I just saw an ad from Apple about "live photos"... it stuck me immediately that this is a great way for photos to take up a LOT more room, on devices that don't have expandable RAM.
Coincidence? No intent to clog up devices that much sooner?
I have a recent iPad, upgraded to the current iOS. A huge number of the installed applications are now broken. They worked fine; Apple "upgraded" iOS; now they crash or variously misbehave. iOS's seriously crippled user and data models aren't exactly helping either.
OS X has broken quite a few things with upgrades as well (and of course, they leave broken stuff behind them all the time.)
Apple also sets up entire paradigms and then breaks them. For instance, initially, Aperture supported cameras. Then one "upgrade", they moved new camera support to the (new) OS, thus leaving users of the current version of Aperture without support for newly added cameras, even though they notionally supported the OS level they were using. The way out of that for me was to move to Adobe's Lightroom, but after paying for Aperture and two subsequent upgrades, I'm not about to forgive Apple. I don't matter to Apple as a paying customer? Okay, then I won't be a paying customer. The used market is fine with me — my cash can go elsewhere than directly into Apple's pockets.
The iPad... I've stopped using my iPad completely — almost all of the apps I found useful (and some that were simply fun) are now broken, and I've stopped upgrading OS X. I've no interest whatsoever in breaking software I've paid good money for. Nothing Apple has offered thus far in newer versions of OS X is even slightly tempting.
In fact, the only thing I can think of at the moment that would get me to upgrade OS X further is OS-level speech recognition without requiring going online. A reliable implementation of that would be a total game changer. Amazon's Echo has made very clear what the advantages of STT are; it has also made very clear what the disadvantages of requiring the cloud and locking down the ecosystem are. Mycroft looks like it may break out of these problems. If so... bye bye Echo.
Pretty sure Apple has convinced me permanently that iPads, iPhones and iWatches are not sane purchases for me to make. I'll allow for the vague possibility that they could come up with something to convince me otherwise — like OS-level STT — but I'm not holding my breath.
It also prevents versionitis: where the package didn't go away, but was changed in such a way that it no longer works the way it used to.
Your stance may not be "popular", but it is 100% correct — and very smart.
We can still be hosed by irresponsible changes in the underlying language, and/or irresponsible changes in the underlying OS (if there is one... not always the case.)
Python and Perl have both outright broken older code that was designed to the language spec. Windows and OS X have both broken APIs that were used properly to spec. I'm sure the lists are much, much longer than that -- those are just the cases I'm personally aware of.
And we should take very seriously the idiot "X has been deprecated" warnings in a language or an OS API, because that means some lame-ass bonehead is thinking about doing that very thing to us. Javascript, c libraries, OS APIs...
Yes, the programmer bandwagon initiative has just created an oversupply of programmers.
Yes, the programmer bandwagon initiative has just created an oversupply of wannabe script kiddies playing around in HLL sandboxes while having mega-angst attacks about utterly insignificant UX issues. While mostly making a huge bloody mess. And inflicting travesties like roll-over activated menus and pop-ups on everyone they can. They're so busy appity-apping their grossly overweight, minimally functional apps they haven't had time to learn how computers work or build deep algorithmic competencies. Nor do I ever expect they will.
Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige
It actually goes like this:
Extremely simplistic computer programming done in the earliest days of trivial computer architectures and largely trivial computing tasks, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by anyone possessed of a week's familiarization and two wet brain cells to rub together. But as computer architectures became more sophisticated, and the programs written under them were both more aggressively complex and able to utilize considerably broader and deeper resources in terms of both hardware and data, the job began paying more and gained prestige. A process that continues to this day.
I have one here, and hope to write a proper network server for it; right now its in limbo, as they're being spotty in terms of developer communications. As it stands -- as a USB interface device -- it suffers from the wildly differing USB APIs between linux, OS X and Windows. Supporting it directly means writing three completely different sets of code; supporting it via the supplied libraries means low OS revision compatibility.
