Although I have a high user ID, I have been reading since the late 1990s. Thank you for reaching out to your readers for feedback.
I often use older devices (~3 GHz) to view your site. Rendering Slashdot's web pages on such machines is usually painfully slow. Viewing web pages in the dial-up days, on much slower machines, was less arduous. I assume this has to do with the Javascript filtering of the hundreds of posts (I'm an embedded programmer, not a web coder). Can anything be done about this? It's a sour trend that the machines over time get faster and faster, but the ability to read text is getting slower and slower. I figured a tech site could actually do something about such silliness.
As a postscript to fellow users, what huge advantage does Unicode bring? Doesn't it have many downsides?
I cut my teeth in a radio shop in the late 1980s; I left several years later. I know and understand why they were converting the getting-crowded cellular system to digital back then (bandwidth --> $), but why did the municipal/commercial radios follow suit when the transmissions I hear are of such terrible quality versus the analog I remember?
And if your answer involves crowded bandwidth, I ask, is it really? I have seen graphics describing the use of radio bands, but every time I've had the opportunity to use a scanner and poke around over the years, I find very little in my suburb of a major U.S. city. Haven't a major portion of businesses gone to cellular communication anyway?
They say they are concerned about the number of annual road deaths. Aren't most caused by people who can't afford autonomous cars (teens, seniors, white trash drunks, etc.)? (And no, an autonomous car with a steering wheel can never be cheaper than the cheapest non-autonomous car.)
Isn't obvious that this technology will only work in areas with great climes and clear roads (a fraction of the country)?
Isn't this another one of those situations where we ALL pay (suffer) for something that only a fraction of the people will have/use?
Shouldn't we permanently fix the hacking problem (my old microwave oven is un-hackable) before putting millions of people's lives/time at stake?
Solyndra 2.0, I suppose... Yes, autonomous vehicles have their place perhaps, but that place is not on everyone's dime.
I post this for future generations to read, not some of my loony, hype-swallowing contemporaries who can't see beyond the end of their cell phones.
I read a lot on the Internet and off, mostly technical stuff. I find much is poorly written, in the end only conveying a confusing or pointless message. Somehow, though, I've noticed that often I am skipping over entire paragraphs that my eyes "don't want to read". I assumed it was some sort of temporary mental laziness, so I would force myself to go back and painstakingly read the text, sentence-by-sentence, only to find again and again that my eyes were correct! The text was indeed a waste of my time!
I'm guessing there's a lower, faster comprehension taking place before my full consciousness receives the messages. It's fascinating, and I'm glad you posted about what I thought was only in my head.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw
I agree with the other negative posters, recall Google Glass et. al. to "see" through the hype. This already died once in the late 1990s. At that time, my friend commented, 'Virtual reality is just video games really close to your face.'
I don't believe the government should ever use tax breaks to encourage anything. Such incentives are often abused, and later we all pay for it. And any mass benefits are dubious to begin with.
If someone wants solar panels, 'let them eat eat solar panels'. But it shouldn't be on our tax dime the way I see it. Our history is rife with pointless breaks/expenditures.
Disincentives, I can understand and sometimes support.
Can someone tell me WHY we need such a system at all? I doubt that we are importing only once-in-100-years mega-geniuses, so is it worth all the cost and problems and cheating and vigilance and unemployment? I don't see how...
I have learned to use Afrin to get all the way through a bad cold, but then when I'm feeling better, I use pills to recover from the Afrin dependency, which is usually brief.
PS - I have dramatically reduced my nasal issues in life once I started taking very good care of my teeth. It never dawned on me that germs have 8 hours every night to travel a short, wet, warm path to my sinuses.
Looking at the graduation rate, I think they have bigger concerns.
This may be slightly off topic, but I always wondered whether high school graduation should be mandated by law, with the punishment being either a school camp or house arrest until the degree is obtained. I'd imagine the betterment of the younger people would give them more options in life and benefit society.
Don't kid yourself people, the much larger issue will be when these vehicles significantly slow traffic daily, everywhere, when they attempt to respond to the infinite number of scenarios that occur on the roadways.
It's "corner cases" all the way down... I agree with your post, but you stopped short (I couldn't resist).
