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User: steveg

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  1. Re:Perhaps at last an affordable mini PC? on Tiny Fanless Mini-PC Runs Linux Or Windows On Quad-core AMD SoC · · Score: 1

    Pretty good job finding these for sale, considering they won't be available until February at any price. Amazon doesn't have them listed yet. Nor does anyone else they have linked.

    Yes, there are other Fit-branded systems by the same people, but no Fitlets. And no idea about prices other than the bare-bone base model.

    It sounds really interesting, and I'm sorry I have those cartons full of mini-itx stuff sitting on my kitchen table. This would probably have made a better firewall.

  2. Re:What's scary is on Firefox 35 Arrives With MP4 Playback On Mac, Android Download Manager Support · · Score: 1

    Is this a "they couldn't help themselves, it was just too tempting" kind of defense? :)

    I think the constant UI changes are worse, but both are annoying.

  3. Re:But on Microsoft Ends Mainstream Support For Windows 7 · · Score: 1

    I'm sticking with the XP VMs for anything I personally have to use.

    I have a Win 7 VM with Office 2010 on it (nothing else) and it ballooned up to over 30G of storage and slams into a resource wall if you only allocate 3G to it. My XP VM with Office 2007 took less than 7G and was happy with less than 2G RAM. We had to upgrade hard drives and RAM on the lab that uses that VM, just to manage the the Windows image that's used for that one class.

  4. What's scary is on Firefox 35 Arrives With MP4 Playback On Mac, Android Download Manager Support · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...that Firefox is still my favorite browser. I really don't care for any of the rest, but my gods, what kinds of drugs are they doing over at the Mozilla compound?

  5. Re:Doesn't really matter if they do patch it on Google Throws Microsoft Under Bus, Then Won't Patch Android Flaw · · Score: 1

    I'm kind of hoping that my 2012 updates fairly soon. It's still on KitKat, and it's painfully slow, even after clearing the cache.

    It's not that I'm looking forward to Lollipop particularly. It looks pretty ugly (well, maybe not as ugly as KitKat) but I'd like to test it out on a non-critical device before I allow it on my phone. It seems that each new version of Android has regressions, adding things I don't care about and remving things I find useful.

    I liked Jelly Bean. Don't care much for KitKat. I'm skeptical of Lollipop.

  6. Re:Principles vs Practicality on EFF: Apple's Dev Agreement Means No EFF Mobile App For iOS · · Score: 1

    They didn't refuse. If you go to their github page for the app, it says that it runs under either Android or IOS.

    They chose not to push it through the Apple App Store, because of those terms and conditions. The code is there, though, if you want to figure out how to get it onto your iDevice.

  7. Re:No They Aren't Adhering At ALL on EFF: Apple's Dev Agreement Means No EFF Mobile App For iOS · · Score: 3, Informative

    Did you look on the EFF page about this app?

    Here ya go.

  8. Re:Seriously? GOOD NEWS? on FCC Favors Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    Let me fix that for you.

    1. Tell the telecom companies to leave the Internet alone, it's been working just fine for years. Use regulation if necessary to enforce it.

    2. Let the telecom companies change the structure of the Net "to pursue 'innovative' partnerships" and create "tiers" of service depending on the source of the packets and whether that source competes with their own business model. This is what you are calling Net Neutrality.

  9. Re:And? on Unbundling Cable TV: Be Careful What You Wish For · · Score: 1

    On the other hand, they're also pushing free in-flight entertainment on those same newer 737s. It's over WiFi, but you don't get outside access, just what they have canned on the plane.

  10. Re:yeah but like... on Sony Thinks You'll Pay $1200 For a Digital Walkman · · Score: 1

    Most expensive music player? Not even close....

    Astell-Kern-AK240-Mastering-Quality

    Apparently this is what iRiver has morphed into. I had an iRiver H340 back in the day, but they've apparently abandoned the mass market in a big way.

  11. Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device on Sony Thinks You'll Pay $1200 For a Digital Walkman · · Score: 1

    Note that you don't have to buy the card to match the Sony -- the player you pointed to already had 128G internally. The card would add an *extra* 128G.

