So what would people do if they knew what to do? Would they hold a planning/coordination meeting where each neighbour gets assigned a channel, or what?
Dialing the time was popular long before the 80's, and in fact by the 80's I recall it being much less used, even if it still existed. I remember dialing the time as being more of a 1960's and 70's thing.
I suppose next you're going to tell me that people nowadays don't understand why it's called "dialing" a number. Or why it was faster to dial a number with lots of low digits than lots of high digits.
You probably got a TV with teletext sometime in the 1970's or 80's that told you the time. IIRC lower end TV:s did not ship with teletext well into the 1990's.
What I find really interesting is not the linked article itself, but the one right below it on Scania's new inductively-charged bus.If we can inductively supply power to buses, why can't we supply power to trains in the same way, even if just for urban light rail? Getting rid of the pantographs and that nineteenth-century tangle of overhead wires would make mass transit cheaper and more esthetically acceptable.
The cost per km of track would be prohibitively high. It's cheaper to just use conductive propulsion with a third rail divided into isolated sections that power up when a rail vehicle passes over them.
Doesn't matter very much, honestly. Even 100% coal powered electric vehicles are cleaner than gasoline or diesel, and electric vehicles will improve as the cost of wind, solar, etc continue to drop.
Maybe so in Sweden where coal plants are forced to install good smoke scrubbers and to double as district heat sources. That is not exactly the arrangement that they have in China or India. They just spew out the smoke with little to no scrubbing. A gasoline car will certainly be a lot cleaner than a 100% coal powered electric car under those circumstances.
Yeah. Why reinvent something that works? It seems like it might be good way to power large trucks. A good use case would be a road between a mine and a port. Roads are a lot cheaper to build than railways and can be built more rapidly.
The other obvious way of building an electric road is to put conductors in the road itself. This could work for regular cars as well as trucks and buses. These people are working on that: http://elways.se/?lang=en
A lot of companies that make Android tablets over-estimated the market size and rushed to marked with less than stellar devices. Then the market turned out to be a lot smaller and a lot more crowded than most of them had predicted. So they stopped investing in Android tablet hardware development. I think most of the Android tablets that you seen on store shelves now are probably basically 2012 models with some slight modifications. Of course they're under-powered compared to smartphones from 2015 and 2016 that have much more RAM and more powerful CPU:s.
Some exceptions: Lenovo's new models. Their screens are not great, but they're okay for indoor use. The Nvidia Shield K1. Samsung's high end models, if you want to spend iPad-levels of cash on an Android tablet.
Is it stupid to assume that an operating system that has been designed for end users will not go out of its way to harm those users?
I know I can disable these things on Windows 10 through some mechanism or another, but I'm sick and tired of having to fix things that are broken on purpose. The proper solution is to only use Windows when you truly need it for some task or another.
Which reminds me I need to boot up my Windows 10 VM and run Windows update on that thing, so that it is in good shape the next time I need to do some coding in Visual Studio. I don't mind doing manual updates when I have time for it, like on weekends.
Bike theft is one of the fastest growing crimes here in Europe. It will definitely get worse still a few years from now when the average bike is a $1500 e-bike instead of a $150 regular bike. There is an inherent problem with a vehicle that is both expensive enough to be worth stealing and lightweight enough that a person can just pick it up and walk away with it.
According the space nutters on Slashdot all you need to fix those issues it is some tinfoil and to watch more Star Trek. The idea of sending people to Mars is a joke. We aren't ever going to live anywhere else but the Earth. We evolved on Earth.
There is a lot of room between zero and approximately zero when we're talking about a population of billions. Your statement would still be approximately true even if the population of Mars would grow to a million.
I think it's likely there will be at least one small base with scientists and space tourists on Mars in the second half of this century.
It makes sense to send some geologists there to bark orders at the robots without the time lag between Earth and Mars. AI is going to get a lot better over time, but you'll still need people to make a lot of the science decisions for the foreseeable time.
The super-rich of our time have already shown that they will pay enormous amounts of money to go visit the scientists, even for a short time. As the world's wealth concentrates into ever fewer hands, interplanetary tourism is almost bound to happen. What else is there for the super rich to do with all that money?
