When did the word "dongle" become a synonym for...?
The moment the first dongle first dangled from the first computer that it was attached to.
Well, actually it was the moment the second dongle first dangled from the first computer it was attached to, otherwise there'd have been nothing for it to be synonymous with, but this statement lacks the poetic elegance of the first.
I just spent 30 seconds trying (and failing) to locate an alternative that was being pushed in France in the 80s. It looked like two modern gaming mice, with a ton of buttons that were easy to access without moving your fingers too much. You could create a lot of different inputs with button combinations. I wasted a few days getting better at the contraption than anyone I knew. My father saw me, and asked me to spent eight hours getting better at using a keyboard. Guess what turned out to be faster, more accurate, and not noticeably more tiring?
Are you talking about a chording keyboard, perhaps? They still exist in various forms, though it looks like the design of them has actually gone backwards in the last 20 years. They service a niche (at least) in that you can type with one hand and, since you're holding it in your hand, they do not require a surface to rest on. However, the number of people that can't get by without typing as they walk etc. is pretty damn small.
As for the rest of your post, yup. Keyboards are not going anywhere.
Better tell that to the parents of the Adderall generation Mr Mackey.
What, they're too whacked on Oxy to care?
Just what is it that you want to do? Well, we wanna be free, we wanna be free to do what we wanna do And we wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time
The thing that surprised me most about this whole affair was that no-one seems to have modified a gunfire location system to see where these sounds originated.
I understand that ensuring the safety of your diplomatic staff is of primary concern but, given the US's traditional response to threats, I'd have expected a 'squad' of marines or a pair of men in dark glasses knocking on the door of room 623 in the overlooking office block* within a week of 'hearing' the sounds.
*An example. Not the actual location of the origin of the sounds, as far as I know...
Hyperloop One is based on air bearings for suspension to avoid the need for (expensive) maglev...
"Hyperloop" One, however, is a standard maglev vactrain, and an old concept.
You seem to contradict yourself here.
I think you mean Hyperloop Alpha was based on air bearings, while the spin-off, Hyperloop One, uses magnetic levitation. A third option, Hyperloop Cheetah uses wheels, and substitutes low pressure steam for low pressure air within the tunnel.
To be honest I see no benefit to maglev, but could see a combination of steam bearings and a low pressure steam filled tube as having potential. Having said that there are many downsides to the steam option which pretty much balance the reduced pumping costs.
I am also very skeptical of the use of water / steam as a medium for dumping energy within the capsule in Hyperloop Alpha, rather than a salt, and there are huge issues with all of the proposals when it comes to the design of the stations and airlocks. Of course these are not insurmountable but there are a number of obvious (to me) issues that I've not seen anyone address yet.
Finally, while it clearly would be cheaper to build the tunnels above ground, and doing so does allow you to put solar panels on top to supply all the power for the system it is also considerably less safe, no easier when it comes to permitting, and massively exacerbates the issues of thermal expansion - which would vanish almost entirely if the pipes were buried.
It is nice to see interest from potentially serious investors however. It might mean that this goes from a pipe dream to a practical reality within my lifetime, and, if not, it will absolutely prove, without any doubt, that settlement of Mars is currently beyond us, as many of the technical challenges that need to be overcome are essentially the same.
For someone who clearly thinks they're one of the smart people your posts demonstrate a remarkable lack of vision, a dearth of wisdom, and a stunning disregard for the welfare of other human beings.
You should probably let go of some of your bitterness and bile, before you do yourself (or others) an injury...
Over the past few years I've watched with a kind of sickened admiration as Amazon has grown from an online bookstore to a purveyor of 'all things'. Really, their expansion to a definitely-not-a-monopoly player within a market, their subsequent embrace of another market, followed by expansion within that market, and so on, is a thing of beauty. In a sense it's been like watching the growth and evolution of a living organism.
One perfect example of this effect hit the news only the other day: After its retail sales had reached a certain size it made perfect sense, from an economies of scale perspective, for it to start performing its own logistics and deliveries to the detriment of long standing logistics companies. The obvious end point, again benefiting from economies of scale, is to then actually enter the logistics business.
