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Comment: Re:the new flickr interface (Score 1) 102

by rwa2 (#43788669) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Can Yahoo Actually Stage a Comeback?

So what's better?

I'm kinda annoyed that Google+ automatically uploads everything from my phone's camera gallery, but there's not really a good way to pull down from my Picasa albums shared on Google+ to my phone's Gallery, without swimming through a bunch of third-party apps.

FWIW, the only "third party" picture interface app that I've really liked is "Floating Image", which can pull from various feeds including Facebook and Flickr and probably Picasa / Google+ / or whatever passes for Google's photo service du jour. But it pulls to its own cache dir rather than to your Gallery.

Comment: Re:One is fine the other is creepy (Score 1) 315

by rwa2 (#43781695) Attached to: Head-mounted displays / sensors like Google Glass are:

Well, I'll see it before Glass does, of course.

Glass will be connected through a really powerful telescope that peers through a 300Mm path of prisms, so I'll have a second to block its camera. Maybe I'll also tune netfilter to run everything through a 10MB FIFO buffer, so that might give me another few seconds to cut off the uplink. Hell, maybe I'll configure it to act as a "FR33 C4NDY" open wifi access point too, so all other Glass users within line-of-sight would also have a 10 second uplink delay I could surreptitiously cut... hmm.

Or maybe I just won't be recording all of the damn time. I dunno. Glass sounds like it would be much more useful if it really was recording all of the time, so I can go back to see what I did with my keys.

Comment: Re:Also (Score 1) 367

by rwa2 (#43762059) Attached to: Bloomberg To HS Grads: Be a Plumber

IT isn't a trade? Yeah, actually you're right.

My father always said, "computers are a tool, not a trade".

But with most trades, it's useful to be able to apply your tools well. So most IT/CS geeks would do well for themselves to "diversify" somewhat into a specific trade, and not limit their knowledge/education solely to kicking computer HW/SW. Focus on what you do with it, not the tool itself.

Comment: Re:One is fine the other is creepy (Score 2) 315

by rwa2 (#43762007) Attached to: Head-mounted displays / sensors like Google Glass are:

I'm looking forward to much more of this, though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPW8xmI4w6U

(both from people using Glass and not paying attention to where they're going, and from people who use Glass to surreptitiously collect more funny gaffes from others a /whee/ bit faster than people can currently whip out their cellphones)

I'm not frightened, though. The whole point of being a technologist is knowing how to master it.

If that means turning off my Glass before looking at things that look vaguely like dildos so I don't get spammed with sex aids in my contextually-aware adstream, then so be it. And if I have to start wearing a Guy Fawkes mask out in public so my friends' Glass doesn't facial-recognize me when I'm out spanking it in the park... I'm sure I can come to cope with that too.

I really had very little interest in Glass at the current price point until I started reading about how much people are pissing themselves over it. Now I'm actually considering plunking down for one just to watch people's reactions (hell, maybe even a non-functional display model)

Comment: Re:One teensy detail (Score 4, Interesting) 392

by rwa2 (#43735655) Attached to: Why We Should Build a Supercomputer Replica of the Human Brain

Well, supposedly they have enough CPU power to do a pretty reasonable simulation of insect and even small mammal brains, like rats and cats.

But supposedly there might be more going on in there than just interactions between connected neurons...
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/13-is-quantum-mechanics-controlling-your-thoughts#.UZQDe7VeZ30

Comment: Re:not just iTunes (Score 1) 512

by rwa2 (#43731017) Attached to: iTunes: Still Slowing Down Windows PCs After All These Years

There's a win32 build of GKrellm, which is probably just as useful if not more than Rainmeter:
http://www.srcbox.net/projects/gkrellm/

Bonus for having the same interface as gkrellm on your Linux boxes. And maybe being able to remote display it using its own client server protocol.

I don't know why it isn't easier to monitor disk utilization, after all, it's pretty much the slowest component in your PC.
On Linux, try iotop, iftop, dstat, etc. to get more detailed views of what processes are using up your precious I/O. That said, I'm pretty envious of the new Windows Performance Monitor introduced since Vista for all of the fine-grained process info it presents in one interface.

Comment: Re:Too big to jail (Score 1) 190

by rwa2 (#43703733) Attached to: Data Leak Spurs Huge Offshore Tax Evasion Investigation

Not sure if serious...

In government by Kickstarter, money would truly equal political power (and Kickstarter would be the world's largest megacorp from all those transaction fees)...doesn't sound good to me.

Ha, well, my "Not Sure if Serious" political science theory is that everything will be better if representative democracy was run like OKCupid, where you could answer a ton of questions about your positions on things, and then delegate your voting authority on the issue to the politician that has the highest % match to you in those matters.

Comment: Re:Education??? You are being lied to. (Score 1) 405

by rwa2 (#43671379) Attached to: The public sector in direst need of reform is ...

Ha, yeah, it's amazing that Education is leading the polls.

The "solutions" all seem to be of the form of either (but not both) "spend more money on good teachers" or "spend less money on bad teachers".

Or of the occasional/omnipresent "introduce new technology in all classrooms" and that will be the silver bullet. Not that computers in every classroom has had much more effect than TVs + VCRs in the 70s, or how expensive projectors have improved over blackboards, or expensive mandatory textbooks have replaced worksheets that the teachers would make themselves and duplicated using those old blue copies that smelled like bananas because modern copying machines were too nice (and most are still subject to embarrassingly small quotas today). No, the good teachers somehow manage to dutifully spread the education around anyway, regardless of the tools made available to them.

The one biggest factor that research consistently points to is actually the parents. Parents are the ones who find the best schools with good teachers for their children to attend, and push their kids to work hard and value education. But how can we really reform that, if it's a societal/cultural thing?

--
I support public education: I married a teacher

Comment: Re:Nintendo (Score 2) 288

by rwa2 (#43625949) Attached to: Compared to its non-Super version, I most prefer ...

You know... I keep going back through my childhood for games I'd like to play with my own kids, and the list goes something like:
    Super Dodgeball (NES)
    Contra (NES)
    River City Ransom (NES)
    Great Tank / Iron Tank (NES)
    MegaMan (NES)
    1943 (NES)

I try to think of games from the SNES I'd like to play with them, but all the good ones I can think of now have better versions on the PS:
    Chrono Trigger
    FFIII / VI

But maybe it just means I'm too damn old.

Comment: Re:Imagine The Poor Guy Who Changed This (Score 1) 338

by rwa2 (#43625899) Attached to: Google Formally Puts Palestine On Virtual Map

Ha ha, just as well. I can imagine the poor guy.... when I was a kid a decade or so ago I was a devmin for a small UN site and, uh "accidentally" filed the West Bank and Gaza under Israel in the database hierarchy.

Fortunately my client at the World Bank with a bit more knowledge of world events that I received from US HS History set me straight before we pushed it to production.

But I suppose this balances it all out then!

Still, it's amazing how much trouble "kids these days" can get into for doing the same shit we did when we were young.

"Facts are stupid things." -- President Ronald Reagan (a blooper from his speeach at the '88 GOP convention)

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