It's increasingly looking like Android is fast cornering the vast majority of the tablet market (and by tablet, I mean regular tablet, e-book readers and anything that doesn't have a keyboard and mouse, or an intel CPU).
Frankly, I prefer an old, well-known, slowly dying monopoly like Microsoft than the fast, aggressive, secretive, personal-data-hungry and quite frankly worrying Google monopoly.
The first application I see is *finally* a decent braille screen for the blind. They can even dispense with the LCD screen altogether, to make the device affordable.
all you would need is a dataset of all the interesting things that happened. Your dad tying his shoelaces is in no way interesting
It's all a matter of perspective: my dad tying his shoelaces would have been a major achievement, considering he had Parkinson's diseases.
In the same vein, consider, for instance, a bedouin, constantly on the move in the desert, who doesn't have access to any newspaper, TV, and pretty much doesn't know or give a fuck about anything outside his little world of camels and trading. For this guy, 9/11 was a completely ordinary day.
Despite what most westerners believe, it turns out that most things we consider important and newsworthy aren't even known to the vast majority of the world's population. So the most boring day picked up by Cambridge was only boring to people who share Cambridge's worldviews.
What's wrong with hiring flesh and blood people to combat poaching? With over 25% unemployment, you'd think the government could hire people to take them off the unemployed statistics, and for a lot cheaper than the cost of a UAV + salary of its remote pilot.
It sounds awfully like a scheme to help a national company who can't sell enough stuff on the private market to stay afloat. Kind of like the french Rafale airplane, produced by Dassault, whose only customer is the french military.
This shows how well prepared is the british police to deal with matters regarding the internet: I reckon they never heard of the hosts file or, for an URL only, favorites. Such simple minds... life for them must be a permanent bliss.
They're simple minds eh? Do you know what ironyis?
Attachmate is a venture capital firm, which means:
- They're loaded but you never heard of them, - VCs usually buy or invest in a company to make a lot of money quickly, - If Novell's market cap doesn't increase a lot soon, or they don't turn a huge profit soon (fat chance), they're hosed, like most companies taken over by VC money.
In short, expect Novell to be up for sale within 3 years.
but will be able to catch up with real world, performance-degraded humans considerably faster...
If you'd ever watched a semi truck driver cross the country non-stop running on speed (the driver, not the truck), you'd know it's possible to extend the number of hours a human can perform without significantly degraded performances. In my youth, I've always preferred hitching a ride with a truck driver than ride the bus, as I would invariably get there faster, and I never really felt unsafe.
As for the economics of autonomous vehicles, they'll become commonplace when
- a human behind the wheel is massively more expensive than the computer solution, - people get over their fear of runaway machines, - drivers unions are squashed
In short, it's not gonna happen anytime soon. Heck, even trains, the one kind of vehicle that could drive itself completely safely today, are still manned by "drivers" who spend their time pushing a button to tell the computer they're still alive, because passengers would be scared without drivers and unions prevent their removal from the trains.
Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that this law will be applied WAY more often to fight torrent sites than it will ever be used to fight actual terrorists?
Torrent sites that aren't taken over by russian virus makers, where the files you download are guaranteed genuine and not cheap porn movies that have been renamed, certified safe by the government? Yeah, I'm all for that.
Unless I can use it to "see" through the walls of the girls locker-room, then its not X-Ray vision
You didn't specify if the girls in the locker room should remain unaware of your watching them. Cuz if don't, a large lump hammer is enough to see through the wall, no need for X-rays...
The first customer will either be the TSA or some branch of the military.
High-tech companies would invent anything that would sell to any agency vaguely related to counter-terrorism or warfare these days. If they poured a tenth of the resources they spent developing this kind of devices into finding solutions to the world's real problems, we'd all be cancer-free and solar-powered by now...
I highly doubt that someone in the public eye as much as Assange (not to mention someone who is under a microscope already) would have something to do with rape.
Yeah, public figures who do bad thing, that could neverhappen...
