Phone numbers are going to die. But Facebook isn't the answer. Any proprietary solution isn't the answer.
It's especially not going to happen outside of the US. Imagine the president of Russia ordering military maneuvers using Facebook Messenger. Not going to happen.
It would be extremely complicated to switch away from phone numbers and phone numbers in and of themselves do not have considerable drawbacks, so phone numbers will probably be around for the foreseeable future. We humans will no doubt see the actual number less often as our software gets more intelligent, but the number will still exist, much like the ip address of a server.
Night is hardly a problem since we use very little energy at night (unless it's extremely cold outside, more on that later...). Clouds are a problem in some areas at certain times of year, like if there is a rain season or a cloudy season.
The really, really big problem with solar is winter in the places that have winter.
If you live at the equator and use solar and wind for your energy, your storage needs are on the order of 1 day of average consumption. If you live in Germany, your storage needs are on the order of 4 months of average consumption. So your storage cost in Germany is going to be on the order of 100 times your storage costs near the equator. The problem is made worse by the need for additional heating during winter.
You could probably still power Germany on solar with the right technology, but it would have to be a completely different kind of technology. It would essentially have to be something that converted solar radiation to fuel which you would store in tanks during the summer half of the year and consume during the winter half of the year.
Email works just fine. You can get increased anonymity through Tor.
Facebook is proprietary, so it would be nice if there was an alternative, but it's unlikely that the alternative would ever become more popular than Facebook itself.
FOSS projects should focus on building fundamental stuff that others can build on top of.
Don't build a Gmail clone or a Facebook clone. Build a web server that can automatically scale from 1 connection per day to 1000,000,000 connections per day and back down again to 1 connection per day, without ruining the person who owns the web site (that's the tricky part). If you do that then other people will build an anonymous web mail service on top of that, and a Facebook clone, and a Youtube clone, and a ton of other stuff that nobody has even thought of yet.
You could say that Java is like Bill Clinton spending a third term in the White House: an old thing that ought to have been retired, who's kept around because it is married to something successful.
In all seriousness, Java is useful because a lot of people are good at writing Java. It will be a long while before the it is retired and replaced by C#, Swift, or some other language that is Java-like but slightly better. Java will probably retire along with programmers who grew up in the 1980's and 1990's who learned it in school and on the job.
I think what the author meant to say is that novices who get access to a battery powered, laser-aimed, gyro-stabilised screwdriver will frequently spend hours thinking about how to hammer nails with it.
It would be wise to read up on a very similar project that the Roman Empire carried out. We're talking about solar photovoltaics for collection and power lines for distribution. Back then, the Romans used wheat for collection and ships for distribution, but it was the same basic idea. You outsource the collection of energy so that your own lands can be used for nicer things, like fancy villas and fruit orchards, you police the overseas production areas and the distribution network as best you can and pray that you never face organised resistance from political forces overseas.
It worked for a while for the Romans, but in the end it probably contributed to the collapse of the empire.
All of these delays need to get well below 10 ms in order for the whole loop to approach 10 ms. I don't know what the specific problems they have are, but you can tell that it's not just one problem that you have to solve.
Cheap accelerometers are too slow, this creates a nauseating lag, rendering it useless for many types of games. Presumably there are high grade sensors used in aviation and precision fabrication plants that will eventually come down to consumer level pricing.
I would like to see VR done without the gamer in mind, just tech for the sake of it project to see what can be done had money not been a factor, like hypercars.
This is true, but a little misleading. It's not the analog part of the accelerometer that is slow, it's the digital part and the ADC.
Cheap accelerometers often deliver sample rates of about 50-100 Hz, which means you get something like 20-10 Ms of latency right off the bat. Filters that you attach will add another 20 Ms or more depending on what sort of filters you use. If the signal runs through a software layer (Android, iOS, etc) you get additional latency on the order of 20 Ms. In the end you might end up with 100 Ms or more of latency on a smartphone.
Now, the underlying analog system inside the chip (the MEMS accelerometer itself) that functions as a sensor has latency lower than 1 Ms.
