This. Especially with some of the political rants that Arrington (TechCrunch founder) has put up on the main page, I do have some worry that if this gains steam he may feel the desire to wield it to further his own personal agenda rather than the tech agenda as a whole.
Something like this is needed though, and I'm heartened to see it happening.
This! I actually enjoy working with old code every now and then, even if it's a sea of crap. It's kind of neat not to be solve problems yourself, the way that you would, but to see how other people solve problems, get in their mindset, their mind frame and learn how they think. Then see how them and others dealt with extending, maintaining, and refactoring. It's odd, they become like old friends. It's kind of intriguing to through code to get to know someone well enough to say "This is Fred's module, here's how to would have programmed it" and have an idea of how to fix it or refactor it before even looking at the code.
Right, but a higher barrier to entry means higher learning curve, which means that even good developers will put out crap code for a while. I much prefer programming languages that allow good developers to produce good code form Day 1, not Day 789.
Yes, it was. At those altitudes, the only thing to prevent spins would be a gas reaction system like satellites use. Aka, vent gas out of pressurized bottles to counter-act unwanted spin. Having those on his suit would have added a ton of weight, and precluded him wanting to do this in just a pressure suit. There's no air or anything to allow him to do it himself. That's why when he jumped, he tried to be as still as possible. Even while spinning, the idea was not to move or react. Just wait until you hit enough atmosphere that you can move your body to stabilize yourself with the drag. When he started tumbling, I was screaming for him to hit the atmosphere and be able to stabilize himself. Then he did, and once that happened I knew that he had it nailed.
Android's had turn by turn navigation for quite a few years, and you can cache GB's of map data for offline use. There is a limit on the cache amount, but it's more than you can cover in a a couple of weeks. I use it all the time in the middle of nowhere, and hiking.
Does Nokia maps also do train schedules, bus schedules, walking directions, biking directions, street view and indoor navigation inside of large malls an airports? (serious question, just asking)
I've been on a Southwest plane out of their home airport that gave us free drinks for the flight because "It's not every day that the CEO helped clean the plane you were flying on". He was in the airport, saw a plane behind schedule and pitched in. Yea, there's a reason they're now the largest domestic US airline.
RF Engineer here. Let's put this in perspective. Your typical cell phone will receive somewhere around -50dBmW maximum. That's typically 4-5 full bars of reception. My phone is sitting next to me right now running -88dBmW, and that's two bars.
So, let's say that you're receiving that -50dBmW signal. -50dBm is -80dBW. Let's convert that straight to Watts now, so 10^(-80/10). That's 1e-8 Watts, or 80 nano-Watts. Good luck charging your phone with that.
That's also why you see RF being used everywhere. The dynamic range is huuuuuuuuge! Your cell phone can transmit +30dBm or more, and you can reliably receiving -80dBm. So, you're able to transmit Watts pretty easily, and receive nano Watts pretty easily. Yea, path loss can be a lot, but you've got a lot of headroom to deal with. That's just in the palm of your hand. Add in big, megawatt amplifiers and huge dishes with large, sensitive electronics and it's no wonder that we can reach out billions of miles. Really mind-boggling stuff if oyu stop to think about it.
With the latest version of LTE phones, it's not so much the browsing/downloading (heck on my Galaxy Nexus with the old inefficient LTE radios, I could download over 3GB in a day and still have battery at the end of it), but rather the screen drain.
I get tons of hours of usage if I'm in a dark room. Well-lit airport, and I'm easily half that unless I turn down the brightness low enough that I can barely read the thing.
#1 draw on nearly all modern smartphones is the display, which the 4S and lower had an edge on due to being quite a bit smaller. With the iPhone5 I expect that the biggest dip in longevity numbers will be screen-on-time, aka when you're using/browsing.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but the cable TV part of cable is crapola also.
I was paying $45 a month for all SD, no HD channels with fewer channels than I got over the air. To upgrade to equivalent of what I could get for free was $60/mo, and anything with more stuff was pushing ~$100.mo. This is Comcast in my area. But they have the best internet hands down. So I'm doing only internet. Despite them offering me the "basic cable" package for $1/mo on top of my broadband I still declined because it literally is worse than free OTA.
Shame is a powerful method of control. When society convinces you that you should be embarassed about something, the person who knows it gains a lot of power over you. If everyone knew it, there's no power. Shame, and the associated need for a concept of privacy, were constructs that arise over and over as ways of controlling a population.
