Comment Re:And you thought ink was already expensive! (Score 1) 27
We don't use 'aluminum' or 'aluminium' anymore. They new Unified English® spelling is 'aluminininium'.
We don't use 'aluminum' or 'aluminium' anymore. They new Unified English® spelling is 'aluminininium'.
I've been using this wonderful device for controlling drip irrigation:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
The user interface is brain-dead simple. The dial simply has 17 settings, for
1: Daily for 2 minutes
2: Daily for 5 minutes
3: Daily for 10 minutes
7: Every other day for 5 minutes
8: Every other day for 10 minutes
12: Every third day for 10 minutes
13: Every third day for 15 minutes
That's it! There isn't an option for "2 minutes every 3 days" because -- guess what -- gardeners don't actually need that level of control! It just has a laser focus on a simple user interface that will be good for 99% of residential customers.
Would my life be better if I had to change the batteries in the irrigation controller every 5 days to power its wifi? Or if I had to run mains power and Ethernet cabling out into the garden for it? Would my life be better if I had a fiddly iPhone/Android app with more settings pages than I'd care to use, maybe a cloud-based controller like my Nest? Do I ever go on holiday and wish I'd changed the watering schedule before departing?
NO.
No, it is not bigoted or racist to assume that someone of a different skin color may have had a different upbringing than you
It is certainly racist.
You are using race as the determining factor to make a presumption about an individual human.
What other useful definition of racism could there be?
Counter-anecdote.
My dad was active in Mensa when I was younger and he was newly divorced. My dad is an unapologetic anti-democrat; I think Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan may be above Jesus in his world view.
As near as I can tell, his interest in Mensa was for social networking with people that had a chance of understanding him. He's brilliant, loyal, fair, judgmental, and not at all sentimental. He has great difficulty expressing himself emotionally. Only certain people "get" him, and that's fine with him as long as there's at least one.... He's a hardcore INTJ.
He has no desire to run the world or to run other people's lives.
I haven't bothered to apply officially for Mensa, but I think I'd be borderline for admission. I'm also NOT a technocrat and ALSO not a liberal democrat.
There is nothing worthwhile in diversity in and of itself
This is the attitude that needs to stop. Diversity may not be a value in your pantheon, but it's not social engineering to want an inclusive society. It's wisdom.
Why does it need to stop?
A huge problem -- that few people seem to speak about -- is that using gender, nationality, or, most frustratingly -- race, as a measure of "diversity" is implicitly bigoted.
The diversity that people _claim_ to want is one of perspectives, life experiences, etc.
The things that are relatively easy to bucketize - gender identity, race, socio-economic status, etc.... these things in and of themselves are not a valuable source of "diversity"
The implicit bigotry in the "diversity" argument says that, if you hire more black people, you'll get much different ideas than what you already have. Why? Because all black people are different from the white people you already have.
I've never seen a more stark illustration of _racism_ then that.
The conjecture here is that if a population distribution doesn't' look the way certain people expect it to, then there is some upstream social problem that needs tinkering with.
That conjecture is only ever true or false on a case by case basis. The real problem that needs to stop is for people to believe this conjecture in the general case; the real problem is that people don't even agree or are not willing to state what their expectations are for the "ideal" population distribution, but, are still willing to cry foul and to assert that a problem exists.
The author coated it at $160mil / mile
It might be really cheap and thin, e.g. Eiffel Tower with venetian blinds to block the wind when needed?
Microsoft tested Picco in two group of interns and a family. All groups found the device amusing, but also reported that Picco and Picclets were useless for any functional or meaningful communication. Subjects, did, however, feel that the appearance of Picclets made the workplace feel a little more intimate.
“Two studies of the device at work demonstrated how crafting was an expression of intimacy when the device was used to connect the workplace to the home, and a way of demonstrating skill and humor to a broad audience when messages were sent amongst co-workers,” the paper reports. It also says Picco helped to personalise workspaces, but some testers felt left out because they were either lousy artists or couldn't make clever messages. As the paper puts it, “the level of skill needed to produce these messages became a barrier to entry for some co-workers.”
I'm making a note here — Great Success
FIRST POST
(however, the apparent local time when you see this post may differ based on the apparently non-constant nature of c )
Well, not exactly a feature phone.
I use facebook, multiple account email, and Exchange calendar from my phone multiple times a day. Its just that, I'm usually at home or work, and both have WiFi.
Contract phone plans are absurdly expensive, and, I've been running a pre-paid SIM for over 7 years. I don't want to go back to a situation where I pay a high monthly fee for a limited selection of phones with phone company malware on them...
I am getting everything I need out of this smart phone WITHOUT a gmail account.
I'll tell you how I've landed on a Windows Phone -- one that I paid for out of pocket, and using a plan that I also pay for out of pocket.