Occulus has designed their own accelerometer that runs at 1000Hz. I would guess that they have designed filters and a simple software layer so that the total latency of the accelerometer samples that a game gets on the Occulus is below 10 Ms, with a smooth enough signal that the movement isn't too jerky... I guess we'll find out when the final product launches.
I can assure you that your bank will charge for money transfers, one way or another. Banks are not charities, exactly...
The Swish system is probably cheap enough for them to run that some tiny increase in your monthly bank fee will cover the costs and allow them to make a profit.
If they had any interest in taxing everything, why would gifts not be taxable already?
The gift tax and the inheritance tax were abolished in Sweden because people hated those taxes in particular. The gift and inheritance taxes were easy to circumvent, so they were never going to bring in a lot of money anyway.
The only people who are ever going to pay a gift tax (or an inheritance tax) are people who can't afford to hire someone to help them create a legal device to circumvent the tax. Those people also can't afford to gift a lot of money. Of course, a lot of voters know so little about finance and economics that they don't understand this, so the gift tax and the inheritance tax will probably make a return at some point.
It also makes sense to keep adding capabilities and longevity until your satellite costs a lot more than the launch price.
A company that launches something into space faces the same sort of thinking that you face when you want to order something online when shipping isn't included in the price. If shipping is $15 you are probably not going to buy something that costs $30. If you really need to order the $30 item then you are going to be strongly tempted to order additional items that you think you might want or need until your total purchase is something like $150, or whatever you deem enough to make the $15 shipping negligible in comparison.
I guess you might say that SpaceX is aiming to be to space what sub-$1 shipping would be to online retail.
There's more than one drone ship. They have at least two operational and maybe a third partially ready.
I think they intend to use them with their bigger rocket, the Falcon Heavy. The center core of the FH first stage will have too much horizontal speed to boost back to the launch area.
Maybe one day they'll be able to launch from a site farther to the west, so that the center core can land on land, but that's not happening anytime soon for a bunch of reasons.
A crash at high speed can cause dozens of human deaths if the car becomes airborne and lands on a spectator stand. The higher the speed, the greater the danger.
I think safety should be a huge concern if they plan to have spectators at races with robotic cars.
With that said it would be pretty awesome if we could see where Formula One had taken us speed-wise if the driver hadn't been the weakest link. They've been adding rules to slow cars down ever since the early 1970's, so there's 40+ years of technological progress in things like engine technology and aerodynamics that might suddenly get an outlet if someone decides to start a no-rules (except for rules restricting the size and weight of the car) robotic race series...
"Forewarned is forearmed" sounds like a very un-english to my ears, because it doesn't have any superfluous articles like "the", "a" or "an".
The thing about English is that it has survived 1500 years of mangling by our nasty foreign tongues, mostly by bending itself to accommodate different ways of using the language. I doubt that Mandarin will be able to do that in this century.
Similar to the theory of light bulbs as darkness absorbers?
In a sense yes. Attractive forces like gravity and magnetism have always been a challenge to explain in terms of direct contact.
The motivation for the screening theories is that some people, or perhaps most people, have a deep-seated intuition that all of physics ought to be reducible to direct contact interaction.
You could say that one of the prime motivations of the early scientist was to prove that there were no non-direct contact forces at work in the universe, except for the force of God himself.
Yeah, with Marshmallow they've figured out that if the screen is off and the readings from the accelerometers (the 3 axes) are almost the same now as they were a couple of minutes ago, then it's probably fine to not burn a ton of battery doing networking and processing right now, even if an app says that it would like to do that.
Apps can still force their way through, but only once a minute at most.
I'm sure they'll switch to a more sophisticated quota system in some future OS upgrade.
Maybe if you keep the power brick plugged in. Apple might have slacked off and decided to not optimise for low idle power when the brick is plugged in, since the user won't notice... That's where legislation might come in eventually.
It should be way less than 1W assuming everything is working normally and the laptop is not plugged in.
