You magnetically drop your device into place onto a block on a power cord. Instead of plugging the power cord into your device. The actual distinction in convenience is a half a second of fiddling per day.
I got my wife one of those HP Touchpads on the $99 close-out special and loaded Android on it. Fantastic device, really, too bad they sold it with WebOS (which is fine, but nobody* supports it).
But their USB charger is fundamentally junk. I looked all over boards and everybody seems to have come to this conclusion. The wireless charger is, however, well made and so I got one, just to solve the charging problem.
The interesting thing is, it's a stand, not just a charger, so now there's a 9" information display sitting up on the desk in the living room, not just a tablet laying flat and charging. By default it goes into clock mode, but I need to spend some time soon to figure out how to make that mode show me a weather widget as well, maybe a headline or bitcoin price ticker too.
So, if done right, wireless charging can be more useful than simply saving a few seconds. My phone, on the other hand, is a regular MicroUSB, and the cable is always in the way or falling down off the desk, or whatever. I could rig up a cable management solution, but if I'm going to spend that time/effort/money, I might as well just get a wireless charging mat.
Aside: anybody know about flashing the Sprint Nexus 5 onto Verizon pre-paid? Verizon is all that works where I need to go.
Thanks for making me go looking - the total wealth of all the billionaires is actually more like $1.5T, which actually gets the government four months of theoretical spending, not two. My bad.
The upper 1% controls about 30% of that, call it $15T.
I didn't check the number, but let's go with it. Instead of billionaires, we're now talking about everybody making more than $350K/yr. That total wealth would include all assets, naturally. To seize it would require liquidation of all those assets. If the millionaires are now broke, I'm not sure who buys the mansions in the Hamptons, the Bentleys, the Manhattan penthouses, or the private jets. So, there are practical barriers to such liquidation.
But, let's say we just give those Bentleys to the homeless to live in until the first repair makes them abandoned. What would be the net total value of the seizure? Perhaps half of the $15T? Given the current budget deficits, we kick the can perhaps three years down the road and meanwhile the productive capital of the country has been destroyed, so the economy is tanking even harder.
The real solution to paying for the current spending levels is to raise the rates on everybody making $100K to 50%. Except that makes the people making $100K worse off than those making much less, so they stop working so hard, because there's no point to it. You could also double the tax rates all the way down the scale, but that also leads to economic disaster.
There's no real end game that doesn't involve dramatically smaller government or hyperinflation that only gets through a few more years of it.
Try powering the coasts from a solar array in the middle of the USA and you'll see much bigger losses./If/ the power generation is cheap enough, then it's actually cost effective to use superconductors along the long-distance paths and pay with the power to keep them cool. There is a superconducting cable feeding NYC now, for example, kept cool with liquid nitrogen. Getting such power lines down the East coast and then over to the nearest desert is just a function of relative costs.
If they use hydrocarbon fuel cells the cars may be able to use the existing fuel stations (likely to need filters to prevent poisoning from impurities). They'd probably still release CO2 but be more efficient.
And you can even take your hydrogen source, grab some CO2 out of the air, and use membranes (see George Olah's work) to convert it into methanol, which is a liquid compatible with the existing infrastructure.
Sure, it releases CO2 on the other end, but it's the CO2 you just borrowed from the atmosphere last month. Sure it takes a bit more energy, but if you get that from solar or safe nuclear, it's much less energy than trying to re-build the entire world's fuel distribution infrastructure and trying to contain hydrogen.
You could even take an oil derrick that's had a well gone dry, cover it with solar panels, start pumping in sea water and start pumping out methanol. We have the technology. That particular arrangement may or may not make financial sense, but we have what we need to do it (aside from the fuel cell cars that would make the best use of it).
This can be an unpleasant a way to live, is a lot like prison, and is very different from the past.
Indeed, and it's not surprising that some have used the panopticon metaphor to describe the society that is being built.
However, there is another possible outcome: instead of pretending that people don't make mistakes, people don't have sex, people don't use drugs, people don't say "naughty" words - perhaps society will move to stop pretending about these things and then passing around a photo showing Joe hitting a bong won't be any more scandalous than passing around a photo showing that Joe has black hair. Some day it might even be possible to admit that Joe has a penis, without yelling "SHAME!" at him.
