I have both a FireTV stick and a Roku 2. I find the Roku crashes less and generally the same applications seem more stable on the Roku than the FireTV stick. That's only one data point, but there you have it.
That seemed small to me given the number of people signing petitions these days. The reason for it is that these are the people who signed the letter when it was originally drafted. There's no provision to add your own name to this letter, which is kind of too bad, because I'd sign on to it if I could. In this day and age, I wonder if having "only" 14 signatories to a letter (who aren't well known in some relevant field) detracts from the power of the message.
Yes and yes. It fills a need for content aggregation/summary better than any other technology, especially for tracking low volume/high quality sources.
Apropos of nothing, the recent ad placements on/. really, really suck. They cover so much content and take up so much screen real estate. I don't begrudge any site the need for ads, but seriously, it makes me much less likely to visit the site.
Over the last five years life expectancies in the U.S. have gone up, so I presume you're looking for something that happened five years ago to make overall life expectancies go up, right? Or does your twisted logic only work one way?
I also remember something called "portscan" that was part of the FireWall Tool Kit (fwtk). If I recall correctly, I was using it as early as 1993. I don't recall by how much it predated my use.
I presume the reason startups with a $1B valuation are called "unicorns" is because they're ostensibly rare, but if we were seeing 20 new ones each quarter in recent years, I propose "raccoons" would be a more apt name.
You do mention driving, but I'm going to assume you're not operating your phone or laptop while you're actually driving. If this is not a valid assumption, then don't do that. I'm assuming at the very least that if you're in a motor vehicle, when you're operating your device the vehicle is stopped and not in gear. You state, "even the brightest Samsungs, Motorolas, and LGs I've seen cannot hold a candle to the summer sun north of Seattle." One other thing there is a lot of in the area north of Seattle is trees. Put one between you and the sun. Problem solved. If that's not enough, throw a towel over both your head and the device. If it was good enough for Douglas Adams, it's good enough for me. If that's not sufficient, you could bring your device down here and try to use it in the less well vegetated parts of the Mojave Desert, at which point I'm betting that the Seattle sun wouldn't seem so bad.
There is something to this. Nonetheless, I continue to be surprised that on rare occasion the FCC actually, you know, makes decisions that benefit the end-user and not the huge corporations that produce the majority of the commissioners and give them high priced jobs once they leave government service. Back in *my* day, this never happened. I'll take a small victory.
MS in has recently shown interest in listening to the community and it's important we keep prying them for that information so that we can eventually feel at ease about what's happening.
I approve of modding this to +5, but only in the category "Funny".
If you read the articles, this is the approach both the original research authors and Phil Plait have taken. It's most likely something mundane that we haven't seen before, but unlike most of what we observe, it's unusual enough that we can't yet rule out something more exotic. While no doubt silly people will misinterpret this, to me, the actual scientists who have commented on this have done so responsibly.
... and if the star had one significantly sized periodic dip in it's luminosity, that would be a plausible explanation. However, that's not what we see. We see a lot of different sized dips with no apparent periodicity so far. It's not one brown dwarf. Do you honestly think that professional astronomers wouldn't have considered this possibility before publishing their findings?
Cepheids (and other variables) have well known and well studied light curves (luminosity as a function of time). This star's light curve shows no resemblance to any type of pulsating variable star. It's not a Cepeid. It's also not an RR Lyrae, RV Tauri, or Mira type variable star. So, it's not surprising that nobody has suggested this is a Cepheid.
True, but for there to be frequent occultations, there would then need to be a lot of these chunks, much larger and denser than we see in our own asteroid belt, Kuiper belt, or Oort cloud. While this is certainly theoretically possible, it's hard to imagine how so much mass could form in such a configuration.
There are possibilities, but there are observational problems with all the most obvious ones. For example, if the star were surrounded by a large gas cloud, we'd expect to see an excess of stellar energy in the infrared. As Plait explains, we don't see that.
