Now wearable computer, that would be interesting, but this sounds more like some Android gadgets than a wearable computer.
If you already have an Android phone you already take everywhere, then it makes more sense. An independent device would certainly be more useful, but that would greatly increase cost and size, and increase battery drain. And most of that would just be replicating things your smartphone already does. Given the hardware constraints, it seems that this method is a decent compromise, at least for a first-generation device.
Personally I think the round version from Motorola looks good enough that I'd consider wearing it. It actually looks like a watch, even if a bit too thick for my taste, though I like my watches to be as thin as possible (I tend to buy Skagen).
The LG just looks too much like a gadget to me, sort of like the Pebble and the Samsung Gear, which is why I never got any of those.
There's a reason real medicines are tested and "alternative medicine" isn't.
That's not true. Alternative medicine has been tested, in some cases extensively, and proven not to work beyond the placebo effect.
In the rare cases that it does work (some traditional herbal concoction turns out to actually have medicinal properties) it stops being labelled "alternative medicine" and joins the ranks of "real medicine". That's the irony of alternative medicine -- if it does work, it's no longer alternative. Proponents of alternative medicine are essentially trusting their health to the exact therapies which have been proven *not* to work.
That's rich. Nice choice of words there. I bet you could also replace the Windows kernel with Linux "with enough effort". Or turn a car into a space shuttle, "with enough effort". Or move the great wall of China 10 meters to the left, "with enough effort".
That actually makes sense, and wouldn't surprise me at all. Considering that dogs and humans have evolved together for the last thousands of years, if dogs' brains have adapted, why wouldn't ours' have as well?
I actually paid the 1$/year for it, and it gave me immense pleasure doing so. Firstly because they've made a good product and I believe they deserve to be rewarded, and secondly (and most importantly), it makes their monetisation clear as day, so it's less likely they will turn around and sell all of my data to the highest bidder, or start doing annoying stuff like pushing ads into my device.
That is, until they got bought by one of the worst companies in the tech world.
If they change that, or if Facebook starts mucking with it, I'll use something else.
The you're a lucky man. I wish I could just up and drop What's App like that, just like I wish I could do that to Facebook. Unfortunately, the same network effects keep me from cancelling my FB account will now do the same for my WA one.
The problem isn't the technology. Replicating what's app is relatively simple as can be seen by the fact that Messenger apps are dime-a-dozen. Getting that critical mass of users is what's hard to do, and why FB paid so much.
One of my favourites lately has been RimWorld. A sort of colony simulator where your characters have to survive the harsh environment of the planet where they crash-landed, as well as the occasional raiding parties. It's similar to Prison Architect (another indie), which is also nice, but I prefer the sci-fi aspect of RimWorld. The game is currently in alpha, but it already runs quite well, and has a Linux version.
I've also been playing Faster Than Light and Kerbal Space Program which need no introduction here, and Gunpoint which despite not being that new anymore, is a very compelling 2d platformer. Unfortunately, Gunpoint only has a Windows version and runs like a dog on Wine (at least it did for me, YMMV).
On Android I've been playing The Room 2, which was released just a few days ago. That one's also pretty good, but I think I enjoyed the first installation more. Not sure if it was because of the novelty at the time, but I feel like the first had more depth to each table.
AAA games are becoming less and less interesting for me. It feels like the really innovative game making is being done by indies. Big companies seem to be interested only in sure investments, so they keep on pushing the same stuff year after year. Not that that's completely bad. I did enjoy the hell out of GTA V, but it does follow a formula.
I tried being on unstable for a while, and it's actually pretty stable. In fact, I have no complaints at all besides the too-frequent updates, which was what eventually drove me back to testing.
That, and the fact that things in Gnome seemingly kept breaking, only to find out later that it was intentional and part of Gnome's strategy to slowly make their desktop experience less and less usable. I fixed that by moving to KDE, which improved considerably since I last tried it years ago.
Almost there, now we just need to mention the company and product names as often as possible, and of course use the trademark symbols otherwise it won't look corporate enough:
The Computer Software Services® Quintopus is an enabler, allowing your choice of personal peripherals, like the CSS® Whatchamacallit to be connected in exciting and innovative ways. The CSS® Quintopus is a green solution, less cabling, better for the planet!
The Quintopus is a tremendously convenient device [...]
You have to love a product description which reads like it was written by a human rather than a marketing drone. Or maybe I'm so jaded by modern marketing drone speak that even a pitch from a few years ago sounds human by comparison.
What power savings? Power is being consumed somewhere else where as a customer YOU are paying for that too. Lets not forget about additional power requirements required to push insane number of real-time bits for trivial reasons over the Internet.
