I agree with your criticisms. I have found a way to fix one thing, if it helps:
Almost everything is smaller and harder to read, and it's not obvious what is a "button" and what is just text in a corner somewhere.
In the accessibility options, turning on "Bold Text" will make the app names in the home screen bold again, which makes them much easier to read. Unfortunately, the other problems seem to be unfixable so far.
This may have been true a few years ago with Android handsets generally being underpowered, but the hardware caught up a while ago already.
I'm talking about stuff like how much lag there is between me swiping my finger and the app list scrolling to the next page, or between me pushing a button on the phone keypad and the phone responding to the button press. I tried several a few different Android phones that my friends had and several store models, but always saw the same thing. I went with an iPhone 4S (this was last year).
If the responsiveness has improved since then, that's great news, and I'll definitely pay more attention to Android next time I go phone shopping.
There seem to be two different kinds of slowdown. The first is due to the new animations for things like going back to the home screen. The second is more intermittent, and happens mostly when task switching. Both of them are annoying. The whole reason I went with iOS over Android was the snappier UI.
The disappearing Safari toolbar also drives me crazy. I wish I had held off on upgrading. Hopefully Apple will have some tweaks and patches out soon.
Just in case you were worried about Windows updates, the defective patches are for Office 2007 and Office 2013. From the article:
KB 2817630 is not a security patch, it's a gratuitously delivered functionality patch for Office 2013, and man has it had an impact on functionality. I've seen dozens of reports that installing this patch, possibly in conjunction with the KB 2810009 patch that is part of MS13-074, causes the folder pane in Outlook 2013 to disappear. An anonymous poster on the SANS Internet Storm Center offers this picture of the effect.
KB 2760411, KB 2760588, and KB 2760583 are parts of the MS13-072 and MS13-073 security patches for Office 2007. There are many reports of the patches being offered and re-offered and re-re-... you get the idea
Interesting! I didn't know the safety limit was so low. As I recall, the big danger of standing in front of a microwave oven is supposed to be cornea damage, so now I'm wondering about risks to eyesight from charging the phone while you're talking on it.
I dug up what looks to be the main patent for the technology from 2008:
The microwave energy is focused onto a device to be charged by a power transmitter having one or more adaptively-phased microwave array emitters. Rectennas within the device to be charged receive and rectify the microwave energy and use it for battery charging and/or for primary power. A communications channel is opened between the wireless power source and the device to be charged. The device to be charged reports to the power source via the channel a received beam signal strength at the rectennas. This information is used by the system to adjust the transmitting phases of the microwave array emitters until a maximum microwave energy is reported by the device to be charged. Backscatter is minimized by physically configuring the microwave array emitters in a substantially non-uniform, non-coplanar manner.
I don't know enough about antennas and E&M to evaluate that. Any help here? According to the articles it gets ~10% efficiency at 10 feet and receives (?) 1 watt at 30 feet.
On to the possible crank warning signs: * According to his LinkedIn profile, he's spent his whole career being a CEO and/or (later) doing software testing at Microsoft. * He's identified as a physicist, but all he has to show for it is a bachelor's in physics from the University of Manchester (where he also "studied... computational linguistics"). No graduate degree or research career. * Twenty years after he gets his degree, having done nothing but software, he's suddenly producing miraculous hardware based on cutting-edge physics? * Charger is hidden behind a curtain during a demo. * Charger is six feet tall, but they're going to consumerize it to the size of a desktop PC in two years, when it will cost ~$100. * Replacing all their off-the-shelf hardware with custom-built optimized hardware? No problem! * Current fridge-sized charger has 200 transmitters, but when consumerized will have "20,000 transmitters in an 18-inch cube". * The only public demo makes an iPhone declare itself to be charging. No electrical test equipment or data shown. No real evidence that it does anything. * Claims the power goes through walls just like Wi-Fi, even though Wi-Fi signal strength can drop by orders of magnitude when it goes through walls. * Charger only gets 10% efficiency from 10 feet away in open air, but this is never mentioned as an obstacle. Come to think of it, no technical obstacles are mentioned at all. * This:
“In wave theory and electromagnetic systems, you don’t get linearities everywhere,” he added, describing the science behind Cota. “There are situations where double could mean for more, like double could mean square, or 3 plus 3 apples could result in a net total of 9 apples, so to speak. When you move from the linear version to the power version, things happen that were quite surprising.”
I don't know, maybe I'm being too hard on the guy. Maybe he's been doing physics and electronics as hobbies all this time, actually did come up with a workable idea, and used his management experience to drive the development of a real product. Maybe they really will have a commercialized version ready in a couple months and I'll have to eat crow. I just can't help but feel skeptical of people who announce their world-changing new product before it actually is a product.
Why the fuck he's talking about "image quality"? Until we get 4k displays the quality differences are non-existent.
