3, which is very similar to AdobeRGB and much more relevant for video since it's in the digital cinema standard. Full coverage of rec. 2020 is pretty much mission impossible so the important part is what bits do you miss. Hopefully not much within DCI P3 or Pointer's gamut (which is approximately all the colors natural objects give off, like not neon signs etc.) while the photo standards aren't very important unless you use the TV as a monitor.
If you can't see the bits you just can't trust it.
My dad used to feel the same way about vacuum tubes and magnetic core memory. As long as you could use a scope and inspect the single bits you could always get to the bottom of it. Yes, it was a looong time ago.
Even computer geeks don't have an unlimited appetite for customization, or not all of them, at least. But we tend to act as if other people do.
I think it's more like "don't fuck with our workflows and muscle memory just because you've decided DVORAK is the future". I still prefer a desktop which is fairly reminiscent of Windows 95, menu bar w/classic start menu at bottom, system tray in bottom right, mix/max/quit buttons in upper right, alt-tab to switch applications, single-click to select/focus, double-click to launch. You want tiles? Cool. Ribbons? Cool. Spinning cubes? Cool. Follow focus? Cool. Mouse gestures? Cool. I don't want to be the grumpy old fart that decided it's good enough for me, so it's good enough for everybody and touchscreens and virtual desktops are an abomination. I understand that you might even have UX studies that support that if an average person was starting from scratch this would be easier and better.
I'm just asking people to accept that if you already know how to do it then in most cases it's very little effort to keep doing it. For example I drive a manual transmission car, if you write it out like a process it seems like I'm doing a lot of work to gauge the RPM, push the clutch, shift gears up/down and release the clutch. I seem to remember it was a little tricky in the beginning. But after 20+ years of driving that way I'm not consciously thinking about it at all. An automatic wouldn't make my driving experience any measurably better. I understand that in the real world you have production volumes and all that but with software a "classic" menu system is just a bit of old, proven and nearly feature complete code but you're throwing it out simply because it's not fashionable anymore. And you're doing it because you need to take away the choice to force your vision on everybody else. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
The suggestions are prompted by Firefox itself. Mozilla doesn't know what you're up to.
It will have a pre-existing list of recommendations, it won't query Mozilla "what recommendation(s) do you have for facebook.com" when/if you go there. They'll probably know if you install the extension, but not whether it's because you didn't want it or you don't use Facebook.
People love to blame companies or executives for things like this, when it's their own damn fault. Top-level executives may make the decision to try out ideas like this, but whether the idea succeeds ultimately depends on what the customers do. (...) If you think Americans are buying Chinese-made goods because Walmart opted to carry them instead of American-made goods, you have cause and effect reversed.
While I in principle agree with you, it's a bit much to pretend companies are innocent bystanders who do nothing but follow the changing tides of customer wants and needs. Companies do their best to bury negative aspects of their products, you can see this with sticker price manipulation where they've slashed the quantity, hidden costs in fees, accessories, consumables and so on. They'll constantly try to cut corners using cheaper components, not doing things properly and skimping on QA. And that's just the things you could potentially discover researching the actual product.
The pedigree of a product or service is complex and not something they talk about unless it's a selling point like "this product is not animal tested", "no child labor" or "not from the rain forest". Even if you get a "made in [country]" sticker you can manipulate where the final assembly is, the corporate structure and ownership is fluid so you can always cut off a problematic supplier and replace it with a new entity under new management that's really the same money with the same workers. And nobody wants to tell you where they make their money or how much so it's near impossible to get the full picture.
I go to a grocery store, I see a steak on sale. Do I know where it came from? What the store workers are paid? What the guy who delivered it to the store was paid? What the butcher was paid? What the guy who delivered it to the butcher was paid? What the farmer was paid? What the farmer's farmhands were paid? Their working hours and working conditions? That it was done according to environment, health and safety regulations? I'll honestly say that I don't and it's only a general belief that the market is fairly well regulated.
Imagine this from an IT perspective, okay so we've heard a lot of horror stories about outsourcing to the lowest bidder in India. Let's say I want to make a stand on that, what do I ask? If I ask if you have any code from India, chances are pretty high I couldn't use Linux. If I want to know where all the code came from and all the libraries came from down to the guy who wrote it... does that seem feasible to you? Am I actually making a difference or am I just randomly picking the one company that made the news?
I don't mean to say consumer boycotts are completely useless, sometimes we are able to draw a line in the sand and enact change. But if factory workers are not happy with the wages at the factory they should go on strike, thinking that we should buy other products until they get a living wage is an extremely optimistic view of what the consumer market can and will do. Don't forget that part of capitalism is progress through competition, we don't know if low prices mean exploitation or efficiency. Though I will admit we have a self-interest in turning a blind eye to the former...