This is an important note to make. It's really the pass/fail criteria behind DoD security clearances (barring other big issues). They don't necessarily care that you slept with another dude in college or smoke some Marijuana or did X or did Y. They care about whether that knowledge can be used to blackmail/shame you into revealing secrets. If you admit it up front and have no problem with everyone in the world knowing that you did that, then they don't care either. But if you're a straight arrow and you're so absolutely ashamed of the time that you took an extra-long lunch break, but still charged normal hours then they're going to think twice about you. It's all about there being nothing to shame/blackmail/bribe you with in your background (and not having erratic/bad judgement). Not about how goody two-shoes you are.
In this sense, social media makes the vetting process easier. Easy to check on your judgement good/bad, and easy to see if you're ashamed of something or not (aka, did you/would you post about it).
But the app doesn't require cell phone service to be usable. You just need the smartphone or tablet. (in reference to your last sentence).
I do have a printout of one-time codes, but I find that I never use them anymore because I always just use the phone app, because it works as long as the phone has juice. Which you should have some available if you're using a computer to check your gmail...
Uh, they do have a one-time pad of pre-authenticated numbers, and an app that doesn't require an internet connection. I've authenticated form a 9200bps modem from the middle of the Pacific using my list of one-time security access codes.
In other words, it's glorious. Google does security right, and everyone else needs to take notice. Including corporate IT departments. I've used it for years, and every now and then when I need a new account, I go and get an outlook.com account or similar, because all the regular names are taken in gmail, but I always feel so naked using them. No security at all.
Yea. Windows 7 strikes a nice balance between being able to use the keyboard for just about everything, while providing a pretty full featured, but simple interface. I can navigate directories in the explorer GUI by typing just like I would in a shell, whether I click on the nav bar or just have focus, I can launch/search/whatever after pressing the command key, and so on and so forth. It's really just *polished* and I haven't seen anything nearly as good yet.
Hell, I had KDE4 latest version in a VM the other day, and I drug across a file from Windows onto the KDE desktop in VMWare. It copied fine, I I didn't drag to one of those folder/widget thingy's on the desktop, just the base desktop. Couldn't figure out how to move the file somewhere else. Did updatedb/locate, searched around manually, etc. Nothing could find the file. Posted in the Ubuntu forums, and was told that I wasn't supposed to drag files to *just* the desktop. That that didn't work. Suggested work-around was to just re-copy it across. I was floored. Apparently it was in some weird desktop DB backend or something that KDE uses. I never plan on using KDE4 again, if drag/drop of files can put them in places where I can't get to them.
I always had a nagging feeling that I should buy an Ouya, it's just so cool. But I just never had the *oomph*, the specific reason to buy one. I'm waiting in line for my Raspberry Pi, and was planning on using it to replace my large XBMC box. Then I saw the XBMC port to Android, and was looking at those little Android machines to maybe port it to. Then Ouya and XBMC kind of came together and made this a no brainer.
Takes care of my casual gaming wants, my want for XBMC on my home theater, and my want for Android streaming on my home theater. All in one box, for $99. This is really convergence for me. Being able to launch the Android Pandora app rather than the XBMC version that Pandora sometimes blocks, and same for Netflix and various other streaming video options while still having XBMC for all of my movies and TV on my NAS, while also having a built in little controller for browsing and casual gaming really has me excited, and really removes like 4 boxes from my home theater, and keeps me from spending $500 on upgrading them all.
Well done XBMC/Ouya. You're definitely contenders, and I am proud to be backing *open* software/standards rather than this Roku/Xbox/whatever crap that I can't hack/customize.
Wow. That's about the most naive politics I've ever seen.
Hint, just because they have a D next to their name does not mean that they vote in lockstep for what Obama says to. In fact, many with D's next to their name voted with R's significantly more often than other D's. Hell, they often couldn't get an up/down vote in the Senate on any legislation pushed by Obama for months at a time.
A lot of that extra RAM space is actually in all of the images/bitmaps. When you're phone is doing 720p, just caching a background image is pretty huge. Add in all of the layers to draw on top of it (widgets, icons), some picture caching for recently run apps, etc and you're using a pretty huge chunk of RAM. On my OG Droid w/ 256MB of RAM, I noticed that when I was running out of RAM, most of what was taking up space was cached images.
I've seen lots of people pay way more to get ads on TV at totally random times that probably reach none of their customers just so they can see their add on TV. It feels more real to them.