It's all about target market. If all you do is write email, use Facebook, browse the web and make Power Point presentations, then you really only ever need one port. If you're reading this odds are you're exactly not in that market. That's fine. Let the business people buy this one.
Have a look at the ZenBook UX305 if you want an ASUS.
So sales of their ageing current generation Macbook Pro were in terminal decline and their next generation product was delayed because some of the people in engineering screwed up...
That's when the marketing team came up with a solution: to threaten to make the next-gen product so bad that people would think that now might be their last chance to get a halfway decent Mac, by buying the current generation product.
Cue the design guy with the pretentious British accent.
"All truly great products have a golden age. In order to say that a product has had a golden age, the next product must be, in some way, less desirable. The definition of a legendary product is that it was, in the past, so good that legends were written about it. Our next generation computer is not only better than the previous generation, but also considerably worse in all key technical areas."
It's a safe bet that it is due to low demand. You need a lot of readers who read a lot of books in order to get economies of scale in a book import and distribution business.
It probably doesn't help that Uganda is a landlocked country with poor freight infrastructure. Imagine how expensive books would be in rural inland USA if there were no highways, railways or airports.
The Macbook Air is reasonably priced compared to other ultralight laptops if you take resell value into account.
The same goes for the macbook Pro. If you compare it to the Dell XPS 13/15 and do some math on the resell value (assuming you sell it after 3-5 years) then the Dell is only a couple of hundred bucks cheaper.
The new Macbook is reasonably priced only if you desperately want a beautiful, lightweight, laptop for casual use and you have enough money that you think $800 and $1600 is the same amount of money to a first approximation...
You can get two ultralight Asus laptops for the price of one Macbook.
Honest question: What would it take to make that happen? Money, time or technology?
It's not even know whether or not it is possible in principle to predict when a major earthquake will happen. If you look at a time series of magnitude measurements at a particular fault it looks like something coming out of a random number generator. It might be predictable, but it's not obvious that it is.
Some systems are fundamentally unpredictable because their long-term behaviour depends on arbitrarily small differences in the initial state of the system.
I doubt that. The rocket scientists are probably some of the only people in NK who are able to feel reasonably safe, as long as they stay out of politics.
Even in the Kim dynasty ends in a coup by some other faction, the next dictator is still going to want to have those rockets.
If you're literally reading War and Peace you probably want to slow down a lot and think about what's going on. You may want to go back and re-read a particularly good or interesting passage. You will probably need to go and look things on Wikipedia for proper context. The same thing goes for a lot of older literature and literature from other cultures, like for instance the Old Testament books.
If you're reading Dan Brown's latest masterpiece or something else in that vein, then you're basically reading a hollywood movie script, which is best enjoyed at a very high pace.
Nothing from this time and place got recorded, not a single word. People were illiterate. There is art that appears suggestive of tales and religious myths centred around seafaring and sun worship.
The earliest records from northern Europe were written by Roman explorers and historians more than a millennium later.
can you make a phone the size of an iPod touch still usable?? Because I'd buy that.
Of course they can. They'll just have to find a way to cram in the SIM and the mobile radio. They apparently couldn't do it at a low enough price point this time around, so it looks like you'll have to wait for the iPhone SE 2.
The biggest drawback is that Android wear is far from fully functional. The connection between the watch and the phone drops out randomly after many hours of use, but there's no hint that it has happened other than the lack of notifications on the watch. The only way to fix the problem seems to be to reboot the phone. There are some huge software feature omissions. Off the top of my head Google Maps does not have transit directions on wear for some reason. I mean, transit directions is one of the primary use cases for a smartwatch... The built-in fitness apps from Google and Motorola measure your heart rate automatically every now end then, but they do not even attempt to break down heart rate measurements into active vs rest. It should be pretty easy to associate each heart rate measurement with a step rate value from the step counter. I'm sure some of the third part fitness apps do this, but it should have been included out of the box.
OK Google barely works. Seems to be a hardware or firmware problem with all second-gen Moto 360's. I don't know if you'd ever want to talk to your wrist anyway.
Battery life is not a big deal since you'll want to charge it every night anyway. Mine is usually at 50-70% by bedtime.
A higher res screen with better contrast would be nice in order to make the watch faces look better. The screen is visibly pixelated. The "flat tyre" screen makes it look bad with any watch face that does not have a black background, so you'll be using black and white watch faces most of the time.
It is a big, fat watch. The large diameter version that I have would look just right if it were about 20% thinner.
If it were $149 it would be a great buy for someone who uses Android and has thick wrists, but at $399 I can't really recommend it. The software really has to get better before you'd want to spend hundreds of dollars on one of these.
"The number of people who want to wear a watch is extremely high"
LMAO. Really. Thanks for the laugh. I work for a university and get to interact with many people on a daily basis, and I use public transportation for most of my commute. I can count on one hand (and have fingers left over) the number of people wearing a watch.
Sounds like a local cultural thing where you live.
The wristwatch is currently a multi-billion dollar industry and (perhaps surprisingly) shows no sign of declining.
Sure, but the legal marijuana industry is also several billion annually and I don't think that means the number of people who smoke pot is very high (pun partially intended).
Yeah, but a pot habit will cost you a lot more than a wrist watch "habit", unless you're into really expensive watches or grow the pot yourself or something...
The wrist watch industry is so big that nobody knows how many they ship each year, but it is in the 1B-2B range. Most of those are dirt-cheap watches sold in the third world, but many are more expensive and sold in the first world.
Slashdot Mirror
So what would people do if they knew what to do? Would they hold a planning/coordination meeting where each neighbour gets assigned a channel, or what?
Dialing the time was popular long before the 80's, and in fact by the 80's I recall it being much less used, even if it still existed. I remember dialing the time as being more of a 1960's and 70's thing.
I suppose next you're going to tell me that people nowadays don't understand why it's called "dialing" a number. Or why it was faster to dial a number with lots of low digits than lots of high digits.
You probably got a TV with teletext sometime in the 1970's or 80's that told you the time. IIRC lower end TV:s did not ship with teletext well into the 1990's.
Congratulations. You have invented the train.
What I find really interesting is not the linked article itself, but the one right below it on Scania's new inductively-charged bus.If we can inductively supply power to buses, why can't we supply power to trains in the same way, even if just for urban light rail? Getting rid of the pantographs and that nineteenth-century tangle of overhead wires would make mass transit cheaper and more esthetically acceptable.
The cost per km of track would be prohibitively high. It's cheaper to just use conductive propulsion with a third rail divided into isolated sections that power up when a rail vehicle passes over them.
Google "catenary free tram" for examples.
Doesn't matter very much, honestly. Even 100% coal powered electric vehicles are cleaner than gasoline or diesel, and electric vehicles will improve as the cost of wind, solar, etc continue to drop.
Maybe so in Sweden where coal plants are forced to install good smoke scrubbers and to double as district heat sources. That is not exactly the arrangement that they have in China or India. They just spew out the smoke with little to no scrubbing. A gasoline car will certainly be a lot cleaner than a 100% coal powered electric car under those circumstances.
Congratulations. You have invented the train.
Yeah. Why reinvent something that works? It seems like it might be good way to power large trucks. A good use case would be a road between a mine and a port. Roads are a lot cheaper to build than railways and can be built more rapidly.
The other obvious way of building an electric road is to put conductors in the road itself. This could work for regular cars as well as trucks and buses. These people are working on that: http://elways.se/?lang=en
Are they also planning to subsidize the data plans for FB users?
Yup. At least for people in areas where data is prohibitively expensive.
Remember the news about Facebook Free Basics?
A lot of companies that make Android tablets over-estimated the market size and rushed to marked with less than stellar devices. Then the market turned out to be a lot smaller and a lot more crowded than most of them had predicted. So they stopped investing in Android tablet hardware development. I think most of the Android tablets that you seen on store shelves now are probably basically 2012 models with some slight modifications. Of course they're under-powered compared to smartphones from 2015 and 2016 that have much more RAM and more powerful CPU:s.
Some exceptions:
Lenovo's new models. Their screens are not great, but they're okay for indoor use.
The Nvidia Shield K1.
Samsung's high end models, if you want to spend iPad-levels of cash on an Android tablet.