Fix the OS, and botnets will pop up on a different OS
That is indeed the common wisdom. However, somehow I'm not convinced that's entirely true: Linux and MacOS machines have been around for a long time, and even if the represent a small (albeit growing) segment of the market, they're there and you'd think many pieces of malware would have cropped up on these platforms already. Yet it just hasn't happened: there are some, but nowhere near what you'd expect if the latter OSes were as insecure as Windows.
The other wisdom is that Windows is insecure because Windows users don't know jack squat and can't take care of their own security. That too I think isn't true: there are a lot of Windows users who can and do take precautions, and setup accounts with limited rights and whatnot. It goes a long way to curb malware infestations, yet those Windows boxes still get infected. At any rate, if indeed Windows is insecure because it has to stay simple, it means that in 25 years Microsoft still hasn't figured out a way to cater to noobs without compromising security, which is pathetic.
There's a reason why running an antivirus and a firewall is an absolute necessity only on Windows...
The real shocking truth here is that one single OS harbors the vast majority of botnets and viruses. That OS should be the real target, not ISPs or poor users or something. Sheesh...
AC is right on the money there. Open-source software has come such a long way that Microsoft products and business are entirely avoidable these days, and therefore are no longer a threat. Google is the true danger of the age because they're fast on the way to make off-line applications obsolete altogether and render the open-source vs. closed source debate moot, as we'll have to swallow their online applications shenanigans without being able to do a thing about it.
Benchmarks are very nice and all, but in the end, users using different browsers for real should decide which *feels* faster or better (which isn't the same as being faster or better). If real-world users can't feel the difference, then benchmarks are just there for masturbation value, and quite frankly, on reasonably modern hardware, I've never felt any true difference in rendering speed between the various "big" browsers out there.
I reckon the only thing that truly matters is the speed at which a browser starts up without prefetching (another semi-dishonest technique used by Microsoft for years to make users believe their products start so much faster than the competition incidentally).
Then how come they have never been able to write a better OS than, say, Linux?
Look, I use Linux and I like it as much as the next guy, and I hate to break it to you, but Windows hasn't sucked since XP came out. It's actually a very decent and stable platform nowadays, and has been for a very long time.
The other thing is, most people think it's just natural that they can run Windows 7 on an 64-bit machine and run any old software made for XP-x86 or Vista, perhaps even Win 95 (I haven't tried) without problem. The level of backward-compatibility almost every release of Windows since 3.11 has managed to achieve is nothing short of amazing. Just ask a Mac guy who had to ditch his software collection every time Apple released a new MacOS... People don't give Microsoft enough credit for *that* marvel of engineering, because believe it or not, it works so well that people take it for granted. Me, it never ceases to amaze me...
This said, I prefer to run Linux for other reasons (chiefly that I can tinker, tweak it better than Windows and code for it without paying through the nose), but if I have work to do and Windows is the platform of choice, I use it because it works. I suggest you drop the Linux fanboi attitude if you want to be taken seriously when you talk about Microsoft.
what's going to happen is M$ is going to take the code and use it to add new features to Kinect in future releases
No they won't. Microsoft is notoriously unable to reuse free (as in libre) software that can't be repackaged into a binary that they can sell for $$$ without releasing the source code for. It's just impossible for them because of their very nature as a closed-source software vendor. Any GPL code out there will not be touched by Microsoft with a 10 foot pole.
Also, if Microsoft wants to create high-tech apps for the Kinect, they have all the available R&D resources to do it on their own. There are a lot of very very smart people working for Microsoft, and if a bunch of unpaid hackers can turn the Kinect into something useful in a matter of hours, so can the Microsoft PhDs and code monkeys.
I'm going to create my new product - The "Social Toilet" - it's a cubicle that everyone can share and allows you to twitter, facebook, search and share your poop. I'm going to need about $10 million to get me started.
Call it Poop 2.0. Anything-two-oh attracts investors.
Slashdot Mirror
It's increasingly looking like Android is fast cornering the vast majority of the tablet market (and by tablet, I mean regular tablet, e-book readers and anything that doesn't have a keyboard and mouse, or an intel CPU).
Frankly, I prefer an old, well-known, slowly dying monopoly like Microsoft than the fast, aggressive, secretive, personal-data-hungry and quite frankly worrying Google monopoly.
