Since this is Google we're talking about, can we assume there is no microSD? Overpriced internal storage and small capacities on the cheapest models, with no external storage, was the biggest failure of the Nexus line, and the main thing that turned me off. Google continued to push slow, cumbersome cloud storage while people bought scads of Samsung and other phones with expandable storage. Is this Google as usual, or have they seen the light? These new phones sound amazing, but I can't get by with 32GB and I bet the premium for the 128GB models will be high.
And are these expected to be SIM-unlocked and have unlocked boot loaders, or is that changing as they kill the Nexus name?
Well done, old_kennyp. Your attention to the multi-ton vehicle you operate means that of the eight times that people hit my cars in the past twenty years, it was you precisely zero times! On the other hand, one accident was caused by a young lady on a cell phone (who hit me head on - after I stopped at a stop sign!), one was an old lady fussing with her purse, one was a young man distracted by a passenger's cell phone, and one was a young lady who was eating and dropped something on her pants. I know from experience how serious even slight distractions can be while driving.
Do you drive? Because I do, and it's handy as hell. Read/write messages without removing your hands from the steering wheel, or make calls or prettt much anything you want.
there are many situations in which is very handy to use a phone/computer with your voice, and some have saved lives.
I drive, a lot. And I think I'm pretty decent at it. Part of my success as a driver has been recognizing how much distractions can negatively impact my driving, and by distractions I mean even just conversing with passengers or especially talking on the phone hands-free. I honestly don't want more excuses to use technology on the road, whether hands-free or voice-activated. Surely using Siri is safer than texting, but I feel that technology that requires less attention can lull people into a false sense of security, resulting in them fiddling with BT phones, changing music, using Siri, etc. way more than they should.
Squirrels *are* tasty. But more to the point... traveling 16 light years to catch some squirrels seems pretty expensive.
Buying and maintaining a loaded full-size V-8 pickup truck just to drive half a mile to Dairy Queen for some fake ice cream seems pretty expensive too, but people who buy them for other reasons still stop at the drive-through for a sundae when they feel like it. And maybe aliens don't develop FTL with the main purpose being to visit Earth, but that doesn't mean they won't ever drop in when they have some free time or a spare star cruiser. Maybe some are colonial and think we would obviously put up little fight if they deduced that Earth would make a suitable location for a new home. It is reasonable that any futuristic technology will have multiple uses, lead to other developments, and perhaps be used by people with less than pure intentions.
There's no possibility that aliens capable of FTL would find us remotely interesting.
It is impossible for me to get behind a statement like that given that we have (to my knowledge) not learned anything about any such aliens. We can't make such broad generalizations while being completely in the dark.
Perhaps some species capable of FTL travel might find us interesting to hunt, or maybe they'd like to get their hands on Earth for resources ("natural" or labor) or as an outpost near something or someone else they are interested in. Not finding us particularly sexy doesn't necessarily mean they wouldn't have any interest at all in contact, even if they might not have strongly altruistic intentions or want to trade technology. Who knows, maybe even FTL travel has limits and we happen to be firmly in the middle of someone else's neighborhood.
No they won't. They'll remember him for being a cripple that speaks with a monotone robotic voice machine.
Hawking is on the lower rung of great scientists, a lot of this theories have been debunked. He just throws out so many that when a couple turn out right, we all give him a standing ovation. If he wasn't crippled, you wouldn't have any idea who he is.
I wasn't sure if you were joking or not, then I noticed you posted this garbage anonymously, so I must assume you were indeed joking. Hawking's greatest achievement may not be his scholarly work but instead the great success he has had in communicating arcane science to the masses and convincing them to think about matters like this in an intelligent, inquisitive way. Guys like Hawking, Tyson, Sagan, and even Bill Nye and Don Herbert have arguably had as big of an impact on society as have Einstein, Bohr, or Tesla. They make otherwise dense and dry topics exciting and interesting, and if there's one thing we need it's more people of all ages maintaining an interest in science, and being open to learning and continuing to investigate the workings of the universe.
You could have said your piece in a less offensive way, too.
