An "important note" at the bottom of the ZDNet article explains that much of this drop is caused by the rise of convertible tablet PCs that run a PC operating system, which IDC counts as tablets, not PCs. Gartner appears to count them as PCs if they run a PC operating system, not a smartphone-derived, all-maximized-all-the-time operating system like iOS or Android.
I would be prone to count tablets as mobile devices and Laptops as computers. Because, if I ship a desktop machine with Android on it, does that make it a mobile device? I think the form factor is the best way to determine mobility. Besides, Windows 8 is pretty much a "smartphone-derived" operating system. Or at least the UI was designed for phones/tablets and supporting non-touch screen devices like most recent laptops and desktops was an afterthought.
I've been rear ended three times by people on cell phones. I actually saw all three in my rear view (I was stopped), before they hit me. Want to guess what EVERY SINGLE ONE failed to mention in the police report?
If you have been rear ended 3 times, then you should probably stop cutting people off, or slamming on your breaks.
Most road signs give information that you act on immediately. By their nature, road signs also don't tend to take your eyes completely off the road ahead, and certainly not for several seconds.
No. Most road signs give you information that you don't act on at all. Your GPS tells you "Your exit is number 167 and it is in 0.9 miles." The road signs say things like "This is a random road that is not your exit" and "This is another random road that is not your exit." The GPS actually takes your attention away from driving for a much shorter time, especially on long trips on the interstate.
If you passed your test, you know how to pull over somewhere safe for maybe 20 seconds to check a map or reconfigure your sat-nav, and you really ought to know how dangerous it is to unnecessarily take your hands off the wheel, your eyes off the road, or your mind off your driving.
So, by that logic, we should ban car stereos since they encourage people to take their eyes off the road and their mind off driving. And we would also have to ban GPS units since that map they show can only be seen if you look at it.
If you ban GPS units, then people will use paper based maps they printed from online map services. This is far more dangerous than using your phone. Also, if you deprive people of good maps they will drive farther to get to their destination, which has a number of harms to society including more wear on roads, increasing global warming, and increasing the risk of car accidents.
To test whether or not we have photos of black holes, I tried doing a Google image search for "black hole", but I was surprised by the lack of porn on the first page of results and got bored and stopped looking.
I would require each person who I built a compartment for to sign a sworn statement under penalty of perjury that they will not use their hidden compartment for illegal purposes. I would have some kind of checklist of reasons that they are planning to use the hidden compartment. For example, "to prevent theft of legally possessed valuables", "to store electronics that are at high risk of theft", "for other legal purposes", and "for illegal purposes". Obviously, if someone checks "for illegal purposes", you refuse them service.
Does Google Glass deserve extra scrutiny before it hits the market?"
No, it deserves scrutiny after it hits the market.
And it doesn't really need extra scrutiny at all. It needs the same level of scrutiny as any other piece of high tech equipment. This manufactured hysteria is exactly the same thing we got when camera phones were first introduced. Luckily, we got over it. Well, except for the police, who are still resisting being video taped.
Only on Slashdot does someone who's anti-Google has to be pro-Microsoft.
There's not a single Microsoft thing in my house, and I'm concerned with everything Google is doing.
The original author of the article is not a Microsoft sympathizer. He thinks that the iPhone is ubiquitous and he also assumes that the reader has an iPhone as well. I would be willing to bet that when apple comes out with their clone of Google Glass, even if they sell live video feeds from every user on iTunes, he will suddenly think it is the best thing ever.
The jerkiness of Google is they went against the direct wishes of the creator of the project. Sun wanted to make sure that Java was compatible with Java anywhere, which is why they sued Microsoft for adding incompatibilities.
Sun decided they wanted to make Java open source, but took measures to make sure any new implementation would be compatible. They did whatever they could to make sure it would be.
Then Google decided to make an incompatible version, apparently to avoid the J2ME license issues, but for whatever reason, they made it incompatible. Not cool.
The creator of the Mp3 player probably never intended other companies like apple to add a bunch of DRM and make their Media Player incompatible with everything else.
Why is the parent mod'd informative and not funny?
Actually, the popularity of Linux over BSD is probably helped a lot by the fact that Bell Labs did try to sue over this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi
When my current phone dies, I'm buying another dumb phone. I do NOT need a "smart" phone to track me and let others track me, I'll stick with a dumb phone that makes phone calls.
You are pretty naive to think a dumb phone doesn't allow people to track you. Why would you think that? It has been a required feature in cell phones in the US for years...
