"in at least one large retailer's case, regular customers will be able to walk out of the door without ever approaching a cash register."
rfid tags and 'walk through' charging is dubious at best. imagine a small smartphone app that jams the rfid tag signal with its own, at close range quite a bit can be stolen.
i bought 3 computers in 2013, one was to replace my gaming rig, which failed, a relative needed a replacement laptop so i sold my laptop to them for $50, but i bought a gaming laptop and realized i needed a linux laptop so cyber monday i got a quad core for $350 it has a few issues with linux, mainly the sound never can be muted or raised or lowered except in some but not all in application volume. the linux laptop is primarily for virus scanning/backing up/formatting usb mass storage devices. and while the laptop was cheap it's still a quad core the a6-5200 with 128 gpu cores which is technically fast enough to run a lot of games. i think gaming quality hit a wall, where the cost to develop vs the cost for people to run rigs to play games vs the widespread availability of simple games, on phones that are as fast as laptops were 10 years ago... well it all fits together and people aren't buying expensive rigs, and ASIC processors make more sense on crypto currency which had a 'bubble' of selling high end gpu rigs to prospective bitcoin mining. also antivirus software has gotten better, so people are spending less on computers for a lot of reasons.
"A multiplier is massively more, dividing is even more complicated still." which is why you multiply by.5 to get division by 2. by 3 you need to multiply by.333334 depending on your precision. all possible divisions are a subset of multiplication from.999 infinite repeating to.000near infinite zeros followed by a 1. strange that something so 'easy' is harder than regular multiplication.
well they also have a 46 gb mess archive and likely most of us have dusty broken consoles in a closet somewhere, but have to download the whole thing since the links for individual roms is broken last time i checked for it. in the usa at least it is legal to download roms for cartridges you already own for backup usage. so extract your roms then delete the huge file or put it on a bluray 50 and hide it for when these files are legal.
in my experience you pay around $400 for a basic laptop with 1366x768 screen. you pay around $500-600 for a 1440Ã--900 and you have to switch models to get higher res and that even on a $2000 laptop you still wind up with a screen that isn't set to it's native resolution(1080p) by default.
they said that about paper every time it's been invented, but the problem with paper is it's inability to handle too little humidity (dry rot) too much humidity (mildew etc) and it's tempting nesting site for insects that routinely eat tree leaves. oh and it's bitrate per energy put into it is atrocious especially if you throw in modern hermetically sealed deoxygenated and humidity controlled environs. but it is easy to copy, any schooled child can copy letters from one piece of paper to another. but computers are even more awesome for data sharing and copying. even if laws against it exist. but i digress. having an optical backup is fine, there are times where optical is necessary, but it doesn't prevent accidental damage of discs or make sorting them easier. bitrot detection is an underserved market. raid has it, bluray doesn't and some filesystems actively have deduplication to reduce the number of copies left undeleted are few. anyways, the best way to check for bitrot is by scanning the md5sum on them with a script that runs automatically on the server that sends out the files to the offsite and if bitrot is detected it simply requests the data from the off site storage. before it is lost.
if china makes knockoffs of everything even smartphones they don't necessarily license android, against the law, but then the Chinese knockoffs have never cared about that before.
the problem with your 8 megapixel camera is that it saves the files as jpeg images. jpeg is a lossy compression even at 100% unless you have a DSLR that can do TIFF or RAW images you are being hampered by cheap hardware on regular cameras. if you are using a phone it is even worse than mass market cameras. if you buy a 31 megapixel camera like the nokia keep in mind it has a diffferent os than other cameras and microsoft and nokia have more experience with compressing images than stupid android or apple cameras that take awful stills below what their video capture rates because they use h.264 for video and jpeg for stills. also capturing video puts the phone processor into high speed mode meaning you get about 30 minutes of video recording. good digital cameras don't come at a cheap price. and they use a lot of cpu overhead.
