Overkill isn't a problem in itself. It's not like the extra power is doing any harm.
Additionally, you'd be potentially opening yourself up to a world of hurt since your netbook, being a general-purpose computing device at heart, is going to be more vulnerable to outside attack than a purpose-built router/gateway/wireless access point.
How exactly? The software packages in the summary are specially designed for routing. It's not like the S/W becomes more vulnerable just by running on a faster CPU
I reckon there are a lot of people looking for "objectionable" pages and censoring them, wonder if these are counted. I wouldn't expect it to be a large fraction of 2 M though, unless it happens on a more local level than for all of China.
Unrelated, but what's this talk about "clients"? do they do it for paying customers too?
Wait, so if tech doesn't eliminate the need for work -- making the total burden of sustaining humanity lighter -- what are we doing it for? Is it all just a big game then?
I did have one in my previous laptop (one of the first "Momentus" drives). It's *great* to have 500 GB but even that got too tight. This was four years ago, flash only wasn't an option for that capacity. The hard drive itself was also reasonably fast, even without the flash.
There are some clear disadvantages: - It's always spinning and making as much noise and vibrations as a HDD - Uses more power than a HDD or SSD - Should be as careful with the laptop as for HDD when shutting down or hibernating - Significantly slower than SSD only - Some random access data can flush out the useful stuff from the cache. My case was large data files from sensors which I read from.
Overall not a bad option. I'd consider sticking the 512GB momentus into my current laptop if I could, to replace a 120GB SSD. But definitely some drawbacks
No no, don't worry about the intel one. For Linux there's bcache and flashcache. Like with any multi-drive RAID-ish system, better to go with a plain software solution than a software solution hidden in a proprietary driver. There is also ZFS with support for read cache devices, but you won't get great boot speed because it's not persistent across reboots (there is a patch in one version of ZFS). Basically a bigger RAM cache that also doesn't get wiped out by applications
The best part was when LavaBit sent them the SSL key, as a 4 point font printout:-)
That seems dangerous! While it may not be possible to read, there are not so many possibilities for each symbol (A-Z, 0-9), and one can determine data by trying different letters and seeing what the result is. This is similar to using "blur" functions in photo editors to censor things, which can also be defeated when the space of inputs is limited. It's much easier than a brute force attack because each symbol can be determined semi-independently. [I think there was a story on slashdot a LONG time ago, but can't find it]
The "Classic" design (drop down on top of story column) is pretty decent. I get the same amount of text on a page as in the old slashdot. The comment system has been covered above, I agree with everyone that it's too narrow. Bordering on a "WTF". Also, I think the font is about half a pt too small.
The images; I don't think most of us slashdot readers come here to experience beauty. But if they're relevant then images are good. E.g. if it's some new gadget like the steam controller, then I wouldn't mind a picture. However, please don't just stick stock images on the stories, and keep them of the "classic" front page.
If someone could offer me some help; I see the new page with the font "Nimbus Sans L Regular", and it's hard to read... Do you get the same font (maybe only on linux)
I'm surprised so many people complain about this. I agree that it's too narrow, but it sounds like people with 1920x1080 are actually browsing the current slashdot in full screen mode? Just trying it; It doesn't help me fit a lot more comments, lots of wasted space because people don't write long enough paragraphs. I seem to gravitate around a window width of ~ 1200 pixels, which is less than half the width of this 27" monitor
Sure it solves the problem. No more spam for the victim, the stalker may find better things to do, or maybe he doesn't even realise he's blocked and continues wasting his own time but nobody else's.
The police are notoriously bad at dealing with these things. IMO, that's not bad. The stalker is really a spammer at worst. The police can't just go and extrapolate that and arrest him for ponentially being a murderer in the future. I was being teased by someone for a period of months while at school, I'd love to chuck the police on them then, but I realise now that's not the way I want society to be. If every little bothersome action is criminal, then we will literally live in a police state. The police will control all.
I'm not saying that all stalking must be legal, just that we must tolerate a small level of annoying people in order to have a free society.