It's not just unexpected human behavior on the road, but also unexpected, well, everything. I would say that I see something unusual that significantly affects driving just about every other month. Just off the top of my head I have had to deal with the following in the last few months alone:
-- There is local road construction that closed a two-way road, turning it into one lane/direction at a time, controlled by a human construction flagger. How could a GPS-driven vehicle possibly know what to do there, intentionally driving in the wrong lane for a half mile? What would it think the speed limit is if the signs were obscured? And the human with the "Slow" sign was standing well into our lane, causing us to drive around him. Would the (autonomous vehicle) AV just stop? Further into that single lane there were construction cones cutting our lane down to three quarters of a lane, effectively forcing us to drive along a rough, but paved, shoulder. Would an AV have any clue what to do or would it accidentally ditch itself, utterly blocking traffic until a tow truck came?
-- A highway accident occurred in front of the car in front of me, where the car smashed into the wall head on, perpendicular to traffic flow. The first clue I got that something was amiss was its screeching tires followed by the sideways car entering my peripheral vision. What would an AV do there?
-- More local road construction caused a newly formed temporary dip in the road. The construction people put a sign near it alerting drivers to that fact. I assume the AV would drive over it at the speed limit sense it can't read English.
-- There is a "no turn on red" sign near my house which disallows such turns at certain hours on certain days. Again, can the AV decipher English?
I have been driving for thirty years. And I was learning about the world fifteen years before that. An AV can never be that smart about everything. I am an embedded software engineer, and it always tickles me how many engineers believe they can think of everything in advance. They rarely get called on when they can't. How does the song go, "They let the monkey go and blame the monkey wrench." Here are other scenarios I have encountered; have the AV designers thought of these; will you bet your life on it?
-- A live power wire on the street after a storm.
-- A small, long tree branch, which looks like a live power wire, also lying across the street.
-- Is it true that GPS navigation becomes flaky around tall buildings?
-- I was once caught in a torrential downpour where the road was suddenly and completely invisible. I could only navigate because I knew the roadside landmark's well.
-- I have been run completely off the road three times (usually by cell phone drivers). I saved myself and my car each time by swerving onto the shoulder.
-- There was a raging car fire that I drove past. That he was so intense that it instantly warmed my face as I drove past at 40 miles an hour, even though the windows were rolled up.
-- I swerved violently on the highway to avoid being hit by a drunk from behind who was driving way over the speed limit.
-- I have seen roads completely washed out by rain to where it would be dangerous to attempt travel.
-- I have seen red fireworks shot off by amateurs in their driveways.
-- I have seen tumbleweeds cross the road in front of me.
-- I have seen a half dozen cars in ditches cluing me into the fact that black ice was ahead.
-- I have seen emergency vehicles racing to a scene, some with red lights that were visible over a mile away, and some where their lights were not visible until they were near (sirens from an unmarked car).
-- I drove on a local road that was littered with potholes. After months, I finally hit one so deep, I cracked a rim.
-- An open manhole (someone stole the cover for scrap).
I didn't take care of my teeth as well as I should have when I was younger. Coincidentally, I always had minor nasal issues, especially when I first woke up. I assumed that frequently stuffy and occasional bloody noses in the morning were just parts of life. After I grew older and started aggressively taking care of my teeth, all those problems disappeared at the same time, and those nasal issues turning into colds vanished. Further, they all show up again if, for some reason, I don't take of my teeth for a night or two.
It never dawned on me that there is a moist, 100-degree Fahrenheit tube of only a few inches that any germs could travel within the 8 hours of being horizontal that could lead to such nasal infections.
I wonder whether someone who is not disciplined to get enough sleep also does not take care of his mouth.
Although this isn't high-end gaming, I noticed a couple of interesting power measurements at work:
My 10-year old Dell desktop, running Windows XP and no anti-virus (AV) boots ~25% faster and draws ~30% less power overall (idle & taxed with performance software) than the new guy's new Dell laptop that runs Windows 7 & Norton AV. We can both run all the same software effectively (albeit all my versions are several years older), except that I have a different brand of PCB design software than he; I'm guessing if I ran his PCB program my computer might drag.
Also, my ball mouse draws 1/5 the power that his optical mouse does! That was a surprise, too. I wonder whether a ball mouse is a better idea for laptop users when it comes to extending battery life.
