Why anyone would buy these useless, locked, and one purpose devices is beyond me.
Because the Kindle is cheap, it's light, the battery lasts a month and you can read the screen outdoors. All kind of useful for a device you plan to use for reading ebooks.
This vehicle is being designed for freeway driving.....
Why would you want an electric car for freeway driving? Electric cars only make any kind of sense in situations where you don't have to sit and wait for them to recharge (e.g. a daily commute where you can recharge overnight).
When the batteries are depleted, Tesla says even the 300-mile range Model S will be able to recharge from empty to full in under an hour thanks to its new direct current external charger. The 90 kilowatt units will be installed by Tesla at suitable rest-stop locations or hotels alongside arterial freeways such as I-5 between Canada and Mexico.
Wow, I'll be able to recharge in under an hour every 300 miles, so long as I find the 'suitable' location where electricity will probably be priced at $1 a kWh because they know that I have no alternative other than to pay the price or pay for a tow.
I'll stick to my Civic, thanks, which can travel about twice as far, fill up in two minutes and do so at any gas station we pass.
Yeah, I tried the Transformer at a trade show when it first came out and it seemed pretty good. I just couldn't think of a reason why I'd want to buy it over a netbook that cost half as much.
That's ridiculous. Are we supposed to believe that, without Apollo, nobody at all would have seen the value of the integrated circuit?
Indeed. The IC pre-dated the AGC and while NASA definitely assisted their development by buying a lot of them the difference would probably just have been a few years delay in production ramp-up; we'd be using Core 2s right now instead of i7s.
But Firefox 4 sucked, which is why most of us have stuck to 3.6. Perhaps by Firefox 15 it will be a suitable replacement by 3.6, particularly if they've given in and started supporting stable releases again.
Given how many development programs they've cancelled since the shuttle, that's debatable.
High performance rocket engines are not inherently reusable things.
That's why reliability is more important than performance if you want a reusable engine.
And the more fuel you leave on the rocket for controlled re-entry and a powered landing, means a lot less cargo you can take into orbit. SpaceX is wasting their time pursuing this.
If halving the payload means you can reuse the stages ten times, then you can launch up to five times as much for the same amount of money. You seem to have fallen into the 'efficiency is everything' mindset which plagued NASA when designing the shuttle and is why it ended up costing so much.
Just like software engineers can take many steps to produce good code, and when something goes disastrously wrong with their code, they take steps to correct it rapidly and repair the damages their negligence caused.
So whenever there's a bug in software you want it to be handled by lawyers rather than software developers?
One of the most likely results of this kind of nonsense would be for companies to simply deny that bugs exist until they're forced to do something about it because by admitting the bug exists they suddenly open themselves up for liability claims.
I've proven code to work and then found it didn't because of hardware bugs. I've even run the same code on the hardware simulator which precisely implements the hardware design and found it works, yet the actual hardware doesn't.
Adding defensive programming techniques is ANOTHER layer, with MORE potential for failure. When it comes to software, less is more.
There was an interesting comment about this on a mailing list I'm on some time back where a guy who builds satellites was talking about their flight computer design; they considered making it 'smart', but given that the software has to absolutely work all the time or cost a few hundred million dollars in lost satellite, their solution was that any fault would make it drop into safe mode and wait for someone to tell it what to do.
You could also argue that defensive programming contributed to the AF447 crash, because from what I've read the stall warning turned off if the aircraft was flying too slow for a reliable angle of attack measurement, leading to the paradoxical result that increasing speed -- even though it was the correct thing to do -- caused the stall warning to come on as the inputs suddenly became valid.
sane would be requiring software manufacturers to do the same thing (or have a way to patch things when these bugs come to light.
And, generally speaking, they do.
Meanwhile our car has a design flaw where there's not enough protection for the AC unit so a rock can fly up from the road and smash a hole in it thereby requiring about $1000 of repairs. No recall for that one, and you're lucky if they'll even fix it for free.
The idea that cars are bug-free or even that any design fault will be fixed for free is a joke.
Automobiles are complex enough that even the most diligent automotive designer will produce bugs. It's nigh impossible to create 100% bug free autos. I think this would pretty much kill the industry as well as be detrimental to hobbyists.
See how foolish it sounds when you start crying like the sky is falling?
What's foollish about that? Automobiles routinely ship with potentially disastrous bugs, particularly now they're full of software; one big manufacturer recently had a recall because repeatedly switching between drive and reverse on some of their auto transmissions could destroy the transmission due to a bug in the transmission controller software, for example.
If you want a car with no bugs, you'd better be prepared to pay $500,000 for a Honda Civic.
If Console game developers can put in the added effort to make a product that is reasonably bug free, or is otherwise unplayable, back before consoles could update the software then I'm sure MS can debug Office a little bit better before shipping.
Office has a heck of a lot more code than Atari 2600 Space Invaders. And a heck of a lot more ways to interact with the user.
Office bugs aren't 'I press the left button and go right', they're 'I embed an Excel spreadsheet with 500,000 columns and when I change the font to 96-point Comic Sans the first column displays in the wrong font'.
