...people are downloading it for free so they're not necessarily paying customers...
And, more importantly, the number of downloads has no real correlation to the number of users -- which is what the paid products are based on. I've downloaded OpenOffice probably fifty times since its inception. I've bought Microsoft Office once.
Yes, but google has room to grown. I'd be surprised if Apple did anything interesting in the next year, I expect it of Google.
Google is an advertising company that has blown massive amounts of money on side products that have effectively been loss-leaders for their advertising revenue.
The thing about advertising, though -- the more people see, the less its worth.
Google doing something "interesting" is of virtually zero value from an investment standpoint if they can't convert to revenue, and so far they've shown even their biggest bets (like Android) haven't.
"The submitter got it by misreading the ZDnet article. It was the author of that article (Zack Whittaker) who made the recommendation, not MS."
Just as well timothy picked it up in editing. Oh, wait...
Its a Microsoft story -- what is Slashdot going to pick? A summary of an article that communicates the total non-news of a Patch Tuesday, or a hyped-up Anti-Microsoft article that excites their target audience into high levels of self-congratulatory mental masturbation?
The principles behind the EmDrive have serious theoretical problems, and the original builder and designer never tested it in a vacuum chamber.
Taking a sealed container and pumping a few kilowatts of microwaves into it, chances are any thrust developed is actually air that's getting heated up and expanding out of the container. Unless the EmDrive has been put in a vacuum chamber where this can be demonstrated to definitely not be the case (i.e. low enough that their couldn't be enough reaction mass) then it's not actually working.
Out of curiosity, is it a racist thing that you assume the Chinese scientists are incapable of running a valid experiment, or is it a pro-west political bias that you assume they'd be lying about it?
... if the complaints against Windows 8 weren't common. That they are so common says there is something more to them than you're implying.
To me, tiles are just a horrible idea. They're like over-sized icons using 1980s-ish graphics. I hate more screens and sliding just to get to a damn application. Quicklaunch, tada. Even the Start Menu, not that far. Now? Start-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Click. Fuck you.
They're common on Slashdot, who wants to whip up the zealots to drive ad views. They're not common anywhere else.
Screw Microsoft and their Azure platform.. I'm working on a project where I'll need a cloud Linux VM. The choice is between an Azure VM, which I signed up for a freeby 90 day eval, and a 1 year freeby AWS tiny instance.. Obviously I was leaning towards AWS, but figured "what the heck, lets see what this Azure platform is all about".. I went ahead and signed up for the 90 day eval.. Set up a CentOS VM, lit it off, planning to load the project code on to, but got buried in honey-doos, and only got back to the VM after about a month, having lost 1/3 of the eval period. After getting most of the honey-doos done, I went back and signed up for an AWS tiny instance, to eval the two side-by-side... A week or so later, still WELL within the 90 days, I get an email from MS telling me I'm getting close to exhausting the resources allocated to the VM and I need to put a credit card on the account to continue.. Mind you, this VM was idle, since I'd yet to get to installing the project I wanted it for... I said "screw MS" and cancelled the account, and went with AWS.. I got a whole year free before I have to start paying for my project...
Wait, you're saying that your inability to read or do basic math is Microsoft's fault? The free Azure trial specifies the number of compute hours it includes. It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or, frankly, a sixth grader) to divide that number by 24 and see how many days of a VM that covers. (And, by the way, EVERY cloud vendor charges by the hour the VM exists -- they don't care if its idle, suspended, hibernated or anything else.)
Step 1: Sign up for the Azure free trial Step 2: Create a Linux VM in Azure... from their VM image archive. Step 3: Experience your mind being blown as you realize Microsoft, in fact, actively supports Linux.
Don't be a moron. Not only is Microsoft not a controlling investor, they're not an investor at all!
And, of course, if you want to run Linux, a particularly nice option is the single-click install of Linux in an Azure VM... hosted by Microsoft... supported by Microsoft...
But, sure, a loan from them means no more Linux from Dell.
OP was a joke, referencing Michael Dell's 1997 comment about how he would fix Apple at the time. His response: "Close it down and give the money back to the shareholders"
If their stock keeps tanking, that may be a good option in 2014, too...
