82280533
submission
LWATCDR writes:
The new Chevy Bolt is about to start rolling of the production line. It is made in America by union workers. It has a 200 mile range. It has a price tag of only $30,000 after the $7000 tax rebate from the IRS.
Will anyone care since it is not a Tesla?
77198023
submission
LWATCDR writes:
The couple followed their Waze GPS app, thinking it would lead them to a touristy avenue in Niteroi, a large city across the bay from Rio de Janeiro.
Instead, it led them to another street of the same name in Niteroi in one of the city's most notorious slum areas. The woman was shot and killed.
Crowd sourced maps like Waze and OSM, as well as commercially sourced maps like Google Maps, Bing, and Apple maps can tell you the traffic or what restaurants are worth going to but they do not include any risk or safety information.
Including crowd sourced risk information could cause issues. A person of one race may feel that a perfectly safe area is not safe because they feel uncomfortable. An area might be safe but poor and people might feel that it is at risk. An area maybe safe for a person of one race but risky for another.
The other big issue is someone goes to an area marked "low risk" but is a victim of a random crime they might blame the mapping provider.
Should risk be included in mapping software? Can it be included without racism real or imaginary being an issue? Would it actually create a form of segregation where well todo people can completely bypass improvised areas?
Personally I had this issue pop up when I went to a football game in Miami. My wife and I took TriRail to the game but had to walk 6 blocks to the stadium. When the game was over I asked the police officer for the best way to get back to the station and he told me that it was not safe to walk back at night so we took an Uber.
76596343
submission
LWATCDR writes:
By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI
Sept. 21, 2015 1:38 p.m. ET
Apple Inc. is accelerating efforts to build an electric car, designating it internally as a “committed project” and setting a target ship date for 2019, according to people familiar with the matter.
The go-ahead came after the company spent more than a year investigating the feasibility of an Apple-branded car, including meetings with two groups of government officials in California. Leaders of the project, code-named Titan , have...
65228825
submission
LWATCDR writes:
The Verge has published an article on Gamergate that is in their own words highly biased. I also seems that it is too inflamatory for the Verge to allow comments on the story so they put a single comment telling people to go to the Verge's gaming forums to comment. This all leads to three questions.
1. Can the Verge actually be thought of as a source of journalism?
2. Is this a case of massive click bait?
3. And when will journalists stop taking gate on to the end of stores for no good reason.
28158674
submission
LWATCDR writes:
In this report http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-cut-soot-methane-curb-warming-190656506.html scientists say that reducing methane and soot are more important to reduce the effect of climate change than reducing CO2 emissions. The logic is simple, methane is a far more potent green house gas than CO2 and both methane and soot do not stay in the atmosphere as long as CO2 so a reduction will have more immediate benefits than a reduction in CO2. CO2 emission still need to be reduced for the long term but cutting back on methane and soot will make the biggest impact short term. So in other words boycot Taco Bell folks for the good of the planet.
25843430
submission
LWATCDR writes:
Google is dropping not just the source code for Ice Cream Sandwich but also Honeycomb. I can hardly wait for Cyanogen to get to work on this. I wonder how it will run on my wife's GTab and my Evo 4G. I guess the worries about Google not releasing the source to Android can now be put to rest. Check out the announcement here https://groups.google.com/group/android-building/msg/c0e01b4619a1455a?pli=1
24049340
submission
LWATCDR writes:
At IDF Intel and RealVNC demoed RealVNC integrated at the BIOS level. Using VNC one can now power down, power up, reboot, go into the BIOS, and even mount disk images on the network. All of this has been available for a while using IPMI but how it is can be done using the open standard VNC. It is available now on Q57 and Q67 motherboards. One can just imagine how useful this could be in a data center, school, or any other system with a large number of computers. Let's hope AMD joins in.
19482980
submission
LWATCDR writes:
Should someone be fired for a an opinion? Should someone become unemployed for getting drunk outside of work and saying something stupid? Well Christian Dior has started proceedings to fire designer John Galliano after he was filmed making anti-Semitic comments in a Paris restaurant. It seems that Mr. Galliano got drunk at a cafe in Paris and said some ugly things about Jewish people. http://www.cnn.com/2011/SHOWBIZ/celebrity.news.gossip/03/01/portman.galliano/index.html
For that it looks like he is going to be fired, probably more disturbing is that police arrested him on charges of assault and making anti-Semitic comments after a couple pressed charges.
It seems that you can go to jail for just making ugly statements.
So where is the outrage? Yes he is being a jerk but how is making an anti-semitic statement anymore of a crime than a lot of what is written right on the pages of Slashdot? Frankly I got no love for an anti-semitic idiot that makes hyper expensive ugly clothes for the famous and uber rich but where should the protections on speech end?
