I find it difficult to believe it's intentional, as it makes it difficult to quote someone.
That would go hand in hand with the meta-moderation page ripping out both the quote and i tags, so when you quote someone, the quoted text appears that You are saying it, and thus you get modded whatever the parent post should be/is.
The plot thickens...
Yeah. And the no paste thing only works in Chrome. Can someone check the page's source and see if there is something intentional in there blocking it?
Mouse and/or keyboard for those things that just don't work so well with the fancy remote, external HDD to play back content from (instead of a media center thing that plays back over HDMI and needing an HDMI switch), camera/card reader (presuming it doesn't have a built-in card reader)... yeah, those 4 could end up being used simultaneously just fine.
What about a USB blender to mix me some hard drinks every time a Reality TV show comes on?
No one cares about the current and planned IPTV offerings. Cable/satellite companies will never let them mature into anything worthwhile. Sony.
Reasons Slashdot will shit on this: Flash.
Its not so much IPTV like AT&T U-Verse, that requires everyone to agree on how it works, its just web TV, like Hulu. I already use Hulu as my main source of TV, and don't have cable, just internet, with a media center hooked up to the TV.
Plenty of people would do that too if it were built into to their TV already.
Paraphrasing since copy-paste isn't working (did slashdot do that on purpose or is my computer on crack?)
"Even though google annouced their own google tv... their partnership with sony will make it obsolete..."
Anyway.. whaaaa? Did the person writing this even read about Google TV? Google didn't announce a TV... the announced a software platform called Google TV, which sony is using. So the partnership isn't going to make it obsolete... it's USING Google TV!
Such a terrible summary its actually weird. Also, nice random semicolon. -Taylor
There was a quote from an ex FBI guy in the gizmodo article. He was saying that normally they're much more well-hidden. They know you may go to the mechanic or whatever, and don't want to be found. He said something to the effect of: if they install it right, you won't find it.
And not one major car manufacturer had announced any plans to sell a pure electric until years after Tesla started selling their cars. As far as I can tell, Tesla singlehandedly created the (still small) market for pure electrics, and met their goal.
Give them some fucking credit. -Taylor
You know, I've read all the stuff about Musk's financial trouble, Tesla being behind schedule, prices still out of range in the near future, but I had never really given thought to the fact that Tesla was the brand that put the "cool" back in electric cars. You're probably right that we wouldn't be seeing the Nissan Leaf, Coda, Focus EV, etc., today if it weren't for them.
That said, it's still going to be a while before they turn into a money machine. They have a lot of competition in a fledgling market where it is easy to make a mistake and fall behind. I do hope they become one of many successful EV makers.
I agree. They've got a steep road still ahead of them, but I really hope they make it. All the other car manufacturers ignored electrics for years and years, until finally Tesla came about and decided to do what the established car companies didn't care enough to do. GM might be just about to release the Volt, but Tesla announced the Roadster back in 2006, when the Hummer was still king (a google search shows that Hummer sales were still *accelerating* in 2006). Tesla really did do something truly innovative and awesome and I hope they succeed.
Sorry if I came off a bit harsh, I'm just so used to people ragging on them for being an evil company that steals government funds to make pleasure vehicles for the rich, but that couldn't be farther from the truth.
I really respect Tesla and Musk for what they've done. -Taylor
Actually, Tesla is a money sink, and always will be. Its goal was never to cater to anything other than Musk's tiny/imaginary market for luxury electric cars with average performance (for electrics)....
GOD I am SO tired of people not fucking getting it... Tesla started by making a $100k car... to prove that electrics could be cool and performance did not have to be an issue, and to cover the high costs of entering that kind of market.
NOW they're working on a $50k electric car that is basically already done, and they have shown off. Its a nice family sedan and it looks great.
They have said the the goal after that is to make a $20k electric car, as well as a van, and basically all car types.
Everyone things Tesla is only about the Roadster, and gets all fucking pissed off every time they get government funding, but the whole idea is and always has been to prove the viability of electric cars as more than just for weenies, and then sell them to everyone. Selling the expensive one first was just to make enough money to keep doing it! Its also the only kind of car you can ask people to pay for up front, and deliver a year later. People that buy a Tesla can afford to wait, so it gave them advance funding to help development.
And not one major car manufacturer had announced any plans to sell a pure electric until years after Tesla started selling their cars. As far as I can tell, Tesla singlehandedly created the (still small) market for pure electrics, and met their goal.
Elon is under 40, has a fortune in the low billions and several successful businesses under his belt. If anyone has a shot at getting to Mars, it is he.
Hmm. I guess he's got a lot of stock options and whatnot, but he ran out of cash recently. I know that for a guy like him, he'll have lots of other assets besides cash, but I got the sense his fortune wasn't that big. Maybe its just all tied up. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/22/elon-musk-says-hes-broke_n_620612.html
He does own one of the two companies that has a good shot at jump starting commercial spaceflight though.
Glass is really remarkably strong when it comes out of the furnace. The tensile strength is amazing, it can bend enough to absorb some shocks. It's a great material before it gets to the real world.
But, once it does, it immediately develops microcracks in the surface, and each of these could be the beginning of a fracture that goes through the bulk of the glass. So, what to do?
I don't know if they've taken the hint from the semiconductor industry (look up 'strained silicon') but they did a similar thing with glass. By bombarding the surface of the glass with larger atoms, they create significant stress in the surface, so that any microcracks are immediately pushed shut. But, this is only true down to the level that these atoms diffuse into the surface...not far at all!
So, if you create a significant scratch (and this might just be 100 microns) you are through this surface, and have a potentially catastrophic failure waiting to happen.
A screen-protecting film of plastic would be a good investment.
