Much of the reason for satellite communications is to provide communications to locations that are out of reach of ground stations. The InReach devices communicate directly with satellites to trigger a rescue - and communicate - in remote areas. Espionnage 140 characters at a time?
Getting past the Slack-hate... Slack's ubiquity once it's in place at a company eventually makes it the de-facto communications tool. People start using it for everything. Private conversations occur in direct message channels all the time.
"I'm interviewing at competitor X on Thursday." "Director Y is incompetent." "Staffer Z is kinda hot."
Besides the fact that people using Slack should always assume that someone's watching, or at least able to be watching, how does Slack's analytics treat one-on-one conversations?
Check out the rampant nuttiness of Google local guide reviews, with utterly obvious fakes like this: https://www.google.com/maps/co...
They review every business, point of interest, and yes, road sign, with made-up reviews. It's awesome, and depressing, and Google doesn't do anything about it.
I rented a car with automatic braking, and the false positives are terrifying. I routinely triggered the autobraking when backing out of driveways onto the road, where there's a change in gradient. The ABS kicks in, and it sounds like your car has bottomed out and is grinding against the ground.
It's particularly annoying because you can see on the reverse camera that there's nothing behind you, so you start doubting yourself, the camera, and the car. It's kind of like a random punishment system. You don't know what's going to cause the next zap, so there's no clear corrective path of action to take to correct this.
Truly groundbreaking. Anyone interested in buying my Pebble Kickstarter edition? It has several days of battery life, basic but somewhat useful smartwatch functions, and, oh yeah, it's been abandoned by its new IP owner, Fitbit.
In this respect, techies are like anybody else. Some are out to help save the world, or at least make it a better place, and some aren't. It's not the tech that makes the savior, it's the person.
The same can be said about:
- finance folks (microcredit vs subprime mortgages) - engineers (postwar reconstruction vs weapons) - architects (affordable housing designs vs Trump towers) - builders (habitat for humanity vs suburban subdivisions)
Even hardware projects with experienced teams can fail. If you see a hardware crowdfunding project, be fully willing to accept that your 'investment' (which is what it really is) is more likely to disappear than result in a finished product.
"Michael Abrash is a game programmer and technical writer specializing in optimization and 80x86 assembly language, game programming, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge. Related issues were covered in his later book Zen of Graphics Programming. [...] After working at Microsoft on graphics and assembly code for Windows NT 3.1, he returned to the game industry in the mid-1990s to work on Quake for id Software. "
This would be hugely useful for remotely deployed ship-based (operating near shore) sensors which use cell networks to send back readings. For security and environmental reasons, the sensors are sealed boxes with no physical access to what's inside, including the SIM. What happens if the device is moved to another carrier's coverage area, or another country? What happens if the current carrier goes under, or they jack up their rates, or change their roaming policies? Right now, a carrier going under would brick the device.
Additionally, think beyond phones, as TFA implies. Physical access to a SIM is a security risk in itself. I would rather restrict phyical access to the SIM, and have password restricted access to a reprogrammable SIM than have my sensor drop off the air, or start sending readings somewhere else altogether.
It's not crazy, and it's already being done, by organization like HeroRATs - http://www.apopo.org/cms.php?cmsid=107. They train African giant pouched rats to detect mines. They're also using them to detect tuberculosis, in human spit. Yuck, but way cool.
Why should I make the individual investment when I can just go to Menards with an AutoCAD or Unigraphics file and say, "print me a plastic part" for $2.99 and I'll stop by when its done?
Few people thought they needed home laser printers at first either. And you can bet that there will be a Kinko's model coming around the bend quite quickly.
My father was lent a Pong unit. Ugly black and brown console, two rheostats. Semi-crappy B&W display on the tube TV. And that's about all. Looked like a rejected sci-fi prop.
And it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
Roll forward a few years (past the Atari 2600, which was much like the Pong console, in retrospect). I walk by a computer store, and they're selling Apple II's. Every machine on display had a game running on it, and a line of kids waiting for their turn. It was at that moment that I knew that computers would be a pretty big thing in my life.
Not that I knew at the time that it would lead to a career in IT. But it was games that did it.
I have been running Vista Enterprise for a month and a half (it was released to software assurance customers in early December) on my personal laptop.
Pros: It's a nice visual upgrade, things are smoother, Aero is pretty, the integration between it and Office 2007 is tight, but otherwise, it's not a sea change. I find the most interesting improvements are in the laptop features, with a quick wake from sleep - you actually have to dig to find the shutdown command. It's very stable.