My single CRT drew 1/3 more power than an LCD. My new, micromanaging, pointy-haired boss forced me to toss it(?), and replace it with two LCD widescreens. So now I draw 50% MORE than my single CRT did. My productivity is unchanged. Sigh...
When I started reading this site in the late 1990s, I took "News For Nerds - Stuff That Matters" as "News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters", as in "This is technical news, stuff that doesn't matter to most people but does to us nerds (wink, wink)..."
"News For Nerds - Stuff That Matters" meaning "News For Nerds AND Stuff That Matters" doesn't make any sense (since hundreds of outlets already cover general news), and this was not how the site was run back then if I recall correctly.
Amen to the call quality. I was there when it "happened". My first technical job in my early 20s was installing car phones in the late 1980s. I worked my way up to service department manager. In the early 1990s I was given by the carrier a batch of these new-fangled digital cellular phones to give for free (worth thousands each) to our best customers as part of their nationwide beta test. My customers vehemently hated them - one wanted it removed immediately. They said things like "The voice sounds metallic." and "It sounds like I'm in a tunnel!", etc. Sound familiar?
I was told by my boss to tell the customers that software upgrades would fix such issues over time. That never happened. Today I loathe cellular phones at either end of my conversations. Even at that time, you could clearly see with an RF spectrum analyzer what was going on: the normal analog bandwidth for 1 call was being split into 3 calls, with quality being the trade-off. It's probably even worse today.
Phones/calls were very expensive back then; I remember the roaming rate for Los Angeles was $0.90 per minute. So it's no wonder that most folks today are unaware that the original cellular phone calls were just as good as a landline call - no awful distortion, no noticeable delay - I'm not exaggerating (assuming you had coverage, of course).
And, with the incredible amount of wasteful digital projects that consume human labor, I question whether we really NEED 140,000 new computer people each year. I'd say about half of the projects I have worked on within the last decade have been canceled before completion. Mine can't be the only company engaged in such misdirected waste. Do we really need so many Linux distributions? Does MS really need to shuffle the features around in its latest operating system? Why do the newer web browsers seem to work worse than their predecessors? How does craigslist.com work so well using, zOMG!, HTML with plain fonts? Do touchscreens need to be everywhere? Do automobiles need so many microprocessors and networks(?!) to where they are now at the point of dubious stability? Does anyone really think that the "Internet of things" is going to live up to its hype when anyone over the age of 40 remembers how we were already promised a Jetsons-like paradise in the late 1990s, when the Java virtual machine was going to connect our dishwasher to our toaster? VRML anyone? Virtual Boy (now called "Oculus Rift")?
It's like a thousand-pound man is asking for his second bag of potato chips when really he needs a diet.
1) A "whole house" fan. They are very nice if you're not super-sensitive to temperature (i.e., gotta have the AC on all the time); it's like an instant breeze from each window and can even cool the house down before turning on the pricey AC.
2) A fireplace insert that houses small fans itself. This also can save on the bills if you're in a woodsy area with much dead wood/branches.
3) I bought empty property and may put a custom house on it some day. My dream (which is not for everyone) is to wire it with 120 VAC AND a 12-volt DC bus to every room.
I think everyone is getting wrong, which is why solar hasn't taken off. Expensive inverters? Rows of costly batteries taking room in the basement? Hugely expensive solar panels? And major labor costs to put it all in?
I think the bigger home motors need to remain 120 VAC (refrigerators, etc.). Whereas many of our modern devices (televisions, etc.) could be run directly off of 12 VDC.
My plan would be this: Devise a standard, DC port (with circuit breaker) for each room. Throw a couple of $100 car batteries in the basement hooked to a DC breaker panel with the battery's own AC-adapter trickle power supply. Add $200 solar panels to the roof, etc., one-at-a-time, whenever I have the cash/mood, and connect each to the DC bus (with appropriate diodes everywhere). Add an external, weather-proof DC port too so that the family car can possibly connected for charging the car's dead battery, or, in reverse, partially running the house after a long power outage. (I experimented and found I could keep food chilled indefinitely during an outage by filling pots with ice from the local store, and stuffing the pots into the refrigerator. Just like they did over a century ago!)