By polling all processing power in the same place you can optimize a number of things compared to distributed clients: - It's more efficient to cool a huge data centre than a number of small consoles which have other design constraints such as low price, low noise and small footprint; - You can build the data centre where energy is cheaper; - You can more easily upgrade the server hardware when newer, more efficient technology appears; - As someone else noted, you'll have many clients requesting the same calculations (say, in multiplayer games), which only need to be done once by the server.
Hopefully those combined savings put together can offset the extra power requirements for all the added bandwidth being generated.
I also moved from Ubuntu to Debian. For me it was that I prefer Gnome Shell to Unity.
I did try installing Gnome on Ubuntu, and then the Ubuntu Gnome variation (or whatever it's called), but in both cases I had the impression that the integration was a bit wonky. You'd have a mixture of Ubuntu and Gnome apps which supposedly did the same things, but in subtle different ways. Like the "Online Accounts" thing in the settings.
Anyway, I decided to try Debian and was surprised to see that not only Gnome had a much saner default configuration, but the system itself was also a lot more stable - I've always had small problems with my laptop under Linux, which I consider my own fault - I'm never buying Sony again!
I'd be happy if I could at least get a system which drives itself on highways. The majority of time spent in my vehicle on long trips is on the highway anyway - if I could drop the wheel during that time to do something more meaningful, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
I've recently installed a cruise control system on my car, and it was one of the best purchases I've ever done. Worrying about the speed you're driving seems to be a small matter until you try cruise control. Then you realise how much more relaxing driving long distances is.
The one thing I wish is that the cruise control know the distance to the car in front of me, and automatically adjust my speed if the other guy is going slower, to keep a safe distance. This type of technology is already common on expensive cars for automatic braking.
Then I guess the next step would be if it would "see" the lane lines and adjust the steering wheel to always keep me in the centre of the lane. The sensors for this also exist already on expensive cars to warn you when you start drifting outside of the road.
This is the path I always envisioned towards eventual fully autonomous cars, but it seems most projects I've seen are trying to go for the full monty. I wonder if there's a reason for that.
I've seen this workflow enforced on git-only environments by making the "master" git repository reject merges. This forces developers to rebase their changes on the top of the master branch before pushing and at least for us it was working quite well.
I'm not familiar with git-svn, but I thought it was a kind of stop-gap solution for SVN devs who didn't want to switch with the project. I'd be wary of using two source control mechanisms simultaneously as a permanent solution.
Care to expand on that? I recently moved from Ubuntu to Debian and am finding the font rendering to be a bit worse in the Debian configuration (unlike everything else - Debian is just great, and stable as a rock). I've tried changing the system fonts and while it helped a bit, there are still things that bother me.
Perhaps nobody wants to take up that debate because you obviously have a political axe to grind. I have my own opinion on the use of tax dollars here, but I don't want to get into it because I know it'll turn into a never ending discussion on politics.
I have better stuff to do with my time, and I do not live or pay taxes in the US, so I don't think my opinion is too relevant here anyway.
But good luck finding someone who will debate you though.
Tesla Motors is a publicly traded company. You're welcome to go over their numbers if you'd like. Unless you want to claim they're lying in their financial reports, in which case you can report them to the proper authorities.
The Volt operates as a pure battery electric vehicle until its plug-in battery capacity drops to a predetermined threshold from full charge. From there its internal combustion engine powers an electric generator to extend the vehicle's range if needed. Once the engine is running in this extended range mode, it may at times be linked mechanically (via a clutch) to assist the traction motor in propelling the car in order to improve energy efficiency.
In fairness, they can't produce enough of the things to match demand. That has to say something to their product.
The question is: if they were able to match demand, would they make a profit? If so, then the fact that they're already cash-positive (if artificially), means they have a viable long-term future.
Two different things. Once you're using social networking services, you've already gone through the "why" and the tradeoffs involved in questions of privacy, self-hosting, using other platforms, etc. You're already using social networking for whatever reason, so why not try to mitigate your exposure at essentially zero cost (as I said, nobody's going to see your old posts anyway, and most of them are just useless fluff like "great weather today").
Like you, I also keep my interactions on FB and G+ minimal, but my proposal stands regardless of level of usage. It's actually easier for me to go back in history and delete everything exactly because I've so few posts there, but for someone more prolific, it'd be a hassle.
Possibly - we all assume that, but we don't really know. Perhaps it gets deleted in time. Perhaps in certain jurisdictions they are forced to really delete it.
The point remains that even if the data is still available to the service itself, at least it becomes unavailable for everybody else Something is better than nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Now wearable computer, that would be interesting, but this sounds more like some Android gadgets than a wearable computer.
If you already have an Android phone you already take everywhere, then it makes more sense.
An independent device would certainly be more useful, but that would greatly increase cost and size, and increase battery drain. And most of that would just be replicating things your smartphone already does.
Given the hardware constraints, it seems that this method is a decent compromise, at least for a first-generation device.