Cons: Disk thrash: 1.25 gigs of ram is just enough. Readyboost - didn't notice any huge improvement with a 2-gig USB key set to cache the page file. I will try again with an SD or CF card. Strange activation errors - I don't have an activation server, so I don't know if my copy will eventually partially shut down. A general dumbing down of the dialog boxes: twice the dialogs for the same net result. I am already blindly clicking on OK.
I won't be recommending an upgrade from XP to Vista (and Office 2007) for any of my clients until the the market hits critical mass, meaning that they start complaining about being unable to open.docx files, and want all their desktops to look like their new laptops.
Frontpage has been dropped as of Office 2007. It has been replaced by two apps - SharePoint Designer and Expression Web - but I have yet to see them, and I'm just a little worried.
A hard drive library is not useful for long-term and/or offsite storage. You would need multiple libraries and cart them around to even keep a minimal backup set that goes back a few weeks or months.
Also, HDs may or may not work after coming out of storage, tapes usually do, since there's less to break down in a tape.
I would like all kinds of security, but discreet. Motion sensors all over the place, window and door sensors. My favorite extra would be some kind of status on open or closed doors and locks. We have five exterior doors in our house, and I would love to know at a glance if the bolts have been locked on all of them.
The funny thing is I'm not paranoid, and until I had kids, I couldn't have cared less. Stuff is stuff.
Remote monitoring and control of the house systems - temperature, blinds, lights - would be super cool.
And of course, network throughout the house, and even though I wired ours, we're using wireless almost exclusively. I'll think of something to do with all that Cat 5 cabling...
And all this should be as unobtrusive as possible - if not invisible.
Slashdot Mirror
Much of the reason for satellite communications is to provide communications to locations that are out of reach of ground stations. The InReach devices communicate directly with satellites to trigger a rescue - and communicate - in remote areas. Espionnage 140 characters at a time?
Bizarre.
...that 24+ hours in, there are still only four comments. Samsung is clearly onto something.
Getting past the Slack-hate... Slack's ubiquity once it's in place at a company eventually makes it the de-facto communications tool. People start using it for everything. Private conversations occur in direct message channels all the time.
"I'm interviewing at competitor X on Thursday."
"Director Y is incompetent."
"Staffer Z is kinda hot."
Besides the fact that people using Slack should always assume that someone's watching, or at least able to be watching, how does Slack's analytics treat one-on-one conversations?
Check out the rampant nuttiness of Google local guide reviews, with utterly obvious fakes like this: https://www.google.com/maps/co...
They review every business, point of interest, and yes, road sign, with made-up reviews. It's awesome, and depressing, and Google doesn't do anything about it.
I rented a car with automatic braking, and the false positives are terrifying. I routinely triggered the autobraking when backing out of driveways onto the road, where there's a change in gradient. The ABS kicks in, and it sounds like your car has bottomed out and is grinding against the ground.
It's particularly annoying because you can see on the reverse camera that there's nothing behind you, so you start doubting yourself, the camera, and the car. It's kind of like a random punishment system. You don't know what's going to cause the next zap, so there's no clear corrective path of action to take to correct this.
Or maybe it was Eithernet.
Name your price. It's just gathering dust.
Truly groundbreaking. Anyone interested in buying my Pebble Kickstarter edition? It has several days of battery life, basic but somewhat useful smartwatch functions, and, oh yeah, it's been abandoned by its new IP owner, Fitbit.
Nice try.
As of the current macOS beta, you will get the following message is Time Machine tries to backup to an AFPS drive:
"Time Machine couldn’t complete the backup. The backup disk is not in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format, which is required."
You can use Time Machine restore TO an AFPS drive, but you can not back up to an AFPS drive until Apple provides a fix.
Agreed. Also worrisome is that Time Machine won't back up to drives that have been upgraded to APFS.
What's a drone? I build all kinds flying things. I build drones. I build planes.
I have built a plane that can hover. Is that a drone?
In this respect, techies are like anybody else. Some are out to help save the world, or at least make it a better place, and some aren't. It's not the tech that makes the savior, it's the person.
The same can be said about:
- finance folks (microcredit vs subprime mortgages)
- engineers (postwar reconstruction vs weapons)
- architects (affordable housing designs vs Trump towers)
- builders (habitat for humanity vs suburban subdivisions)
to name a few examples.
