I am writing this on my aging - but still fully functional - Samsung Galaxy Note 3. How can I use a nearly 6 year old phone you ask?
Why I can replace the battery! I'm on my third... (Well it was also a high end phone of the time, one of the first with 3 GB ram...)
But my point is; the reason it survive is I can change battery. And it is one of the last of its kind. Check gsmarena.com and you'll find almost no high end phones with replaceable batt from 2018 and forward.
But the are all ip 68 or whatever waterproof. Well I have yet to have a phone die of water. Most was replaced because of the battery (or because the keyboard broke). When I hear my colleagues getting new iphones, it is always the battery. My parents just bought a new one because of...
Am I the only one that believes, that the *true* reason all new devices are waterproof, is planned obsolescence??... Could be I'm just an old geek that doesn't care to buy a new phone that can the same (but slightly faster, of course) as the one I have.... Or maybe you all drop phones in the toilet regularly? (really??)
If not, then spread the idea, and help save both money and the environment! Let's rebel!... Regard my heading "by law" I mean, it doesn't have to be user replaceable, but eg that right-to-repair have an upper limit of what a new battery must cost, sufficiently low - like maybe 5% of the original price - to ensure that the can be replaced, and is not epoxy'ed inside.
I loved BF2. Played it until they closed the servers.
BF2 was primitive with today's standards (and the plane/choppers was difficult to use and FAR too powerful in the hands of those who mastered them!).
Its strength - in my opinion - was a nice balance between being sufficiently slow paced that you could act strategically, while still have enough close quarters action that it wasn't boring. The snipers worked well. They were annoying but not that dangerous if you were aware. Could hide fairly well (not like in BF3 where the choppers had infrared vision). Generally if a team started winning too much, people would start sniping, which automatically would leveling the game back, until the winners started loosing again. It balanced itself out. I loved playing as a counter-sniper sniper:)
But the best part that it actually tried to make the squads cooperate. 90% of all squads were bad, but with some luck (and I soon started to recognize the good leaders) I could get on a squad which really worked together. When that happened we could CRUSH the other team. Of course there were a good change that the other team had the good squads. In that case it was just a matter of playing cannon food for the round, so at least the other team could have a great time - and hope for a better next round...
With the servers offline I bought BF3. What a waste. Felt far to arcade-like. The squads did not work. If you were on one, you were randomly assigned as "leader" - so with a squad of 5(?) there was a >80% change that the squad leader DID NOT want to lead...:-(
Then the BF2 servers were resurrected, and I played until EA forced them closed. After which I swore never to buy from EA again! Good thing they are making it SOO easy!:-)
For me it is more like 95% that is spam. In the rare event I take the call, the caller either just close the connection (probably expecting me to call again at to number that costs money?) or is the Indian "Microsoft Technical Support" (I must have a lot of virus). It can also be a legitimate insurance companies, or callers from red cross etc.
If I take my phone, I generally just answer with the following line. "No! I am not interested. You may not call this number. Take me off you list". And then I close the line. I do feel it actually started to lower the amount of spam calls after I started saying that.
But mostly I do NOT answer my phone if I don't know the number, or expects a call. I check my email once a day. At most. Same with SMS. I generally leave my phone at my desk when walking around the office. Same at home.
It is fascinating to realize that I am more difficult than ever to get a hold on.
I don't get the specific fear of the "note" line. It is a different phone! It is not like it has 'evolved' from the Note 7, and has to have the same flaws.
Also I don't understand why anyone but a few power users would upgrade? My galaxy note 3 is now 4 years, in perfect shape. Can run anything I throw at it. Still a huge screen with more pixels than I can see. And has a new battery!
Which is another point; new phones are IP67 or whatever compliant. Waterproof down to several meters. Oh, and btw, that feature ensures that you can no longer replace the battery. Which dies after 2+ years!
I have NEVER needed a waterproof phone. It is a very nice feature. But NOT at the cost of avoiding planned obsolescence. I want to be able to replace my battery.