What about universities that do research? Many widely used technologies came from university R&D and most of them have no intention of actually implementing what they're researching.
The question then is, would that research otherwise have been done by a company which _was_ intending to make use of it?
Aside from that I doubt you'd even know what language an app was running in unless you went poking around in its directory, or the app gave itself away (e.g. by using metal theme).
The multi-second garbage collections and multi-gigabyte memory usage for a text editor tends to be a pretty good indication of a Java app.
it's trying out bleeding-edge design concepts instead of rehashing old interfaces and patterns
Most people don't want 'bleeding-edge', they want something that works. If you're pushing something new, then we want something that's, you know, better than what we already have.
When the best thing most Gnome fanboys can say is 'yeah, I know that starting an application from the UI sucks but if you press CTRL+ALT+SYSREQ+BACKSPACE+G and type the name of the application then it's much faster' you know that it's neither of those things.
it's successfully targeting non-geek users AND proving quite usable for technical users.
Gnome 2, yes. Gnome 3 is a tablet UI being pushed onto a desktop mostly used by technical users. It's a disaster even worse than Mozilla's random version upgrades.
Turn in your geek cards, old dudes, from someone who was using Linux way back in the days of Slackware 4.
Presumably that includes Linus Torvalds, who's already publically abandoned Gnome because Gnome 3 sucks so bad?
We don't miss you, nor your lack of comprehension of how user fees work.
You may not, but the store owners do. Where I used to live in the UK there used to be a thriving street full of stores in the mdidle of town, but after the council increased the price of parking to insane levels it became a street full of restaurants (due to free parking after 6pm), charity shops and betting shops (i.e. stores for people who are too poor to own a car).
Treat parking as a revenue source and you'll probably find that pretty soon you're losing far more revenue from all the stores that went out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't move to an ereader until the players figure out how to let you move your "license" between competing devices.
Here's a suggestion: if you want to be able to read your ebooks anywhere, don't buy ebooks with DRM.
There are plenty of DRM-free ebooks on Amazon and plenty of Kindle-compatible DRM-free ebooks on other sites.
Why anyone would buy these useless, locked, and one purpose devices is beyond me.
Because the Kindle is cheap, it's light, the battery lasts a month and you can read the screen outdoors. All kind of useful for a device you plan to use for reading ebooks.
Wow. In one out of ten trips you take with you car, you are driving over 300 miles?
This is a 'luxury sedan': why would you buy it just to drive to the supermarket?
This vehicle is being designed for freeway driving.....
Why would you want an electric car for freeway driving? Electric cars only make any kind of sense in situations where you don't have to sit and wait for them to recharge (e.g. a daily commute where you can recharge overnight).
When the batteries are depleted, Tesla says even the 300-mile range Model S will be able to recharge from empty to full in under an hour thanks to its new direct current external charger. The 90 kilowatt units will be installed by Tesla at suitable rest-stop locations or hotels alongside arterial freeways such as I-5 between Canada and Mexico.
Wow, I'll be able to recharge in under an hour every 300 miles, so long as I find the 'suitable' location where electricity will probably be priced at $1 a kWh because they know that I have no alternative other than to pay the price or pay for a tow.
I'll stick to my Civic, thanks, which can travel about twice as far, fill up in two minutes and do so at any gas station we pass.
Yeah, I tried the Transformer at a trade show when it first came out and it seemed pretty good. I just couldn't think of a reason why I'd want to buy it over a netbook that cost half as much.
That's ridiculous. Are we supposed to believe that, without Apollo, nobody at all would have seen the value of the integrated circuit?
Indeed. The IC pre-dated the AGC and while NASA definitely assisted their development by buying a lot of them the difference would probably just have been a few years delay in production ramp-up; we'd be using Core 2s right now instead of i7s.
What do you think would have happened to the Space Shuttle if they had treated the hardware the same way?
It would have exploded and killed the crew one flight in sixty?
Firefox 7 is a better browser than Firefox 4 was.
But Firefox 4 sucked, which is why most of us have stuck to 3.6. Perhaps by Firefox 15 it will be a suitable replacement by 3.6, particularly if they've given in and started supporting stable releases again.
Maybe in version 8 they can add support for Page Up and Page Down. It's not working for me on version 7 right now.
It seems to have disappeared somewhere between 3.6 and 7.0. I guess it was a confusing feature so they had to remove it.
Don't be silly. NASA could build this.
Given how many development programs they've cancelled since the shuttle, that's debatable.
High performance rocket engines are not inherently reusable things.
That's why reliability is more important than performance if you want a reusable engine.
And the more fuel you leave on the rocket for controlled re-entry and a powered landing, means a lot less cargo you can take into orbit. SpaceX is wasting their time pursuing this.
If halving the payload means you can reuse the stages ten times, then you can launch up to five times as much for the same amount of money. You seem to have fallen into the 'efficiency is everything' mindset which plagued NASA when designing the shuttle and is why it ended up costing so much.
Just like software engineers can take many steps to produce good code, and when something goes disastrously wrong with their code, they take steps to correct it rapidly and repair the damages their negligence caused.