This is easy - I just don't keep anything with 24x7 lights in my bedroom. When I did, 1 cent worth of electrical tape darkened the room perfectly. If you are an IT pro and worried about losing sleep due to these lights, you are pretty crumby at your job if you have to sleep with the servers or routers.
He probably has bills to pay and family to keep up with like every other person out there.
And that's fine, but all of the sensitive attachments he forwarded from his government account to his AOL account are a pretty damn serious matter. Brennan was definitely not just using his AOL email account to pay bills and see if his brother wanted to play golf on Sunday.
The article says there were sensitive files stolen from his personal email account. If true, he shouldn't have had them there.
From a Wired article dated almost a year ago:
"News of the hack was first reported by the New York Post after the hacker contacted the newspaper last week. The hackers described how they were able to access sensitive government documents stored as attachments in Brennan’s personal account because the spy chief had forwarded them from his work email. The documents they accessed included the sensitive 47-page SF-86 application that Brennan had filled out to obtain his top-secret government security clearance. Millions of SF86 applications were obtained recently by hackers who broke into networks belonging to the Office of Personnel Management. The applications, which are used by the government to conduct a background check, contain a wealth of sensitive data not only about workers seeking security clearance, but also about their friends, spouses and other family members. They also include criminal history, psychological records and information about past drug use as well as potentially sensitive information about the applicant’s interactions with foreign nationals—information that can be used against those nationals in their own country."
Sounds pretty bad to me, but I doubt he'll receive the same level of scrutiny as Hillary Clinton has, because it isn't as interesting politically.
Source: https://www.wired.com/2015/10/... -- interesting article.
Upon reading this summary, my immediate thought was, "Which is worst, that some high-ranking intelligence officials got hacked, the fact that it was so easy that kids did it without having to do any real hacking, that these high-ranking intelligence officials use AOL, or that ANYONE still uses AOL?" This makes Hillary's former IT under-achievers look like actual professionals. I think we now need to investigate whether these morons were using AOL for sensitive communications that should only go through secure and approved channels.
Personally, I'm glad to see that this "Cracka" joker is not the infamous ytcracker, at least. When he was young he learned his lesson about not messing with US government agencies. These fools did less and will likely face worse penalties, but such are the times, I guess.
You're right - we don't have that evidence. But even Einstein was wrong more than once, and we haven't been developing technology for very long at all, on cosmic, geologic, or evolutionary timescales. If you mean *we* aren't traveling to other stars any time soon, you're probably right. But if comparable life elsewhere isn't it right to assume that some civilization somewhere might be much older and much more advanced than us? Human understanding of math and science hasn't been perfected yet, so maybe we have some big things wrong and there are probably some significant technologies that we haven't even conceived of yet. So I'm not saying these stars we've just found to dim oddly are evidence of Dysonspere-esque structures or alien civilizations, but we haven't exactly been around long or traveled very far, ya know?
*WE* can't travel at velocities approaching the speed of light, or light years at a time, but that doesn't necessarily preclude others from doing so. When I see discoveries like this and you say it is definitely nothing especially interesting, I am reminded that any sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic.
If there exists a civilization that has managed to survive and advance for say, a billion years, or maybe even 1/100th of that, they would surely have at least some technologies that would be difficult for us to comprehend. We all walk around with miniature high-powered computers in our pockets, while just a generation ago few people knew what the internet was and less powerful computers occupied a lot of desk space and stayed tethered to walls. Merely two hundred years ago there was no widespread use of electricity. I think it is the height of hubris to presume that something can't be done simply because we have no idea how to do it today. And, after all, our laws of science and mathematics are still evolving constantly, as they always have. FTL travel may be impossible, but even if we find a way to work it out theoretically we are still a long way from making it practical. So what if our understanding of the underlying physics and the nature of spacetime is less sophisticated than we presume it to be?
M$ should really take the idea of naming updates and run with it, like Anniversary Update, as if anyone gives a shit that it has been a year since they released their latest over-hyped bug fest. Call it Stinky Elephant Dung or Rainbow Kitten and people are still going to use it, and have problems with it. Next time maybe they'll go full-DPRK and name something the "Bill Gates is God Edition," or just show all their cards and release "Microsoft Owns Your Computer, Bitch. Edition", and you'll have no choice whether to install it or not. But that still isn't as lame as Apple naming crap after big cats, as if that would make the OS more fierce or something.