This calls for Impeachment and trial of everyone involved. It will not happen of course, because murder is not as big a deal as getting a blowjob from an intern.
Impeachment can only happen if a law has been broken, and US law explicitly grants those rights. If you don't like that, you need to contact your senators and representatives, and get them to propose a law changing that. And wait for it to happen. And you still couldn't impeach because *its not illegal right now*.
Or you can just post bumbling stupidity on the Internet.
Mars had liquid water at some point and is outside the habitable zone, for some definitions of habitable zone. So it is entirely possible that planets with liquid water can exist outside the habitable zone.
Am I correct in assuming that the liquid which must have flowed on Mars doesn't necessarily have to be water, or has there been proof that the liquid was specifically water? That's a real question by the way, I'm not trying to be sarcastic. If anyone knows, I'd appreciate an answer.
The presence of water is proven on Mars. The existence of minerals that only form in the presence of water is proven on the surface of Mars. Massive liquid-based erosion is proven on the surface of Mars. Its reasonable to assume they're all related. And, frankly, the fact that water is found damn near everywhere in the solar system where it hasn't been torn apart by radiation, or heat makes is really implausible that there wouldn't have been water on Mars -- water that got there the same way it got to Earth, during a period of time in which Mars was more conducive to surface water than Earth.
IMO, the whole "finding water on Mars" thing is more akin to the "seeing a giant squid alive in the ocean". Everyone knows its there, but scientists just like to see things with their own eyes. The search is the fun part, so... search away.
Mars had liquid water at some point and is outside the habitable zone, for some definitions of habitable zone. So it is entirely possible that planets with liquid water can exist outside the habitable zone. The real issue is with stability.
An interesting take on this is to consider the flux of radiation from the Sun hitting the Earth. For a disk the size of the Earth, one can calculate the distance where water freezes and where water boils as a rough estimate of a "zone" of sorts. When looked at in this way, the Earth is at a point just barely above freezing. That we have the climate that we do beyond that near freezing point is due entirely to greenhouse effects.
Mars isn't outside the habitable zone, in any accepted definition of it. In fact, there's no reason to presume it isn't currently habitable. Keep in mind, even if it has "seized" up, and no longer has a LOT of interior heat (and, thus, no magnetic field, no protection from solar wind, and thus very little atmosphere), the interior is still hot. The planet had water, and is absolutely warmer underground... conditions where life lives just fine on Earth. (Note, although its a fact that life *could* live on Mars, that has nothing to do with if life *does* or *has* lived on Mars.)
And there are absolutely gasses that are heavier, less prone to being stripped by the solar wind, and better as a "greenhouse" gas, so another Mars-like planet with a slightly different chemistry could be absolutely comfortable for Earth-like life, even on the surface.
So while most of your post I agree with, the statement that Mars is outside the habitable zone, for some definitions, is a preamble that is neither accurate nor necessary for the good point you were making. I think the key thing is that there are lots of conditions that are clearly outside the planetary habitable zone (which is defined based on surface habitability of a "planet") in which life could persist. If the Sun went out today, it'd be a billion years before the teeming masses of underground bacteria on Earth knew -- they live off the interior heat of the Earth, and have nothing to do with the Sun. Same thing with life that could exist on Jovian moons -- the interior heat of the moons keeps liquid water common well outside the solar "habitable zone". We know Io has heavy volcanism -- if Europa does, too, then there's little reason to think if you plopped chemosynthetic bacteria from deep ocean vents on Earth into similar environments there that it isn't at least plausible that it could survive.
IMO, the real limitation of the definition of "habitable zone" is that its really talking about surface conditions that are viable to "life" working with the same chemistry that life on Earth uses -- and non-surface life and differing chemistries aren't really considered.
I remember looking at these in the early 90's. They seemed interesting, but the inability to easily make copies due to idiotic DRM made it uninteresting to me. And I'm sure that Sony was asking absurd licensing fees for others to make players (like the home Betamax days).
And rather than Sony learn any lessons, they have doubled down. For two decades. Is it any wonder their stock and their corporate goodwill are both in the shitter?
