Plumbing is already at the point where you can buy most of the stuff at your local plumbing/hardware store, and do it yourself. But most people can't be bothered. Same way that most people could easily change their own oil, or even make their own meals, but many people don't.
Personally, I kind of agree. Until I can read a book, watch a movie, or play video games while my car drives me around, all this car automation stuff is really just gimmicks that make the car more expensive, while not really providing me tangible day-to-day benefits Sure it will lower accident rates, but accident rates have already been going down for quite a while, even without automation technologies.
We're not even at the point where most people have photo quality printers at home. And for many of those who do have one, it's currently out of ink, and hasn't been turned on in years. Why do you think the average Joe would own a 3D printer? For the two or three times a year you need something printed up, it's much easier to go to a shop that owns one and have them print out the part. I know people who print out lots of pictures, but almost nobody I know owns a photo printer. It's much easier and cheaper to bring your SD card into Walmart or Costco and have them print them while you're shopping. Even if you're going to print stuff off once a month, which I think would be quite high for most people, it would still be way more convenient to just go to a shop and have it done.
Why not just install the app as well? Then you don't need the USB cable. You just load up you database, and opt to view the password. Then type it in manually. Just be on the lookout for people looking over your shoulder or cameras that could read the screen.
Re:RPi? That overhyped underdimensioned joke alive
on
New Raspberry Pi Model B+
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think the problem that people run into is that it's somewhere in the middle of where they want a device to be. For people who want true low power computing, Arduino is the way to go. Some people want to be able to run an actual desktop operating systems, hook up standard off the shelf peripherals and run a home server, or hook it up to their TV. This is what Mini ITX or Intel NUC machines do pretty well.
The problem is that the Raspberry Pi looks like the second kind of device, because you can install Linux on it, plug in USB devices, hook it up to your TV, and do many other desktop / media centric things. However, due to certain constraints like the slow processor, small amount of RAM, slow I/O, and insufficient power for USB, it seems to fall short of what many people envision using it for. I guess you can blame the customers because they bought something that wasn't really meant to fulfill their needs. But you also have to look at the way the device is marketed and designed. Why put all these USB ports if you can't actually hook up a bunch of USB peripherals? Why put an HDMI port on the thing if you don't have the power to drive a 1080 desktop environment? Why run full Linux when you don't have enough power to run most Linux applications?
Don't get me wrong, I think the RPi is a great little machine, but I think that many people get disappointed with it because from the person who's inexperienced with it, it looks very much like it's trying to be a full desktop replacement, but then get disappointed when they find out that it's really just great for running embedded machines.
I'd love one with an Ethernet interface that wasn't tied the USB bus. I'd also like the ability to have some kind of storage that supports DMA, be it SATA or IDE to Compact Flash I tried using the Raspberry Pi as a Torrent download device. Saving the files to the SD Card caused so much overload that the whole thing froze up. Using USB allowed me to run without the thing freezing up, but the download speeds were still pretty slow, and the slowdowns seemed to be from waiting for writing to the disk rather than waiting for the network. The I/O on both the USB and the SD Card causes way too much CPU activity.
Re:Slow CPU, crippled network, too little RAM
on
New Raspberry Pi Model B+
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Cases have always been problem with the Raspberry Pi. They didn't really think about cases when they designed it. It's almost as if they just expected people to have the board sitting unprotected on the desk. I like that they actually have mounting holes now, which should help things out a lot.
Perhaps. But personally I find that Amazon has made books way more accessible to me than 20 years ago. The town I grew up in didn't even have a book store. The closest thing was the mass market paperbacks you could find at the department stores and pharmacies. Now you can get just about any book you want delivered to your door in a few days. And often below cover price. If publishers want to compete with piracy, they need to make it more convenient for people to get the books they want, at the price they want.
This. When I was shopping for a tablet last Christmas, there were a lot of reviews saying that the 2048x1536, tablets were slower than their predecessors at many tasks even though the processor was faster, because it took so much computation just to run the screen. For a 10 inch tablet, 1080p seems to be good enough. And trying to cram more pixels in there just for the sake of it, at the expense of battery life and framerates seems be a bad idea.
