Comment Re:Paid Advertisement (Score 0) 76
firefox.js noob
firefox.js noob
A public domain movie can be watched technically but how many public domain movies are in the top 100 most watched list?
Free software is awesome. Too bad the same can't be said for free music/movies.
Personally, I have a Windows tablet and I love it. The only real problem is the small number of apps. If they could make iOS and Android apps run on it, then all the better.
Why do you think a small number of apps is a problem? I have a Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 with Windows 8, and it can run any Windows software ever written that it meets the minimum requirements for. I have never once thought "boy I wish I had an app that did X". In fact, I wish some of the apps that I do have (Skype, for one) were not apps at all but normal Windows programs.
they're probably talking about wanting to run Android/iOS apps on Windows 10 phones.
Are you sure about that? I have only seen Windows phones, and not owned one but as an owner of a Windows 8 tablet, the desktop OS looks a lot like a portable device and vice versa. In fact, it seems they have been planning convergence for some time. Windows 10 might be the OS where the differences between mobile and desktop are only in the relevent aspects of the UI.
Ouya has loads of competition now from ARM "sticks" and media adapters like the Fire, Roku or Cu Box. And each year brings more capable hardware while Ouja stays the same. The new raspberry pi 2 or Amazon Fire are arguably superior in all ways. Certainly both those alternatives make excellent XBMC/Kodi boxes.
And competition has also come from tablets in terms of casual gaming. Tablets benefit from huge economies of scale and large online market ecosystems. Ouja was always going to be a niche market appealing to techies and gamers.
I have a Fire TV (the fat one, not the stick) with Kodi on it, and it is not that "excellent". If you don't exit Kodi properly (by just pushing the "home" button on the remote, for example), then Amazon videos won't play. Various other minor, but irritating bugs make me wonder if I should have just gotten a cheap Chinese android stick or android box instead. I got a Maige TV HD3 recently, which is OUTSTANDING albeit not perfectly legal, so I will probably be dumping Kodi and all my home server content in the near future anyway. Curating my own content just takes up too much of my time, at a time when the amount of free time I have is shrinking.
But what really frosted me was the "Oh the advertised rates are for NEW customers only!" line. Come on Verizon, I've been your customer for 6 years, never a late bill payment, no changes in my service, not even a technician visit to my home to fix something. You are going to give the guy up the street you don't know is really going to pay you a better deal then me? You people are NUTS..
The only reason that works is because of limited competition. Which, sadly, is the system that almost everyone in the USA lives under.
Interesting how in some places in the world, we call it bribery and corruption. In other places, it's just "how stuff gets done."
It's still graft either way. Think of all the problems caused by money buying influence in government. Now imagine how terrible it would be if businesses did it to each other too. The US government might be bought and paid for, but at least we have quite low levels of business-to-business bribery and corruption. My company can bid on projects and stand a very good chance of being evaluated on the quality of our bid and our reputation. That isn't true in a lot of places.
I can't imagine how ridiculous things must be in China, where bribery is rampant and government and business are hard to distinguish from each other.
Ok, fine, I will bite.
Now let's say the university alters their courses to be more attractive to women. But the jobs that engineers will not change. You may want to change them, but if they want them to actually achieve something useful, they really can't change. It's like asking painters to be more like actors, so actors can also enter the field of painters; this will not create more painters, since the skill of painting, remains the skill of painting.
"more societally meaningful" ?! And I don't get it either. My job does not get more societally meaningful; if I don't do my job (Software Engineer, Industrial Automation), you don't get any power to your home, don't drive a car, don't get air condition in the mall and many more things. Sure I am only a small cog in that bigger scheme of things, but without engineers modern society would not exist.
I would like more women in engineering; many of the colleagues I like to work with are women. And talking with them, the content of their work is not what is holding them back. In some cases it may be social or cultural and in other cases just "math is hard".
On that note, I demand more male nurses!
When a man doesn't want to be a nurse, that's OK because most men would prefer not be nurses.
When a woman doesn't want to be an engineer, that's because the male dominated field is holding them back, and remedies must be made!
Why not a Bluetooth mouse?
Just another stupid thing that takes batteries or needs to be charged.
There are a several wireless mice out there that can charge from USB, and can be used while charging, even if the battery is completely flat.
Show me a product from 10 years ago that is still around, and popular, in essentially the same form.
... My ISP still offers Usenet access...
I don't believe that for a second.
Ain't nobody going to install pentabular screws in my body.