The "alien observer" would be humored by the degree of Puritan ethos in our society that we won't even admit to (if we can even recognize it). I think he'd be saddened, though, that we get men in black dresses to meter out revenge to people who get "caught" doing those things. If mass communication gets our society to stop doing those unkind things, perhaps it won't actually be a bad thing.
I'm pretty sure you have no idea how difficult it is to productively invest a cash hoard the size of the one Apple has. It's virtually impossible.
Which is why they should be using the money for R&D to bring new products to market - that's where the ROI always is in technology.
What business do you think Apple should do that is going to generate $14 billion in the next year?
The only way to grow at that kind of rate is to create new businesses. So, one should expect that Apple would be doing just that, as much as it can. But, perhaps it's too big to do so anymore.
You can't cherry pick a bunch of successful one trick ponies, with smallish markets, and then ask why multinational hasn't got a stable of such ponies. It doesn't work like that.
Which basically describes the mp3 player market before the iPod. Productizing these sorts of formerly-niche products is what Apple is really good at.
we should pay more attention to degrees (good or bad) than the skills someone brings along with them.
Actually he said:
M: [An MBA program] teaches people all sorts of wrong things.... M: I hire people in spite of an MBA, not because of one.
So, he hires people who have the skills he needs, basically overlooking the (mis)education. I do see his point about a misallocation of resources (MBA school) but young kids might be forgiven for believing that it's worthwhile. On the other hand, I know some "I can't get a job, I'll go to MBA school" people who aren't out creating their own jobs.
On top of that, SpaceX and Tesla are probably getting a very skewed portion of the applicant pool, so Musk probably has selection bias in his data. Which could swing the other way on MBA school credentials.
I note the lack of any specific examples. As I expected.
OK, if I have to tell you what the tech market looks like, here's a few off the top of my head:
Occulus Rift Raspberry Pi Steam Machine Lytro Sol Tablet Wilocity PicoP Fitbit CubeX Zigbee Nest
If you put all of those companies together, their combined market cap probably doesn't even meet 5% of Apple's. Why isn't Apple taking 10% of its cash and inventing like mad?
Back in the day, Apple had the Advanced Technology Group that would pioneer such brand-new things and get them ready so that the productions side of the house could bring them to market. Nowadays, Apple occasionally buys a startup to integrate into existing products.
As opposed to........... ? Which other consumer product company that invents something new ever year?
Lots of companies do, but the point is that Apple is as large as a hundred smaller consumer products companies, and they haven't really done anything very unique in about seven years. If people want to make an argument that the iPad isn't just a big iPhone, fine (it is, but fine), but by their size alone, they should have several new and interesting products each year - unless their size itself is a hindrance to innovation.
Because government, that's why (we can't have nice things). They all want a monopoly on or cut of any sort of gambling.
Michigan is apparently somewhat more lax in this regard and there there have been excellent results with lottery savings accounts, where organizations target poorer folks to start saving where for every n dollars in savings they get an entry into a lottery which randomly awards one depositor some value (say $20k) once a month.
It has done tremendous things for getting the savings rates up among the poor. It's illegal in most places.
The poster is partially wrong - VCR's is correct - any acronym or initialism where the 's' could be ambiguously interpreted as part of said abbreviation gets an apostrophe, for clarity's sake.
It's going to save a lot of people a lot of money. After my wife went to a hospital and paid $400 out of pocket for a Vitamin D test (the State forced us out of 'insurance' a few years ago), I began to research the options and wound up going with a service that does a full blood panel (~60 tests) for a little over $300, including fasting glucose. Since I'm not a diabetes risk now, my next panel will be even cheaper.
All my ranges were normal except for some inflammatory markers and I've modified my diet and exercise to try to cause a change. I'm going to get a new mini-panel next week to see how things are going, on just those specific tests, and then keep getting the full panel every year. I'll consider pharmaceutical intervention with a physician if the obvious solutions don't pan out first.
The result is much more comprehensive than any mainstream approach, at a lower cost.