There's also a good argument to be made that updating a device hurts future sales. If your phone isn't updated, it will start to feel old, so you're more likely to buy a new phone sooner.
Yes, refusing to provide updates does make phones feel old prematurely, and does make users more likely to upgrade sooner - to OTHER manufacturers' phones! People think, "Oh, jeez, this phone sucks now. I'm not buying another LG, I'll try a Samsung or Motorola (yes, everyone still calls Moto Motorola) this time." So by not providing updates and waiting for users to upgrade when they want to, OEMs are cheapening their own products, and customers notice.
KDE is the Gold standard in Linux Desktops. It has the most utilitarian behavior of all of the existing Linux desktops.
Funny, I tried it many times with various distros, and I never cared for it. I was a Gnome user until they went bonkers and MATE and Cinnamon from its ashes. Cinnamon seems much more intuitive to me, and since it just works so well out of the box I can focus on whatever work I need to get done without it getting in the way, rather than having to tinker with and tweak KDE. I know some folks have loved KDE for a long time but it's no wonder why so many people have flocked to Mint + Cinnamon. It looks good (if not as good as KDE), works reliably, and is easier to learn and manage.
And people will argue about the included components until they are blue in the face, but they are largely irrelevant to most people just coming to Linux, if not most Linux users in general. No one cares about bundled browsers like Konqueror because they mostly use a bigger-name browser, desktop email apps get less and less use every day (due to both the current state of webmail and smartphone use, even in corporate environments), and the even less-used little niche apps and tools have never been deal breakers or big draws. So while KDE may not be dying, it may need to focus more on what people want, which is usability on par with the eye candy.
The former Rovio CEO is named Pekka Rantala, not Pikka Rantala. Despite being of one quarter Finnish descent I speak no Finnish, though I do understand that Pekka is not an uncommon given name for a Finn.
Banks have been issuing new cards (or replacing older ones) with NFC versions for at least a year. Just bonk and pay.
Our main excuse is that the roll-out has been so uneven - chip cards started going out last fall and many retailers had the hardware in place well ahead of time but many STILL aren't using anything other than the swipers. My own 70 year-old mom has a grasp on it, though she figured out how to use Uber last night and is more fluent in GIMP than I am in Photoshop, so maybe she's not the most representative example, though she is proof that seniors can manage just fine.
Europe has been using chip readers for 5+ years now. Why is America just now getting into this? It's things like this that make us seem slow and 'backwards' in the eyes of foreigners (although I think it's shallow to think that).
We're also still not warming up to the metric system, even though most of the world uses it because it is a much more sensible and standardized system. But they've largely converted to "our" language when it comes to business and whenever travelling between countries within Europe. You can survive just fine speaking only English in any large European city, while not knowing English makes life quite difficult in the US, even if you are a resident. And we drive way more SUVs and got to catch Pokemons first, so the score is US 3, Europe 1.
Debit is chip and pin. Credit is chip and signature. Throughout the US.
Yes, but for as long as I've had a debit card (since 2000vor so?) I've almost always signed rather used my PIN, unless I wanted cash back. A lot of people are afraid of entering their PIN in public, especially if they don't have to, and a lot of banks used to limit free debit transactions and would charge fees after a certain number. I even remember commercials telling us how quick and easy it was to swipe and sign, no ID required and no "secret code" to remember. Now it seems that I can still use my debit card (with no credit account linked) like a credit card at some retailers, if I choose to, and sign for a transaction, while at others I must use the PIN.
Also, I have already personally witnessed someone leaving their card in the chip reader on two occasions. For one I was able to point it out before they walked away, but for the other I found the card unattended. Good thing for both of them I didn't watch them enter their PIN and abscond with the card!
Slashdot Mirror
Since this is Google we're talking about, can we assume there is no microSD? Overpriced internal storage and small capacities on the cheapest models, with no external storage, was the biggest failure of the Nexus line, and the main thing that turned me off. Google continued to push slow, cumbersome cloud storage while people bought scads of Samsung and other phones with expandable storage. Is this Google as usual, or have they seen the light? These new phones sound amazing, but I can't get by with 32GB and I bet the premium for the 128GB models will be high. And are these expected to be SIM-unlocked and have unlocked boot loaders, or is that changing as they kill the Nexus name?