Another interesting aside is that many have tried to explain gravity by postulating that the universe is full of tiny particles that fly about randomly in all directions and that gravity works because bodies block the particles from hitting one another.This is sometimes called the screening theory of gravity.
If you make some reasonable assumptions you will find that two nearby bodies would block particles from hitting one another, creating forces that follow the inverse square law...
These theories also predict that planets will de-orbit and crash into their stars, and that moons will similarly crash into their plants. But hey, no theory is perfect.
Yeah, I'm a big proponent of combining text and graphics whenever there is room.
If you look at design by the big software companies, Microsoft has probably been the most consistent in combining text and iconography in the last couple of decades. I don't know, but I believe they probably have a lot of data that indicates that users perform better if you combine text and icons. Maybe Apple and Google will eventually come to the same conclusions based on their own data.
Apple was actually one of the last of the big companies to adopt the flat UI style. Microsoft was first.
I don't think it's fair to credit/blame Jonathan Ive or any other Apple employee with inventing it. The flat UI was probably invented by someone at Microsoft. MS itself claims that it was a community effort. See here for example: https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...
Okay, but iOS i still easier to use compared to Android, which is why I steer my parents and any other people who are likely to want computer support toward iOS devices whenever it makes sense.
My mom was more productive on her iPad after a week of using it than she was with her Galaxy S2 after 3 years. Of course, the big screen of the tablet really helps compared to the tiny screen of the phone, but it's not just that. I think that a big part of why iOS is often easier to use than Android is that the cleanness of the UI prevents accidental clicks and input, which often cause users to cry help, or give up.
A mandatory back button on the bottom half of iOS devices might be a good idea, but it could also be that Apple tried it and found that users kept touching it by mistake. Maybe that's why they recommend that apps have a back button in the most inconvenient place imaginable, in the top left corner of the screen.
Slashdot Mirror
Phone numbers are going to die. But Facebook isn't the answer. Any proprietary solution isn't the answer.
It's especially not going to happen outside of the US. Imagine the president of Russia ordering military maneuvers using Facebook Messenger. Not going to happen.
It would be extremely complicated to switch away from phone numbers and phone numbers in and of themselves do not have considerable drawbacks, so phone numbers will probably be around for the foreseeable future. We humans will no doubt see the actual number less often as our software gets more intelligent, but the number will still exist, much like the ip address of a server.
Night is hardly a problem since we use very little energy at night (unless it's extremely cold outside, more on that later...). Clouds are a problem in some areas at certain times of year, like if there is a rain season or a cloudy season.
The really, really big problem with solar is winter in the places that have winter.
If you live at the equator and use solar and wind for your energy, your storage needs are on the order of 1 day of average consumption. If you live in Germany, your storage needs are on the order of 4 months of average consumption. So your storage cost in Germany is going to be on the order of 100 times your storage costs near the equator. The problem is made worse by the need for additional heating during winter.
You could probably still power Germany on solar with the right technology, but it would have to be a completely different kind of technology. It would essentially have to be something that converted solar radiation to fuel which you would store in tanks during the summer half of the year and consume during the winter half of the year.
Email works just fine. You can get increased anonymity through Tor.
Facebook is proprietary, so it would be nice if there was an alternative, but it's unlikely that the alternative would ever become more popular than Facebook itself.
FOSS projects should focus on building fundamental stuff that others can build on top of.
Don't build a Gmail clone or a Facebook clone. Build a web server that can automatically scale from 1 connection per day to 1000,000,000 connections per day and back down again to 1 connection per day, without ruining the person who owns the web site (that's the tricky part). If you do that then other people will build an anonymous web mail service on top of that, and a Facebook clone, and a Youtube clone, and a ton of other stuff that nobody has even thought of yet.
You could say that Java is like Bill Clinton spending a third term in the White House: an old thing that ought to have been retired, who's kept around because it is married to something successful.
In all seriousness, Java is useful because a lot of people are good at writing Java. It will be a long while before the it is retired and replaced by C#, Swift, or some other language that is Java-like but slightly better. Java will probably retire along with programmers who grew up in the 1980's and 1990's who learned it in school and on the job.