Resolution is far from the only thing that matters for image quality. Contrast, black levels, ghosting, viewing angle, color reproduction, and even input lag (for lip sync) can make a big difference. For an extreme example, compare LCD vs. plasma at the same resolution.
Yes, but I'd like it to 3,840 x 2,160 resolution video at 120 or 240fps.
You realize that's 24 gigabits/second *minimum* just for 4K 120fps raw video, right? (With 4K's better color, it might be 32 Gbps, I'm not sure.) That is not a trivial challenge.
Movies come in different aspect ratios. At 1.78:1 you get 1080p or 2160p. At the also popular 2.35:1 you get ~817p. 720p likewise becomes ~544p. Those aren't really helpful for comparison since 817p isn't lower resolution than 1080p. Only the horizontal resolution is constant, so it actually makes sense to use it. The use of vertical resolution comes from the days of analog TV when only horizontal resolution was continuous, not discrete.
(I'm sure the marketing folks were salivating over it anyway.)
Also, while I haven't watched your hour-long video (summary?), I'm not sure why anyone would target 4096 pixels wide, which would make upscaling existing HD very painful. Doubling the resolution is much simpler, and I very much doubt that 4K was ever a spec as opposed to a marketing term.
We're talking microns of gold plating on the surface of another metal. If you're paying more than a few dollars extra for that, it's not the gold that's driving up the price.
That being said, I agree that digital signals and error correction along with electrical and mechanical standards make cable quality almost irrelevant.
Every jurisdiction effectively picks and chooses which laws it's going to enforce and when. It's called "prioritizing". And sure enough, that's what the feds are doing:
The memo directs federal prosecutors to focus their resources on eight specific areas of enforcement, rather than targeting individual marijuana users, which even President Obama has acknowledged is not the best use of federal manpower.
The moral and legal value of prioritization is in the results (i.e. who gets targeted and who gets ignored), not the act itself.
Both were similar in the amount of destruction they caused but Katrina was only SS Cat 3 at landfall, where Andrew was SS Cat 5.
Hurricane Ike produced a similar situation a few years ago. It hit Texas as a very large Category 2, causing far more damage than one would expect from the wind speed.
Accuracy measures how close the frequency is to the target, on average. Stability measures how the frequency drifts over time (and temperature, etc.). Accuracy is more of an absolute measurement while stability is more of a relative measurement. From the article:
The ticks of any atomic clock must be averaged for some period to provide the best results. One key benefit of the very high stability of the ytterbium clocks is that precise results can be achieved very quickly. For example, the current U.S. civilian time standard, the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, must be averaged for about 400,000 seconds (about five days) to achieve its best performance. The new ytterbium clocks achieve that same result in about one second of averaging time.
and
[U.S. civilian standard cesium reference clock] NIST-F1's performance is described in terms of accuracy, which refers to how closely the clock realizes the cesium atom's known frequency, or natural vibration rate. Accuracy is crucial for time measurements that must be traced to a primary standard. NIST scientists plan to measure the accuracy of the ytterbium clocks in the near future, and the accuracy of other high performance optical atomic clocks is under study at NIST and JILA.
So it sounds like accuracy is defined in terms of how well the clock reproduces the ideal frequency of the physical process it's based on. Hopefully there's a physicist or two around who can give us the exciting details.
How many times do we need to see this "coincidence", of a comet diving into the sun, followed by an instaneous CME, to at least calculate the probability of CMEs being caused by comets vs not caused by comets?
If you watch the video, you'll see that the CME happens well before the comet hits the sun.
Update: Looks like this is an xHCI specific issue, and probably not the cause of the USB device disconnects under EHCI. To everyone who commented with other USB issues (none of which really sounded related), please email the linux-usb mailing list with a description of your issue.
Provide 1280 peacekeepers. Cost approximately $128,000/month. Receive compensation from UN of $1.3M. Profit > $1M/month.
Take-home pay is not the only expense. Flying people back and forth to the other side of the world and keeping them supplied is not free, especially in a place with minimal infrastructure. Whatever profit Nepal is making, I doubt it's over $1M/month.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information has many examples of slick-looking graphics going back decades, long before computers were any good at graphics. How to Lie with Statistics is even older than that. Newspapers and news magazines have always been infamously bad at showing data. It's a rare data graphic that doesn't focus on decoration over content, and that's ignoring the ones that are deliberately distorted.
That being said, most software (I'm looking at you, Excel) is way too helpful about creating bad data graphics.
The summary links to both a guy who writes on DailyKos and a guy who writes on Free Republic, and they agree with each other. Apparently vinegar-spraying chemtrail nuts are, in fact, the key to world peace. Or at least 1990s nostalgia.
Tell me, Slashdot, how difficult would it be to rewrite an insurance billing system to aggregate a policyholder's out-of-pocket costs?