Anyway, Walgreens can probably run Vitamin D for about $35. The hospitals will probably fight this. This is also a microscopic example about why the US has such healthcare cost problems.
Those blocks will never be used, therefore the drive always have plenty of free space, so there is no need for trim.
Clue me in: how in the world does the drive firmware know which blocks the filesystem data structures have pointers to as valid, currently unused ranges?
Sign that a company is jumping or is about to jump the shark: Build a huge lavish HQ.
I get that Apple is sitting on Scrooge McDuck levels of cash and building the new HQ isn't that big of a deal for them.
What astonishes me is that they have all this cash and they don't seem to be inventing anything new or creating any new markets. That's the bigger sign of distress at the company.
you have to pay $100 more for a dumb TV these days? Well, OK, I guess that's a feature.
(we're happy as a clam with our Vizio dumb LCD panel. LED/120Hz, buncha HDMI, all the 'enhancements' and speakers can be turned off and open source stuff plugs into the HDMI ports just fine).
Have you actually used DLNA? I personally think it stinks. For a way to get a list of files it is pretty good. For any sort of meta data, thumbs, run time, etc it blows.
yeah, I'd been searching for a decent remote control keyboard for my XBMC (formerly MythTV) box for a while (tried a few 2.4GHz and Bluetooth devices), and never found any I liked (nor do I find the XBMC interface very usable). Then I found out about DLNA and MediaHouse on Android, and now I keep all of our media on the NAS in the basement and the XBMC box is set to receive DLNA and we just use whichever android device is around for a much better remote experience.
I agree, though, there's not much metadata on it (just ID3 AFAIK). We have pretty much no need for more on the remote, though, so that's fine.
The other thing is that the allowed port range (like UDP 30000-60000) is insane - reminds me of the bad-old NFSv3 days. There's an heir apparent protocol out there that few vendors have implemented to date. It's probably time, though.
In the meantime, the list of files (I have a folder structure) is all my kids (7 & 10) need to actually watch what they want. They have friends over and go through their karaoke videos or whatever and the friends think it's like magic - I was chagrined that I never noticed DLNA several years ago!
To them it represents greater convenience in lifestyle as products are tailor-made to their kinks and purchasing habits.
So far, LG hasn't done a flash-bang home invasion / shooting / kidnapping based on its surreptitious data stealing. If they did, some significant segment of its customer base would go to the competition.
The 'herds' actually have this security analysis fairly correct.
But we also need PROPER ways to protect the individual rights of the coppers.
Government is in a special category of accountability because it has a monopoly on the use of violence in our society. If a government employee is on the job, he's on the record, no exceptions.
Of course, when he's off the job he has every expectation of privacy of a private individual, including not being tracked by GPS devices.
If he doesn't like "on the job, on the record", there are thousands of other ways to be employed, including private security (which may or may not include GPS tracking of employees as part of the employment contract). Our employment contract with the government insists on accountability "at all times".
The US Government is less concerned with the interests of its people than most countries. It's heavily controlled by monied corporate interests, which seek to control the power that comes with having the world's reserve currency and a printing press. Don't worry, this won't last too much longer (which will shock most Americans when their purchasing power falls by 60% or more when everybody else leaves Bretton Woods).
I'm actually more surprised that the interests that worked so hard against SOPA and PIPA are not raising a ruckus this time; most of the same provisions are in the US version of the TPP and it's not even 'just' a law that Congress can theoretically repeal - this is International Treaty, which effectively becomes permanent law under the US Constitution. What's worse, Congress is set to give the Executive Branch FastTrack approval on this treaty.
But, the US Government is less concerned with the interests of its people than most countries.
Good point - get it over with. FISA is only accountable to the Chief Justice anyway - there may not be a structural way to get to FISA, but that's just more damning evidence against FISA. For the several thousand people in the population who seem to actually care, anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
You magnetically drop your device into place onto a block on a power cord. Instead of plugging the power cord into your device. The actual distinction in convenience is a half a second of fiddling per day.
I got my wife one of those HP Touchpads on the $99 close-out special and loaded Android on it. Fantastic device, really, too bad they sold it with WebOS (which is fine, but nobody* supports it).