I used one for almost ten years, and never had an issue with it. If you bought music on it, perhaps... but if you bought CDs and just burned mix MDs, it worked great. I used it daily on my commute and when I traveled until I got my first iPod. It was durable, had great battery life, etc... ideal, particularly as compared to a portable CD player.
Its VERY serious. You can lose a lot of money by doing the wrong thing.
Slashdot, as a community, has shown in one patent article after another than there's literally no collective wisdom, from reading and interpreting patents, to offering advice. The worst thing you could do would be to take any here that is anything more than "talk to an attorney, and stop talking about it online until you do so".
Why not stick 16 or 32 GB in it, if you use 8GB dimms it is cheap. Will be even cheaper by the time the thing is released.
When you're making a $300 consumer device, the extra $25 makes a big difference. And when you're competing in the $300 consumer space, a $25 increase in price will knock you out of the market.
I borrowed a friend's old iPhone for app development and testing. AT&T discovered it was "on" and started charging my friend for another line even though it was not making calls or accessing data and had no phone number. He had to call and argue with them to take of the charges.
You need to keep an eye on your AT&T bills.
Or, you know... pull the SIM card when you're not using phone and data.
I've been using my old iPhone for a couple years that way.
Hollywood's doing as good of a job portraying programmers as they have every other aspect of technology. I've never seen this 'brogrammer' in the wild. I don't doubt that there may be small, isolated pockets of them but it's not exactly the cancer that is killing the industry.
Well, much like Fox needs to make up drama to drive their slobbering masses to keep watching, so does Slashdot, from time to time.
And, no, "Brogramming" doesn't happen in the real world.
If you read the news you can find plenty examples of long established, "legitimate religions" still doing shitty things to people.
For the most part, those shitty things aren't officially sanctioned parts of the religion. Some of the things (I'm thinking of the handling of catholic pedo priests) are widespread enough that you could make a reasonable argument that they are instuitional, but they are not doctrine To the best of my knowledge, Scientology has not had any sort of reformation yet.
You need to read some history, kid. Or... hell... play Assassin's Creed if a book is too much of a stretch for you. Because rape, murder, genocide, persecution and things like formed not only a core institutional policy of the Catholic church for five centuries -- the parts of the Bible they skipped in Sunday School *still* call out those behaviors... as the literal word of "God".
And, this is a big part of the problem. As long as we, as a society, choose to "respect" people who live outside the realm of reality -- and force their particular brand of insanity on others -- things won't improve.
So let me echo everything you said, and add that I fundamentally mean to disrespect anyone who happens to fall under those points.
My point being that you don't need a large sample of Scientologists since by definition they all believe this.
Well, to be fair, that's no more batshit crazy than the things a billion Christians believe, or a half billion followers of Isalm, or...hell... the other five billion people who follow some sort of batshit crazy theology.
Once you turn your back on reality, the degree you do so, or your particular theology hardly matters. You're still choosing to put a pack of lies at the core of the way you live your life.
And, the shit Scientologists pull pales in comparison to... well... the Catholic church. Islam. Mormons. Israel's been working to get Jews on that list. In fact, there's not very many "faiths" that haven't made persecution, murder, war, abuse and the like a core part of their rise. Hell, the religious right's battle against science and reality hurts people many orders of magnitude more than the Church of Scientology ever has.
Slashdot Mirror
...people are downloading it for free so they're not necessarily paying customers...
And, more importantly, the number of downloads has no real correlation to the number of users -- which is what the paid products are based on. I've downloaded OpenOffice probably fifty times since its inception. I've bought Microsoft Office once.
Yes, but google has room to grown. I'd be surprised if Apple did anything interesting in the next year, I expect it of Google.
Google is an advertising company that has blown massive amounts of money on side products that have effectively been loss-leaders for their advertising revenue.
The thing about advertising, though -- the more people see, the less its worth.
Google doing something "interesting" is of virtually zero value from an investment standpoint if they can't convert to revenue, and so far they've shown even their biggest bets (like Android) haven't.
Article is a forum post from 2008 talking about things we knew before then.
Why was this posted?