So far, the best bang for the buck I've run into are the ANDRUS MK 1.5, AFEDRI and RFSPACE models for 0-30 MHz. For above, the cheap and obvious way is an el cheapo USB stick, with which you can do some fun things, but the units have all kinds of weak points and you will definitely run into them if you use them in any kind of real RF surfing. They make really fun commercial FM receivers if the stations are reasonably local. And preamps can make them into real monsters, FM-wise. I regularly listen to a station almost 200 miles away here on the plains. In decent fidelity, in stereo.
This unit looks to have a proper ethernet interface, but the kickstarter page doesn't seem to specifically say so - I'm going by the picture. If it does, then it may be possible (should be, I would think) to support it beyond the minimal web interface they're talking about on the page. The direct sampling design is a very, very attractive feature and can potentially result in awesome RF capabilities, all depending on the unit's front end. And I love the idea of the integral GPS unit. You can do some really cool things with a solid frequency reference. Like this, for instance.
My mom has been dead for over a decade. Makes her rather inefficient at cleaning the cat box. Which leaves it up to me. A task I would be happy to pass along to a droid, once they become sophisticated enough to handle it.
Shortwave stations from every continent. Longwave stations. The long established 160-, 80-, 40-, 20-, 15-, and 10-meter ham bands, as well as the newer (and lower bandwidth) WARC bands. Time and frequency reference stations. Weather fax. Lots of pirate radio. Various textual and other FSK encoded data transmissions. Beacons. Natural phenomena such as solar RF emissions. The AM radio bands. Maritime weather broadcasts. Citizen's band radio (both European and US band spans.) All manner of military and commercial and non-military government signals.
In addition, because of the way RF propagates through the atmosphere, signals at these frequencies are far better able to reach long distances than signals at higher frequencies; get much higher than 50 MHz, and reliable reception falls down into line-of-sight distance without the assistance of intermediate receive-and-re-transmit relay stations such as towers or satellites.
During the course of the day, the propagation characteristics of the atmosphere change, primarily due to varying exposure to solar radiation. This varies with solar output and events, terrestrial weather, and can even be affected to some degree by intentional energy delivery by technological means.
There are also signals at the low end that are electromagnetically sourced that have been found to presage events such as earthquakes.
If one goes to the (very minor) effort of converting from other types of signals, for instance from sound (air pressure variation) to electrical (IOW, use a microphone or a speaker-as-microphone), you can look into information realms normally out of perceptibility. For instance, I have a couple of old super-tweeters mounted in my attic and this enables me to check out the otherwise inaudible chirps and whistles of the bats that live up there (I have a bat habitat.)
There is more in the world than data packets. That doesn't mean these things will be of interest to everyone; but they are definitely of interest to some, and so that's what gives SDR hardware designed to work in this particular frequency range real value.
I write software for SDRs; it works with any frequency range the SDR is capable of, and because I do this, I have quite a few SDRs on the bench at any one time, and quite a range of frequency capabilities. I live in a fairly rural area, and for me, there is a lot more interesting going on from 0-30 Mhz than there is within 30 MHz and above. It's all in what tweaks your particular curiosities and leanings.:)
eng1: How many digits of pi did you use? eng2: 16. eng1: So how come the spacecraft isn't on track? It's off by several tens of meters already, and we just launched. eng2: Meters?
The last of us will be little more than pathetic cat ladies.
...so what's the problem?
Why do you think humans in general have to keep existing, so long as you keep existing?
I'm going to be dead in 50 years, most likely, and I really, really don't care what the rest of you get up to, or don't, once my nipples go terminally north. You want to hump robots, good luck to ya.:)
That thing isn't even remotely close to human looking; it evokes absolutely no "uncanny valley" feeling for me. It has (poorly resolved, far too slow, inaccurate) expressions, inaccurate voice/mouth synch, eyes that look, at best, as if you're talking to a heroin addict, and moves in jerky, uneven steps.