Really, Groupon is one of the new places/styles for internet ads. You have a new restaurant and need to get the word out? Put out a Groupon or facebook deal or similar and watch droves of people come in. It's really incredibly effective. One of my favorite local restaurants went from being a ghost town to at full capacity for two weeks straight due to a well-timed Groupon, which then trailed off quickly. But form that they now have a relatively steady clientele that keeps them in business. Best money they ever spent. Way better than ROI than the TV and radio ads they were buying before.
I click Google ads on their search engine site all the time. Of course, I'm always searching for technology to meet some new requirements, or fed up with a vendor and looking for a new one and the Google ads are consistently very relevant for that.
Now, while doing personal searches or ads on a general webpage? Largely useless.
There's a guy in town that uses a laser to get the plaque off, and very very rarely has to use the scraper. I went to him forever and loved it, then my dental insurance decided he wasn't any good and I can't go to him anymore:(
Given that Flame was highly sophisticated, modular and individually targetable there is the potential that some machines had modules that had not yet been discovered and that could also be a reason to destruct - to prevent anyone from discovering more.
Well, that and faking GPS over a wide area is notoriously difficult. Simple boxes that put out properly corrected spoofed GPS for a single point in space have just recently come down to the $500,000 mark. Making it work over a wide area is very, very tough without a multitude of jammers in different locations around the target all very precisely coordinated.
I have to write some manuals, etc sometimes that are very likely to never be read by humans, and just scanned by a computer for relevant info. It still has to be in human readable format in case the scan fails, or a human wants more info. But in general, I find it incredibly de-motivating to write good sentences or go back and polish my work when I know that it's likely to never be read.
And this is for my job where they pay me money. I can't imagine how de-motivating it would be to students.
This is my big problem with education currently. When I went through school, it was very, very easy to tell what was important to the adults (and as they shoved more portables and temp teachers into the school, it became very obvious that it wasn't education). As such, I paid less and less attention and cared less and less. More standardized testing was the same thing; if all that mattered to the admins was passing that silly test, then why care about anything but that? As a result, more goofing around in class. Going to where the teacher doesn't even freakin' look at your papers?!? My god, how ridiculously demotivating to students.
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This. Especially with some of the political rants that Arrington (TechCrunch founder) has put up on the main page, I do have some worry that if this gains steam he may feel the desire to wield it to further his own personal agenda rather than the tech agenda as a whole.
Something like this is needed though, and I'm heartened to see it happening.
This! I actually enjoy working with old code every now and then, even if it's a sea of crap. It's kind of neat not to be solve problems yourself, the way that you would, but to see how other people solve problems, get in their mindset, their mind frame and learn how they think. Then see how them and others dealt with extending, maintaining, and refactoring. It's odd, they become like old friends. It's kind of intriguing to through code to get to know someone well enough to say "This is Fred's module, here's how to would have programmed it" and have an idea of how to fix it or refactor it before even looking at the code.
Right, but a higher barrier to entry means higher learning curve, which means that even good developers will put out crap code for a while. I much prefer programming languages that allow good developers to produce good code form Day 1, not Day 789.
Yes, it was. At those altitudes, the only thing to prevent spins would be a gas reaction system like satellites use. Aka, vent gas out of pressurized bottles to counter-act unwanted spin. Having those on his suit would have added a ton of weight, and precluded him wanting to do this in just a pressure suit. There's no air or anything to allow him to do it himself. That's why when he jumped, he tried to be as still as possible. Even while spinning, the idea was not to move or react. Just wait until you hit enough atmosphere that you can move your body to stabilize yourself with the drag. When he started tumbling, I was screaming for him to hit the atmosphere and be able to stabilize himself. Then he did, and once that happened I knew that he had it nailed.
Huh?
Android's had turn by turn navigation for quite a few years, and you can cache GB's of map data for offline use. There is a limit on the cache amount, but it's more than you can cover in a a couple of weeks. I use it all the time in the middle of nowhere, and hiking.
Does Nokia maps also do train schedules, bus schedules, walking directions, biking directions, street view and indoor navigation inside of large malls an airports? (serious question, just asking)
I've been on a Southwest plane out of their home airport that gave us free drinks for the flight because "It's not every day that the CEO helped clean the plane you were flying on". He was in the airport, saw a plane behind schedule and pitched in. Yea, there's a reason they're now the largest domestic US airline.
RF Engineer here. Let's put this in perspective. Your typical cell phone will receive somewhere around -50dBmW maximum. That's typically 4-5 full bars of reception. My phone is sitting next to me right now running -88dBmW, and that's two bars.
