Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment This is to kill ad blockers (Score 3, Insightful) 27

This is a plan intended to kill ad blockers. One of the major issues advertisers have right now is that they can't guarantee that their code will be executed as intended. A lot of ad systems now have anti-blocker technology that checks to make sure an ad loaded successfully, and if it didn't or if the dimensions are wrong or if the element is messed with, throw up a page-wide dialog to block access to the site. (Or do what Slashdot does at present, throw you into an infinite alert() loop.)

But that requires JavaScript to work. Block that JavaScript, and you block the ability to block ad-blockers.

Add in things to insure "integrity" of JavaScript delivered to the client, and you break that. No more blocking scripts, no more blocking ads - or at least, no more blocking the scripts detecting if you're blocking ads.

Comment Re:Words of wisdom (Score 2) 32

Worriers need to stop freaking out and just figure out what it can do for them.

And if they find that it's not helpful to them right now, there's no point in learning something about it for the future -- because it's going to change. If it ever achieves its full promise there will be no need to learn how to use it, because it will learn how to work with us.

Well, assuming it doesn't kill us all.

Comment Re: TBH... (Score 1) 51

massive shortfalls in production

Not necessarily.

I notice that you didn't provide any counterexamples which is, of course, because there aren't any. No planned economy larger than a few hundred people has ever succeeded. While capitalist economies do go through cycles of expansion and recession (which a well-functioning central bank and adequate regulatory oversight can ameliorate but not eliminate), capitalism consistently makes the entire society wealthier, top to bottom. Yes, it does tend to produce inequality, and that has some negative social effects, but over time even the poorest end up better off than under any other system, assuming modest government regulation to prevent abuses.

Capitalism is not very efficient, there's a lot of wasted resources and duplication of effort.

There really isn't; definitely not compared to central planning. The results speak for themselves, but it's useful to understand why, I think. When people look at the way capitalist economies tend to produce 10 factories making similar shoes while it seems obvious that one big factory would be more efficient, the mistake they're making is in looking only at what they can see with their eyes: Buildings, machinery, people, all making shoes, redundantly. What they fail to see is the knowledge about how to make shoes efficiently that ebbs and flows through those same enterprises. This is the core flaw in the Labor Theory of Value, actually, which was the basis of Marx's understanding of economics.

The Labor Theory of Value will tell you that the value of a product is determined by the resources that went into producing it, material, energy and labor. But it omits the knowledge required to produce the product and the right knowledge can decrease the resource requirements by orders of magnitude. Capitalism works because it incentivizes the creation of knowledge that enables more efficient production, as well as the creation of better products (where "better" means "optimized to consumer desires in context").

This is why the 10 shoe factories end up being more efficient than one.

But that's not where capitalism provides the biggest efficiency boost to the economy. The biggest boost comes from the knowledge it generates about the most efficient way to allocate capital. Wall Street looks on its face like an incredible waste of money. All of those people generating massive personal incomes by "gambling" on stocks and bonds. In truth, that competitive game is the knowledge engine that no central planning board has come remotely close to matching, and certainly has never exceeded. All of the money to be made in trading incentivizes brainpower to concentrate on solving the problem of making sure that the most productive enterprises have the resources they need.

Any system that fails to replace the knowledge generation capitalism provides will ultimately be far less efficient, and will generate production shortfalls. No one has yet proposed any system that even attempts to cover that critical gap.

So far, the absolute best economic structure we've devised -- as evidenced by actual outcomes, not just theory -- is lightly-fettered capitalism overlaid with a redistributive social safety net.

Comment Re:Saving consumers a whole 4.5 Euros (Score 1) 123

If wireless charging is the new standard, why would anyone still be buying USB adapters?

It's not like wireless charging is banned in the EU. You just also have to include a USB port that has the capability to charge the device *as well*. You know, like every phone sold on the market with wireless charging already does.

What a ridiculous argument.

Comment Re:Excellent (Score 1) 123

Because laws can never be amended to include new standards, right?

And in the meantime, we don't have an explosion of proprietary garbage that doesn't enter landfills. On balance, I think we're still better off than we were before the EU enacted these laws.

Comment Re: Excellent (Score 1) 123

I have a thunderbolt cable with a magnetically attaching end. It charges my laptop and connects external displays, etc. All problems solved.