I look forward to a robot I can't tell from a human. Even just in simple conversation. But holding my breath based on that thing, I'm not, nor does the video in any way make me feel like I'm actually witnessing a real conversation.
I am confident that anyone who takes that thing to be any kind of disturbing (or not) facsimile of a human being has the approximate emotional sensitivity of an Indian weather rock.
Democracy is just some privileged people telling other people what to do.
No, that's a characteristic of oligarchy (which is what we have today), plutocracy, etc. Democracy is 50.000001% of those with votes threatening everyone else with violence of one kind or another (and likely delivering same) if they don't do what that 50.000001% demand of them.
But don't worry about it. How about those Kardashians, eh? GEE!
Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed.
Press one if you’d like to be driven insane by something that might have been on-hold music before it was turned into horrific, distorted mush on its way to your phone.
Press two if you’d like to listen to another menu full of options that have nothing to do with why you called.
Press three if you would like to be summarily disconnected while waiting for “the next available representative.”
Press four if you would like us to kill your cellphone battery with an indefinite hold, regularly punctuated by wholly false assurances that “we really care about you and will be with you soon.”
Press five if you’d like to be directed to our website. Please be aware that our website is only partly functional and was designed by poorly paid foreigners who have neither language skills appropriate to the regions we sell our products in, or any understanding that websites should only take action, such as drop menus or pop up windows, when people actually click on buttons and links clearly intended to initiate such action.
Pulse seis si desea escuchar a estos menús en mal hablado español.
Press zero to hear these options again. Thank you for calling StupidCorp, and we look forward to taking your money and under-serving you in the future. Remember: StupidCorp. We were the ones that drove you to regular doses of Bupropion. Now you can up your dose!
Slashdot Mirror
I just saw an ad from Apple about "live photos"... it stuck me immediately that this is a great way for photos to take up a LOT more room, on devices that don't have expandable RAM.
Coincidence? No intent to clog up devices that much sooner?
Doubtful.
As does pretty much everything else they do.
I have a recent iPad, upgraded to the current iOS. A huge number of the installed applications are now broken. They worked fine; Apple "upgraded" iOS; now they crash or variously misbehave. iOS's seriously crippled user and data models aren't exactly helping either.
OS X has broken quite a few things with upgrades as well (and of course, they leave broken stuff behind them all the time.)
Apple also sets up entire paradigms and then breaks them. For instance, initially, Aperture supported cameras. Then one "upgrade", they moved new camera support to the (new) OS, thus leaving users of the current version of Aperture without support for newly added cameras, even though they notionally supported the OS level they were using. The way out of that for me was to move to Adobe's Lightroom, but after paying for Aperture and two subsequent upgrades, I'm not about to forgive Apple. I don't matter to Apple as a paying customer? Okay, then I won't be a paying customer. The used market is fine with me — my cash can go elsewhere than directly into Apple's pockets.
The iPad... I've stopped using my iPad completely — almost all of the apps I found useful (and some that were simply fun) are now broken, and I've stopped upgrading OS X. I've no interest whatsoever in breaking software I've paid good money for. Nothing Apple has offered thus far in newer versions of OS X is even slightly tempting.
In fact, the only thing I can think of at the moment that would get me to upgrade OS X further is OS-level speech recognition without requiring going online. A reliable implementation of that would be a total game changer. Amazon's Echo has made very clear what the advantages of STT are; it has also made very clear what the disadvantages of requiring the cloud and locking down the ecosystem are. Mycroft looks like it may break out of these problems. If so... bye bye Echo.
Pretty sure Apple has convinced me permanently that iPads, iPhones and iWatches are not sane purchases for me to make. I'll allow for the vague possibility that they could come up with something to convince me otherwise — like OS-level STT — but I'm not holding my breath.
It also prevents versionitis: where the package didn't go away, but was changed in such a way that it no longer works the way it used to.
Your stance may not be "popular", but it is 100% correct — and very smart.