I worked at a glass shop for a summer installing windows and doors in peoples houses when I was younger. If it wasn't a brand new house, we'd have to take out the old windows. Often those windows had tempered glass. We took all the old windows back to our shop and threw them in a big trailer for the dump (sadly, window glass isn't as high quality as bottle glass, so it wasn't worth recycling. or thats what they told me).
Anyway, we loved to break the tempered glass. Normal glass breaks in big sheets, but tempered glass is made for safety, so it is both stronger, and won't break into sheets - it shatters into 1000's of tiny pieces when it breaks, so you can't get stabbed.
The fun comes with how it breaks. You can hit a 1/4" thick tempered glass window head on with a sledge hammer and it won't break. BUT, tempered glass gets its strength from really high surface tension, which is unbalanced on the edge of the glass. So, after we hit the thing with the sledgehammer and it didn't break, we'd take a regular hammer and lightly tap an exposed edge of the glass, and BOOM, it instantly shattered!
I don't know how gorilla glass compares to regular tempered glass, but it seems like a bit of a bad design to have the edges exposed like that.
Unless the glass is breaking all by itself, I'm going to go with "people who spent too much money on a phone don't know how to take proper care of them."
Fact is, I spent like $100 (and renewed my contract with tmobile) to get a samsung vibrant. The first thing I did was slap a protective case around it and put on a screen protector. Following that, a visit to eBay showed me some nicer things to protect the phone and I also got one of those belt holders for the phone. Why?
1. I spend what I consider to be a lot of money for a phone. 2. Things I spend money on, I try to take care of 3. Keeping a phone in your pocket will cause problems starting with dust and ending with who knows what else 4. In spite of all the care I want to give it, things fall, slide off, whatever.
If I had an iPhone (and people who know me know the LOOONG list of reasons why I will never own an iPhone) I would do the same thing to it -- protect the shit out of it. It's frikken expensive and needs to be protected.
People need to get over complaining about how durable something is or isn't and start simply being careful for a change.
I spent $600 on my nexus one in February, and have never had a case on it. I have dropped it once, getting out of the car, and it fell about 2 feet. It has one scratch from that, and no more.
I am a mechanical engineer who also runs our machine shop. I spend a lot of time running prototypes in the shop, and working with hammers, large pieces of steel, sharp cutting tools, and pulling chips of metal out of my hair/pockets/shoes.
My phone just hangs out in my pocket mostly, though I take it out all the time to play with it. I do always keep it by itself in my left pocket, with keys and everything else in the right pocket. Aside from having to blow metal chips out of the USB connector from time to time, the phone is basically completely unaffected by my work in the shop.
I'm just careful.
You don't need a goofy case and hip holster to watch out for your stuff, you really do just need to be careful.
Also, hip holsters make people look like a tool. They also - I think - make your phone more likely to be damaged, since its out there more where your body bumps into things (my hip hits things more than my pocket areas do).
So I dunno, people just need to be careful. Though my roommate is incapable of being careful with stuff, so he always has cases on his phones. -Taylor
So you are somewhat realistic about it costing trillions of dollars to put a few dozen people on Mars.
Do you really see trillions of dollars of benefits from such a thing?
It depends. What else are you using the money for? War? Or feeding the poor?
If we spent trillions on space exploration, I imagine that the amount of new technology developed to do so could greatly improve the lives of many people on earth. At least, in the long run.
But its really hard to say, unfortunately. That would be a long debate, and I'd have to do some research to give you a good answer. For now, all I can say is that I think it would be a good thing.
Am I the only one who thinks that this could have been done 30 years ago with multiple shuttle launches. I know, I know, the shuttle engines are designed to perform multiple long burns without being inspected and rebuilt but come on, orbital refueling just seems like the kind of thing we should have been doing for decades now. I guess we haven't done much for manned (and therefor time critical) long range missions since Apollo but still, this seems like it's some pretty low hanging fruit as far as space exploration technology is concerned.
I know you're just highlighting the point, but you really shouldn't act so surprised. Sadly, everything we do in space is low-hanging fruit. We've done some amazing stuff with telescopes and things launched out into space, but as far as human exploration... not much has been done in the last 40 years. We could have easily had a manned outpost on Mars already, but it would have taken a lot of money, a lot of risk (with likely some tragic deaths along the way - more so than what we've had) and least likely of all, the cooperation from one political administration to the next.
That's the biggest problem at NASA - one president says "The last president had no vision - lets go to mars!" and then the next president says "The last president was spending like crazy. We can't afford to go to mars!" and then it repeats every 8 years or so.
If we had had a concerted and continuous effort to explore space, we could have filled out the inner solar system by now.
But would have taken trillions of dollars, and a level of agreement that we've simply never had.
Thats why I'm so excited about privatization of space exploration - a corporation has a real vested interest in getting something done. Unlike politicians.
Hopefully the billionaires of the world will take us places no government has. THAT is what I'm looking forward to.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has said he'd like to retire on mars. That's likely a little far-fetched, but he's more likely to make that happen than NASA. (well, technically his fortune is pretty small in comparison to some other people, but lets say Tesla does really well...) -Taylor
> I know exactly where the file is, because I know how to right click and select "Open in windows explorer".
Except that it did not work, songs were not copied on any library. Under which conditions I dunno, likely they were listened from a CD or gotten in a usb key. Might happen to others? http://www.google.com/search?q=itunes+loosing+songs
> I really don't have much sympathy for people that hate something because they don't know anything about it.
I really love when people use the "linux defense" on apple software. I knew about Open in windows explorer - that one option is even fairly well put in the UI. Thanks anyway.
>...This all started because the OP said openmoko died because *we* didn't support it. That's just fucking bullshit,
I agree with you on that. Open stuff must first be adopted by geeks, and only later it may become palatable to the public.
Ah... *that* losing song issue. I figured that one out years ago. If you don't tell itunes to organize your music, and then you download some torrent and drag the music into itunes, it just references the file from wherever you torrented it. If, then, down the line you decide to clean up your torrent folder and delete the music, itunes doesn't know its gone until you try to play it, and then it can't find it.