  12. Re:Nothing New for Sony... on Sony Thinks You'll Pay $1200 For a Digital Walkman · · Score: 1

    I used to think of Sony as a premium electronics company. But that was in the 70s and 80s. I kind of stopped paying attention for a while (all my electronics were already bought, and in those days they lasted) and then the 90s came along.

    I bought a CD changer that lasted almost a year. Not learning anything, I bought another, which lasted less than that. And so on.

  13. Re:something new. on What Language Will the World Speak In 2115? · · Score: 1

    Sure, you could find something he could read. But for the vast majority of books, it would be more than new technology, it would be new concepts, new knowlege, new *memes*.

    A police procedural thriller, a medical drama, a spy novel, etc. would have new vocabulary, but more importantly, new concepts behind the vocabulary. And none of it explained, because a modern reader would already understand them.

    I heard somewhere (yeah, yeah, I don't have a citation handy) that English has something like 5 times as many words as it did when Shakespeare was around. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of those were added in the last hundred years.

  14. Re:something new. on What Language Will the World Speak In 2115? · · Score: 1

    While you may be correct, that's not an indication that English hasn't changed. The question might be asked, could a literate speaker from the early 1900s pick up an English language book from today and read it with the same ease that going the other way would be?

    Modern English is a superset of English from back then. That's still significant change, even if it's not the kind of radical change that the "English" of 6 or 700 years ago would be.

  15. Re: PITA on Why Aren't We Using SSH For Everything? · · Score: 1

    Which don't?

    I always check it, and every distro I've tried has root login set to yes. I don't try as many distros as I used to though.

  16. Re:Re usability on In Daring Plan, Tomorrow SpaceX To Land a Rocket On Floating Platform · · Score: 1

    That was the first thing that jumped to my mind. Kind of reminds me of retread tires -- a lot of the truck tire fragments you see by the side of the road are from retread tires that self destructed. A lot of companies buy them because they're cheaper, but the chances that they'll fail is far higher.

    But the consequnces of your first stage failing are much worse than the consequences of your tire shredding on the freeway. And those are bad enough.

  17. Re:I used to work on SYNC on Ford Ditches Microsoft Partnership On Sync, Goes With QNX · · Score: 1

    Yow. Is that why the 3.6.2 upgrade eliminated Daylight Savings Time? Couldn't find the code that supported it?

    My car changes time zones when I cross to a new one. But during the summer you set it to the GPS time and then *manually* shift by an hour. Because the option for DST was removed.

  18. Re:sync unintuitive on Ford Ditches Microsoft Partnership On Sync, Goes With QNX · · Score: 1

    I have a 2013 Fusion.

    I keep seeing complaints about how unintuitive and hard to use My Ford Touch is. That hasn't been my experience at all (OK, let's ignore the nav system. I'll give you confusing and unintuitive *there*.) Most of the system, by and large, is pretty easy to use.

    Now flaky? That's another issue. It crashes, freezes up, reboots, and is generally unreliable. The older version of MFT would re-index my music each time I started the car, and start playing the same song that it had decided should be the first in the list. Great song, but less great the 40th or 50th time in a row.

    Once I upgraded to a newer version and learned all its tricks and what is likely to cause it to screw up, it's much more reliable, but I would never actually call it reliable. But unintuitive has never been my complaint.

  19. Re:Open Source not a silver bullet on Why Open Source Matters For Sensitive Email · · Score: 1

    Ken Thompson modified the original C compiler to put a back door into the Unix login program, as well as to modify any compiler that was compiled with that compiler to include the backdoor function. So for generations of code, and backdoor was inserted, with no evidence of its existence in any code you could examine.

    http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ke...

  20. Re:Free Enterprise on Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay Again · · Score: 1

    But it's not. When the price rises above what the market will bear, you get a vigorous black market. That's exactly what we've got. If the assertion that cutting the prices by a factor of 4 will increase sales by more than 4x were true, that would be evidence that current prices are *more* than the market will bear.

