Smart watches are marketed as a type of wrist watches, but being a wrist watch is a task they don't do well at all.
My Apple Watch keeps fantastic time, not sure what piece of crap you've been sold.
You missed the part where I explained why wrist watches took off and became ubiquitous? Like how you can use them no-handed, unlike the pocket watches of yore, and how you could wear them 24/7?
Are you confused? Are you under the impression they are basically just a watch?
I think you are the confused one. No one is saying it's just a watch, but if it is a watch, it better bloody work well as a watch too. And that's where it fails, big time, mainly due to the high power requirements. As it is, it's a wrist device and has no business calling itself a smart "watch".
That's like saying your laptop fails at being a calculator. It uses way more energy, it's 100x bigger, it doesn't fit in your pocket, and doesn't have a dedicated keypad.
It isn't marketed as a calculator. (But who needs a calculator? I carry a small slide rule. It works in rain or -40 temperatures, doubles as a ruler, doesn't make a bulge in my jacket pocket, and never runs out of batteries.)
Smart watches are marketed as a type of wrist watches, but being a wrist watch is a task they don't do well at all. Wrist watches replaced pocket watches due to the convenience. You no longer needed to free a hand to take out the watch to check the time. You could just glance at your wrist. This was especially handy during the Great War (WWI), where soldiers who had their hands full could still see what time it was. And you could check the time at night, without even sitting up, because you wore it while sleeping too. Convenience. Today's "smart watches" fail at these tasks, because they run out of steam.
They generally fail at being a watch. Either the battery life is abysmal compared to regular watches where batteries last for years, or you have to push buttons to get them to operate.
That said, what does make sense are the fitness trackers with heart rate monitors, step counters and sleep monitoring. As long as they also have a decent battery life. The Apple watches fail completely on that account, and can't even track a full day.
PaleMoon is alas no longer an option at work, as it won't work on Enterprise Linux 6 anymore, the still supported and last systemd free major OS family. And building it on my gentoo machine at home is not an option either, as I have to install and switch to old gcc 4.9 compilers just to get it to build.
Seamonkey is no problem building, but alas, there are a few sites it doesn't work with. Like the Kinja empire and BofA. So Firefox it is, at least for now.
I find it faster to use siri (or google) to set an alarm when I'm cooking, or to check the weather quickly.
My stove has a perfectly good timer that I just twist to set.
And I can just glance out the window to check the weather quickly. If I need a weather forecast, there's really no way to avoid being blasted with them on all media. It never snows any more; now every snowfall is called a STORM, if not a snowcapolypse or bomb cyclone.
I mean that. That wanted to catch up, only to show they haven't. With luck they wont kill anyone.
Not much luck needed. It's no more likely to kill anyone than any of the ~5-10[*] meteorite strikes that happen every year. Likely less, due to the much lower speed.
[*] Actually, around 500 per year, but most of them are too small to be picked up by radar or found.
Maybe it's a hint about what you're supposed to do with PCs once the update has been installed -- push them down a flight of stairs and watch the results for entertainment?
Sure, we have a strong history of luddites successfully stopping technology via vandalism. It's worked at least... what... zero times?
It might not be about stopping it, but about influencing it. Make people at the top notice and influence how things appear. Someone else here named "phone slapping" - I had never heard of that, but it would not surprise me if it at least in a minor way influenced the phone manufacturers to make phones less loud and obnoxious, and spurred on development of bluetooth headsets so the phones could stay in pockets and purses. (Then "smart phones" arrived and changed all that.)
Perhaps a change for self-driving cars is that they won't be built looking like normal cars, so pedestrians won't expect them to behave the same as ones driven by humans and react if they don't. Or perhaps there are other changes, small or not, that can be the result. In any case, the squeaky wheel tends to get the grease, and destructive protests can have positive effects even if they don't stop anything.
What do people expect to happen from attacking robots?
That they get heard.
Send a letter, and nobody will read it, and it will certainly not be escalated up to the person you addressed it to. But do a small act of defiance like this, and it hits the news, and those high up will notice that the product doesn't get an universal warm welcome, no matter what their trail of sycophants might have told them.