It should be a legal requirement that the user can replace the battery. And if the can't, the company should be legally required to replace the battery for no more than 5% of price of the original device, for at least 10 years.
As far as I can see, no one have mentioned http://www.flowgorithm.org/ - which as far as I can tell is the exact answer to your question!
Well at least the last part: "draw a flowchart, and have that flowchart turn into working C code"
In Flowgorithm you draw a flowchart, which can be executed! And turned into source-code from whatever language you desire (well, most, it supports C#, C++, Delphi/Pascal, Java, JavaScript, Lua, Perl, Python, QBasic, Ruby, Swift 2 and Visual Basic.)
As many other have commented; flowcharts was never *that* useful when developing. But I've often used flowgorithm when I need to quickly make a diagram explaining a particular behavior. Much faster than Visio (at the cost of you can not change the layout/position). I find the UI very well made.
LabVIEW is a compiled language. It is fast. If you do it right, easily as fast as C. Faster if you are doing e.g. machine vision (due to highly optimized libraries). Do not be fooled by the graphical interface!
Its applications are, as with any language, unlimited. But where LabVIEW excels is in rapid prototyping and data acquisition. What it lacks is flexibility in GUI: You have what you got.
I've been using LabVIEW (and C#/Python) more than 15 years. Many people do not like it for some reason or another. But whenever I've asked them to clarify, it is always because they've (utterly) missed the point or are doing it wrong. (there is an old but still popular blog post somewhere, ranting along the lines of "why I hate and despite LabVIEW", which have exactly one valid point (that you essentially need a state-of-the-art gaming mouse) the rest just exposes the writes lack of knowledge/skill.)
Don't get me wrong, I have a *long* list of complains/annoyances regarding LabVIEW. It is just that whenever I hear someone saying something against LabVIEW, it is usually just some minor detail they've missed (the #1: "it is slow"... No it is most certainly not:-).
I fully understand why amazon does this: To avoid people like me...
I hate when stores keeps payment info! I actually like having to get my cards from my wallet, in my jacket, hanging in another room.
Why? Because half the time I realize I do not need what I was about to purchase anyway. Or realize that I should search for a better deal on a cheaper site...
That habit saves me a lot of money and I have less stuff that I never use anyway...
We've had this in major cities in Denmark for years. Really nice: spots vandalism or a broken light. Fire up the app. Take a photo. The app logs GPS and gives option to move found position on map. Add optional comment and press send. Then the app keeps track of ticket status.
Other stuff we've had for years includes sms/app based mobile payment between individuals and stores. Sms/app based purchase of stamps when sending letters. Tickets for train/bus. Etc.
Slashdot.org has really become a blast from the past:-)
National Instruments LabVIEW - a graphical (but compiled) flow-oriented programming language - is also used for industrial automation/testing. Some of the components within your computer have most probably been tested or handled (before or during soldering/assembly) by a piece of hardware programmed in LabVIEW.
Well, the problem is that the premise of this article is that the author somehow is superhuman and sees threats to humanity that the common plebs can't observe because of their inferior mental capabilities.
No, individuals have always been superhuman compared to other humans *on average*. Just think of Einstein or any other person who has changed the world. Imho the issue is quite real. I can understand an event may wipe out my grandchildren. But even though the thought is a "ohh fuck" for me intellectually, the *feeling* I have is more on the level of "maybe I should get another cup of coffee".... Now try to motivate any political system with that level of involvement... Not gonna happen. We are all going to die!
The question is: How do we detect said aliens? We can probably not use radio, because as some of you have touched, modern spread-spectrum communication is indistinguishable from noise. Add to this that we have this HUGE wide-band noise-generator right next to us called the sun. The radiation from alien suns is hard enough to block out at stellar distances in the visible regime, even harder at radio frequencies.
So how do we detect aliens? By the bulk. E.g. by looking at the atmospheric composition and saying "here are compounds that can not be produced by any natural method ".
So we will be checking against our models and trying to find deviations. Which leads me to my point: Here we have a planet with the mass 17 times of earth, but with an atmosphere way of the chart of any predictions!
