As much as I have been fairly anti-MS over the years (except their backend stuff, that's decent), they have been such a staple of nerd\geek culture over these many years that I find myself saddened and feeling quite bad for them as I watch them make such huge, and possibly in the long term, suicidal mistakes. It is only as I watch them die a slow death that I realize I have had an affection for them all along.
Sorry, nothing insightful or informative to mod up here. I just wanted to say my piece.
Yesterday I made a posting on CNN regarding the story about the heightened terrorist threat alert. While it covers a different subject, I could re-write it to fit this situation, but I think the slashdot crowd will get my drift, here is a direct copy\paste:
I do not know who to trust or what to think anymore. If this threat is real or not, I imagine we are intended to suppose that it was the US governments blanket surveillance of the world, including domestic spying that tipped them off. On the other hand, the timing is such (Snowden/Manning) that for all I know they made the whole thing up to better justify government wrongdoing in the eyes of the people. Or perhaps al Qaeda made the whole thing up just to see if they can manipulate the movements of our government by taking advantage of info gathering with a campaign of false intel. I don't know who to trust or what to think anymore, with the exception that I know I don't trust my own government. They have proven themselves manipulative liars.
I have been curious for awhile: does the term pwned, and Pwnie award, stem at all from the "OMG Pink Ponies" April first slashdot gag from a few years ago? The Pwnie awards does show a pink pony on their front page. Or does the term predate all that?
Really just curious, hope this isn't too off topic.
I would imagine our government would be more interested in acquiring a secretly swapping it with one like killed that lady in China, or swapping with any political enemies that use an iPhone.
Correction: OpenOffice has years to catch up. While LibreOffice of course gets parts of OpenOffice back ported, the code gutting and re-writes that made LibreOffice put it far ahead of OpenOffice. LibreOffice is great when it comes to outputting.doc, although I don't do much with spreadsheets so I can't comment there. Every once in awhile I install OpenOffice just to see how it's going but I always end up removing it after a few bug filled hours. I really don't know why anyone would use OpenOffice over LibreOffice.
But I'm sure if they would just show us the redacted slides, it would clear everything up... right?
Seriously though, I kind of expected things to be this bad, and they may even be worse, but this really does add frightening perspective. If they release enough information about their systems, perhaps one day someone or some group will come up with a way to at least partially work against it, or at least muddy up the data they are collecting.
Sorry to respond to myself I would also like to point out that push to talk has been ported over to CDMA from IDEN and it works well. I at one time thought that the Nextel purchase was a dumb move, and perhaps at the time it was. The reason they are decommissioning IDEN is to free up the 850 mhz spectrum it uses... they have interesting plans for it.
I am by no means a Sprint fanboy, just telling it like it is.
Until recently, I supported smartphones at Sprint. As a consequence, I had a front row seat to the Network Vision rollout from both the strictly corporate perspective as well as from the perspective of access to a wealth of robust network analysis tools. I can tell you that it is happening as quickly as is possible. One problem for LTE rollouts regarding all carriers is the simple fact that no one predicted that all of a sudden 200+ countries would suddenly start ordering massive amounts of LTE equipment from the very few companies that sell it... so there is a run LTE equipment which has been a speed bump. However, the Network Vision rollout has a lot more going on than just the LTE rollout but I don't have time get into that. Personally, I just got Sprint LTE in my area and regularly get 30+ down and 8 - 10 up. Not bad. One thing that has been confusing for customers is the difference between Sprint's 4G WiMax and LTE. A lot of customers currently getting great WiMax coverage are buying LTE phones in areas that don't have LTE yet, not realizing there is a difference (stores should explain this better), consequently they go from 8 - 10 down and 2 - 4 up to 3g, when they call up and find out what has happened from me (formerly), it's usually too late to take the phone back at which point they get understandably upset, pay their ETF, and go to another carrier. There are other complexities as well. Also, I have a good friend who works at T-Mobile and the way they are selling phones and service now really is a sweat deal to the point I might make the switch. However, it also needs to be said that Sprint has adopted a very similar model that is taking place as a pilot program in limited areas and through stores only. I think a lot of the reason they are shedding customers is due to their aggressive marketing for 4G LTE and unlimited data. A whole lot of the country has yet to have their 4G LTE switched on, and no one cares about unlimited data over 3g, so it is kind of misleading. Another part of the problem is the way they advertise the number of cities that now have LTE, the thing there is that they are concentrating their rollouts primarily in very small towns which is an artificial way of inflating their numbers - which is also confusing for customers. Basically their rollout is on schedule but their dubious ahead-of-time marketing is killing them.