there are two problems with this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet according to wikipedia stuxnet was to be self deleting in 2012 but is mentioned in TFA, and stuxnet doesn't affect linux systems at all. also the space station only uses linux for their laptops. so TFA is very poorly written and with no fact checking. scada is not based on linux either it is windows based so tfa is way off base. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA
you are way off base with your assumptions. the problem with insurance is that adjusters can no longer simply deny the claim under ACA reforms. the law killed predatory insurance, where the fine print makes it so they can collect premiums with no intent of ever paying to the working poor who try to find affordable healthcare, and in generations past have always been burned to find out they not only had a $3000-5000 deductible and a $20,000 cap or worse. ACA was written to fix this and people say now they can't afford healthcare because before they didn't really have real healthcare. these companies have come and gone over the years, but they are all regulated out of business by ACA which defines so many rules and has the teeth to shutdown malicious predatory insurance scams.
i have a niece and a nephew and they have had access to windows computers their whole life. and it is scary how wrong they are in what they do. they made anti virus software give up trying to work. and they do it with flash and java games inside a firefox browser window.
they now have tablets which they pollute with free games that aren't even in the popular games for android. now i made a lot of mistakes with computers, but the computers i was given access to were amazing relics. 1 mb of ram for a video driver. slow processor windows dying and being reinstalled from 35 floppies... ugh i always had to teach myself and other people always asked me for help with their problems... i have a few friends on slashdot but while i am not any smarter i do have better hardware and i no longer assume windows is safe. for a while i wouldn't even run windows. linux is okay i run it in emergencies and in virtual machines, but it just doesn't work good enough for me for what i do for fun these days. i see no reason to run an os that won't play blurays and won't burn data blurays correctly from a user friendly gui 99% bug in k3b and has mostly low end games from fans... though there has been efforts to remedy the gaming situation, while i only game on weekends gamefly unlimited pc play is an impressive setup. when the games run.
it is here now. if you want a cell phone you get a cap even with 'unlimited' access there is a fee for using tethering as they want that phone id. and most people are pissy about uing cell bandwith and always nag for the wifi password on the broadband in houses. not to mention microsoft just recalled a 6 gb windows 8.1 upgrade from windows 8. i recently got a new computer and i downloaded 600 mb of pre or full install software to make the computer usable plus i redownloaded my meager 4 steam games for a total of well over 20 gigabytes. plus i watched a few movies streaming... and then there are the blizzard games which spent about 90 minutes torrenting all the software behind it's games. the isps get it people can legally use all the highspeed internet and they are uncomfortable about letting people use equipment how they want to.
the real killer app i've heard of for gaming rigs is making realtime special effects for movies and tvs. other than that there is news departments where thin clients can take advantage of a gpu assited server to run as many displays as the hardware can handle.
then there is wallstreet where a cuda assisted computer can model market dynamics in real time, there are a lot of superfast computers on stock exchanges. so there you go. 3 reasons for gpus to go as far as technology will allow.
"Imaginary damage done to imaginary property that was made with real effort for a real result taking real skill and real investment by real people."
i know people who 'have an internet band' they gave me several of their songs free they only cared about how good their music sounded. and they are using linux and open source tools for mixing etc. the cost to them was the cost of their computers of which they were already using for other reasons. so for one band the cost is already moot nearly zero. they don't have a soundroom or anything fancy like that but they love the linux music making tools. to a point certain artists would rather have fame and good music over the almost zero cost of production. they are the kind who would grab a spindle of cds burn their music on it and hand it out at a concert. anyways the real cost of making music is vastly overrated.
there are a lot of people who send money overseas to poor relatives. i realize in this case it's a real guy trying to fund terrorists but how is that any different from sending money to a relative who happens to be islamic and might someday take up arms against american interests over seas? where does the slippery slope begin and where is the point of no return? there are people who can't get jobs because the big companies won't hire qualified americans and insist on h1b visas to fill jobs, it makes me sick just thinking of how corporations can do no wrong in republican eyes.
