Comment Problem Solved! (Score 1) 361
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spokey_Dokes
You're welcome!
Comment Assumptions ... (Score 1) 117
They tested it for 5,000 consecutive charging cycles -- the equivalent of over 13 years of daily charging and discharging -- and found that it retained more than 90 percent of its capacity."
That assumes you only charge once per day. My phone gets charged at least twice a day and frequently more often than that.
I'm not saying I'm not impressed - but I think equating 5000 charge cycles to 13 years because 5000/365=13.7(ish) is a bit of a stretch!
I suppose it depends on what sort of batteries they might build. The Tesla Powerwall might be something that has a single charge per day cycle - charge up during sunlight - discharge when there is no sun but even that is pretty simplistic. Maybe I'll just change the status to "It's complicated"!
Comment Re:How fast is the 0 to 88 MPH speed? (Score 0) 175
Where are my moderation points when I need them! :) Oh well, I'll just have to say "Funny" ... Funny. :)
Submission + - WSJ: Facebook's Point System Fails to Close Diversity Gap
theodp writes: Gizmodo and others are picking up on a paywalled WSJ story which reported that Facebook's failure to move the needle on the diversity is all the more surprising because The Social Network awarded Facebook recruiters double points for a 'diversity hire' — a female, Black, or Hispanic engineer — compared to the hire of a White or Asian male. Facebook declined to comment on whether this points-based system is still in effect. The WSJ also notes that Intel has paid its employees double referral bonuses for women, minorities, and veterans. The reward schemes evoke memories of gender-based (and later race-based) incentives offered for K-12 coding and STEM programs run by tech-backed Code.org (to which Facebook just pledged $15M) and Google, which offered lower funding or no funding at all to teachers if participation by female students was deemed unacceptable to the sponsoring organizations. Facebook's efforts also seem consistent with the tech-backed Every Student Succeeds Act, which calls for increasing CS and STEM access to address a tech-declared national crisis, but only "for students through grade 12 who are members of groups underrepresented in such subject fields, such as female students, minority students, English learners, children with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged students." Hey, sometimes "every" doesn't mean "every"!
Submission + - People Ignore Software Security Warnings Up To 90% of the Time, Says Study (phys.org)
An anonymous reader writes: A new study from BYU, in collaboration with Google Chrome engineers, finds the status quo of warning messages appearing haphazardly — while people are typing, watching a video, uploading files, etc. — results in up to 90 percent of users disregarding them. Researchers found these times are less effective because of "dual task interference," a neural limitation where even simple tasks can't be simultaneously performed without significant performance loss. Or, in human terms, multitasking. For example, 74 percent of people in the study ignored security messages that popped up while they were on the way to close a web page window. Another 79 percent ignored the messages if they were watching a video. And a whopping 87 percent disregarded the messages while they were transferring information, in this case, a confirmation code. For example, Jenkins, Vance and BYU colleagues Bonnie Anderson and Brock Kirwan found that people pay the most attention to security messages when they pop up in lower dual task times such as: after watching a video, waiting for a page to load, or after interacting with a website. For part of the study, researchers had participants complete computer tasks while an fMRI scanner measured their brain activity. The experiment showed neural activity was substantially reduced when security messages interrupted a task, as compared to when a user responded to the security message itself. The BYU researchers used the functional MRI data as they collaborated with a team of Google Chrome security engineers to identify better times to display security messages during the browsing experience.
Submission + - EU Exploring Idea of Using Government ID Cards as Mandatory Online Logins (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Fears that fake online reviews might ruin the consumer market and damage legitimate businesses are making the European Commission consider the idea of forcing all EU citizens to log into online accounts using their government-issued ID cards. Details about these plans can be found in a proposal named "Online Platforms and the Digital Single Market Opportunities and Challenges," announced on May 25, 2016. According to this document, "online platforms should accept credentials issued or recognised by national public authorities, such as electronic or mobile IDs, national identity cards, or bank cards." The reasoning, according to the EU is that "online ratings and reviews of goods and services are helpful and empowering to consumers, but they need to be trustworthy and free from any bias or manipulation. A prominent example is fake reviews."
Submission + - Yahoo is Auctioning Off 3,000 Patents To The Highest Bidder (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Wall Street Journal reports that bids are being accepted for nearly 3,000 Yahoo patents and pending applications. In April, Yahoo moved 2,659 patents into a patent-holding company called Excalibur IP LLC, which was seen as a first step toward a patent sale. "This represents a unique opportunity for companies operating in the Internet industry to acquire some of the most pioneering and foundational patents related to Web search and advertising," Yahoo said in a statement. Those invited to join the auction include "strategic buyers, private-equity firms, and investment firms focused on intellectual property," according to the Journal. Preliminary bids are due by the middle of this month, and the patents are expected to fetch more than $1 billion, according to "people familiar with the matter" who spoke to the Journal. Bloomberg, which also reported on the patent sale, said there was no official reserve price or bidding guidelines.