I would have been happy to buy a device and possibly develop for it, but they have really horrible developer support. They don't let you even download the SDK! Apparently 40,000 people applied to the developer program, but they are only giving access to people that they have decided to give free devices. Their actual end-user device is shipping soon, but we can't even download the SDK? WTF??? It is cheap and I would be happy to buy one. But, without an SDK it is pretty worthless to me...
It summarises the stories for you, apparently quite competently (I haven't used it myself - it won't run on a 2nd gen Touch). As far as I could tell, none of those aggregators in the linked article do that.
That feature sounds nice. But, how long would it take someone to reverse engineer how it works. Why would Yahoo spend more than 1 engineer's annual salary buying this? It sounds like the kind of thing that could be replaced by a pretty small Perl Script.
This display is better than LCD displays for e-readers. It is low-power and works well in sunlight like e-ink, but allows you to have color and video. Samsung probably doesn't want to make e-readers. But, Amazon might be interested in making e-readers with color displays that can do video. So, I think they want to buy it to give their e-readers a competitive advantage over other people's.
Not true, the fact of the matter is that card counting depends upon there being relatively large number of cards to function correctly. If you were trying to count against a single deck, you wouldn't see enough hands in order to have any meaningful impact on the cards.
That's ridiculous. The reason they use multi-deck shoes is to increase the difficulty of counting cards. If they were only dealing with 52, it would be relatively easy for a normal person to count cards according to a simple system and watch as the odds turned for or against them and increase or reduce their bets or change the level at which they stay. Also, if they use 12-deck shoes, it's impossible for a player to determine when the casino isn't playing with full decks.
It doesn't increase the difficulty of counting cards at all. But, it does decrease the variance. Card counting involves placing higher bets when there are a significantly higher than average number of 10's, face cards and aces in the deck than 2-6's. With a small number of decks, this situation occurs much more frequently than with a larger number of decks. Player's can't easily determine whether or not they are playing with a full deck even when there is only one deck because they do not deal all the way down to the last card, and they also burn a card at the beginning.
A typical card counting scheme involves each card having a value of either -1, 0 or +1. For example, card 2-6 might be +1, and 10's, face cards and Aces would be -1. You just keep track of a running total of the count. But usually, that number is pretty close to zero because the cards tend to cancel each other out. I think the highest count I ever saw was like +15. You can teach yourself to count cards pretty easily. If you are good at it, with say a $15 hand minimum bet you can have a positive expected value. The problem is it will usually be something like $250 plus or minus $2000 or something. So, in the end, you need to have a lot of capital in order to have a hope of beating the variance. Meanwhile, you are likely to be detected and banned.
I'd be perfectly happy if all these companies up and vanished from lack of ad revenue. The internet was a far less troll friendly place before they came along;)
So, you would like all the search engines to collapse? Then how would you find your pron?
Actually, EasyDNS is better. It blocks specific bloggers and tumblrs, that many "Enterprise" solutions give a pass.
But for EasyDNS, you HAVE to be able to control the resolv.conf of your clients, or it is bypassed.
It depends on what the requirements of your users are. For my research I often need to go to web sites that host malware. It is annoying when the network goes out of its way to return fake DNS results. And when ISP's start doing this in the cloud, then someone comes up with the bright idea of just redirecting all the invalid DNS requests to a web site that hosts advertisements and then collecting revenue from them.
We need government to stop companies from dumping their losses on government? That makes no sense. How about we take wealth and power away from the government so they are in no position to cover losses or hand out favors at all?
Imagine a federal government that was given 8% of annual GDP (roughly $1.2 trillion) to perform its duties and constrained by a balanced budget law. Let's see them do an $800 billion bailout of their banker friends on that budget.
The problem is that business has too much power over government. And your solution is to give businesses more power? The government would just contract out all the services it provides to private companies and let them charge for it. Take the post office for example, the government would just sell it to private businesses and then the cost of mailing stuff would go up a lot. Instead of calling them taxes, they would instead become fees and could be given directly to private business. For example, if you want a new social security card, you just pay blackwater (or whoever is friends with the administration at the time) $1000 for it. And now, without government oversight, these businesses would just cut out the middle man and be corrupt all on their own.
Slashdot Mirror
If you like static typing and buy into the current craze over functional programming, Scala is awesome. .
Wait, what? There is a functional programming craze? When did that happen?
An "important note" at the bottom of the ZDNet article explains that much of this drop is caused by the rise of convertible tablet PCs that run a PC operating system, which IDC counts as tablets, not PCs. Gartner appears to count them as PCs if they run a PC operating system, not a smartphone-derived, all-maximized-all-the-time operating system like iOS or Android.