the real problem with nuclear is the spent fuel needs to be cooled to store it.that place in japan has 12,000 rods being cooled in holding tanks. it needs to be reprocessed into new fuel rods by breeding while the rest is stored as slag with other metals creating a stable alloy that doesn't need cooled storage.
yeah yeah but obama gave free cell phones to food stamp recipients. so that doesn't fly. also rich enough to afford a computer or a phone could reflect previous work prior to being sacked and unable to find work. i know a few hobos and at least one of them also loved video games especially grand theft auto. also the internet boom is global now. http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm
most real research is paywalled and/or sells books to fund their research above whatever grants they get. it is how academia works these are feel good stories for republicans to seed disinformation, as it takes all blame away from them.
even if the global warming is a result of the sun fusing higher density particles and not burning of fuels while deforestation there is still merit in finding ways to slow global warming. it's not 'shit we better burn all the coal we can before it all ignights and screws humanity'
in my experience pc gaming is a nightmare, card upgrades driver going from single card to every possible hardware configuration...various oses and computer that fail... the tech universe has always been a nightmare scenario, it's just that usually you can get things to work for a few years if you search message boards for problems you can usually use someone elses disaster to keep from affecting you. usually but seriously does a small bug here or there stop you from using computers? i have probably bought about $10,000 worth in consumer grade computers, it is my hobby. i have seen almost every type of consumer grade hardware failure. i have yet to meet a hardware company that is able to please all their userbase, and i have upgraded gpus many times i have magazines where computers cost $3,500 and in the day were about equivalent to todayâ(TM)s graphing programmable calculators. anyways i have nvidia and amd/ati systems and for the most part things work, although the linux drivers were a real challenge to get working on my laptop. mainly the wifi but on my desktop (gaming one) the lack of usb keyboard function in linux was unacceptable. some of us don't have the same ibm ones built to withstand a nuclear war. why force a usb keyboard? well for one it glows blue. sidetracked a bit but oh well
'On the downside, how many kids/grandkids are there that will know how to fix their parents/grandparents Linux machines?'
"Probably close to the same amount that will know how to fix their Windows 8 machine."
so zero, then because windows 8 can't be fixed, it uses massive hdd space and always runs about 20 live tiles that constantly break and oem software breaks too because they assumed it would be like win7, and it is not, you can't power it off without invoking the shutdown command. and while it can be learned in 20 minutes on youtube (i did that when mom needed a new laptop) how many people who know xp will have a chance at fixing win8? which cannot be fully repaired because some of the live tiles are immune to deletion.
android and iOS have made cheap portable gaming to people who never gamed before as well as for people who like to be able to play on the go. but android is a mess(hard to find something that wasn't promoted towards you) and ios is hard to get an app on. and we will ignore windows phone because their answer to what is wrong with smartphones is a 41 megapixel camera on a phone. really it doesn't have the lenses the pros need and it isn't like everyone is mad at their choices in digital cameras.
i wanted to pick a few bones. first off there is this handy thing called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) this technology works great in spinning metal but not as well for flash memory. now about the return rate, linus lost all his data But was able to Secure reformat the drive and it recovered.
spinning metal has it's flaws. but if the device can stop responding then work again after being reformatted suggests that the flaws in flash memory are individual sectors failing which on a spinning disk usually means backup then RMA, now it went from 'uh oh format lose data fail' to call tech support and get asked 'have you tried formatting it yet?'
my oem win 7 uses a full dvd. my win8 recovery to factory disc is 6 dvds prior to that my hp recovery made 3 dvds but the upgrade to windows 7 discs needed only 2 dvds. and can install to a wiped physical hard drive. hp added about 15 new live tile apps. i seriously doubt 30 apps takes 6 dvds 3 more than win7. the games weren't even downloaded on the win8 laptop. perhaps hp come with drivers for every hp computer they ever made and that is why the win7 upgrade media was smaller than the win vista (old laptop) media.