(I mention this only because I'm an MS employee, and I want to avoid the problem of someone claiming that I am astroturfing here)
For the last year or two, I had been using a used iPhone 3G. I had to jailbreak it so I could SIM unlock it.
I never bought any apps from any appstores. Free apps, yes. Paid apps - no.
The basic problem with the iPhone series is that apple simply obsoletes its hardware too quickly. Most of the apps in the apple app store couldn't install on my phone, because my phone couldn't be updated to the newest OS. The phone was unbearably slow when browsing desktop-class pages.
I feel like apple is a premium-price for a below-average experience.
Regarding Android - every android phone I've seen has been completely different from the others. If I pick up an android phone, it always takes me a while to adjust to the quirks of that particular handset's UI. I'm attracted to the ease of "owning" an android device, but, ultimately, I want a phone that just works. I rarely want to tinker with it.
Finally, Android bothers me because I don't use gmail and I don't trust google. The people I've talked to claim that it is difficult to really make the most of an Android phone without giving your life over to your google account.
So, Microsoft finally comes out with the Lumia 521 -- a no-contract phone that is natively built for Windows Mobile 8. I really like this phone. It has a fast browser, and the 1st party apps are quite good. It is like $120 from Wal-Mart. The camera and photostitching apps are good, and it comes with a built-in Nokia mapping/navigation program that has complete offline capability. This is important for me since I don't have a data plan and I am often in places with no data service anyhow. The Nokia HERE DRIVE and HERE MAPS applications are fantastic.
The windows mobile UI is great. More consistent then Android, and better information density than iPhone.
Microsoft has a long and interesting Linux/FOSS history.
I remember in the late 90s, Microsoft actually released a Front Page Server Extensions module for Apache on Linux, so people using FP could publish sites to Linux servers.
During the early 2000s, MS shipped a bunch of GPL'd stuff via the Interix/SFU product.
Currently, System Center (enterprise management tool) can also monitor and manage Linux machines along side windows (and Mac) machines.
As noted elsewhere, Microsoft has made Linux a 1st class scenario for Hyper-V on-premise and Azure hosted uses.
Microsoft has opened some its internal projects to the external community, with acceptable licenses, and Microsoft has also contributed to existing FOSS projects where it has made sense. Internally, "should we use existing FOSS" or "should we open source this?" are questions that are coming up now where in the past, they never did, and asking them would get you some funny looks.
In the future, you're going to see Microsoft doing a better job of meeting customers in mixed/heterogenous settings. We've got a new CEO that has provided this guidance to the entire company. The market changes have certainly become too large to ignore, but the bottom line is that we're adapting.
On the business side, getting some of a customer's business is better than getting none of their business.
As always, we partner with everybody and we compete against everybody. For example, I sit in a building where most of the developers here work on Microsoft's own ERP products, yet I worked on features that let Visual Studio talk to SAP.
Bugs weren't missed in mainline openSSL. Bugs were logged, sat around for years, and didn't get fixed.
The project management and software engineering practices for openSSL were/are simply not acceptable.
The code is salvageable. The people and processes that allowed the code to get that way are not.
"This code under new management"
It seems like it's based on dynamically allocating spectrum between GSM and LTE
http://www.networkworld.com/ar...
However, using a technology called GL DSS (GSM-LTE Dynamic Spectrum Sharing) Vodafone and Huawei have shown a way to allow GSM and LTE to coexist.
In a traditional mobile network, operators allocate each technology an exclusive set of frequencies. For example, many operators, including Vodafone, currently hold 20MHz of spectrum at 1.8GHz, of which 10MHz is used for LTE and the rest for GSM traffic.
GL DSS lets Huawei's SRC (Single Radio Controller) give GSM a higher priority during periods of heavy traffic, ensuring that voice calls get though unharmed. But the SRC can also provide more room for LTE when users aren't making calls, allowing for better throughput, the vendor said on Tuesday.
There's a paper on it (or at least a similar idea) here
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.0320...
It's interesting because it seems like GSM will live on for low bandwidth machine to machine applications even though most of the spectrum has been converted to LTE. So if you've got an embedded system with a GSM modem, there's no need to worry that the carriers will cut off the signal in order to get more LTE bandwidth.
It is likely that Arthur C. Clarke, the co-author of Space Odyssey, was the one who was right on the science for that bit of plot. Since he also did things like invent the idea for communication satellites and was a member of the British Interplanetary Society, it was likely on his capable shoulders that making the scene realistic fell. It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall as that scene came together, with a great cinematic genius working with somebody explaining the harsh realities of microgravity, explosive decompression (and the velocity that causes Bowman to bounce around), and the very limited window of time in which the human body could get back into the airlock and survive. Then scripting, filming, and editing it together to convey that committed step leading to frantic, chaotic urgency.
The whole movie is a great example of collaboration. It sure wound up as one of the more memorable scenes in a movie packed with memorable scenes.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker
