In the UK wind is considered more reliable than nuclear, in terms of the amount of backup capacity needed for it. If a nuclear plant has an unexpected problem the grid loses a gigawatt or more instantly, if a wind turbine or even an entire farm has an issue the impact is much smaller.
What value does keeping the Windows calculator closed source provide? It's not like competitors are going to benefit, they already have calculators in their operating systems and the quality of the built-in calculator app is not a factor in picking Windows over say Linux.
On the other hand, making it open source may help developers on the Windows platform by giving them things like an arbitrary precision maths library and a nice example app to learn from. They are using git internally for development anyway, so the amount of effort to transfer it to Github (if it wasn't already there but set to private) is tiny.
It's the same reason that Google releases stuff like Tensorflow, Facebook released that Javascript library... Open Source is good for business, because it helps build up platforms and ecosystems by making use of work the company was doing anyway.
Calculators are actually surprisingly tricky bits of software. The Windows Calculator has a pretty decent arbitrary precision maths library, for example. If you just use the double type in your code you will very quickly run into rounding errors.
In fact flaws in calculators are used for "calculator forensics", which is the practice of identifying a particular device or chip or bit of software by the errors it exhibits. There always has to be some compromise.
The Windows calculator is actually pretty robust and the arbitrary precision maths library is a welcome addition to open source.
Even if the liquidators are okay, what about the developers? Would they be okay with their AAA title that was released a month ago being re-released DRM free because Steam went out of business?
A little bit of good news though: companies have started offering refunds when they shut down vital online services. Microsoft did it with their band fitness trackers, and Sony is doing it with a game that was supposed to be free to play online "forever".
We need to keep pushing for this to be the norm. Make retiring services that products depend on expensive for the manufacturer. Make them think hard about committing to long term support before making features dependent on cloud services.
To be fair this thing is an ARM SoC, similar to a phone, so actually a lot of what it does relies on fast servers with hardware accelerated speech recognition and huge databases of knowledge to answer questions.
It's kind of interesting how back in the mainframe age science fiction assumed that there would be one massive all-knowing computer that everyone in the world could ask questions of via a terminal, and then when microcomputers came along it switched to everyone having a robot with the entirety of human knowledge in its positronic brain.
What actually happened is that we have a large number of specialist AIs shared between everyone, living in the cloud. Hopefully processing and storage will continue to advance fast enough to make having a local copy feasible.
Hmm, if they go out of business won't they try to sell their assets and the administrator will be upset if they devalue them by removing all the DRM? And can they even remove DRM, won't they need permission from the game's developers before releasing an unprotected version?
Do you really own your Steam games though? In 30 years will you be able to play them?
My understanding is that it needs to periodically verify your account and you can't easily make backups of the games to reinstall later without the client and your online account.
What happens if your account is banned? Microsoft is a bit heavy handed with the ban-hammer.
Microsoft has been failing with IE and then Edge for decades, and there is just no sense in continuing to throw money at it.
They had everything. Beat Netscape, were they default and uninstallable on Windows. MSN was the default homepage, and most people didn't know how to change it. And they failed. MSN failed, Bing failed, IE became a joke - the browser you use to download a decent browser.
Edge was their last ditch effort to gain some traction. Since that also failed, they are left with just needing a browser to ship with the OS and not wanting to use a third party one, so throw a skin on Chromium and call it a day.
By the way, the HTML rendering engine in the OS isn't actually Edge. It's a separate DLL that uses the HTML engine from Word, of all things. It used to be IE, but they switched to the Word one because it was more secure and only supported a safer subset of IE's features.
The Bank of Japan's web site requires Internet Explorer. Part of it runs on an ActiveX control.
When Microsoft announced that IE is being retired, they went into panic mode. Having stubbornly resisted making a proper site for two decades now, they now have to redevelop it from scratch.
Mozilla has rested stubbornly on their laurels for 20 years.
You didn't notice that they replaced the entire add-on ecosystem, replaced the JS engine and ripped out tonnes of legacy code? Strange because a lot of people on Slashdot were complaining about it.
It shows just how screwed up text handling is on computers. Chinese has thousands of characters, maybe 50k total although only a few thousand are in common use. But computers are mostly handling ASCII, and ASCII only reliably stores about 6 per character (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) because control characters, extended characters and punctuation are often filtered or mangled.
This affects English speaking users too. For example, by default Microsoft's pre-boot authentication for Bitlocker defaults to a numeric PIN which can be entered with the F keys, because those are the only ones guaranteed to work no matter what language keyboard you plug in. Yubico uses the following character set for similar reasons:
cbdefghijklnrtuvCBDEFGHIJKLNRTUV0123456789
The USB keyboard standard is pretty awful really, but that's another story.
