There are a few cases where it's really handy - the application I use most is the shopping list: while making stuff in the kitchen and noting I'm running low on something, I just sing out "add this to the shopping list" and it's done. Extremely convenient. I've also started using a dot as my alarm clock as it's easier to speak the time than to juggle the up/down buttons or even "alexa stop" than to groggily find the right button on the clock. I also use it where I don't have an alarm clock, e.g. reading, where I set an alarm to remind me it's time to go to bed (books are the biggest hazard to a full night's sleep!)
The voice interface is nearly trivial to use - I've written several apps, interfacing to my weather station and solar panels for example, and it's very convenient to "ask my weather station current temperature" or "how much rain we got today". That sort of thing is not going to be common though as you have to have a local server to get to the data.
The downside is things like my friends have too much fun putting weird things on my shopping list. The first thing I did was disable the ability to order things for just that sort of reason.
I recently dipped into the 3D printing world with a $300 printer, and while it's a low end printer, from what I've read, the issues are common: getting a print to stick and work is the blackest of arts. It's a complex, finicky process to go from design (which most software is complex and non-intuitive; so far, I've found tinkercad to be the best, albeit limited), to slicing (generating the printing commands - Simplify3D seems to be a lot better than the free options) to actually getting the printer to work (the object has to stay stuck to the bed until it's done, and the printer feed must not gum up). And it's slow. For something reasonably sized (e.g. a 100mm open cube), it can take half a day to print. It's a lot of fun when it works, but the value is primarily with people doing lots of real prototyping of small objects.
Interesting to see this as the next article after https://science.slashdot.org/s... - 1% or so and he could keep a million people from becoming homeless...
I specifically avoid using the News Feed on Facebook because it keeps missing posts from friends. Instead I have a "Following" list with everyone I want on it. It still occasionally misses posts, but it's a lot better than the News Feed. Don't tell me what I want to see, I can skim over the stuff I don't care about - the scroll wheel works very well thankyouverymuch.
...go ahead and put ads in it. If the first thing I see is an ad, or one pops up, my immediate next click is on the window close button. I'm there for the content, and if you disrupt that, you're history as there's no point otherwise.
* it avoids the ads * It avoids any chance of Amazon taking away books * I only buy books that are either non-DRMd or can be made so
The Kindle, however, is the best and most stable ereader I've found, which is why I went back to it. But everything gets onto it only over usb under my control.
Because messenger is part of the facebook page, everyone on facebook uses it? Someone is very optimistic... Facebook will get financial information out of my cold, dead, hands.
I've had my GPS lead me on "scenic routes" a few times, and realized it fairly soon, even in an area I was unfamiliar with (a dirt road is not likely an optimal route). Usually I followed it to see where it would go, at least for a while, but if it didn't get back on track before I got bored with it, either backtracked or cut over to where I knew it would get there.
Yes, and that's a lifesaver, but many of them need to be logged into again, and then it flashes up bazillions of windows for a while while recreating them and it's generally a nuisance.
Gave up on trying to call into the IRS and went down to the a nearby (well, 40 miles) office yesterday early afternoon. It wasn't actually crowded surprisingly, but the guy that handles real things (as opposed to taking checks and other minor receptionist duties) wasn't there, so I had to come back today. Got there bright and early and got it taken care of with a "they say up to 180 days for your refund". The receptionist had said "he can push it through" but apparently not really. Oh well, hopefully it won't take that long. They recommend filing a local police report, so I stopped in on my way to work and did that too. That actually took longer because they had to call a cop in off the street to take the report!? Although this tax refund fraud isn't usually taken beyond that to real identity theft, I filled out a form with a password that puts a flag on me so that if they deal with someone who claims to be me, they ask for the password to make sure it's really me and not an imposter.
But at least my state refund got deposited last week...
No, for the same reason you couldn't get away with not paying, you can't get away with ignoring the refund - the right tax return has to be filed. They could already tell if they cared to look, as my tax return is not simple and it's highly unlikely that the fraudulent one looks anything like the real one. The best case that would come out of ignoring it is an audit, and no one wants that.