Its really not a terrible design. Back when hard drives were small, apple didn't want to copy by default. One of the top search results in that search you linked is from 2003. And the rest seem to be from 2008 or older. I think apple finally decided to set the default to "Organize my library for me" where it copied it to the itunes forlder and the problem effectively went away for people.
Both methods seem reasonable to me. How would you handle it?
I really don't see how you can fault itunes for that. What does Amarok do to handle it? Probably the same thing. I'm not thrilled about how bloated itunes is, but if you have a decent computer, I still think its the best music software out there.
And the "linux defense" makes sense here. It *doesnt* make sense when people tell you you're supposed to read a bunch of documentation and figure out what commands to type... but realizing that your files are gone because you deleted the folder they were in? That has to be something the user figures out. The only thing I would have done is added a prompt that says "The files were added from folder:xxx which no longer exists. To avoid this, you may want to let itunes organize your music."
But who knows, I might be crazy trying to have helpful messages. Still, it wasn't a terrible design the way it was, and I'm not much sure what would be a better way, except what apple *did* do, which is setting the default to err on the side of wasted space, not lost files. -Taylor
This is NOT a good analogy. The iPhone was found in a bar, and the jackass that "found" it knew whose it was and made no attempt to give it back. This device was intentionally left attached to the car, with the hope that it would never be found. Basically, the two situations are opposites of each other.
What the fuck? The "jackass" who found it made multiple calls to apple, trying to return it. No one in customer service believed him (which makes some sense - they don't know jack about secret stuff like that), and after they continually refused to listen to him, he contacted gizmodo.
Don't call random people a jackass just because you don't know how to read. That kind of shit pisses me off. -Taylor
LOL ITunes is easy? You think you have a song because it's listed and the file is who knows where. You have to search documentation to select what to sync on the ipod. Amarok has a few glitches with import/export of playlists IIRC, and it's not the super intuitive player either, but I'd take it over itunes any day if I owned an Ipod.
Also you incorrectly assume that I ascribe to poor consumer choices the failure of openmoko and similar open stuff. It seems not so. Pandora, the touchbook, and others seem to suffer from high demand and insufficient production for one reason or another. The N900 is probably less palatable for the carriers and devs because the user is unrestricted. The one laptop per child is another example where mismanagement is more to blame than lack of consumer demand.
I simply called BS on the argument that consumers decide.
What the fuck? "You think you have a song because it's listed and the file is who knows where." I know exactly where the file is, because I know how to right click and select "Open in windows explorer".
And because I just let iTunes organize my music. It keeps everything in my iTunes folder, which I select, and keeps everything in folders like Artist\Album.
I know a lot of crotchety old users who got all irate that iTunes does that, because they got used to winamp where you *had* to arrange your folders, and they don't like them being organized any other way. But it's a fucking database, just let itunes deal with it. And learn how to right click if I need the file. It works great.
I really don't have much sympathy for people that hate something because they don't know anything about it.
And you call BS on the argument that consumers decide... but they do! They might not all be the most sensible decisions, but you have to appeal to them. Hell, even if you were right, and people just do what they're told, then the people running the openmoko project were still idiots (or, more likely, just underfunded) because THEY weren't out there getting in consumer's faces.
This all started because the OP said openmoko died because *we* didn't support it. That's just fucking bullshit, and that's the only point I'm trying to make. Openmoko failed because they either didn't market well, didn't make a good enough product, or both. There is no other excuse. That's just how business works. And as long as OSS projects are run by people like the OP, we'll never get anywhere. So I actually agree with you that the problem can also be mismanagement, I'm just not buying the "You didn't support me!" bullshit.
This is a really interesting model and it has a nice ring to it. (And Robin is one of the best researchers I know in this area, so that adds confidence, too.) But can we not use the definite statements in the headlines? This is a model. A good model, to be sure, but just one. I've definitely seen work even recently that makes a comet origin seem plausible, so in the very least, there's a competing model that has to be answered.
ALL HEADLINES ARE TRUE. -Fantasyland, USA: Today, a top researcher said some headlines might be true, under certain circumstances. This is an amazing find, as previously it was believed that all headlines were complete fabrications, as covered in our story yesterday entitled "ALL HEADLINES FALSE".
#152037 +(3036)- [X] <dm> I discovered that you'd never get an answer to a problem from Linux Gurus by asking. You have to troll in order for someone to help you with a Linux problem. <dm> For example, I didn't know how to find files by contents and the man pages were way too confusing. What did I do? I knew from experience that if I just asked, I'd be told to read the man pages even though it was too hard for me. <dm> Instead, I did what works. Trolling. By stating that Linux sucked because it was so hard to find a file compared to Windows, I got every self-described Linux Guru around the world coming to my aid. They gave me examples after examples of different ways to do it. All this in order to prove to everyone that Linux was better. * ion has quit IRC (Ping timeout) <dm> brings a tear to my eye...:') so true.. <dm> So if you're starting out Linux, I advise you to use the same method as I did to get help. Start the sentence with "Linux is gay because it can't do XXX like Windows can". You will have PhDs running to tell you how to solve your problems. <dm> this person must be a kindred spirit of mine
Haha, oh, man, that is the best idea ever. I will so use that. Thank you!
You mean that consumers want to throw money at bluescreening OSes, music player with usb interface that can't do proper usb storage, pads with cams usb and sd coming as an option, stuff that bricks when you tamper with it, updates that remove capability as general as being able to install an OS?
IMHO: Advertisement backed media tell what consumers should want, consumers use what they perceive as most popular because they haven't got a clue nor time to get a clue, and their issues are lost in the sea of noise and astroturfing.