It is far out, even for me:-) but this is actually the "kind" of signs for life we are looking for. Alright in this case, I have a hard time imagine what could suck the air out of the alien atmosphere - but then again, that would make it really alien! - probably not carbon based:-)
Actually, this raises a more interesting question (at least to me) which your little thought experiment approaches. What if my autonomous car decides that the action to take that is likely to cause the least harm is to kill the driver? For example, what if the car has the opportunity to swerve off the side of a mountain road and drop you 1000 feet onto some rocks to avoid a crash that would have killed far more people than simply you? Is my autonomous car required to act in my own best interest, or should it act in the best interests of everyone on the road?
Your autonomous car?:-)
It will be a Google car. Partly paid by ads and data collected while used. As such it should - of course - behave in the best interest of the real costumers. I.e. not you!:)
... Which means it will start with a 10 minute teaser/cliffhanger to prevent people from leaving during commercials. Then the commercial break. Then a 10 minute teaser, repeating most of what was said in the previous segment, adding like 2-3 minutes new stuff and a new cliffhanger. Commercial break. Then 10 minutes of repetition. Etc. etc.
There are a lot of *seemingly* interesting documentaries being made in the US, but upon inspection they are mostly made to ensure viewers STAY for the COMMERCIALS.
If you watch them without commercials, the look like they were made by retards for retards!:-/
I will probably give it a change, but I guess I will be disappointment... Currently I'm only watching documentaries made by the BBC...
A company (I've forgotten which, think it was a "pre-cloud" storage solution) used this approach: Each day post a photo of the front page from a local newspaper, with the message that if said image was no longer updated, they had received a 'request'. The idea being that the government/law agency/whatever only have the legal means to make them STOP doing something, but are unable to force them to go through the trouble of uploading a new image each day.... I remember wondering if there is some legal way to force a person/company to stop stopping...
I've apparently made 'USB condoms' myself. A male and female usb connector soldered end-to-end, the data pins shorted together.
This enables my ancient HTC Desire to recognize any usb charger as a dedicated charger, and charge with up to 1 A (in reality significantly less). It is a low tech solution that works.
... Then the GlassUps will be at least 1 year delayed, and when - if - they finally arrive, they will be inferior, fragile, buggy and has to compete with Google glasses v2.
The idea is nice, I wish them the best of luck! And after donating to some kickstarter projects, I know they will need it. The path to a final product is not straight and easy.
For all of you who donate: Cool! And I mean this sincerely. You are willing to risk money for a great idea, I appreciate that. I've myself lost money on great ideas on Kickstarter... Too much money for my taste... This time I'll pass donating, I'm beginning to loose my faith in crowdfounding.
I did of course phrase the subject to maximize the provocation:-) but my point is, while I really like the plumping to work, I don't really care about "the nine traits of a veteran plumber". For me a network admin is (believe it or not) a LOW TECH job, using of-the-shelf standard components (as any other admin/technician/mechanic). If my mechanic has to stare blankly while mentally figuring out what is preventing my car to start, I will let him do that in peace - because I assume he knows better than me how to do his job.
I have NO doubt that network administration is an intriguing job, with its share of problems to solve. But as long as the down time is counted in hours and not days, I prefer them to work invisible behind the scenes, not bothering me and hindering me to do my job.
Don't get me wrong, I know that a good admin is well worth his pay. But also I love the cleaning personal, especially when they don't clean while I'm working:-)
I guess I was hoping to gain a little insight in how the admin job is done - I dunno, maybe adapt some of it to my little (tiny) home network. But most of the points was fairly obvious - yes I also reboot my router. No of course I can't calculate subnet masks/read packages/write filters in my head. Is it impressive he can? Slightly, but not much, skills like that develop by regular use. I would be more surprised if he had written "we just google it":-)
They have not "found" anything. I am not a native English speaker, so I feel I am missing the right word, but they have "theorized" or "speculated", and then realized, that a program in full control of a device with sensors, can use said sensors as inputs...
