One of the first computers I operated was a PDP-8, complete with the lights and toggle switches. It was kind of a pain because one or two of the light bulbs were invariable burnt out, so reading back what you had already hand entered for the boot loaded was never a certainty.
It was also a twelve bit machine and the instruction set (what little there was) was always written in octal.
Our programming exercises were written out by hand on graph paper. When we thought it looked all correct we had to manually toggle it into those front panel switches. Once entered we could spit it out to paper tape to be re-used at a later date, because we were just that technically advanced.
The idea of modular phones or computers, where customers are expected to purchase proprietary modules to change their setup or just to upgrade, has been around since the dawn of the PC. Back in the 80's Byte magazine was filled with ads from computer manufacturers that claimed that you never had to buy a new computer, just swap out their custom (and therefore expensive) modules. Those manufacturers are, of course, not around any longer. It isn't possible to implement something like this without increasing size and manufacturing costs. *Every* time this idea gets flouted it fails miserably, but companies don't appear to learn from the past.
Because it will frequently fail. Try leaving that out in the rainy parking lot and see how long it lasts. It needs power, so now you have to recharge all your shopping carts every night, and of course they cost twice as much as a normal shopping cart. How does the customer dispute an error?, and yes errors will happen. Also, it's then so much easier to game the system to rip off the store.
This is one of those pipe dream ideas that always show up on TV commercials for big tech companies, yet nobody seems to ask the people that would be expected to actually use it.
It could, but it won't. Retails stores now only hire enough checkout clerks to keep customers from abandoning their shopping cart and walking out. When checkout clerks disappear, the stores will simply replace them with as few of these machines as possible. Your wait in line will still be just as long.
That would be well & fine for those areas from which the water was directly removed. The millions of trees the article is talking about, however, are mostly in the mountains and the associated foothills, upstream from where the water is eventually redirected. The trees get their water from precipitation, either directly as rainfall or from later snow melt. The years of drought have reduced the amount or rainfall, and removing every bit of infrastructure in the state's water system won't change that one bit, so please save you armchair engineering.
My IP, from Time Warner Cable, is effectively static, in that it doesn't change unless my cable modem is powered off for several hours, which hasn't happened in several years at least. Once the modem has a connection they have never cycled to a new IP address, and the few times it has happened I just updated my DNS records. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
Still no longer run an outgoing mail server however, just too much of a pain in the ass to be worrying about.
Electronic transfers of course only take milliseconds, but what's the point of banks using them if they can't steal your money for a few days and earn some interest on it before finally handing it over to the party that you originally intended to have it.
Block chains will be no different. Banks will still take the attitude of "Fuck you, pay me".
I have a brother HL2170W that's been our household workhorse printer for over eight years now. Had an issue exactly once, when a small foam pad in the inner works started to get sticky, causing paper jams. A quick youtube search showed me how to repair it. Other than that it's been working great. All the previous printers we owned, from HP & Epson, barely lasted two years.
I learned my lesson long ago, and I will *never* again buy an HP product.
I'm assuming that Google fiber is available in that area, because Comcast is pretty much only providing these offers in areas where they have some actual competition. Elsewhere, it's the usual monopolistic rates.
I never use variable names of more than one character unless all possible single character names have already been used, which rarely happens. I never indent blocks; extra white space is only superfluous. I never do in six lines of code what can be done in one long convoluted line.
If the person that needs to maintain my code can't make sense of it, too bad. They're probably just a sloppy programmer.
I just went to a doctor this week, and they also asked me about my current medications. I also said "same as last time", so they printed out a form with the medications I mentioned in my last visit and just had me initial it to make sure. They don't just do this to cover their ass, they also do this to cover yours. For every ten patients that insist that "Oh, nothing's changed", they'll probably have one that eventually says "Oh wait, I stopped taking that one two months ago, I forgot to mention it". When it comes to my health, I'm glad they double check their work, and mine.
My internist, who's many years younger me so he's not just some cranky old Luddite, tried the using iPads, etc., for about a year before he threw it all out and went back to a manila folder with the patient's name on it, with all the medical records inside. I feel more comfortable with him than with his associate who seems to look everything up on their phone before making a decision.