I can't help feeling like a bit of a doomsayer here, but we all know the step that follows embrace and extend.
I suspect that I know what some of you are thinking right now: Amazon is not a monopoly. Amazon has tons of competition. Amazon isn't anything like Microsoft. Amazon doesn't even make a profit. (I could go on, but I'll save us all the time...)
I know Amazon is not a monopoly, any more than (another perfect example of the strategy) Google is. They're very cleverly making sure of that. Any time they're in danger of being considered a monopoly they simply expand into another market and bingo they're in competition with dozens of other players. As this market consolidates, or rather as Amazon (or Google) grows into the main player in this market, they expand into another.
I must admit though I hadn't thought of prescription drugs (although I had wondered about when or if they'd start selling pot - in the US at least) as one of their next markets. Somewhat blinkered there. And I'd actually thought they'd go with fairly high quality frozen ready meals first, rather than outright buy a supermarket chain. Just goes to show I wasn't thinking Bezo's-big enough.
^ And it's this last thought that's starting to worry me!
First off, Volkswagen's current liability scandal estimate is ~$30 billion, and that number seems to grow every quarter
Well, that I didn't know, so thanks. I haven't actually paid that much attention to the ongoing fallout - they did wrong; they got caught; they got, financially, punitively punished; the executives essentially got away with it. Not worth worrying about further.
Also, as you alluded, ARM is British - distinct from Europe these days.
Despite what you might have heard, or what you might believe, the UK is still part of Europe, and still part of the European Union. It will remain part of the EU for at least another 18(ish) months.
And what is ARM, in the actual context of Europe or the UK? Virtually all the outfit's design, engineering, and production facilities are overseas.
Given that the original article is about Apple, and your comment is from from the perspective of "us not-any-brand of socialist coal-burner Americans" let's turn this nugget around shall we? And what is Apple in the actual context of Europe or the US? Virtually all the outfit's design, engineering, and production facilities are overseas.
Although the design and engineering parts aren't, in the case of either ARM (Cambridge, UK) or Apple (CA, USA). But please don't let facts get in the way of your rhetoric.
1) Despite the name, there just isn't that much lithium in a lithium-ion battery
Just the other day I read the following figures: "Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) 70kWh Model S battery pack contains 63Kg of lithium, equivalent to the amount of lithium in 10,000 cellphones"
Granted, this was in the same advertorial that claimed: "Lithium brine deposits are estimated to contain 66 percent of the world's 14 million metric tonnes (MT) of Lithium" so I am inclined to take their figures with a pinch of salt (no pun intended). After all, combining both of their numbers means there's only enough lithium on the planet to 'power' 220 million electric cars. Oops!
One also imagines that the effort involved in extracting lithium from seawater increases (and the extraction rate decreases) as concentrations decrease. It will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few years, especially once one (and more) of Elon's Gigafactories come online.
Biggest corporate news out of Europe, about European company, that I can think about in past couple years is Volkswagen and their vast emissions scandal.
The clue is in the last word of this sentence: scandal!
Scandal sells stories.
The biggest news of the last couple of years out of Europe, about a European company, that I can think of would be the sale of ARM* to a Japanese firm (SoftBank) for £24 billion (and then the subsequent sale of 25% of it to a Saudi backed Investment fund - although, tbf, that's no longer 'European' news). The cash involved, and to a lesser degree the implications, dwarf the numbers relating to the VW affair. That you were unable to bring it to mind when trying to think of news about European companies merely highlights my first point.
*If you need to ask who ARM is, or what they do... try to imagine your current favourite smart phone without its processor.
The illusion that each healthy uninjured human body has one integrated consciousness is a complete fantasy. Injuries and other pathologies expose this fact in interesting ways, but fragmented and incomplete consciousness is the normal way of being for all of us."
A good way to see the separation is to compare desire vs behavior.
This might be simply an artifact of the way my brain works but I'll put it out here and you can try it for yourselves...
