What's really sad is that this isn't some random general-population site on the internet, this is supposed to be the home of geeks and nerds, people who are supposedly smarter than the average. Even so, your words are true; this level of stupidity is normal here in 2012. The intelligence level here on Slashdot, like everywhere else in American society, has fallen greatly in the last 10 years or so.
Smarter than average, less socially adept than average, poorer hygiene than average, being a gamer. There's a lot of reasons people self associate or are associated with being geeks/nerds. As technology and gaming have become a bigger chunk of the economy and society, it seems the "geeks and nerds are smarter than average" correlation has become weaker over time.
And, this site isn't about geeks and nerds who are smarter than average. There are lots of good sites on the Internet that probably meet those criteria. While that may have been true in the past, Slashdot is really little more than a hangout for a growing polarized set of self-identified geeks and nerds who believe in a few common things above reason. I've said before this is the Fox News of tech sites now, and all evidence suggests that is, in fact, the case.
No amount of stupidity surprises me here anymore. There are some key subjects that really pull the dims out of the woodwork, though.
It's a feature where where you download random programs from the internet and install them, windows checks if it's known malware. That actually seems a useful feature, one I wish my parents had on their machine!
Upgrade their computer to IE9 -- the anti-MS orgasms aside on this article, it has nothing to do with Windows 8, its a feature if IE9 and IE10.
Sony stores opened long before Apple Stores. First Sony Style store opened in the early 1980s even. There were many Sony retail stores worldwide before the first Apple store in 2001.
Apple directly took the idea of opening it's own one-brand direct retail store from Sony.
Now get off lawn etc etc
And before Apple were Gateway stores. Arguably the first Apple stores were a lot more like Gateway stores than the old Sony stores.
The main question is how much GFlop per watt you get out of it, or the number of transactions per watt. Saying it is ARM so it is energy efficient is as stupid as saying it is pink so it is pretty.
Some application are best processed (energy wise) by using a kick ass power hungry GPU. Who cares if you consume a lot of electricity if you have a tremendous throughput?
No, all the important information for this advertisement is there -- the link to Slashdot's other site with its full page advertisement.
Yep. My own pessimism comes from watching an unsustainable economy (basically a Ponzi scheme based on perpetual growth) on a collision course with the laws of physics in a finite world.
Since I don't subscribe to magical thinking, I'm convinced there must come a time when the population stops growing, when the birth rate matches the mortality rate. It might be really messy. And the lack of political will to address the fundamentals makes me pessimistic and cynical.
But the prospect for real change and a sustainable future excites me. I hope SF writers, engineers, and thinking people can come up with a saner, more grounded future.
And this is precisely why some near-future SciFi can be so... uplifting. The problems you talk about are because the Earth used to be a closed system that was so big that, in an economic sense, it was an open system. In the early 21st century, its not really all that big anymore. Expansion is the solution to keeping that ponzi scheme going. Getting off the Earth, chewing up the solar system and slowly moving beyond.
Forget applying a "short" "directly at the actuator" (whatever that means): If you've already got the lockset disassembled, you just unlock it mechanically; no electronics needed.
Electric locks will have a deadbolt that's moved by a solenoid. That probably has nothing to grip onto to slide it mechanically, but all you need to do is apply a AA battery to the wires going into the solenoid and it'll slide right back.
Of course you can open it mechanically, otherwise a dead battery would leave the lock permanently inoperable.
We make software that does this automatically so LEO and others don't have to spend all day looking at this stuff. We do this faster and more accurately than anyone else, that we know of else, in the world.
Speaking as someone who works as a mobility specialist in the medical products industry, the FDA already issues guidance in this area. It won't be long before the guidance turns into regulation.
Speaking as someone who works as a mobility specialist in the medical products industry, the FDA already issues guidance in this area. It won't be long before the guidance turns into regulation.
There are plenty of categories of medical software that already require FDA certification.
We use GoToMeeting to record this stuff. Mind you, every time we need to record something, we also happen to have stakeholders from other offices calling in for the meeting. If everyone is present in the same room, then G2M would add an extra, unnecessary, layer.
