No. It's gambling only if the investor is completely uninformed. Successful investors have a solid background in all aspects of business and do a great deal of research all the time to eliminate (to the greatest extent possible) the effects of "luck" on their investments.
She deserves the praise. Public schools strive to teach submission and conformity over all else. Those who succeed are the ones who learn to adapt and think independently.
Pushing the Mac platform is a horrible idea and a form of playing russian roulette with their computer skills and future job possibilities.
Russian Roulette. You've got to be shitting me. Did Netcraft confirm this?
That means you will have students that can work with a small segment of the computers which will seriously hurt their chances.
I was going to write a response about how a given person should be able to use any other popular desktop OS after having learned another, but I realized it wasn't true. Every single Mac and Linux user I know can muddle their way through Windows when necessary. But I know a lot of Windows users and administrators who cannot use anything but Windows. (And refuse to try.)
but when your dealing with the future of teens don't gamble on them with your preferences. Teach them what they need or you'll be doing more harm then good. Or as so many love to scream 'Think of the children'.
I don't think you've been to a high school lately or college lately... Teen usage of Macs is much higher than in the general population. A survey of the Cornell residential network pegged Mac usage at around 21% in 2007. I find it hard to swallow that more than 20% of any Ivy league school's graduates are simply unfit for the modern workplace (to paraphrase your words) because they did their homework on OS X instead of Windows.
I have no sympathy for our lazy homeowners who don't want to take the time to understand exactly what that magic box does, and now are mad at Google.
Here's the gray area. You and I would both agree that users of unencrypted wifi networks should understand all of the security and privacy implications. What's not so clear is whether they should be expected to understand the basic technologies (to include authorization and encryption algorithms) behind wireless networks.
I argue that they shouldn't. I place much of the blame on router manufacturers and wireless protocol designers. If these little boxes are being sold to consumers, they should be secure out of the box without requiring end users to go through a lengthy setup procedure. It should be: plug it in, optionally set a password, and you're done.
Not a single solitary router sold since 2001 should come with even the option to use WEP. Yet they all do. There should be no way to pass traffic in the clear except for special debugging or development purposes, even on an "open" network where no password is required to join. These two things alone would have prevented the vast majority of privacy problems stemming from the use of unencrypted (or insecure) wifi over the last decade.
Re:Apparently it's even faster than Chrome 5
on
Safari 5 Released
·
· Score: 1
Chrome and Safari should always be fairly close in performance, they both use the same code under the hood.
There have been mouse-driven GUI BIOS interfaces for well over a decade. They were just never very popular because they ended up being clunky as all hell. They did not exactly engender the appreciation of the PC technicians who had to work with them. Plus, who the hell wants to dig up a spare mouse just to change the boot order of the drivers?
I'm not trying to belittle these guys' security research or anything, but why is it surprising that you can whip up a rootkit which runs on a phone? Anything with a CPU can have backdoors made for it. The hard part has always been getting the backdoors onto arbitrary devices without the owner knowing about it.
Engineer a computer which can be proven secure and then I'll be impressed.
HTTPS only conceals the content of your web browsing, not which sites you visit. Except for user authentication, and possibly user-to-user messages, adding HTTPS to Slashdot and most other public content sites would be utterly pointless since anyone who sees that your computer is talking to a Slashdot IP has immediate access to all of the content you're viewing.
Sensitive communications (email, IM, etc) should be encrypted. But anything that's public, nah. If you really want complete privacy both from potential snoops on your end (say, your ISP) and on the remote end (websites tracking your visits), then set up an encrypted VPN to a server that you pay for with PayPal and from there route your outbound HTTP through Tor.
I'll switch to Chrome the day it can support a plugin which can block the downloading of ads and other unwanted content, not just hide them with a bit of CSS and Javascript.
(An adblocking proxy isn't a viable solution for me.)
Seconded. I bought an el-cheapo color laser printer on clearance a few years back for $200. The print quality is way better than any inkjet ever will be and I'm still on the original toner cartridges that came with it. The biggest downside is that it takes up a bit of space, has a rather long warmup cycle, and probably consumes a lot more electricity than an inkjet. But I'm sure that cost is more than offset by not having to buy $30-$50 in liquid gold every few months.
So you propose a permanent end to day trading. Okay, but keep in mind that day trading isn't just some speculating little wonk sitting in his apartment all day poring over charts and trends. Many major financial companies have automated and manual day trading operations. And if you piss them off, all you're going to do is drive them into building some kind of new over-the-counter network that's loose enough to avoid the most onerous exchange restrictions.