I like a power user's tool with half a dozen different menus and toolbars and windows floating or docked all over the place and so do 99% of all the people here I would assume. Certainly nobody is intimidated by Visual Studio or Photoshop or anything else that throw a ton of controls at you. I see my old man is struggling even on fairly simple web sites though because there's too many menus and sidebars and dynamically expanding and contracting sections and whatnot. Modal dialogs make for a very simple interaction model, either you open a file or you cancel. You save a file or you cancel. You print something or you cancel. Heck with smartphones pretty much everything is a "modal" dialog because there's not much space for else on a 5" screen operated by sausage fingers. Yes, they're overused because they make the programmer's life simple. But a lot of times making it non-modal wouldn't really add any value either, least that's my opinion.
Every generation likes to talk about how lazy the next one is. It's a narrative pushed by our ruling class to keep us at each other's throats while they rob us blind. (...) I really wish that here, now, in 2018 with the power of the internet, we could get a majority of people to spot this pattern and start pushing back against it.
The current generation got bigger problems - no, really - and it's social media. The constant flow of perfect Instagram pictures is making everyone feel inadequate and lead to depression and burn-outs even though they drink less, smoke less, work harder, take better care of their health and is in many ways much less rebellious than in the past. Because that shit goes on social media too and there's never a cell phone camera far away. There's a huge uptick in anxiety issues that they're not good enough or cool enough, driven by a lot of superficial relationships aka Facebook "friends" and Tinder "dates". It's gotten to the point that many teens need a mental coach to unwind and allow for experimentation and failure than a chaperone and to just be themselves instead of competing in a popularity contest. Of course we had bits and pieces of that but social media has dialed it up to 11.
Though a screamer at 36K mph, a fraction of a snail's pace in terms getting to another star.
Yeah. The moon was hard. Mars is hard. But going interstellar... even if SpaceX built the BFR, boosted it to the max in a high elliptic orbit, put another stage on top instead of the BFS and sent it on the Grand Tour of gravity slingshots (which won't happen again until 2150, but that's still a small problem) it'll go from 40000 years like Voyager to what, like 10000 years? Chemical rockets are almost like breeding horses to reach the moon. But I do hope they'll limp humans to Mars in my lifetime...
Learning "to code" as in C# or Java syntax is just a skill. Breaking down a problem to a set of precise instructions to complete a task is fantastic general tool. For example if you ask someone to find the sum of all numbers from 1 to 100, being able to create pseudo-code like:
sum = 0; for i in sequence(1,100)
sum + i; return sum;
and realizing this is the same as 1+2+3+4+5+....+100 is the key to saving tons of tedious work. It may seem trivial to us, but you have to more or less run the loop in your head to see what's happening. That said it's rather dull for a kid, I'd rather go with Rube Goldberg contraptions, Lemmings-style games and 4X games for learning to plan chains of events to execute. And probably some action-based puzzle game like Portal 2 to learn about state. If they show a good aptitude for that, then I'd probably move on to spreadsheets as a way to introduce math, formulas and chaining calculations. It's only after that I'd start on actual programming...
You going to pay for it? Or do you expect to be provided with a service at absolutely no cost to you? If ads don't pay for it, something has to.
I don't recall ever paying for access to an IRC server nor did they have any ads, not even back in the 90s. The problem is not so much operating the service, it's the evolution of the service. Why did everybody leave for ICQ? Why did skyping become a thing? Why did people leave Skype for Facebook Messenger? Why did we start using Discord for game chats instead? Telegram? Whatsapp? Signal? Because we constantly want new features and server-side support.
If people at your company think that phrasing things differently is what will help them improve, then you're in a corporate cargo cult.
I see it mostly as the culmination of a linguistic arms race. The thing is, we as developers tend to look at first-order solutions to problems, if there's a bug the code needs fixing. If there's technical debt the code needs refactoring. If there's outdated code it needs upgrading. If we're very blunt about the negatives we can make any solution look bad, even when it's a solid workhorse that has served and continues to serve most the users well and has adapted to different business requirements and delivered to tight deadlines.
From a manager's perspective though there's a constant conflict about the way forward, are we really solving it the right way with the right technology and who'll get the budget and resources to do new tasks. Basically, should we take the old horse out back and shoot it and replace it with a new one? Should we leave existing solutions be and design new ones around cars? Should we actively phase out the horse in favor of cars? And are we actually designing a process around flying cars, on the assumption it's the future? And hey should we even do it ourselves or outsource to the cloud and India.
Somebody started this by intentionally overselling/underselling to get the decision they want. And then those who lost got pissed because one solution was described as the glass half full, the other as the glass half empty. So the decree came down to stop trash talking ourselves, if they want to sugar coat the issue we'll sugar coat the issue. To an outsider it of course looks like insanity and maybe once in a while you'll see a counter-movement to stop putting lipstick on all the pigs and call a spade a spade. But you know it'll just reset the game and the same will happen all over again.
Every once is a while, someone who appears to be perfectly healthy just suddenly dies. Film at 11. Is there some reason we would should be surprised that Google employees are not exempt from this possibility?
Well it's not really once in a while anymore, it's rare. From the mortality tables here in Norway the average 22 year old has a 0.0473% chance of dying that year. And of those it's about 1/3rd accidents/violence, 1/3rd suicide and 1/3rd medical conditions. From there I'd have to speculate based on diagnosis how many of those conditions were previously completely unknown, but it's definitively a minority so the risk of unexpectedly dropping dead is <0.01% and quite possibly much lower than that too.
