Prime is one of those services that relies on most people not getting their money's worth from it. It basically amortises the cost of two day shipping over everyone using it. Some will win, some will lose.
In the UK it's worse than that though, because most items eligible for Prime cost more anyway. It usually costs the same to buy the non-Prime version and just pay for next day shipping on top.
I get the impression that the selection of stuff available in the US is much better too, especially since they bought that grocery chain.
Modern life can make good parenting rather difficult. For example, new houses built in the UK are usually too small. The kitchen is just barely big enough for one person to work in, meaning they can't have the children playing on the floor in there too. Designers make sure you can't see from the kitchen to the living room directly, because that makes the house feel even smaller and kinda cheap.
One thing that really stands out about countries with good educational results is that they design their societies to facilitate raising children.
This is a common problem for older people that means they don't have access to the best deals. For example, a lot of energy companies now offer discounts if you have an online-only account with no paper billing or phone contacts, but older people often can't get those due to lack of technical skills.
Older people are often the ones who need these good deals the most too. Worse still, companies often see these older customers who rarely switch provider as cash cows.
One proposed solution has been to force the suppliers to offer the lower prices to customers over a certain age even if they can't be online-only. Obviously other customers will subsidize this.
Unfortunately the take-downs and de-monetization are unlikely to stop.
The illegitimate take-downs are mostly due to false flagging attacks. Dick Coughlan was hit for the 4th time yesterday. If there is any human oversight, it's not working.
De-monetization is driven by the advertisers, not YouTube. You can't force advertisers to give you money. The most you can do is appeal to them to not remove their ads from your content, but they seem to have little interest in that because most of them are pandering to the lowest common denominator of prudishness, i.e. ultra conservatives who don't like swearing, gay people, violence and being made to feel uncomfortable.
By the way, YouTube does allow advertisers to be on less conservative videos if they like. It's not all-or-nothing. It's just that few choose that option because they don't trust YouTube not to put them on a Paul Logan video or something. They are fine with swearing and bikinis, but not dead bodies or antisemitism, and YouTube can't make guarantees about the latter.
Entanglement is useful for created shared encryption keys that cannot be undetectably intercepted. While you can't control the information being sent (it's random, which is fine for encryption keys) you are transmitting that information to a remote receiver.
There needs to be more come-back for police who fail to properly investigate DNA evidence before making arrests. If they didn't account for the possibility of false positives before arresting someone, they need to be punished. Arrest should not be an investigatory technique, hoping that the suspect will crack under the pressure of questioning.
We should wait for this to be tested in court first. In the past similar DNA evidence, where it has been linked through family members, has proven to be unreliable. Particularly where the DNA was preserved for a long time and had to be processed to make a usable sample.
The example of touching something subsequently touched by a bad actor is realistic. There was a case a few years ago where police charged a man with destroying mail, only to discover that his DNA was on it because he wrote the mail in question and was actually the victim. Unfortunately, DNA is the favourite tool of the lazy cop.
And no car is going to rely on another car to tell it what is a safe route.
That's actually exactly what Autopilot does. In traffic it follows the car in front. The lead car turns blue on the display when the Tesla is locked on to it.
Meh. Just write the fly-by-wire system in Javascript using four different frameworks like NASA does (node.js, Angular, Polymer and Facebook/React are all pretty popular this month) and you are good to fly. Naturally you want to be doing devops, so you can patch any issues on the fly.
- Dual SSD slots - RAM socket - Easily removable battery (no glue) - Plenty of full size USB ports - Thunerbolt port - SD card reading and headphone jack - Good performance and battery life
You could make it a hackintosh if you really need MacOS.
This has been going on for 15+ years, well back into the Jobs era.
Remember the first unibody Macbooks that weren't really unibody? They were actually two bits of metal stuck together with glue... And the glue was right where the fans vented hot air, and under a lot of strain from the hinges pulling on it. Maybe you can remember what happened.
So they made the next generation a real unibody, but the hinges were made out of really thin flat metal. Most laptop hinges are an L shape for strength, but Apple must have wanted to shave 0.25mm off. The screws holding the LCD in were also too close to the edge so the hole itself tended to break after a while.
They had endless "logic board" problems too, which referred to a number of issues mostly around power delivery. The most common failure over about a decade of models was capacitor failure, because they under-specified the part again and again.
See, that's Apple's problem. They learn extremely slowly and they don't do proper testing. Other laptop manufacturers catch things like hinge failures because they test the lid opening and closing until it breaks. Okay, on the cheap ones they don't care, but a Lenovo or NEC ultrabook probably isn't going fall apart on you.
What I learned in lectures at university was mostly a waste of time, but the experience wasn't. I had time to develop my own skills as a developer without the pressures of work.
Well, not entirely true, I did learn that Ada is an awful language that I should avoid at all costs.
It doesn't help that Apple parts are expensive and hard to come by. You can't even buy an Apple replacement screen yourself, you have to sign up as an authorized repair centre or take your chances on the grey market.