I think what the author meant to say is that novices who get access to a battery powered, laser-aimed, gyro-stabilised screwdriver will frequently spend hours thinking about how to hammer nails with it.
It would be wise to read up on a very similar project that the Roman Empire carried out. We're talking about solar photovoltaics for collection and power lines for distribution. Back then, the Romans used wheat for collection and ships for distribution, but it was the same basic idea. You outsource the collection of energy so that your own lands can be used for nicer things, like fancy villas and fruit orchards, you police the overseas production areas and the distribution network as best you can and pray that you never face organised resistance from political forces overseas. It worked for a while for the Romans, but in the end it probably contributed to the collapse of the empire.
editorial authority: looks like Linux is pretty much ready for the desktop.
reader: what is this desktop you speak of?
After all, what do bots care about reputation?
Well, it's the whole loop that accumulates to a delay...
analog sensor -> digital electronics / filtering -> wire connection -> computer -> wire connection -> display filter -> display panel
All of these delays need to get well below 10 ms in order for the whole loop to approach 10 ms. I don't know what the specific problems they have are, but you can tell that it's not just one problem that you have to solve.
Well, I'd say sports, sports, games and porn are the four factors. Maybe in that order.
Cheap accelerometers are too slow, this creates a nauseating lag, rendering it useless for many types of games. Presumably there are high grade sensors used in aviation and precision fabrication plants that will eventually come down to consumer level pricing.
I would like to see VR done without the gamer in mind, just tech for the sake of it project to see what can be done had money not been a factor, like hypercars.
This is true, but a little misleading. It's not the analog part of the accelerometer that is slow, it's the digital part and the ADC.
Cheap accelerometers often deliver sample rates of about 50-100 Hz, which means you get something like 20-10 Ms of latency right off the bat. Filters that you attach will add another 20 Ms or more depending on what sort of filters you use. If the signal runs through a software layer (Android, iOS, etc) you get additional latency on the order of 20 Ms. In the end you might end up with 100 Ms or more of latency on a smartphone.
Now, the underlying analog system inside the chip (the MEMS accelerometer itself) that functions as a sensor has latency lower than 1 Ms.
Occulus has designed their own accelerometer that runs at 1000Hz. I would guess that they have designed filters and a simple software layer so that the total latency of the accelerometer samples that a game gets on the Occulus is below 10 Ms, with a smooth enough signal that the movement isn't too jerky... I guess we'll find out when the final product launches.
I can assure you that your bank will charge for money transfers, one way or another. Banks are not charities, exactly...
The Swish system is probably cheap enough for them to run that some tiny increase in your monthly bank fee will cover the costs and allow them to make a profit.
If they had any interest in taxing everything, why would gifts not be taxable already?
The gift tax and the inheritance tax were abolished in Sweden because people hated those taxes in particular. The gift and inheritance taxes were easy to circumvent, so they were never going to bring in a lot of money anyway.
The only people who are ever going to pay a gift tax (or an inheritance tax) are people who can't afford to hire someone to help them create a legal device to circumvent the tax. Those people also can't afford to gift a lot of money. Of course, a lot of voters know so little about finance and economics that they don't understand this, so the gift tax and the inheritance tax will probably make a return at some point.
It also makes sense to keep adding capabilities and longevity until your satellite costs a lot more than the launch price.
A company that launches something into space faces the same sort of thinking that you face when you want to order something online when shipping isn't included in the price. If shipping is $15 you are probably not going to buy something that costs $30. If you really need to order the $30 item then you are going to be strongly tempted to order additional items that you think you might want or need until your total purchase is something like $150, or whatever you deem enough to make the $15 shipping negligible in comparison.
I guess you might say that SpaceX is aiming to be to space what sub-$1 shipping would be to online retail.
There's more than one drone ship. They have at least two operational and maybe a third partially ready.
I think they intend to use them with their bigger rocket, the Falcon Heavy. The center core of the FH first stage will have too much horizontal speed to boost back to the launch area.