If you've ever tried fasting, that all seems kind of ridiculous. You don't need food every couple of hours, you can go days without food with no harmful effects at all. Learning to treat hunger as a normal, non-urgent situation is a big part in learning not to overeat in a food-saturated world. Once you've done it a few times, you realize a hunger pang isn't an emergency alarm. It's a routine reminder to think about getting some food, one that turns off in a few minutes and can be safely ignored for a few hours or even days in a world where food is nearly always at arms reach.
Actually it's far more than that, us humans may not go into hibernation like bears but we are genetically programmed to deal with huge seasonal swings. Even though we've resorted to many different preservation techniques the primary method has been storing it as body fat, because food that's been in storage for months is very easily tainted. In humanity's history far more people have died from starvation than obesity. So there's an urge in all of us to fatten up to prepare, even though we don't need it right now. Of course today there's food at the store all winter long, so there's no need but the body doesn't know that. The hunger that you get from needing energy right here and now is something else entirely.
Trying to get the body to burn more calories is the wrong way to solve the obesity problem. People need to figure out ways to ingest less calories, not burn more.
It's certainly one solution, but it's a bit like saying the only right way to avoid STDs and unwanted pregnancies is abstinence. I love eating food, like sex I know it's just evolution hard-wiring survival and reproduction into my pleasure centers but nothing is going to stop me wanting to dig into a juicy steak. It's the flavors, texture and smell that makes me want it, the calorie intake is just one tiny bit though I suppose you couldn't get the sugar rush without actually consuming the sugar but I wouldn't mind something like a "condom" for my stomach that sent the calories straight through. Or sent my metabolism into hyperactive like I was running for miles to work it off, burning it away.
Eating less saves money and time you would otherwise need for food and eating. Also, increasing metabolism most likely has bad side effects on longer term, such as higher rates of cancer due to increased oxidative stress.
I doubt that, athletes that during their career have eaten and spent way more calories than average don't seem to suffer any ill effects. Sure, it would probably be a really bad idea to change it permanently if you ever got lost and had to live off very few calories in an emergency. And it certainly could be hard to get off the mental addiction that you can just gorge on anything without getting fat if you lost access to the calorie blockers. From an environmental perspective it's a waste. But from a personal perspective I'd like to eat my cake and have my waistline too. There's no doubt that I'm overweight and my health would be substantially improved if I was thinner, but dieting sucks. It certainly works, but it's always going to suck.
Oh sure. There's a special kind of maths that only allows law enforcement people to de-anonymize encrypted data. That kind of maths is not accessible by the general public nor the bad guys. Idiots.
Actually... we do have encryption algorithms that seem solid but are vulnerable only if you know secret properties which is not feasible for anyone else to find. The problem is that there's more than one jurisdiction and not everybody is happy with the NSA reading everything, nor the potential that someone else steals their key. But if you're China it's not that hard to impose an algorithm only the government can read.
In a previous incarnation the company I worked for used Lotus Notes. What an absolute disaster. I think IBM is very lucky to palm this off to get $1.8 billion for it after paying $3.5 billion those many years ago. Good work, IBM. I wonder how much they lost over the years trying to maintain it.
Lotus Notes is sorta a cross-breed between Excel macros and MS Access. You're going to hate it for all the reasons IT people hate the latter too, but for the time I actually saw some kinda impressive business applications which somehow worked and delivered value. Our perception is usually skewed by the fact that we're only called in when it's become a Frankenstein's monster nobody really can understand or maintain or doesn't work right. I can already see the pattern, we've worked on a very ad hoc basis even in production. Now we're trying to introduce process and rigidity into the system, the end result is they go around us instead of through us. Yes, we have more staging and QA and whatnot... which doesn't matter because they read the underlying data and create their own DIY solution instead of ours totally outside the system. It's called progress.
Same way that my council collects my rubbish "for free" because if you charged me specifically to take my rubbish away, all those people who can't afford things will sacrifice rubbish collection and turn all the poor areas of the city into unofficial municipal rubbish tips in seconds.
I don't know about you but I get an itemized bill of all county services, including hot and cold water, sewage, garbage collection etc. but I don't know if it's actually optional. I assume that if you did try they'd require documentation that you actually have an alternate waste disposal system in compliance with everything. The rest is quite obvious, if you have well water you don't pay for water and if you have a septic tank you don't pay for public sewage. You usually pay more to maintain your own system though.
So will people endure some of that with Windows and ARM PC's in order to get benefits like battery life, always connected, and possibly better security.
Hasn't the market answered this already with Win RT? If you want a PC to run Windows software you don't get the ARM version and if you would be happy with the ARM version there's better alternatives in Mac / Linux / Chromebooks / tablets. I think the only one who could pull it off is Apple. Not because of the x86 Macs, but because they have the iPhone/iPad base of ARM software. Like for example Adobe is now porting Photoshop to the iPad. If they've made it for the iPad (ARM based) but have the Mac GUI (x86 based) it should be really easy to give you an ARM version with a desktop GUI, it's just taking two halves you already got and splicing them together.