I'm in the process of dealing with something like that now: someone filed a tax return for me before I got around to it. As a result, I had to file on paper, including an "identity theft affidavit" and a copy of some id, but they still sent back a letter requiring me to verify my identity. The online system rejected me (probably because it was asking for information on the fraudulent return), requiring me to call in. After wading through a 5 minute phone tree to get to a human, the system says "sorry, we're too busy go away". OK, it doesn't say "go away" but says call back later and hangs up, which is effectively the same. In the future, I will definitely be using the system to get a PIN ahead of time... If I owed money, I'd probably say fine - if you don't want to talk to me, I don't care, but sadly that's not the case...
I vote on the latter - even now, with an 8' projection screen, I often select 720P instead of 1080 because the file sizes are much smaller and the visual difference is negligible. 4K media may be worth it on a 10m screen, but not at home.
In my case, I assume it takes a load off the local distribution - when I'm producing more than I'm using, I'm basically feeding my neighbors power and reducing the amount coming in on the neighborhood feed. If we all had solar, such that it started backfeeding upstream, I can see at a point that might be an issue, and is probably what Hawaii and a few other sunny areas are running into. Even so, I can see partly cloudy days with clouds abruptly changing the power flow being a real problem in cases where the cloud covers a large enough area. Fortunately, I think battery technology is soon going to make the issue moot, and we won't be feeding the grid at all.
I treat such questions as passwords and never put real info in them. If they're basing it on info they think they already have, they should be slapped hard.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a few cases where it's really handy - the application I use most is the shopping list: while making stuff in the kitchen and noting I'm running low on something, I just sing out "add this to the shopping list" and it's done. Extremely convenient. I've also started using a dot as my alarm clock as it's easier to speak the time than to juggle the up/down buttons or even "alexa stop" than to groggily find the right button on the clock. I also use it where I don't have an alarm clock, e.g. reading, where I set an alarm to remind me it's time to go to bed (books are the biggest hazard to a full night's sleep!)
The voice interface is nearly trivial to use - I've written several apps, interfacing to my weather station and solar panels for example, and it's very convenient to "ask my weather station current temperature" or "how much rain we got today". That sort of thing is not going to be common though as you have to have a local server to get to the data.
The downside is things like my friends have too much fun putting weird things on my shopping list. The first thing I did was disable the ability to order things for just that sort of reason.
I recently dipped into the 3D printing world with a $300 printer, and while it's a low end printer, from what I've read, the issues are common: getting a print to stick and work is the blackest of arts. It's a complex, finicky process to go from design (which most software is complex and non-intuitive; so far, I've found tinkercad to be the best, albeit limited), to slicing (generating the printing commands - Simplify3D seems to be a lot better than the free options) to actually getting the printer to work (the object has to stay stuck to the bed until it's done, and the printer feed must not gum up). And it's slow. For something reasonably sized (e.g. a 100mm open cube), it can take half a day to print. It's a lot of fun when it works, but the value is primarily with people doing lots of real prototyping of small objects.
I've never understood what moron decided that making things hard to read was a good idea, even for those who still have good eyesight.
Sounds about right: 90% of everything is crap, and glad for it - there's too much good stuff to watch as it is...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Why does the Matrix come to mind?
Interesting to see this as the next article after https://science.slashdot.org/s... - 1% or so and he could keep a million people from becoming homeless...
Neither does mine, but that doesn't mean it's not a useful tool to help in keeping up with non-local friends.
I specifically avoid using the News Feed on Facebook because it keeps missing posts from friends. Instead I have a "Following" list with everyone I want on it. It still occasionally misses posts, but it's a lot better than the News Feed. Don't tell me what I want to see, I can skim over the stuff I don't care about - the scroll wheel works very well thankyouverymuch.
...but you *know* everyone is going to call it "Boaty", regardless of what the Powers That Be want...
...go ahead and put ads in it. If the first thing I see is an ad, or one pops up, my immediate next click is on the window close button. I'm there for the content, and if you disrupt that, you're history as there's no point otherwise.
...7 in 10 people don't understand the Internet
In fact, that's exactly what I've done:
* it avoids the ads
* It avoids any chance of Amazon taking away books
* I only buy books that are either non-DRMd or can be made so
The Kindle, however, is the best and most stable ereader I've found, which is why I went back to it. But everything gets onto it only over usb under my control.