Slashdot Mirror
"in at least one large retailer's case, regular customers will be able to walk out of the door without ever approaching a cash register."
rfid tags and 'walk through' charging is dubious at best. imagine a small smartphone app that jams the rfid tag signal with its own, at close range quite a bit can be stolen.
i bought 3 computers in 2013, one was to replace my gaming rig, which failed, a relative needed a replacement laptop so i sold my laptop to them for $50, but i bought a gaming laptop and realized i needed a linux laptop so cyber monday i got a quad core for $350 it has a few issues with linux, mainly the sound never can be muted or raised or lowered except in some but not all in application volume. the linux laptop is primarily for virus scanning/backing up/formatting usb mass storage devices. and while the laptop was cheap it's still a quad core the a6-5200 with 128 gpu cores which is technically fast enough to run a lot of games. i think gaming quality hit a wall, where the cost to develop vs the cost for people to run rigs to play games vs the widespread availability of simple games, on phones that are as fast as laptops were 10 years ago... well it all fits together and people aren't buying expensive rigs, and ASIC processors make more sense on crypto currency which had a 'bubble' of selling high end gpu rigs to prospective bitcoin mining. also antivirus software has gotten better, so people are spending less on computers for a lot of reasons.
"A multiplier is massively more, dividing is even more complicated still." .5 to get division by 2. by 3 you need to multiply by .333334 depending on your precision. all possible divisions are a subset of multiplication from .999 infinite repeating to .000near infinite zeros followed by a 1. strange that something so 'easy' is harder than regular multiplication.
which is why you multiply by
well they also have a 46 gb mess archive and likely most of us have dusty broken consoles in a closet somewhere, but have to download the whole thing since the links for individual roms is broken last time i checked for it. in the usa at least it is legal to download roms for cartridges you already own for backup usage. so extract your roms then delete the huge file or put it on a bluray 50 and hide it for when these files are legal.
in firefox for mobile the hamburger menu 'request desktop site' works too
in my experience you pay around $400 for a basic laptop with 1366x768 screen. you pay around $500-600 for a 1440Ã--900 and you have to switch models to get higher res and that even on a $2000 laptop you still wind up with a screen that isn't set to it's native resolution(1080p) by default.
they said that about paper every time it's been invented, but the problem with paper is it's inability to handle too little humidity (dry rot) too much humidity (mildew etc) and it's tempting nesting site for insects that routinely eat tree leaves. oh and it's bitrate per energy put into it is atrocious especially if you throw in modern hermetically sealed deoxygenated and humidity controlled environs. but it is easy to copy, any schooled child can copy letters from one piece of paper to another. but computers are even more awesome for data sharing and copying. even if laws against it exist. but i digress. having an optical backup is fine, there are times where optical is necessary, but it doesn't prevent accidental damage of discs or make sorting them easier. bitrot detection is an underserved market. raid has it, bluray doesn't and some filesystems actively have deduplication to reduce the number of copies left undeleted are few. anyways, the best way to check for bitrot is by scanning the md5sum on them with a script that runs automatically on the server that sends out the files to the offsite and if bitrot is detected it simply requests the data from the off site storage. before it is lost.
if china makes knockoffs of everything even smartphones they don't necessarily license android, against the law, but then the Chinese knockoffs have never cared about that before.
the problem with your 8 megapixel camera is that it saves the files as jpeg images. jpeg is a lossy compression even at 100% unless you have a DSLR that can do TIFF or RAW images you are being hampered by cheap hardware on regular cameras. if you are using a phone it is even worse than mass market cameras. if you buy a 31 megapixel camera like the nokia keep in mind it has a diffferent os than other cameras and microsoft and nokia have more experience with compressing images than stupid android or apple cameras that take awful stills below what their video capture rates because they use h.264 for video and jpeg for stills. also capturing video puts the phone processor into high speed mode meaning you get about 30 minutes of video recording. good digital cameras don't come at a cheap price. and they use a lot of cpu overhead.
