You begin with a lecture to your Vegas audience of confirmed skeptics about the pseudoscience of high end digital audio cables ---- and afterwards claim with a straight face that confirmation bias didn't taint your so-called experiment.
The entire affair was inexcusable pop-science crap and wholly unworthy of Ars.
Kamkar said GM is aware of the security hole and is working on a fix.
If he knows a fix is in the works why is he broadcasting his hack on YouTube? The OnStar client isn't a geek, doesn't follow every obscure hacker channel on YouTube, and doesn't read Computerworld.
secretary-typists and the typists in corporate typing pools complained about the location of the Caps Lock key not being where they were used to it. Keyboards for computers intended for general business use accordingly swapped over, since the people who typed the most and had the strongest opinions on keyboards in the early 1980s wanted it that way.
and I bet the same could be said for full-time clerical workers in 2015. changes in software and workflow in the office can be glacial.
Business as usual until we find a buyer (and hopefully after).
Slashdot opened for business in 1997 --- and it remains, despite cosmetic changes good and bad, very much a reflection of the us vs them geek mind-set of the nineties.
It's been awhile since a new idea has made it past the gates.
Compared to the Internet population as a whole, far, far, more people who stop by here are still in school --- and they aren't hanging around as long as they used to.
You can't hope to talk sensibly about tech unless you can place it in a larger social context --- and if at least 40% of your audience is female, you can't put gender issues in tech on the back burner and expect to survive.
No one knows what Columbus was wearing when he set foot in the New World, but on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong took his ''one giant leap'' onto the Moon, he was clad in this custom-made spacesuit, model A7L, serial number 056. Its cost, estimated at the time as $100,000 (more than $670,000 today), sounds high only if you think of it as couture. In reality, once helmet, gloves and an oxygen-supplying backpack were added, it was a wearable spacecraft. Cocooned within 21 layers of synthetics, neoprene rubber and metalized polyester films, Armstrong was protected from the airless Moon's extremes of heat and cold (plus 240 Fahrenheit degrees in sunlight to minus 280 in shadow), deadly solar ultraviolet radiation and even the potential hazard of micrometeorites hurtling through the void at 10 miles per second.
The Apollo suits were blends of cutting-edge technology and Old World craftsmanship. Each suit was hand-built by seamstresses who had to be extraordinarily precise; a stitching error as small as 1/32 inch could mean the difference between a space-worthy suit and a reject. While most of the suit's materials existed long before the Moon program, one was invented specifically for the job. After a spacecraft fire killed three Apollo astronauts during a ground test in 1967, NASA dictated the suits had to withstand temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The solution was a state-of-the-art fabric called Beta cloth, made of Teflon-coated glass microfibers, used for the suit's outermost layer.
For the suit's creator, the International Latex Corporation in Dover, Delaware, the toughest challenge was to contain the pressure necessary to support life (about 3.75 pounds per square inch of pure oxygen), while maintaining enough flexibility to afford freedom of motion. A division of the company that manufactured Playtex bras and girdles, ILC had engineers who understood a thing or two about rubber garments. They invented a bellowslike joint called a convolute out of neoprene reinforced with nylon tricot that allowed an astronaut to bend at the shoulders, elbows, knees, hips and ankles with relatively little effort. Steel aircraft cables were used throughout the suit to absorb tension forces and help maintain its shape under pressure.
The Smithsonian budget for 2015 is $851 million. Surely they can afford this?
To repeat what I said the other day:
The Smithsonian preserves about 138 million artifacts.
$851 million divided by 138 million artifacts yields $6.17 per artifact for conservation, restoration, display, research, physical security, insurance, educational outreach, administration, and so on.
Industrial giants like Mitsubishi dominate the production of video hardware in all market segments from studio production to home video.
If their UHDTV sets and other gear do not support your codec, you are dead in the water. Which is precisely what happened to the alternatives to H.264.
Irate owners of NVidia graphics cards have taken to support forums to complain that automatically-installed drivers installed have broken their computers.
Interestingly the problem has also been experienced by Forbes contributor Paul Monckton who has done some digging and explained to me that the fault lies in a conflict between Windows Update and Nvidia's own driver and software management tool the 'Nvidia GeForce Experience'.