Good luck with that. The precision of Lego's molding process is beyond what can be done at home.
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-po...
Quote:
Hardware is hard. Really really hard.
The list goes on, and on.
Even hardware projects with experienced teams can fail. If you see a hardware crowdfunding project, be fully willing to accept that your 'investment' (which is what it really is) is more likely to disappear than result in a finished product.
"Michael Abrash is a game programmer and technical writer specializing in optimization and 80x86 assembly language, game programming, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge. Related issues were covered in his later book Zen of Graphics Programming. [...] After working at Microsoft on graphics and assembly code for Windows NT 3.1, he returned to the game industry in the mid-1990s to work on Quake for id Software. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
This would be hugely useful for remotely deployed ship-based (operating near shore) sensors which use cell networks to send back readings. For security and environmental reasons, the sensors are sealed boxes with no physical access to what's inside, including the SIM. What happens if the device is moved to another carrier's coverage area, or another country? What happens if the current carrier goes under, or they jack up their rates, or change their roaming policies? Right now, a carrier going under would brick the device.
Additionally, think beyond phones, as TFA implies. Physical access to a SIM is a security risk in itself. I would rather restrict phyical access to the SIM, and have password restricted access to a reprogrammable SIM than have my sensor drop off the air, or start sending readings somewhere else altogether.
It's not crazy, and it's already being done, by organization like HeroRATs - http://www.apopo.org/cms.php?cmsid=107. They train African giant pouched rats to detect mines. They're also using them to detect tuberculosis, in human spit. Yuck, but way cool.
Why should I make the individual investment when I can just go to Menards with an AutoCAD or Unigraphics file and say, "print me a plastic part" for $2.99 and I'll stop by when its done?
Few people thought they needed home laser printers at first either. And you can bet that there will be a Kinko's model coming around the bend quite quickly.
How does one liquidate siphoned carbon credits? Do they hold a black market value?
Very interesting. Care to elaborate?
My father was lent a Pong unit. Ugly black and brown console, two rheostats. Semi-crappy B&W display on the tube TV. And that's about all. Looked like a rejected sci-fi prop.
And it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
Roll forward a few years (past the Atari 2600, which was much like the Pong console, in retrospect). I walk by a computer store, and they're selling Apple II's. Every machine on display had a game running on it, and a line of kids waiting for their turn. It was at that moment that I knew that computers would be a pretty big thing in my life.
Not that I knew at the time that it would lead to a career in IT. But it was games that did it.
I have been running Vista Enterprise for a month and a half (it was released to software assurance customers in early December) on my personal laptop.
.docx files, and want all their desktops to look like their new laptops.
Pros: It's a nice visual upgrade, things are smoother, Aero is pretty, the integration between it and Office 2007 is tight, but otherwise, it's not a sea change. I find the most interesting improvements are in the laptop features, with a quick wake from sleep - you actually have to dig to find the shutdown command. It's very stable.
Cons: Disk thrash: 1.25 gigs of ram is just enough. Readyboost - didn't notice any huge improvement with a 2-gig USB key set to cache the page file. I will try again with an SD or CF card. Strange activation errors - I don't have an activation server, so I don't know if my copy will eventually partially shut down. A general dumbing down of the dialog boxes: twice the dialogs for the same net result. I am already blindly clicking on OK.
I won't be recommending an upgrade from XP to Vista (and Office 2007) for any of my clients until the the market hits critical mass, meaning that they start complaining about being unable to open
Frontpage has been dropped as of Office 2007. It has been replaced by two apps - SharePoint Designer and Expression Web - but I have yet to see them, and I'm just a little worried.
A hard drive library is not useful for long-term and/or offsite storage. You would need multiple libraries and cart them around to even keep a minimal backup set that goes back a few weeks or months.
Also, HDs may or may not work after coming out of storage, tapes usually do, since there's less to break down in a tape.
I would like all kinds of security, but discreet. Motion sensors all over the place, window and door sensors. My favorite extra would be some kind of status on open or closed doors and locks. We have five exterior doors in our house, and I would love to know at a glance if the bolts have been locked on all of them.
The funny thing is I'm not paranoid, and until I had kids, I couldn't have cared less. Stuff is stuff.
Remote monitoring and control of the house systems - temperature, blinds, lights - would be super cool.
And of course, network throughout the house, and even though I wired ours, we're using wireless almost exclusively. I'll think of something to do with all that Cat 5 cabling...
And all this should be as unobtrusive as possible - if not invisible.