Given that the diameter of a silicon atom is around 0.2nm, that means they are now building transistors out of something like 30-35 atoms across. How far down can this go before it all disappears in some kind of quantum uncertainty blob?
Functionally, if you're looking just to produce one transistor and not billions of them then around 3 nm:
In 2006, a team of Korean researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the National Nano Fab Center co-developed a 3 nm transistor, the world's smallest nanoelectronic device based on conventional finFET technology.
Of course if you choose exotic designs even a single atom can function as a transistor or possibly even electrons and whatnot. But compared to the current gen 7nm chips that TSMC got in the iPhone etc. there's two more generations, 5nm and 3nm then anything resembling current chips is done. If they can even make that work in volume, though they've managed to continuously pull new rabbits out of the hat. But sometimes in the early 2020s Moore's law will be completely dead.
I need more cores, but I am not throwing this motherboard, chip, and memory out, any time soon.
Of course having a bunch of old hardware that you don't really need lying around is so useful... if you're just looking at the environmental angle and not the economic one just sell it and buy what you actually need as somebody else will be actually using it. Personally I notice I'm a bit too optimistic and lazy and indifferent, I buy something and then realize it's not really as useful as I thought or I never get around to using it or I used it before but don't really need it much anymore but the second hand value is almost nothing and I'm too lazy to deal with the hassle. So a lot of it sits around collecting dust and will eventually end up in a landfill. It's kinda strange because I'm paying attention to sales and such to save money on new things, but not nearly as efficient when it comes to selling off the old ones.
By no stretch of the imagination is an airplane with a burning engine "working as designed". The safety systems may work as designed to put out the fire, and the redundant systems may be working as designed to prevent catastrophic failure, but the plane as a whole is certainly not working as designed.
We're really getting down to semantics here because the system as in "the set of all contingencies and modes of operation" can be working as designed because the failure modes are part of that plan. Somebody obviously considered "what if an engine catches fire" and made that part of the design and if you have an actual fire it either works according to that plan or it doesn't.
The grid fin failed so that's obviously not "working as designed", duh. But there was a design for what should happen in the event of loss of control and it worked as intended. There's really no ambiguity here unless you look for absurd possibilities like that somebody intended for the grid fin to get stuck or that nobody designed for this contingency and the way it played out was just pure luck.
I would ask the people of Slashdot to face something else; the truth that most people do not care about privacy. At all.
The main problem I think is the discrepancy between what harm you could do and what harm is actually done. I've walked around with a radio buoy aka cell phone most of my adult life. I'm sure there's lots of potentially bad things you could do with that data, but have I actually seen the cell phone operator or the government abuse it? Not that I'm aware of. I've been paying for more and more things electronically with e-tail and just in general. I'm sure there's lots of potentially bad things you could do with that data, but have I actually seen the bank or the government abuse it? Not that I'm aware of. Maybe I'm just ignorant or they're so subtle nobody notices, but I got very little I can point to say and say this bad thing happened to me because they were spying on me.
Sure I could point to China or Gestapo or McCarthyism and say that bad things has happened to other people in other countries in other times and it would be terrible if anything like that happened to me, but to the vast majority of people the threat will seem very remote. So with a lot of very high probability, very low impact risk like Facebook will show me personally targeted ads and very low probability, very high impact risk like the next Hitler will round up the dissidents and send me to the death camps the aggregate risk is still very low. At least compared to all the "mundane" risks we live with every day, like if I get mugged on the street I hope they do track down the mugger even though that video surveillance can probably be used for lots of bad things too.
That would all be nice and well if this was totally fungible, give up your privacy when it's not being abused and take it back when it's getting abused. Except that's not how it works, the privacy that's eroded is not easily clawed back as the anonymous options disappear, the social norms change and your history rarely goes away. And we keep deluding ourselves to think it won't happen here, okay Snowden showed what the NSA is doing but they're not the Gestapo. Trump is no Putin, much less a Hitler. It's something people actually believe and it's something people want to believe and maybe even need to believe. Because if a really bad guy got access to all our electronic tracks we're utterly and totally fucked. Where the DDR had a file on everyone, China has an encyclopedia. The part they hook into your social credit score is just the tip of the iceberg.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the average user knows how much, but I also think the average user doesn't care enough to go find out. However, I don't believe that is any fault on Google's part. Without getting into whether Google should collect as much as it does, what it collects and where to find it is available as long as the user actually pays attention and/or cares to find it. They're not hiding it.
Sure there's lots of controls... but probably not a very convenient global "off" switch nor any way to set the default for new options. At least that's been my impression with other data mining products and services, not giving you the choice at all would be bad PR but it's a game of attrition and you're often asked for broad or permanent permissions when you'd really like to make a narrow exception. Google doesn't really want to make opt-out easy and effective, but as the CEO you can't say that out loud. You have to pretend that they are in control and use their lack of altering the defaults as permission, it probably works in the legal sense because it was buried down in an EULA but if you actually started reading the logs back at them I think a lot more people would be concerned.
2020 is for consumer UHDTV, is what UHD content will be mastered for, and so is most applicable to this discussion.