To supply google with 2560x1600 panels for the nexus 10?
Wish it were so. But the major Android device makers appear to be afraid of Apple. They will never make something with a form factor that can be mistaken for an iPad.
It will probably be 10" 2560x1280... Or similar stupid "widescreen" format:-/
Citation needed. Note that none of the astronauts have died due to the lack of gravity.
And to see how evolution proceeds without gravity we just need to look at the sea. Sea lions, dolphins and whales are all descended from mammals that used to live exclusively on land.
Sea lions etc. are just as much influenced by gravity as we are. The problem is in our organs. Whether you're surrounded by air or water on earth, the gravitational pull on your organs are the same (they are, in a sense, always submerged anyway)...
Anyhow, seeing the rapid drop of energy prices, I assume the solution is near, when energy becomes essential free, everyone gets a jetpack!...... Oh wait! I am holding the card upside down!
Reminds me; I once read a sci fi - can't remember which - there were a passing reference to other races who had burned the fuel on their planet before reaching spaceflight. They were forever trapped in the gravity well. I assume the same will happen to us.
Not that it changes much. Saving between 0% (robotic probe) and 0.00001% (a crew of few thousands) of the population will not really make a dent, especially when you add the fact that it mission will either be bias towards christian theocracy or aggressive capitalistic pseudocommunism (how much do you trust e.g. China to represent American, if they are the ones "rescuing the race"??). All in all, regardless of the outcome, the probe will not be representative for most.. The rest are left to die...
I have been fighting a virus on my work the last couple of days. It is calling itself McAfee Antivirus Enterprise. The symptoms is it slows my (aging) lab computers to a grinding halt. The last 3 days it has essentially incapacitating them for more than an hour, every day. I hope whatever payload it needed to update is done, so it will stop disrupting experiments by stalling.
We'll soon need to upgrade an old - but still adequate - dedicated lab computer running a single piece of equipment, just because IT have chosen McAfee...
(fyi; If I take it offline I can only log-on a month or so, then it has to connect to the domain, resulting in a torrent of forced updates. Beside we need to be able to retrieve the data, and last time I needed one, no one had an usb stick!).
This seems to be an old, but reoccurring, question to slashdot! The only thing changing is apparently the AGE of the drives. I predict the next who ask will have a bunch of 15-20 year old drives...:-)
We've had this in Denmark for 5+ years. E-boks.dk - except it is not only government mail, but all official mail. My bank, insurance - even my salary slip from my company. Also I can upload my own scanned documents into the repository, where it will stay forever.
I haven't received anything important in my mailbox for YEARS. I only check and empty it once every second week (only spam).
The system is secured by the national "Nem-ID" (Easy-ID) system, which is a combination of a password and a one-time pad. Also used by my bank (and all other danish banks. I have an old account in another bank. Same login work for both).
It took a while to get it all running smoothly, but it is really nice now it works. Added advantage is that electronic thefts (stolen login details etc.) from banks dropped to almost 0 nationwide since it was introduced.
Reminds me: Somewhere on the internet is a description of how to build an anti-camera cap. Basically a baseball cap with a battery, and a row of powerful IR emitters along the rim. It utilizes that most security cameras can see into the IR, so the camera will gain down and leave the face in darkness, or at least distort it enough to nullify automated face recognition. Can be used during transport, where wearing a cap is not as suspicious as covering the face.... Or will it soon be so that anyone not instantly recognized will automatically be a suspect?:-)
It is not a novel idea, he mentions it himself at 1:07: an almost 100 year old idea that everybody has forgotten:-)
Quite cool idea though. Looking back at those first "automobile like" designs; cars with legs, monowheels etc. it is not surprising - they were good at thinking outside the "4 wheels on a box" box back then. Probably because the "car" idea was not established yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I am writing this on my aging - but still fully functional - Samsung Galaxy Note 3. How can I use a nearly 6 year old phone you ask?
Why I can replace the battery! I'm on my third... (Well it was also a high end phone of the time, one of the first with 3 GB ram...)