Personally I think the round version from Motorola looks good enough that I'd consider wearing it. It actually looks like a watch, even if a bit too thick for my taste, though I like my watches to be as thin as possible (I tend to buy Skagen).
The LG just looks too much like a gadget to me, sort of like the Pebble and the Samsung Gear, which is why I never got any of those.
These watches have a touchscreen
There's a reason real medicines are tested and "alternative medicine" isn't.
That's not true. Alternative medicine has been tested, in some cases extensively, and proven not to work beyond the placebo effect.
In the rare cases that it does work (some traditional herbal concoction turns out to actually have medicinal properties) it stops being labelled "alternative medicine" and joins the ranks of "real medicine".
That's the irony of alternative medicine -- if it does work, it's no longer alternative. Proponents of alternative medicine are essentially trusting their health to the exact therapies which have been proven *not* to work.
could be replaced, with enough effort
That's rich. Nice choice of words there.
I bet you could also replace the Windows kernel with Linux "with enough effort".
Or turn a car into a space shuttle, "with enough effort".
Or move the great wall of China 10 meters to the left, "with enough effort".
That actually makes sense, and wouldn't surprise me at all.
Considering that dogs and humans have evolved together for the last thousands of years, if dogs' brains have adapted, why wouldn't ours' have as well?
Cats have been reported to be developing smaller brains since their domestication. Whatever it takes, I guess.
Dogs also tend have smaller brains than wolves the same size.
I actually paid the 1$/year for it, and it gave me immense pleasure doing so.
Firstly because they've made a good product and I believe they deserve to be rewarded, and secondly (and most importantly), it makes their monetisation clear as day, so it's less likely they will turn around and sell all of my data to the highest bidder, or start doing annoying stuff like pushing ads into my device.
That is, until they got bought by one of the worst companies in the tech world.
If they change that, or if Facebook starts mucking with it, I'll use something else.
The you're a lucky man. I wish I could just up and drop What's App like that, just like I wish I could do that to Facebook.
Unfortunately, the same network effects keep me from cancelling my FB account will now do the same for my WA one.
The problem isn't the technology. Replicating what's app is relatively simple as can be seen by the fact that Messenger apps are dime-a-dozen.
Getting that critical mass of users is what's hard to do, and why FB paid so much.
One of my favourites lately has been RimWorld.
A sort of colony simulator where your characters have to survive the harsh environment of the planet where they crash-landed, as well as the occasional raiding parties.
It's similar to Prison Architect (another indie), which is also nice, but I prefer the sci-fi aspect of RimWorld.
The game is currently in alpha, but it already runs quite well, and has a Linux version.
I've also been playing Faster Than Light and Kerbal Space Program which need no introduction here, and Gunpoint which despite not being that new anymore, is a very compelling 2d platformer.
Unfortunately, Gunpoint only has a Windows version and runs like a dog on Wine (at least it did for me, YMMV).
On Android I've been playing The Room 2, which was released just a few days ago.
That one's also pretty good, but I think I enjoyed the first installation more. Not sure if it was because of the novelty at the time, but I feel like the first had more depth to each table.
AAA games are becoming less and less interesting for me. It feels like the really innovative game making is being done by indies. Big companies seem to be interested only in sure investments, so they keep on pushing the same stuff year after year.
Not that that's completely bad. I did enjoy the hell out of GTA V, but it does follow a formula.
I tried being on unstable for a while, and it's actually pretty stable. In fact, I have no complaints at all besides the too-frequent updates, which was what eventually drove me back to testing.
That, and the fact that things in Gnome seemingly kept breaking, only to find out later that it was intentional and part of Gnome's strategy to slowly make their desktop experience less and less usable.
I fixed that by moving to KDE, which improved considerably since I last tried it years ago.
Almost there, now we just need to mention the company and product names as often as possible, and of course use the trademark symbols otherwise it won't look corporate enough:
The Computer Software Services® Quintopus is an enabler, allowing your choice of personal peripherals, like the CSS® Whatchamacallit to be connected in exciting and innovative ways. The CSS® Quintopus is a green solution, less cabling, better for the planet!
The Quintopus is a tremendously convenient device [...]
You have to love a product description which reads like it was written by a human rather than a marketing drone.
Or maybe I'm so jaded by modern marketing drone speak that even a pitch from a few years ago sounds human by comparison.
What power savings? Power is being consumed somewhere else where as a customer YOU are paying for that too. Lets not forget about additional power requirements required to push insane number of real-time bits for trivial reasons over the Internet.
By polling all processing power in the same place you can optimize a number of things compared to distributed clients:
- It's more efficient to cool a huge data centre than a number of small consoles which have other design constraints such as low price, low noise and small footprint;
- You can build the data centre where energy is cheaper;
- You can more easily upgrade the server hardware when newer, more efficient technology appears;
- As someone else noted, you'll have many clients requesting the same calculations (say, in multiplayer games), which only need to be done once by the server.