If LinkedIn was an open system, the victim (in a broad sense of the word) could have implemented filtering on the client side, and there would be no problem (go open systems!)
The main problem is that electrons of such high energy produce X-rays when they smash into something (or are accelerated), and X-rays are dangerous. One could imagine home X-ray scanners, if we could get through the regulatory clusterfuck. Maybe one could make a weapon, if the beam intesity was ramped up by placing many of htese in parallel.
Particle physicists are planning the next thing after LHC, and it's a linear electron-positron collider. The device only claims to accelerate electrons to 1 GeV in the best case, however, and the "International Linear Collider requires more than 1 TeV beams
Maybe now that there's a demonstrable military use we will finally see some breakthroughs in the energy storage business. [don't really think it's that bad, but it had to be said]
One difference I can think of between electromagnetic radiation and sound waves is that the former are transverse waves and the latter are longitudinal waves. Does that make much of a difference for these purposes?
It's been explained already by Solandri but I'll give it a try. The sensor measures the displacement of the air, not the pressure. The GP post argues that it measures the vector sum of the displacement caused by all sounds, and this is correct. I imagine a small light ball that's magnetically suspended and being pushed around by the air, and the movement of the ball is recorded (this is probably not how it's done, I imagine it would have a highly non-linear frequency response). If there are two sounds from different directions with different frequencies, you could easily tell them apart -- e.g. the ball is moving up and down fast, and left and right slowly. If the sources have the same frequency, or it's just some broadband noise, you can't tell them apart. You could probably do it easily with two vector sensors and relative timing, but the whole point was that you can do it with one sensor in plausible conditions.
As for electromagnetism / sound, you are right that the transverse/longitudinal distinction makes a difference. The air displacement is analogous to the electric field. An RF antenna sort of measures the projection of the electric field onto some given axis, and an omnidirectional antenna measures approximately the absolute value of the electric field. (A mic may measure pressure, not displacement, but these are alternative variables for discribing the same wave). An analogous RF detector to the sound vector sensor would be three small linear antennae pointing in linearly independent directions, measuring the x,y and z components of the electric field as functions of time. The transverse / longitudinal distinction comes in here: the EM waves have an additional degree of freedom, namely polarisation. The E field can point in any direction perpendicular to the direction of propagation. Given the polarisation vector you can thus only constrain the vector to the source to a plane.
It's not even incompetence. Flash, Adobe Reader and MS Office have had bugs just as serious as the Java ones. Unfortunately, this is to be expected in any software. I think the reason people go crazy about Java is the complete apathy Oracle has shown when it comes to fixing bugs. The patches have been scandalously late and some haven't actually fixed the problems.
(maybe an additional factor is that people feel they wouldn't lose a lot if all applets were removed)
Yeah I came to say the same. There's a large body of simulations and illustrations out there; code that's just as good as the day it was made. Just last night I read about phasors, and two of the pages linked from Wikipedia had applets.
Scientists have better thing to do than to re-write their teaching aids every five years. And I don't even think HTML5 is on par with Java for that kind of code.
So, as long as they stick with the warnings, it's fine. The old code will work, and people will click past the red warnings. Maybe it will scare off scientists from making new Java applets, and we'll lose out. Maybe they will use proprietary products like MATLAB and Mathematica. A fraction of the applets could be replaced by plain videos without any loss.
THIS is why the name of the new console is idiotic. Had me fooled many times when people talked about the Xbox one, now I had to try to figure out if you meant the first Xbox or the Xbox One. Seems people found a way, and call the new one Xbone:)
If we are to learn from past behaviour, there will definitely be no option. The Gnome people seem to believe that any optional feature, no matter how well hidden, will confuse "new users". Maybe it's just laziness; after all it's another code path to test, debug and accept bug reports for.
Slightly unrelated, but I have to commend them for improving the touch experience -- sort of hedging our collecive Linux bet in case the world turns all-touch. It's just a shame that the power users get fudged in the process
NaCl is definitely better than NPAPI. Can you spell "sandbox"?