Ugh. "Consumers are sheeple. They only do what big media tells them. My product died because I was fighting the man. Whaa whaa."
I don't like Apple's wacky methods and I think they could do just fine without locking down the iphone, but I don't think they're successful because they *tell* people to buy their stuff (though if anyone has that power, it's them).
I might not like what they do, but you have to admit that the iPod was a great product (especially with iTunes) and people who bought one may have liked mass storage, but that's not why you buy a media player! If you want mass storage to be able to put music on it... well, get over it. My android phone is just mass storage and I got so sick of the lack of organization I started using doubletwist, which is... just like iTunes!
People buy windows because it works, they bought iPods because they work, and they buy iPhones because they work. The OP was complaining that no one bought OpenMoko devices, but you know what? I bet they were crap compared to an iPhone!
No one cares that it can SSH into your debian server if it can't fucking browse the web, go texty texty, and listen to music.
So go ahead and keep blaming customers for their choices. You'll never own a fucking successful business in your life. -Taylor
If you really want to have an "open" device, you should have supported the various open hardware platforms that eventually failed because of your lack of support.
You can't really complain that you don't have choices when you made no effort to support the good choices that you had.
Oh my fucking god man, whaaa whaa whaa. I really try to support open source, but THIS is the fucking reason why open source isn't more widely supported. Everyone developing for them says they're the best thing ever, and then when users don't adopt, the developers blame the USERS.
WTF? Did you not ever take a business class in your life? Consumers do what they want, and you either provide them with what they want or you get left behind. If you don't see it that way, you will also get left behind. If consumers don't pick up your device, its YOUR FAULT.
If the CEO of a poorly performing company came out and said "We lost money this year because consumers refuse to support us." that CEO would get fucking FIRED.
This mentality upsets me so much, because every year I download Ubuntu and give it a shot. I *want* it to be awesome and I want to switch. But every time I have some menial little issue that ends up taking a week to sort out, and I give up. Then, when I mention that experience to people who strongly support linux, they say it was my fault. That "All you have to do it edit.asoundrc. If you won't RTFM we can't help you.", as if you just click "edit" and its done. No one on the forums could tell me *what* I needed to do in the editor (and I searched, and asked nicely - I know how to ask things on forums) and I *tried* reading the manual, and reading everything else I could find, but all I was trying to do was get my media center to properly mix the audio for 5.1 channel surround! In windows you just check a box. In linux, I spent a week on it and then gave up.
As long as people keep developing crap software and then blaming it on the user, they will never succeed. That said, I am still excited for Ubuntu 10.10. Just like I was for 7.10,8.4,8.10,9.4,9.10, and 10.4. Lets hope *this* time its money...
That is very bad news. Let’s put things in perspective and imagine sending the international space station (m= 370 metric tons) to Gliese 581g. The whole trip would require something like:
* E = 1.8 x 10^25 Joules
Or approximately 5% of the sun’s energy output in a second. That sounds reasonable, until you realize that that tiny amount would take approximately:
* 3 million years to collect on earth if the entire surface were covered with solar panels
That, as the physicists say, is non-trivial.
Better start building that Dyson sphere.
I was looking around, and I found another interesting metric.
The largest nuclear bomb ever detonated was the Tsar Bomba, and had a 50 Megaton Yield. The wikipedia article claims that the average output of it was about 1.4% of the sun's output for 39 nanoseconds. So if you go off the estimate above, you'd need about 90,000,000 of those bombs to put out the energy required (5% of the sun's output for 1 second). That would weigh about 2.4 trillion kilograms, based on the 24 tonne weight of the original bomb. Still only a tiny fraction of the earth's mass though!
They said it could have put out 100 Megatons but was reduced for safety, so really we might only need 45,000,000 of those.
Seriously, back up your data. Multiple copies in multiple locations.
These guys were smart enough to keep backups (hopefully up-to-date backups) so this is nothing more than an annoyance to them, but if they hadn't it would be what we refer to around here as a resume-generating-event.
If it's worth keeping, its worth backing up.
Yeah, seriously. I work at a small (10 people) company, and I still have us set up with an Ubuntu server with nightly incremental backups to a second machine, as well as weekly full backups to the second machine and the server itself that go back 6 weeks. Every month I do the same thing, and keep those for 6 months. I also backup manually to an external USB drive once every month or so.
It took a bit of time out of my schedule to setup, but now it just goes, and damn if having backups isn't amazing. Our issue here is usually not one of drive failure, but of users accidentally erasing a file. They come running to me, and I can grab the most recent copy in 30 seconds.
I feel like most small businesses aren't that well-prepared, but I encourage anyone else that can to do it. -Taylor
Could he have given them a random password, and then act dumbfounded when it does not work? Maybe even accuse them of breaking his system?
It is hard to prove that the header of an encrypted disk has not been corrrupted.
Would that work with the current law? Has anyone already tried it?
I wonder if it works the other way around? When they take my un-encrypted system, I'll claim it is in fact encrypted, and all the apparent data on the disk is just random garbage that happens to look like a windows 7 file system full of furry midget porn. I'll provide them with the 'real' encryption key and they'll see that all I was keeping on the disk was random garbage data. -Taylor
Yeah, aside from the "damage to the internet" part (the spirit is fine, but that actual statement is a bit... silly), this is exactly what they need to do.
They can't just cut people off or they'll hate it. They need to have it be very easy to fix. Landing page with free virus scan is perfect. Override for people who need the net is good too. Maybe they can have an annoying persistent banner up top of every page until they fix it.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it difficult to believe it's intentional, as it makes it difficult to quote someone.
That would go hand in hand with the meta-moderation page ripping out both the quote and i tags, so when you quote someone, the quoted text appears that You are saying it, and thus you get modded whatever the parent post should be/is.
The plot thickens...
Yeah. And the no paste thing only works in Chrome. Can someone check the page's source and see if there is something intentional in there blocking it?