Well done, old_kennyp. Your attention to the multi-ton vehicle you operate means that of the eight times that people hit my cars in the past twenty years, it was you precisely zero times! On the other hand, one accident was caused by a young lady on a cell phone (who hit me head on - after I stopped at a stop sign!), one was an old lady fussing with her purse, one was a young man distracted by a passenger's cell phone, and one was a young lady who was eating and dropped something on her pants. I know from experience how serious even slight distractions can be while driving.
Do you drive? Because I do, and it's handy as hell. Read/write messages without removing your hands from the steering wheel, or make calls or prettt much anything you want.
there are many situations in which is very handy to use a phone/computer with your voice, and some have saved lives.
I drive, a lot. And I think I'm pretty decent at it. Part of my success as a driver has been recognizing how much distractions can negatively impact my driving, and by distractions I mean even just conversing with passengers or especially talking on the phone hands-free. I honestly don't want more excuses to use technology on the road, whether hands-free or voice-activated. Surely using Siri is safer than texting, but I feel that technology that requires less attention can lull people into a false sense of security, resulting in them fiddling with BT phones, changing music, using Siri, etc. way more than they should.
So basically Hillary pulls off the mask and goes from President to Reptillian overlord?
You are making a few large assumptions that pro-Trump wackos automatically reject.
Squirrels *are* tasty. But more to the point... traveling 16 light years to catch some squirrels seems pretty expensive.
Buying and maintaining a loaded full-size V-8 pickup truck just to drive half a mile to Dairy Queen for some fake ice cream seems pretty expensive too, but people who buy them for other reasons still stop at the drive-through for a sundae when they feel like it. And maybe aliens don't develop FTL with the main purpose being to visit Earth, but that doesn't mean they won't ever drop in when they have some free time or a spare star cruiser. Maybe some are colonial and think we would obviously put up little fight if they deduced that Earth would make a suitable location for a new home. It is reasonable that any futuristic technology will have multiple uses, lead to other developments, and perhaps be used by people with less than pure intentions.
There's no possibility that aliens capable of FTL would find us remotely interesting.
It is impossible for me to get behind a statement like that given that we have (to my knowledge) not learned anything about any such aliens. We can't make such broad generalizations while being completely in the dark.
Perhaps some species capable of FTL travel might find us interesting to hunt, or maybe they'd like to get their hands on Earth for resources ("natural" or labor) or as an outpost near something or someone else they are interested in. Not finding us particularly sexy doesn't necessarily mean they wouldn't have any interest at all in contact, even if they might not have strongly altruistic intentions or want to trade technology. Who knows, maybe even FTL travel has limits and we happen to be firmly in the middle of someone else's neighborhood.
No they won't. They'll remember him for being a cripple that speaks with a monotone robotic voice machine.
Hawking is on the lower rung of great scientists, a lot of this theories have been debunked. He just throws out so many that when a couple turn out right, we all give him a standing ovation. If he wasn't crippled, you wouldn't have any idea who he is.
I wasn't sure if you were joking or not, then I noticed you posted this garbage anonymously, so I must assume you were indeed joking. Hawking's greatest achievement may not be his scholarly work but instead the great success he has had in communicating arcane science to the masses and convincing them to think about matters like this in an intelligent, inquisitive way. Guys like Hawking, Tyson, Sagan, and even Bill Nye and Don Herbert have arguably had as big of an impact on society as have Einstein, Bohr, or Tesla. They make otherwise dense and dry topics exciting and interesting, and if there's one thing we need it's more people of all ages maintaining an interest in science, and being open to learning and continuing to investigate the workings of the universe.
You could have said your piece in a less offensive way, too.
Still using mine, when I use my desktop anyway, which is not too often. But it still works great.
This is easy - I just don't keep anything with 24x7 lights in my bedroom. When I did, 1 cent worth of electrical tape darkened the room perfectly. If you are an IT pro and worried about losing sleep due to these lights, you are pretty crumby at your job if you have to sleep with the servers or routers.