Just my data point.
I have a late model car with one of those back-up cameras, which is displayed on an LCD display mounted in the dash. On a bright sunny day, when I'm backing into, say, a shaded parking spot, the cameras display in completely useless. The glare from the dashboard, hood, etc., completely drowns out the wimpy LCD display. In those cases, there's no way in hell I'm going to want a car without mirrors.
"Bots can now respond with GIFs, audio, video, and other files "to help a brand's personality come across," " Oh boy, more crap driven by the idiots in marketing.
Remember when grocery stores in the U.S. first starting giving "discounts" if you used your loyalty card, or whatever it was called at the time, that allowed them to track your purchases? Now they just raise the prices on select items far above the price of their competitors, then only sell it to you for the normal price if you hand over your personal data. The same thing will eventually happen with phones.
"A significant number of Waze users will not be city residents."
So what? A significant number of Chevy drivers will also not be city residents. Should the city sue Chevrolet for building cars that violate the sanctity of this neighborhood?
Waze doesn't create more traffic. For every car that moves onto a less traveled road there's one less car that's on the busier roads. The total wear & tear on pavement is the same, and the total roadway maintenance costs are the same.
"This means that they need a court to tell them that they need to behave properly in respect to a public commons, or else."
Or else what? Public commons? Here's the thing with these public commons; everyone has the right to choose their own route through them. Don't like them in your neighborhood, then maybe they won't allow you to drive through their neighborhood.
Kill yourself. No, seriously, put a gun in your mouth and kill yourself. You have lost any scruples you ever had (if you even ever had any). Suck on a tailpipe, jump off a cliff, just kill yourself.
Reminds me of a newspaper startup back in the 80's(?) called Good News, that only printed uplifting and cheerful stories. Needless to say that experiment didn't last long.
Slashdot Mirror
... whose time passed...
One of the first computers I operated was a PDP-8, complete with the lights and toggle switches. It was kind of a pain because one or two of the light bulbs were invariable burnt out, so reading back what you had already hand entered for the boot loaded was never a certainty. It was also a twelve bit machine and the instruction set (what little there was) was always written in octal. Our programming exercises were written out by hand on graph paper. When we thought it looked all correct we had to manually toggle it into those front panel switches. Once entered we could spit it out to paper tape to be re-used at a later date, because we were just that technically advanced.
The idea of modular phones or computers, where customers are expected to purchase proprietary modules to change their setup or just to upgrade, has been around since the dawn of the PC. Back in the 80's Byte magazine was filled with ads from computer manufacturers that claimed that you never had to buy a new computer, just swap out their custom (and therefore expensive) modules. Those manufacturers are, of course, not around any longer. It isn't possible to implement something like this without increasing size and manufacturing costs. *Every* time this idea gets flouted it fails miserably, but companies don't appear to learn from the past.
Because it will frequently fail. Try leaving that out in the rainy parking lot and see how long it lasts. It needs power, so now you have to recharge all your shopping carts every night, and of course they cost twice as much as a normal shopping cart. How does the customer dispute an error?, and yes errors will happen. Also, it's then so much easier to game the system to rip off the store.
This is one of those pipe dream ideas that always show up on TV commercials for big tech companies, yet nobody seems to ask the people that would be expected to actually use it.
Though you add some interesting additional information, you're replying to what was intended as a joke. Woosh...
It could, but it won't. Retails stores now only hire enough checkout clerks to keep customers from abandoning their shopping cart and walking out. When checkout clerks disappear, the stores will simply replace them with as few of these machines as possible. Your wait in line will still be just as long.
That would be well & fine for those areas from which the water was directly removed. The millions of trees the article is talking about, however, are mostly in the mountains and the associated foothills, upstream from where the water is eventually redirected. The trees get their water from precipitation, either directly as rainfall or from later snow melt. The years of drought have reduced the amount or rainfall, and removing every bit of infrastructure in the state's water system won't change that one bit, so please save you armchair engineering.