Mouse and/or keyboard for those things that just don't work so well with the fancy remote, external HDD to play back content from (instead of a media center thing that plays back over HDMI and needing an HDMI switch), camera/card reader (presuming it doesn't have a built-in card reader)... yeah, those 4 could end up being used simultaneously just fine.
What about a USB blender to mix me some hard drinks every time a Reality TV show comes on?
Or you could just right click the selected text and hit "copy". It's really not that complicated.
Thank you, mr computer guru, I never thought of that... Only, IT DOESN'T PASTE. Something won't let it. Using chrome.
but thanks for being a jackass.
No one cares about the current and planned IPTV offerings.
Cable/satellite companies will never let them mature into anything worthwhile.
Sony.
Reasons Slashdot will shit on this:
Flash.
Its not so much IPTV like AT&T U-Verse, that requires everyone to agree on how it works, its just web TV, like Hulu. I already use Hulu as my main source of TV, and don't have cable, just internet, with a media center hooked up to the TV.
Plenty of people would do that too if it were built into to their TV already.
Paraphrasing since copy-paste isn't working (did slashdot do that on purpose or is my computer on crack?)
"Even though google annouced their own google tv... their partnership with sony will make it obsolete..."
Anyway.. whaaaa? Did the person writing this even read about Google TV? Google didn't announce a TV... the announced a software platform called Google TV, which sony is using. So the partnership isn't going to make it obsolete... it's USING Google TV!
Such a terrible summary its actually weird. Also, nice random semicolon.
-Taylor
I'd recommend you go look at the pictures of the device that have been posted. It will not be hard to recognize. And this is not a thing they can easily disguise, the biggest part of it is a battery.
http://www.google.com/images?q=fbi+tracking+device&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1600&bih=1047
There was a quote from an ex FBI guy in the gizmodo article. He was saying that normally they're much more well-hidden. They know you may go to the mechanic or whatever, and don't want to be found. He said something to the effect of: if they install it right, you won't find it.
Spooky.
-Taylor
And not one major car manufacturer had announced any plans to sell a pure electric until years after Tesla started selling their cars. As far as I can tell, Tesla singlehandedly created the (still small) market for pure electrics, and met their goal.
Give them some fucking credit.
-Taylor
You know, I've read all the stuff about Musk's financial trouble, Tesla being behind schedule, prices still out of range in the near future, but I had never really given thought to the fact that Tesla was the brand that put the "cool" back in electric cars. You're probably right that we wouldn't be seeing the Nissan Leaf, Coda, Focus EV, etc., today if it weren't for them.
That said, it's still going to be a while before they turn into a money machine. They have a lot of competition in a fledgling market where it is easy to make a mistake and fall behind. I do hope they become one of many successful EV makers.
I agree. They've got a steep road still ahead of them, but I really hope they make it. All the other car manufacturers ignored electrics for years and years, until finally Tesla came about and decided to do what the established car companies didn't care enough to do. GM might be just about to release the Volt, but Tesla announced the Roadster back in 2006, when the Hummer was still king (a google search shows that Hummer sales were still *accelerating* in 2006).
Tesla really did do something truly innovative and awesome and I hope they succeed.
Sorry if I came off a bit harsh, I'm just so used to people ragging on them for being an evil company that steals government funds to make pleasure vehicles for the rich, but that couldn't be farther from the truth.
I really respect Tesla and Musk for what they've done.
-Taylor
Actually, Tesla is a money sink, and always will be. Its goal was never to cater to anything other than Musk's tiny/imaginary market for luxury electric cars with average performance (for electrics)....
GOD I am SO tired of people not fucking getting it... Tesla started by making a $100k car... to prove that electrics could be cool and performance did not have to be an issue, and to cover the high costs of entering that kind of market.
NOW they're working on a $50k electric car that is basically already done, and they have shown off. Its a nice family sedan and it looks great.
They have said the the goal after that is to make a $20k electric car, as well as a van, and basically all car types.
Everyone things Tesla is only about the Roadster, and gets all fucking pissed off every time they get government funding, but the whole idea is and always has been to prove the viability of electric cars as more than just for weenies, and then sell them to everyone. Selling the expensive one first was just to make enough money to keep doing it! Its also the only kind of car you can ask people to pay for up front, and deliver a year later. People that buy a Tesla can afford to wait, so it gave them advance funding to help development.
And not one major car manufacturer had announced any plans to sell a pure electric until years after Tesla started selling their cars. As far as I can tell, Tesla singlehandedly created the (still small) market for pure electrics, and met their goal.
Give them some fucking credit.
-Taylor
Elon is under 40, has a fortune in the low billions and several successful businesses under his belt. If anyone has a shot at getting to Mars, it is he.
Hmm. I guess he's got a lot of stock options and whatnot, but he ran out of cash recently. I know that for a guy like him, he'll have lots of other assets besides cash, but I got the sense his fortune wasn't that big. Maybe its just all tied up.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/22/elon-musk-says-hes-broke_n_620612.html
He does own one of the two companies that has a good shot at jump starting commercial spaceflight though.
Glass is really remarkably strong when it comes out of the furnace. The tensile strength is amazing, it can bend enough to absorb some shocks. It's a great material before it gets to the real world.
But, once it does, it immediately develops microcracks in the surface, and each of these could be the beginning of a fracture that goes through the bulk of the glass. So, what to do?
I don't know if they've taken the hint from the semiconductor industry (look up 'strained silicon') but they did a similar thing with glass. By bombarding the surface of the glass with larger atoms, they create significant stress in the surface, so that any microcracks are immediately pushed shut. But, this is only true down to the level that these atoms diffuse into the surface...not far at all!
So, if you create a significant scratch (and this might just be 100 microns) you are through this surface, and have a potentially catastrophic failure waiting to happen.