Yes and no. Depends on what else is going on. A audio or video conferencing solution can be a far better option if you're doing things like showing a PowerPoint or want to record the video as well. I've recorded plenty of meetings where everyone was local just because I wanted to have a digital whiteboard or a slide deck recorded with the audio.
Stolen? Why stolen? Society gives you a lot of rights and safegards, infrastructures and services, and above all, the right to trial by a jury of your peers (as opposed to jury by the sole hand of a despot or potentate.) In return, you are asked to give a service in return. That service, which is a small token in the grand scheme of things, will cost something in return (inconvenience and loss of some of your salary.)
Strange, every year I seem to get about 40% of my salary taken in return for those conveniences.
Everything in the piece is a fact. There is no commentary on why this might be good or bad.
Except its not a fact. "Has the highest dollar value in history" would be an accurate statement. "Most valuable in history" requires adjusting the price for inflation, which is (as I'm sure you know) a measure of the reduction in value of the currency the company is valued with.
Based on that scale, its not the highest in history. Adjusted for inflation, I don't think that even makes the top five. I can say for certain it does't take #1, which was Microsoft 13 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, its value was more than $200b higher. Apple stock needs to hit $900 to be the most valuable company in history. (And that is assuming it does it very quickly -- that number will rise as inflation continues.)
Obviously the patent squabbles in these cases are ridiculous - the only reason we have functioning high-tech industry in the US is that most companies are not like Apple, and do not use patents offernsively.
It's a good time to review the reasons why, for example, software patents do not work, and can never be made to work:
Actually, offensive use of patents has been the norm for over two centuries. Its a trend that you hear about now because its new in software technology, and you're clearly either in technology or interested in software technology.
The *only* unique thing about patents relative to software is that the industry got as big as it did before patent trolling and offensive litigation became so common. It was the norm in virtually every vertical space involved with the industrial revolution going back to the founding of the US, and was typically immediate to the arising of a new vertical.
True, but your post is a classic "slashdot is has gone to the dogs." I am sure you can find a many posts from 2002 saying something like "I can't believe slashdot posted another stupid article about Theo and all the dumbass BSD flaming politics. Can we get on with the real news, or do I just need to go over to Ars for good?"
As someone who has been on this site since well before you could even get a user account, its absolutely gone down hill steadily for a decade now. Its really dropped off enormously in the last two years. Slashdot, and its community, like to act like they're so intellectual, but Slashdot is driven by ad revenue, and it hit on the exact same solution to driving ad views that Fox News did -- identify an overzealous market and carefully pick the stories that market wants to hear. Keep them whipped up in a frenzy, because a frenzy drives views. Slashdot is as guilty of driving and profiting from polarization as any of the far left or far right media outlets in the political space.
In that context, this story makes perfect sense. Its Apple, its got the opportunity for a "zomg, our privacy!" jab.
I suspect for a lot of us who were around back then, the only reason we're still here is 15 years of habit, and some sad desire to somehow find a way to bring back the community as it used to be.
As a general rule in human history, privacy has been totally foreign. People always knew what their tribe, hamlet, neighborhood or building were up to. There wasn't an expectation of any sort of privacy, for anything from actions, to sexual activities, to hygeine. It just simply didn't happen.
And that's why there has never been an unsolved crime in all of human history!
Privacy and secrecy are not the same thing. You can have secrets without an expectation or right of privacy.
I'm not certain why this is modded funny instead of insightful. We have been programmed by popular media and life in general to devalue privacy.
Actually, you've been programmed by the media into believing privacy is something historically "normal". As a general rule in human history, privacy has been totally foreign. People always knew what their tribe, hamlet, neighborhood or building were up to. There wasn't an expectation of any sort of privacy, for anything from actions, to sexual activities, to hygeine. It just simply didn't happen.
Privacy, as a popular expectation, has a lot more to do with manipulating people. Shame is a powerful method of control. When society convinces you that you should be embarassed about something, the person who knows it gains a lot of power over you. If everyone knew it, there's no power. Shame, and the associated need for a concept of privacy, were constructs that arise over and over as ways of controlling a population.
I'm not sure why someone hasn't built a Twitter clone that just runs on top of IRC. Twitter is in many ways web IRC already.