Now here's part where being an electronics designer is required: Each electronic device would need to be internally modified so it accepts the 12 VDC. I know this is a dream for most people, but I look forward to a day (should I Kickstart it?) where such small devices accept 120 VAC OR 12 VDC. Then, the would be plug and play. Until the, I'll just have to mod my stuff myself (have already done in the past) or use those cheapo cigarette light inverters for automobiles.
I'm not trolling, but is XP that bad? I'm asking whether there is any vulnerability right now that would likely affect the average user?
Further, is XP worse than they'll eventually find 8 or 10 to be, especially with all the "cloud" nonsense? To me this seems like the devil you know versus the devil you don't, arguably FUD. Since hackers strive to be "profitable" in their endeavors, wouldn't they focus on the more popular OSes anyway?
I spent a bit of time in hardware design, too - you think its fair game to ask what pin 7 and pin 14 mean, generally, on TTL chips? if you have touched hardware at all, you'd know this, but I doubt even 10% of googlers would know it. I know it. why shouldn't they?
Amen, brother. Similarly, I switched from Lycos a decade+ ago because they dropped Boolean searching (some of us are power users!). I used Yahoo! next, but it was painful on dial-up with all the extra junk on their home page. Then I came across this new, misspelled site called "Google". I loved it; but lately it has been wearing on me as it panders more and more to the masses.
Note to Google: We nerds might be in the minority, but it is WE who direct the non-nerds as to how to set up their digital devices, avoid online trouble, choose their search engines, etc. Don't ruin it for us. I already started to keep one eye open for another search place, because I fear it'll only get worse.
I know this is slightly off-topic, but I found this surprising. About twenty years ago my main PC was a 66 MHz machine with 8 MB of RAM running Windows 95. I was learning to use the 3D graphics program "trueSpace" and I created a scene that was 11 MB big when saved to the hard drive as a wireframe. When I tried to render the scene, the hard drive thrashed for ten hours straight, and the scene was still only halfway rendered. Later, I bought 16 MB of RAM (if I recall for ~$400[!]), bringing my total up to 24 MB. That same scene rendered completely in twenty minutes. That was an fascinating lesson.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I have a high user ID, I have been reading since the late 1990s. Thank you for reaching out to your readers for feedback.
I often use older devices (~3 GHz) to view your site. Rendering Slashdot's web pages on such machines is usually painfully slow. Viewing web pages in the dial-up days, on much slower machines, was less arduous. I assume this has to do with the Javascript filtering of the hundreds of posts (I'm an embedded programmer, not a web coder). Can anything be done about this? It's a sour trend that the machines over time get faster and faster, but the ability to read text is getting slower and slower. I figured a tech site could actually do something about such silliness.
As a postscript to fellow users, what huge advantage does Unicode bring? Doesn't it have many downsides?
I cut my teeth in a radio shop in the late 1980s; I left several years later. I know and understand why they were converting the getting-crowded cellular system to digital back then (bandwidth --> $), but why did the municipal/commercial radios follow suit when the transmissions I hear are of such terrible quality versus the analog I remember?
And if your answer involves crowded bandwidth, I ask, is it really? I have seen graphics describing the use of radio bands, but every time I've had the opportunity to use a scanner and poke around over the years, I find very little in my suburb of a major U.S. city. Haven't a major portion of businesses gone to cellular communication anyway?
They say they are concerned about the number of annual road deaths. Aren't most caused by people who can't afford autonomous cars (teens, seniors, white trash drunks, etc.)? (And no, an autonomous car with a steering wheel can never be cheaper than the cheapest non-autonomous car.)
Isn't obvious that this technology will only work in areas with great climes and clear roads (a fraction of the country)?
Isn't this another one of those situations where we ALL pay (suffer) for something that only a fraction of the people will have/use?
Shouldn't we permanently fix the hacking problem (my old microwave oven is un-hackable) before putting millions of people's lives/time at stake?
Solyndra 2.0, I suppose... Yes, autonomous vehicles have their place perhaps, but that place is not on everyone's dime.
I post this for future generations to read, not some of my loony, hype-swallowing contemporaries who can't see beyond the end of their cell phones.
Yes. YES. YES! I have noticed the same thing!
I read a lot on the Internet and off, mostly technical stuff. I find much is poorly written, in the end only conveying a confusing or pointless message. Somehow, though, I've noticed that often I am skipping over entire paragraphs that my eyes "don't want to read". I assumed it was some sort of temporary mental laziness, so I would force myself to go back and painstakingly read the text, sentence-by-sentence, only to find again and again that my eyes were correct! The text was indeed a waste of my time!