But my point is; the reason it survive is I can change battery. And it is one of the last of its kind. Check gsmarena.com and you'll find almost no high end phones with replaceable batt from 2018 and forward.
But the are all ip 68 or whatever waterproof. Well I have yet to have a phone die of water. Most was replaced because of the battery (or because the keyboard broke). When I hear my colleagues getting new iphones, it is always the battery. My parents just bought a new one because of...
Am I the only one that believes, that the *true* reason all new devices are waterproof, is planned obsolescence?? ... Could be I'm just an old geek that doesn't care to buy a new phone that can the same (but slightly faster, of course) as the one I have. ... Or maybe you all drop phones in the toilet regularly? (really??)
If not, then spread the idea, and help save both money and the environment! Let's rebel! ... Regard my heading "by law" I mean, it doesn't have to be user replaceable, but eg that right-to-repair have an upper limit of what a new battery must cost, sufficiently low - like maybe 5% of the original price - to ensure that the can be replaced, and is not epoxy'ed inside.
I loved BF2. Played it until they closed the servers.
BF2 was primitive with today's standards (and the plane/choppers was difficult to use and FAR too powerful in the hands of those who mastered them!).
Its strength - in my opinion - was a nice balance between being sufficiently slow paced that you could act strategically, while still have enough close quarters action that it wasn't boring. The snipers worked well. They were annoying but not that dangerous if you were aware. Could hide fairly well (not like in BF3 where the choppers had infrared vision). Generally if a team started winning too much, people would start sniping, which automatically would leveling the game back, until the winners started loosing again. It balanced itself out. I loved playing as a counter-sniper sniper :)
But the best part that it actually tried to make the squads cooperate. 90% of all squads were bad, but with some luck (and I soon started to recognize the good leaders) I could get on a squad which really worked together. When that happened we could CRUSH the other team. Of course there were a good change that the other team had the good squads. In that case it was just a matter of playing cannon food for the round, so at least the other team could have a great time - and hope for a better next round...
With the servers offline I bought BF3. What a waste. Felt far to arcade-like. The squads did not work. If you were on one, you were randomly assigned as "leader" - so with a squad of 5(?) there was a >80% change that the squad leader DID NOT want to lead... :-(
Then the BF2 servers were resurrected, and I played until EA forced them closed. :-)
After which I swore never to buy from EA again! Good thing they are making it SOO easy!
For me it is more like 95% that is spam. In the rare event I take the call, the caller either just close the connection (probably expecting me to call again at to number that costs money?) or is the Indian "Microsoft Technical Support" (I must have a lot of virus). It can also be a legitimate insurance companies, or callers from red cross etc.
If I take my phone, I generally just answer with the following line. "No! I am not interested. You may not call this number. Take me off you list". And then I close the line. I do feel it actually started to lower the amount of spam calls after I started saying that.
But mostly I do NOT answer my phone if I don't know the number, or expects a call. I check my email once a day. At most. Same with SMS. I generally leave my phone at my desk when walking around the office. Same at home.
It is fascinating to realize that I am more difficult than ever to get a hold on.
I don't get the specific fear of the "note" line. It is a different phone! It is not like it has 'evolved' from the Note 7, and has to have the same flaws.
Also I don't understand why anyone but a few power users would upgrade? My galaxy note 3 is now 4 years, in perfect shape. Can run anything I throw at it. Still a huge screen with more pixels than I can see. And has a new battery!
Which is another point; new phones are IP67 or whatever compliant. Waterproof down to several meters. Oh, and btw, that feature ensures that you can no longer replace the battery. Which dies after 2+ years!
I have NEVER needed a waterproof phone. It is a very nice feature. But NOT at the cost of avoiding planned obsolescence. I want to be able to replace my battery.
It should be a legal requirement that the user can replace the battery. And if the can't, the company should be legally required to replace the battery for no more than 5% of price of the original device, for at least 10 years.
As far as I can see, no one have mentioned http://www.flowgorithm.org/ - which as far as I can tell is the exact answer to your question!