Simple. You can be assurred that 99.999% of Twitter's users don't care in the slightest about this, and the value of Twitter is its user base.
Its the exact same reason none of the "free" social networking projects have made even a tiny blip in the public awareness, and will never overtake Facebook.
Twitter and FB have done something that MySpace never did -- transitioned out of a finnicky group of users (kids who try new things all the time) and got broad usage among the pool of people who don't. (Adults who have better things to do with their time then chase the latest trend.)
300 miles is because it has a HUGE battery. The Volt has LiIon batteries, too, and only gets 42 miles (give or take).
The Volt has a 16kw battery pack, of which it uses about 10.4kw to get the 42 miles.
The high end Model S is a 85kw battery pack for ~300 miles. I've seen nothing that talks about what percentage of that it uses to get the 300 miles, but it sounds like its probably nearly identical to the efficiency the Volt gets. GM determined that its battery life is maximized by both actively maintaining the temperature of the battery -- heating and cooling, and only using the middle 2/3 of the battery's storage range.
Now, that means to add 100 miles of range to the Tesla, you'd need to generate about 28 kwh of electricity. (Enough to power 5-6 houses!)
If you can invent PV cells that fit on the roof of a small sedan and can generate that kind of power in a day, I can tell you -- there's a much better market for them.
Everyone else doesn't use standard USB. Samsung, for example, has a dock-like connector, too. Why? For the same reason so many digital cameras have proprietary USB connectors -- you have other signals you need to provide. The dock connector has line level audio, video output, and a bunch of other things like that.
For a simple charge-and-sync application, USB is fine, but there are no standard formats that include that PLUS video, audio, serial, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
What's really sad is that this isn't some random general-population site on the internet, this is supposed to be the home of geeks and nerds, people who are supposedly smarter than the average. Even so, your words are true; this level of stupidity is normal here in 2012. The intelligence level here on Slashdot, like everywhere else in American society, has fallen greatly in the last 10 years or so.
Smarter than average, less socially adept than average, poorer hygiene than average, being a gamer. There's a lot of reasons people self associate or are associated with being geeks/nerds. As technology and gaming have become a bigger chunk of the economy and society, it seems the "geeks and nerds are smarter than average" correlation has become weaker over time.
And, this site isn't about geeks and nerds who are smarter than average. There are lots of good sites on the Internet that probably meet those criteria. While that may have been true in the past, Slashdot is really little more than a hangout for a growing polarized set of self-identified geeks and nerds who believe in a few common things above reason. I've said before this is the Fox News of tech sites now, and all evidence suggests that is, in fact, the case.
No amount of stupidity surprises me here anymore. There are some key subjects that really pull the dims out of the woodwork, though.
It's a feature where where you download random programs from the internet and install them, windows checks if it's known malware.
That actually seems a useful feature, one I wish my parents had on their machine!
Upgrade their computer to IE9 -- the anti-MS orgasms aside on this article, it has nothing to do with Windows 8, its a feature if IE9 and IE10.
Sony stores opened long before Apple Stores. First Sony Style store opened in the early 1980s even. There were many Sony retail stores worldwide before the first Apple store in 2001.
Apple directly took the idea of opening it's own one-brand direct retail store from Sony.
Now get off lawn etc etc
And before Apple were Gateway stores. Arguably the first Apple stores were a lot more like Gateway stores than the old Sony stores.
The reason for the "how can I skip town on short notice" post this morning makes a lot more sense now ...
The main question is how much GFlop per watt you get out of it, or the number of transactions per watt. Saying it is ARM so it is energy efficient is as stupid as saying it is pink so it is pretty.
Some application are best processed (energy wise) by using a kick ass power hungry GPU. Who cares if you consume a lot of electricity if you have a tremendous throughput?
No, all the important information for this advertisement is there -- the link to Slashdot's other site with its full page advertisement.
Please note: I don't say what the pilot did was right, but he had the right to make that descision.
This is what happens when make pilots stop drinking before their flights ...
Mr Potatohead!
Backdoors are NOT secrets!
Yep. My own pessimism comes from watching an unsustainable economy (basically a Ponzi scheme based on perpetual growth) on a collision course with the laws of physics in a finite world.