I'm guessing there's a lower, faster comprehension taking place before my full consciousness receives the messages. It's fascinating, and I'm glad you posted about what I thought was only in my head.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw
I agree with the other negative posters, recall Google Glass et. al. to "see" through the hype. This already died once in the late 1990s. At that time, my friend commented, 'Virtual reality is just video games really close to your face.'
I don't believe the government should ever use tax breaks to encourage anything. Such incentives are often abused, and later we all pay for it. And any mass benefits are dubious to begin with.
If someone wants solar panels, 'let them eat eat solar panels'. But it shouldn't be on our tax dime the way I see it. Our history is rife with pointless breaks/expenditures.
Disincentives, I can understand and sometimes support.
Can someone tell me WHY we need such a system at all? I doubt that we are importing only once-in-100-years mega-geniuses, so is it worth all the cost and problems and cheating and vigilance and unemployment? I don't see how...
I have learned to use Afrin to get all the way through a bad cold, but then when I'm feeling better, I use pills to recover from the Afrin dependency, which is usually brief.
PS - I have dramatically reduced my nasal issues in life once I started taking very good care of my teeth. It never dawned on me that germs have 8 hours every night to travel a short, wet, warm path to my sinuses.
Looking at the graduation rate, I think they have bigger concerns.
This may be slightly off topic, but I always wondered whether high school graduation should be mandated by law, with the punishment being either a school camp or house arrest until the degree is obtained. I'd imagine the betterment of the younger people would give them more options in life and benefit society.
Don't kid yourself people, the much larger issue will be when these vehicles significantly slow traffic daily, everywhere, when they attempt to respond to the infinite number of scenarios that occur on the roadways.
I agree wholeheartedly. A system can't be abused if there is no system.
...And then copy and paste that concept in many other areas too please.
I planted a tree. Where's my money?
It's "corner cases" all the way down... I agree with your post, but you stopped short (I couldn't resist).
It's not just unexpected human behavior on the road, but also unexpected, well, everything. I would say that I see something unusual that significantly affects driving just about every other month. Just off the top of my head I have had to deal with the following in the last few months alone:
-- There is local road construction that closed a two-way road, turning it into one lane/direction at a time, controlled by a human construction flagger. How could a GPS-driven vehicle possibly know what to do there, intentionally driving in the wrong lane for a half mile? What would it think the speed limit is if the signs were obscured? And the human with the "Slow" sign was standing well into our lane, causing us to drive around him. Would the (autonomous vehicle) AV just stop? Further into that single lane there were construction cones cutting our lane down to three quarters of a lane, effectively forcing us to drive along a rough, but paved, shoulder. Would an AV have any clue what to do or would it accidentally ditch itself, utterly blocking traffic until a tow truck came?
-- A highway accident occurred in front of the car in front of me, where the car smashed into the wall head on, perpendicular to traffic flow. The first clue I got that something was amiss was its screeching tires followed by the sideways car entering my peripheral vision. What would an AV do there?
-- More local road construction caused a newly formed temporary dip in the road. The construction people put a sign near it alerting drivers to that fact. I assume the AV would drive over it at the speed limit sense it can't read English.
-- There is a "no turn on red" sign near my house which disallows such turns at certain hours on certain days. Again, can the AV decipher English?
I have been driving for thirty years. And I was learning about the world fifteen years before that. An AV can never be that smart about everything. I am an embedded software engineer, and it always tickles me how many engineers believe they can think of everything in advance. They rarely get called on when they can't. How does the song go, "They let the monkey go and blame the monkey wrench." Here are other scenarios I have encountered; have the AV designers thought of these; will you bet your life on it?
-- A live power wire on the street after a storm.
-- A small, long tree branch, which looks like a live power wire, also lying across the street.
-- Is it true that GPS navigation becomes flaky around tall buildings?
-- I was once caught in a torrential downpour where the road was suddenly and completely invisible. I could only navigate because I knew the roadside landmark's well.
-- I have been run completely off the road three times (usually by cell phone drivers). I saved myself and my car each time by swerving onto the shoulder.