My IP, from Time Warner Cable, is effectively static, in that it doesn't change unless my cable modem is powered off for several hours, which hasn't happened in several years at least. Once the modem has a connection they have never cycled to a new IP address, and the few times it has happened I just updated my DNS records. Your mileage, of course, may vary. Still no longer run an outgoing mail server however, just too much of a pain in the ass to be worrying about.
*couldn't*
Electronic transfers of course only take milliseconds, but what's the point of banks using them if they can't steal your money for a few days and earn some interest on it before finally handing it over to the party that you originally intended to have it. Block chains will be no different. Banks will still take the attitude of "Fuck you, pay me".
Who;s lifetime? Certainly not yours. Plex will be out of business or the terms will change long before your life ends.
I have a brother HL2170W that's been our household workhorse printer for over eight years now. Had an issue exactly once, when a small foam pad in the inner works started to get sticky, causing paper jams. A quick youtube search showed me how to repair it. Other than that it's been working great. All the previous printers we owned, from HP & Epson, barely lasted two years. I learned my lesson long ago, and I will *never* again buy an HP product.
He's talking about a floppy disk. Yes the heads touch the disk.
I'm assuming that Google fiber is available in that area, because Comcast is pretty much only providing these offers in areas where they have some actual competition. Elsewhere, it's the usual monopolistic rates.
I never use variable names of more than one character unless all possible single character names have already been used, which rarely happens. I never indent blocks; extra white space is only superfluous. I never do in six lines of code what can be done in one long convoluted line. If the person that needs to maintain my code can't make sense of it, too bad. They're probably just a sloppy programmer.
I just went to a doctor this week, and they also asked me about my current medications. I also said "same as last time", so they printed out a form with the medications I mentioned in my last visit and just had me initial it to make sure. They don't just do this to cover their ass, they also do this to cover yours. For every ten patients that insist that "Oh, nothing's changed", they'll probably have one that eventually says "Oh wait, I stopped taking that one two months ago, I forgot to mention it". When it comes to my health, I'm glad they double check their work, and mine.
My internist, who's many years younger me so he's not just some cranky old Luddite, tried the using iPads, etc., for about a year before he threw it all out and went back to a manila folder with the patient's name on it, with all the medical records inside. I feel more comfortable with him than with his associate who seems to look everything up on their phone before making a decision. Just my data point.
Freedom of speech is the 1st amendment, not the 2nd.
I have a late model car with one of those back-up cameras, which is displayed on an LCD display mounted in the dash. On a bright sunny day, when I'm backing into, say, a shaded parking spot, the cameras display in completely useless. The glare from the dashboard, hood, etc., completely drowns out the wimpy LCD display. In those cases, there's no way in hell I'm going to want a car without mirrors.
"Bots can now respond with GIFs, audio, video, and other files "to help a brand's personality come across," "
Oh boy, more crap driven by the idiots in marketing.
Remember when grocery stores in the U.S. first starting giving "discounts" if you used your loyalty card, or whatever it was called at the time, that allowed them to track your purchases? Now they just raise the prices on select items far above the price of their competitors, then only sell it to you for the normal price if you hand over your personal data. The same thing will eventually happen with phones.
"A significant number of Waze users will not be city residents." So what? A significant number of Chevy drivers will also not be city residents. Should the city sue Chevrolet for building cars that violate the sanctity of this neighborhood? Waze doesn't create more traffic. For every car that moves onto a less traveled road there's one less car that's on the busier roads. The total wear & tear on pavement is the same, and the total roadway maintenance costs are the same. "This means that they need a court to tell them that they need to behave properly in respect to a public commons, or else." Or else what? Public commons? Here's the thing with these public commons; everyone has the right to choose their own route through them. Don't like them in your neighborhood, then maybe they won't allow you to drive through their neighborhood.
Will it also come with DRM? If you miss a monthly maintenance fee payment will it automatically disable your vision?
Kill yourself. No, seriously, put a gun in your mouth and kill yourself. You have lost any scruples you ever had (if you even ever had any). Suck on a tailpipe, jump off a cliff, just kill yourself.
Reminds me of a newspaper startup back in the 80's(?) called Good News, that only printed uplifting and cheerful stories. Needless to say that experiment didn't last long.