Is it stupid to assume that an operating system that has been designed for end users will not go out of its way to harm those users?
I know I can disable these things on Windows 10 through some mechanism or another, but I'm sick and tired of having to fix things that are broken on purpose. The proper solution is to only use Windows when you truly need it for some task or another.
Which reminds me I need to boot up my Windows 10 VM and run Windows update on that thing, so that it is in good shape the next time I need to do some coding in Visual Studio. I don't mind doing manual updates when I have time for it, like on weekends.
Bike theft is one of the fastest growing crimes here in Europe. It will definitely get worse still a few years from now when the average bike is a $1500 e-bike instead of a $150 regular bike. There is an inherent problem with a vehicle that is both expensive enough to be worth stealing and lightweight enough that a person can just pick it up and walk away with it.
According the space nutters on Slashdot all you need to fix those issues it is some tinfoil and to watch more Star Trek. The idea of sending people to Mars is a joke. We aren't ever going to live anywhere else but the Earth. We evolved on Earth.
There is a lot of room between zero and approximately zero when we're talking about a population of billions. Your statement would still be approximately true even if the population of Mars would grow to a million.
I think it's likely there will be at least one small base with scientists and space tourists on Mars in the second half of this century.
It makes sense to send some geologists there to bark orders at the robots without the time lag between Earth and Mars. AI is going to get a lot better over time, but you'll still need people to make a lot of the science decisions for the foreseeable time.
The super-rich of our time have already shown that they will pay enormous amounts of money to go visit the scientists, even for a short time. As the world's wealth concentrates into ever fewer hands, interplanetary tourism is almost bound to happen. What else is there for the super rich to do with all that money?
It's all about target market. If all you do is write email, use Facebook, browse the web and make Power Point presentations, then you really only ever need one port. If you're reading this odds are you're exactly not in that market. That's fine. Let the business people buy this one.
Have a look at the ZenBook UX305 if you want an ASUS.
... that of all the companies in the world, it was Microsoft itself who finally launched Year Of The Linux Desktop.
Yeah either that or the Android desktop, where we'll apparently be expected to pay for upgrades... Or so I read somewhere.
So sales of their ageing current generation Macbook Pro were in terminal decline and their next generation product was delayed because some of the people in engineering screwed up...
That's when the marketing team came up with a solution: to threaten to make the next-gen product so bad that people would think that now might be their last chance to get a halfway decent Mac, by buying the current generation product.
Cue the design guy with the pretentious British accent.
"All truly great products have a golden age. In order to say that a product has had a golden age, the next product must be, in some way, less desirable. The definition of a legendary product is that it was, in the past, so good that legends were written about it. Our next generation computer is not only better than the previous generation, but also considerably worse in all key technical areas."
dwarf fortress comes to mind
Yes and Infiniminer, obviously. Notch's motivation for building Minecraft was that Infiniminer wasn't quite fun enough.
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2...
It's a safe bet that it is due to low demand. You need a lot of readers who read a lot of books in order to get economies of scale in a book import and distribution business.
It probably doesn't help that Uganda is a landlocked country with poor freight infrastructure. Imagine how expensive books would be in rural inland USA if there were no highways, railways or airports.
The Macbook Air is reasonably priced compared to other ultralight laptops if you take resell value into account.
The same goes for the macbook Pro. If you compare it to the Dell XPS 13/15 and do some math on the resell value (assuming you sell it after 3-5 years) then the Dell is only a couple of hundred bucks cheaper.
The new Macbook is reasonably priced only if you desperately want a beautiful, lightweight, laptop for casual use and you have enough money that you think $800 and $1600 is the same amount of money to a first approximation...
You can get two ultralight Asus laptops for the price of one Macbook.
Honest question: What would it take to make that happen? Money, time or technology?
It's not even know whether or not it is possible in principle to predict when a major earthquake will happen. If you look at a time series of magnitude measurements at a particular fault it looks like something coming out of a random number generator. It might be predictable, but it's not obvious that it is.
Some systems are fundamentally unpredictable because their long-term behaviour depends on arbitrarily small differences in the initial state of the system.