Short-term volatility doesn't affect long-term investors much, yet they're always the ones complaining the loudest about it. Day traders aren't taking money from long-term investors, they're taking money from other (less skilled) day traders. The only people who should be pissed off about market volatility are the day traders because it makes their job so much riskier. (Although potentially more profitable as well.) A smart mid- to long-term investor with investments in solid companies sees a market crash and says, "Cool! A Sale!" right before calling his broker and ordering as much as he can afford.
Then finally at the end they showed the back and surprise, there's another motor there, but trying to explain it off that this motor requires far less energy than you're going to gain by using the rest of the system.
The theory appears to go that the control motors need far less torque than the input motor. Hence, if your input is a gasoline engine held at constant throttle, you can control the speed of the output with a low-torque DC motor which doesn't actually contribute to the output power.
That said, I'm not an engineer either, but it seems to me like engineers getting paid the big bucks by automotive companies would have already considered a system similar to this and discarded it as impractical. No doubt this Steve guy is brilliant, but little red flags tend to go up in my mind when I hear things like, "a school teacher in Idaho found a cure for the common cold," "a welder has invented an engine that runs on water", or "a plumber has invented the holy grail of transmissions."
I could see a lot of things going wrong if the synchronization was imperfect, or if something went wrong.
It should be easy to synchronize the shafts with optical encoders and a computer driving the motors connected to the shaft. Or you could couple the output to a standard fiction clutch. When the "car" is in neutral or park, the clutch can be disengaged via solenoid for additional safety. Heck, if a car had this kind of transmission, I'm not sure if you'd even need brakes at all. To slow down the car, just slow down the transmission output. I get the gist of how the D-Drive works, but I don't think the article mentioned how it handles torque coming in from the output (wheels).
But where's the style? I thought it was common knowledge that the very first thing you're supposed to do after you've programmed a park to screech into a parking space is install a loudspeaker behind the grille which yells out, "heeeee-like a glove!"
I don't understand why the nub/clit/eraser/whatever is ubiquitous among laptop manufacturers.
I don't know that I would call the trackpoint ubiquitous on laptops... If I recall, IBM has a patent on the design so other manufacturers (excepting Lenovo) have to license the technology. I haven't seen anything but Lenovo laptops using them for quite awhile.
I find trackballs so much easier to use on laptops--particularly since there's no fuzzy-logic-acceleration involved.
Easy answer: trackballs are much more fragile than trackpoints or touchpads. They get filled with gunk, break easily, and the ball comes out and gets lost. Not an issue if you take care of your stuff, but we're talking about the general population here.
Slashdot Mirror
No. It's gambling only if the investor is completely uninformed. Successful investors have a solid background in all aspects of business and do a great deal of research all the time to eliminate (to the greatest extent possible) the effects of "luck" on their investments.
She deserves the praise. Public schools strive to teach submission and conformity over all else. Those who succeed are the ones who learn to adapt and think independently.
Russian Roulette. You've got to be shitting me. Did Netcraft confirm this?
I was going to write a response about how a given person should be able to use any other popular desktop OS after having learned another, but I realized it wasn't true. Every single Mac and Linux user I know can muddle their way through Windows when necessary. But I know a lot of Windows users and administrators who cannot use anything but Windows. (And refuse to try.)
I don't think you've been to a high school lately or college lately... Teen usage of Macs is much higher than in the general population. A survey of the Cornell residential network pegged Mac usage at around 21% in 2007. I find it hard to swallow that more than 20% of any Ivy league school's graduates are simply unfit for the modern workplace (to paraphrase your words) because they did their homework on OS X instead of Windows.
Here's the gray area. You and I would both agree that users of unencrypted wifi networks should understand all of the security and privacy implications. What's not so clear is whether they should be expected to understand the basic technologies (to include authorization and encryption algorithms) behind wireless networks.
I argue that they shouldn't. I place much of the blame on router manufacturers and wireless protocol designers. If these little boxes are being sold to consumers, they should be secure out of the box without requiring end users to go through a lengthy setup procedure. It should be: plug it in, optionally set a password, and you're done.
Not a single solitary router sold since 2001 should come with even the option to use WEP. Yet they all do. There should be no way to pass traffic in the clear except for special debugging or development purposes, even on an "open" network where no password is required to join. These two things alone would have prevented the vast majority of privacy problems stemming from the use of unencrypted (or insecure) wifi over the last decade.
Chrome and Safari should always be fairly close in performance, they both use the same code under the hood.
There have been mouse-driven GUI BIOS interfaces for well over a decade. They were just never very popular because they ended up being clunky as all hell. They did not exactly engender the appreciation of the PC technicians who had to work with them. Plus, who the hell wants to dig up a spare mouse just to change the boot order of the drivers?