Standard-wise that's true, but it requires them to do a separate color grade for UHD compared to the cinema release. I was under the impression that many would reuse that, it'd be in a Rec. 2020 format but the actual color would be within DCI P3 as that's a strict subset and pretty wide already. Though my info on that may be outdated, I've not done any actual tests.
While its valid to ask why these aren't promoted in TV specs, "dynamic range" is a completely different spec item.
That's not really true, when you combine color space and brightness you get color volume because most TVs can display fewer colors when it's really bright. Like it can show extremely bright white sunlight but vibrant reds and greens and blues were much harder. It's one of the things they've made good progress on in recent years, they've now "filled out" the box bounded by the gamut and dynamic range.
Because video is ultimately encoded as YCrCb, wide gamut is compared against Rec. 2020, and you're not looking at the right review sites
Or against DCI P3, which is very similar to AdobeRGB and much more relevant for video since it's in the digital cinema standard. Full coverage of rec. 2020 is pretty much mission impossible so the important part is what bits do you miss. Hopefully not much within DCI P3 or Pointer's gamut (which is approximately all the colors natural objects give off, like not neon signs etc.) while the photo standards aren't very important unless you use the TV as a monitor.
If you can't see the bits you just can't trust it.
My dad used to feel the same way about vacuum tubes and magnetic core memory. As long as you could use a scope and inspect the single bits you could always get to the bottom of it. Yes, it was a looong time ago.
Even computer geeks don't have an unlimited appetite for customization, or not all of them, at least. But we tend to act as if other people do.
I think it's more like "don't fuck with our workflows and muscle memory just because you've decided DVORAK is the future". I still prefer a desktop which is fairly reminiscent of Windows 95, menu bar w/classic start menu at bottom, system tray in bottom right, mix/max/quit buttons in upper right, alt-tab to switch applications, single-click to select/focus, double-click to launch. You want tiles? Cool. Ribbons? Cool. Spinning cubes? Cool. Follow focus? Cool. Mouse gestures? Cool. I don't want to be the grumpy old fart that decided it's good enough for me, so it's good enough for everybody and touchscreens and virtual desktops are an abomination. I understand that you might even have UX studies that support that if an average person was starting from scratch this would be easier and better.
I'm just asking people to accept that if you already know how to do it then in most cases it's very little effort to keep doing it. For example I drive a manual transmission car, if you write it out like a process it seems like I'm doing a lot of work to gauge the RPM, push the clutch, shift gears up/down and release the clutch. I seem to remember it was a little tricky in the beginning. But after 20+ years of driving that way I'm not consciously thinking about it at all. An automatic wouldn't make my driving experience any measurably better. I understand that in the real world you have production volumes and all that but with software a "classic" menu system is just a bit of old, proven and nearly feature complete code but you're throwing it out simply because it's not fashionable anymore. And you're doing it because you need to take away the choice to force your vision on everybody else. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
[citation needed]
It's right there in the TFA:
The suggestions are prompted by Firefox itself. Mozilla doesn't know what you're up to.
It will have a pre-existing list of recommendations, it won't query Mozilla "what recommendation(s) do you have for facebook.com" when/if you go there. They'll probably know if you install the extension, but not whether it's because you didn't want it or you don't use Facebook.
People love to blame companies or executives for things like this, when it's their own damn fault. Top-level executives may make the decision to try out ideas like this, but whether the idea succeeds ultimately depends on what the customers do. (...) If you think Americans are buying Chinese-made goods because Walmart opted to carry them instead of American-made goods, you have cause and effect reversed.
While I in principle agree with you, it's a bit much to pretend companies are innocent bystanders who do nothing but follow the changing tides of customer wants and needs. Companies do their best to bury negative aspects of their products, you can see this with sticker price manipulation where they've slashed the quantity, hidden costs in fees, accessories, consumables and so on. They'll constantly try to cut corners using cheaper components, not doing things properly and skimping on QA. And that's just the things you could potentially discover researching the actual product.
The pedigree of a product or service is complex and not something they talk about unless it's a selling point like "this product is not animal tested", "no child labor" or "not from the rain forest". Even if you get a "made in [country]" sticker you can manipulate where the final assembly is, the corporate structure and ownership is fluid so you can always cut off a problematic supplier and replace it with a new entity under new management that's really the same money with the same workers. And nobody wants to tell you where they make their money or how much so it's near impossible to get the full picture.
I go to a grocery store, I see a steak on sale. Do I know where it came from? What the store workers are paid? What the guy who delivered it to the store was paid? What the butcher was paid? What the guy who delivered it to the butcher was paid? What the farmer was paid? What the farmer's farmhands were paid? Their working hours and working conditions? That it was done according to environment, health and safety regulations? I'll honestly say that I don't and it's only a general belief that the market is fairly well regulated.
Imagine this from an IT perspective, okay so we've heard a lot of horror stories about outsourcing to the lowest bidder in India. Let's say I want to make a stand on that, what do I ask? If I ask if you have any code from India, chances are pretty high I couldn't use Linux. If I want to know where all the code came from and all the libraries came from down to the guy who wrote it... does that seem feasible to you? Am I actually making a difference or am I just randomly picking the one company that made the news?