8639342
submission
LWATCDR writes:
The US military http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/earthquake-hit-haiti-still-offline-military-relief-agencies-rush-to-rebuild-comms/comment-page-1/#comment-80488 and other groups are trying to aid to Haiti as fast as possible but the total destruction of the infrastructure is hampering efforts. The destruction seems to be complete, power, phone, internet, air traffic control, and cell service seems to be down. The only reliable communications are by satellite and amateur radio. Right now they are saying that the dead could number more than 100,000 and many more injured. Medical facilites have been destroyed they are running out of medical supplies and there are dead bodies in the street.
So what can a geek do to help. The first thing is to donate money to the reputable charity of your choice. The Red Cross, Doctors without Boarders, and Catholic Charities are all good choices. Second get your friends and family to also help. Even five dollars will help. Third help your less savy friends avoid the scam websites out there. Yes the scum of the earth are already setting up fake charity websites to take money that should go to the victims. Hopefully Mozilla and IE will start to black list those as soon as possible. Finally you are an amature radio operator check in to the nets and see if you can help.
One final thing that is very ungeeky but needs to be done. If you have friends or coworkers that are from Haiti ask them how they are doing and let them know that you do care.
3844229
submission
LWATCDR writes:
Okay Microsoft has finally figured out how to get everybody to install Silverlight.
They have partnered with Playboy and put up classic Playboy images on line but require you to install silverlight to view them.
Tricky.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2343529,00.asp
3505437
submission
LWATCDR writes:
nVidia is going to support the VIA Nano CPU on the ION platform. For those people that don't know the ION platform brings the HD video decoding to netbook and nettop class systems. nVidia has already shown the ION combined with Intel's Atom CPU but now it will be available for the higher performance VIA Nano CPU.
What this means is that we could see some very nice, low power, and Linux friendly netbooks, nettops, media pcs, and set-top boxes. While nVidia doesn't offer FOSS drivers they do have a much better record of Linux support than S3 does.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/20/nivida-ion-platform-to-support-via-nano-processors-this-year/ for a little more info.
3208895
submission
LWATCDR writes:
Mozilla has given the Wikimedia foundation $100,000 to fund Ogg development. The reason is simple, "Open standards for audio and video are important because they can be used by anyone for any purpose without royalties, and can be inspected and improved by an open community. Today, video and audio on the web are dominated by proprietary technologies, most frequently patent-encumbered codecs wrapped into closed-source player widgets."
While Vorbis is better standard than MP3 everything I have heard about Theora is that it is technical inferior to many other video codecs. I wonder if wouldn't be better if more effort directed to Dirac http://diracvideo.org/ and maybe even putting Dirac into an Ogg container.
No mention was made of FLAC or Speex funding. If more media players supported Speex it would be an ideal codec for many podcasts and audio books. It really is too bad that these codecs get over looked so often.
2448913
submission
LWATCDR writes:
The 64 bit march goes on. First we got 64 bit Flash now Sun is providing a 64 bit Java plugin.
Now for most people there is nothing to hold you back from running 64 bit Linux.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjkyOQ
1318835
submission
LWATCDR writes:
Well the Source for Android is now available. A will assume that it is GPL so it should make all FOSS users pretty happy. It is available for download here http://source.android.com/
So when will we see it on Palm Treos. What other devices will end up running Android?
I kind of want to see how well it would work on a Netbook?
1293901
submission
LWATCDR writes:
Okay I have set up a Linux box for a group I am a member of to replace an old Windows 95 machine. This is to replace the computer in the media center. The old system was only used to look up information in a large text file that has a list of all the videos tapes on hand. I have already moved the data into an OpenOffice Calc. I hate using spreadsheets as a database but they are a good tool for converting a text file into something useful like a CSV or xBase file. I was going to use the database in OpenOffice to make a nice little application. The problem is that the "new" PC is only a 500 Mhz Celeron with 192 mb of ram. It will not run OpenOffice I have the spreadsheet moved over to gnumeric but I was thinking I should write a real media manager for them.
I know Java, C++, and a few other programming languages but Java is too heavy for this machine. C# and Mono also seem a little heavy for this machine. C++ seems like overkill for such a simple application. I am just not fond of LAMP for local single user program. I mean why put a web server on this box? I figure SQLlite would be a good database for this but what language would be good for writing the GUI and logic in? Python would be fun to learn but what IDE and interface builders are available? Ruby could be an option as well. Or should I just bite the bullet and use C++?
I have the box up and working with Zenworks and it seems pretty snappy. I would have to say I was impressed with Zenworks.
So what is a good, fast, and light development platform to write a simple form and database application in Linux?