I'm not trying to belittle these guys' security research or anything, but why is it surprising that you can whip up a rootkit which runs on a phone? Anything with a CPU can have backdoors made for it. The hard part has always been getting the backdoors onto arbitrary devices without the owner knowing about it.
Engineer a computer which can be proven secure and then I'll be impressed.
Yes.
To put it bluntly, what for?
HTTPS only conceals the content of your web browsing, not which sites you visit. Except for user authentication, and possibly user-to-user messages, adding HTTPS to Slashdot and most other public content sites would be utterly pointless since anyone who sees that your computer is talking to a Slashdot IP has immediate access to all of the content you're viewing.
Sensitive communications (email, IM, etc) should be encrypted. But anything that's public, nah. If you really want complete privacy both from potential snoops on your end (say, your ISP) and on the remote end (websites tracking your visits), then set up an encrypted VPN to a server that you pay for with PayPal and from there route your outbound HTTP through Tor.
Rusty Shackleford, is that you?
I'll switch to Chrome the day it can support a plugin which can block the downloading of ads and other unwanted content, not just hide them with a bit of CSS and Javascript.
(An adblocking proxy isn't a viable solution for me.)
When you install Chrome on Ubuntu/Debian, it adds a line to your software sources so it gets updated along with everything else via Update Manager.
What day was that? I'm running 5.0.375.55 beta and the http:/// is right there in the address bar.
Seconded. I bought an el-cheapo color laser printer on clearance a few years back for $200. The print quality is way better than any inkjet ever will be and I'm still on the original toner cartridges that came with it. The biggest downside is that it takes up a bit of space, has a rather long warmup cycle, and probably consumes a lot more electricity than an inkjet. But I'm sure that cost is more than offset by not having to buy $30-$50 in liquid gold every few months.
I think I read that one, but the only line that I can remember from it is, "a miserable pile of secrets."
So you propose a permanent end to day trading. Okay, but keep in mind that day trading isn't just some speculating little wonk sitting in his apartment all day poring over charts and trends. Many major financial companies have automated and manual day trading operations. And if you piss them off, all you're going to do is drive them into building some kind of new over-the-counter network that's loose enough to avoid the most onerous exchange restrictions.
Short-term volatility doesn't affect long-term investors much, yet they're always the ones complaining the loudest about it. Day traders aren't taking money from long-term investors, they're taking money from other (less skilled) day traders. The only people who should be pissed off about market volatility are the day traders because it makes their job so much riskier. (Although potentially more profitable as well.) A smart mid- to long-term investor with investments in solid companies sees a market crash and says, "Cool! A Sale!" right before calling his broker and ordering as much as he can afford.
A good, informative read. I like the author's description of the reference encoder:
8-D -- Prophet Mohammed
Unlike Hollywood movies, this one is open source, so you can go jump in and make it better...
http://durian.blender.org/get-involved/
The theory appears to go that the control motors need far less torque than the input motor. Hence, if your input is a gasoline engine held at constant throttle, you can control the speed of the output with a low-torque DC motor which doesn't actually contribute to the output power.
That said, I'm not an engineer either, but it seems to me like engineers getting paid the big bucks by automotive companies would have already considered a system similar to this and discarded it as impractical. No doubt this Steve guy is brilliant, but little red flags tend to go up in my mind when I hear things like, "a school teacher in Idaho found a cure for the common cold," "a welder has invented an engine that runs on water", or "a plumber has invented the holy grail of transmissions."
It should be easy to synchronize the shafts with optical encoders and a computer driving the motors connected to the shaft. Or you could couple the output to a standard fiction clutch. When the "car" is in neutral or park, the clutch can be disengaged via solenoid for additional safety. Heck, if a car had this kind of transmission, I'm not sure if you'd even need brakes at all. To slow down the car, just slow down the transmission output. I get the gist of how the D-Drive works, but I don't think the article mentioned how it handles torque coming in from the output (wheels).
Well in either case, the difference doesn't seem to be terribly acute after a few beers.
goddamn it, I'll sooner win the lottery than post a joke to slashdot without a glaring typo in it
But where's the style? I thought it was common knowledge that the very first thing you're supposed to do after you've programmed a park to screech into a parking space is install a loudspeaker behind the grille which yells out, "heeeee-like a glove!"
I don't know that I would call the trackpoint ubiquitous on laptops... If I recall, IBM has a patent on the design so other manufacturers (excepting Lenovo) have to license the technology. I haven't seen anything but Lenovo laptops using them for quite awhile.
Easy answer: trackballs are much more fragile than trackpoints or touchpads. They get filled with gunk, break easily, and the ball comes out and gets lost. Not an issue if you take care of your stuff, but we're talking about the general population here.