I was going to jump on here and point out (along with everyone else so far) that this is a dumb idea. Consumers simply won't care. Then I decided to RTFA... From Sony's website where I saw, "standard for professional-use" and "In recent years, there has been an increasing need for archive capabilities, not only from video production industries, such as motion pictures and broadcasting, but also from cloud data centers that handle increasingly large volumes of data following the evolution in network services."
So this is not intended for general consumers anyway. But I still think it's a dumb ass idea. I have seen too-many ultra high density optical disks schemes come and go over the years, and none have found traction in any sector.
Every time I gain a little faith in humanity, it falls into a sinkhole as we see here with the twitter abuse, only to be built back up by good hearted people (the 55,000). We live in extra bizarre times thanks to mass communication. Across the whole of the earth, I often wonder which dominates: good or evil? Is evil hereditary for some and good others, or do social conditioning factors override that very notion? I doubt it's that simple anyway, but I really truly don't understand much of what drives hatred, except perhaps ignorance.
I would ask if humanity as a whole can be repaired, but I suspect we were overall broken from the start. Barring a technological singularity event that has us all holding transcended hands after it occurs, this is a reminder that we need to leave the planet and go our separate idealogical ways... forever.
Thank you for that information Angela Wilson! This has been truly enlightening! I will surely follow the path to glory that this lays out! In return, I have a wonderful investment opportunity for you too! I know some folks in Nigeria who need to perform a wire transfer of $500,000 over to the USA. Due to quirks in international law, they need someone stateside to put up a mere $5,000 in order for the transfer to take place. If you help them, they will split the $500,000 with you out of nothing but gratitude! That's right, you can make $250,000 right now for the low investment of only $5,000! I would do it myself, but I estimate that by following your incredible path to wealth, it will take me an entire three-days to make that much, at which point it will be too late! Act now!
Oh yah! One more thing! Don't forget to go fuck yourself!
This is the sort of seemingly trivial machine learning achievement that will ultimately coalesce with other seemingly trivial achievements in the field to serve as the bulk of a future, human-level or above AI. Or so I think.
The question is: will we know it when we see it? If we ever do develop a truly sentient AI, will we even be able to prove it?
I guess I'm not as politically mind as I thought as I had never heard of Gary Johnson. I am reading about him now and will be keeping an eye on him as we approach 2016 - he has apparently committed to running again. I will also inform my friends that they should take a look. He is definitely not as crazy as Ron Paul, so I don't have to make so many idealogical compromises. Thanks.
It's like I tell my conservative friends: Yes, I'm disappointed in Obama but looking back, I would still vote for him over Romney. However, I would have much rather had the opportunity to vote for Ron Paul.
Obama: All bark no bite. Didn't do most of the things he said he would do if I voted form him; quite the opposite in fact.
Romney: Religious zealotry makes him dangerous. From where I live I can see the spires of the Mormon temple that he believes Jesus will soon descend to in order to bring about 1,000 years of christly rule. How do you trust someone who believes that to have the long-term interests of my country in mind when he does not believe in long-term? Nuts for other reasons too.
Ron Paul: Do I even have to say? He might have set us back socially in some ways, but overall worth the trade off for a long term outlook for so many reasons.
I have been on slashdot regularly under one ID or another since day one. I even remember chips and dip. I have never been one to complain about the many things that people have complained about regarding slashdot over the years. I always thought it was campy... This is something else. First, what is up with the way this is rendering on the front page? I know I'm not the only one seeing it, per below posts. How can you screw that up? I mean really? Second, when I saw that there was a second ad before the interview, I was dismayed. When I saw the second ad had a runtime of 70 seconds, I said fuck it, stopped the video, and won't be playing it again. Multiple ads before a video, with one of them weighing in at 70 seconds? I know you have to make money, but not even CNN would try and pull that stunt (yet). Third, have you guys been screwing with the code in general lately? I've seen some rendering issues over the last few weeks that require a reload, and sometimes I click to read the comments for a story where I have not yet viewed the comments, only to find myself dumped off in the middle or even end as though it's trying to take me to where I left off on a page yet visited, but rarely at the top. What is going on? Are you about to lose funding and making desperate moves. Please explain yourself, slashdot.