We can still be hosed by irresponsible changes in the underlying language, and/or irresponsible changes in the underlying OS (if there is one... not always the case.)
Python and Perl have both outright broken older code that was designed to the language spec. Windows and OS X have both broken APIs that were used properly to spec. I'm sure the lists are much, much longer than that -- those are just the cases I'm personally aware of.
And we should take very seriously the idiot "X has been deprecated" warnings in a language or an OS API, because that means some lame-ass bonehead is thinking about doing that very thing to us. Javascript, c libraries, OS APIs...
Just start looking, horse common should be just as easy to find as horse rare, at least in France.
Billionaire != meaningful.
Internet != "social media"
Yes, the programmer bandwagon initiative has just created an oversupply of wannabe script kiddies playing around in HLL sandboxes while having mega-angst attacks about utterly insignificant UX issues. While mostly making a huge bloody mess. And inflicting travesties like roll-over activated menus and pop-ups on everyone they can. They're so busy appity-apping their grossly overweight, minimally functional apps they haven't had time to learn how computers work or build deep algorithmic competencies. Nor do I ever expect they will.
FTFY. :)
It actually goes like this:
Extremely simplistic computer programming done in the earliest days of trivial computer architectures and largely trivial computing tasks, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by anyone possessed of a week's familiarization and two wet brain cells to rub together. But as computer architectures became more sophisticated, and the programs written under them were both more aggressively complex and able to utilize considerably broader and deeper resources in terms of both hardware and data, the job began paying more and gained prestige. A process that continues to this day.
We're so fortunate. :/
This... coming from Facebook... is just about the funniest thing I've seen in several days.
"meaningful"
Ah ha.
Ha ha ha ha. :)
I have one here, and hope to write a proper network server for it; right now its in limbo, as they're being spotty in terms of developer communications. As it stands -- as a USB interface device -- it suffers from the wildly differing USB APIs between linux, OS X and Windows. Supporting it directly means writing three completely different sets of code; supporting it via the supplied libraries means low OS revision compatibility.
So far, the best bang for the buck I've run into are the ANDRUS MK 1.5, AFEDRI and RFSPACE models for 0-30 MHz. For above, the cheap and obvious way is an el cheapo USB stick, with which you can do some fun things, but the units have all kinds of weak points and you will definitely run into them if you use them in any kind of real RF surfing. They make really fun commercial FM receivers if the stations are reasonably local. And preamps can make them into real monsters, FM-wise. I regularly listen to a station almost 200 miles away here on the plains. In decent fidelity, in stereo.
This unit looks to have a proper ethernet interface, but the kickstarter page doesn't seem to specifically say so - I'm going by the picture. If it does, then it may be possible (should be, I would think) to support it beyond the minimal web interface they're talking about on the page. The direct sampling design is a very, very attractive feature and can potentially result in awesome RF capabilities, all depending on the unit's front end. And I love the idea of the integral GPS unit. You can do some really cool things with a solid frequency reference. Like this, for instance.
My mom has been dead for over a decade. Makes her rather inefficient at cleaning the cat box. Which leaves it up to me. A task I would be happy to pass along to a droid, once they become sophisticated enough to handle it.
Perhaps you should go out and look at more humans. :)
Shortwave stations from every continent. Longwave stations. The long established 160-, 80-, 40-, 20-, 15-, and 10-meter ham bands, as well as the newer (and lower bandwidth) WARC bands. Time and frequency reference stations. Weather fax. Lots of pirate radio. Various textual and other FSK encoded data transmissions. Beacons. Natural phenomena such as solar RF emissions. The AM radio bands. Maritime weather broadcasts. Citizen's band radio (both European and US band spans.) All manner of military and commercial and non-military government signals.
In addition, because of the way RF propagates through the atmosphere, signals at these frequencies are far better able to reach long distances than signals at higher frequencies; get much higher than 50 MHz, and reliable reception falls down into line-of-sight distance without the assistance of intermediate receive-and-re-transmit relay stations such as towers or satellites.