Acetaminophen aka Tylenol can actually be quite harmful. The difference between the maximum safe dose, and the amount to cause liver problems (or failure) is quite a small margin. Combine that with the fact that they put it in other medications such as cold medications that people take along with regular acetaminophen, and you end up with a recipe for disaster. This American Life did an episode on it.
It's amazing how fast phones reached this level of performance. The iPhone was only released 7 years ago, and the first BlackBerry, which many would consider the one of the first smart phones, 15 years ago. In that short amount of time, we have gone from always wanting the newest thing, to models which are 2 years old being sufficiently fast enough, and people are starting to see little reason for upgrades. The PC market hit a similar point a few years back. And since then, you have 2 basic types of PC owners. Those who simply must have the newest stuff be it for games, work, status, or just because. This makes up a small percentage of users. And the rest of us, who will buy the cheapest PC.Laptop we can find (usually around $400), and use it until the hardware breaks. Cell phones are pretty much headed the same way. There is very little reason for people to continue to spend $700 on a phone every 12-24 months.
Rather or not specific jobs (or specific people who hold specific titles) are getting paid too much or too little is hardly part of the argument. Because communism says everybody should get an equal share regardless of the actual work they are accomplishing or the contributions they make to society. Paying everybody the exact same amount makes even less sense than paying a small percentage of the people too much.
What happens when all the jobs have been automated away except those that require real ingenuity? Self driving cars, robot factories, self checkout, automated fast food restaurants, the list goes on and on. Doing the same thing over and over again will not be an option. Eventually the only jobs left will be those that will having people actually have original thoughts. Based on my experience in the workplace and the world in general, there is a high percentage of people who are probably completely unable to do such a job. From the beginning of the industrial revolution until now, we've only seen the tip of the iceberg as far as automation goes. Using robots/machines to completely replace human workers will lead to a very high percentage of people out of work. Perhaps not in developed countries, but in developing countries. If the automation happens before they can develop infrastructure, and their entire economy is still built around manufacturing when to machines take over all the manufacturing, they will have very few job opportunities, and no infrastructure to get them to a position where they can do non-manufacturing jobs.
Presumably, they are producing something with 10x the value. I could sit at home all day making rainbow loom bracelets, and I'm still producing something, but what I'm producing is worth very little. The output of your work is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. Does an Engineer who designs a bridge which is depended on to transport hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people over its lifetime safely deserve the same amount of money as someone who's job it is to answer tech support calls, and who can't even solve your problems because they are just reading from a script and don't actually have any skills?
You could argue that being a CEO is easy, and it probably looks that way from the outside, but it's not something most people would do without proper compensation. You never really get any time off. Your every action is under public scrutiny. Lawyers also have a difficult job. If you're a defense attorney, making a mistake could mean an innocent person goes to jail.
And of those who wear watches, 90% of them will probably be wearing them as jewelry. The time keeping functionality is secondary. Even among the younger people I know who wear them, it's mostly just a fashion accessory.
I don't even know if I'd classify something like this as "AI". It's just running an algorithm using lots of information and doing complex calculations. Way more complex than any person could do, but they are not the kind of actions I would generally consider "intelligent". Efficient allocation of resources works great for computers, because they aren't biased. They don't give their friends extra shifts or wait until later to call in a repair crew because the didn't like the attitude of the person who reported the problem.
Especially since many newer laptops are like 3/4 filled with batteries anyway. The pictured laptop is a Macbook Air. There's plenty of room in there to house an actually fully functional laptop with the same specs but partially reduced battery life, and hide other stuff in there.
I don't think a faster Ethernet connector would help. Even on my 20 mbit connection, using bittorrent on the Pi causes crashes because the SD card can't keep up with the I/O load. Didn't crash when I used a USB drive, but the performance was still terrible. Downloads were much slower than on my computer.
You can actually run the RPi quite well on batteries. I was able to get 4 hours, 23 minutes running the Quake 3 demo loop. the battery life wasn't much better when sitting idle, about 5 and a half hours. I used a pair of 18650s in a USB charger/power supply. That's plenty of battery life for a toy robot.