I don't mean to say consumer boycotts are completely useless, sometimes we are able to draw a line in the sand and enact change. But if factory workers are not happy with the wages at the factory they should go on strike, thinking that we should buy other products until they get a living wage is an extremely optimistic view of what the consumer market can and will do. Don't forget that part of capitalism is progress through competition, we don't know if low prices mean exploitation or efficiency. Though I will admit we have a self-interest in turning a blind eye to the former...
I like a power user's tool with half a dozen different menus and toolbars and windows floating or docked all over the place and so do 99% of all the people here I would assume. Certainly nobody is intimidated by Visual Studio or Photoshop or anything else that throw a ton of controls at you. I see my old man is struggling even on fairly simple web sites though because there's too many menus and sidebars and dynamically expanding and contracting sections and whatnot. Modal dialogs make for a very simple interaction model, either you open a file or you cancel. You save a file or you cancel. You print something or you cancel. Heck with smartphones pretty much everything is a "modal" dialog because there's not much space for else on a 5" screen operated by sausage fingers. Yes, they're overused because they make the programmer's life simple. But a lot of times making it non-modal wouldn't really add any value either, least that's my opinion.
Every generation likes to talk about how lazy the next one is. It's a narrative pushed by our ruling class to keep us at each other's throats while they rob us blind. (...) I really wish that here, now, in 2018 with the power of the internet, we could get a majority of people to spot this pattern and start pushing back against it.
The current generation got bigger problems - no, really - and it's social media. The constant flow of perfect Instagram pictures is making everyone feel inadequate and lead to depression and burn-outs even though they drink less, smoke less, work harder, take better care of their health and is in many ways much less rebellious than in the past. Because that shit goes on social media too and there's never a cell phone camera far away. There's a huge uptick in anxiety issues that they're not good enough or cool enough, driven by a lot of superficial relationships aka Facebook "friends" and Tinder "dates". It's gotten to the point that many teens need a mental coach to unwind and allow for experimentation and failure than a chaperone and to just be themselves instead of competing in a popularity contest. Of course we had bits and pieces of that but social media has dialed it up to 11.
Though a screamer at 36K mph, a fraction of a snail's pace in terms getting to another star.
Yeah. The moon was hard. Mars is hard. But going interstellar... even if SpaceX built the BFR, boosted it to the max in a high elliptic orbit, put another stage on top instead of the BFS and sent it on the Grand Tour of gravity slingshots (which won't happen again until 2150, but that's still a small problem) it'll go from 40000 years like Voyager to what, like 10000 years? Chemical rockets are almost like breeding horses to reach the moon. But I do hope they'll limp humans to Mars in my lifetime...
Learning "to code" as in C# or Java syntax is just a skill. Breaking down a problem to a set of precise instructions to complete a task is fantastic general tool. For example if you ask someone to find the sum of all numbers from 1 to 100, being able to create pseudo-code like:
sum = 0;
for i in sequence(1,100)
sum + i;
return sum;
and realizing this is the same as 1+2+3+4+5+....+100 is the key to saving tons of tedious work. It may seem trivial to us, but you have to more or less run the loop in your head to see what's happening. That said it's rather dull for a kid, I'd rather go with Rube Goldberg contraptions, Lemmings-style games and 4X games for learning to plan chains of events to execute. And probably some action-based puzzle game like Portal 2 to learn about state. If they show a good aptitude for that, then I'd probably move on to spreadsheets as a way to introduce math, formulas and chaining calculations. It's only after that I'd start on actual programming...
You going to pay for it? Or do you expect to be provided with a service at absolutely no cost to you? If ads don't pay for it, something has to.
I don't recall ever paying for access to an IRC server nor did they have any ads, not even back in the 90s. The problem is not so much operating the service, it's the evolution of the service. Why did everybody leave for ICQ? Why did skyping become a thing? Why did people leave Skype for Facebook Messenger? Why did we start using Discord for game chats instead? Telegram? Whatsapp? Signal? Because we constantly want new features and server-side support.
If people at your company think that phrasing things differently is what will help them improve, then you're in a corporate cargo cult.
I see it mostly as the culmination of a linguistic arms race. The thing is, we as developers tend to look at first-order solutions to problems, if there's a bug the code needs fixing. If there's technical debt the code needs refactoring. If there's outdated code it needs upgrading. If we're very blunt about the negatives we can make any solution look bad, even when it's a solid workhorse that has served and continues to serve most the users well and has adapted to different business requirements and delivered to tight deadlines.
From a manager's perspective though there's a constant conflict about the way forward, are we really solving it the right way with the right technology and who'll get the budget and resources to do new tasks. Basically, should we take the old horse out back and shoot it and replace it with a new one? Should we leave existing solutions be and design new ones around cars? Should we actively phase out the horse in favor of cars? And are we actually designing a process around flying cars, on the assumption it's the future? And hey should we even do it ourselves or outsource to the cloud and India.