Perhaps a simpler way of seeing this separation is to do the following: Lie on one side for a few minutes, and let your mind find a train of thought. Follow that train for a little while. Now, roll over and lie on your other side. After you're comfortably settled ask yourself: Are your thoughts still on the same track?
For me the answer is invariably "no". I suspect it has to do with blood flows within the brain but short of sticking myself in an MRI or PET scanner while trying it I can't be sure. Either way it's an interesting phenomenon and actually quite useful if I want to get a different 'perspective' or disengage an 'unproductive' line of thought.
This company makes graphene for use in carbon fibres and plastics, although as far as I can tell it's still fairly early days and hence small scale. The parent company also makes graphene impregnated inks for printable electronic circuitry amongst other things.
I think there's still stumbling blocks to making vast amounts of the stuff, and the companies linked above hold patents on some current manufacturing processes, which might be delaying further wide scale development.
I think it's fair to say that working with stuff at essentially the atomic level is tricky, but we're getting there. Manufacturing techniques are (by my reading anyway) proving to be the main stumbling block. If this becomes a 'solved' problem the sky's the limit (well space's the limit at that point...).
If only the UK government would pull their fingers out of their collective arses and give it the final go-ahead.
*In brief: Construction costs £1.3 billion; Estimated lifespan (tbh I'm a tad skeptical of this figure) 120 years; 'Capacity' of 320 MW (which they estimate to provide power for 155,000 homes - think it's more like 60,000 based on your calculations).
Sometimes I wonder at the priorities of those in government, then I remember: stay in power, make out like a bandit. Having a sensible energy policy comes a long long way down the list!
How come my 12 year old Lexus had auto-levelling head lights and windshield wiper sensors but still most economy vehicles don't have these features?
Because these are not safety features*, they are 'bragging rights', hence they have not been legally mandated, unlike seat belts and air bags.
As an aside, and I'm sure it's just me, whenever I read about windshield wiper sensors I have to wonder at the sheer laziness implicit in a technology that does away with the need to reach out with a single finger, with no additional need to move your hand, in order to move a lever approximately 1 cm. I idly wonder what other wiping functions we can replace next...
*OK auto-leveling headlights might be considered a safety feature, but not in 99% of common driving situations. The nanny state will have to dig quite a bit further into its rabbit hole before it starts mandating them for all cars.
When a safer (but not perfect) alternative in vaping is being blocked by the FDA?
The funny thing is, if "under the terms of that law, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would have the authority to approve or deny any new tobacco products introduced after February 15, 2007" is essentially the whole of the law (barring the legalese) then it doesn't apply to 'electronic cigarettes', only to (some of) the liquids used in them, after all there's no tobacco and no nicotine in an 'e-cig', or in many of the liquids used in them. As long as at least one manufacturer of the nicotine liquids applies for, and is granted, regulatory approval there will be refills available for all makes and models of device, whether that be an existing device or one introduced in the future.
Having said that, I am, largely, playing Devil's Advocate, I haven't read the full law, and I can see numerous problems inherent in 'simplifying' to the letter of the law as I have.
Ah, that's right, they don't care about anything anymore, as they're dead.
And, please, before you point out that this was so long ago, way back in 2003, and thus not relevant or important, do at least try to remember that people might want to turn the air conditioning on before the temperature gets hot enough to kill...
Slashdot Mirror
When did the word "dongle" become a synonym for ...?
The moment the first dongle first dangled from the first computer that it was attached to.
Well, actually it was the moment the second dongle first dangled from the first computer it was attached to, otherwise there'd have been nothing for it to be synonymous with, but this statement lacks the poetic elegance of the first.
...but they don't know whether Tulip and Blue are my cats or my kids.
The former I hope!
D
I just spent 30 seconds trying (and failing) to locate an alternative that was being pushed in France in the 80s. It looked like two modern gaming mice, with a ton of buttons that were easy to access without moving your fingers too much. You could create a lot of different inputs with button combinations. I wasted a few days getting better at the contraption than anyone I knew. My father saw me, and asked me to spent eight hours getting better at using a keyboard. Guess what turned out to be faster, more accurate, and not noticeably more tiring?