Switched to Tiny Tiny RSS. Hosting it on a shared hosting (Dreamhost) which I was paying for anyway. It works great, and its nice having a solution that won't just disappear one day. Sure my web host could disappear, but I could always switch to another one.
Or you could rent a car for the few times year you need to travel more than 200 miles. Some people almost never travel that far. Some people go that far every weekend.
I've always wondered how big of a generator you would need to keep an electric car running continuously, and whether it would be feasible to just tow it behind you on a trailer. Maybe make those available to rent so that people can make long trips on their electric car. It would probably be cheaper to rent than an actual car, and the money you'd save from using an electric car for most of the year would easily offset the cost of renting the generator once in a while.
Maybe people are just overworked and don't want to waste time sitting around doing nothing. I know when I'm at home, I usually try to find something to do. Either housework, internet, reading a book, watching some TV. Sitting there idle, doing nothing isn't really all that great. I don't think I would resort to shocking myself for 6-15 minutes of boredom, but It's not really pleasant to sit and do nothing. It would be a different story if you were not at home. Think about waiting at the doctor's office. There's really not much to do, and not much you can do to speed up the wait, so it's not really a problem to just zone out and relax. There isn't that looming feeling that you could be spending your time better.
That was in 1931. I think that things have changed in the last 83 years. It wasn't so long ago (1947) that Jackie Robinson became the first black MLB player. A good example is Manon Rheaume who actually got an NHL contract. Although she only played in 2 exhibition games, and she only played 1 period of her first game.
Also, there's probably a difference between having thoughts, and writing down those thoughts and posting them on an internet forum. Death threats are illegal. Posting online that you are going to kill and eat a real person could probably be considered a death threat.
Possibly not, but there's other reasons not to go with TekSavvy or other smaller providers. They don't own the lines, and instead piggy back off the big boys (Rogers, Bell, etc.) This means it takes much longer to get issues resolved because often TekSavvy has no control over problems being fixed and must wait for the people at Rogers to get around to fixing it. I realize this is another reason that Rogers shouldn't get my business, but I'm also not going to go without internet for weeks (had it happen to an acquaintance of mine) because the company I'm dealing with doesn't have any ability to fix the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Plumbing is already at the point where you can buy most of the stuff at your local plumbing/hardware store, and do it yourself. But most people can't be bothered. Same way that most people could easily change their own oil, or even make their own meals, but many people don't.
Personally, I kind of agree. Until I can read a book, watch a movie, or play video games while my car drives me around, all this car automation stuff is really just gimmicks that make the car more expensive, while not really providing me tangible day-to-day benefits Sure it will lower accident rates, but accident rates have already been going down for quite a while, even without automation technologies.
We're not even at the point where most people have photo quality printers at home. And for many of those who do have one, it's currently out of ink, and hasn't been turned on in years. Why do you think the average Joe would own a 3D printer? For the two or three times a year you need something printed up, it's much easier to go to a shop that owns one and have them print out the part. I know people who print out lots of pictures, but almost nobody I know owns a photo printer. It's much easier and cheaper to bring your SD card into Walmart or Costco and have them print them while you're shopping. Even if you're going to print stuff off once a month, which I think would be quite high for most people, it would still be way more convenient to just go to a shop and have it done.
Why not just install the app as well? Then you don't need the USB cable. You just load up you database, and opt to view the password. Then type it in manually. Just be on the lookout for people looking over your shoulder or cameras that could read the screen.
I think the problem that people run into is that it's somewhere in the middle of where they want a device to be. For people who want true low power computing, Arduino is the way to go. Some people want to be able to run an actual desktop operating systems, hook up standard off the shelf peripherals and run a home server, or hook it up to their TV. This is what Mini ITX or Intel NUC machines do pretty well.
The problem is that the Raspberry Pi looks like the second kind of device, because you can install Linux on it, plug in USB devices, hook it up to your TV, and do many other desktop / media centric things. However, due to certain constraints like the slow processor, small amount of RAM, slow I/O, and insufficient power for USB, it seems to fall short of what many people envision using it for. I guess you can blame the customers because they bought something that wasn't really meant to fulfill their needs. But you also have to look at the way the device is marketed and designed. Why put all these USB ports if you can't actually hook up a bunch of USB peripherals? Why put an HDMI port on the thing if you don't have the power to drive a 1080 desktop environment? Why run full Linux when you don't have enough power to run most Linux applications?