Maybe one day they'll be able to launch from a site farther to the west, so that the center core can land on land, but that's not happening anytime soon for a bunch of reasons.
Ah, yes. I figure they got crushed by Ubuntu Phone...
A crash at high speed can cause dozens of human deaths if the car becomes airborne and lands on a spectator stand. The higher the speed, the greater the danger.
I think safety should be a huge concern if they plan to have spectators at races with robotic cars.
With that said it would be pretty awesome if we could see where Formula One had taken us speed-wise if the driver hadn't been the weakest link. They've been adding rules to slow cars down ever since the early 1970's, so there's 40+ years of technological progress in things like engine technology and aerodynamics that might suddenly get an outlet if someone decides to start a no-rules (except for rules restricting the size and weight of the car) robotic race series...
"Forewarned is forearmed" sounds like a very un-english to my ears, because it doesn't have any superfluous articles like "the", "a" or "an".
The thing about English is that it has survived 1500 years of mangling by our nasty foreign tongues, mostly by bending itself to accommodate different ways of using the language. I doubt that Mandarin will be able to do that in this century.
Similar to the theory of light bulbs as darkness absorbers?
In a sense yes. Attractive forces like gravity and magnetism have always been a challenge to explain in terms of direct contact.
The motivation for the screening theories is that some people, or perhaps most people, have a deep-seated intuition that all of physics ought to be reducible to direct contact interaction.
You could say that one of the prime motivations of the early scientist was to prove that there were no non-direct contact forces at work in the universe, except for the force of God himself.
Yeah, with Marshmallow they've figured out that if the screen is off and the readings from the accelerometers (the 3 axes) are almost the same now as they were a couple of minutes ago, then it's probably fine to not burn a ton of battery doing networking and processing right now, even if an app says that it would like to do that.
Apps can still force their way through, but only once a minute at most.
I'm sure they'll switch to a more sophisticated quota system in some future OS upgrade.
Maybe if you keep the power brick plugged in. Apple might have slacked off and decided to not optimise for low idle power when the brick is plugged in, since the user won't notice... That's where legislation might come in eventually.
It should be way less than 1W assuming everything is working normally and the laptop is not plugged in.
Another interesting aside is that many have tried to explain gravity by postulating that the universe is full of tiny particles that fly about randomly in all directions and that gravity works because bodies block the particles from hitting one another.This is sometimes called the screening theory of gravity.
If you make some reasonable assumptions you will find that two nearby bodies would block particles from hitting one another, creating forces that follow the inverse square law...
These theories also predict that planets will de-orbit and crash into their stars, and that moons will similarly crash into their plants. But hey, no theory is perfect.
Yeah, I'm a big proponent of combining text and graphics whenever there is room.
If you look at design by the big software companies, Microsoft has probably been the most consistent in combining text and iconography in the last couple of decades. I don't know, but I believe they probably have a lot of data that indicates that users perform better if you combine text and icons. Maybe Apple and Google will eventually come to the same conclusions based on their own data.
Apple was actually one of the last of the big companies to adopt the flat UI style. Microsoft was first.
I don't think it's fair to credit/blame Jonathan Ive or any other Apple employee with inventing it. The flat UI was probably invented by someone at Microsoft. MS itself claims that it was a community effort. See here for example: https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...
Okay, but iOS i still easier to use compared to Android, which is why I steer my parents and any other people who are likely to want computer support toward iOS devices whenever it makes sense.
My mom was more productive on her iPad after a week of using it than she was with her Galaxy S2 after 3 years. Of course, the big screen of the tablet really helps compared to the tiny screen of the phone, but it's not just that. I think that a big part of why iOS is often easier to use than Android is that the cleanness of the UI prevents accidental clicks and input, which often cause users to cry help, or give up.
A mandatory back button on the bottom half of iOS devices might be a good idea, but it could also be that Apple tried it and found that users kept touching it by mistake. Maybe that's why they recommend that apps have a back button in the most inconvenient place imaginable, in the top left corner of the screen.