there are two problems with this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet according to wikipedia stuxnet was to be self deleting in 2012 but is mentioned in TFA, and stuxnet doesn't affect linux systems at all. also the space station only uses linux for their laptops. so TFA is very poorly written and with no fact checking. scada is not based on linux either it is windows based so tfa is way off base. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA
when i read http://xkcd.com/1286/ apparently password hints were exposed in the clear. not cool not cool...
you are way off base with your assumptions.
the problem with insurance is that adjusters can no longer simply deny the claim under ACA reforms. the law killed predatory insurance, where the fine print makes it so they can collect premiums with no intent of ever paying to the working poor who try to find affordable healthcare, and in generations past have always been burned to find out they not only had a $3000-5000 deductible and a $20,000 cap or worse. ACA was written to fix this and people say now they can't afford healthcare because before they didn't really have real healthcare. these companies have come and gone over the years, but they are all regulated out of business by ACA which defines so many rules and has the teeth to shutdown malicious predatory insurance scams.
i have a niece and a nephew and they have had access to windows computers their whole life. and it is scary how wrong they are in what they do. they made anti virus software give up trying to work. and they do it with flash and java games inside a firefox browser window.
they now have tablets which they pollute with free games that aren't even in the popular games for android. now i made a lot of mistakes with computers, but the computers i was given access to were amazing relics. 1 mb of ram for a video driver. slow processor windows dying and being reinstalled from 35 floppies... ugh i always had to teach myself and other people always asked me for help with their problems... i have a few friends on slashdot but while i am not any smarter i do have better hardware and i no longer assume windows is safe. for a while i wouldn't even run windows. linux is okay i run it in emergencies and in virtual machines, but it just doesn't work good enough for me for what i do for fun these days. i see no reason to run an os that won't play blurays and won't burn data blurays correctly from a user friendly gui 99% bug in k3b and has mostly low end games from fans... though there has been efforts to remedy the gaming situation, while i only game on weekends gamefly unlimited pc play is an impressive setup. when the games run.
it is here now.
if you want a cell phone you get a cap even with 'unlimited' access there is a fee for using tethering as they want that phone id. and most people are pissy about uing cell bandwith and always nag for the wifi password on the broadband in houses. not to mention microsoft just recalled a 6 gb windows 8.1 upgrade from windows 8. i recently got a new computer and i downloaded 600 mb of pre or full install software to make the computer usable plus i redownloaded my meager 4 steam games for a total of well over 20 gigabytes. plus i watched a few movies streaming... and then there are the blizzard games which spent about 90 minutes torrenting all the software behind it's games. the isps get it people can legally use all the highspeed internet and they are uncomfortable about letting people use equipment how they want to.
the real killer app i've heard of for gaming rigs is making realtime special effects for movies and tvs. other than that there is news departments where thin clients can take advantage of a gpu assited server to run as many displays as the hardware can handle.
then there is wallstreet where a cuda assisted computer can model market dynamics in real time, there are a lot of superfast computers on stock exchanges. so there you go. 3 reasons for gpus to go as far as technology will allow.
"Imaginary damage done to imaginary property that was made with real effort for a real result taking real skill and real investment by real people."
i know people who 'have an internet band' they gave me several of their songs free they only cared about how good their music sounded. and they are using linux and open source tools for mixing etc. the cost to them was the cost of their computers of which they were already using for other reasons. so for one band the cost is already moot nearly zero. they don't have a soundroom or anything fancy like that but they love the linux music making tools. to a point certain artists would rather have fame and good music over the almost zero cost of production. they are the kind who would grab a spindle of cds burn their music on it and hand it out at a concert. anyways the real cost of making music is vastly overrated.
there are a lot of people who send money overseas to poor relatives. i realize in this case it's a real guy trying to fund terrorists but how is that any different from sending money to a relative who happens to be islamic and might someday take up arms against american interests over seas? where does the slippery slope begin and where is the point of no return?
there are people who can't get jobs because the big companies won't hire qualified americans and insist on h1b visas to fill jobs, it makes me sick just thinking of how corporations can do no wrong in republican eyes.
