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User: nickovs

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  1. Obligatory XKCD cartoon on Is Statistical Significance Significant? (npr.org) · · Score: 5, Funny
  2. No links? The article that was liked to contained links to both the report summary, from which you can download the full report, and also a sub-site where you can get the data. It might be worth reading the whole article and checking your facts rather than just posting your unchecked reactions.

  3. "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is." Yogi Berra

  4. BOLERO on IBM Completes Blockchain Trial Tracking a 28-Ton Shipment of Oranges (coindesk.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Bill Of Lading Electronic Registry Organization (BOLERO) has been allowing shipping companies to use electronic, cryptographically secured bills of lading for more than 20 years. Unfortunately they don't use !!!BLOCKCHAIN!!!, so obviously the IBM solution is the only real alternative to using paper Bills of Lading.

  5. Re:The Charity?? on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ Promises Better Performance, Starts at $25 (venturebeat.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Perhaps you might want to actually look into the facts before spouting utterly incorrect suppositions. A quick search of Companies House and two minutes reading of the financials show that less than 25% of the staff earn more than £60,000 a year and the highest paid person at the Raspberry Pi Foundation in the 2017 (last year will full published accounts) earned less that £150,000 in the year, on a little over £28,000,000 in turnover. Over at Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd. Eben Upton takes no salary and his wife Liz (who runs communications) earned £38,984 in the year and they paid out just over £11.5K in expenses to Dr. Upton. Assuming that "the executives who run it" are the highest paid people there, they hardly seem to be making themselves "rich". In Silicon Valley that would be considered a substance wage.

  6. Still a lot lighter than a Commodore SX-64, which weighs 10.5 kg (23lb).

    Or indeed the Osborne 1 at 10.7kg, which I'm old enough to remember being impressed by (and not just for it's impressive "mass to screen area" ratio!)

  7. At 410 mm (16.1") wide, 402 mm (15.8") deep, 43mm (1.7") thick and, according to the product page, and average weight of 4.4 Kg (9.7 lb), the term "laptop" seems to be a bit of a stretch. Perhaps "transportable" might be a better term.

  8. Virgil warned of this 2,000 years ago on 'Beware Silicon Valley's Gifts To Our Schools' (nationalreview.com) · · Score: 1

    "Beware of Geeks bearing gifts", Virgil's Aeneid, circa 20 BC.

  9. ... the day my Time Steel dies will be a dark day.

    My Pebble Round's battery finally died and it was a dark day indeed. I recently replaced it with a Garmin vivomove HR, which has an analogue face and a small OLED display for notifications, step counter, music controls and weather, which is basically all I ever used on the Pebble, but also adds a heart rate monitor and happily lasts a week on a single charge. It's also lighter and thinner than most of the clunky "smart" watches and while it's not as thin as the Pebble it's certianly better looking. It's not the same as a Pebble but might be worth a look once you've tried and failed to find a replacement battery for your Steel.

  10. Re: Dogecoin disagrees on Crypto Growth Nears 'Ceiling,' Ethereum Co-Founder Buterin Says (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Boring Company started that way too.

    Yup, but they are going to have a hard time going to the moon.

  11. Re: Americans don't really care about their countr on Why Is American Mass Transit So Bad? It's a Long Story. (citylab.com) · · Score: 2

    Those in prison are **not committing any crime** outside it.

    No, but by being imprisoned they are both (a) loosing much of their ability to make a living through non-criminal means when they get out (because people generally don't hire ex-cons) and (b) getting the connections and skills that set them up for committing more crime when they get out. That's why most of the data indicates that, when all other things are equal, people who are given custodial sentences are more likely to re-offend than people given non-custodial sentences. That in turn is why America having one of the largest prison populations in the world is a cause of, as well as a symptom of, America's relatively high crime rate.

  12. > Bitcoin mining now uses about five gigawatts of electricity per day

    5GW/day is about 57.9K Joules per second per second, which represents a rate of change of power consumption. If this is true then by the end of the year most of the worlds electricity is going to be used for "mining" Bitcoin!

  13. Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale ... on Finally, It's the Year of the Linux... Supercomputer (zdnet.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... Linux is also taking over the world of IoT.

    I don't think that there has ever been another operating system that has been used across such a wide range of systems with such a range of scales.