Since I don't subscribe to magical thinking, I'm convinced there must come a time when the population stops growing, when the birth rate matches the mortality rate. It might be really messy. And the lack of political will to address the fundamentals makes me pessimistic and cynical.
But the prospect for real change and a sustainable future excites me. I hope SF writers, engineers, and thinking people can come up with a saner, more grounded future.
And this is precisely why some near-future SciFi can be so ... uplifting. The problems you talk about are because the Earth used to be a closed system that was so big that, in an economic sense, it was an open system. In the early 21st century, its not really all that big anymore. Expansion is the solution to keeping that ponzi scheme going. Getting off the Earth, chewing up the solar system and slowly moving beyond.
Forget applying a "short" "directly at the actuator" (whatever that means): If you've already got the lockset disassembled, you just unlock it mechanically; no electronics needed.
Electric locks will have a deadbolt that's moved by a solenoid. That probably has nothing to grip onto to slide it mechanically, but all you need to do is apply a AA battery to the wires going into the solenoid and it'll slide right back.
Of course you can open it mechanically, otherwise a dead battery would leave the lock permanently inoperable.
These are hotel doors, not bank safes.
We make software that does this automatically so LEO and others don't have to spend all day looking at this stuff. We do this faster and more accurately than anyone else, that we know of else, in the world.
http://www.videntifier.com/
And who tested it at your company?
Speaking as someone who works as a mobility specialist in the medical products industry, the FDA already issues guidance in this area. It won't be long before the guidance turns into regulation.
Speaking as someone who works as a mobility specialist in the medical products industry, the FDA already issues guidance in this area. It won't be long before the guidance turns into regulation.
There are plenty of categories of medical software that already require FDA certification.
We use GoToMeeting to record this stuff. Mind you, every time we need to record something, we also happen to have stakeholders from other offices calling in for the meeting. If everyone is present in the same room, then G2M would add an extra, unnecessary, layer.
Yes and no. Depends on what else is going on. A audio or video conferencing solution can be a far better option if you're doing things like showing a PowerPoint or want to record the video as well. I've recorded plenty of meetings where everyone was local just because I wanted to have a digital whiteboard or a slide deck recorded with the audio.
Stolen? Why stolen? Society gives you a lot of rights and safegards, infrastructures and services, and above all, the right to trial by a jury of your peers (as opposed to jury by the sole hand of a despot or potentate.) In return, you are asked to give a service in return. That service, which is a small token in the grand scheme of things, will cost something in return (inconvenience and loss of some of your salary.)
Strange, every year I seem to get about 40% of my salary taken in return for those conveniences.
Admit it, you've been waiting years to use that joke, haven't you?
Clearly you've never been to San Francisco, where Google did much of its 300,000 miles.
Tourists, dirty hippies, hipsters, you name it, they're walking around in the street looking to be hit.
Everything in the piece is a fact. There is no commentary on why this might be good or bad.
Except its not a fact. "Has the highest dollar value in history" would be an accurate statement. "Most valuable in history" requires adjusting the price for inflation, which is (as I'm sure you know) a measure of the reduction in value of the currency the company is valued with.
Based on that scale, its not the highest in history. Adjusted for inflation, I don't think that even makes the top five. I can say for certain it does't take #1, which was Microsoft 13 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, its value was more than $200b higher. Apple stock needs to hit $900 to be the most valuable company in history. (And that is assuming it does it very quickly -- that number will rise as inflation continues.)
Obviously the patent squabbles in these cases are ridiculous - the only reason we have functioning high-tech industry in the US is that most companies are not like Apple, and do not use patents offernsively.
It's a good time to review the reasons why, for example, software patents do not work, and can never be made to work:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Why_abolish_software_patents
Actually, offensive use of patents has been the norm for over two centuries. Its a trend that you hear about now because its new in software technology, and you're clearly either in technology or interested in software technology.
The *only* unique thing about patents relative to software is that the industry got as big as it did before patent trolling and offensive litigation became so common. It was the norm in virtually every vertical space involved with the industrial revolution going back to the founding of the US, and was typically immediate to the arising of a new vertical.