So, let's say that you're receiving that -50dBmW signal. -50dBm is -80dBW. Let's convert that straight to Watts now, so 10^(-80/10). That's 1e-8 Watts, or 80 nano-Watts. Good luck charging your phone with that.
That's also why you see RF being used everywhere. The dynamic range is huuuuuuuuge! Your cell phone can transmit +30dBm or more, and you can reliably receiving -80dBm. So, you're able to transmit Watts pretty easily, and receive nano Watts pretty easily. Yea, path loss can be a lot, but you've got a lot of headroom to deal with. That's just in the palm of your hand. Add in big, megawatt amplifiers and huge dishes with large, sensitive electronics and it's no wonder that we can reach out billions of miles. Really mind-boggling stuff if oyu stop to think about it.
With the latest version of LTE phones, it's not so much the browsing/downloading (heck on my Galaxy Nexus with the old inefficient LTE radios, I could download over 3GB in a day and still have battery at the end of it), but rather the screen drain.
I get tons of hours of usage if I'm in a dark room. Well-lit airport, and I'm easily half that unless I turn down the brightness low enough that I can barely read the thing.
#1 draw on nearly all modern smartphones is the display, which the 4S and lower had an edge on due to being quite a bit smaller. With the iPhone5 I expect that the biggest dip in longevity numbers will be screen-on-time, aka when you're using/browsing.
Chrome to phone man. It works beautifully.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but the cable TV part of cable is crapola also.
I was paying $45 a month for all SD, no HD channels with fewer channels than I got over the air. To upgrade to equivalent of what I could get for free was $60/mo, and anything with more stuff was pushing ~$100.mo. This is Comcast in my area. But they have the best internet hands down. So I'm doing only internet. Despite them offering me the "basic cable" package for $1/mo on top of my broadband I still declined because it literally is worse than free OTA.
Shame is a powerful method of control. When society convinces you that you should be embarassed about something, the person who knows it gains a lot of power over you. If everyone knew it, there's no power. Shame, and the associated need for a concept of privacy, were constructs that arise over and over as ways of controlling a population.
This is an important note to make. It's really the pass/fail criteria behind DoD security clearances (barring other big issues). They don't necessarily care that you slept with another dude in college or smoke some Marijuana or did X or did Y. They care about whether that knowledge can be used to blackmail/shame you into revealing secrets. If you admit it up front and have no problem with everyone in the world knowing that you did that, then they don't care either. But if you're a straight arrow and you're so absolutely ashamed of the time that you took an extra-long lunch break, but still charged normal hours then they're going to think twice about you. It's all about there being nothing to shame/blackmail/bribe you with in your background (and not having erratic/bad judgement). Not about how goody two-shoes you are.
In this sense, social media makes the vetting process easier. Easy to check on your judgement good/bad, and easy to see if you're ashamed of something or not (aka, did you/would you post about it).
Any computer I use to check gmail is fully under my control.
Lucky you. That's not the case for most of us.
But the app doesn't require cell phone service to be usable. You just need the smartphone or tablet. (in reference to your last sentence).
I do have a printout of one-time codes, but I find that I never use them anymore because I always just use the phone app, because it works as long as the phone has juice. Which you should have some available if you're using a computer to check your gmail...
Uh, they do have a one-time pad of pre-authenticated numbers, and an app that doesn't require an internet connection. I've authenticated form a 9200bps modem from the middle of the Pacific using my list of one-time security access codes.
In other words, it's glorious. Google does security right, and everyone else needs to take notice. Including corporate IT departments. I've used it for years, and every now and then when I need a new account, I go and get an outlook.com account or similar, because all the regular names are taken in gmail, but I always feel so naked using them. No security at all.
Yea. Windows 7 strikes a nice balance between being able to use the keyboard for just about everything, while providing a pretty full featured, but simple interface. I can navigate directories in the explorer GUI by typing just like I would in a shell, whether I click on the nav bar or just have focus, I can launch/search/whatever after pressing the command key, and so on and so forth. It's really just *polished* and I haven't seen anything nearly as good yet.
Hell, I had KDE4 latest version in a VM the other day, and I drug across a file from Windows onto the KDE desktop in VMWare. It copied fine, I I didn't drag to one of those folder/widget thingy's on the desktop, just the base desktop. Couldn't figure out how to move the file somewhere else. Did updatedb/locate, searched around manually, etc. Nothing could find the file. Posted in the Ubuntu forums, and was told that I wasn't supposed to drag files to *just* the desktop. That that didn't work. Suggested work-around was to just re-copy it across. I was floored. Apparently it was in some weird desktop DB backend or something that KDE uses. I never plan on using KDE4 again, if drag/drop of files can put them in places where I can't get to them.