He probably has bills to pay and family to keep up with like every other person out there.
And that's fine, but all of the sensitive attachments he forwarded from his government account to his AOL account are a pretty damn serious matter. Brennan was definitely not just using his AOL email account to pay bills and see if his brother wanted to play golf on Sunday.
The article says there were sensitive files stolen from his personal email account. If true, he shouldn't have had them there.
From a Wired article dated almost a year ago:
"News of the hack was first reported by the New York Post after the hacker contacted the newspaper last week. The hackers described how they were able to access sensitive government documents stored as attachments in Brennan’s personal account because the spy chief had forwarded them from his work email.
The documents they accessed included the sensitive 47-page SF-86 application that Brennan had filled out to obtain his top-secret government security clearance. Millions of SF86 applications were obtained recently by hackers who broke into networks belonging to the Office of Personnel Management. The applications, which are used by the government to conduct a background check, contain a wealth of sensitive data not only about workers seeking security clearance, but also about their friends, spouses and other family members. They also include criminal history, psychological records and information about past drug use as well as potentially sensitive information about the applicant’s interactions with foreign nationals—information that can be used against those nationals in their own country."
Sounds pretty bad to me, but I doubt he'll receive the same level of scrutiny as Hillary Clinton has, because it isn't as interesting politically.
Source: https://www.wired.com/2015/10/... -- interesting article.
Last time I checked, AOL Instant Messenger needed a AOL account, at least one on the free tier. Or has everybody switched from AIM to Skype?
Yes, everyone left AIM years ago, for Skype and others.
Upon reading this summary, my immediate thought was, "Which is worst, that some high-ranking intelligence officials got hacked, the fact that it was so easy that kids did it without having to do any real hacking, that these high-ranking intelligence officials use AOL, or that ANYONE still uses AOL?" This makes Hillary's former IT under-achievers look like actual professionals. I think we now need to investigate whether these morons were using AOL for sensitive communications that should only go through secure and approved channels.
Personally, I'm glad to see that this "Cracka" joker is not the infamous ytcracker, at least. When he was young he learned his lesson about not messing with US government agencies. These fools did less and will likely face worse penalties, but such are the times, I guess.
You're right - we don't have that evidence. But even Einstein was wrong more than once, and we haven't been developing technology for very long at all, on cosmic, geologic, or evolutionary timescales. If you mean *we* aren't traveling to other stars any time soon, you're probably right. But if comparable life elsewhere isn't it right to assume that some civilization somewhere might be much older and much more advanced than us? Human understanding of math and science hasn't been perfected yet, so maybe we have some big things wrong and there are probably some significant technologies that we haven't even conceived of yet. So I'm not saying these stars we've just found to dim oddly are evidence of Dysonspere-esque structures or alien civilizations, but we haven't exactly been around long or traveled very far, ya know?
*WE* can't travel at velocities approaching the speed of light, or light years at a time, but that doesn't necessarily preclude others from doing so. When I see discoveries like this and you say it is definitely nothing especially interesting, I am reminded that any sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic.
If there exists a civilization that has managed to survive and advance for say, a billion years, or maybe even 1/100th of that, they would surely have at least some technologies that would be difficult for us to comprehend. We all walk around with miniature high-powered computers in our pockets, while just a generation ago few people knew what the internet was and less powerful computers occupied a lot of desk space and stayed tethered to walls. Merely two hundred years ago there was no widespread use of electricity. I think it is the height of hubris to presume that something can't be done simply because we have no idea how to do it today. And, after all, our laws of science and mathematics are still evolving constantly, as they always have. FTL travel may be impossible, but even if we find a way to work it out theoretically we are still a long way from making it practical. So what if our understanding of the underlying physics and the nature of spacetime is less sophisticated than we presume it to be?
M$ should really take the idea of naming updates and run with it, like Anniversary Update, as if anyone gives a shit that it has been a year since they released their latest over-hyped bug fest. Call it Stinky Elephant Dung or Rainbow Kitten and people are still going to use it, and have problems with it. Next time maybe they'll go full-DPRK and name something the "Bill Gates is God Edition," or just show all their cards and release "Microsoft Owns Your Computer, Bitch. Edition", and you'll have no choice whether to install it or not. But that still isn't as lame as Apple naming crap after big cats, as if that would make the OS more fierce or something.
samsung on verizon gets updates every few months
And that's one more reason why Samsung is killing everyone else, other than Apple. LG, HTC and others should be learning from that, but they aren't.