Why would you go through the effort of making a robot arm to do this? Seems to me you could bake these burgers in the same way bread is baked. A conveyor belt that moves the burgers over the fire in a consistent way.
In that case, the customer might as well go to McDonalds or Burger King. That people go to CaliBurger is at least in part due to a perception that the burgers are cooked better.
You don't need to replace a human worker 100%, though. If this machine handles 60-80% of the grill worker's tasks/time, you can combine that worker's job with another one that is at less than 100% utilization, and you've potentially replaced one worker for multiple shifts per day.
Only if the other task can be done in the time between him putting fresh patties on the grill and taking cooked ones off. He can't really delay the latter because he's doing something else, or people will eat overcooked burgers, and won't come back.
I can see how it could enable a charmaster of bovinity to cook twice as many burgers in the same time, so a busy place might replace one of two people with a machine. But you still need someone who can pay attention and rescue the burgers quickly when the machine says they're done.
But you need a human anyhow, to place the patties on the grill, take them off, carry the box of patties from the truck to the cooler, from the cooler to the cooking station, discard old boxes, oil and clean the grill plate, and now also give daily maintenance to the burger flipping machine (or likely even more often for the spatula equivalents, if hygiene is a concern). And you will still get the odd order of a double-cooked burger, which the robot can't handle. You then have a choice between telling the customer to go pound sand, or make her happy.
Sure it will. It will almost certainly have a diagnostic panel, and almost certainly won't have even a three nines uptime guarantee. Doctors of the expensive kind that make house calls have to give it regular check-ups.
You never run communication cables and power cables together.
You most certainly do. Ground cables are shielded. They cost 2-4 times as much per length as a result, but you get less interference on a data cable buried next to a power cable than from an overhead cable that receives all kinds of EM interference.
You have to avoid existing buried telephone, internet, cable, water, sewer, and gas lines.
That's an opportunity to use those. Smart companies make chutes that can fit extras, and then burying becomes even easier than stretching overhead cables. And even where there are old buried cables, they can often be replaced with newer cables that can carry both the old and new infrastructure. This is how many homes got their fiber hookup[*] - the old copper was pulled out, trailing new cables that had both copper and fiber.
[*]: At least in parts of the world where true fiber connections are offered, and not "fiber" which is copper the last mile.
No, the problem is that US businesses aren't competitive, and need subsidies and government protections like import tariffs to stay alive. As a manufacturer, why would I want to (or should I be forced to) have to pay more to get inferior American steel than I'd pay for higher quality Swedish steel? And as a retailer or consumer, why would I want to (or should I be forced to) buy inferior products made with American steel instead of higher quality steel? That's what happened in the Eastern Bloc, where tariffs made imports near impossible, and quality went down the drain. Protectionism is a communist/dictatorship "solution" that never works.
If a business cannot compete on either quality, delivery or price, it needs to go away and be replaced with something different that is competitive. Tariffs won't work in the long run - it's like peeing your pants to keep warm.
(Which in my opinion should never have been granted; with under-table purse hooks being around for a century, the man on the Clapham omnibus would see it as obvious that large ones can also be used to hang headphones from.)
It affects search so much that I don't go there if I can help it. Otherwise I have to wade through pages of counterfeits and knockoffs and "related products" before I find the actual product I explicitly searched for.
It's not like adding "genuine" to the search helps either - that just tends to exclude the real product, while generating hits for "genuine cable for [insert brand}". (It's a genuine cable, as opposed to a painted rope, I take it.)
America needs the Chinese a lot more than the Chinese needs America. China sells to a lot more countries, which combined dwarf what the US buys. But the opposite is not true - the US depends on Chinese production to a very high degree.
With the dollar based oil economy being on its last leg, the US will lose more and more control, and protectionism will do more harm than good. Already, the rest of the world can go on without the US a heck of a lot better than the US can go on without the rest of the world, and as the last control measure dwindles, this is going to be even more apparent.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps he did the honourable thing.
You missed the part where I explained why wrist watches took off and became ubiquitous? Like how you can use them no-handed, unlike the pocket watches of yore, and how you could wear them 24/7?