Unfortunately, the major purpose of plugins is to break out of the sandbox, to access things like sockets, webcams, local files, hardware information, etc. I haven't seen many plugins for the purpose of running speedy code.
It's modded funny, but it seems like a fine way to get DRM-free ebooks, just like you can get superior quality music by ripping CDs vs. downloading MP3s. OCR software has advanced recently, and if you have an automatic book scanner it may not be that much of a hassle. Not only do you get a DRM-free copy in any format, you also bypass the legal hassles with downloaded goods (often can't legally give away, sell or pass on as inheritance).
Maybe that should be US companies: not even once (I'm not American, so not anti-patriotic). How about the power adapter for my new Dell? Even the adapter that came with the laptop sometimes registers as "invalid", and the PC *slows down*, even relative to how it runs on battery. Total DRM fail. It ruined an evening of playing games when I couldn't figure out what happened, and it continues to be an annoyance, when I have to unplug and re-plug the adapter. Never had such problems with the Lenovo.
And just look at the printer manufacturers and the DRM on ink cartridges. Compare to Samsung, which doesn't pull that junk.
Finally; Microsoft, product activation, you know it already.
I have a VM with a dedicated GPU for windows games. I'm a bit sad everytime I boot up the VM and play Dota 2, because it is on Linux too, but I get about 50 % better frame rates on windows (even vs. the same GPU assigned to native Linux). Also, they should be saying "Ubuntu", not linux, as they only offer a download for ubuntu. Have to have an ubuntu system in a chroot to use steam, and Ubuntu aren't too accommodating with supporting this, especially with the dbus stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Overkill isn't a problem in itself. It's not like the extra power is doing any harm.
Additionally, you'd be potentially opening yourself up to a world of hurt since your netbook, being a general-purpose computing device at heart, is going to be more vulnerable to outside attack than a purpose-built router/gateway/wireless access point.
How exactly? The software packages in the summary are specially designed for routing. It's not like the S/W becomes more vulnerable just by running on a faster CPU
I reckon there are a lot of people looking for "objectionable" pages and censoring them, wonder if these are counted. I wouldn't expect it to be a large fraction of 2 M though, unless it happens on a more local level than for all of China.
Unrelated, but what's this talk about "clients"? do they do it for paying customers too?
Wait, so if tech doesn't eliminate the need for work -- making the total burden of sustaining humanity lighter -- what are we doing it for? Is it all just a big game then?
I did have one in my previous laptop (one of the first "Momentus" drives). It's *great* to have 500 GB but even that got too tight. This was four years ago, flash only wasn't an option for that capacity. The hard drive itself was also reasonably fast, even without the flash.
There are some clear disadvantages:
- It's always spinning and making as much noise and vibrations as a HDD
- Uses more power than a HDD or SSD
- Should be as careful with the laptop as for HDD when shutting down or hibernating
- Significantly slower than SSD only
- Some random access data can flush out the useful stuff from the cache. My case was large data files from sensors which I read from.
Overall not a bad option. I'd consider sticking the 512GB momentus into my current laptop if I could, to replace a 120GB SSD. But definitely some drawbacks
No no, don't worry about the intel one. For Linux there's bcache and flashcache. Like with any multi-drive RAID-ish system, better to go with a plain software solution than a software solution hidden in a proprietary driver. There is also ZFS with support for read cache devices, but you won't get great boot speed because it's not persistent across reboots (there is a patch in one version of ZFS). Basically a bigger RAM cache that also doesn't get wiped out by applications
The best part was when LavaBit sent them the SSL key, as a 4 point font printout :-)
That seems dangerous! While it may not be possible to read, there are not so many possibilities for each symbol (A-Z, 0-9), and one can determine data by trying different letters and seeing what the result is. This is similar to using "blur" functions in photo editors to censor things, which can also be defeated when the space of inputs is limited. It's much easier than a brute force attack because each symbol can be determined semi-independently. [I think there was a story on slashdot a LONG time ago, but can't find it]
Even if Tor was compromised, I doubt they would use it for something relatively "minor" like this case.