Are you talking about a chording keyboard, perhaps? They still exist in various forms, though it looks like the design of them has actually gone backwards in the last 20 years. They service a niche (at least) in that you can type with one hand and, since you're holding it in your hand, they do not require a surface to rest on. However, the number of people that can't get by without typing as they walk etc. is pretty damn small.
As for the rest of your post, yup. Keyboards are not going anywhere.
I hope everyone's insurance is up to date...
Pardon, that was a feature, not a bug.
No, they were definitely Doodle Bugs.
Better tell that to the parents of the Adderall generation Mr Mackey.
What, they're too whacked on Oxy to care?
Just what is it that you want to do?
Well, we wanna be free, we wanna be free to do what we wanna do
And we wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time
The thing that surprised me most about this whole affair was that no-one seems to have modified a gunfire location system to see where these sounds originated.
I understand that ensuring the safety of your diplomatic staff is of primary concern but, given the US's traditional response to threats, I'd have expected a 'squad' of marines or a pair of men in dark glasses knocking on the door of room 623 in the overlooking office block* within a week of 'hearing' the sounds.
*An example. Not the actual location of the origin of the sounds, as far as I know...
Hyperloop One is based on air bearings for suspension to avoid the need for (expensive) maglev ...
"Hyperloop" One, however, is a standard maglev vactrain, and an old concept.
You seem to contradict yourself here.
I think you mean Hyperloop Alpha was based on air bearings, while the spin-off, Hyperloop One, uses magnetic levitation. A third option, Hyperloop Cheetah uses wheels, and substitutes low pressure steam for low pressure air within the tunnel.
To be honest I see no benefit to maglev, but could see a combination of steam bearings and a low pressure steam filled tube as having potential. Having said that there are many downsides to the steam option which pretty much balance the reduced pumping costs.
I am also very skeptical of the use of water / steam as a medium for dumping energy within the capsule in Hyperloop Alpha, rather than a salt, and there are huge issues with all of the proposals when it comes to the design of the stations and airlocks. Of course these are not insurmountable but there are a number of obvious (to me) issues that I've not seen anyone address yet.
Finally, while it clearly would be cheaper to build the tunnels above ground, and doing so does allow you to put solar panels on top to supply all the power for the system it is also considerably less safe, no easier when it comes to permitting, and massively exacerbates the issues of thermal expansion - which would vanish almost entirely if the pipes were buried.
It is nice to see interest from potentially serious investors however. It might mean that this goes from a pipe dream to a practical reality within my lifetime, and, if not, it will absolutely prove, without any doubt, that settlement of Mars is currently beyond us, as many of the technical challenges that need to be overcome are essentially the same.
I really don't know how else to say this.
For someone who clearly thinks they're one of the smart people your posts demonstrate a remarkable lack of vision, a dearth of wisdom, and a stunning disregard for the welfare of other human beings.
You should probably let go of some of your bitterness and bile, before you do yourself (or others) an injury...
Over the past few years I've watched with a kind of sickened admiration as Amazon has grown from an online bookstore to a purveyor of 'all things'. Really, their expansion to a definitely-not-a-monopoly player within a market, their subsequent embrace of another market, followed by expansion within that market, and so on, is a thing of beauty. In a sense it's been like watching the growth and evolution of a living organism.
One perfect example of this effect hit the news only the other day: After its retail sales had reached a certain size it made perfect sense, from an economies of scale perspective, for it to start performing its own logistics and deliveries to the detriment of long standing logistics companies. The obvious end point, again benefiting from economies of scale, is to then actually enter the logistics business.
I can't help feeling like a bit of a doomsayer here, but we all know the step that follows embrace and extend.
I suspect that I know what some of you are thinking right now: Amazon is not a monopoly. Amazon has tons of competition. Amazon isn't anything like Microsoft. Amazon doesn't even make a profit. (I could go on, but I'll save us all the time...)