There's also a good argument to be made that updating a device hurts future sales. If your phone isn't updated, it will start to feel old, so you're more likely to buy a new phone sooner.
Yes, refusing to provide updates does make phones feel old prematurely, and does make users more likely to upgrade sooner - to OTHER manufacturers' phones! People think, "Oh, jeez, this phone sucks now. I'm not buying another LG, I'll try a Samsung or Motorola (yes, everyone still calls Moto Motorola) this time." So by not providing updates and waiting for users to upgrade when they want to, OEMs are cheapening their own products, and customers notice.
Linux.
KDE is the Gold standard in Linux Desktops. It has the most utilitarian behavior of all of the existing Linux desktops.
Funny, I tried it many times with various distros, and I never cared for it. I was a Gnome user until they went bonkers and MATE and Cinnamon from its ashes. Cinnamon seems much more intuitive to me, and since it just works so well out of the box I can focus on whatever work I need to get done without it getting in the way, rather than having to tinker with and tweak KDE. I know some folks have loved KDE for a long time but it's no wonder why so many people have flocked to Mint + Cinnamon. It looks good (if not as good as KDE), works reliably, and is easier to learn and manage.
And people will argue about the included components until they are blue in the face, but they are largely irrelevant to most people just coming to Linux, if not most Linux users in general. No one cares about bundled browsers like Konqueror because they mostly use a bigger-name browser, desktop email apps get less and less use every day (due to both the current state of webmail and smartphone use, even in corporate environments), and the even less-used little niche apps and tools have never been deal breakers or big draws. So while KDE may not be dying, it may need to focus more on what people want, which is usability on par with the eye candy.
The fifth force is... LOVE!? Who's been screwing with this thing?
According to some work done in the 1960's by an Englishman named Lennon, the other forces of nature are largely irrelevant .
The former Rovio CEO is named Pekka Rantala, not Pikka Rantala. Despite being of one quarter Finnish descent I speak no Finnish, though I do understand that Pekka is not an uncommon given name for a Finn.
What exactly is your excuse there, over the pond?
Banks have been issuing new cards (or replacing older ones) with NFC versions for at least a year. Just bonk and pay.
Our main excuse is that the roll-out has been so uneven - chip cards started going out last fall and many retailers had the hardware in place well ahead of time but many STILL aren't using anything other than the swipers. My own 70 year-old mom has a grasp on it, though she figured out how to use Uber last night and is more fluent in GIMP than I am in Photoshop, so maybe she's not the most representative example, though she is proof that seniors can manage just fine.
Europe has been using chip readers for 5+ years now. Why is America just now getting into this? It's things like this that make us seem slow and 'backwards' in the eyes of foreigners (although I think it's shallow to think that).
We're also still not warming up to the metric system, even though most of the world uses it because it is a much more sensible and standardized system. But they've largely converted to "our" language when it comes to business and whenever travelling between countries within Europe. You can survive just fine speaking only English in any large European city, while not knowing English makes life quite difficult in the US, even if you are a resident. And we drive way more SUVs and got to catch Pokemons first, so the score is US 3, Europe 1.
Debit is chip and pin. Credit is chip and signature. Throughout the US.
Yes, but for as long as I've had a debit card (since 2000vor so?) I've almost always signed rather used my PIN, unless I wanted cash back. A lot of people are afraid of entering their PIN in public, especially if they don't have to, and a lot of banks used to limit free debit transactions and would charge fees after a certain number. I even remember commercials telling us how quick and easy it was to swipe and sign, no ID required and no "secret code" to remember. Now it seems that I can still use my debit card (with no credit account linked) like a credit card at some retailers, if I choose to, and sign for a transaction, while at others I must use the PIN.
Also, I have already personally witnessed someone leaving their card in the chip reader on two occasions. For one I was able to point it out before they walked away, but for the other I found the card unattended. Good thing for both of them I didn't watch them enter their PIN and abscond with the card!