    *Is* it true? Maybe. Someone would have to do the experiment, and I'm not holding my breath on that.

    I'd guess that the drop in income the music industry has seen in the last decade or so is evidence that they *are* charging more than the market will bear. No, the industry's problems are due to file sharing you say (*they* say)? I suggest that file sharing is one of the *reasons* that the market is willing to bear so much less, but so is the perception that if you're not getting something physical you shouldn't pay as much. That perception may not even being accurate (physical distribution is a smaller percentage of the total cost than we might think) but it's still "intuitively obvious" to most people that a download should be cheaper than a physical object.

    "But people just want something for free! Making it cheaper won't help!" For some people that's probably true. But most people want it *easier*. If it's easier to buy it, and it doesn't cost too much, then most people will take the easier path and just buy it. Black markets won't go away. There will always be free riders. But I suspect a lot of people in the black market aren't that hardcore about it, and would be paying customers if it were less expensive.

  21. Re:7 years ago on Hawking Warns Strong AI Could Threaten Humanity · · Score: 1

    Moore's law is really not tied to CPU architecture. All it really says is that they can get more components on a substrate. Neural nets normally use CPUs and are implemented in software. Even a hardware neural net implementation is going to make use of components contructed on a substrate, either transistors or memristors, or something similar.

    And positronic brains? Um, you're aware that those fall in the MacGuffin category, right?

    No matter what, AI development is likely going to need a boost from exponential growth, and that means, if not Moore's Law, one of its close cousins. For better or worse, it's likely to get that boost.

  22. Re:7 years ago on Hawking Warns Strong AI Could Threaten Humanity · · Score: 1

    Is it? Don't forget Moore's Law. Or some variation of it. It may be that we're coming close to the end of how much we can cram onto a silicon chip, but Intel and others are exploring 3D fabrication, and there are probably other approaches as well (carbon nanotubes, etc.)

    Kurzweil might be overly optimistic on a lot of things, but his notion of the Law of Accelerating Returns is pretty compelling, and it's not based on our prowess with silicon. Moore's Law is just a specific instantiation of a more general principle. Even people who *do* understand the implications of exponential growth can be surprised by it.

    And the question is how much of our job performance is based on being "fully human"? Does it really require "strong-AI" to do most jobs? "Weak-AI" is often defined as task-specific AI, and really most jobs are task specific. It isn't going to take strong-AI to take most jobs -- weak-AI should be sufficient. It may require that weak-AI to be improved, but again, Moore's Law.

    By all accounts self-driving vehicles are not sufficiently advanced to allow them to safely drive anywhere that hasn't been carefully mapped for them. But Cadillac will be offering autonomous freeway cruise control in two years -- essentially self driving, limited to freeways. That's a long way from a fully self driving car, but if you had predicted such a thing ten years ago I'd have told you that it would be (many) decades away.

    Ten years ago I'd have been confident that a driving job would be safe for a long time. Only humans could do that.

  23. Re:until you threaten it on Hawking Warns Strong AI Could Threaten Humanity · · Score: 1

    Why would it be less destructive? *Its* needs are not served by a functioning biome (unless it needs *us*, of course.) What it needs are energy and computational resources. Once it figures out how to come up with those on its own (without us) the biome becomes irrelevant.

    And carbon is likley going to be a very important resource for computational capacity. Why waste it on unimportant biological phenomena?

  24. Re:I bet Slashdot knows better than any engineer.. on What Would Have Happened If Philae Were Nuclear Powered? · · Score: 1

    Not the same thing. He's not second-guessing the scientists who designed it, he's second-guessing the Slashdot self-appointed experts.

  25. Re:With a RTG, it couldn't have got to the comet. on What Would Have Happened If Philae Were Nuclear Powered? · · Score: 1, Informative

    My understanding is that they don't build these to order. There is one size, or possibly a couple, and you deisgn your mission with that in mind. And the mass of the RTG unit alone would have been far more than the completed lander as built.