Somebody started this by intentionally overselling/underselling to get the decision they want. And then those who lost got pissed because one solution was described as the glass half full, the other as the glass half empty. So the decree came down to stop trash talking ourselves, if they want to sugar coat the issue we'll sugar coat the issue. To an outsider it of course looks like insanity and maybe once in a while you'll see a counter-movement to stop putting lipstick on all the pigs and call a spade a spade. But you know it'll just reset the game and the same will happen all over again.
Every once is a while, someone who appears to be perfectly healthy just suddenly dies. Film at 11. Is there some reason we would should be surprised that Google employees are not exempt from this possibility?
Well it's not really once in a while anymore, it's rare. From the mortality tables here in Norway the average 22 year old has a 0.0473% chance of dying that year. And of those it's about 1/3rd accidents/violence, 1/3rd suicide and 1/3rd medical conditions. From there I'd have to speculate based on diagnosis how many of those conditions were previously completely unknown, but it's definitively a minority so the risk of unexpectedly dropping dead is <0.01% and quite possibly much lower than that too.
If you've ever tried fasting, that all seems kind of ridiculous. You don't need food every couple of hours, you can go days without food with no harmful effects at all. Learning to treat hunger as a normal, non-urgent situation is a big part in learning not to overeat in a food-saturated world. Once you've done it a few times, you realize a hunger pang isn't an emergency alarm. It's a routine reminder to think about getting some food, one that turns off in a few minutes and can be safely ignored for a few hours or even days in a world where food is nearly always at arms reach.
Actually it's far more than that, us humans may not go into hibernation like bears but we are genetically programmed to deal with huge seasonal swings. Even though we've resorted to many different preservation techniques the primary method has been storing it as body fat, because food that's been in storage for months is very easily tainted. In humanity's history far more people have died from starvation than obesity. So there's an urge in all of us to fatten up to prepare, even though we don't need it right now. Of course today there's food at the store all winter long, so there's no need but the body doesn't know that. The hunger that you get from needing energy right here and now is something else entirely.
Trying to get the body to burn more calories is the wrong way to solve the obesity problem. People need to figure out ways to ingest less calories, not burn more.
It's certainly one solution, but it's a bit like saying the only right way to avoid STDs and unwanted pregnancies is abstinence. I love eating food, like sex I know it's just evolution hard-wiring survival and reproduction into my pleasure centers but nothing is going to stop me wanting to dig into a juicy steak. It's the flavors, texture and smell that makes me want it, the calorie intake is just one tiny bit though I suppose you couldn't get the sugar rush without actually consuming the sugar but I wouldn't mind something like a "condom" for my stomach that sent the calories straight through. Or sent my metabolism into hyperactive like I was running for miles to work it off, burning it away.
Eating less saves money and time you would otherwise need for food and eating. Also, increasing metabolism most likely has bad side effects on longer term, such as higher rates of cancer due to increased oxidative stress.
I doubt that, athletes that during their career have eaten and spent way more calories than average don't seem to suffer any ill effects. Sure, it would probably be a really bad idea to change it permanently if you ever got lost and had to live off very few calories in an emergency. And it certainly could be hard to get off the mental addiction that you can just gorge on anything without getting fat if you lost access to the calorie blockers. From an environmental perspective it's a waste. But from a personal perspective I'd like to eat my cake and have my waistline too. There's no doubt that I'm overweight and my health would be substantially improved if I was thinner, but dieting sucks. It certainly works, but it's always going to suck.
Oh sure. There's a special kind of maths that only allows law enforcement people to de-anonymize encrypted data. That kind of maths is not accessible by the general public nor the bad guys. Idiots.
Actually... we do have encryption algorithms that seem solid but are vulnerable only if you know secret properties which is not feasible for anyone else to find. The problem is that there's more than one jurisdiction and not everybody is happy with the NSA reading everything, nor the potential that someone else steals their key. But if you're China it's not that hard to impose an algorithm only the government can read.
In a previous incarnation the company I worked for used Lotus Notes. What an absolute disaster. I think IBM is very lucky to palm this off to get $1.8 billion for it after paying $3.5 billion those many years ago. Good work, IBM. I wonder how much they lost over the years trying to maintain it.
Lotus Notes is sorta a cross-breed between Excel macros and MS Access. You're going to hate it for all the reasons IT people hate the latter too, but for the time I actually saw some kinda impressive business applications which somehow worked and delivered value. Our perception is usually skewed by the fact that we're only called in when it's become a Frankenstein's monster nobody really can understand or maintain or doesn't work right. I can already see the pattern, we've worked on a very ad hoc basis even in production. Now we're trying to introduce process and rigidity into the system, the end result is they go around us instead of through us. Yes, we have more staging and QA and whatnot... which doesn't matter because they read the underlying data and create their own DIY solution instead of ours totally outside the system. It's called progress.
Same way that my council collects my rubbish "for free" because if you charged me specifically to take my rubbish away, all those people who can't afford things will sacrifice rubbish collection and turn all the poor areas of the city into unofficial municipal rubbish tips in seconds.