A screen-protecting film of plastic would be a good investment.
I worked at a glass shop for a summer installing windows and doors in peoples houses when I was younger. If it wasn't a brand new house, we'd have to take out the old windows. Often those windows had tempered glass. We took all the old windows back to our shop and threw them in a big trailer for the dump (sadly, window glass isn't as high quality as bottle glass, so it wasn't worth recycling. or thats what they told me).
Anyway, we loved to break the tempered glass. Normal glass breaks in big sheets, but tempered glass is made for safety, so it is both stronger, and won't break into sheets - it shatters into 1000's of tiny pieces when it breaks, so you can't get stabbed.
The fun comes with how it breaks. You can hit a 1/4" thick tempered glass window head on with a sledge hammer and it won't break. BUT, tempered glass gets its strength from really high surface tension, which is unbalanced on the edge of the glass. So, after we hit the thing with the sledgehammer and it didn't break, we'd take a regular hammer and lightly tap an exposed edge of the glass, and BOOM, it instantly shattered!
I don't know how gorilla glass compares to regular tempered glass, but it seems like a bit of a bad design to have the edges exposed like that.
But then, we knew it was a bad design...
-Taylor
Unless the glass is breaking all by itself, I'm going to go with "people who spent too much money on a phone don't know how to take proper care of them."
Fact is, I spent like $100 (and renewed my contract with tmobile) to get a samsung vibrant. The first thing I did was slap a protective case around it and put on a screen protector. Following that, a visit to eBay showed me some nicer things to protect the phone and I also got one of those belt holders for the phone. Why?
1. I spend what I consider to be a lot of money for a phone.
2. Things I spend money on, I try to take care of
3. Keeping a phone in your pocket will cause problems starting with dust and ending with who knows what else
4. In spite of all the care I want to give it, things fall, slide off, whatever.
If I had an iPhone (and people who know me know the LOOONG list of reasons why I will never own an iPhone) I would do the same thing to it -- protect the shit out of it. It's frikken expensive and needs to be protected.
People need to get over complaining about how durable something is or isn't and start simply being careful for a change.
I spent $600 on my nexus one in February, and have never had a case on it. I have dropped it once, getting out of the car, and it fell about 2 feet. It has one scratch from that, and no more.
I am a mechanical engineer who also runs our machine shop. I spend a lot of time running prototypes in the shop, and working with hammers, large pieces of steel, sharp cutting tools, and pulling chips of metal out of my hair/pockets/shoes.
My phone just hangs out in my pocket mostly, though I take it out all the time to play with it. I do always keep it by itself in my left pocket, with keys and everything else in the right pocket. Aside from having to blow metal chips out of the USB connector from time to time, the phone is basically completely unaffected by my work in the shop.
I'm just careful.
You don't need a goofy case and hip holster to watch out for your stuff, you really do just need to be careful.
Also, hip holsters make people look like a tool. They also - I think - make your phone more likely to be damaged, since its out there more where your body bumps into things (my hip hits things more than my pocket areas do).
So I dunno, people just need to be careful. Though my roommate is incapable of being careful with stuff, so he always has cases on his phones.
-Taylor
So you are somewhat realistic about it costing trillions of dollars to put a few dozen people on Mars.
Do you really see trillions of dollars of benefits from such a thing?
It depends. What else are you using the money for? War? Or feeding the poor?
If we spent trillions on space exploration, I imagine that the amount of new technology developed to do so could greatly improve the lives of many people on earth. At least, in the long run.
But its really hard to say, unfortunately. That would be a long debate, and I'd have to do some research to give you a good answer. For now, all I can say is that I think it would be a good thing.
-Taylor
Am I the only one who thinks that this could have been done 30 years ago with multiple shuttle launches. I know, I know, the shuttle engines are designed to perform multiple long burns without being inspected and rebuilt but come on, orbital refueling just seems like the kind of thing we should have been doing for decades now. I guess we haven't done much for manned (and therefor time critical) long range missions since Apollo but still, this seems like it's some pretty low hanging fruit as far as space exploration technology is concerned.
I know you're just highlighting the point, but you really shouldn't act so surprised. Sadly, everything we do in space is low-hanging fruit. We've done some amazing stuff with telescopes and things launched out into space, but as far as human exploration... not much has been done in the last 40 years. We could have easily had a manned outpost on Mars already, but it would have taken a lot of money, a lot of risk (with likely some tragic deaths along the way - more so than what we've had) and least likely of all, the cooperation from one political administration to the next.
That's the biggest problem at NASA - one president says "The last president had no vision - lets go to mars!" and then the next president says "The last president was spending like crazy. We can't afford to go to mars!" and then it repeats every 8 years or so.
If we had had a concerted and continuous effort to explore space, we could have filled out the inner solar system by now.
But would have taken trillions of dollars, and a level of agreement that we've simply never had.
Thats why I'm so excited about privatization of space exploration - a corporation has a real vested interest in getting something done. Unlike politicians.
Hopefully the billionaires of the world will take us places no government has. THAT is what I'm looking forward to.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has said he'd like to retire on mars. That's likely a little far-fetched, but he's more likely to make that happen than NASA. (well, technically his fortune is pretty small in comparison to some other people, but lets say Tesla does really well...)
-Taylor
> I know exactly where the file is, because I know how to right click and select "Open in windows explorer".
Except that it did not work, songs were not copied on any library. Under which conditions I dunno, likely they were listened from a CD or gotten in a usb key. Might happen to others? http://www.google.com/search?q=itunes+loosing+songs
> I really don't have much sympathy for people that hate something because they don't know anything about it.
I really love when people use the "linux defense" on apple software. I knew about Open in windows explorer - that one option is even fairly well put in the UI. Thanks anyway.
> ...This all started because the OP said openmoko died because *we* didn't support it. That's just fucking bullshit,
I agree with you on that. Open stuff must first be adopted by geeks, and only later it may become palatable to the public.