True, but your post is a classic "slashdot is has gone to the dogs." I am sure you can find a many posts from 2002 saying something like "I can't believe slashdot posted another stupid article about Theo and all the dumbass BSD flaming politics. Can we get on with the real news, or do I just need to go over to Ars for good?"
As someone who has been on this site since well before you could even get a user account, its absolutely gone down hill steadily for a decade now. Its really dropped off enormously in the last two years. Slashdot, and its community, like to act like they're so intellectual, but Slashdot is driven by ad revenue, and it hit on the exact same solution to driving ad views that Fox News did -- identify an overzealous market and carefully pick the stories that market wants to hear. Keep them whipped up in a frenzy, because a frenzy drives views. Slashdot is as guilty of driving and profiting from polarization as any of the far left or far right media outlets in the political space.
In that context, this story makes perfect sense. Its Apple, its got the opportunity for a "zomg, our privacy!" jab.
I suspect for a lot of us who were around back then, the only reason we're still here is 15 years of habit, and some sad desire to somehow find a way to bring back the community as it used to be.
As a general rule in human history, privacy has been totally foreign. People always knew what their tribe, hamlet, neighborhood or building were up to. There wasn't an expectation of any sort of privacy, for anything from actions, to sexual activities, to hygeine. It just simply didn't happen.
And that's why there has never been an unsolved crime in all of human history!
Privacy and secrecy are not the same thing. You can have secrets without an expectation or right of privacy.
I'm not certain why this is modded funny instead of insightful. We have been programmed by popular media and life in general to devalue privacy.
Actually, you've been programmed by the media into believing privacy is something historically "normal". As a general rule in human history, privacy has been totally foreign. People always knew what their tribe, hamlet, neighborhood or building were up to. There wasn't an expectation of any sort of privacy, for anything from actions, to sexual activities, to hygeine. It just simply didn't happen.
Privacy, as a popular expectation, has a lot more to do with manipulating people. Shame is a powerful method of control. When society convinces you that you should be embarassed about something, the person who knows it gains a lot of power over you. If everyone knew it, there's no power. Shame, and the associated need for a concept of privacy, were constructs that arise over and over as ways of controlling a population.
I'm not sure why someone hasn't built a Twitter clone that just runs on top of IRC. Twitter is in many ways web IRC already.
Simple. You can be assurred that 99.999% of Twitter's users don't care in the slightest about this, and the value of Twitter is its user base.
Its the exact same reason none of the "free" social networking projects have made even a tiny blip in the public awareness, and will never overtake Facebook.
Twitter and FB have done something that MySpace never did -- transitioned out of a finnicky group of users (kids who try new things all the time) and got broad usage among the pool of people who don't. (Adults who have better things to do with their time then chase the latest trend.)
300 miles is because it has a HUGE battery. The Volt has LiIon batteries, too, and only gets 42 miles (give or take).
The Volt has a 16kw battery pack, of which it uses about 10.4kw to get the 42 miles.
The high end Model S is a 85kw battery pack for ~300 miles. I've seen nothing that talks about what percentage of that it uses to get the 300 miles, but it sounds like its probably nearly identical to the efficiency the Volt gets. GM determined that its battery life is maximized by both actively maintaining the temperature of the battery -- heating and cooling, and only using the middle 2/3 of the battery's storage range.
Now, that means to add 100 miles of range to the Tesla, you'd need to generate about 28 kwh of electricity. (Enough to power 5-6 houses!)
If you can invent PV cells that fit on the roof of a small sedan and can generate that kind of power in a day, I can tell you -- there's a much better market for them.
Problem is, you're two orders of magnitude off.
Use standard USB like everyone else.
Everyone else doesn't use standard USB. Samsung, for example, has a dock-like connector, too. Why? For the same reason so many digital cameras have proprietary USB connectors -- you have other signals you need to provide. The dock connector has line level audio, video output, and a bunch of other things like that.
For a simple charge-and-sync application, USB is fine, but there are no standard formats that include that PLUS video, audio, serial, etc.
Oh damn it. What's the odds I posted nearly the identical example?
At least I was man enought to take the Karma hit!
Why in the world would you even try to do it? What is the goal of this endeavour?
Its like squeezing a Chevy V6 into a Ferrari.
Because you can.