It's not just iPhones either. Linux Tech Tips recently bought a top of the range iMac for many thousands of dollars. They cracked the screen while moving it and went to Apple for a repair. Apple said they couldn't even order a replacement screen and had no ETA on availability. They are selling products without a supply of spare parts available to anyone, even themselves.
Considering Apple's long history of design flaws and insufficient testing, this should be a major concern to anyone buying their products.
No need to rush, I'll have this replacement for Unicode finished in a year or two and I'm sure the ISO will quickly adopt it. Maybe for Slashdot's 25th anniversary?
Transparency won't help. They will just tune the rules to oppress the people they don't like, the same way as they quite openly gerrymander and suppress voters or craft laws that disproportionately criminalize one particular group.
We have thinner fonts and lines which are harder to read unless you have perfect vision.
The first thing I noticed about the new Gmail is that the fonts are heavier weight than the old ones.
We have flat designs where we can't see what's clickable.
This is a consequence of touch interfaces. When browsing the web on a phone you only have a big fat finger, no precision single pixel pointer, so all the hit boxes have to be enlarged. This people have become used to tapping in the general area of what they want and not worrying about hitting it precisely. Making the user try to aim at a visible hit box is considered bad now.
Unfortunately this does lead to Cheeseplant Syndrome, where the user is sometimes unsure what they can click on. Material design tries to alleviate that through the use of colour hints, and on desktop mouse-over highlighting.
Note I'm not endorsing any of this, just explaining it.
The specific threat it is designed to protect against is hacked email accounts. If someone gets into the recipient's email account then they can see every email you ever sent to them, unless it was one of these links to an expiring web page.
Honda's manufacturing is quite incredible. Their factories keep 30 minutes worth of parts on hand, with constant deliveries through the day. They have really got it down to a fine art.
You have been able to buy commercial delivery boxes for years now. Some have a time-base barcode for the delivery person to scan as proof that they were there, and I read something about some kind of certification with major delivery companies. Panasonic make them for the Japanese market but you can get them everywhere.
Personally I just get stuff delivered to work. It's considered a minor perk of the job.
For me the most annoying thing is that they moved the archive button. The report spam button is there now and I always go to click it when I mean to archive.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait... Do you think I'm an Islamist or something?
Prime is one of those services that relies on most people not getting their money's worth from it. It basically amortises the cost of two day shipping over everyone using it. Some will win, some will lose.
In the UK it's worse than that though, because most items eligible for Prime cost more anyway. It usually costs the same to buy the non-Prime version and just pay for next day shipping on top.
I get the impression that the selection of stuff available in the US is much better too, especially since they bought that grocery chain.
Modern life can make good parenting rather difficult. For example, new houses built in the UK are usually too small. The kitchen is just barely big enough for one person to work in, meaning they can't have the children playing on the floor in there too. Designers make sure you can't see from the kitchen to the living room directly, because that makes the house feel even smaller and kinda cheap.
One thing that really stands out about countries with good educational results is that they design their societies to facilitate raising children.
This is a common problem for older people that means they don't have access to the best deals. For example, a lot of energy companies now offer discounts if you have an online-only account with no paper billing or phone contacts, but older people often can't get those due to lack of technical skills.
Older people are often the ones who need these good deals the most too. Worse still, companies often see these older customers who rarely switch provider as cash cows.
One proposed solution has been to force the suppliers to offer the lower prices to customers over a certain age even if they can't be online-only. Obviously other customers will subsidize this.
Unfortunately the take-downs and de-monetization are unlikely to stop.
The illegitimate take-downs are mostly due to false flagging attacks. Dick Coughlan was hit for the 4th time yesterday. If there is any human oversight, it's not working.
De-monetization is driven by the advertisers, not YouTube. You can't force advertisers to give you money. The most you can do is appeal to them to not remove their ads from your content, but they seem to have little interest in that because most of them are pandering to the lowest common denominator of prudishness, i.e. ultra conservatives who don't like swearing, gay people, violence and being made to feel uncomfortable.
By the way, YouTube does allow advertisers to be on less conservative videos if they like. It's not all-or-nothing. It's just that few choose that option because they don't trust YouTube not to put them on a Paul Logan video or something. They are fine with swearing and bikinis, but not dead bodies or antisemitism, and YouTube can't make guarantees about the latter.
Entanglement is useful for created shared encryption keys that cannot be undetectably intercepted. While you can't control the information being sent (it's random, which is fine for encryption keys) you are transmitting that information to a remote receiver.
There needs to be more come-back for police who fail to properly investigate DNA evidence before making arrests. If they didn't account for the possibility of false positives before arresting someone, they need to be punished. Arrest should not be an investigatory technique, hoping that the suspect will crack under the pressure of questioning.
We should wait for this to be tested in court first. In the past similar DNA evidence, where it has been linked through family members, has proven to be unreliable. Particularly where the DNA was preserved for a long time and had to be processed to make a usable sample.