Well at least the last part: "draw a flowchart, and have that flowchart turn into working C code"
In Flowgorithm you draw a flowchart, which can be executed! And turned into source-code from whatever language you desire (well, most, it supports C#, C++, Delphi/Pascal, Java, JavaScript, Lua, Perl, Python, QBasic, Ruby, Swift 2 and Visual Basic.)
As many other have commented; flowcharts was never *that* useful when developing. But I've often used flowgorithm when I need to quickly make a diagram explaining a particular behavior. Much faster than Visio (at the cost of you can not change the layout/position). I find the UI very well made.
LabVIEW is a compiled language. It is fast. If you do it right, easily as fast as C. Faster if you are doing e.g. machine vision (due to highly optimized libraries). Do not be fooled by the graphical interface!
Its applications are, as with any language, unlimited. But where LabVIEW excels is in rapid prototyping and data acquisition. What it lacks is flexibility in GUI: You have what you got.
I've been using LabVIEW (and C#/Python) more than 15 years. Many people do not like it for some reason or another. But whenever I've asked them to clarify, it is always because they've (utterly) missed the point or are doing it wrong. (there is an old but still popular blog post somewhere, ranting along the lines of "why I hate and despite LabVIEW", which have exactly one valid point (that you essentially need a state-of-the-art gaming mouse) the rest just exposes the writes lack of knowledge/skill.)
Don't get me wrong, I have a *long* list of complains/annoyances regarding LabVIEW. It is just that whenever I hear someone saying something against LabVIEW, it is usually just some minor detail they've missed (the #1: "it is slow"... No it is most certainly not :-).
I fully understand why amazon does this: To avoid people like me...
I hate when stores keeps payment info! I actually like having to get my cards from my wallet, in my jacket, hanging in another room.
Why? Because half the time I realize I do not need what I was about to purchase anyway. Or realize that I should search for a better deal on a cheaper site...
That habit saves me a lot of money and I have less stuff that I never use anyway...
We've had this in major cities in Denmark for years. Really nice: spots vandalism or a broken light. Fire up the app. Take a photo. The app logs GPS and gives option to move found position on map. Add optional comment and press send. Then the app keeps track of ticket status.
Other stuff we've had for years includes sms/app based mobile payment between individuals and stores. Sms/app based purchase of stamps when sending letters. Tickets for train/bus. Etc.
Slashdot.org has really become a blast from the past :-)
National Instruments LabVIEW - a graphical (but compiled) flow-oriented programming language - is also used for industrial automation/testing. Some of the components within your computer have most probably been tested or handled (before or during soldering/assembly) by a piece of hardware programmed in LabVIEW.
Well, the problem is that the premise of this article is that the author somehow is superhuman and sees threats to humanity that the common plebs can't observe because of their inferior mental capabilities.
No, individuals have always been superhuman compared to other humans *on average*. Just think of Einstein or any other person who has changed the world. Imho the issue is quite real. I can understand an event may wipe out my grandchildren. But even though the thought is a "ohh fuck" for me intellectually, the *feeling* I have is more on the level of "maybe I should get another cup of coffee". ... Now try to motivate any political system with that level of involvement... Not gonna happen. We are all going to die!
I will go and get a cup of coffee...
The question is: How do we detect said aliens? We can probably not use radio, because as some of you have touched, modern spread-spectrum communication is indistinguishable from noise. Add to this that we have this HUGE wide-band noise-generator right next to us called the sun. The radiation from alien suns is hard enough to block out at stellar distances in the visible regime, even harder at radio frequencies.
So how do we detect aliens? By the bulk. E.g. by looking at the atmospheric composition and saying "here are compounds that can not be produced by any natural method ".
So we will be checking against our models and trying to find deviations. Which leads me to my point:
Here we have a planet with the mass 17 times of earth, but with an atmosphere way of the chart of any predictions!