Due to the nature of the story, I was expecting this to be one of those 800+ comment stories. You can make the flogging a dead horse argument, but I assure you the horse is alive and well.
We may have lost this battle, but the war has barely begun. I would like to point out that when looking up your representatives, don't just maneuver to call and chew out those who voted against our liberties, call those who voted for us and praise them in a show of support.
I would also like to take a moment to sincerely apologize to the tin foil hat crowd: I have made fun of you in the past, only now I am sorry I was too blind to really listen. You were right all along.
I live in Kansas City where google has been steadily expanding their rollout for some time now. In response to this Time Warner has been quietly bumping up our bandwidth. They can't compete with Google Fibre speeds by a large margin, but getting fifty down is unfortunately pretty good for my part of KC, so it's nice while waiting for fiber. It's funny that the only thing that would keep me with them is my thirteen-year-old kc.rr.com address -- the thought of giving that up is painful. I would easily continue paying $20 or possibly even more just to keep that address while using google fiber. Where fibre has been rolled out, Time Warner has been proactively lowering peoples monthly bill--although I don't see how it's legal to give some people billing breaks over those areas where we are still waiting. The bottom line is, Time Warner has received the swift kick in the ass that they have needed since they started offering service here over a decade ago. It might be too late for them since google roll out will complete soon--long before Time Warner could even get started on an upgrade, but I'm overall suspicious that copper wire yet has more bandwidth to be squeezed out of it in the future. Finally, I think Time Warner vs. Google's first fiber rollout will be a wake up call to providers around the nation that they better get in gear and be ready to compete with ridiculously fast internet, tagged with a low price. Perhaps spurring everyone else was google's point with the project to begin with.
Somewhat ironically, my bandwidth has been nearly useless shit for several days now. There is no point in calling their so called 'tech support'. I accepted years ago that several days of shitty bandwidth a few times a year is simply the level of service they offer, which is low.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I have been fairly anti-MS over the years (except their backend stuff, that's decent), they have been such a staple of nerd\geek culture over these many years that I find myself saddened and feeling quite bad for them as I watch them make such huge, and possibly in the long term, suicidal mistakes. It is only as I watch them die a slow death that I realize I have had an affection for them all along.
Sorry, nothing insightful or informative to mod up here. I just wanted to say my piece.
Yesterday I made a posting on CNN regarding the story about the heightened terrorist threat alert. While it covers a different subject, I could re-write it to fit this situation, but I think the slashdot crowd will get my drift, here is a direct copy\paste:
I do not know who to trust or what to think anymore. If this threat is real or not, I imagine we are intended to suppose that it was the US governments blanket surveillance of the world, including domestic spying that tipped them off. On the other hand, the timing is such (Snowden/Manning) that for all I know they made the whole thing up to better justify government wrongdoing in the eyes of the people. Or perhaps al Qaeda made the whole thing up just to see if they can manipulate the movements of our government by taking advantage of info gathering with a campaign of false intel. I don't know who to trust or what to think anymore, with the exception that I know I don't trust my own government. They have proven themselves manipulative liars.
I have been curious for awhile: does the term pwned, and Pwnie award, stem at all from the "OMG Pink Ponies" April first slashdot gag from a few years ago? The Pwnie awards does show a pink pony on their front page. Or does the term predate all that?
Really just curious, hope this isn't too off topic.
I would imagine our government would be more interested in acquiring a secretly swapping it with one like killed that lady in China, or swapping with any political enemies that use an iPhone.
Slashdot has editors?
American spring? It could happen...
LibraOffice has years to play catchup
Correction: OpenOffice has years to catch up. While LibreOffice of course gets parts of OpenOffice back ported, the code gutting and re-writes that made LibreOffice put it far ahead of OpenOffice. LibreOffice is great when it comes to outputting .doc, although I don't do much with spreadsheets so I can't comment there. Every once in awhile I install OpenOffice just to see how it's going but I always end up removing it after a few bug filled hours. I really don't know why anyone would use OpenOffice over LibreOffice.
But I'm sure if they would just show us the redacted slides, it would clear everything up... right?
Seriously though, I kind of expected things to be this bad, and they may even be worse, but this really does add frightening perspective. If they release enough information about their systems, perhaps one day someone or some group will come up with a way to at least partially work against it, or at least muddy up the data they are collecting.