Ah... *that* losing song issue. I figured that one out years ago. If you don't tell itunes to organize your music, and then you download some torrent and drag the music into itunes, it just references the file from wherever you torrented it. If, then, down the line you decide to clean up your torrent folder and delete the music, itunes doesn't know its gone until you try to play it, and then it can't find it.
Its really not a terrible design. Back when hard drives were small, apple didn't want to copy by default. One of the top search results in that search you linked is from 2003. And the rest seem to be from 2008 or older. I think apple finally decided to set the default to "Organize my library for me" where it copied it to the itunes forlder and the problem effectively went away for people.
Both methods seem reasonable to me. How would you handle it?
I really don't see how you can fault itunes for that. What does Amarok do to handle it? Probably the same thing. I'm not thrilled about how bloated itunes is, but if you have a decent computer, I still think its the best music software out there.
And the "linux defense" makes sense here. It *doesnt* make sense when people tell you you're supposed to read a bunch of documentation and figure out what commands to type... but realizing that your files are gone because you deleted the folder they were in? That has to be something the user figures out. The only thing I would have done is added a prompt that says "The files were added from folder:xxx which no longer exists. To avoid this, you may want to let itunes organize your music."
But who knows, I might be crazy trying to have helpful messages. Still, it wasn't a terrible design the way it was, and I'm not much sure what would be a better way, except what apple *did* do, which is setting the default to err on the side of wasted space, not lost files.
-Taylor
This is NOT a good analogy. The iPhone was found in a bar, and the jackass that "found" it knew whose it was and made no attempt to give it back. This device was intentionally left attached to the car, with the hope that it would never be found. Basically, the two situations are opposites of each other.
What the fuck? The "jackass" who found it made multiple calls to apple, trying to return it. No one in customer service believed him (which makes some sense - they don't know jack about secret stuff like that), and after they continually refused to listen to him, he contacted gizmodo.
Don't call random people a jackass just because you don't know how to read. That kind of shit pisses me off.
-Taylor
LOL ITunes is easy? You think you have a song because it's listed and the file is who knows where. You have to search documentation to select what to sync on the ipod. Amarok has a few glitches with import/export of playlists IIRC, and it's not the super intuitive player either, but I'd take it over itunes any day if I owned an Ipod.
Also you incorrectly assume that I ascribe to poor consumer choices the failure of openmoko and similar open stuff. It seems not so. Pandora, the touchbook, and others seem to suffer from high demand and insufficient production for one reason or another. The N900 is probably less palatable for the carriers and devs because the user is unrestricted. The one laptop per child is another example where mismanagement is more to blame than lack of consumer demand.
I simply called BS on the argument that consumers decide.
What the fuck? "You think you have a song because it's listed and the file is who knows where."
I know exactly where the file is, because I know how to right click and select "Open in windows explorer".
And because I just let iTunes organize my music. It keeps everything in my iTunes folder, which I select, and keeps everything in folders like Artist\Album.
I know a lot of crotchety old users who got all irate that iTunes does that, because they got used to winamp where you *had* to arrange your folders, and they don't like them being organized any other way. But it's a fucking database, just let itunes deal with it. And learn how to right click if I need the file. It works great.
I really don't have much sympathy for people that hate something because they don't know anything about it.
And you call BS on the argument that consumers decide... but they do! They might not all be the most sensible decisions, but you have to appeal to them. Hell, even if you were right, and people just do what they're told, then the people running the openmoko project were still idiots (or, more likely, just underfunded) because THEY weren't out there getting in consumer's faces.
This all started because the OP said openmoko died because *we* didn't support it. That's just fucking bullshit, and that's the only point I'm trying to make. Openmoko failed because they either didn't market well, didn't make a good enough product, or both. There is no other excuse. That's just how business works. And as long as OSS projects are run by people like the OP, we'll never get anywhere. So I actually agree with you that the problem can also be mismanagement, I'm just not buying the "You didn't support me!" bullshit.
-Taylor
This is a really interesting model and it has a nice ring to it. (And Robin is one of the best researchers I know in this area, so that adds confidence, too.) But can we not use the definite statements in the headlines? This is a model. A good model, to be sure, but just one. I've definitely seen work even recently that makes a comet origin seem plausible, so in the very least, there's a competing model that has to be answered.
ALL HEADLINES ARE TRUE.
-Fantasyland, USA: Today, a top researcher said some headlines might be true, under certain circumstances. This is an amazing find, as previously it was believed that all headlines were complete fabrications, as covered in our story yesterday entitled "ALL HEADLINES FALSE".
You're doing it wrong. From http://bash.org/?152037:
#152037 +(3036)- [X] :') so true..
<dm> I discovered that you'd never get an answer to a problem from Linux Gurus by asking. You have to troll in order for someone to help you with a Linux problem.
<dm> For example, I didn't know how to find files by contents and the man pages were way too confusing. What did I do? I knew from experience that if I just asked, I'd be told to read the man pages even though it was too hard for me.
<dm> Instead, I did what works. Trolling. By stating that Linux sucked because it was so hard to find a file compared to Windows, I got every self-described Linux Guru around the world coming to my aid. They gave me examples after examples of different ways to do it. All this in order to prove to everyone that Linux was better.
* ion has quit IRC (Ping timeout)
<dm> brings a tear to my eye...
<dm> So if you're starting out Linux, I advise you to use the same method as I did to get help. Start the sentence with "Linux is gay because it can't do XXX like Windows can". You will have PhDs running to tell you how to solve your problems.
<dm> this person must be a kindred spirit of mine
Haha, oh, man, that is the best idea ever. I will so use that. Thank you!
> Consumers do what they want...