I always had a nagging feeling that I should buy an Ouya, it's just so cool. But I just never had the *oomph*, the specific reason to buy one. I'm waiting in line for my Raspberry Pi, and was planning on using it to replace my large XBMC box. Then I saw the XBMC port to Android, and was looking at those little Android machines to maybe port it to. Then Ouya and XBMC kind of came together and made this a no brainer.
Takes care of my casual gaming wants, my want for XBMC on my home theater, and my want for Android streaming on my home theater. All in one box, for $99. This is really convergence for me. Being able to launch the Android Pandora app rather than the XBMC version that Pandora sometimes blocks, and same for Netflix and various other streaming video options while still having XBMC for all of my movies and TV on my NAS, while also having a built in little controller for browsing and casual gaming really has me excited, and really removes like 4 boxes from my home theater, and keeps me from spending $500 on upgrading them all.
Well done XBMC/Ouya. You're definitely contenders, and I am proud to be backing *open* software/standards rather than this Roku/Xbox/whatever crap that I can't hack/customize.
Wow. That's about the most naive politics I've ever seen.
Hint, just because they have a D next to their name does not mean that they vote in lockstep for what Obama says to. In fact, many with D's next to their name voted with R's significantly more often than other D's. Hell, they often couldn't get an up/down vote in the Senate on any legislation pushed by Obama for months at a time.
A lot of that extra RAM space is actually in all of the images/bitmaps. When you're phone is doing 720p, just caching a background image is pretty huge. Add in all of the layers to draw on top of it (widgets, icons), some picture caching for recently run apps, etc and you're using a pretty huge chunk of RAM. On my OG Droid w/ 256MB of RAM, I noticed that when I was running out of RAM, most of what was taking up space was cached images.
+1
I've seen lots of people pay way more to get ads on TV at totally random times that probably reach none of their customers just so they can see their add on TV. It feels more real to them.
Really, Groupon is one of the new places/styles for internet ads. You have a new restaurant and need to get the word out? Put out a Groupon or facebook deal or similar and watch droves of people come in. It's really incredibly effective. One of my favorite local restaurants went from being a ghost town to at full capacity for two weeks straight due to a well-timed Groupon, which then trailed off quickly. But form that they now have a relatively steady clientele that keeps them in business. Best money they ever spent. Way better than ROI than the TV and radio ads they were buying before.
I click Google ads on their search engine site all the time. Of course, I'm always searching for technology to meet some new requirements, or fed up with a vendor and looking for a new one and the Google ads are consistently very relevant for that.
Now, while doing personal searches or ads on a general webpage? Largely useless.
That's a cruise ship horn. Yea, I get that one too. If you wait five seconds, the horn will be over and they'll try to sell you a cruise package.
There's a guy in town that uses a laser to get the plaque off, and very very rarely has to use the scraper. I went to him forever and loved it, then my dental insurance decided he wasn't any good and I can't go to him anymore :(
Given that Flame was highly sophisticated, modular and individually targetable there is the potential that some machines had modules that had not yet been discovered and that could also be a reason to destruct - to prevent anyone from discovering more.
Well, that and faking GPS over a wide area is notoriously difficult. Simple boxes that put out properly corrected spoofed GPS for a single point in space have just recently come down to the $500,000 mark. Making it work over a wide area is very, very tough without a multitude of jammers in different locations around the target all very precisely coordinated.
This.
I have to write some manuals, etc sometimes that are very likely to never be read by humans, and just scanned by a computer for relevant info. It still has to be in human readable format in case the scan fails, or a human wants more info. But in general, I find it incredibly de-motivating to write good sentences or go back and polish my work when I know that it's likely to never be read.
And this is for my job where they pay me money. I can't imagine how de-motivating it would be to students.
This is my big problem with education currently. When I went through school, it was very, very easy to tell what was important to the adults (and as they shoved more portables and temp teachers into the school, it became very obvious that it wasn't education). As such, I paid less and less attention and cared less and less. More standardized testing was the same thing; if all that mattered to the admins was passing that silly test, then why care about anything but that? As a result, more goofing around in class. Going to where the teacher doesn't even freakin' look at your papers?!? My god, how ridiculously demotivating to students.