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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Saving consumers a whole 4.5 Euros (Score 1) 98

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) 98

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) 98

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) 61

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) 45

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) 45

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) 77

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.

Comment Re:remove health care from jobs in the usa the wor (Score 4, Informative) 232

Here's what really tightens my jaws: if you take the average health care premium that you pay for employer-provided health care insurance and add that to the medicare / medicaid taxes, it probably comes out pretty even with what the medicare cost would be for single-payer healthcare.

It's not like private health insurance somehow gets massive discounts or something - Medicare sets reimbursement rates for procedures, so the care costs what the care costs. Hospitals love Medicare billing because they know what they're going to get, and they know they'll get it.

Private health insurance is a fucking leech attached to the money artery. How can anyone every expect an efficient health care system when you have profit-seeking entities in the middle of it, extracting money out of it while adding the only "value" of bureaucratic runaround and trying to dodge paying due to an "out of network" radiologist that you didn't choose and were not informed of looking at your x-ray in an in-network facility as listed on their own damn web site.

Their business model is to extract the most premiums they can, while paying out as little claims as they can. They exist to create inefficiency, and profit wildly for themselves. And we're all paying for it, for no reason at all.

Slashdot Top Deals

Marvelous! The super-user's going to boot me! What a finely tuned response to the situation!

Working...