Okay, the bit about how many folks wouldn't report a security breach is disturbing, but what's the fixation with updating passwords? I've been working in computer security for decades, and I almost never update passwords unless I'm required to or there is an incident. I'd much rather have my users pick strong passwords and not change them often than pick weak passwords because I insist they change them often. Sure, it's not just an either/or, but on the list of my concerns about system security, how frequently users update their passwords ranks WAAAAY down on the list.
Wait, these things were discovered like a hundred years ago. They haven't finished translating them? All the folks who know ancient Greek have better things to do? Like what?
Not so easy. What if Apple is adding wasted space to their OS distributions in order to coerce/trick customers into upgrading the older, lower capacity devices? Bear in mind that I don't know that they are, but I think it's certainly okay to pose the question if the larger space required by the newer operating systems is actually being used by new features or not. It may not be illegal for them to do so, but it's certainly morally questionable, and if they're doing this, I'd at least like to know.
Everything you say is true, but at least having such a forum where one can get some support is better than not, and better than having that pseudo-support scattered across a dozen boards over the Internet. Doesn't excuse such lazy behavior, of course. Generally, if a company is providing an expensive product for which I need support, and then provides crappy support, I'll be looking for an excuse to try a competitor's product next time out. You might think that this would lead companies to upgrade their support, but it doesn't seem to.
One of the big problems is that most of that company's customers are idiots, so it's a huge money sink to constantly answer their silly questions with expensive, highly trained support people. So, if a producer is using the forum to weed out the Tier 1 "Would it work better if I plug it in?" crowd while jumping in and helping out when someone has a real problem, then I guess I don't have a problem with it. If such a forum is viewed as a replacement for support, then I'll likely be looking at competing products next time.
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I have both a FireTV stick and a Roku 2. I find the Roku crashes less and generally the same applications seem more stable on the Roku than the FireTV stick. That's only one data point, but there you have it.
I consider my eyesight to be valuable, so the only direct viewing of the eclipse I'll be doing is through a piece of shade 14 welding glass.
Oh yeah? Define 'asshole'. I dare you.
Everyone who's not me.
That seemed small to me given the number of people signing petitions these days. The reason for it is that these are the people who signed the letter when it was originally drafted. There's no provision to add your own name to this letter, which is kind of too bad, because I'd sign on to it if I could. In this day and age, I wonder if having "only" 14 signatories to a letter (who aren't well known in some relevant field) detracts from the power of the message.
Yes and yes. It fills a need for content aggregation/summary better than any other technology, especially for tracking low volume/high quality sources.
Apropos of nothing, the recent ad placements on /. really, really suck. They cover so much content and take up so much screen real estate. I don't begrudge any site the need for ads, but seriously, it makes me much less likely to visit the site.
Over the last five years life expectancies in the U.S. have gone up, so I presume you're looking for something that happened five years ago to make overall life expectancies go up, right? Or does your twisted logic only work one way?
I also remember something called "portscan" that was part of the FireWall Tool Kit (fwtk). If I recall correctly, I was using it as early as 1993. I don't recall by how much it predated my use.
Stay classy.
I'm a little concerned that the system still uses 8" floppies. I'm much more concerned it uses 90's era (or even contemporary) Microsoft products.
I presume the reason startups with a $1B valuation are called "unicorns" is because they're ostensibly rare, but if we were seeing 20 new ones each quarter in recent years, I propose "raccoons" would be a more apt name.
You do mention driving, but I'm going to assume you're not operating your phone or laptop while you're actually driving. If this is not a valid assumption, then don't do that. I'm assuming at the very least that if you're in a motor vehicle, when you're operating your device the vehicle is stopped and not in gear. You state, "even the brightest Samsungs, Motorolas, and LGs I've seen cannot hold a candle to the summer sun north of Seattle." One other thing there is a lot of in the area north of Seattle is trees. Put one between you and the sun. Problem solved. If that's not enough, throw a towel over both your head and the device. If it was good enough for Douglas Adams, it's good enough for me. If that's not sufficient, you could bring your device down here and try to use it in the less well vegetated parts of the Mojave Desert, at which point I'm betting that the Seattle sun wouldn't seem so bad.