I don't know about you but I get an itemized bill of all county services, including hot and cold water, sewage, garbage collection etc. but I don't know if it's actually optional. I assume that if you did try they'd require documentation that you actually have an alternate waste disposal system in compliance with everything. The rest is quite obvious, if you have well water you don't pay for water and if you have a septic tank you don't pay for public sewage. You usually pay more to maintain your own system though.
So will people endure some of that with Windows and ARM PC's in order to get benefits like battery life, always connected, and possibly better security.
Hasn't the market answered this already with Win RT? If you want a PC to run Windows software you don't get the ARM version and if you would be happy with the ARM version there's better alternatives in Mac / Linux / Chromebooks / tablets. I think the only one who could pull it off is Apple. Not because of the x86 Macs, but because they have the iPhone/iPad base of ARM software. Like for example Adobe is now porting Photoshop to the iPad. If they've made it for the iPad (ARM based) but have the Mac GUI (x86 based) it should be really easy to give you an ARM version with a desktop GUI, it's just taking two halves you already got and splicing them together.
Given that the diameter of a silicon atom is around 0.2nm, that means they are now building transistors out of something like 30-35 atoms across. How far down can this go before it all disappears in some kind of quantum uncertainty blob?
Functionally, if you're looking just to produce one transistor and not billions of them then around 3 nm:
In 2006, a team of Korean researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the National Nano Fab Center co-developed a 3 nm transistor, the world's smallest nanoelectronic device based on conventional finFET technology.
Of course if you choose exotic designs even a single atom can function as a transistor or possibly even electrons and whatnot. But compared to the current gen 7nm chips that TSMC got in the iPhone etc. there's two more generations, 5nm and 3nm then anything resembling current chips is done. If they can even make that work in volume, though they've managed to continuously pull new rabbits out of the hat. But sometimes in the early 2020s Moore's law will be completely dead.
I need more cores, but I am not throwing this motherboard, chip, and memory out, any time soon.
Of course having a bunch of old hardware that you don't really need lying around is so useful... if you're just looking at the environmental angle and not the economic one just sell it and buy what you actually need as somebody else will be actually using it. Personally I notice I'm a bit too optimistic and lazy and indifferent, I buy something and then realize it's not really as useful as I thought or I never get around to using it or I used it before but don't really need it much anymore but the second hand value is almost nothing and I'm too lazy to deal with the hassle. So a lot of it sits around collecting dust and will eventually end up in a landfill. It's kinda strange because I'm paying attention to sales and such to save money on new things, but not nearly as efficient when it comes to selling off the old ones.
By no stretch of the imagination is an airplane with a burning engine "working as designed". The safety systems may work as designed to put out the fire, and the redundant systems may be working as designed to prevent catastrophic failure, but the plane as a whole is certainly not working as designed.
We're really getting down to semantics here because the system as in "the set of all contingencies and modes of operation" can be working as designed because the failure modes are part of that plan. Somebody obviously considered "what if an engine catches fire" and made that part of the design and if you have an actual fire it either works according to that plan or it doesn't.
The grid fin failed so that's obviously not "working as designed", duh. But there was a design for what should happen in the event of loss of control and it worked as intended. There's really no ambiguity here unless you look for absurd possibilities like that somebody intended for the grid fin to get stuck or that nobody designed for this contingency and the way it played out was just pure luck.
I would ask the people of Slashdot to face something else; the truth that most people do not care about privacy. At all.
The main problem I think is the discrepancy between what harm you could do and what harm is actually done. I've walked around with a radio buoy aka cell phone most of my adult life. I'm sure there's lots of potentially bad things you could do with that data, but have I actually seen the cell phone operator or the government abuse it? Not that I'm aware of. I've been paying for more and more things electronically with e-tail and just in general. I'm sure there's lots of potentially bad things you could do with that data, but have I actually seen the bank or the government abuse it? Not that I'm aware of. Maybe I'm just ignorant or they're so subtle nobody notices, but I got very little I can point to say and say this bad thing happened to me because they were spying on me.
Sure I could point to China or Gestapo or McCarthyism and say that bad things has happened to other people in other countries in other times and it would be terrible if anything like that happened to me, but to the vast majority of people the threat will seem very remote. So with a lot of very high probability, very low impact risk like Facebook will show me personally targeted ads and very low probability, very high impact risk like the next Hitler will round up the dissidents and send me to the death camps the aggregate risk is still very low. At least compared to all the "mundane" risks we live with every day, like if I get mugged on the street I hope they do track down the mugger even though that video surveillance can probably be used for lots of bad things too.
That would all be nice and well if this was totally fungible, give up your privacy when it's not being abused and take it back when it's getting abused. Except that's not how it works, the privacy that's eroded is not easily clawed back as the anonymous options disappear, the social norms change and your history rarely goes away. And we keep deluding ourselves to think it won't happen here, okay Snowden showed what the NSA is doing but they're not the Gestapo. Trump is no Putin, much less a Hitler. It's something people actually believe and it's something people want to believe and maybe even need to believe. Because if a really bad guy got access to all our electronic tracks we're utterly and totally fucked. Where the DDR had a file on everyone, China has an encyclopedia. The part they hook into your social credit score is just the tip of the iceberg.