The first application I see is *finally* a decent braille screen for the blind. They can even dispense with the LCD screen altogether, to make the device affordable.
Sit on the display in a night club: the ambient black light projectors will turn it into a vibrating cushion.
all you would need is a dataset of all the interesting things that happened. Your dad tying his shoelaces is in no way interesting
It's all a matter of perspective: my dad tying his shoelaces would have been a major achievement, considering he had Parkinson's diseases.
In the same vein, consider, for instance, a bedouin, constantly on the move in the desert, who doesn't have access to any newspaper, TV, and pretty much doesn't know or give a fuck about anything outside his little world of camels and trading. For this guy, 9/11 was a completely ordinary day.
Despite what most westerners believe, it turns out that most things we consider important and newsworthy aren't even known to the vast majority of the world's population. So the most boring day picked up by Cambridge was only boring to people who share Cambridge's worldviews.
What's wrong with hiring flesh and blood people to combat poaching? With over 25% unemployment, you'd think the government could hire people to take them off the unemployed statistics, and for a lot cheaper than the cost of a UAV + salary of its remote pilot.
It sounds awfully like a scheme to help a national company who can't sell enough stuff on the private market to stay afloat. Kind of like the french Rafale airplane, produced by Dassault, whose only customer is the french military.
Your link is wrong, it doesn't even mention the .uk TLD.
Yes, oddly enough, I looked long and hard for an article on British war crimes on mil.uk but couldn't find any...
This shows how well prepared is the british police to deal with matters regarding the internet: I reckon they never heard of the hosts file or, for an URL only, favorites. Such simple minds... life for them must be a permanent bliss.
They're simple minds eh? Do you know what irony is?
Many, many rogues sites don't have a fixed IP.
More ironically, does that include mil.uk
If it had KDE, you'd need a 3GHz i7 and a NVidia GTX480 just to open the fridge in less than a minute.
Attachmate is a venture capital firm, which means:
- They're loaded but you never heard of them,
- VCs usually buy or invest in a company to make a lot of money quickly,
- If Novell's market cap doesn't increase a lot soon, or they don't turn a huge profit soon (fat chance), they're hosed, like most companies taken over by VC money.
In short, expect Novell to be up for sale within 3 years.
but will be able to catch up with real world, performance-degraded humans considerably faster...
If you'd ever watched a semi truck driver cross the country non-stop running on speed (the driver, not the truck), you'd know it's possible to extend the number of hours a human can perform without significantly degraded performances. In my youth, I've always preferred hitching a ride with a truck driver than ride the bus, as I would invariably get there faster, and I never really felt unsafe.
As for the economics of autonomous vehicles, they'll become commonplace when
- a human behind the wheel is massively more expensive than the computer solution,
- people get over their fear of runaway machines,
- drivers unions are squashed
In short, it's not gonna happen anytime soon. Heck, even trains, the one kind of vehicle that could drive itself completely safely today, are still manned by "drivers" who spend their time pushing a button to tell the computer they're still alive, because passengers would be scared without drivers and unions prevent their removal from the trains.
Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that this law will be applied WAY more often to fight torrent sites than it will ever be used to fight actual terrorists?
Torrent sites that aren't taken over by russian virus makers, where the files you download are guaranteed genuine and not cheap porn movies that have been renamed, certified safe by the government? Yeah, I'm all for that.
If that just means new security standards that companies have to meet, then I can't see the harm in that
When the standards are defined and enforced by incompetents, they tend to be useless, costly and bad for productivity.
a deaf man telling others how to sing. Maybe they should get their act together before giving lessons...
Unless I can use it to "see" through the walls of the girls locker-room, then its not X-Ray vision
You didn't specify if the girls in the locker room should remain unaware of your watching them. Cuz if don't, a large lump hammer is enough to see through the wall, no need for X-rays...
The first customer will either be the TSA or some branch of the military.
High-tech companies would invent anything that would sell to any agency vaguely related to counter-terrorism or warfare these days. If they poured a tenth of the resources they spent developing this kind of devices into finding solutions to the world's real problems, we'd all be cancer-free and solar-powered by now...