But their USB charger is fundamentally junk. I looked all over boards and everybody seems to have come to this conclusion. The wireless charger is, however, well made and so I got one, just to solve the charging problem.
The interesting thing is, it's a stand, not just a charger, so now there's a 9" information display sitting up on the desk in the living room, not just a tablet laying flat and charging. By default it goes into clock mode, but I need to spend some time soon to figure out how to make that mode show me a weather widget as well, maybe a headline or bitcoin price ticker too.
So, if done right, wireless charging can be more useful than simply saving a few seconds. My phone, on the other hand, is a regular MicroUSB, and the cable is always in the way or falling down off the desk, or whatever. I could rig up a cable management solution, but if I'm going to spend that time/effort/money, I might as well just get a wireless charging mat.
Aside: anybody know about flashing the Sprint Nexus 5 onto Verizon pre-paid? Verizon is all that works where I need to go.
* for large values of 'nobody'
Thanks for making me go looking - the total wealth of all the billionaires is actually more like $1.5T, which actually gets the government four months of theoretical spending, not two. My bad.
The upper 1% controls about 30% of that, call it $15T.
I didn't check the number, but let's go with it. Instead of billionaires, we're now talking about everybody making more than $350K/yr. That total wealth would include all assets, naturally. To seize it would require liquidation of all those assets. If the millionaires are now broke, I'm not sure who buys the mansions in the Hamptons, the Bentleys, the Manhattan penthouses, or the private jets. So, there are practical barriers to such liquidation.
But, let's say we just give those Bentleys to the homeless to live in until the first repair makes them abandoned. What would be the net total value of the seizure? Perhaps half of the $15T? Given the current budget deficits, we kick the can perhaps three years down the road and meanwhile the productive capital of the country has been destroyed, so the economy is tanking even harder.
The real solution to paying for the current spending levels is to raise the rates on everybody making $100K to 50%. Except that makes the people making $100K worse off than those making much less, so they stop working so hard, because there's no point to it. You could also double the tax rates all the way down the scale, but that also leads to economic disaster.
There's no real end game that doesn't involve dramatically smaller government or hyperinflation that only gets through a few more years of it.
Try powering the coasts from a solar array in the middle of the USA and you'll see much bigger losses. /If/ the power generation is cheap enough, then it's actually cost effective to use superconductors along the long-distance paths and pay with the power to keep them cool. There is a superconducting cable feeding NYC now, for example, kept cool with liquid nitrogen. Getting such power lines down the East coast and then over to the nearest desert is just a function of relative costs.
If they use hydrocarbon fuel cells the cars may be able to use the existing fuel stations (likely to need filters to prevent poisoning from impurities). They'd probably still release CO2 but be more efficient.
And you can even take your hydrogen source, grab some CO2 out of the air, and use membranes (see George Olah's work) to convert it into methanol, which is a liquid compatible with the existing infrastructure.
Sure, it releases CO2 on the other end, but it's the CO2 you just borrowed from the atmosphere last month. Sure it takes a bit more energy, but if you get that from solar or safe nuclear, it's much less energy than trying to re-build the entire world's fuel distribution infrastructure and trying to contain hydrogen.
You could even take an oil derrick that's had a well gone dry, cover it with solar panels, start pumping in sea water and start pumping out methanol. We have the technology. That particular arrangement may or may not make financial sense, but we have what we need to do it (aside from the fuel cell cars that would make the best use of it).
This can be an unpleasant a way to live, is a lot like prison, and is very different from the past.
Indeed, and it's not surprising that some have used the panopticon metaphor to describe the society that is being built.
However, there is another possible outcome: instead of pretending that people don't make mistakes, people don't have sex, people don't use drugs, people don't say "naughty" words - perhaps society will move to stop pretending about these things and then passing around a photo showing Joe hitting a bong won't be any more scandalous than passing around a photo showing that Joe has black hair. Some day it might even be possible to admit that Joe has a penis, without yelling "SHAME!" at him.
The "alien observer" would be humored by the degree of Puritan ethos in our society that we won't even admit to (if we can even recognize it). I think he'd be saddened, though, that we get men in black dresses to meter out revenge to people who get "caught" doing those things. If mass communication gets our society to stop doing those unkind things, perhaps it won't actually be a bad thing.