Unless, of course, someone was about to leak how Tor was compromised anyway -- we will see if this happens in the near future
The "Classic" design (drop down on top of story column) is pretty decent. I get the same amount of text on a page as in the old slashdot. The comment system has been covered above, I agree with everyone that it's too narrow. Bordering on a "WTF". Also, I think the font is about half a pt too small.
The images; I don't think most of us slashdot readers come here to experience beauty. But if they're relevant then images are good. E.g. if it's some new gadget like the steam controller, then I wouldn't mind a picture. However, please don't just stick stock images on the stories, and keep them of the "classic" front page.
If someone could offer me some help; I see the new page with the font "Nimbus Sans L Regular", and it's hard to read... Do you get the same font (maybe only on linux)
I'm surprised so many people complain about this. I agree that it's too narrow, but it sounds like people with 1920x1080 are actually browsing the current slashdot in full screen mode? Just trying it; It doesn't help me fit a lot more comments, lots of wasted space because people don't write long enough paragraphs. I seem to gravitate around a window width of ~ 1200 pixels, which is less than half the width of this 27" monitor
Did Barbara "interface" at full-duplex speed? (sorry...)
Sure it solves the problem. No more spam for the victim, the stalker may find better things to do, or maybe he doesn't even realise he's blocked and continues wasting his own time but nobody else's.
The police are notoriously bad at dealing with these things. IMO, that's not bad. The stalker is really a spammer at worst. The police can't just go and extrapolate that and arrest him for ponentially being a murderer in the future. I was being teased by someone for a period of months while at school, I'd love to chuck the police on them then, but I realise now that's not the way I want society to be. If every little bothersome action is criminal, then we will literally live in a police state. The police will control all.
I'm not saying that all stalking must be legal, just that we must tolerate a small level of annoying people in order to have a free society.
If LinkedIn was an open system, the victim (in a broad sense of the word) could have implemented filtering on the client side, and there would be no problem (go open systems!)
The main problem is that electrons of such high energy produce X-rays when they smash into something (or are accelerated), and X-rays are dangerous. One could imagine home X-ray scanners, if we could get through the regulatory clusterfuck. Maybe one could make a weapon, if the beam intesity was ramped up by placing many of htese in parallel.
Particle physicists are planning the next thing after LHC, and it's a linear electron-positron collider. The device only claims to accelerate electrons to 1 GeV in the best case, however, and the "International Linear Collider requires more than 1 TeV beams
Maybe now that there's a demonstrable military use we will finally see some breakthroughs in the energy storage business. [don't really think it's that bad, but it had to be said]
One difference I can think of between electromagnetic radiation and sound waves is that the former are transverse waves and the latter are longitudinal waves. Does that make much of a difference for these purposes?
It's been explained already by Solandri but I'll give it a try. The sensor measures the displacement of the air, not the pressure. The GP post argues that it measures the vector sum of the displacement caused by all sounds, and this is correct. I imagine a small light ball that's magnetically suspended and being pushed around by the air, and the movement of the ball is recorded (this is probably not how it's done, I imagine it would have a highly non-linear frequency response). If there are two sounds from different directions with different frequencies, you could easily tell them apart -- e.g. the ball is moving up and down fast, and left and right slowly. If the sources have the same frequency, or it's just some broadband noise, you can't tell them apart. You could probably do it easily with two vector sensors and relative timing, but the whole point was that you can do it with one sensor in plausible conditions.
As for electromagnetism / sound, you are right that the transverse/longitudinal distinction makes a difference. The air displacement is analogous to the electric field. An RF antenna sort of measures the projection of the electric field onto some given axis, and an omnidirectional antenna measures approximately the absolute value of the electric field. (A mic may measure pressure, not displacement, but these are alternative variables for discribing the same wave). An analogous RF detector to the sound vector sensor would be three small linear antennae pointing in linearly independent directions, measuring the x,y and z components of the electric field as functions of time. The transverse / longitudinal distinction comes in here: the EM waves have an additional degree of freedom, namely polarisation. The E field can point in any direction perpendicular to the direction of propagation. Given the polarisation vector you can thus only constrain the vector to the source to a plane.