Don't get me wrong, I think the RPi is a great little machine, but I think that many people get disappointed with it because from the person who's inexperienced with it, it looks very much like it's trying to be a full desktop replacement, but then get disappointed when they find out that it's really just great for running embedded machines.
I'd love one with an Ethernet interface that wasn't tied the USB bus. I'd also like the ability to have some kind of storage that supports DMA, be it SATA or IDE to Compact Flash I tried using the Raspberry Pi as a Torrent download device. Saving the files to the SD Card caused so much overload that the whole thing froze up. Using USB allowed me to run without the thing freezing up, but the download speeds were still pretty slow, and the slowdowns seemed to be from waiting for writing to the disk rather than waiting for the network. The I/O on both the USB and the SD Card causes way too much CPU activity.
Cases have always been problem with the Raspberry Pi. They didn't really think about cases when they designed it. It's almost as if they just expected people to have the board sitting unprotected on the desk. I like that they actually have mounting holes now, which should help things out a lot.
Perhaps. But personally I find that Amazon has made books way more accessible to me than 20 years ago. The town I grew up in didn't even have a book store. The closest thing was the mass market paperbacks you could find at the department stores and pharmacies. Now you can get just about any book you want delivered to your door in a few days. And often below cover price. If publishers want to compete with piracy, they need to make it more convenient for people to get the books they want, at the price they want.
This. When I was shopping for a tablet last Christmas, there were a lot of reviews saying that the 2048x1536, tablets were slower than their predecessors at many tasks even though the processor was faster, because it took so much computation just to run the screen. For a 10 inch tablet, 1080p seems to be good enough. And trying to cram more pixels in there just for the sake of it, at the expense of battery life and framerates seems be a bad idea.
Acetaminophen aka Tylenol can actually be quite harmful. The difference between the maximum safe dose, and the amount to cause liver problems (or failure) is quite a small margin. Combine that with the fact that they put it in other medications such as cold medications that people take along with regular acetaminophen, and you end up with a recipe for disaster. This American Life did an episode on it.
It's amazing how fast phones reached this level of performance. The iPhone was only released 7 years ago, and the first BlackBerry, which many would consider the one of the first smart phones, 15 years ago. In that short amount of time, we have gone from always wanting the newest thing, to models which are 2 years old being sufficiently fast enough, and people are starting to see little reason for upgrades. The PC market hit a similar point a few years back. And since then, you have 2 basic types of PC owners. Those who simply must have the newest stuff be it for games, work, status, or just because. This makes up a small percentage of users. And the rest of us, who will buy the cheapest PC.Laptop we can find (usually around $400), and use it until the hardware breaks. Cell phones are pretty much headed the same way. There is very little reason for people to continue to spend $700 on a phone every 12-24 months.
Rather or not specific jobs (or specific people who hold specific titles) are getting paid too much or too little is hardly part of the argument. Because communism says everybody should get an equal share regardless of the actual work they are accomplishing or the contributions they make to society. Paying everybody the exact same amount makes even less sense than paying a small percentage of the people too much.
What happens when all the jobs have been automated away except those that require real ingenuity? Self driving cars, robot factories, self checkout, automated fast food restaurants, the list goes on and on. Doing the same thing over and over again will not be an option. Eventually the only jobs left will be those that will having people actually have original thoughts. Based on my experience in the workplace and the world in general, there is a high percentage of people who are probably completely unable to do such a job. From the beginning of the industrial revolution until now, we've only seen the tip of the iceberg as far as automation goes. Using robots/machines to completely replace human workers will lead to a very high percentage of people out of work. Perhaps not in developed countries, but in developing countries. If the automation happens before they can develop infrastructure, and their entire economy is still built around manufacturing when to machines take over all the manufacturing, they will have very few job opportunities, and no infrastructure to get them to a position where they can do non-manufacturing jobs.