the real problem with nuclear is the spent fuel needs to be cooled to store it.that place in japan has 12,000 rods being cooled in holding tanks. it needs to be reprocessed into new fuel rods by breeding while the rest is stored as slag with other metals creating a stable alloy that doesn't need cooled storage.
yeah yeah but obama gave free cell phones to food stamp recipients. so that doesn't fly. also rich enough to afford a computer or a phone could reflect previous work prior to being sacked and unable to find work.
i know a few hobos and at least one of them also loved video games especially grand theft auto. also the internet boom is global now.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Climate_Depot
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wattsupwiththat.com
both are highly known as clime change deniers they are not reputable as you claim.
most real research is paywalled and/or sells books to fund their research above whatever grants they get. it is how academia works these are feel good stories for republicans to seed disinformation, as it takes all blame away from them.
even if the global warming is a result of the sun fusing higher density particles and not burning of fuels while deforestation there is still merit in finding ways to slow global warming. it's not 'shit we better burn all the coal we can before it all ignights and screws humanity'
in my experience pc gaming is a nightmare, card upgrades driver going from single card to every possible hardware configuration...various oses and computer that fail... the tech universe has always been a nightmare scenario, it's just that usually you can get things to work for a few years if you search message boards for problems you can usually use someone elses disaster to keep from affecting you. usually but seriously does a small bug here or there stop you from using computers? i have probably bought about $10,000 worth in consumer grade computers, it is my hobby. i have seen almost every type of consumer grade hardware failure. i have yet to meet a hardware company that is able to please all their userbase, and i have upgraded gpus many times i have magazines where computers cost $3,500 and in the day were about equivalent to todayâ(TM)s graphing programmable calculators.
anyways i have nvidia and amd/ati systems and for the most part things work, although the linux drivers were a real challenge to get working on my laptop. mainly the wifi but on my desktop (gaming one) the lack of usb keyboard function in linux was unacceptable. some of us don't have the same ibm ones built to withstand a nuclear war. why force a usb keyboard? well for one it glows blue. sidetracked a bit but oh well
'On the downside, how many kids/grandkids are there that will know how to fix their parents/grandparents Linux machines?'
"Probably close to the same amount that will know how to fix their Windows 8 machine."
so zero, then because windows 8 can't be fixed, it uses massive hdd space and always runs about 20 live tiles that constantly break and oem software breaks too because they assumed it would be like win7, and it is not, you can't power it off without invoking the shutdown command. and while it can be learned in 20 minutes on youtube (i did that when mom needed a new laptop) how many people who know xp will have a chance at fixing win8? which cannot be fully repaired because some of the live tiles are immune to deletion.
android and iOS have made cheap portable gaming to people who never gamed before as well as for people who like to be able to play on the go. but android is a mess(hard to find something that wasn't promoted towards you) and ios is hard to get an app on. and we will ignore windows phone because their answer to what is wrong with smartphones is a 41 megapixel camera on a phone. really it doesn't have the lenses the pros need and it isn't like everyone is mad at their choices in digital cameras.
i wanted to pick a few bones. first off there is this handy thing called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) this technology works great in spinning metal but not as well for flash memory. now about the return rate, linus lost all his data But was able to Secure reformat the drive and it recovered.
spinning metal has it's flaws. but if the device can stop responding then work again after being reformatted suggests that the flaws in flash memory are individual sectors failing which on a spinning disk usually means backup then RMA, now it went from 'uh oh format lose data fail' to call tech support and get asked 'have you tried formatting it yet?'
my oem win 7 uses a full dvd. my win8 recovery to factory disc is 6 dvds
prior to that my hp recovery made 3 dvds but the upgrade to windows 7 discs needed only 2 dvds. and can install to a wiped physical hard drive. hp added about 15 new live tile apps. i seriously doubt 30 apps takes 6 dvds 3 more than win7. the games weren't even downloaded on the win8 laptop. perhaps hp come with drivers for every hp computer they ever made and that is why the win7 upgrade media was smaller than the win vista (old laptop) media.