The example of touching something subsequently touched by a bad actor is realistic. There was a case a few years ago where police charged a man with destroying mail, only to discover that his DNA was on it because he wrote the mail in question and was actually the victim. Unfortunately, DNA is the favourite tool of the lazy cop.
And no car is going to rely on another car to tell it what is a safe route.
That's actually exactly what Autopilot does. In traffic it follows the car in front. The lead car turns blue on the display when the Tesla is locked on to it.
Meh. Just write the fly-by-wire system in Javascript using four different frameworks like NASA does (node.js, Angular, Polymer and Facebook/React are all pretty popular this month) and you are good to fly. Naturally you want to be doing devops, so you can patch any issues on the fly.
How about an LG Gram?
- Dual SSD slots
- RAM socket
- Easily removable battery (no glue)
- Plenty of full size USB ports
- Thunerbolt port
- SD card reading and headphone jack
- Good performance and battery life
You could make it a hackintosh if you really need MacOS.
This has been going on for 15+ years, well back into the Jobs era.
Remember the first unibody Macbooks that weren't really unibody? They were actually two bits of metal stuck together with glue... And the glue was right where the fans vented hot air, and under a lot of strain from the hinges pulling on it. Maybe you can remember what happened.
So they made the next generation a real unibody, but the hinges were made out of really thin flat metal. Most laptop hinges are an L shape for strength, but Apple must have wanted to shave 0.25mm off. The screws holding the LCD in were also too close to the edge so the hole itself tended to break after a while.
They had endless "logic board" problems too, which referred to a number of issues mostly around power delivery. The most common failure over about a decade of models was capacitor failure, because they under-specified the part again and again.
See, that's Apple's problem. They learn extremely slowly and they don't do proper testing. Other laptop manufacturers catch things like hinge failures because they test the lid opening and closing until it breaks. Okay, on the cheap ones they don't care, but a Lenovo or NEC ultrabook probably isn't going fall apart on you.
What I learned in lectures at university was mostly a waste of time, but the experience wasn't. I had time to develop my own skills as a developer without the pressures of work.
Well, not entirely true, I did learn that Ada is an awful language that I should avoid at all costs.
It doesn't help that Apple parts are expensive and hard to come by. You can't even buy an Apple replacement screen yourself, you have to sign up as an authorized repair centre or take your chances on the grey market.
It's not just iPhones either. Linux Tech Tips recently bought a top of the range iMac for many thousands of dollars. They cracked the screen while moving it and went to Apple for a repair. Apple said they couldn't even order a replacement screen and had no ETA on availability. They are selling products without a supply of spare parts available to anyone, even themselves.
Considering Apple's long history of design flaws and insufficient testing, this should be a major concern to anyone buying their products.
No need to rush, I'll have this replacement for Unicode finished in a year or two and I'm sure the ISO will quickly adopt it. Maybe for Slashdot's 25th anniversary?
Transparency won't help. They will just tune the rules to oppress the people they don't like, the same way as they quite openly gerrymander and suppress voters or craft laws that disproportionately criminalize one particular group.
We have thinner fonts and lines which are harder to read unless you have perfect vision.
The first thing I noticed about the new Gmail is that the fonts are heavier weight than the old ones.
We have flat designs where we can't see what's clickable.
This is a consequence of touch interfaces. When browsing the web on a phone you only have a big fat finger, no precision single pixel pointer, so all the hit boxes have to be enlarged. This people have become used to tapping in the general area of what they want and not worrying about hitting it precisely. Making the user try to aim at a visible hit box is considered bad now.
Unfortunately this does lead to Cheeseplant Syndrome, where the user is sometimes unsure what they can click on. Material design tries to alleviate that through the use of colour hints, and on desktop mouse-over highlighting.
Note I'm not endorsing any of this, just explaining it.
The specific threat it is designed to protect against is hacked email accounts. If someone gets into the recipient's email account then they can see every email you ever sent to them, unless it was one of these links to an expiring web page.
How does the moderation work here? It's current scored:
30% Insightful
30% Troll
20% Interesting
Yet the modifier is -1. Seems like it is 70% good and 30% trigger warning, so surely should be at at least +1...
Honda's manufacturing is quite incredible. Their factories keep 30 minutes worth of parts on hand, with constant deliveries through the day. They have really got it down to a fine art.
You have been able to buy commercial delivery boxes for years now. Some have a time-base barcode for the delivery person to scan as proof that they were there, and I read something about some kind of certification with major delivery companies. Panasonic make them for the Japanese market but you can get them everywhere.
Personally I just get stuff delivered to work. It's considered a minor perk of the job.
It makes fonts a lot more readable, especially at small sizes. How valuable is even just a 10% increase in text scanning speed?
It also makes word processors / DTP look much better because the on screen kerning looks right at 4k.
These will be great for computer monitors. CAD will look fantastic.
For me the most annoying thing is that they moved the archive button. The report spam button is there now and I always go to click it when I mean to archive.
UI's from 2000 were pretty bad too... That's right in the middle of the WinAMP era when everything had to have a custom skin on it.
I think we peaked around 1993.