Many PC components and peripherals come with bundled software that automatically manages driver updates already. PC makers also often bolt on driver update management software onto their PCs (Lenovo is a notable example) which then has the potential to conflict with driver updates delivered by Windows Update.
''It looks like driver version 353.54 [the latest at time of writing] is available only via Window Update,'' Monckton told me. ''The problem is the Nvidia GeForce Experience then tried to downgrade that to the previous version while claiming the previous version was actually newer.''
The problem is compounded by the fact that Windows Update doesn't actually reveal driver version numbers prior to install or warn the user in advance so pinpointing something that has suddenly caused problems can be hard to identify.
Given Windows 10 updates cannot be stopped the most obvious solution is to uninstall third party driver management and hand it all over to Windows Update to avoid clashes. This potentially simplifies matters by providing an all-in-one update service, but it does mean taking away control from specialist companies over their own products.
someone with her education who goes to make cheese...
I wonder if the geek would have the same sarcastic reaction if she had designed and opened a craft brewery instead of an artisan dairy --- she milks sheep not cows.
Sheep have been raised for milk for thousands of years and were milked before cows. The world's commercial dairy sheep industry is concentrated in Europe and the countries on or near the Mediterranean Sea.
The dairy sheep industry is in its infancy in the United States. There are approximately 100 dairy sheep farms in the U.S. They are found mostly in New England and the Upper Midwest. There are several large commercial sheep dairies in New York and California.
While sheep usually produce less milk than goats and much less than cows, sheep milk sells for a significantly higher price per pound, almost four times the price of cow milk.
Most of the sheep milk produced in the world is made into cheese. Some of the most famous cheeses are made from sheep milk: Feta (Greece, Italy, and France), Ricotta and Pecorino Romano (Italy) and Roquefort (France). The U.S. is a large importer of sheep milk cheeses. Sheep milk is also made into yogurt and ice cream.
Modern sheep dairies use sophisticated machinery for milking: milking parlors, pipelines, bulk tanks, etc. Ewes are milked once or twice per day.
Cheese from the ewe, milk from the goat, butter from the cow . . . Spanish proverb.
I take it then that you are a subscriber to Slashdot --- and to every other site that you visit on a regular basis.
The geek on the lecture circuit.
on
On Being Pro-GPL
·
· Score: -1
I have always thought as a home user that one of the greatest pleasures of owning a Windows PC is that it is a purely commercial product with no pretensions of ideological purity or political correctness.
Computers are being locked down because Internet access has grown exponentially. In no vision of the future will the geek find 3 to 6 billion technically sophisticated users.
"The chain is only as strong as its weakest link."
Neither should the geek be surprised that in a population this size more users are taking shelter in walled gardens of more manageable size.
Around 40% of the world population has an internet connection today. In 1995, it was less than 1%. The number of internet users has increased tenfold from 1999 to 2013. The first billion was reached in 2005. The second billion in 2010. The third billion in 2014.
That policy is not going to survive as people start augmenting their eyes and brains.
The augmentations will be part of your medical record and evaluations. You will not be working in a secure facility if the augmentations do not abide by its rules.
Is this any different that our government forcing printer manufacturers to put secret watermarks on pages printed?
1 It is not "our" government alone, but "all" governments whose currency can be plausibly counterfeited by a color laser printer that demand watermarks.
The geek living "off the books" needs a $20 bill which is generally trusted.
2 The laser printer is not an operating system that can tag all files sent and received.
The Smithsonian has a $805,000,000 budget.... surely they could scrounge up 0.06% of their annual budget to pay for it themselves since preserving significant artifacts of USA history is pretty much exactly what taxpayers are paying them for.
The Smithsonian owns 137 million artifacts.
That translates to a budget of $5.88/yr per artifact for research. conservation, storage and display, security, outreach and all other purposes and expenses.
When the business guys start making the technological decisions, it's time to look for another job.
The business guys get to decide which projects will get funding, talent and resources for development, marketing and technical support.
AOL was my first encounter with automatic updates in the home software market.
I liked the idea then. I like it now.