Comment Yes! (Score 1) 380
Not only should you be able to sell, gift or bequeath digital media - it doesn't actually hurt anyone and, in most cases, it helps the author. (That may vary for digital media like movies and TV shows but bear with me
Old way - I buy a physical copy of a book/CD/DVD. Say it's a series. I lend a copy to a friend. I can't watch/read/listen to it while my friend has it but he likes it so much - he goes and buys his own copy of the series - net gain for the content creator. Problem: I often lose media this way because I either forget who I've loaned it to or they abscond with it!
New way - My and my friend both have Google accounts (for example - could be any online service). I buy a copy of a book from Google Play. The nasty way is for Google to keep the copy server side and I'd need to be online to read it - which would annoy me - but it would allow Google to let me transfer, temporarily or permanently, that copy/license to another Google user. Better than the old way because the book would still be listed in my library but "greyed out" while it was on loan. Unlike a real book, if I don't get it back - it isn't lost because I'd have the option to retrieve the book whether my friend was finished or not
Another of the arguments is that selling second hand prevents the copyright holder from making a sale because they get nothing from a re-sale - but the likelihood is, the person wasn't going to pay full price for it anyway so they wouldn't have made a sale in the first place. They've lost nothing. They potentially gain because the reader/listener/viewer that got the "cheap" copy
I own series of books, hundreds - possibly into the thousands of dollars of books - that almost all started with one a friend loaning me a copy - or a copy I borrowed from the library. The same goes for DVDs of TV Series and movies.
Someone mentioned renting digital media - well most streaming services already let you do that for TV, Movies and Music and last I heard. it was doing extremely well and the artists aren't complaining! Books would be no different and I think there are a few that let you subscribe for unlimited books? Say I can pay a dollar to "rent" a book whenever I want - I still have to be online and then download it for the period of the loan (OverDrive is a great App for free ebooks if your library supports it!) but it still isn't as convenient as owning a copy. Even though I know I can get ebooks free from my library, their licensing agreement means the only have limited copies so they aren't always available when I want them
At the moment I well neither buy real books or ebooks because real books are inconvenient and I don't like not being able to treat my ebook like real books - net loss for the content creators.
I am tempted to try one of those book subscriptions if they actually exist but they'd need to have better content than my local library to make it worthwhile
Comment D: All of the above! (Score 1) 103
First time in a while I couldn't decide which one to vote one - which usually drives me towards the humorous answer that is usually the last one. I don't really know who CowboyNeil is though.
Comment What? Not one comment about the Kessel Run? (Score 1) 117
I read through all of the comments too ... I think the Indianna Jones references were actually the winners although I did chuckle at the One Armed Man comment ...
edit: Oh drat ... someone posted one while I was typing this! :) Well played!
Comment Hello World ... (Score 1) 143
To be honest - I expected the example to be the programmer's equivalent of a guitarist playing Stairway to Heaven. I'm actually disappointed the example wasn't a kernel module to print "Hello World"! :)
Comment $60 games? Luxury! (Score 5, Informative) 435
$60 Games? I'd LOVE to see the price drop to $60 games. Most new PC Titles in Australia debut at between $89 and $99. The collectors edition of .. .Dragon Age I think it was, was $109.
$60 games ... luxury.
Comment Forget Medicine - Aim at Paranoid new parents! (Score 1) 42
Baby monitors are pretty useless - they only tell you when the bub is making noise and if they're making noise, they're still alive! :) It's when the little buggers are quiet you have to worry.
There are mattress pads that can monitor their breathing but if they roll off the pad you'd probably have a minor coronary as you rushed into the room only to find the tot curled up at the far end of the cot.
A little pair of smart pj's though ... what a great idea! Bub stops breathing - alarm goes off! I'd pay $100 for that!
Valve Releases Updated Alien Swarm For Free With Code Base 164
baronvoncarson tips news that today Valve released an updated version of Alien Swarm, a popular Unreal Tournament 2004 total conversion mod. The creators of the mod were hired by Valve, and they've helped turn it into a stand-alone game running on the Source engine. Valve is also releasing the code base for Alien Swarm and an SDK. The game is available for free on Steam.
Linux Kernel 2.6.32 Released 195
diegocg writes "Linus Torvalds has officially released the version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel. New features include virtualization memory de-duplication, a rewrite of the writeback code faster and more scalable, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a 'perf timechart' tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run-time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers. See the full changelog for more details."
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