It is far out, even for me :-) but this is actually the "kind" of signs for life we are looking for. Alright in this case, I have a hard time imagine what could suck the air out of the alien atmosphere - but then again, that would make it really alien! - probably not carbon based :-)
Actually, this raises a more interesting question (at least to me) which your little thought experiment approaches. What if my autonomous car decides that the action to take that is likely to cause the least harm is to kill the driver? For example, what if the car has the opportunity to swerve off the side of a mountain road and drop you 1000 feet onto some rocks to avoid a crash that would have killed far more people than simply you? Is my autonomous car required to act in my own best interest, or should it act in the best interests of everyone on the road?
Your autonomous car? :-)
It will be a Google car. Partly paid by ads and data collected while used. As such it should - of course - behave in the best interest of the real costumers. I.e. not you! :)
... Which means it will start with a 10 minute teaser/cliffhanger to prevent people from leaving during commercials. Then the commercial break. Then a 10 minute teaser, repeating most of what was said in the previous segment, adding like 2-3 minutes new stuff and a new cliffhanger. Commercial break. Then 10 minutes of repetition. Etc. etc.
There are a lot of *seemingly* interesting documentaries being made in the US, but upon inspection they are mostly made to ensure viewers STAY for the COMMERCIALS.
If you watch them without commercials, the look like they were made by retards for retards! :-/
I will probably give it a change, but I guess I will be disappointment... Currently I'm only watching documentaries made by the BBC...
A company (I've forgotten which, think it was a "pre-cloud" storage solution) used this approach: ... I remember wondering if there is some legal way to force a person/company to stop stopping...
Each day post a photo of the front page from a local newspaper, with the message that if said image was no longer updated, they had received a 'request'. The idea being that the government/law agency/whatever only have the legal means to make them STOP doing something, but are unable to force them to go through the trouble of uploading a new image each day.
I've apparently made 'USB condoms' myself. A male and female usb connector soldered end-to-end, the data pins shorted together.
This enables my ancient HTC Desire to recognize any usb charger as a dedicated charger, and charge with up to 1 A (in reality significantly less). It is a low tech solution that works.
So why so much electronics on the board??
... Then the GlassUps will be at least 1 year delayed, and when - if - they finally arrive, they will be inferior, fragile, buggy and has to compete with Google glasses v2.
The idea is nice, I wish them the best of luck! And after donating to some kickstarter projects, I know they will need it. The path to a final product is not straight and easy.
For all of you who donate: Cool! And I mean this sincerely. You are willing to risk money for a great idea, I appreciate that. I've myself lost money on great ideas on Kickstarter... Too much money for my taste... This time I'll pass donating, I'm beginning to loose my faith in crowdfounding.
I did of course phrase the subject to maximize the provocation :-) but my point is, while I really like the plumping to work, I don't really care about "the nine traits of a veteran plumber". For me a network admin is (believe it or not) a LOW TECH job, using of-the-shelf standard components (as any other admin/technician/mechanic). If my mechanic has to stare blankly while mentally figuring out what is preventing my car to start, I will let him do that in peace - because I assume he knows better than me how to do his job.
I have NO doubt that network administration is an intriguing job, with its share of problems to solve. But as long as the down time is counted in hours and not days, I prefer them to work invisible behind the scenes, not bothering me and hindering me to do my job.
Don't get me wrong, I know that a good admin is well worth his pay. But also I love the cleaning personal, especially when they don't clean while I'm working :-)
I guess I was hoping to gain a little insight in how the admin job is done - I dunno, maybe adapt some of it to my little (tiny) home network. But most of the points was fairly obvious - yes I also reboot my router. No of course I can't calculate subnet masks/read packages/write filters in my head. Is it impressive he can? Slightly, but not much, skills like that develop by regular use. I would be more surprised if he had written "we just google it" :-)
They have not "found" anything. I am not a native English speaker, so I feel I am missing the right word, but they have "theorized" or "speculated", and then realized, that a program in full control of a device with sensors, can use said sensors as inputs...
To supply google with 2560x1600 panels for the nexus 10?
Wish it were so. But the major Android device makers appear to be afraid of Apple. They will never make something with a form factor that can be mistaken for an iPad.