So whenever there's a bug in software you want it to be handled by lawyers rather than software developers?
One of the most likely results of this kind of nonsense would be for companies to simply deny that bugs exist until they're forced to do something about it because by admitting the bug exists they suddenly open themselves up for liability claims.
I've proven code to work and then found it didn't because of hardware bugs. I've even run the same code on the hardware simulator which precisely implements the hardware design and found it works, yet the actual hardware doesn't.
Adding defensive programming techniques is ANOTHER layer, with MORE potential for failure. When it comes to software, less is more.
There was an interesting comment about this on a mailing list I'm on some time back where a guy who builds satellites was talking about their flight computer design; they considered making it 'smart', but given that the software has to absolutely work all the time or cost a few hundred million dollars in lost satellite, their solution was that any fault would make it drop into safe mode and wait for someone to tell it what to do.
You could also argue that defensive programming contributed to the AF447 crash, because from what I've read the stall warning turned off if the aircraft was flying too slow for a reliable angle of attack measurement, leading to the paradoxical result that increasing speed -- even though it was the correct thing to do -- caused the stall warning to come on as the inputs suddenly became valid.
sane would be requiring software manufacturers to do the same thing (or have a way to patch things when these bugs come to light.
And, generally speaking, they do.
Meanwhile our car has a design flaw where there's not enough protection for the AC unit so a rock can fly up from the road and smash a hole in it thereby requiring about $1000 of repairs. No recall for that one, and you're lucky if they'll even fix it for free.
The idea that cars are bug-free or even that any design fault will be fixed for free is a joke.
That said, is it unreasonable to try and fix all bugs? Sure. Impossible? No.
So you're saying that you can ship a bug-free operating system consisting of tens of millions of lines of code. Not one single bug in that code?
You can make your own SELinux policy all you want.
Good luck with that.
Apparmor is hard enough for a typical user to configure, SELinux seems to be pretty much impossible unless you're an expert.
Automobiles are complex enough that even the most diligent automotive designer will produce bugs. It's nigh impossible to create 100% bug free autos. I think this would pretty much kill the industry as well as be detrimental to hobbyists.
See how foolish it sounds when you start crying like the sky is falling?
What's foollish about that? Automobiles routinely ship with potentially disastrous bugs, particularly now they're full of software; one big manufacturer recently had a recall because repeatedly switching between drive and reverse on some of their auto transmissions could destroy the transmission due to a bug in the transmission controller software, for example.
If you want a car with no bugs, you'd better be prepared to pay $500,000 for a Honda Civic.
If Console game developers can put in the added effort to make a product that is reasonably bug free, or is otherwise unplayable, back before consoles could update the software then I'm sure MS can debug Office a little bit better before shipping.
Office has a heck of a lot more code than Atari 2600 Space Invaders. And a heck of a lot more ways to interact with the user.
Office bugs aren't 'I press the left button and go right', they're 'I embed an Excel spreadsheet with 500,000 columns and when I change the font to 96-point Comic Sans the first column displays in the wrong font'.
What about universities that do research? Many widely used technologies came from university R&D and most of them have no intention of actually implementing what they're researching.
The question then is, would that research otherwise have been done by a company which _was_ intending to make use of it?
Aside from that I doubt you'd even know what language an app was running in unless you went poking around in its directory, or the app gave itself away (e.g. by using metal theme).
The multi-second garbage collections and multi-gigabyte memory usage for a text editor tends to be a pretty good indication of a Java app.
it's trying out bleeding-edge design concepts instead of rehashing old interfaces and patterns
Most people don't want 'bleeding-edge', they want something that works. If you're pushing something new, then we want something that's, you know, better than what we already have.
When the best thing most Gnome fanboys can say is 'yeah, I know that starting an application from the UI sucks but if you press CTRL+ALT+SYSREQ+BACKSPACE+G and type the name of the application then it's much faster' you know that it's neither of those things.
it's successfully targeting non-geek users AND proving quite usable for technical users.
Gnome 2, yes. Gnome 3 is a tablet UI being pushed onto a desktop mostly used by technical users. It's a disaster even worse than Mozilla's random version upgrades.
Turn in your geek cards, old dudes, from someone who was using Linux way back in the days of Slackware 4.
Presumably that includes Linus Torvalds, who's already publically abandoned Gnome because Gnome 3 sucks so bad?
We don't miss you, nor your lack of comprehension of how user fees work.
You may not, but the store owners do. Where I used to live in the UK there used to be a thriving street full of stores in the mdidle of town, but after the council increased the price of parking to insane levels it became a street full of restaurants (due to free parking after 6pm), charity shops and betting shops (i.e. stores for people who are too poor to own a car).
Treat parking as a revenue source and you'll probably find that pretty soon you're losing far more revenue from all the stores that went out of business.
Oh wait! this is linux...
Linus said that Gnome 3 sucks and he's switching to a sane UI. So don't blame him.
I see no taskbar in that video...you need to zoom out to pick up windows in the same workspace?
But it's so much cooler than just clicking on the taskbar.