-- There was a raging car fire that I drove past. That he was so intense that it instantly warmed my face as I drove past at 40 miles an hour, even though the windows were rolled up.
-- I swerved violently on the highway to avoid being hit by a drunk from behind who was driving way over the speed limit.
-- I have seen roads completely washed out by rain to where it would be dangerous to attempt travel.
-- I have seen red fireworks shot off by amateurs in their driveways.
-- I have seen tumbleweeds cross the road in front of me.
-- I have seen a half dozen cars in ditches cluing me into the fact that black ice was ahead.
-- I have seen emergency vehicles racing to a scene, some with red lights that were visible over a mile away, and some where their lights were not visible until they were near (sirens from an unmarked car).
-- I drove on a local road that was littered with potholes. After months, I finally hit one so deep, I cracked a rim.
-- An open manhole (someone stole the cover for scrap).
I didn't take care of my teeth as well as I should have when I was younger. Coincidentally, I always had minor nasal issues, especially when I first woke up. I assumed that frequently stuffy and occasional bloody noses in the morning were just parts of life. After I grew older and started aggressively taking care of my teeth, all those problems disappeared at the same time, and those nasal issues turning into colds vanished. Further, they all show up again if, for some reason, I don't take of my teeth for a night or two.
It never dawned on me that there is a moist, 100-degree Fahrenheit tube of only a few inches that any germs could travel within the 8 hours of being horizontal that could lead to such nasal infections.
I wonder whether someone who is not disciplined to get enough sleep also does not take care of his mouth.
Although this isn't high-end gaming, I noticed a couple of interesting power measurements at work:
My 10-year old Dell desktop, running Windows XP and no anti-virus (AV) boots ~25% faster and draws ~30% less power overall (idle & taxed with performance software) than the new guy's new Dell laptop that runs Windows 7 & Norton AV. We can both run all the same software effectively (albeit all my versions are several years older), except that I have a different brand of PCB design software than he; I'm guessing if I ran his PCB program my computer might drag.
Also, my ball mouse draws 1/5 the power that his optical mouse does! That was a surprise, too. I wonder whether a ball mouse is a better idea for laptop users when it comes to extending battery life.
My single CRT drew 1/3 more power than an LCD. My new, micromanaging, pointy-haired boss forced me to toss it(?), and replace it with two LCD widescreens. So now I draw 50% MORE than my single CRT did. My productivity is unchanged. Sigh...
When I started reading this site in the late 1990s, I took "News For Nerds - Stuff That Matters" as "News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters", as in "This is technical news, stuff that doesn't matter to most people but does to us nerds (wink, wink)..."
"News For Nerds - Stuff That Matters" meaning "News For Nerds AND Stuff That Matters" doesn't make any sense (since hundreds of outlets already cover general news), and this was not how the site was run back then if I recall correctly.
Amen to the call quality. I was there when it "happened". My first technical job in my early 20s was installing car phones in the late 1980s. I worked my way up to service department manager. In the early 1990s I was given by the carrier a batch of these new-fangled digital cellular phones to give for free (worth thousands each) to our best customers as part of their nationwide beta test. My customers vehemently hated them - one wanted it removed immediately. They said things like "The voice sounds metallic." and "It sounds like I'm in a tunnel!", etc. Sound familiar?
I was told by my boss to tell the customers that software upgrades would fix such issues over time. That never happened. Today I loathe cellular phones at either end of my conversations. Even at that time, you could clearly see with an RF spectrum analyzer what was going on: the normal analog bandwidth for 1 call was being split into 3 calls, with quality being the trade-off. It's probably even worse today.
Phones/calls were very expensive back then; I remember the roaming rate for Los Angeles was $0.90 per minute. So it's no wonder that most folks today are unaware that the original cellular phone calls were just as good as a landline call - no awful distortion, no noticeable delay - I'm not exaggerating (assuming you had coverage, of course).
Ooo, I love Pepperidge Farm...