Sorry to respond to myself I would also like to point out that push to talk has been ported over to CDMA from IDEN and it works well. I at one time thought that the Nextel purchase was a dumb move, and perhaps at the time it was. The reason they are decommissioning IDEN is to free up the 850 mhz spectrum it uses... they have interesting plans for it.
I am by no means a Sprint fanboy, just telling it like it is.
Until recently, I supported smartphones at Sprint. As a consequence, I had a front row seat to the Network Vision rollout from both the strictly corporate perspective as well as from the perspective of access to a wealth of robust network analysis tools. I can tell you that it is happening as quickly as is possible. One problem for LTE rollouts regarding all carriers is the simple fact that no one predicted that all of a sudden 200+ countries would suddenly start ordering massive amounts of LTE equipment from the very few companies that sell it... so there is a run LTE equipment which has been a speed bump. However, the Network Vision rollout has a lot more going on than just the LTE rollout but I don't have time get into that. Personally, I just got Sprint LTE in my area and regularly get 30+ down and 8 - 10 up. Not bad. One thing that has been confusing for customers is the difference between Sprint's 4G WiMax and LTE. A lot of customers currently getting great WiMax coverage are buying LTE phones in areas that don't have LTE yet, not realizing there is a difference (stores should explain this better), consequently they go from 8 - 10 down and 2 - 4 up to 3g, when they call up and find out what has happened from me (formerly), it's usually too late to take the phone back at which point they get understandably upset, pay their ETF, and go to another carrier. There are other complexities as well. Also, I have a good friend who works at T-Mobile and the way they are selling phones and service now really is a sweat deal to the point I might make the switch. However, it also needs to be said that Sprint has adopted a very similar model that is taking place as a pilot program in limited areas and through stores only. I think a lot of the reason they are shedding customers is due to their aggressive marketing for 4G LTE and unlimited data. A whole lot of the country has yet to have their 4G LTE switched on, and no one cares about unlimited data over 3g, so it is kind of misleading. Another part of the problem is the way they advertise the number of cities that now have LTE, the thing there is that they are concentrating their rollouts primarily in very small towns which is an artificial way of inflating their numbers - which is also confusing for customers. Basically their rollout is on schedule but their dubious ahead-of-time marketing is killing them.
Well said. I needed a reminder that I closely hold extropian ideals. Lately I have found it easy to lose my way in the chaos of our growing pains.
I was going to jump on here and point out (along with everyone else so far) that this is a dumb idea. Consumers simply won't care. Then I decided to RTFA... From Sony's website where I saw, "standard for professional-use" and "In recent years, there has been an increasing need for archive capabilities, not only from video production industries, such as motion pictures and broadcasting, but also from cloud data centers that handle increasingly large volumes of data following the evolution in network services."
So this is not intended for general consumers anyway. But I still think it's a dumb ass idea. I have seen too-many ultra high density optical disks schemes come and go over the years, and none have found traction in any sector.
Every time I gain a little faith in humanity, it falls into a sinkhole as we see here with the twitter abuse, only to be built back up by good hearted people (the 55,000). We live in extra bizarre times thanks to mass communication. Across the whole of the earth, I often wonder which dominates: good or evil? Is evil hereditary for some and good others, or do social conditioning factors override that very notion? I doubt it's that simple anyway, but I really truly don't understand much of what drives hatred, except perhaps ignorance.
I would ask if humanity as a whole can be repaired, but I suspect we were overall broken from the start. Barring a technological singularity event that has us all holding transcended hands after it occurs, this is a reminder that we need to leave the planet and go our separate idealogical ways... forever.
Thank you for that information Angela Wilson! This has been truly enlightening! I will surely follow the path to glory that this lays out! In return, I have a wonderful investment opportunity for you too! I know some folks in Nigeria who need to perform a wire transfer of $500,000 over to the USA. Due to quirks in international law, they need someone stateside to put up a mere $5,000 in order for the transfer to take place. If you help them, they will split the $500,000 with you out of nothing but gratitude! That's right, you can make $250,000 right now for the low investment of only $5,000! I would do it myself, but I estimate that by following your incredible path to wealth, it will take me an entire three-days to make that much, at which point it will be too late! Act now!
Oh yah! One more thing! Don't forget to go fuck yourself!