It's not even incompetence. Flash, Adobe Reader and MS Office have had bugs just as serious as the Java ones. Unfortunately, this is to be expected in any software. I think the reason people go crazy about Java is the complete apathy Oracle has shown when it comes to fixing bugs. The patches have been scandalously late and some haven't actually fixed the problems.
(maybe an additional factor is that people feel they wouldn't lose a lot if all applets were removed)
Yeah I came to say the same. There's a large body of simulations and illustrations out there; code that's just as good as the day it was made. Just last night I read about phasors, and two of the pages linked from Wikipedia had applets.
Scientists have better thing to do than to re-write their teaching aids every five years. And I don't even think HTML5 is on par with Java for that kind of code.
So, as long as they stick with the warnings, it's fine. The old code will work, and people will click past the red warnings. Maybe it will scare off scientists from making new Java applets, and we'll lose out. Maybe they will use proprietary products like MATLAB and Mathematica. A fraction of the applets could be replaced by plain videos without any loss.
The XBOX 1 lost [...]
THIS is why the name of the new console is idiotic. Had me fooled many times when people talked about the Xbox one, now I had to try to figure out if you meant the first Xbox or the Xbox One. Seems people found a way, and call the new one Xbone :)
If we are to learn from past behaviour, there will definitely be no option. The Gnome people seem to believe that any optional feature, no matter how well hidden, will confuse "new users". Maybe it's just laziness; after all it's another code path to test, debug and accept bug reports for.
Slightly unrelated, but I have to commend them for improving the touch experience -- sort of hedging our collecive Linux bet in case the world turns all-touch. It's just a shame that the power users get fudged in the process
and a 10 micrometre stack of CDs could store 5.8 MB of data, that's 4 x 10^-7 times the data contained in books at the library of Congress
NaCl is definitely better than NPAPI. Can you spell "sandbox"?
Unfortunately, the major purpose of plugins is to break out of the sandbox, to access things like sockets, webcams, local files, hardware information, etc. I haven't seen many plugins for the purpose of running speedy code.
The FAA is part of the US government. Hence the F.
For the NSA, the "F" is hidden, but it quickly becomes obvious if you type something like "terror bomb" in a private e#NO CARRIER
It's modded funny, but it seems like a fine way to get DRM-free ebooks, just like you can get superior quality music by ripping CDs vs. downloading MP3s. OCR software has advanced recently, and if you have an automatic book scanner it may not be that much of a hassle. Not only do you get a DRM-free copy in any format, you also bypass the legal hassles with downloaded goods (often can't legally give away, sell or pass on as inheritance).
Apple: Not Even Once
Maybe that should be US companies: not even once (I'm not American, so not anti-patriotic). How about the power adapter for my new Dell? Even the adapter that came with the laptop sometimes registers as "invalid", and the PC *slows down*, even relative to how it runs on battery. Total DRM fail. It ruined an evening of playing games when I couldn't figure out what happened, and it continues to be an annoyance, when I have to unplug and re-plug the adapter. Never had such problems with the Lenovo.
And just look at the printer manufacturers and the DRM on ink cartridges. Compare to Samsung, which doesn't pull that junk.
Finally; Microsoft, product activation, you know it already.
I have a VM with a dedicated GPU for windows games. I'm a bit sad everytime I boot up the VM and play Dota 2, because it is on Linux too, but I get about 50 % better frame rates on windows (even vs. the same GPU assigned to native Linux). Also, they should be saying "Ubuntu", not linux, as they only offer a download for ubuntu. Have to have an ubuntu system in a chroot to use steam, and Ubuntu aren't too accommodating with supporting this, especially with the dbus stuff.