I'm pretty sure you have no idea how difficult it is to productively invest a cash hoard the size of the one Apple has. It's virtually impossible.
Which is why they should be using the money for R&D to bring new products to market - that's where the ROI always is in technology.
What business do you think Apple should do that is going to generate $14 billion in the next year?
The only way to grow at that kind of rate is to create new businesses. So, one should expect that Apple would be doing just that, as much as it can. But, perhaps it's too big to do so anymore.
You can't cherry pick a bunch of successful one trick ponies, with smallish markets, and then ask why multinational hasn't got a stable of such ponies. It doesn't work like that.
Which basically describes the mp3 player market before the iPod. Productizing these sorts of formerly-niche products is what Apple is really good at.
we should pay more attention to degrees (good or bad) than the skills someone brings along with them.
Actually he said:
So, he hires people who have the skills he needs, basically overlooking the (mis)education. I do see his point about a misallocation of resources (MBA school) but young kids might be forgiven for believing that it's worthwhile. On the other hand, I know some "I can't get a job, I'll go to MBA school" people who aren't out creating their own jobs.
On top of that, SpaceX and Tesla are probably getting a very skewed portion of the applicant pool, so Musk probably has selection bias in his data. Which could swing the other way on MBA school credentials.
I note the lack of any specific examples. As I expected.
OK, if I have to tell you what the tech market looks like, here's a few off the top of my head:
Occulus Rift
Raspberry Pi
Steam Machine
Lytro
Sol Tablet
Wilocity
PicoP
Fitbit
CubeX
Zigbee
Nest
If you put all of those companies together, their combined market cap probably doesn't even meet 5% of Apple's. Why isn't Apple taking 10% of its cash and inventing like mad?
Back in the day, Apple had the Advanced Technology Group that would pioneer such brand-new things and get them ready so that the productions side of the house could bring them to market. Nowadays, Apple occasionally buys a startup to integrate into existing products.
And the iPod was launched, what, six or seven years before the iPhone?
At a time when Apple was struggling to make a profit, much less being the largest capitalized company in the world.
And we all remember the reaction to it here...
Hey, I bought one - I had firewire devices everywhere.
As opposed to........... ? Which other consumer product company that invents something new ever year?
Lots of companies do, but the point is that Apple is as large as a hundred smaller consumer products companies, and they haven't really done anything very unique in about seven years. If people want to make an argument that the iPad isn't just a big iPhone, fine (it is, but fine), but by their size alone, they should have several new and interesting products each year - unless their size itself is a hindrance to innovation.
Isn't this what people have been saying about Apple for the last 30+ years or so?
People who haven't noticed the iPod or iPhone, I guess. The iPhone was launched, what, seven years ago?
Any time I try to contribute to wikipedia it's just reverted by some 15 year old control freak
One one hand I donated to WP on their last appeal, and on the other hand what you write here is why I don't even care about this story.
Why not just a SETI lottery?
Because government, that's why (we can't have nice things). They all want a monopoly on or cut of any sort of gambling.
Michigan is apparently somewhat more lax in this regard and there there have been excellent results with lottery savings accounts, where organizations target poorer folks to start saving where for every n dollars in savings they get an entry into a lottery which randomly awards one depositor some value (say $20k) once a month.
It has done tremendous things for getting the savings rates up among the poor. It's illegal in most places.
The poster is partially wrong - VCR's is correct - any acronym or initialism where the 's' could be ambiguously interpreted as part of said abbreviation gets an apostrophe, for clarity's sake.
It's going to save a lot of people a lot of money. After my wife went to a hospital and paid $400 out of pocket for a Vitamin D test (the State forced us out of 'insurance' a few years ago), I began to research the options and wound up going with a service that does a full blood panel (~60 tests) for a little over $300, including fasting glucose. Since I'm not a diabetes risk now, my next panel will be even cheaper.
All my ranges were normal except for some inflammatory markers and I've modified my diet and exercise to try to cause a change. I'm going to get a new mini-panel next week to see how things are going, on just those specific tests, and then keep getting the full panel every year. I'll consider pharmaceutical intervention with a physician if the obvious solutions don't pan out first.