Assange allegedly replied, "[citation needed]"
"But officer... she said she loved every minute of it!" -- Julian Assange
I highly doubt that someone in the public eye as much as Assange (not to mention someone who is under a microscope already) would have something to do with rape.
Yeah, public figures who do bad thing, that could never happen...
Fix the OS, and botnets will pop up on a different OS
That is indeed the common wisdom. However, somehow I'm not convinced that's entirely true: Linux and MacOS machines have been around for a long time, and even if the represent a small (albeit growing) segment of the market, they're there and you'd think many pieces of malware would have cropped up on these platforms already. Yet it just hasn't happened: there are some, but nowhere near what you'd expect if the latter OSes were as insecure as Windows.
The other wisdom is that Windows is insecure because Windows users don't know jack squat and can't take care of their own security. That too I think isn't true: there are a lot of Windows users who can and do take precautions, and setup accounts with limited rights and whatnot. It goes a long way to curb malware infestations, yet those Windows boxes still get infected. At any rate, if indeed Windows is insecure because it has to stay simple, it means that in 25 years Microsoft still hasn't figured out a way to cater to noobs without compromising security, which is pathetic.
There's a reason why running an antivirus and a firewall is an absolute necessity only on Windows...
The real shocking truth here is that one single OS harbors the vast majority of botnets and viruses. That OS should be the real target, not ISPs or poor users or something. Sheesh...
AC is right on the money there. Open-source software has come such a long way that Microsoft products and business are entirely avoidable these days, and therefore are no longer a threat. Google is the true danger of the age because they're fast on the way to make off-line applications obsolete altogether and render the open-source vs. closed source debate moot, as we'll have to swallow their online applications shenanigans without being able to do a thing about it.
Benchmarks are very nice and all, but in the end, users using different browsers for real should decide which *feels* faster or better (which isn't the same as being faster or better). If real-world users can't feel the difference, then benchmarks are just there for masturbation value, and quite frankly, on reasonably modern hardware, I've never felt any true difference in rendering speed between the various "big" browsers out there.
I reckon the only thing that truly matters is the speed at which a browser starts up without prefetching (another semi-dishonest technique used by Microsoft for years to make users believe their products start so much faster than the competition incidentally).
Then how come they have never been able to write a better OS than, say, Linux?
Look, I use Linux and I like it as much as the next guy, and I hate to break it to you, but Windows hasn't sucked since XP came out. It's actually a very decent and stable platform nowadays, and has been for a very long time.
The other thing is, most people think it's just natural that they can run Windows 7 on an 64-bit machine and run any old software made for XP-x86 or Vista, perhaps even Win 95 (I haven't tried) without problem. The level of backward-compatibility almost every release of Windows since 3.11 has managed to achieve is nothing short of amazing. Just ask a Mac guy who had to ditch his software collection every time Apple released a new MacOS... People don't give Microsoft enough credit for *that* marvel of engineering, because believe it or not, it works so well that people take it for granted. Me, it never ceases to amaze me...
This said, I prefer to run Linux for other reasons (chiefly that I can tinker, tweak it better than Windows and code for it without paying through the nose), but if I have work to do and Windows is the platform of choice, I use it because it works. I suggest you drop the Linux fanboi attitude if you want to be taken seriously when you talk about Microsoft.
what's going to happen is M$ is going to take the code and use it to add new features to Kinect in future releases
No they won't. Microsoft is notoriously unable to reuse free (as in libre) software that can't be repackaged into a binary that they can sell for $$$ without releasing the source code for. It's just impossible for them because of their very nature as a closed-source software vendor. Any GPL code out there will not be touched by Microsoft with a 10 foot pole.
Also, if Microsoft wants to create high-tech apps for the Kinect, they have all the available R&D resources to do it on their own. There are a lot of very very smart people working for Microsoft, and if a bunch of unpaid hackers can turn the Kinect into something useful in a matter of hours, so can the Microsoft PhDs and code monkeys.
I'm going to create my new product - The "Social Toilet" - it's a cubicle that everyone can share and allows you to twitter, facebook, search and share your poop. I'm going to need about $10 million to get me started.
Call it Poop 2.0. Anything-two-oh attracts investors.