This is the sort of seemingly trivial machine learning achievement that will ultimately coalesce with other seemingly trivial achievements in the field to serve as the bulk of a future, human-level or above AI. Or so I think.
The question is: will we know it when we see it? If we ever do develop a truly sentient AI, will we even be able to prove it?
I guess I'm not as politically mind as I thought as I had never heard of Gary Johnson. I am reading about him now and will be keeping an eye on him as we approach 2016 - he has apparently committed to running again. I will also inform my friends that they should take a look. He is definitely not as crazy as Ron Paul, so I don't have to make so many idealogical compromises. Thanks.
It's like I tell my conservative friends: Yes, I'm disappointed in Obama but looking back, I would still vote for him over Romney. However, I would have much rather had the opportunity to vote for Ron Paul.
Obama: All bark no bite. Didn't do most of the things he said he would do if I voted form him; quite the opposite in fact.
Romney: Religious zealotry makes him dangerous. From where I live I can see the spires of the Mormon temple that he believes Jesus will soon descend to in order to bring about 1,000 years of christly rule. How do you trust someone who believes that to have the long-term interests of my country in mind when he does not believe in long-term? Nuts for other reasons too.
Ron Paul: Do I even have to say? He might have set us back socially in some ways, but overall worth the trade off for a long term outlook for so many reasons.
at least you fixed the front page...
I have been on slashdot regularly under one ID or another since day one. I even remember chips and dip. I have never been one to complain about the many things that people have complained about regarding slashdot over the years. I always thought it was campy... This is something else. First, what is up with the way this is rendering on the front page? I know I'm not the only one seeing it, per below posts. How can you screw that up? I mean really? Second, when I saw that there was a second ad before the interview, I was dismayed. When I saw the second ad had a runtime of 70 seconds, I said fuck it, stopped the video, and won't be playing it again. Multiple ads before a video, with one of them weighing in at 70 seconds? I know you have to make money, but not even CNN would try and pull that stunt (yet). Third, have you guys been screwing with the code in general lately? I've seen some rendering issues over the last few weeks that require a reload, and sometimes I click to read the comments for a story where I have not yet viewed the comments, only to find myself dumped off in the middle or even end as though it's trying to take me to where I left off on a page yet visited, but rarely at the top. What is going on? Are you about to lose funding and making desperate moves. Please explain yourself, slashdot.
Due to the nature of the story, I was expecting this to be one of those 800+ comment stories. You can make the flogging a dead horse argument, but I assure you the horse is alive and well.
I'm listening now, have at.
Perhaps it did for one - his name was Edward Snowden.
Perhaps it did for one - his name is Edward Snowden.
We may have lost this battle, but the war has barely begun. I would like to point out that when looking up your representatives, don't just maneuver to call and chew out those who voted against our liberties, call those who voted for us and praise them in a show of support.
I would also like to take a moment to sincerely apologize to the tin foil hat crowd: I have made fun of you in the past, only now I am sorry I was too blind to really listen. You were right all along.
Your assuming she knows how to take it down. : p
I live in Kansas City where google has been steadily expanding their rollout for some time now. In response to this Time Warner has been quietly bumping up our bandwidth. They can't compete with Google Fibre speeds by a large margin, but getting fifty down is unfortunately pretty good for my part of KC, so it's nice while waiting for fiber. It's funny that the only thing that would keep me with them is my thirteen-year-old kc.rr.com address -- the thought of giving that up is painful. I would easily continue paying $20 or possibly even more just to keep that address while using google fiber. Where fibre has been rolled out, Time Warner has been proactively lowering peoples monthly bill--although I don't see how it's legal to give some people billing breaks over those areas where we are still waiting. The bottom line is, Time Warner has received the swift kick in the ass that they have needed since they started offering service here over a decade ago. It might be too late for them since google roll out will complete soon--long before Time Warner could even get started on an upgrade, but I'm overall suspicious that copper wire yet has more bandwidth to be squeezed out of it in the future. Finally, I think Time Warner vs. Google's first fiber rollout will be a wake up call to providers around the nation that they better get in gear and be ready to compete with ridiculously fast internet, tagged with a low price. Perhaps spurring everyone else was google's point with the project to begin with.
Somewhat ironically, my bandwidth has been nearly useless shit for several days now. There is no point in calling their so called 'tech support'. I accepted years ago that several days of shitty bandwidth a few times a year is simply the level of service they offer, which is low.