I doubt that. The rocket scientists are probably some of the only people in NK who are able to feel reasonably safe, as long as they stay out of politics.
Even in the Kim dynasty ends in a coup by some other faction, the next dictator is still going to want to have those rockets.
You know, that really depends.
If you're literally reading War and Peace you probably want to slow down a lot and think about what's going on. You may want to go back and re-read a particularly good or interesting passage. You will probably need to go and look things on Wikipedia for proper context. The same thing goes for a lot of older literature and literature from other cultures, like for instance the Old Testament books.
If you're reading Dan Brown's latest masterpiece or something else in that vein, then you're basically reading a hollywood movie script, which is best enjoyed at a very high pace.
I have to give it to you USA:ians, your elections keep getting more and more entertaining. Remember Bush v.s. Gore? What a sleeping pill.
My predictions for the next few presidencies:
Clinton/Clark 2016
Clinton/Clinton 2020 (Hillary/Bill)
Palin/Trump 2024
Clinton/Clinton 2036 (Chelsea/Hillary)
Musk/Superhuman AI 2040
Superhuman AI 2.0/Mecha-Rumsfeld 2044
Lord Rumsfeld 2048
(Assumes slight reinterpretations of the constitution with regards to eligibility for foreign-born citizens and death robots.)
Nothing from this time and place got recorded, not a single word. People were illiterate. There is art that appears suggestive of tales and religious myths centred around seafaring and sun worship.
The earliest records from northern Europe were written by Roman explorers and historians more than a millennium later.
Aw, looks like part of our shared cultural heritage has been lost.
can you make a phone the size of an iPod touch still usable?? Because I'd buy that.
Of course they can. They'll just have to find a way to cram in the SIM and the mobile radio. They apparently couldn't do it at a low enough price point this time around, so it looks like you'll have to wait for the iPhone SE 2.
Yeah, I have the second-gen Moto 360.
The biggest drawback is that Android wear is far from fully functional. The connection between the watch and the phone drops out randomly after many hours of use, but there's no hint that it has happened other than the lack of notifications on the watch. The only way to fix the problem seems to be to reboot the phone. There are some huge software feature omissions. Off the top of my head Google Maps does not have transit directions on wear for some reason. I mean, transit directions is one of the primary use cases for a smartwatch... The built-in fitness apps from Google and Motorola measure your heart rate automatically every now end then, but they do not even attempt to break down heart rate measurements into active vs rest. It should be pretty easy to associate each heart rate measurement with a step rate value from the step counter. I'm sure some of the third part fitness apps do this, but it should have been included out of the box.
OK Google barely works. Seems to be a hardware or firmware problem with all second-gen Moto 360's. I don't know if you'd ever want to talk to your wrist anyway.
Battery life is not a big deal since you'll want to charge it every night anyway. Mine is usually at 50-70% by bedtime.
A higher res screen with better contrast would be nice in order to make the watch faces look better. The screen is visibly pixelated. The "flat tyre" screen makes it look bad with any watch face that does not have a black background, so you'll be using black and white watch faces most of the time.
It is a big, fat watch. The large diameter version that I have would look just right if it were about 20% thinner.
If it were $149 it would be a great buy for someone who uses Android and has thick wrists, but at $399 I can't really recommend it. The software really has to get better before you'd want to spend hundreds of dollars on one of these.
"The number of people who want to wear a watch is extremely high"
LMAO. Really. Thanks for the laugh. I work for a university and get to interact with many people on a daily basis, and I use public transportation for most of my commute. I can count on one hand (and have fingers left over) the number of people wearing a watch.
Sounds like a local cultural thing where you live.
The wristwatch is currently a multi-billion dollar industry and (perhaps surprisingly) shows no sign of declining.
Sure, but the legal marijuana industry is also several billion annually and I don't think that means the number of people who smoke pot is very high (pun partially intended).
Yeah, but a pot habit will cost you a lot more than a wrist watch "habit", unless you're into really expensive watches or grow the pot yourself or something...
The wrist watch industry is so big that nobody knows how many they ship each year, but it is in the 1B-2B range. Most of those are dirt-cheap watches sold in the third world, but many are more expensive and sold in the first world.