Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment (shrug) (Score 1) 47

I have an LG CX (OLED) and love it.
The whole thing about burn in is a canard; I guess it's a risk if you have like a bar-tv where you leave it on one channel with a chyron or a video game with a persistent UI (like the frames of buttons) that doesn't change for hours and hours and hours.
And "potentially thinner"? My CX is literally the thickness of a single pane of glass - 4mm. There's a point where thinner isn't necessarily better, I don't even know how the guy mounted this thing without cracking it.

Comment Of course they don't: nobody READS books (Score 1) 154

Ofc I don't mean LITERALLY nobody. There are niches of readers here and there.

But my kids are all in their 20s and 30s, and they have many friends who say things like "you know, I haven't read a single actual book since college".

To me it's incomprehensible, and I sort of take it as evidence of the collapse but...is it really all that different than say, the 1950s? 1930s? Sure, intellectuals of all eras read but I don't believe the % of intellectuals by nature has particularly swung one way or another since then.

Comment power (Score 2) 69

I'm curious what they're going to use up power dragonfly?

  Sure the atmo density should make flying easier* but that distance and air density combine to make solar basically impossible.

*I'm not sure that's as "given" as they make it sound. Low air pressure on Mars meant that even hurricane-speed winds aren't that forceful. At 1.5bar, I'd assume the force of even a gentle breeze will be significant.

Ingenuity leveraged daily solar charging to avoid having to lug hefty batteries around; certainly that won't be an option for dragonfly.

Comment Security? (Score 1) 120

"He'd like to see the government encourage more competition"

I think we all would like that, but let's be clear that is an ECONOMIC preference and (in essence) an ideological preference, not a security one.

I do NOT believe that the security environment of the US government - a government were a lot of sites (esp internal) look more like myspace pages - would be materially IMPROVED by having a vast array of churning alternative vendors of uncertain provenance being managed by IT depts that can barely keep up with one vendor, either.

No, the 'security-focused' answer is that if I'm putting your (MS's) code on government-critical and security-critical machines, that code is
- transparent
- only accessible to a hot box of HIGHLY secured and vetted A-team of MS coders (ie vetted to the standard of actually working in the agencies it's deployed in)
- every patch is critically vetted by that same team to the last byte, and yes, this means those patches are going to come out slower to the secure ecosystem.

Comment Re:We were forced to use MS OneDrive (Score 4, Interesting) 120

Let's be clear that this has been the experience for a LOT of people in a lot of companies.

My firm is an ardently left-leaning European manufacturer who is all-in about a host of left-of-center values such as sustainability, DEI, etc etc. ...and we too are compelled to move to Onedrive, despite lots of objections and (by now) many examples of Onedrive's shortcomings.

Maybe the point of this isn't political, it's about a shit piece of software that's not ready for the critical needs to which it's being put, management choices that have little to do with actual staff needs, and IT accountability for following those dumb fads.

WHETHER we're talking about an organization led by an orange-colored nutball, or a senescent child-sniffing grandpa.

Comment More interested in performance, tho (Score 1) 201

As someone in logistics, I'm more interested in the actual performance.

Amazon's operations run at scale that is usefully simulative of real delivery-truck operations, more telling than the performative 'tech demonstrations' of other companies (eg a truck or two that they trot out for pictures when the Sustainability C-suite is giving a speech) where it's impossible to discern if the trucks are providing a value/performance that means EVs are *actually* interesting for businesses.

The comments to the OP referenced article are few, but the one is positive:
"The Amazon Rivian vans are great. Quiet in the neighborhood, and the drivers I have spoken with love them. They also carry more packages than their older trucks. "
+ Drivers love them is a huge plus. They could make all the economic sense in the world but on a practical level, if the drivers hated them they're going to find reasons to make them fail.
+ More packages than other trucks is also huge.

In short, this is promising. Local-region delivery vans that can charge nightly, deliver during the days, lots of start/stops (ie the absolute WORST performance envelope for ICE in terms of efficiency, wear, and pollution!) is a great place to see where EVs can leverage their strengths.

So far, so good. But let's be honest: while the costs for this are large in absolute numbers, Amazon profit was $30bn last year. In terms of what they spend on shipping logistics, $200 million could still be a performative, boutique, tech demonstrator for them.

One question I would also like to know is regarding these vehicles being custom-built for Amazon purposes. I am curious if somehow the EV 'frame' is more amenable to easier/cheaper/more varied internally custom body builds than that of an ICE: that could be a compelling plus in favor of EVs as well? Would Amazon's mentioned benefits - driver preference and better capacity for the kinds of loads they handle - have been available in a custom-built ICE vehicle? If not, why not?

Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 2) 85

"at least it's real (leftists) talking about things (leftists) care about"

FTFY.

The only place you might be able to speak your mind for a moment before getting banned without appeal or explanation is r/unpopularopinion and even that is only a brief respite from the compulsory doctrinal lockstep. r/NeutralPolitics isn't bad either.

I mean, to be fair Reddit DOES fully align with Google's goals politically so them regurgitating each other would be on-brand.

Comment Huh. (Score 1) 116

Maybe it wasn't such a great idea to literally connect every fucking thing to the internet with tissue paper systems that were known to be blatantly insecure?

No, no, you just go ahead and connect your refrigerator, toaster, coffee machine, and front door lock to the internet for "convenience", safe in the assumption that your government is doing exactly the same thing for critical infrastructure for "reasons" that have more to do with not losing allocated budgets than any actual value.

Comment Re:Slashdot doom and gloom (Score 1, Insightful) 35

FOMO and idiots overwhelm what I would say was a reasonable prediction of how informed consumers would behave. The error here was in assuming consumers were faintly aware of their own self-interest and still retained some ability to defer gratification.

The fact is, despite people bitching constantly about not having enough money, too high of rent, and having miserable lives never able to make ends meet, they still cheerfully drop $20/mo to six different subscription services to watch movies on their $1200 phone and buy a $8 latte every morning with a credit card that is nearly maxed out.

Don't blame /.'s "unrelenting upmoderrated pessimism" for getting it wrong; in fact, I'd argue that /. posters weren't cynical enough. /. to recognize that common sense is truly dead and that the sheeple who formerly skated for free on Netflix would cheerfully and instantly buy their own account, guaranteeing that every other service is now going to implement draconian sharing-policies because it's clearly the route to big profits.

Slashdot Top Deals

Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer

Working...