AOL integrated the functionality of a half-dozen or so stand-alone clients.
To say I understood them all on a technical level would be ridiculous. To say I understood the full implications of every system-level update I've installed in the last twenty years would be even more ridiculous ---- what matters is that in all those years I have only seen a trivial number of niche apps break under the strain.
This seems like a good opportunity for Slashdot to retire its dorkish stained glass Windows icon. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, 29 years ago, and 12 years before the launch of Slashdot.
Key words spelled out right in the constitution at least here in the US are "Authors and Inventors" and "limited Times", both of which appear to be FAR beyond the veil here.
"Limited" means nothing until the terms are fixed in legislation. It demands a judgment call, a policy decision, a political decision.
Human evolution has taken a turn for the worse. Rather than eliminating the weak elements and promoting the strong, we have reversed the evolutionary direction.
In your world Stephen Hawking dies in 1964 before completing his graduate thesis.
How does eugenics define "strength and weakness" in a modern society which is fundamentally defined by intelligent --- cooperative --- behavior? Brains, not brawn
We spent a weekend in November hunting deer for sport with superbly engineered guns and bows and haul the carcasses out with our FWD and ATVs.
When we want meat on the table, we raise chickens and cattle on an industrial scale.
"SJW" doesn't mean anybody who is for social justice. I'm for social justice! I want people to stop hating and harassing each other. "SJW" is the term for those who do bad things in the name of social justice.
I have tried to trace the use of SJW ("Social Justice Warrior") as a pejorative.
It seems to be entirely a geek creation and all but unknown before 2011. But one that has proven very useful to the bloggers of the National Review and those farther to the right.
Well as I'm sure you've figured out, ''sjw'' stands for social justice warrior. Back when I and a few others started this tumblr several years ago, ''sjw'' seemed, to us, to be more of a criticism on people who used social justice to further their own bigoted ends, push already marginalized people out of their own spaces, and dominate discussions with bigoted rhetoric.
In the years since this blog died out, ''sjw'' came to stand for anyone who supports social justice, a favorite go-to insult for white male nerds/libertarians/redditors. This blog is now followed by people with that attitude, and still gets asks of that nature. Hence the (partial) reason why I no longer update, even though I've somewhat returned to tumblr.
Before you read this, let me make it entirely clear. You SHOULD NOT MESS AROUND WITH MERCURY. The only reason I have written this post is to show those who are dumb enough to try it the most proper way to do so. PLEASE DON'T DO IT! Mercury easily becomes airborne and when entered into the body will slowly kill you. It takes days for you to notice, and before you can do anything it is too late. Proper mercury disposal should be done at a recycling center, and only a recycling center.
According to the suspect's father, the bomb scare started after his 18-year-old son was arrested for trespassing, entering an abandoned warehouse and salvaging mercury switches...
That fenced-off warehouse may look abandoned, but that doesn't make it your personal salvage yard.
It's been a long time since the home chemist has been encouraged to muck around with mercury; scavenging industrial sites for mercury in any quantity makes you a "person of interest" to the police, to say the least.
''He's not building bombs. He does do a lot of experiments. A lot of them I don't fully understand, but I'm certain he's not making bombs,'' said the suspect's father, Allen Mason.
Slashdot Mirror
You begin with a lecture to your Vegas audience of confirmed skeptics about the pseudoscience of high end digital audio cables ---- and afterwards claim with a straight face that confirmation bias didn't taint your so-called experiment.
The entire affair was inexcusable pop-science crap and wholly unworthy of Ars.
Kamkar said GM is aware of the security hole and is working on a fix.
If he knows a fix is in the works why is he broadcasting his hack on YouTube? The OnStar client isn't a geek, doesn't follow every obscure hacker channel on YouTube, and doesn't read Computerworld.
secretary-typists and the typists in corporate typing pools complained about the location of the Caps Lock key not being where they were used to it. Keyboards for computers intended for general business use accordingly swapped over, since the people who typed the most and had the strongest opinions on keyboards in the early 1980s wanted it that way.
and I bet the same could be said for full-time clerical workers in 2015. changes in software and workflow in the office can be glacial.