I know Amazon is not a monopoly, any more than (another perfect example of the strategy) Google is. They're very cleverly making sure of that. Any time they're in danger of being considered a monopoly they simply expand into another market and bingo they're in competition with dozens of other players. As this market consolidates, or rather as Amazon (or Google) grows into the main player in this market, they expand into another.
I must admit though I hadn't thought of prescription drugs (although I had wondered about when or if they'd start selling pot - in the US at least) as one of their next markets. Somewhat blinkered there. And I'd actually thought they'd go with fairly high quality frozen ready meals first, rather than outright buy a supermarket chain. Just goes to show I wasn't thinking Bezo's-big enough.
^ And it's this last thought that's starting to worry me!
First off, Volkswagen's current liability scandal estimate is ~$30 billion, and that number seems to grow every quarter
Well, that I didn't know, so thanks. I haven't actually paid that much attention to the ongoing fallout - they did wrong; they got caught; they got, financially, punitively punished; the executives essentially got away with it. Not worth worrying about further.
Also, as you alluded, ARM is British - distinct from Europe these days.
Despite what you might have heard, or what you might believe, the UK is still part of Europe, and still part of the European Union. It will remain part of the EU for at least another 18(ish) months.
And what is ARM, in the actual context of Europe or the UK? Virtually all the outfit's design, engineering, and production facilities are overseas.
Given that the original article is about Apple, and your comment is from from the perspective of "us not-any-brand of socialist coal-burner Americans" let's turn this nugget around shall we? And what is Apple in the actual context of Europe or the US? Virtually all the outfit's design, engineering, and production facilities are overseas.
Although the design and engineering parts aren't, in the case of either ARM (Cambridge, UK) or Apple (CA, USA). But please don't let facts get in the way of your rhetoric.
batteries get heavier as they discharge...
Instinctively this just sounds wrong.
I mean seriously wrong!
Even if electrons had negative mass, and were actually 'used up' in providing power, I'd still think something were wrong...
Can someone help me out here?
1) Despite the name, there just isn't that much lithium in a lithium-ion battery
Just the other day I read the following figures: "Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) 70kWh Model S battery pack contains 63Kg of lithium, equivalent to the amount of lithium in 10,000 cellphones"
Granted, this was in the same advertorial that claimed: "Lithium brine deposits are estimated to contain 66 percent of the world's 14 million metric tonnes (MT) of Lithium" so I am inclined to take their figures with a pinch of salt (no pun intended). After all, combining both of their numbers means there's only enough lithium on the planet to 'power' 220 million electric cars. Oops!
One also imagines that the effort involved in extracting lithium from seawater increases (and the extraction rate decreases) as concentrations decrease. It will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few years, especially once one (and more) of Elon's Gigafactories come online.
Even when half your 'friends' no longer come out to play anymore.
Biggest corporate news out of Europe, about European company, that I can think about in past couple years is Volkswagen and their vast emissions scandal.
The clue is in the last word of this sentence: scandal!
Scandal sells stories.
The biggest news of the last couple of years out of Europe, about a European company, that I can think of would be the sale of ARM* to a Japanese firm (SoftBank) for £24 billion (and then the subsequent sale of 25% of it to a Saudi backed Investment fund - although, tbf, that's no longer 'European' news). The cash involved, and to a lesser degree the implications, dwarf the numbers relating to the VW affair. That you were unable to bring it to mind when trying to think of news about European companies merely highlights my first point.
*If you need to ask who ARM is, or what they do ... try to imagine your current favourite smart phone without its processor.
The illusion that each healthy uninjured human body has one integrated consciousness is a complete fantasy. Injuries and other pathologies expose this fact in interesting ways, but fragmented and incomplete consciousness is the normal way of being for all of us."
A good way to see the separation is to compare desire vs behavior.
This might be simply an artifact of the way my brain works but I'll put it out here and you can try it for yourselves...