The result is much more comprehensive than any mainstream approach, at a lower cost.
Anyway, Walgreens can probably run Vitamin D for about $35. The hospitals will probably fight this. This is also a microscopic example about why the US has such healthcare cost problems.
Those blocks will never be used, therefore the drive always have plenty of free space, so there is no need for trim.
Clue me in: how in the world does the drive firmware know which blocks the filesystem data structures have pointers to as valid, currently unused ranges?
A "misses the concept of infinity" patch to sew on your uniform.
But we all know the final lower bound will be 42 anyway.
Sign that a company is jumping or is about to jump the shark: Build a huge lavish HQ.
I get that Apple is sitting on Scrooge McDuck levels of cash and building the new HQ isn't that big of a deal for them.
What astonishes me is that they have all this cash and they don't seem to be inventing anything new or creating any new markets. That's the bigger sign of distress at the company.
you have to pay $100 more for a dumb TV these days? Well, OK, I guess that's a feature.
(we're happy as a clam with our Vizio dumb LCD panel. LED/120Hz, buncha HDMI, all the 'enhancements' and speakers can be turned off and open source stuff plugs into the HDMI ports just fine).
Have you actually used DLNA? I personally think it stinks. For a way to get a list of files it is pretty good. For any sort of meta data, thumbs, run time, etc it blows.
yeah, I'd been searching for a decent remote control keyboard for my XBMC (formerly MythTV) box for a while (tried a few 2.4GHz and Bluetooth devices), and never found any I liked (nor do I find the XBMC interface very usable). Then I found out about DLNA and MediaHouse on Android, and now I keep all of our media on the NAS in the basement and the XBMC box is set to receive DLNA and we just use whichever android device is around for a much better remote experience.
I agree, though, there's not much metadata on it (just ID3 AFAIK). We have pretty much no need for more on the remote, though, so that's fine.
The other thing is that the allowed port range (like UDP 30000-60000) is insane - reminds me of the bad-old NFSv3 days. There's an heir apparent protocol out there that few vendors have implemented to date. It's probably time, though.
In the meantime, the list of files (I have a folder structure) is all my kids (7 & 10) need to actually watch what they want. They have friends over and go through their karaoke videos or whatever and the friends think it's like magic - I was chagrined that I never noticed DLNA several years ago!
To them it represents greater convenience in lifestyle as products are tailor-made to their kinks and purchasing habits.
So far, LG hasn't done a flash-bang home invasion / shooting / kidnapping based on its surreptitious data stealing. If they did, some significant segment of its customer base would go to the competition.
The 'herds' actually have this security analysis fairly correct.
But we also need PROPER ways to protect the individual rights of the coppers.
Government is in a special category of accountability because it has a monopoly on the use of violence in our society. If a government employee is on the job, he's on the record, no exceptions.
Of course, when he's off the job he has every expectation of privacy of a private individual, including not being tracked by GPS devices.
If he doesn't like "on the job, on the record", there are thousands of other ways to be employed, including private security (which may or may not include GPS tracking of employees as part of the employment contract). Our employment contract with the government insists on accountability "at all times".
The US Government is less concerned with the interests of its people than most countries. It's heavily controlled by monied corporate interests, which seek to control the power that comes with having the world's reserve currency and a printing press. Don't worry, this won't last too much longer (which will shock most Americans when their purchasing power falls by 60% or more when everybody else leaves Bretton Woods).
I'm actually more surprised that the interests that worked so hard against SOPA and PIPA are not raising a ruckus this time; most of the same provisions are in the US version of the TPP and it's not even 'just' a law that Congress can theoretically repeal - this is International Treaty, which effectively becomes permanent law under the US Constitution. What's worse, Congress is set to give the Executive Branch FastTrack approval on this treaty.
But, the US Government is less concerned with the interests of its people than most countries.
Good point - get it over with. FISA is only accountable to the Chief Justice anyway - there may not be a structural way to get to FISA, but that's just more damning evidence against FISA. For the several thousand people in the population who seem to actually care, anyhow.