Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

Eric Schmidt: Anxiety Over US Spying Will "Break the Internet" 179

Posted by samzenpus from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept.
jfruh writes Oregon Senator Ron Wyden gathered a group of tech luminaries to discuss the implications of U.S. surveillance programs, and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt didn't mince words. He said that worries over U.S. surveillance would result in servers with different sets of data for users from different countries multiplying across the world. "The simplest outcome is that we're going to end up breaking the Internet."

Comment Re:So you can reuse the PC board? (Score 1) 122

by gabebear (#47392533) Attached to: New Single Board Computer Lets You Swap Out the CPU and Memory
It's a similar problem. Except since this is a much larger connector(100 times as many pins?) with smaller pins(1/4 the size?) and uses a specification that is used by far fewer people than USB it's MANY MANY times more likely to have an issue than a single USB port.

In reality computers solder USB all the time for lower-bandwidth devices(e.g. Bluetooth, WebCam, SD reader, InfraRed, ethernet, WiFi, etc). It's dramatically cheaper and slightly more reliable than including a full USB port because you don't have to worry about charging phones(1000ma+) on a port that will only have a 250ma device on it or buy all the interconnects. The actual chips for most of this stuff are pennies. To build the same thing with interchangeable interconnects raises the power budget, the component budget, and the QA budget...

Comment Won't someone think of the children! (Score 3, Insightful) 355

by gabebear (#46771277) Attached to: Kids Can Swipe a Screen But Can't Use LEGOs
Who is actually raising these concerns?

The main quote comes from a teacher who works for a think tank(that needs funding) talking about conversations he had with other teachers... not stuff he's done himself.

"I've spoken to a number of nursery teachers who have concerns over the increasing numbers of young pupils who can swipe a screen but have little or no manipulative skills to play with building blocks – or pupils who can't socialise with other pupils, but whose parents talk proudly of their ability to use a tablet or smartphone."

Comment Re:I like the open plan (Score 1) 314

by gabebear (#46047021) Attached to: Office Space: TV Documentary Looks At the Dreadful Open Office
I prefer a well laid out open plan to anything else:
  • Separate Office - I get bored and many questions are much more difficult to ask via Chat... why the fuck bother coming to an office building, but work from home
  • Open plan with everyone scattered - interesting that you talk to more people on a day to day basis, but nearly as hard to actually communicate as when you have an office.
  • Open plan with similar people grouped - You can see when people aren't stupid busy and actually talk about issues that are happening. You still run into other departments, but not as often

I'm an iOS developer.

Comment Re:Should have done a battery benchmark (Score 1) 258

by gabebear (#45012157) Attached to: Samsung Fudging Benchmarks Again On Galaxy Note 3
Bingo! They only boosted benchmarks. In the linked article they didn't mention it, but in the Note3's benchmark breakdown they list the exact apps that are boosted(only benchmark apps). http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/galaxy-note-3s-benchmarking-adjustments-inflate-scores-by-up-to-20/
  • com.aurorasoftworks.quadrant.ui.standard
  • com.aurorasoftworks.quadrant.ui.advanced
  • com.aurorasoftworks.quadrant.ui.professional
  • com.redlicense.benchmark.sqlite
  • com.antutu.ABenchMark
  • com.greenecomputing.linpack
  • com.greenecomputing.linpackpro
  • com.glbenchmark.glbenchmark27
  • com.glbenchmark.glbenchmark25
  • com.glbenchmark.glbenchmark21
  • ca.primatelabs.geekbench2
  • com.eembc.coremark
  • com.flexycore.caffeinemark
  • eu.chainfire.cfbench
  • gr.androiddev.BenchmarkPi
  • com.smartbench.twelve
  • com.passmark.pt_mobile
  • se.nena.nenamark2
  • com.samsung.benchmarks
  • com.samsung.benchmarks:db
  • com.samsung.benchmarks:es1
  • com.samsung.benchmarks:es2
  • com.samsung.benchmarks:g2d
  • com.samsung.benchmarks:fs
  • com.samsung.benchmarks:ks
  • com.samsung.benchmarks:cpu

Comment Re:why cloud? (Score 1) 290

by gabebear (#44326857) Attached to: How One Drunk Driver Sent My Company To the Cloud

"The Cloud" when done right is hosted servers that can (and will) move around from place to place as fast as they need to; from local servers to in-country data centers to data centers around the world in order to optimize response time and minimize down time. Just because a lot of people do it wrong, doesn't mean the concept is wrong... Just really hard to understand.

Not only is the ideal cloud hard to understand, it's very expensive and hard to implement. Just looking at the one piece of software he mentioned, Jira, it's rather difficult. Jira at least has a cloud based product, but it has different features(e.g. no project imports) which will disrupt their business and force them into different workflows... Setting up good data replication and backups can be difficult(often blind faith when dealing with these fully portable clouds) and testing portable-cloud backup systems usually requires some kind of voodoo.

Slashdot Top Deals

What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey

Close