The majority of the posts here boil down to one simple fact:
The commercial - proprietary - mass market product or service is more appealing and accessible than anything the geek has to offer.
Business as usual until we find a buyer (and hopefully after).
Slashdot opened for business in 1997 --- and it remains, despite cosmetic changes good and bad, very much a reflection of the us vs them geek mind-set of the nineties.
It's been awhile since a new idea has made it past the gates.
Compared to the Internet population as a whole, far, far, more people who stop by here are still in school --- and they aren't hanging around as long as they used to.
"The cow goes moo."
The Slashdot gender gap is real, though much narrower than the Great Divide you see at Ars Technica. "Who visits Slashdot?", "Who Visits Ars Technica?"
You can't hope to talk sensibly about tech unless you can place it in a larger social context --- and if at least 40% of your audience is female, you can't put gender issues in tech on the back burner and expect to survive.
If you were to go looking, you could find suits and dresses well preserved from a hundred years ago. What's so special about these suits?
Idiot,
Why it is it so expensive?
No one knows what Columbus was wearing when he set foot in the New World, but on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong took his ''one giant leap'' onto the Moon, he was clad in this custom-made spacesuit, model A7L, serial number 056. Its cost, estimated at the time as $100,000 (more than $670,000 today), sounds high only if you think of it as couture. In reality, once helmet, gloves and an oxygen-supplying backpack were added, it was a wearable spacecraft. Cocooned within 21 layers of synthetics, neoprene rubber and metalized polyester films, Armstrong was protected from the airless Moon's extremes of heat and cold (plus 240 Fahrenheit degrees in sunlight to minus 280 in shadow), deadly solar ultraviolet radiation and even the potential hazard of micrometeorites hurtling through the void at 10 miles per second.
The Apollo suits were blends of cutting-edge technology and Old World craftsmanship. Each suit was hand-built by seamstresses who had to be extraordinarily precise; a stitching error as small as 1/32 inch could mean the difference between a space-worthy suit and a reject. While most of the suit's materials existed long before the Moon program, one was invented specifically for the job. After a spacecraft fire killed three Apollo astronauts during a ground test in 1967, NASA dictated the suits had to withstand temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The solution was a state-of-the-art fabric called Beta cloth, made of Teflon-coated glass microfibers, used for the suit's outermost layer.
For the suit's creator, the International Latex Corporation in Dover, Delaware, the toughest challenge was to contain the pressure necessary to support life (about 3.75 pounds per square inch of pure oxygen), while maintaining enough flexibility to afford freedom of motion. A division of the company that manufactured Playtex bras and girdles, ILC had engineers who understood a thing or two about rubber garments. They invented a bellowslike joint called a convolute out of neoprene reinforced with nylon tricot that allowed an astronaut to bend at the shoulders, elbows, knees, hips and ankles with relatively little effort. Steel aircraft cables were used throughout the suit to absorb tension forces and help maintain its shape under pressure.
Neil Armstrong's Spacesuit Was Made by a Bra Manufacturer [Nov 2013]
The Smithsonian budget for 2015 is $851 million. Surely they can afford this?
To repeat what I said the other day:
The Smithsonian preserves about 138 million artifacts.
$851 million divided by 138 million artifacts yields $6.17 per artifact for conservation, restoration, display, research, physical security, insurance, educational outreach, administration, and so on.
I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There is just one small problem.
Industrial giants like Mitsubishi dominate the production of video hardware in all market segments from studio production to home video.
If their UHDTV sets and other gear do not support your codec, you are dead in the water. Which is precisely what happened to the alternatives to H.264.
Irate owners of NVidia graphics cards have taken to support forums to complain that automatically-installed drivers installed have broken their computers.
That would be 17 posters on the NVIDA GeForce drivers forum. Windows 10 Display Driver Feedback Thread
Interestingly the problem has also been experienced by Forbes contributor Paul Monckton who has done some digging and explained to me that the fault lies in a conflict between Windows Update and Nvidia's own driver and software management tool the 'Nvidia GeForce Experience'.
Many PC components and peripherals come with bundled software that automatically manages driver updates already. PC makers also often bolt on driver update management software onto their PCs (Lenovo is a notable example) which then has the potential to conflict with driver updates delivered by Windows Update.