It's somewhat more difficult when you waste three years assuming the Republicans are going to win big in 2012 and repeal the whole ACA. You gamble, you lose.
Snark aside, the real answer seems to be in the article:
The health law, signed more than three years ago by Mr. Obama, clearly established a single overall limit on out-of-pocket costs for each individual or family. But federal officials said that many insurers and employers needed more time to comply because they used separate companies to help administer major medical coverage and drug benefits, with separate limits on out-of-pocket costs. In many cases, the companies have separate computer systems that cannot communicate with one another.
So insurance companies outsourced different parts of their work to different companies that don't talk to each other. It's not "the computer's fault", it's an administrative problem within the insurance company itself. That text was right above the paragraph quoted in the summary, but curiously the submitter felt the need to ask a rhetorical question instead of including the most important piece of explanation in the entire article.
(Also, have you ever heard a story about a giant years-old financial/billing system that was clean, well-implemented, and easy to maintain and modify? I sure haven't. Not sure why we'd expect anything to be a trivial change in one of those...)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your criticisms. I have found a way to fix one thing, if it helps:
Almost everything is smaller and harder to read, and it's not obvious what is a "button" and what is just text in a corner somewhere.
In the accessibility options, turning on "Bold Text" will make the app names in the home screen bold again, which makes them much easier to read. Unfortunately, the other problems seem to be unfixable so far.
This may have been true a few years ago with Android handsets generally being underpowered, but the hardware caught up a while ago already.
I'm talking about stuff like how much lag there is between me swiping my finger and the app list scrolling to the next page, or between me pushing a button on the phone keypad and the phone responding to the button press. I tried several a few different Android phones that my friends had and several store models, but always saw the same thing. I went with an iPhone 4S (this was last year).
If the responsiveness has improved since then, that's great news, and I'll definitely pay more attention to Android next time I go phone shopping.
There seem to be two different kinds of slowdown. The first is due to the new animations for things like going back to the home screen. The second is more intermittent, and happens mostly when task switching. Both of them are annoying. The whole reason I went with iOS over Android was the snappier UI.
The disappearing Safari toolbar also drives me crazy. I wish I had held off on upgrading. Hopefully Apple will have some tweaks and patches out soon.
They had a scale in the first article. You can probably make your own using the tool.
Just in case you were worried about Windows updates, the defective patches are for Office 2007 and Office 2013. From the article:
Thank you very much for the expert insight!
Interesting! I didn't know the safety limit was so low. As I recall, the big danger of standing in front of a microwave oven is supposed to be cornea damage, so now I'm wondering about risks to eyesight from charging the phone while you're talking on it.
I dug up what looks to be the main patent for the technology from 2008:
I don't know enough about antennas and E&M to evaluate that. Any help here? According to the articles it gets ~10% efficiency at 10 feet and receives (?) 1 watt at 30 feet.
On to the possible crank warning signs: ... computational linguistics"). No graduate degree or research career.
* According to his LinkedIn profile, he's spent his whole career being a CEO and/or (later) doing software testing at Microsoft.
* He's identified as a physicist, but all he has to show for it is a bachelor's in physics from the University of Manchester (where he also "studied
* Twenty years after he gets his degree, having done nothing but software, he's suddenly producing miraculous hardware based on cutting-edge physics?
* Charger is hidden behind a curtain during a demo.
* Charger is six feet tall, but they're going to consumerize it to the size of a desktop PC in two years, when it will cost ~$100.
* Replacing all their off-the-shelf hardware with custom-built optimized hardware? No problem!
* Current fridge-sized charger has 200 transmitters, but when consumerized will have "20,000 transmitters in an 18-inch cube".
* The only public demo makes an iPhone declare itself to be charging. No electrical test equipment or data shown. No real evidence that it does anything.
* Claims the power goes through walls just like Wi-Fi, even though Wi-Fi signal strength can drop by orders of magnitude when it goes through walls.
* Charger only gets 10% efficiency from 10 feet away in open air, but this is never mentioned as an obstacle. Come to think of it, no technical obstacles are mentioned at all.
* This:
I don't know, maybe I'm being too hard on the guy. Maybe he's been doing physics and electronics as hobbies all this time, actually did come up with a workable idea, and used his management experience to drive the development of a real product. Maybe they really will have a commercialized version ready in a couple months and I'll have to eat crow. I just can't help but feel skeptical of people who announce their world-changing new product before it actually is a product.
Why the fuck he's talking about "image quality"? Until we get 4k displays the quality differences are non-existent.
Resolution is far from the only thing that matters for image quality. Contrast, black levels, ghosting, viewing angle, color reproduction, and even input lag (for lip sync) can make a big difference. For an extreme example, compare LCD vs. plasma at the same resolution.
Try InfiniBand, maybe? Those prices make Monster Cable look cheap, though...