Because messenger is part of the facebook page, everyone on facebook uses it? Someone is very optimistic... Facebook will get financial information out of my cold, dead, hands.
I've had my GPS lead me on "scenic routes" a few times, and realized it fairly soon, even in an area I was unfamiliar with (a dirt road is not likely an optimal route). Usually I followed it to see where it would go, at least for a while, but if it didn't get back on track before I got bored with it, either backtracked or cut over to where I knew it would get there.
Yes, and that's a lifesaver, but many of them need to be logged into again, and then it flashes up bazillions of windows for a while while recreating them and it's generally a nuisance.
Close firefox? Only when the system crashes or I have to reboot for some reason. Too damn many windows I have to restore.
...Galaxy Quest ought to rate higher than Die Hard here...
Gave up on trying to call into the IRS and went down to the a nearby (well, 40 miles) office yesterday early afternoon. It wasn't actually crowded surprisingly, but the guy that handles real things (as opposed to taking checks and other minor receptionist duties) wasn't there, so I had to come back today. Got there bright and early and got it taken care of with a "they say up to 180 days for your refund". The receptionist had said "he can push it through" but apparently not really. Oh well, hopefully it won't take that long. They recommend filing a local police report, so I stopped in on my way to work and did that too. That actually took longer because they had to call a cop in off the street to take the report!? Although this tax refund fraud isn't usually taken beyond that to real identity theft, I filled out a form with a password that puts a flag on me so that if they deal with someone who claims to be me, they ask for the password to make sure it's really me and not an imposter.
But at least my state refund got deposited last week...
No, for the same reason you couldn't get away with not paying, you can't get away with ignoring the refund - the right tax return has to be filed. They could already tell if they cared to look, as my tax return is not simple and it's highly unlikely that the fraudulent one looks anything like the real one. The best case that would come out of ignoring it is an audit, and no one wants that.
I'm in the process of dealing with something like that now: someone filed a tax return for me before I got around to it. As a result, I had to file on paper, including an "identity theft affidavit" and a copy of some id, but they still sent back a letter requiring me to verify my identity. The online system rejected me (probably because it was asking for information on the fraudulent return), requiring me to call in. After wading through a 5 minute phone tree to get to a human, the system says "sorry, we're too busy go away". OK, it doesn't say "go away" but says call back later and hangs up, which is effectively the same. In the future, I will definitely be using the system to get a PIN ahead of time... If I owed money, I'd probably say fine - if you don't want to talk to me, I don't care, but sadly that's not the case...
Politically driven "science" is what Republicans excel at, so investigating themselves is exactly what they *should* be doing.
I vote on the latter - even now, with an 8' projection screen, I often select 720P instead of 1080 because the file sizes are much smaller and the visual difference is negligible. 4K media may be worth it on a 10m screen, but not at home.
In my case, I assume it takes a load off the local distribution - when I'm producing more than I'm using, I'm basically feeding my neighbors power and reducing the amount coming in on the neighborhood feed. If we all had solar, such that it started backfeeding upstream, I can see at a point that might be an issue, and is probably what Hawaii and a few other sunny areas are running into. Even so, I can see partly cloudy days with clouds abruptly changing the power flow being a real problem in cases where the cloud covers a large enough area. Fortunately, I think battery technology is soon going to make the issue moot, and we won't be feeding the grid at all.
They apparently *really* don't want me to get rid of it:
+ grep SHA-1 /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain
+ security find-certificate -a -Z -c 'CNNIC ROOT'
SHA-1 hash: 8BAF4C9B1DF02A92F7DA128EB91BACF498604B6F
+ security delete-certificate -t -Z 8BAF4C9B1DF02A92F7DA128EB91BACF498604B6F
security: SecTrustSettingsRemoveTrustSettings (user): No Trust Settings were found.
+ security delete-certificate -t -c 'CNNIC ROOT'
x: line 5: 92884 Segmentation fault security delete-certificate -t -c "CNNIC ROOT"
I treat such questions as passwords and never put real info in them. If they're basing it on info they think they already have, they should be slapped hard.