''It looks like driver version 353.54 [the latest at time of writing] is available only via Window Update,'' Monckton told me. ''The problem is the Nvidia GeForce Experience then tried to downgrade that to the previous version while claiming the previous version was actually newer.''
The problem is compounded by the fact that Windows Update doesn't actually reveal driver version numbers prior to install or warn the user in advance so pinpointing something that has suddenly caused problems can be hard to identify.
Given Windows 10 updates cannot be stopped the most obvious solution is to uninstall third party driver management and hand it all over to Windows Update to avoid clashes. This potentially simplifies matters by providing an all-in-one update service, but it does mean taking away control from specialist companies over their own products.
Windows 10 Automatic Updates Start Causing Problems
someone with her education who goes to make cheese...
I wonder if the geek would have the same sarcastic reaction if she had designed and opened a craft brewery instead of an artisan dairy --- she milks sheep not cows.
Sheep have been raised for milk for thousands of years and were milked before cows. The world's commercial dairy sheep industry is concentrated in Europe and the countries on or near the Mediterranean Sea.
The dairy sheep industry is in its infancy in the United States. There are approximately 100 dairy sheep farms in the U.S. They are found mostly in New England and the Upper Midwest. There are several large commercial sheep dairies in New York and California.
While sheep usually produce less milk than goats and much less than cows, sheep milk sells for a significantly higher price per pound, almost four times the price of cow milk.
Most of the sheep milk produced in the world is made into cheese. Some of the most famous cheeses are made from sheep milk: Feta (Greece, Italy, and France), Ricotta and Pecorino Romano (Italy) and Roquefort (France). The U.S. is a large importer of sheep milk cheeses. Sheep milk is also made into yogurt and ice cream.
Modern sheep dairies use sophisticated machinery for milking: milking parlors, pipelines, bulk tanks, etc. Ewes are milked once or twice per day.
Cheese from the ewe, milk from the goat, butter from the cow . . . Spanish proverb.
Sheep 101: Dairy Sheep
The internet is no place for advertising.
I take it then that you are a subscriber to Slashdot --- and to every other site that you visit on a regular basis.
I have always thought as a home user that one of the greatest pleasures of owning a Windows PC is that it is a purely commercial product with no pretensions of ideological purity or political correctness.
Computers are being locked down because Internet access has grown exponentially. In no vision of the future will the geek find 3 to 6 billion technically sophisticated users.
"The chain is only as strong as its weakest link."
Neither should the geek be surprised that in a population this size more users are taking shelter in walled gardens of more manageable size.
Around 40% of the world population has an internet connection today.
In 1995, it was less than 1%.
The number of internet users has increased tenfold from 1999 to 2013.
The first billion was reached in 2005.
The second billion in 2010. The third billion in 2014.
Internet users in the world
That policy is not going to survive as people start augmenting their eyes and brains.
The augmentations will be part of your medical record and evaluations. You will not be working in a secure facility if the augmentations do not abide by its rules.
Is this any different that our government forcing printer manufacturers to put secret watermarks on pages printed?
1 It is not "our" government alone, but "all" governments whose currency can be plausibly counterfeited by a color laser printer that demand watermarks.
The geek living "off the books" needs a $20 bill which is generally trusted.
2 The laser printer is not an operating system that can tag all files sent and received.
The Smithsonian has a $805,000,000 budget.... surely they could scrounge up 0.06% of their annual budget to pay for it themselves since preserving significant artifacts of USA history is pretty much exactly what taxpayers are paying them for.
The Smithsonian owns 137 million artifacts.
That translates to a budget of $5.88/yr per artifact for research. conservation, storage and display, security, outreach and all other purposes and expenses.
You're always in the position of having to trust the maker of your OS, unless it's you.
Trust no one.
There can be nothing more difficult to see than the flaws in your own work.
When the business guys start making the technological decisions, it's time to look for another job.
The business guys get to decide which projects will get funding, talent and resources for development, marketing and technical support.
AOL was my first encounter with automatic updates in the home software market.
I liked the idea then. I like it now.