Hmm... okay, so 2160p with 48-bit color at 60fps would be ~24 Gb/sec. Double that for 120fps and you're well into DDR2 and multi-lane PCIe territory.
Interesting! Thanks for the details.
Yes, but I'd like it to 3,840 x 2,160 resolution video at 120 or 240fps.
You realize that's 24 gigabits/second *minimum* just for 4K 120fps raw video, right? (With 4K's better color, it might be 32 Gbps, I'm not sure.) That is not a trivial challenge.
or just 2160p as it should be called
Movies come in different aspect ratios. At 1.78:1 you get 1080p or 2160p. At the also popular 2.35:1 you get ~817p. 720p likewise becomes ~544p. Those aren't really helpful for comparison since 817p isn't lower resolution than 1080p. Only the horizontal resolution is constant, so it actually makes sense to use it. The use of vertical resolution comes from the days of analog TV when only horizontal resolution was continuous, not discrete.
(I'm sure the marketing folks were salivating over it anyway.)
Also, while I haven't watched your hour-long video (summary?), I'm not sure why anyone would target 4096 pixels wide, which would make upscaling existing HD very painful. Doubling the resolution is much simpler, and I very much doubt that 4K was ever a spec as opposed to a marketing term.
Have you seen the price of gold recently?
We're talking microns of gold plating on the surface of another metal. If you're paying more than a few dollars extra for that, it's not the gold that's driving up the price.
That being said, I agree that digital signals and error correction along with electrical and mechanical standards make cable quality almost irrelevant.
Every jurisdiction effectively picks and chooses which laws it's going to enforce and when. It's called "prioritizing". And sure enough, that's what the feds are doing:
The moral and legal value of prioritization is in the results (i.e. who gets targeted and who gets ignored), not the act itself.
Both were similar in the amount of destruction they caused but Katrina was only SS Cat 3 at landfall, where Andrew was SS Cat 5.
Hurricane Ike produced a similar situation a few years ago. It hit Texas as a very large Category 2, causing far more damage than one would expect from the wind speed.
Accuracy measures how close the frequency is to the target, on average. Stability measures how the frequency drifts over time (and temperature, etc.). Accuracy is more of an absolute measurement while stability is more of a relative measurement. From the article:
and
So it sounds like accuracy is defined in terms of how well the clock reproduces the ideal frequency of the physical process it's based on. Hopefully there's a physicist or two around who can give us the exciting details.
How many times do we need to see this "coincidence", of a comet diving into the sun, followed by an instaneous CME, to at least calculate the probability of CMEs being caused by comets vs not caused by comets?
If you watch the video, you'll see that the CME happens well before the comet hits the sun.
If you watch the video, you can see that the CME happens before the comet hits, and actually vaporizes the comet on the way out.
Sarah's Google+ post has an update:
Provide 1280 peacekeepers.
Cost approximately $128,000/month.
Receive compensation from UN of $1.3M. Profit > $1M/month.
Take-home pay is not the only expense. Flying people back and forth to the other side of the world and keeping them supplied is not free, especially in a place with minimal infrastructure. Whatever profit Nepal is making, I doubt it's over $1M/month.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information has many examples of slick-looking graphics going back decades, long before computers were any good at graphics. How to Lie with Statistics is even older than that. Newspapers and news magazines have always been infamously bad at showing data. It's a rare data graphic that doesn't focus on decoration over content, and that's ignoring the ones that are deliberately distorted.
That being said, most software (I'm looking at you, Excel) is way too helpful about creating bad data graphics.
The summary links to both a guy who writes on DailyKos and a guy who writes on Free Republic, and they agree with each other. Apparently vinegar-spraying chemtrail nuts are, in fact, the key to world peace. Or at least 1990s nostalgia.
Tell me, Slashdot, how difficult would it be to rewrite an insurance billing system to aggregate a policyholder's out-of-pocket costs?
It's somewhat more difficult when you waste three years assuming the Republicans are going to win big in 2012 and repeal the whole ACA. You gamble, you lose.
Snark aside, the real answer seems to be in the article:
The health law, signed more than three years ago by Mr. Obama, clearly established a single overall limit on out-of-pocket costs for each individual or family. But federal officials said that many insurers and employers needed more time to comply because they used separate companies to help administer major medical coverage and drug benefits, with separate limits on out-of-pocket costs. In many cases, the companies have separate computer systems that cannot communicate with one another.
So insurance companies outsourced different parts of their work to different companies that don't talk to each other. It's not "the computer's fault", it's an administrative problem within the insurance company itself. That text was right above the paragraph quoted in the summary, but curiously the submitter felt the need to ask a rhetorical question instead of including the most important piece of explanation in the entire article.
(Also, have you ever heard a story about a giant years-old financial/billing system that was clean, well-implemented, and easy to maintain and modify? I sure haven't. Not sure why we'd expect anything to be a trivial change in one of those...)