It's hard to find a good picture of the thing but my Ponto hearing aid looks like a rounded Torx variant. And I'm OK with having only the doctor have the screwdriver for it.
+1 sad but true. unless you're main product is IT services and it's your job to optimize kernels and specify every single package etc., in 90% of the business world it will be CYA/industry standards and move on to the actual work.
This will happen and you'll hear about it every time it does. - "If you want to build Debian without systemd and deal with all the niggly annoying issues that will come out of that and get progressively worse"
Something I will be curious to see over the next few decades is how propaganda is affected by advertising saturation. Something that has been worrying marketers is that young consumers (ones more accustomed to multitasking and who grew up with heavy advertizing) filter out a larger amount of marketing than other groups. Even as their knowledge and skills improve (ah, the dark uses of all those psych majors), advertising is becoming more difficult and consumers more jaded and less uniform. Since propaganda can be seen as a specialized form of marketing, I wonder how that type of manipulation is going to adjust. It used to be that one coherent message would affect most of the population the same way, but increasingly the same techniques and narratives will have differing effects on different populations. So what we tend to see more and more of is propaganda generating smaller more fanatical groups along with others forming backlash against tem.. it kinda works if you examine only the successful parts of the application, but is no longer all that useful for changing general public perception, just creating partisans.
Having traveled to North Korea and seen what propaganda looks like, you are wrong. Good propaganda is something that people want to believe, or could easily believe, even if it isn't true. Good propaganda has no opposing viewpoint that is credible. Good propaganda speaks to the choir, where the choir intentionally designed to be the largest possible audience. And anyone who isn't in the choir is a bad person.
Consider as just one example the propaganda that in North Korea, everyone must choose from 28 official state haircuts. It's something that the average American could easily be convinced to believe. Perhaps you read the story and believed it too. It sounds plausible enough for most westerners to believe.
Unfortunately, it was complete bunk. But just about everyone I talked to bought it. And they thought I was the odd one for believing otherwise.
Makes me wonder about the economics of producing these things. Apparently something related to the OS choices makes it worth Intel's while to develop separate models and the infrastructure to build each one, rather than just building the higher spec model and slapping either OS onto it.
It's things like this that hearken back to the glory days of the Evil Empire, and why people find it difficult to trust MS now.
Well, I can't speak for the Ubuntu one, but I have a Yoga 2 10" tablet with Windows 8 with nearly identical specs, only the Z3745 processor instead of this stick's Z3735. The difference in CPU is not significant.
2GB of RAM is not enough for web pages with endless scrolling, such as Tumblr, or bloated pages such as Vice.com. Chrome sucks up the RAM, and when there is none left, things aren't pretty. I use "The Great Suspender" addon which saves unused tabs to disk and frees up memory, but even that isn't enough. We are past the point where 2GB of RAM is enough for even simple web browsing. Maybe Ubuntu manages the limited memory better, but based on how much Chrome is using, the OS choice may be irrelevent and these devices really need 4GB of RAM.
SpaceX happens to have another barge for the Vandenberg launches. It still is a big deal in terms of landing in a desert, as you have the option of either trying to fly laterally to Mexico (with some international arms control problems with ITAR) or overfly Los Angeles and/or San Diego with that rocket.
Vandenberg happens to be located at a point where California sort of turns off to the east, and is used for polar orbits explicitly because there is a whole lot of nothing except for ocean between Santa Barbara County and Antarctica. Try to look at a map sometime and answer this question: Which city is further west: Los Angeles or Reno?
There is a landing pad being constructed both at KSC (in Florida) as well as at Vandenberg. Right now both NASA and more significantly the USAF (for Vandenberg especially) are waiting to see the results of landing on the barge first before formal approval for landing at the pads is going to be authorized.
It should be pointed out too that SpaceX does have a landing pad with several dozen square miles of desert to work in at Spaceport America in New Mexico. There was some construction work going on there at least in the recent past, and so far as I know the tests to be conducted there haven't been canceled although most of the current effort seems to be work on the revenue flights like this CRS-6 flight rather than the proposed test flights in New Mexico that were to be suborbital flights mainly going up really high and then coming back to the Earth with possibly a flight over White Sands (which is adjacent to Spaceport America and is both restricted airspace and ground access due to it being a military base). Flight clearance at that location is such that they can go much higher there than they can at their Texas test facility.
As long the launches are at KSC or Vandenberg, however, the recovery at the moment will simply need to be at sea. Physics also plays a part as other than returning to the original launch site, down range from either launch site is simply ocean as far as you can go in the general flight path.
"I am, therefore I am." -- Akira