Presumably, they are producing something with 10x the value. I could sit at home all day making rainbow loom bracelets, and I'm still producing something, but what I'm producing is worth very little. The output of your work is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. Does an Engineer who designs a bridge which is depended on to transport hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people over its lifetime safely deserve the same amount of money as someone who's job it is to answer tech support calls, and who can't even solve your problems because they are just reading from a script and don't actually have any skills?
You could argue that being a CEO is easy, and it probably looks that way from the outside, but it's not something most people would do without proper compensation. You never really get any time off. Your every action is under public scrutiny. Lawyers also have a difficult job. If you're a defense attorney, making a mistake could mean an innocent person goes to jail.
And of those who wear watches, 90% of them will probably be wearing them as jewelry. The time keeping functionality is secondary. Even among the younger people I know who wear them, it's mostly just a fashion accessory.
I don't even know if I'd classify something like this as "AI". It's just running an algorithm using lots of information and doing complex calculations. Way more complex than any person could do, but they are not the kind of actions I would generally consider "intelligent". Efficient allocation of resources works great for computers, because they aren't biased. They don't give their friends extra shifts or wait until later to call in a repair crew because the didn't like the attitude of the person who reported the problem.
Especially since many newer laptops are like 3/4 filled with batteries anyway. The pictured laptop is a Macbook Air. There's plenty of room in there to house an actually fully functional laptop with the same specs but partially reduced battery life, and hide other stuff in there.
I don't think a faster Ethernet connector would help. Even on my 20 mbit connection, using bittorrent on the Pi causes crashes because the SD card can't keep up with the I/O load. Didn't crash when I used a USB drive, but the performance was still terrible. Downloads were much slower than on my computer.
You can actually run the RPi quite well on batteries. I was able to get 4 hours, 23 minutes running the Quake 3 demo loop. the battery life wasn't much better when sitting idle, about 5 and a half hours. I used a pair of 18650s in a USB charger/power supply. That's plenty of battery life for a toy robot.
Switched to Tiny Tiny RSS. Hosting it on a shared hosting (Dreamhost) which I was paying for anyway. It works great, and its nice having a solution that won't just disappear one day. Sure my web host could disappear, but I could always switch to another one.
Or you could rent a car for the few times year you need to travel more than 200 miles. Some people almost never travel that far. Some people go that far every weekend.
I've always wondered how big of a generator you would need to keep an electric car running continuously, and whether it would be feasible to just tow it behind you on a trailer. Maybe make those available to rent so that people can make long trips on their electric car. It would probably be cheaper to rent than an actual car, and the money you'd save from using an electric car for most of the year would easily offset the cost of renting the generator once in a while.
Maybe people are just overworked and don't want to waste time sitting around doing nothing. I know when I'm at home, I usually try to find something to do. Either housework, internet, reading a book, watching some TV. Sitting there idle, doing nothing isn't really all that great. I don't think I would resort to shocking myself for 6-15 minutes of boredom, but It's not really pleasant to sit and do nothing. It would be a different story if you were not at home. Think about waiting at the doctor's office. There's really not much to do, and not much you can do to speed up the wait, so it's not really a problem to just zone out and relax. There isn't that looming feeling that you could be spending your time better.
That was in 1931. I think that things have changed in the last 83 years. It wasn't so long ago (1947) that Jackie Robinson became the first black MLB player. A good example is Manon Rheaume who actually got an NHL contract. Although she only played in 2 exhibition games, and she only played 1 period of her first game.
Also, there's probably a difference between having thoughts, and writing down those thoughts and posting them on an internet forum. Death threats are illegal. Posting online that you are going to kill and eat a real person could probably be considered a death threat.
Possibly not, but there's other reasons not to go with TekSavvy or other smaller providers. They don't own the lines, and instead piggy back off the big boys (Rogers, Bell, etc.) This means it takes much longer to get issues resolved because often TekSavvy has no control over problems being fixed and must wait for the people at Rogers to get around to fixing it. I realize this is another reason that Rogers shouldn't get my business, but I'm also not going to go without internet for weeks (had it happen to an acquaintance of mine) because the company I'm dealing with doesn't have any ability to fix the problem.