  14. This number seems high on Japan Could Have More Than 3 Million Cryptocurrency Traders (coindesk.com) · · Score: 0, Troll

    Japan has about 1.8% of the world's population. The quote oft attributed to P.T. Barnum is that there's a sucker born every minute, which would suggest that about 9,500 are born each year in Japan. Thus this would represent more than 300 years supply of suckers. Perhaps they import them to make up the numbers.

  15. Re:I'm a simple man ... on Ask Slashdot: Are There Any Good Smartwatches Or Fitness Trackers? · · Score: 2

    You might want to take a look at the Nokia Steel HR. It has a clean design with minimal bells and whistles, a weeks-long battery life and is designed to give you the basic fitness monitoring and the time and not much else. https://health.nokia.com/us/en/steel-hr

  16. Size, weight and charging time on Ask Slashdot: Are There Any Good Smartwatches Or Fitness Trackers? · · Score: 2

    Smart or not, my main criteria for a good watch have always been around wanting something slim and relatively light and not needing to take it off for long periods (since for decades I've been in the habit of wearing my watch in bed). For a while I've been using the Pebble Time Round. Although not terribly 'smart' it is quite functional and has the distinct advantages of charging in 15 minutes (usually while I'm in the shower) and not being a huge lump on my wrist. Sadly it has a mediocre display by modern standards and also is no longer manufactured or supported and of late the battery has been failing to hold charge.

    IMHO if someone wants to make a killer product in this space then it needs to be less than 8mm thick, weight in the region 30g including strap, charge fully in less than 20 minutes (or not need to be taken off to charge) and have a round screen and case. Until then when my Pebble dies I'll probably go back to a 'dumb' watch.

  17. Sort of ironic on Alphabet Invests $1 Billion In Lyft (cnet.com) · · Score: 2

    It's a little ironic that Alphabet is putting this much money into Lyft given that back in 2013 Google Venture's largest deal to date was to invest in Uber.

  18. Re:Does it make a difference if the watch on Solar Powered Smartwatch Successfully Crowdfunded on Kickstarter (theverge.com) · · Score: 0

    Yes, it makes a difference if you are not in the habit of taking your watch off. Old fashioned "dumb" watches have batteries that last years. One of the reasons I've not bought a "smart" watch is that I prefer not to have to take it off for hours at a stretch to charge it up. Many "smart" watches also die before bedtime if you have a particularly long day. It doesn't matter that it's solar per se, but it matters to many people that it charges continuously through ambient sources rather than needing you to take it off to charge it.

  19. I've known this all along! on New Work Suggests That P Is Not Equal To NP (arxiv.org) · · Score: 3, Funny

    I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this Slashdot comment is too narrow to contain.

  20. Late to the party on NSA Opens GitHub Account, Lists 32 Projects Developed By the Agency (thehackernews.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The British information security services, GCHQ, have been posting interesting and useful stuff to GitHub for a while. In fact if you want to do interesting analytics on graphs with annotations to both arcs and nodes they have released some pretty neat tools, and they're not just useful for finding terrorists on social networks.

  21. Transistor radio on We Could Have Had Cellphones Four Decades Earlier (reason.com) · · Score: 1

    Given that the first commercial transistor radio was not sold until 1954 my guess is that a 1940s cell phone would have been rather heavy and not had very good battery life.

  22. Earth temperature timeline on 'Extreme and Unusual' Climate Trends Continue After Record 2016 (bbc.com) · · Score: 2

    Yes, it's been warmer and cooler than this before but the rate and scale of change is unprecedented:

    https://xkcd.com/1732/

  23. If this is true (it seems to be just a rumour) then it will be two years in a row that Apple made users' existing headphones obsolete. That would be brave/arrogant/foolish even by Apple's standards.

  24. Re:LinkedIn can't be wrong... on Bay Area Tech Job Growth Has Rapidly Decelerated (mercurynews.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The two facts are not at necessarily odds with each other. The reporting is on the number of people employed; LinkedIn tells you the number of open vacancies. The problem is that with the housing capacity tapped out and the cost of living through the roof it is becoming increasingly hard to fill the jobs that exist, so hiring is slowing down. Cities in the Bay Area from San Mateo to Sunnyvale have been building office space faster than they have been building homes and is this is the result.

  25. The Cantina on Lucasfilm Creates A 4K Ultra-HD Restoration of the Original 'Star Wars' (4k.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "... now the only real question is whether or not the cleaned up and sharpened version of the movie will be hitting the big screen once again."

    No! Now the only real question is whether or not they will show that Han shot first!