Are you confused? Are you under the impression they are basically just a watch?
I think you are the confused one. No one is saying it's just a watch, but if it is a watch, it better bloody work well as a watch too.
And that's where it fails, big time, mainly due to the high power requirements. As it is, it's a wrist device and has no business calling itself a smart "watch".
That's like saying your laptop fails at being a calculator. It uses way more energy, it's 100x bigger, it doesn't fit in your pocket, and doesn't have a dedicated keypad.
It isn't marketed as a calculator.
(But who needs a calculator? I carry a small slide rule. It works in rain or -40 temperatures, doubles as a ruler, doesn't make a bulge in my jacket pocket, and never runs out of batteries.)
Smart watches are marketed as a type of wrist watches, but being a wrist watch is a task they don't do well at all.
Wrist watches replaced pocket watches due to the convenience. You no longer needed to free a hand to take out the watch to check the time. You could just glance at your wrist. This was especially handy during the Great War (WWI), where soldiers who had their hands full could still see what time it was.
And you could check the time at night, without even sitting up, because you wore it while sleeping too.
Convenience.
Today's "smart watches" fail at these tasks, because they run out of steam.
They generally fail at being a watch. Either the battery life is abysmal compared to regular watches where batteries last for years, or you have to push buttons to get them to operate.
That said, what does make sense are the fitness trackers with heart rate monitors, step counters and sleep monitoring. As long as they also have a decent battery life. The Apple watches fail completely on that account, and can't even track a full day.
PaleMoon is alas no longer an option at work, as it won't work on Enterprise Linux 6 anymore, the still supported and last systemd free major OS family.
And building it on my gentoo machine at home is not an option either, as I have to install and switch to old gcc 4.9 compilers just to get it to build.
Seamonkey is no problem building, but alas, there are a few sites it doesn't work with. Like the Kinja empire and BofA.
So Firefox it is, at least for now.
Well thats a relief. I was under the impression that AI was going to take over the planet next week.
Nah, it will take over the Boring Company next week. The rest of the world doesn't have to worry for another few centuries.
I find it faster to use siri (or google) to set an alarm when I'm cooking, or to check the weather quickly.
My stove has a perfectly good timer that I just twist to set.
And I can just glance out the window to check the weather quickly.
If I need a weather forecast, there's really no way to avoid being blasted with them on all media. It never snows any more; now every snowfall is called a STORM, if not a snowcapolypse or bomb cyclone.
There's certainly no AI there. These kinds of apps are currently just expert systems with manual tweaks and a search fallback.
I mean that. That wanted to catch up, only to show they haven't. With luck they wont kill anyone.
Not much luck needed. It's no more likely to kill anyone than any of the ~5-10[*] meteorite strikes that happen every year. Likely less, due to the much lower speed.
[*] Actually, around 500 per year, but most of them are too small to be picked up by radar or found.
Maybe it's a hint about what you're supposed to do with PCs once the update has been installed -- push them down a flight of stairs and watch the results for entertainment?
That would be the Fall Creators release.
I thought the update was meant for spring creators. If you have metal wire and a pair of pliers, you should be all set.
Well, they can pray that any vulnerabilities get revealed, I guess?
Sure, we have a strong history of luddites successfully stopping technology via vandalism. It's worked at least ... what ... zero times?
It might not be about stopping it, but about influencing it. Make people at the top notice and influence how things appear. Someone else here named "phone slapping" - I had never heard of that, but it would not surprise me if it at least in a minor way influenced the phone manufacturers to make phones less loud and obnoxious, and spurred on development of bluetooth headsets so the phones could stay in pockets and purses.
(Then "smart phones" arrived and changed all that.)
Perhaps a change for self-driving cars is that they won't be built looking like normal cars, so pedestrians won't expect them to behave the same as ones driven by humans and react if they don't. Or perhaps there are other changes, small or not, that can be the result.
In any case, the squeaky wheel tends to get the grease, and destructive protests can have positive effects even if they don't stop anything.
What do people expect to happen from attacking robots?
That they get heard.
