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Comment I'm a dying breed (Score 1) 449

I love driving. The pull of g-forces as I accelerate through a curve. The satisfaction of getting my line just absolutely perfect along a technical a stretch of road. The roar of the engine when I downshift to accelerate. The moment the light turns green, and getting that almost-loss-of-traction launch. The strangely smooth sailing over a gravel road.

I enjoy my commute to work. I'm fortunate in that I don't sit in traffic, except for the occasional stoplight, but cover about 18 miles in about 30 minutes. I generally enjoy every chance I get behind the wheel. But, as time goes on, there are fewer and fewer of me. We have automatic transmissions and ABS and GPS and all these luxuries that take the driving out of driving. And people enjoy them.

One day, self-driving cars will be a common sight. And I will have adapted my driving to taking advantage of being able to recognize and anticipate the behavior of self-driving vehicles. And then self-driving cars will become the standard. And just like it's so difficult to find a manual transmission sedan in America today, other things that matter to a "real" driver will become more difficult or time-consuming or frustrating.

And then, sometime after that, it'll be a lost art, relegated to closed courses. And those of us who still care will recall fond memories as we carefully put the SCCA decal on the rear bumper of our self-driving car and look forward to the next weekend getaway where we can take our antique out for a spin.

This is no more than a lamentation - a rarity on /. with its straightforward language - so please take it at face-value. I'm not arguing one way or another. I'm just saying that I think this is how it's going to happen, at least from my perspective, and that it makes me sad.

Comment Lubuntu! (Score 2) 631

by misfit815 (#44946723) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Are We Witnessing the Decline of Ubuntu?

I used Ubuntu for a couple of years, until Unity came along. My history is all Microsoft, all the way back to DOS 3.3. I still earn my paycheck on C# and SQL Server. When I began using Linux, Ubuntu made the transition easy for me. And then they introduced Unity, and tried to pretend my laptop was a tablet. After trying a couple of others, I settled on Lubuntu and have been extremely happy with it ever since. I hope that train keeps rolling for a long time.
Idle

Submission + - James Bond's Lotus Esprit "Submarine Car" sold in auction in London (rmauctions.com)

Submitted by Saphati
Saphati writes: This past Sunday, the James Bond Lotus Esprit "Submarine Car" sold for £550,000 (£616,000 after 12% buyers premium) at an auction in London. It sold for much less than than the estimate of £650,000 — £950,000.

The jewel of the auction was a 1955 Jaguar D-Type that sold for £4,000,000.

Submission + - Amazing Map of Every Person and Ethnic Distribution in America

Submitted by IsoQuantic
IsoQuantic writes: Wired has an interesting article describing what they call the best map ever made of America's racial segregation: http://www.wired.com/design/2013/08/how-segregated-is-your-city-this-eye-opening-map-shows-you/?viewall=true

The map, created by Dustin Cable at University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, requires over one million png files to render some seven gigabytes of data representing the 2010 US Census data. The ethnicity of every person is color coded and displayed in increasing detail as one zooms the map, so after reading the article skip over to the actual interactive map site here: http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html

Submission + - US electrical grid on the edge of failure (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Facebook can lose a few users and remain a perfectly stable network, but where the national grid is concerned simple geography dictates that it is always just a few transmission lines from collapse, according to a mathematical study of spatial networks. The upshot of the study is that spatial networks are necessarily dependent on any number of critical nodes whose failure can lead to abrupt — and unpredictable — collapse.
The warning comes ten years after a blackout that crippled parts of the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada. In that case, a series of errors resulted in the loss of three transmission lines in Ohio over the course of about an hour. Once the third line went down, the outage cascaded towards the coast, cutting power to some 50 million people. The authors say that this outage is an example of the inherent instability the study describes. But others question whether the team’s conclusions can really be extrapolated to the real world. “The problem is that this doesn’t reflect the physics of how the power grid operates,” says Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who served on the government task force that investigated the 2003 outage.

Comment video adapters that work with linux (Score 2) 591

by misfit815 (#43353977) Attached to: If I could change what's "typical" about typical laptops ...

I bought my current laptop because it shipped with Ubuntu. I actually run Lubuntu (which I can't brag about enough), but it virtually guaranteed that I wouldn't have video compatibility issues. My last laptop (from the same manufacturer) had an ATI card that I could never get to perform well (with at least three different distros).

Comment Two Candidates (Score 4, Insightful) 86

by misfit815 (#40847555) Attached to: Twitter Launches Political Index

Yes, there are two candidates with a realistic chance to win, but there are more than two candidates in the election. I was actually a bit surprised when I went to the site and only saw Obama and Romney on there, with no mention at all of Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. So, I guess I need to reevaluate my understanding of where Twitter falls in relation to mainstream media outlets. It's apparently a lot closer than I thought.
Programming

Submission + - Jailbreaking the Developer (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: The nature of computer programming is changing in a big way but the change is slow enough for programmers to swallow. One day they will wake up and remember what it used to be like. You bought some hardware, wrote some programs and did what you like with them.
Today you increasingly have to sign up to some developer program or other and obey the rules of the app store — even if you have no intention of selling your programs. To give away an program for an iOS device you have to pay Apple a per annum fee. Now Microsoft is joining the club and insisting that programmers get a developers license for Windows 8. You need such a license even to start work on a Metro app. At least Microsoft isn't charging anything for it — yet. More worrying is the clause in the license which says — if Microsoft detects any misuse of the license they will revoke it.
It seems that long gone are the days when you bought a computer, wrote some programs and did what ever you wanted with them.
If you want to secure the future of programming, then you really need to support not only the concept of free software but also the free developer. We no longer only need jailbreaks for devices but also for the developer.
Idle

Submission + - Medieval "Lingerie" From 15th Century Castle Could Rewrite Fashion History (ecouterre.com)

Submitted by fangmcgee
fangmcgee writes: Archaeologists have unearthed several 500-year-old bras that some experts say could rewrite fashion history. While they’ll hardly send pulses racing by today’s standards, the lace-and-linen underpinnings predate the invention of the modern brassiere by hundreds of years. Found hidden under the floorboards of Lengberg Castle in Austria’s East Tyrol, along with some 2,700 textile fragments and one completely preserved pair of (presumably male) linen underpants, the four intact bras and two fragmented specimens are thought to date to the 15th century, a hypothesis scientists later confirmed through carbon-dating.
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook Loses Users, Users Happier With Google+ (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by
benfrog
benfrog writes: "Facebook has lost what (by the standards of their userbase) is a modest number of users over the last six months, perhaps being one of the causes of a fall in their stock price. In the meantime, a study shows that (both) Google+ users are more satisfied with the site than Facebook users, who are (understandability) upset about the number of recent UI changes, the amount of advertising, and other elements, according to a statement accompanying the study. Figures also show dramatic growth in Google+ usage."
Programming

Submission + - Twitter Is Officially Killing the API (silicon-news.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Several blog posts on the Twitter development blog, statements issued, app updates and the now-tarnished Twitter-LinkedIn deal following the micro-blogging service cutting LinkedIn off from using its API all strongly support the fact that Twitter is phasing out its API in lieu of forcing users to use its own access methods to drive ad clicks and monetization. But is the service shooting itself in the foot by killing off custom user-facing apps, automated publishing methods and other niche apps in favor of the bland stock app?

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