AOL integrated the functionality of a half-dozen or so stand-alone clients.
To say I understood them all on a technical level would be ridiculous. To say I understood the full implications of every system-level update I've installed in the last twenty years would be even more ridiculous ---- what matters is that in all those years I have only seen a trivial number of niche apps break under the strain.
These people are only after attention, and by putting this story on slashdot, we've given them exactly what they wanted.
If you aren't a card-carrying geek Slashdot isn't even a blip on your radar.
These guys are after bigger game.
This seems like a good opportunity for Slashdot to retire its dorkish stained glass Windows icon. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, 29 years ago, and 12 years before the launch of Slashdot.
Key words spelled out right in the constitution at least here in the US are "Authors and Inventors" and "limited Times", both of which appear to be FAR beyond the veil here.
"Limited" means nothing until the terms are fixed in legislation. It demands a judgment call, a policy decision, a political decision.
Human evolution has taken a turn for the worse. Rather than eliminating the weak elements and promoting the strong, we have reversed the evolutionary direction.
In your world Stephen Hawking dies in 1964 before completing his graduate thesis.
How does eugenics define "strength and weakness" in a modern society which is fundamentally defined by intelligent --- cooperative --- behavior? Brains, not brawn
We spent a weekend in November hunting deer for sport with superbly engineered guns and bows and haul the carcasses out with our FWD and ATVs.
When we want meat on the table, we raise chickens and cattle on an industrial scale.
"SJW" doesn't mean anybody who is for social justice. I'm for social justice! I want people to stop hating and harassing each other.
"SJW" is the term for those who do bad things in the name of social justice.
I have tried to trace the use of SJW ("Social Justice Warrior") as a pejorative.
It seems to be entirely a geek creation and all but unknown before 2011. But one that has proven very useful to the bloggers of the National Review and those farther to the right.
Well as I'm sure you've figured out, ''sjw'' stands for social justice warrior. Back when I and a few others started this tumblr several years ago, ''sjw'' seemed, to us, to be more of a criticism on people who used social justice to further their own bigoted ends, push already marginalized people out of their own spaces, and dominate discussions with bigoted rhetoric.
In the years since this blog died out, ''sjw'' came to stand for anyone who supports social justice, a favorite go-to insult for white male nerds/libertarians/redditors. This blog is now followed by people with that attitude, and still gets asks of that nature. Hence the (partial) reason why I no longer update, even though I've somewhat returned to tumblr.
vice-ci7y asked
Google Trends: social justice warrior
I hate how chemistry is now an "off-limits" hobby.
This "kid" was eighteen.
He was caught trespassing on an old industrial site scavenging for toxic chemicals. That doesn't make you the brightest bulb in the lamp.
Mercury can be purchased online without hassle.
The safety data sheets make interesting reading, so do forum posts to geeks who are in denial about the risks . Mercury Metal (quicksilver), 3X Distilled, 1/2lb
1/2lb of mercury is about 1 1/4 teaspoons.
Before you read this, let me make it entirely clear. You SHOULD NOT MESS AROUND WITH MERCURY. The only reason I have written this post is to show those who are dumb enough to try it the most proper way to do so. PLEASE DON'T DO IT! Mercury easily becomes airborne and when entered into the body will slowly kill you. It takes days for you to notice, and before you can do anything it is too late. Proper mercury disposal should be done at a recycling center, and only a recycling center.
How To Scrap Mercury, Sell Mercury, Recycle Mercury
According to the suspect's father, the bomb scare started after his 18-year-old son was arrested for trespassing, entering an abandoned warehouse and salvaging mercury switches...
That fenced-off warehouse may look abandoned, but that doesn't make it your personal salvage yard.
It's been a long time since the home chemist has been encouraged to muck around with mercury; scavenging industrial sites for mercury in any quantity makes you a "person of interest" to the police, to say the least.
Fun with Quicksilver, Unusual stunts you can do from Freakish Quicksilver 1939 and 1934, respectively.
''He's not building bombs. He does do a lot of experiments. A lot of them I don't fully understand, but I'm certain he's not making bombs,'' said the suspect's father, Allen Mason.
This is a tad less reassuring than it might be.