Send a letter, and nobody will read it, and it will certainly not be escalated up to the person you addressed it to. But do a small act of defiance like this, and it hits the news, and those high up will notice that the product doesn't get an universal warm welcome, no matter what their trail of sycophants might have told them.
Why would you go through the effort of making a robot arm to do this?
Seems to me you could bake these burgers in the same way bread is baked.
A conveyor belt that moves the burgers over the fire in a consistent way.
In that case, the customer might as well go to McDonalds or Burger King. That people go to CaliBurger is at least in part due to a perception that the burgers are cooked better.
You don't need to replace a human worker 100%, though. If this machine handles 60-80% of the grill worker's tasks/time, you can combine that worker's job with another one that is at less than 100% utilization, and you've potentially replaced one worker for multiple shifts per day.
Only if the other task can be done in the time between him putting fresh patties on the grill and taking cooked ones off. He can't really delay the latter because he's doing something else, or people will eat overcooked burgers, and won't come back.
I can see how it could enable a charmaster of bovinity to cook twice as many burgers in the same time, so a busy place might replace one of two people with a machine. But you still need someone who can pay attention and rescue the burgers quickly when the machine says they're done.
But you need a human anyhow, to place the patties on the grill, take them off, carry the box of patties from the truck to the cooler, from the cooler to the cooking station, discard old boxes, oil and clean the grill plate, and now also give daily maintenance to the burger flipping machine (or likely even more often for the spatula equivalents, if hygiene is a concern).
And you will still get the odd order of a double-cooked burger, which the robot can't handle. You then have a choice between telling the customer to go pound sand, or make her happy.
The machine won't call in sick.
Sure it will. It will almost certainly have a diagnostic panel, and almost certainly won't have even a three nines uptime guarantee.
Doctors of the expensive kind that make house calls have to give it regular check-ups.
You never run communication cables and power cables together.
You most certainly do. Ground cables are shielded. They cost 2-4 times as much per length as a result, but you get less interference on a data cable buried next to a power cable than from an overhead cable that receives all kinds of EM interference.
You have to avoid existing buried telephone, internet, cable, water, sewer, and gas lines.
That's an opportunity to use those. Smart companies make chutes that can fit extras, and then burying becomes even easier than stretching overhead cables. And even where there are old buried cables, they can often be replaced with newer cables that can carry both the old and new infrastructure. This is how many homes got their fiber hookup[*] - the old copper was pulled out, trailing new cables that had both copper and fiber.
[*]: At least in parts of the world where true fiber connections are offered, and not "fiber" which is copper the last mile.
No, the problem is that US businesses aren't competitive, and need subsidies and government protections like import tariffs to stay alive. As a manufacturer, why would I want to (or should I be forced to) have to pay more to get inferior American steel than I'd pay for higher quality Swedish steel? And as a retailer or consumer, why would I want to (or should I be forced to) buy inferior products made with American steel instead of higher quality steel? That's what happened in the Eastern Bloc, where tariffs made imports near impossible, and quality went down the drain. Protectionism is a communist/dictatorship "solution" that never works.
If a business cannot compete on either quality, delivery or price, it needs to go away and be replaced with something different that is competitive. Tariffs won't work in the long run - it's like peeing your pants to keep warm.
What you pay for is likely a patent.
(Which in my opinion should never have been granted; with under-table purse hooks being around for a century, the man on the Clapham omnibus would see it as obvious that large ones can also be used to hang headphones from.)
It affects search so much that I don't go there if I can help it. Otherwise I have to wade through pages of counterfeits and knockoffs and "related products" before I find the actual product I explicitly searched for.
It's not like adding "genuine" to the search helps either - that just tends to exclude the real product, while generating hits for "genuine cable for [insert brand}". (It's a genuine cable, as opposed to a painted rope, I take it.)
America needs the Chinese a lot more than the Chinese needs America. China sells to a lot more countries, which combined dwarf what the US buys. But the opposite is not true - the US depends on Chinese production to a very high degree.
With the dollar based oil economy being on its last leg, the US will lose more and more control, and protectionism will do more harm than good. Already, the rest of the world can go on without the US a heck of a lot better than the US can go on without the rest of the world, and as the last control measure dwindles, this is going to be even more apparent.