Hopefully those combined savings put together can offset the extra power requirements for all the added bandwidth being generated.
I also moved from Ubuntu to Debian.
For me it was that I prefer Gnome Shell to Unity.
I did try installing Gnome on Ubuntu, and then the Ubuntu Gnome variation (or whatever it's called), but in both cases I had the impression that the integration was a bit wonky. You'd have a mixture of Ubuntu and Gnome apps which supposedly did the same things, but in subtle different ways. Like the "Online Accounts" thing in the settings.
Anyway, I decided to try Debian and was surprised to see that not only Gnome had a much saner default configuration, but the system itself was also a lot more stable - I've always had small problems with my laptop under Linux, which I consider my own fault - I'm never buying Sony again!
What's the point of wearable technology if you put it away whenever you're not using it?
That'd be like saying "if you're not telling the time, why would you wear a watch on your wrist?"
I'd be happy if I could at least get a system which drives itself on highways. The majority of time spent in my vehicle on long trips is on the highway anyway - if I could drop the wheel during that time to do something more meaningful, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
I've recently installed a cruise control system on my car, and it was one of the best purchases I've ever done. Worrying about the speed you're driving seems to be a small matter until you try cruise control. Then you realise how much more relaxing driving long distances is.
The one thing I wish is that the cruise control know the distance to the car in front of me, and automatically adjust my speed if the other guy is going slower, to keep a safe distance. This type of technology is already common on expensive cars for automatic braking.
Then I guess the next step would be if it would "see" the lane lines and adjust the steering wheel to always keep me in the centre of the lane. The sensors for this also exist already on expensive cars to warn you when you start drifting outside of the road.
This is the path I always envisioned towards eventual fully autonomous cars, but it seems most projects I've seen are trying to go for the full monty. I wonder if there's a reason for that.
I have an easier and cheaper fix:
1. Don't buy the XBox One
I've seen this workflow enforced on git-only environments by making the "master" git repository reject merges.
This forces developers to rebase their changes on the top of the master branch before pushing and at least for us it was working quite well.
I'm not familiar with git-svn, but I thought it was a kind of stop-gap solution for SVN devs who didn't want to switch with the project.
I'd be wary of using two source control mechanisms simultaneously as a permanent solution.
That and the dreadful fontconfig autohinter.
Care to expand on that?
I recently moved from Ubuntu to Debian and am finding the font rendering to be a bit worse in the Debian configuration (unlike everything else - Debian is just great, and stable as a rock).
I've tried changing the system fonts and while it helped a bit, there are still things that bother me.
Perhaps nobody wants to take up that debate because you obviously have a political axe to grind.
I have my own opinion on the use of tax dollars here, but I don't want to get into it because I know it'll turn into a never ending discussion on politics.
I have better stuff to do with my time, and I do not live or pay taxes in the US, so I don't think my opinion is too relevant here anyway.
But good luck finding someone who will debate you though.
I call BS on the demand claim.
Tesla Motors is a publicly traded company. You're welcome to go over their numbers if you'd like.
Unless you want to claim they're lying in their financial reports, in which case you can report them to the proper authorities.
Volt is a true EV; the inbuilt ICE only runs a generator.
That's not entirely true.
According to Wikipedia:
The Volt operates as a pure battery electric vehicle until its plug-in battery capacity drops to a predetermined threshold from full charge. From there its internal combustion engine powers an electric generator to extend the vehicle's range if needed. Once the engine is running in this extended range mode, it may at times be linked mechanically (via a clutch) to assist the traction motor in propelling the car in order to improve energy efficiency.
In fairness, they can't produce enough of the things to match demand.
That has to say something to their product.
The question is: if they were able to match demand, would they make a profit?
If so, then the fact that they're already cash-positive (if artificially), means they have a viable long-term future.
Not if your profile isn't public
Two different things. Once you're using social networking services, you've already gone through the "why" and the tradeoffs involved in questions of privacy, self-hosting, using other platforms, etc.
You're already using social networking for whatever reason, so why not try to mitigate your exposure at essentially zero cost (as I said, nobody's going to see your old posts anyway, and most of them are just useless fluff like "great weather today").
Like you, I also keep my interactions on FB and G+ minimal, but my proposal stands regardless of level of usage.
It's actually easier for me to go back in history and delete everything exactly because I've so few posts there, but for someone more prolific, it'd be a hassle.
Possibly - we all assume that, but we don't really know. Perhaps it gets deleted in time. Perhaps in certain jurisdictions they are forced to really delete it.
The point remains that even if the data is still available to the service itself, at least it becomes unavailable for everybody else
Something is better than nothing.