I would be prone to count tablets as mobile devices and Laptops as computers. Because, if I ship a desktop machine with Android on it, does that make it a mobile device? I think the form factor is the best way to determine mobility. Besides, Windows 8 is pretty much a "smartphone-derived" operating system. Or at least the UI was designed for phones/tablets and supporting non-touch screen devices like most recent laptops and desktops was an afterthought.
I've been rear ended three times by people on cell phones. I actually saw all three in my rear view (I was stopped), before they hit me. Want to guess what EVERY SINGLE ONE failed to mention in the police report?
If you have been rear ended 3 times, then you should probably stop cutting people off, or slamming on your breaks.
Most road signs give information that you act on immediately. By their nature, road signs also don't tend to take your eyes completely off the road ahead, and certainly not for several seconds.
No. Most road signs give you information that you don't act on at all. Your GPS tells you "Your exit is number 167 and it is in 0.9 miles." The road signs say things like "This is a random road that is not your exit" and "This is another random road that is not your exit." The GPS actually takes your attention away from driving for a much shorter time, especially on long trips on the interstate.
If you passed your test, you know how to pull over somewhere safe for maybe 20 seconds to check a map or reconfigure your sat-nav, and you really ought to know how dangerous it is to unnecessarily take your hands off the wheel, your eyes off the road, or your mind off your driving.
So, by that logic, we should ban car stereos since they encourage people to take their eyes off the road and their mind off driving. And we would also have to ban GPS units since that map they show can only be seen if you look at it. If you ban GPS units, then people will use paper based maps they printed from online map services. This is far more dangerous than using your phone. Also, if you deprive people of good maps they will drive farther to get to their destination, which has a number of harms to society including more wear on roads, increasing global warming, and increasing the risk of car accidents.
Both of them are based on the previous Adroid-based Motoblur. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motoblur
Have we taken photos of an actual black hole? No.
To test whether or not we have photos of black holes, I tried doing a Google image search for "black hole", but I was surprised by the lack of porn on the first page of results and got bored and stopped looking.
Is nothing because Slashdot keeps using technology from two decades ago.
DEATH TO FLASH!
Yeah. They should be using HMTL instead, which is 3 decades old!
I would require each person who I built a compartment for to sign a sworn statement under penalty of perjury that they will not use their hidden compartment for illegal purposes. I would have some kind of checklist of reasons that they are planning to use the hidden compartment. For example, "to prevent theft of legally possessed valuables", "to store electronics that are at high risk of theft", "for other legal purposes", and "for illegal purposes". Obviously, if someone checks "for illegal purposes", you refuse them service.
Does Google Glass deserve extra scrutiny before it hits the market?"
No, it deserves scrutiny after it hits the market.
And it doesn't really need extra scrutiny at all. It needs the same level of scrutiny as any other piece of high tech equipment. This manufactured hysteria is exactly the same thing we got when camera phones were first introduced. Luckily, we got over it. Well, except for the police, who are still resisting being video taped.
Only on Slashdot does someone who's anti-Google has to be pro-Microsoft.
There's not a single Microsoft thing in my house, and I'm concerned with everything Google is doing.
The original author of the article is not a Microsoft sympathizer. He thinks that the iPhone is ubiquitous and he also assumes that the reader has an iPhone as well. I would be willing to bet that when apple comes out with their clone of Google Glass, even if they sell live video feeds from every user on iTunes, he will suddenly think it is the best thing ever.
Instead, offer her a ride on your triceratops.
Why didn't Oracle sue over the Trademark instead? It worked for Sun against Microsoft.
Google was careful to not call it Java.
The jerkiness of Google is they went against the direct wishes of the creator of the project. Sun wanted to make sure that Java was compatible with Java anywhere, which is why they sued Microsoft for adding incompatibilities. Sun decided they wanted to make Java open source, but took measures to make sure any new implementation would be compatible. They did whatever they could to make sure it would be. Then Google decided to make an incompatible version, apparently to avoid the J2ME license issues, but for whatever reason, they made it incompatible. Not cool.
The creator of the Mp3 player probably never intended other companies like apple to add a bunch of DRM and make their Media Player incompatible with everything else.
Why is the parent mod'd informative and not funny? Actually, the popularity of Linux over BSD is probably helped a lot by the fact that Bell Labs did try to sue over this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi
When my current phone dies, I'm buying another dumb phone. I do NOT need a "smart" phone to track me and let others track me, I'll stick with a dumb phone that makes phone calls.
You are pretty naive to think a dumb phone doesn't allow people to track you. Why would you think that? It has been a required feature in cell phones in the US for years...