Chance to take a dig at Microsoft, drive a flamefest and get ad views.
You know, like Slashdot has been for a decade.
"excites their target audience into high levels of self-congratulatory mental masturbation?"
Mental? Why would you throw such an extraneous word into that statement?
'Scuse me, I gotta get strokin'!
Well, I'm assuming its hard to franticly reply on Slashdot in one window, and surf 4chan in another, with one hand occupied.
"The submitter got it by misreading the ZDnet article. It was the author of that article (Zack Whittaker) who made the recommendation, not MS."
Just as well timothy picked it up in editing. Oh, wait...
Its a Microsoft story -- what is Slashdot going to pick? A summary of an article that communicates the total non-news of a Patch Tuesday, or a hyped-up Anti-Microsoft article that excites their target audience into high levels of self-congratulatory mental masturbation?
...as the point in interweb non-spacetime where/when slashdot's u-turn from interesting to crass became self-evident.
so long, /. been a fun 10 years. my gratitude, respect & good will as i permanently depart.
Oh jeez, if this post is enough to get you whipped up, you haven't been on here the last few years (ie, decade).
Take it as it is -- an opportunity to troll and whip people up. I played the race card to get it going, I'm sure you can find a fun angle, too!
The principles behind the EmDrive have serious theoretical problems, and the original builder and designer never tested it in a vacuum chamber.
Taking a sealed container and pumping a few kilowatts of microwaves into it, chances are any thrust developed is actually air that's getting heated up and expanding out of the container. Unless the EmDrive has been put in a vacuum chamber where this can be demonstrated to definitely not be the case (i.e. low enough that their couldn't be enough reaction mass) then it's not actually working.
Out of curiosity, is it a racist thing that you assume the Chinese scientists are incapable of running a valid experiment, or is it a pro-west political bias that you assume they'd be lying about it?
... if the complaints against Windows 8 weren't common. That they are so common says there is something more to them than you're implying.
To me, tiles are just a horrible idea. They're like over-sized icons using 1980s-ish graphics. I hate more screens and sliding just to get to a damn application. Quicklaunch, tada. Even the Start Menu, not that far. Now? Start-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Click. Fuck you.
They're common on Slashdot, who wants to whip up the zealots to drive ad views. They're not common anywhere else.
Screw Microsoft and their Azure platform.. I'm working on a project where I'll need a cloud Linux VM. The choice is between an Azure VM, which I signed up for a freeby 90 day eval, and a 1 year freeby AWS tiny instance.. Obviously I was leaning towards AWS, but figured "what the heck, lets see what this Azure platform is all about".. I went ahead and signed up for the 90 day eval.. Set up a CentOS VM, lit it off, planning to load the project code on to, but got buried in honey-doos, and only got back to the VM after about a month, having lost 1/3 of the eval period. After getting most of the honey-doos done, I went back and signed up for an AWS tiny instance, to eval the two side-by-side... A week or so later, still WELL within the 90 days, I get an email from MS telling me I'm getting close to exhausting the resources allocated to the VM and I need to put a credit card on the account to continue.. Mind you, this VM was idle, since I'd yet to get to installing the project I wanted it for... I said "screw MS" and cancelled the account, and went with AWS.. I got a whole year free before I have to start paying for my project...
Wait, you're saying that your inability to read or do basic math is Microsoft's fault? The free Azure trial specifies the number of compute hours it includes. It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or, frankly, a sixth grader) to divide that number by 24 and see how many days of a VM that covers. (And, by the way, EVERY cloud vendor charges by the hour the VM exists -- they don't care if its idle, suspended, hibernated or anything else.)
Step 1: Sign up for the Azure free trial
Step 2: Create a Linux VM in Azure... from their VM image archive.
Step 3: Experience your mind being blown as you realize Microsoft, in fact, actively supports Linux.
No Linux support at all...
Time to support system 76 with my dollars.
Don't be a moron. Not only is Microsoft not a controlling investor, they're not an investor at all!
And, of course, if you want to run Linux, a particularly nice option is the single-click install of Linux in an Azure VM... hosted by Microsoft... supported by Microsoft...
But, sure, a loan from them means no more Linux from Dell.