Unicode might have sorted it all out, but Unicode has some severe design flaws that prevented it ever becoming universal. In particular the handling of Chinese, Japanese and Korean is badly broken and the reason why they continue to use standards like BIG5 and Shift-JIS to wedge their character sets into something that systems can process.
Instead of cameras the police could determine where the danger spots are and create a database, that Google and everyone else could use to show warnings. Many cars already have a speed camera database in the sat nav anyway, wouldn't take much to add accident black spots to that.
Uber's liability stems from not monitoring their test drivers. It's unlikely that this was the first time she wasn't paying attention, and they have a camera pointed at her but apparently no-one was bothering to review it.
They could even use a hands-on-wheel detection or gaze detection system like level 2 cars do.
Also, the entire world's output of Li-ion batteries couldn't backup even the CA grid for 4 hours
What a bizarre metric. Why would CA need to go on to 100% battery backup? How would every other source of energy simultaneously fail while the battery backup somehow remained online?
Nuclear power is fantastic. We're just too obsessed with spent fuel and fear-mongoring to do it right.
Nothing to do with fear, everything to do with cost. It's just not economically viable.
All these new reactor designs are great, but the only people throwing money at them are governments because they are just not a good investment. Too many failures, too much risk.
Don't blame NIMBYs and activists either. There are plenty of places where they have not been a significant factor, e.g. Hinkley C in the UK, and yet the price remains incredibly high.
Come up with a way to make it cheaper and we might have that nuclear renascence.
Look at how fragile this system is. It's on "no touch" at the moment, can't even maintain it, because if it goes down they instantly lose over a gigawatt.
For energy security you need greater distribution and some decent storage.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it always racism with you? You are obsessed.
It's hard to have a conversation about improving tech when people go around screaming racism at everything. Please stop.
In the UK wind is considered more reliable than nuclear, in terms of the amount of backup capacity needed for it. If a nuclear plant has an unexpected problem the grid loses a gigawatt or more instantly, if a wind turbine or even an entire farm has an issue the impact is much smaller.
Lidar isn't a given. Tesla is trying to do self driving with only cameras and a front facing radar, for example.
It's a sound business decision.
What value does keeping the Windows calculator closed source provide? It's not like competitors are going to benefit, they already have calculators in their operating systems and the quality of the built-in calculator app is not a factor in picking Windows over say Linux.
On the other hand, making it open source may help developers on the Windows platform by giving them things like an arbitrary precision maths library and a nice example app to learn from. They are using git internally for development anyway, so the amount of effort to transfer it to Github (if it wasn't already there but set to private) is tiny.
It's the same reason that Google releases stuff like Tensorflow, Facebook released that Javascript library... Open Source is good for business, because it helps build up platforms and ecosystems by making use of work the company was doing anyway.
Calculators are actually surprisingly tricky bits of software. The Windows Calculator has a pretty decent arbitrary precision maths library, for example. If you just use the double type in your code you will very quickly run into rounding errors.
In fact flaws in calculators are used for "calculator forensics", which is the practice of identifying a particular device or chip or bit of software by the errors it exhibits. There always has to be some compromise.
The Windows calculator is actually pretty robust and the arbitrary precision maths library is a welcome addition to open source.
Even if the liquidators are okay, what about the developers? Would they be okay with their AAA title that was released a month ago being re-released DRM free because Steam went out of business?
A little bit of good news though: companies have started offering refunds when they shut down vital online services. Microsoft did it with their band fitness trackers, and Sony is doing it with a game that was supposed to be free to play online "forever".
We need to keep pushing for this to be the norm. Make retiring services that products depend on expensive for the manufacturer. Make them think hard about committing to long term support before making features dependent on cloud services.
To be fair this thing is an ARM SoC, similar to a phone, so actually a lot of what it does relies on fast servers with hardware accelerated speech recognition and huge databases of knowledge to answer questions.
It's kind of interesting how back in the mainframe age science fiction assumed that there would be one massive all-knowing computer that everyone in the world could ask questions of via a terminal, and then when microcomputers came along it switched to everyone having a robot with the entirety of human knowledge in its positronic brain.
What actually happened is that we have a large number of specialist AIs shared between everyone, living in the cloud. Hopefully processing and storage will continue to advance fast enough to make having a local copy feasible.
Hmm, if they go out of business won't they try to sell their assets and the administrator will be upset if they devalue them by removing all the DRM? And can they even remove DRM, won't they need permission from the game's developers before releasing an unprotected version?