There is something to this. Nonetheless, I continue to be surprised that on rare occasion the FCC actually, you know, makes decisions that benefit the end-user and not the huge corporations that produce the majority of the commissioners and give them high priced jobs once they leave government service. Back in *my* day, this never happened. I'll take a small victory.
MS in has recently shown interest in listening to the community and it's important we keep prying them for that information so that we can eventually feel at ease about what's happening.
I approve of modding this to +5, but only in the category "Funny".
If you read the articles, this is the approach both the original research authors and Phil Plait have taken. It's most likely something mundane that we haven't seen before, but unlike most of what we observe, it's unusual enough that we can't yet rule out something more exotic. While no doubt silly people will misinterpret this, to me, the actual scientists who have commented on this have done so responsibly.
... and if the star had one significantly sized periodic dip in it's luminosity, that would be a plausible explanation. However, that's not what we see. We see a lot of different sized dips with no apparent periodicity so far. It's not one brown dwarf. Do you honestly think that professional astronomers wouldn't have considered this possibility before publishing their findings?
Cepheids (and other variables) have well known and well studied light curves (luminosity as a function of time). This star's light curve shows no resemblance to any type of pulsating variable star. It's not a Cepeid. It's also not an RR Lyrae, RV Tauri, or Mira type variable star. So, it's not surprising that nobody has suggested this is a Cepheid.
True, but for there to be frequent occultations, there would then need to be a lot of these chunks, much larger and denser than we see in our own asteroid belt, Kuiper belt, or Oort cloud. While this is certainly theoretically possible, it's hard to imagine how so much mass could form in such a configuration.
There are possibilities, but there are observational problems with all the most obvious ones. For example, if the star were surrounded by a large gas cloud, we'd expect to see an excess of stellar energy in the infrared. As Plait explains, we don't see that.
True enough. However, one thing we can trust them to do is make an expensive games console.
... just not very clearly.
Okay, the bit about how many folks wouldn't report a security breach is disturbing, but what's the fixation with updating passwords? I've been working in computer security for decades, and I almost never update passwords unless I'm required to or there is an incident. I'd much rather have my users pick strong passwords and not change them often than pick weak passwords because I insist they change them often. Sure, it's not just an either/or, but on the list of my concerns about system security, how frequently users update their passwords ranks WAAAAY down on the list.
Wait, these things were discovered like a hundred years ago. They haven't finished translating them? All the folks who know ancient Greek have better things to do? Like what?
Not so easy. What if Apple is adding wasted space to their OS distributions in order to coerce/trick customers into upgrading the older, lower capacity devices? Bear in mind that I don't know that they are, but I think it's certainly okay to pose the question if the larger space required by the newer operating systems is actually being used by new features or not. It may not be illegal for them to do so, but it's certainly morally questionable, and if they're doing this, I'd at least like to know.
Everything you say is true, but at least having such a forum where one can get some support is better than not, and better than having that pseudo-support scattered across a dozen boards over the Internet. Doesn't excuse such lazy behavior, of course. Generally, if a company is providing an expensive product for which I need support, and then provides crappy support, I'll be looking for an excuse to try a competitor's product next time out. You might think that this would lead companies to upgrade their support, but it doesn't seem to. One of the big problems is that most of that company's customers are idiots, so it's a huge money sink to constantly answer their silly questions with expensive, highly trained support people. So, if a producer is using the forum to weed out the Tier 1 "Would it work better if I plug it in?" crowd while jumping in and helping out when someone has a real problem, then I guess I don't have a problem with it. If such a forum is viewed as a replacement for support, then I'll likely be looking at competing products next time.
... and he'll fix it for free. That will be taken into account in the initial bid, as the author suggested.