Perhaps a simpler way of seeing this separation is to do the following: Lie on one side for a few minutes, and let your mind find a train of thought. Follow that train for a little while. Now, roll over and lie on your other side. After you're comfortably settled ask yourself: Are your thoughts still on the same track?
For me the answer is invariably "no". I suspect it has to do with blood flows within the brain but short of sticking myself in an MRI or PET scanner while trying it I can't be sure. Either way it's an interesting phenomenon and actually quite useful if I want to get a different 'perspective' or disengage an 'unproductive' line of thought.
Thanks, I think (bloody geoblocking...)
I'll find a US proxy at some point and give it a look.
This company makes graphene for use in carbon fibres and plastics, although as far as I can tell it's still fairly early days and hence small scale. The parent company also makes graphene impregnated inks for printable electronic circuitry amongst other things.
I think there's still stumbling blocks to making vast amounts of the stuff, and the companies linked above hold patents on some current manufacturing processes, which might be delaying further wide scale development.
I think it's fair to say that working with stuff at essentially the atomic level is tricky, but we're getting there. Manufacturing techniques are (by my reading anyway) proving to be the main stumbling block. If this becomes a 'solved' problem the sky's the limit (well space's the limit at that point...).
Another interesting comparison* would be with the proposed Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon.
If only the UK government would pull their fingers out of their collective arses and give it the final go-ahead.
*In brief: Construction costs £1.3 billion; Estimated lifespan (tbh I'm a tad skeptical of this figure) 120 years; 'Capacity' of 320 MW (which they estimate to provide power for 155,000 homes - think it's more like 60,000 based on your calculations).
Sometimes I wonder at the priorities of those in government, then I remember: stay in power, make out like a bandit. Having a sensible energy policy comes a long long way down the list!
People in big European cities...
In the UK...
While you are quite correct about temperatures in the UK, I think that this is what's referred to as moving the goal posts.
That's why you have Pirates of the Caribbean and not Her Majesty's Ships of the Caribbean.
And once more reality (shows) are stranger than fiction...
How come my 12 year old Lexus had auto-levelling head lights and windshield wiper sensors but still most economy vehicles don't have these features?
Because these are not safety features*, they are 'bragging rights', hence they have not been legally mandated, unlike seat belts and air bags.
As an aside, and I'm sure it's just me, whenever I read about windshield wiper sensors I have to wonder at the sheer laziness implicit in a technology that does away with the need to reach out with a single finger, with no additional need to move your hand, in order to move a lever approximately 1 cm. I idly wonder what other wiping functions we can replace next...
*OK auto-leveling headlights might be considered a safety feature, but not in 99% of common driving situations. The nanny state will have to dig quite a bit further into its rabbit hole before it starts mandating them for all cars.
Going way off topic here but:
When a safer (but not perfect) alternative in vaping is being blocked by the FDA?
The funny thing is, if "under the terms of that law, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would have the authority to approve or deny any new tobacco products introduced after February 15, 2007" is essentially the whole of the law (barring the legalese) then it doesn't apply to 'electronic cigarettes', only to (some of) the liquids used in them, after all there's no tobacco and no nicotine in an 'e-cig', or in many of the liquids used in them. As long as at least one manufacturer of the nicotine liquids applies for, and is granted, regulatory approval there will be refills available for all makes and models of device, whether that be an existing device or one introduced in the future.
Having said that, I am, largely, playing Devil's Advocate, I haven't read the full law, and I can see numerous problems inherent in 'simplifying' to the letter of the law as I have.
People in big European cities don't care about ... AC.
Are you sure about that? What about these people?
Ah, that's right, they don't care about anything anymore, as they're dead.
And, please, before you point out that this was so long ago, way back in 2003, and thus not relevant or important, do at least try to remember that people might want to turn the air conditioning on before the temperature gets hot enough to kill...
Perhaps a âoegreater thanâ and âoeless thanâ pair would be filtered out by /. HTML parser?
Yeah, they are. You have to use > followed by a semicolon for > and < followed by a semicolon for <
God only knows what /. did to your post though (unless you meant to type repeated "a-circumflexes" that is)...