I can't think of a more inane and ultimately useless use for such an amazing technology
he typed, fingers darting across the keyboard so he could get first post on Slashdot.
That's basically what it is, but even dumber and more useless than Alexa, and it cost $900.
Do you really own your Steam games though? In 30 years will you be able to play them?
My understanding is that it needs to periodically verify your account and you can't easily make backups of the games to reinstall later without the client and your online account.
What happens if your account is banned? Microsoft is a bit heavy handed with the ban-hammer.
No, it seems like TFA is confused. The paper isn't looking at deflection really, it's looking the possibility of shattering the asteroid.
Microsoft has been failing with IE and then Edge for decades, and there is just no sense in continuing to throw money at it.
They had everything. Beat Netscape, were they default and uninstallable on Windows. MSN was the default homepage, and most people didn't know how to change it. And they failed. MSN failed, Bing failed, IE became a joke - the browser you use to download a decent browser.
Edge was their last ditch effort to gain some traction. Since that also failed, they are left with just needing a browser to ship with the OS and not wanting to use a third party one, so throw a skin on Chromium and call it a day.
By the way, the HTML rendering engine in the OS isn't actually Edge. It's a separate DLL that uses the HTML engine from Word, of all things. It used to be IE, but they switched to the Word one because it was more secure and only supported a safer subset of IE's features.
The Bank of Japan's web site requires Internet Explorer. Part of it runs on an ActiveX control.
When Microsoft announced that IE is being retired, they went into panic mode. Having stubbornly resisted making a proper site for two decades now, they now have to redevelop it from scratch.
Mozilla has rested stubbornly on their laurels for 20 years.
You didn't notice that they replaced the entire add-on ecosystem, replaced the JS engine and ripped out tonnes of legacy code? Strange because a lot of people on Slashdot were complaining about it.
It shows just how screwed up text handling is on computers. Chinese has thousands of characters, maybe 50k total although only a few thousand are in common use. But computers are mostly handling ASCII, and ASCII only reliably stores about 6 per character (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) because control characters, extended characters and punctuation are often filtered or mangled.
This affects English speaking users too. For example, by default Microsoft's pre-boot authentication for Bitlocker defaults to a numeric PIN which can be entered with the F keys, because those are the only ones guaranteed to work no matter what language keyboard you plug in. Yubico uses the following character set for similar reasons:
cbdefghijklnrtuvCBDEFGHIJKLNRTUV0123456789
The USB keyboard standard is pretty awful really, but that's another story.
Unicode might have sorted it all out, but Unicode has some severe design flaws that prevented it ever becoming universal. In particular the handling of Chinese, Japanese and Korean is badly broken and the reason why they continue to use standards like BIG5 and Shift-JIS to wedge their character sets into something that systems can process.
Instead of cameras the police could determine where the danger spots are and create a database, that Google and everyone else could use to show warnings. Many cars already have a speed camera database in the sat nav anyway, wouldn't take much to add accident black spots to that.
Google Maps is the more conservative app, Waze is where they test features like this out. The fact that it is going mainstream is significant.
Having said that, many car manufacturers have been including it for years too. Both my Leafs had it going back six years now.
Uber's liability stems from not monitoring their test drivers. It's unlikely that this was the first time she wasn't paying attention, and they have a camera pointed at her but apparently no-one was bothering to review it.
They could even use a hands-on-wheel detection or gaze detection system like level 2 cars do.
Also, the entire world's output of Li-ion batteries couldn't backup even the CA grid for 4 hours
What a bizarre metric. Why would CA need to go on to 100% battery backup? How would every other source of energy simultaneously fail while the battery backup somehow remained online?
Nuclear power is fantastic. We're just too obsessed with spent fuel and fear-mongoring to do it right.
Nothing to do with fear, everything to do with cost. It's just not economically viable.
All these new reactor designs are great, but the only people throwing money at them are governments because they are just not a good investment. Too many failures, too much risk.
Don't blame NIMBYs and activists either. There are plenty of places where they have not been a significant factor, e.g. Hinkley C in the UK, and yet the price remains incredibly high.
Come up with a way to make it cheaper and we might have that nuclear renascence.
Look at how fragile this system is. It's on "no touch" at the moment, can't even maintain it, because if it goes down they instantly lose over a gigawatt.
For energy security you need greater distribution and some decent storage.
Useful idiots I think, fully bought in to the alt-lite bullshit.
Well, personally I would nationalize it, but this kind of regulation seems more practical from a political perspective.