It will probably be 10" 2560x1280... Or similar stupid "widescreen" format :-/
"Without gravity, we'd die."
Citation needed. Note that none of the astronauts have died due to the lack of gravity.
And to see how evolution proceeds without gravity we just need to look at the sea. Sea lions, dolphins and whales are all descended from mammals that used to live exclusively on land.
Sea lions etc. are just as much influenced by gravity as we are. The problem is in our organs. Whether you're surrounded by air or water on earth, the gravitational pull on your organs are the same (they are, in a sense, always submerged anyway)...
The problem is not the survival of the individual, but our spices. There are experiments on rats indicating that they can't get pregnant in zero gravity...
Citation: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Packing-Mars-Curious-Science-Space/dp/1851687807/ref=sr_1_2 - just read it; highly recommended. On a similar note; http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/#more-417
Anyhow, seeing the rapid drop of energy prices, I assume the solution is near, when energy becomes essential free, everyone gets a jetpack!... ... Oh wait! I am holding the card upside down!
Reminds me; I once read a sci fi - can't remember which - there were a passing reference to other races who had burned the fuel on their planet before reaching spaceflight. They were forever trapped in the gravity well. I assume the same will happen to us.
Not that it changes much. Saving between 0% (robotic probe) and 0.00001% (a crew of few thousands) of the population will not really make a dent, especially when you add the fact that it mission will either be bias towards christian theocracy or aggressive capitalistic pseudocommunism (how much do you trust e.g. China to represent American, if they are the ones "rescuing the race"??). All in all, regardless of the outcome, the probe will not be representative for most .. The rest are left to die...
Goodnight, and happy dreams! :-)
I have been fighting a virus on my work the last couple of days. It is calling itself McAfee Antivirus Enterprise. The symptoms is it slows my (aging) lab computers to a grinding halt. The last 3 days it has essentially incapacitating them for more than an hour, every day. I hope whatever payload it needed to update is done, so it will stop disrupting experiments by stalling.
We'll soon need to upgrade an old - but still adequate - dedicated lab computer running a single piece of equipment, just because IT have chosen McAfee...
(fyi; If I take it offline I can only log-on a month or so, then it has to connect to the domain, resulting in a torrent of forced updates. Beside we need to be able to retrieve the data, and last time I needed one, no one had an usb stick!).
This seems to be an old, but reoccurring, question to slashdot! The only thing changing is apparently the AGE of the drives. I predict the next who ask will have a bunch of 15-20 year old drives... :-)
We've had this in Denmark for 5+ years. E-boks.dk - except it is not only government mail, but all official mail. My bank, insurance - even my salary slip from my company. Also I can upload my own scanned documents into the repository, where it will stay forever.
I haven't received anything important in my mailbox for YEARS. I only check and empty it once every second week (only spam).
The system is secured by the national "Nem-ID" (Easy-ID) system, which is a combination of a password and a one-time pad. Also used by my bank (and all other danish banks. I have an old account in another bank. Same login work for both).
It took a while to get it all running smoothly, but it is really nice now it works. Added advantage is that electronic thefts (stolen login details etc.) from banks dropped to almost 0 nationwide since it was introduced.
Reminds me: Somewhere on the internet is a description of how to build an anti-camera cap. Basically a baseball cap with a battery, and a row of powerful IR emitters along the rim. It utilizes that most security cameras can see into the IR, so the camera will gain down and leave the face in darkness, or at least distort it enough to nullify automated face recognition. Can be used during transport, where wearing a cap is not as suspicious as covering the face. ... Or will it soon be so that anyone not instantly recognized will automatically be a suspect? :-)
It is not a novel idea, he mentions it himself at 1:07: an almost 100 year old idea that everybody has forgotten :-)
Quite cool idea though. Looking back at those first "automobile like" designs; cars with legs, monowheels etc. it is not surprising - they were good at thinking outside the "4 wheels on a box" box back then. Probably because the "car" idea was not established yet.