And, with the incredible amount of wasteful digital projects that consume human labor, I question whether we really NEED 140,000 new computer people each year. I'd say about half of the projects I have worked on within the last decade have been canceled before completion. Mine can't be the only company engaged in such misdirected waste. Do we really need so many Linux distributions? Does MS really need to shuffle the features around in its latest operating system? Why do the newer web browsers seem to work worse than their predecessors? How does craigslist.com work so well using, zOMG!, HTML with plain fonts? Do touchscreens need to be everywhere? Do automobiles need so many microprocessors and networks(?!) to where they are now at the point of dubious stability? Does anyone really think that the "Internet of things" is going to live up to its hype when anyone over the age of 40 remembers how we were already promised a Jetsons-like paradise in the late 1990s, when the Java virtual machine was going to connect our dishwasher to our toaster? VRML anyone? Virtual Boy (now called "Oculus Rift")?
It's like a thousand-pound man is asking for his second bag of potato chips when really he needs a diet.
1) A "whole house" fan. They are very nice if you're not super-sensitive to temperature (i.e., gotta have the AC on all the time); it's like an instant breeze from each window and can even cool the house down before turning on the pricey AC.
2) A fireplace insert that houses small fans itself. This also can save on the bills if you're in a woodsy area with much dead wood/branches.
3) I bought empty property and may put a custom house on it some day. My dream (which is not for everyone) is to wire it with 120 VAC AND a 12-volt DC bus to every room.
I think everyone is getting wrong, which is why solar hasn't taken off. Expensive inverters? Rows of costly batteries taking room in the basement? Hugely expensive solar panels? And major labor costs to put it all in?
I think the bigger home motors need to remain 120 VAC (refrigerators, etc.). Whereas many of our modern devices (televisions, etc.) could be run directly off of 12 VDC.
My plan would be this: Devise a standard, DC port (with circuit breaker) for each room. Throw a couple of $100 car batteries in the basement hooked to a DC breaker panel with the battery's own AC-adapter trickle power supply. Add $200 solar panels to the roof, etc., one-at-a-time, whenever I have the cash/mood, and connect each to the DC bus (with appropriate diodes everywhere). Add an external, weather-proof DC port too so that the family car can possibly connected for charging the car's dead battery, or, in reverse, partially running the house after a long power outage. (I experimented and found I could keep food chilled indefinitely during an outage by filling pots with ice from the local store, and stuffing the pots into the refrigerator. Just like they did over a century ago!)
Now here's part where being an electronics designer is required: Each electronic device would need to be internally modified so it accepts the 12 VDC. I know this is a dream for most people, but I look forward to a day (should I Kickstart it?) where such small devices accept 120 VAC OR 12 VDC. Then, the would be plug and play. Until the, I'll just have to mod my stuff myself (have already done in the past) or use those cheapo cigarette light inverters for automobiles.
I'm not trolling, but is XP that bad? I'm asking whether there is any vulnerability right now that would likely affect the average user?
Further, is XP worse than they'll eventually find 8 or 10 to be, especially with all the "cloud" nonsense? To me this seems like the devil you know versus the devil you don't, arguably FUD. Since hackers strive to be "profitable" in their endeavors, wouldn't they focus on the more popular OSes anyway?
I spent a bit of time in hardware design, too - you think its fair game to ask what pin 7 and pin 14 mean, generally, on TTL chips? if you have touched hardware at all, you'd know this, but I doubt even 10% of googlers would know it. I know it. why shouldn't they?
see, same logic fallacy.
I see what you did there!
Amen, brother. Similarly, I switched from Lycos a decade+ ago because they dropped Boolean searching (some of us are power users!). I used Yahoo! next, but it was painful on dial-up with all the extra junk on their home page. Then I came across this new, misspelled site called "Google". I loved it; but lately it has been wearing on me as it panders more and more to the masses.
Note to Google: We nerds might be in the minority, but it is WE who direct the non-nerds as to how to set up their digital devices, avoid online trouble, choose their search engines, etc. Don't ruin it for us. I already started to keep one eye open for another search place, because I fear it'll only get worse.
Lisa addressed this.
I know this is slightly off-topic, but I found this surprising. About twenty years ago my main PC was a 66 MHz machine with 8 MB of RAM running Windows 95. I was learning to use the 3D graphics program "trueSpace" and I created a scene that was 11 MB big when saved to the hard drive as a wireframe. When I tried to render the scene, the hard drive thrashed for ten hours straight, and the scene was still only halfway rendered. Later, I bought 16 MB of RAM (if I recall for ~$400[!]), bringing my total up to 24 MB. That same scene rendered completely in twenty minutes. That was an fascinating lesson.