OP was a joke, referencing Michael Dell's 1997 comment about how he would fix Apple at the time. His response: "Close it down and give the money back to the shareholders"
If their stock keeps tanking, that may be a good option in 2014, too ...
This calls for Impeachment and trial of everyone involved. It will not happen of course, because murder is not as big a deal as getting a blowjob from an intern.
Impeachment can only happen if a law has been broken, and US law explicitly grants those rights. If you don't like that, you need to contact your senators and representatives, and get them to propose a law changing that. And wait for it to happen. And you still couldn't impeach because *its not illegal right now*.
Or you can just post bumbling stupidity on the Internet.
Mars had liquid water at some point and is outside the habitable zone, for some definitions of habitable zone. So it is entirely possible that planets with liquid water can exist outside the habitable zone.
Am I correct in assuming that the liquid which must have flowed on Mars doesn't necessarily have to be water, or has there been proof that the liquid was specifically water? That's a real question by the way, I'm not trying to be sarcastic. If anyone knows, I'd appreciate an answer.
The presence of water is proven on Mars. The existence of minerals that only form in the presence of water is proven on the surface of Mars. Massive liquid-based erosion is proven on the surface of Mars. Its reasonable to assume they're all related. And, frankly, the fact that water is found damn near everywhere in the solar system where it hasn't been torn apart by radiation, or heat makes is really implausible that there wouldn't have been water on Mars -- water that got there the same way it got to Earth, during a period of time in which Mars was more conducive to surface water than Earth.
IMO, the whole "finding water on Mars" thing is more akin to the "seeing a giant squid alive in the ocean". Everyone knows its there, but scientists just like to see things with their own eyes. The search is the fun part, so... search away.
Mars had liquid water at some point and is outside the habitable zone, for some definitions of habitable zone. So it is entirely possible that planets with liquid water can exist outside the habitable zone. The real issue is with stability.
An interesting take on this is to consider the flux of radiation from the Sun hitting the Earth. For a disk the size of the Earth, one can calculate the distance where water freezes and where water boils as a rough estimate of a "zone" of sorts. When looked at in this way, the Earth is at a point just barely above freezing. That we have the climate that we do beyond that near freezing point is due entirely to greenhouse effects.
Mars isn't outside the habitable zone, in any accepted definition of it. In fact, there's no reason to presume it isn't currently habitable. Keep in mind, even if it has "seized" up, and no longer has a LOT of interior heat (and, thus, no magnetic field, no protection from solar wind, and thus very little atmosphere), the interior is still hot. The planet had water, and is absolutely warmer underground... conditions where life lives just fine on Earth. (Note, although its a fact that life *could* live on Mars, that has nothing to do with if life *does* or *has* lived on Mars.)
And there are absolutely gasses that are heavier, less prone to being stripped by the solar wind, and better as a "greenhouse" gas, so another Mars-like planet with a slightly different chemistry could be absolutely comfortable for Earth-like life, even on the surface.
So while most of your post I agree with, the statement that Mars is outside the habitable zone, for some definitions, is a preamble that is neither accurate nor necessary for the good point you were making. I think the key thing is that there are lots of conditions that are clearly outside the planetary habitable zone (which is defined based on surface habitability of a "planet") in which life could persist. If the Sun went out today, it'd be a billion years before the teeming masses of underground bacteria on Earth knew -- they live off the interior heat of the Earth, and have nothing to do with the Sun. Same thing with life that could exist on Jovian moons -- the interior heat of the moons keeps liquid water common well outside the solar "habitable zone". We know Io has heavy volcanism -- if Europa does, too, then there's little reason to think if you plopped chemosynthetic bacteria from deep ocean vents on Earth into similar environments there that it isn't at least plausible that it could survive.
IMO, the real limitation of the definition of "habitable zone" is that its really talking about surface conditions that are viable to "life" working with the same chemistry that life on Earth uses -- and non-surface life and differing chemistries aren't really considered.
The most recognition I ever saw for this was that Neo used them.
Also used to record the memory/experience recordings in Strange Days.