During the course of the day, the propagation characteristics of the atmosphere change, primarily due to varying exposure to solar radiation. This varies with solar output and events, terrestrial weather, and can even be affected to some degree by intentional energy delivery by technological means.
There are also signals at the low end that are electromagnetically sourced that have been found to presage events such as earthquakes.
If one goes to the (very minor) effort of converting from other types of signals, for instance from sound (air pressure variation) to electrical (IOW, use a microphone or a speaker-as-microphone), you can look into information realms normally out of perceptibility. For instance, I have a couple of old super-tweeters mounted in my attic and this enables me to check out the otherwise inaudible chirps and whistles of the bats that live up there (I have a bat habitat.)
There is more in the world than data packets. That doesn't mean these things will be of interest to everyone; but they are definitely of interest to some, and so that's what gives SDR hardware designed to work in this particular frequency range real value.
I write software for SDRs; it works with any frequency range the SDR is capable of, and because I do this, I have quite a few SDRs on the bench at any one time, and quite a range of frequency capabilities. I live in a fairly rural area, and for me, there is a lot more interesting going on from 0-30 Mhz than there is within 30 MHz and above. It's all in what tweaks your particular curiosities and leanings. :)
Yep, now you're getting it. :)
eng1: How many digits of pi did you use?
eng2: 16.
eng1: So how come the spacecraft isn't on track? It's off by several tens of meters already, and we just launched.
eng2: Meters?
Why do you think humans in general have to keep existing, so long as you keep existing?
I'm going to be dead in 50 years, most likely, and I really, really don't care what the rest of you get up to, or don't, once my nipples go terminally north. You want to hump robots, good luck to ya. :)
I'll buy when the feature list is...
...
...
o cleans the cat box
That thing isn't even remotely close to human looking; it evokes absolutely no "uncanny valley" feeling for me. It has (poorly resolved, far too slow, inaccurate) expressions, inaccurate voice/mouth synch, eyes that look, at best, as if you're talking to a heroin addict, and moves in jerky, uneven steps.
I look forward to a robot I can't tell from a human. Even just in simple conversation. But holding my breath based on that thing, I'm not, nor does the video in any way make me feel like I'm actually witnessing a real conversation.
I am confident that anyone who takes that thing to be any kind of disturbing (or not) facsimile of a human being has the approximate emotional sensitivity of an Indian weather rock.
Don't kid about my precious bodily fluids, or I'll send you a cowboy riding herd on ballistic nuclear munitions.
No, that's a characteristic of oligarchy (which is what we have today), plutocracy, etc. Democracy is 50.000001% of those with votes threatening everyone else with violence of one kind or another (and likely delivering same) if they don't do what that 50.000001% demand of them.
But don't worry about it. How about those Kardashians, eh? GEE!
Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed.
Press one if you’d like to be driven insane by something that might have been on-hold music before it was turned into horrific, distorted mush on its way to your phone.
Press two if you’d like to listen to another menu full of options that have nothing to do with why you called.
Press three if you would like to be summarily disconnected while waiting for “the next available representative.”
Press four if you would like us to kill your cellphone battery with an indefinite hold, regularly punctuated by wholly false assurances that “we really care about you and will be with you soon.”
Press five if you’d like to be directed to our website. Please be aware that our website is only partly functional and was designed by poorly paid foreigners who have neither language skills appropriate to the regions we sell our products in, or any understanding that websites should only take action, such as drop menus or pop up windows, when people actually click on buttons and links clearly intended to initiate such action.
Pulse seis si desea escuchar a estos menús en mal hablado español.
Press zero to hear these options again. Thank you for calling StupidCorp, and we look forward to taking your money and under-serving you in the future. Remember: StupidCorp. We were the ones that drove you to regular doses of Bupropion. Now you can up your dose!
Underrated
base 2, nm, sigh
10 is divisible by 1,2, 5, and 10, so how is it prime?