You mean that consumers want to throw money at bluescreening OSes, music player with usb interface that can't do proper usb storage, pads with cams usb and sd coming as an option, stuff that bricks when you tamper with it, updates that remove capability as general as being able to install an OS?
IMHO: Advertisement backed media tell what consumers should want, consumers use what they perceive as most popular because they haven't got a clue nor time to get a clue, and their issues are lost in the sea of noise and astroturfing.
Ugh. "Consumers are sheeple. They only do what big media tells them. My product died because I was fighting the man. Whaa whaa."
I don't like Apple's wacky methods and I think they could do just fine without locking down the iphone, but I don't think they're successful because they *tell* people to buy their stuff (though if anyone has that power, it's them).
I might not like what they do, but you have to admit that the iPod was a great product (especially with iTunes) and people who bought one may have liked mass storage, but that's not why you buy a media player! If you want mass storage to be able to put music on it... well, get over it. My android phone is just mass storage and I got so sick of the lack of organization I started using doubletwist, which is... just like iTunes!
People buy windows because it works, they bought iPods because they work, and they buy iPhones because they work. The OP was complaining that no one bought OpenMoko devices, but you know what? I bet they were crap compared to an iPhone!
No one cares that it can SSH into your debian server if it can't fucking browse the web, go texty texty, and listen to music.
So go ahead and keep blaming customers for their choices. You'll never own a fucking successful business in your life.
-Taylor
I don't know about Ubuntu but Debian's had 'check a box' surround sound support for a while now and since Ubuntu is Debian based...
Hmm. Well 9.04 certainly didn't have it. I'll check again when i get 10.10 going...
You get what you pay for.
If you really want to have an "open" device, you should have supported the various open hardware platforms that eventually failed because of your lack of support.
You can't really complain that you don't have choices when you made no effort to support the good choices that you had.
Oh my fucking god man, whaaa whaa whaa. I really try to support open source, but THIS is the fucking reason why open source isn't more widely supported. Everyone developing for them says they're the best thing ever, and then when users don't adopt, the developers blame the USERS.
WTF? Did you not ever take a business class in your life? Consumers do what they want, and you either provide them with what they want or you get left behind. If you don't see it that way, you will also get left behind. If consumers don't pick up your device, its YOUR FAULT.
If the CEO of a poorly performing company came out and said "We lost money this year because consumers refuse to support us." that CEO would get fucking FIRED.
This mentality upsets me so much, because every year I download Ubuntu and give it a shot. I *want* it to be awesome and I want to switch. But every time I have some menial little issue that ends up taking a week to sort out, and I give up. Then, when I mention that experience to people who strongly support linux, they say it was my fault. That "All you have to do it edit .asoundrc. If you won't RTFM we can't help you.", as if you just click "edit" and its done. No one on the forums could tell me *what* I needed to do in the editor (and I searched, and asked nicely - I know how to ask things on forums) and I *tried* reading the manual, and reading everything else I could find, but all I was trying to do was get my media center to properly mix the audio for 5.1 channel surround! In windows you just check a box. In linux, I spent a week on it and then gave up.
As long as people keep developing crap software and then blaming it on the user, they will never succeed. That said, I am still excited for Ubuntu 10.10. Just like I was for 7.10,8.4,8.10,9.4,9.10, and 10.4. Lets hope *this* time its money...
-Taylor
It was supposed to be an optimistic estimate:
Better start building that Dyson sphere.
I was looking around, and I found another interesting metric.
The largest nuclear bomb ever detonated was the Tsar Bomba, and had a 50 Megaton Yield. The wikipedia article claims that the average output of it was about 1.4% of the sun's output for 39 nanoseconds. So if you go off the estimate above, you'd need about 90,000,000 of those bombs to put out the energy required (5% of the sun's output for 1 second). That would weigh about 2.4 trillion kilograms, based on the 24 tonne weight of the original bomb. Still only a tiny fraction of the earth's mass though!
They said it could have put out 100 Megatons but was reduced for safety, so really we might only need 45,000,000 of those.
So we should get on that.
And then build an orion system.
-Taylor
Seriously, back up your data. Multiple copies in multiple locations.
These guys were smart enough to keep backups (hopefully up-to-date backups) so this is nothing more than an annoyance to them, but if they hadn't it would be what we refer to around here as a resume-generating-event.
If it's worth keeping, its worth backing up.
Yeah, seriously. I work at a small (10 people) company, and I still have us set up with an Ubuntu server with nightly incremental backups to a second machine, as well as weekly full backups to the second machine and the server itself that go back 6 weeks. Every month I do the same thing, and keep those for 6 months. I also backup manually to an external USB drive once every month or so.
It took a bit of time out of my schedule to setup, but now it just goes, and damn if having backups isn't amazing. Our issue here is usually not one of drive failure, but of users accidentally erasing a file. They come running to me, and I can grab the most recent copy in 30 seconds.
I feel like most small businesses aren't that well-prepared, but I encourage anyone else that can to do it.
-Taylor
Could he have given them a random password, and then act dumbfounded when it does not work?
Maybe even accuse them of breaking his system?
It is hard to prove that the header of an encrypted disk has not been corrrupted.
Would that work with the current law? Has anyone already tried it?
I wonder if it works the other way around? When they take my un-encrypted system, I'll claim it is in fact encrypted, and all the apparent data on the disk is just random garbage that happens to look like a windows 7 file system full of furry midget porn. I'll provide them with the 'real' encryption key and they'll see that all I was keeping on the disk was random garbage data.
-Taylor
Yeah, aside from the "damage to the internet" part (the spirit is fine, but that actual statement is a bit... silly), this is exactly what they need to do.
They can't just cut people off or they'll hate it. They need to have it be very easy to fix. Landing page with free virus scan is perfect. Override for people who need the net is good too. Maybe they can have an annoying persistent banner up top of every page until they fix it.
Botnets need to die.
-Taylor