I remember looking at these in the early 90's. They seemed interesting, but the inability to easily make copies due to idiotic DRM made it uninteresting to me. And I'm sure that Sony was asking absurd licensing fees for others to make players (like the home Betamax days).
And rather than Sony learn any lessons, they have doubled down. For two decades. Is it any wonder their stock and their corporate goodwill are both in the shitter?
I used one for almost ten years, and never had an issue with it. If you bought music on it, perhaps... but if you bought CDs and just burned mix MDs, it worked great. I used it daily on my commute and when I traveled until I got my first iPod. It was durable, had great battery life, etc ... ideal, particularly as compared to a portable CD player.
Talk to an attorney.
Its VERY serious. You can lose a lot of money by doing the wrong thing.
Slashdot, as a community, has shown in one patent article after another than there's literally no collective wisdom, from reading and interpreting patents, to offering advice. The worst thing you could do would be to take any here that is anything more than "talk to an attorney, and stop talking about it online until you do so".
Why not stick 16 or 32 GB in it, if you use 8GB dimms it is cheap. Will be even cheaper by the time the thing is released.
When you're making a $300 consumer device, the extra $25 makes a big difference. And when you're competing in the $300 consumer space, a $25 increase in price will knock you out of the market.
I borrowed a friend's old iPhone for app development and testing. AT&T discovered it was "on" and started charging my friend for another line even though it was not making calls or accessing data and had no phone number. He had to call and argue with them to take of the charges.
You need to keep an eye on your AT&T bills.
Or, you know... pull the SIM card when you're not using phone and data.
I've been using my old iPhone for a couple years that way.
Hollywood's doing as good of a job portraying programmers as they have every other aspect of technology. I've never seen this 'brogrammer' in the wild. I don't doubt that there may be small, isolated pockets of them but it's not exactly the cancer that is killing the industry.
Well, much like Fox needs to make up drama to drive their slobbering masses to keep watching, so does Slashdot, from time to time.
And, no, "Brogramming" doesn't happen in the real world.
Yeah considering they figured out a week ago it was not the batteries and suspect its the control system for the batteries.
You mean, the core of the technology that Tesla licenses and sells to other companies... like Toyota.
Snarky fail!
If you read the news you can find plenty examples of long established, "legitimate religions" still doing shitty things to people.
For the most part, those shitty things aren't officially sanctioned parts of the religion. Some of the things (I'm thinking of the handling of catholic pedo priests) are widespread enough that you could make a reasonable argument that they are instuitional, but they are not doctrine To the best of my knowledge, Scientology has not had any sort of reformation yet.
You need to read some history, kid. Or... hell... play Assassin's Creed if a book is too much of a stretch for you. Because rape, murder, genocide, persecution and things like formed not only a core institutional policy of the Catholic church for five centuries -- the parts of the Bible they skipped in Sunday School *still* call out those behaviors... as the literal word of "God".
No disrespect meant to anyone.
And, this is a big part of the problem. As long as we, as a society, choose to "respect" people who live outside the realm of reality -- and force their particular brand of insanity on others -- things won't improve.
So let me echo everything you said, and add that I fundamentally mean to disrespect anyone who happens to fall under those points.
I'm not crazy.
And yet, you believe that an alien warlord named Xenu put alien souls in volcanoes on Earth and blew them up with hydrogen bombs while flying a spacecraft that looked like a DC-8. And if you read about that without proper spiritual preparation, you will get pneumonia.
My point being that you don't need a large sample of Scientologists since by definition they all believe this.
Well, to be fair, that's no more batshit crazy than the things a billion Christians believe, or a half billion followers of Isalm, or...hell... the other five billion people who follow some sort of batshit crazy theology.
Once you turn your back on reality, the degree you do so, or your particular theology hardly matters. You're still choosing to put a pack of lies at the core of the way you live your life.
And, the shit Scientologists pull pales in comparison to... well... the Catholic church. Islam. Mormons. Israel's been working to get Jews on that list. In fact, there's not very many "faiths" that haven't made persecution, murder, war, abuse and the like a core part of their rise. Hell, the religious right's battle against science and reality hurts people many orders of magnitude more than the Church of Scientology ever has.