Android phones have come with biometric authentication and have since October, 2011... http://www.android.com/about/ice-cream-sandwich/
>"With our iPhone in hand â" or any smartphone, really "
Oh really? Thanks for the concession! So there is nothing super magical about the iPhone then??? Just... wow!
There is totally a difference! iPhone users worry that they are losing their creativity.
I would have been happy to buy a device and possibly develop for it, but they have really horrible developer support. They don't let you even download the SDK! Apparently 40,000 people applied to the developer program, but they are only giving access to people that they have decided to give free devices. Their actual end-user device is shipping soon, but we can't even download the SDK? WTF??? It is cheap and I would be happy to buy one. But, without an SDK it is pretty worthless to me...
It summarises the stories for you, apparently quite competently (I haven't used it myself - it won't run on a 2nd gen Touch). As far as I could tell, none of those aggregators in the linked article do that.
That feature sounds nice. But, how long would it take someone to reverse engineer how it works. Why would Yahoo spend more than 1 engineer's annual salary buying this? It sounds like the kind of thing that could be replaced by a pretty small Perl Script.
This display is better than LCD displays for e-readers. It is low-power and works well in sunlight like e-ink, but allows you to have color and video. Samsung probably doesn't want to make e-readers. But, Amazon might be interested in making e-readers with color displays that can do video. So, I think they want to buy it to give their e-readers a competitive advantage over other people's.
Not true, the fact of the matter is that card counting depends upon there being relatively large number of cards to function correctly. If you were trying to count against a single deck, you wouldn't see enough hands in order to have any meaningful impact on the cards.
That's ridiculous. The reason they use multi-deck shoes is to increase the difficulty of counting cards. If they were only dealing with 52, it would be relatively easy for a normal person to count cards according to a simple system and watch as the odds turned for or against them and increase or reduce their bets or change the level at which they stay. Also, if they use 12-deck shoes, it's impossible for a player to determine when the casino isn't playing with full decks.
It doesn't increase the difficulty of counting cards at all. But, it does decrease the variance. Card counting involves placing higher bets when there are a significantly higher than average number of 10's, face cards and aces in the deck than 2-6's. With a small number of decks, this situation occurs much more frequently than with a larger number of decks. Player's can't easily determine whether or not they are playing with a full deck even when there is only one deck because they do not deal all the way down to the last card, and they also burn a card at the beginning. A typical card counting scheme involves each card having a value of either -1, 0 or +1. For example, card 2-6 might be +1, and 10's, face cards and Aces would be -1. You just keep track of a running total of the count. But usually, that number is pretty close to zero because the cards tend to cancel each other out. I think the highest count I ever saw was like +15. You can teach yourself to count cards pretty easily. If you are good at it, with say a $15 hand minimum bet you can have a positive expected value. The problem is it will usually be something like $250 plus or minus $2000 or something. So, in the end, you need to have a lot of capital in order to have a hope of beating the variance. Meanwhile, you are likely to be detected and banned.
I'd be perfectly happy if all these companies up and vanished from lack of ad revenue. The internet was a far less troll friendly place before they came along ;)
So, you would like all the search engines to collapse? Then how would you find your pron?
The CLOUD!
No but real. SMB, use EasyDNS.
Big shop? Z-Scaler and similar.
Actually, EasyDNS is better. It blocks specific bloggers and tumblrs, that many "Enterprise" solutions give a pass.
But for EasyDNS, you HAVE to be able to control the resolv.conf of your clients, or it is bypassed.
It depends on what the requirements of your users are. For my research I often need to go to web sites that host malware. It is annoying when the network goes out of its way to return fake DNS results. And when ISP's start doing this in the cloud, then someone comes up with the bright idea of just redirecting all the invalid DNS requests to a web site that hosts advertisements and then collecting revenue from them.
We need government to stop companies from dumping their losses on government? That makes no sense. How about we take wealth and power away from the government so they are in no position to cover losses or hand out favors at all?
Imagine a federal government that was given 8% of annual GDP (roughly $1.2 trillion) to perform its duties and constrained by a balanced budget law. Let's see them do an $800 billion bailout of their banker friends on that budget.
The problem is that business has too much power over government. And your solution is to give businesses more power? The government would just contract out all the services it provides to private companies and let them charge for it. Take the post office for example, the government would just sell it to private businesses and then the cost of mailing stuff would go up a lot. Instead of calling them taxes, they would instead become fees and could be given directly to private business. For example, if you want a new social security card, you just pay blackwater (or whoever is friends with the administration at the time) $1000 for it. And now, without government oversight, these businesses would just cut out the middle man and be corrupt all on their own.