The MagSafe cable is still in it's OEM packaging because I don't need to carry around a single-purpose cable when I can use a USB-C cable with the charger Apple supplied, and that same cable can be used for data connectivity as well.

Comment Re:Hybrids still better than ICE (Score 1) 112

Hybrids use generators rather than ICE. As such, they are more efficient burners of gasoline, reducing pollution per mile.

The study said that they're better: 19% better. That's not nothing! It's just not the 75% better that lab testing showed.

The link you provided is the experience of one driver, one who is conscientious and focused on minimizing fuel consumption (within reason; hypermilers would do better). The study looked at the real-world results across 800,000 drivers, most of whom apparently didn't take so much care to minimize fuel usage.

Also, it's not true in general that "hybrids use generators rather than ICE". That's true of PHEVs that are strictly serial hybrids, but most are series-parallel or "power split" hybrids, meaning they can drive the wheels with the electric motor, or the combustion engine, or both. Often both the electric motor and the ICE are too small to provide the target maximum performance so must be used in parallel when you step hard on the accelerator.

One fascinating strategy for power splitting is "through the road", which has no mechanical connection at all between the ICE and the traction motor, and uses the wheel-driven traction motor as the generator. The way it works is the ICE drives one axle and the traction motor drives the other. Battery charging is done "through the road", using the road itself to transmit power from the ICE-driven axle to the electrically-driven axle. The ICE spins one pair of wheels, driving the vehicle forward, which forces the other pair of wheels to spin which turns the electric motor which charges the battery. This only makes sense in AWD drive cars but it's peak design elegance.

Comment Re:That's not good? (Score 1) 51

obviously we should be striving to make it 100%

If 100% of jobs meet some standard, we'll pick a higher standard. For example, consider the standard that employees not be chained to their benches, fed nothing but moldy bread and be brutally whipped if the overseer feels like it. 100% of legitimate jobs in the US exceed that standard. OSHA exists to ensure that jobs meet minimum workplace safety standards and minimum wage laws ensure that jobs pay at least a certain amount, so we don't discuss whether jobs meet those standards, we take them as a given and set the quality bar higher.

If a study finds that 40% of jobs meet some standard, it means that the researchers did a reasonably good job of writing a description of the median job, then tweaked it upward just a bit. It's not like there is some universal, eternal standard for what constitutes a "quality job". It would be interesting to take the current standard and apply to historical working conditions, 50, 100, 200, 500 years ago. I'll bet the 1975 percentage would be half of the 2026 percentage and the older percentages would quickly tail off to ~0.

Comment Re: TBH... (Score 1) 51

There's always going to be a systemic problem so long as we have capitalism, because capitalism relies upon maintaining a systemic problem, specifically, workers being paid less than the value of their labour, which is, on average, where profits come from..

Of course if you get rid of capitalism then you get a different systemic problem, massive shortfalls in production, making everyone worse off. Much like democracy, capitalism is the worst system except for all of the others.

Comment Re:Really should be honoring Woz Instead! (Score 3, Interesting) 78

We saw the same sort of thing when Jobs returned to Apple and brought the legacy of NeXT with him, but because computer hardware had managed to become a lot more commoditized, general purpose, it was not as much a hardware issue as a software/OS issue. They maintained a virtual machine environment to run classic System within OSX to again allow those with investments in software for System to be able to continue using it (and to allow it to be used when there wasn't a version written for OSX specifically yet) but they certainly weren't looking to perpetuate the original Macintosh line once the models running OSX had supplanted them.

Everyone always forgets about the Carbon API.

There was a way for several years that app developers could target Carbon for their MacOS 9.x apps, and they would magically get OS X features when OS X became a shipping thing. It was an absolutely brilliant transition strategy - I believe when they introduced Carbon, they said "all future life on MacOS will be based on Carbon" which wasn't exactly true when they launched the OS X native "Cocoa" libraries, but they pulled off one of the easiest transitions between two fundamentally different operating systems, and the only people that really had a problem were QuarkXPress customers because Quark decided to be assholes about it and try to squeeze another $800/seat out of people for a new version of XPress where the only thing they did was run it through a compiler targeting Carbon. Just like they did when PowerPC came around and they charged $800/seat for a PowerPC native version of the same Quark XPress 4 with absolutely no additional features.

As it turns out, there's a reason why the publishing industry was more than happy to shitcan that company in favor of Adobe InDesign.

Slashdot Top Deals

In English, every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

Working...