Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:"bring the missing functionality back in future (Score 4, Insightful) 31

Open source doesn't rely simply on users making code changes, it relies on a specific subset of users. Feature developers are users who are also coders and who are also able to get up to speed on the project and who are also skilled enough to implement it and are also able to navigate the politics of the project.

If the feature didn't get implemented, that person for the original implementation has probably already left the project long ago. In many cases because they weren't a supporter of the re-architecture.

It could be because a given feature-developer wanted the production release before they wanted that feature, which would sound plausible if it were one or two significant features left behind. But once you have to start counting the missing major functionality on more than one hand, that points more at the fundamentals of the re-architecture than personal feature-developer priorities.

Comment "bring the missing functionality back in future" (Score 4, Interesting) 31

Whenever I see this sort of statement, it means it's gone. If they could readily do it in a non-janky way, they'd have done it before release; the re-architecture was too fundamental to accommodate it. Particularly on an open source project, where nobody is forcing them to release on a specific schedule.

Comment Canada almost certainly loses more academics to US (Score 1) 195

Not mentioned:

Canada has an economy that has performed *FAR* worse than the US, especially over the past 15 years. Inflation is far higher, taxes are far higher, housing prices are out of control, productivity is stagnant. Canada over the past 20-25 years or so has become increasingly anti-liberty, anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, and anti-free speech.

So, many Canadians have moved to the United States. Including scholars. Far in excess of any Americans moving to Canada.

And a group of 48 moving from the US to Canada is a tiny blip in the academic system.

Meanwhile, the US isn't anti-free-speech, it's just has reduced subsidies for anti-American activities. Or science based on pro-socialist graft, endless growth of government, and faked data that proves to be wrong, again and again. Or science completely contrary to logic. At the same time, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe have gone very ANTI-free speech, jailing people for wrongthink and using Orwell as a playbook.

(My father was a graduate economics professor at Simon Frasier University in Burnaby, British Columbia in the 70s and early 80s. My family moved to California, and he started a new job at Claremont Graduate School. He was paid better, paid less taxes, and our family significantly improved our standard of living. So, this isn't something that new, either.)

Comment Re:AI Control is the new currency (Score 2) 51

AI isn't inherently bad, the system under which AI is being developed is. Capitalism commodifies everything, including humans... slavery is the logical end state of capitalism, commodifying not just the factory or the raw materials, but the worker themselves. In a non-capitalist society, it wouldn't matter that AI ingests and reuses creative output... creators are not beholden to capitalists in order to have food or housing or healthcare. In a non-capitalist society, AI would not be trained on winner-takes-all modalities. We get to a Star Trek world where you can conjure up damn near anything you want in a holodeck by leveraging AI... but only if it's in in a NON-capitalist society.

Comment Re:46USC2304 - Duty to provide assistance at sea (Score 1) 123

This is a story about humans in distress reaching out to a billionaire's boat. If your response is buh-buh-buh-insurance or buh-buh-buh-maritime-law, you're pretty firmly missing the point. This is ultimately Zuck's PR crisis regardless of how many levels of indirection he can employ to cover his ass liability-wise. He owns the boat. He hired the people. His monkeys. His circus.

Comment Airtable users should bail now (Score 1) 13

Nothing says “innovation” like buying a useful, growing product at a distressed valuation, firing the people who built it, hiking subscription prices, crippling the free tier, and calling the resulting rent-extraction machine now “sustainable.”

Bending Spoons claims they're rescuing businesses, but what they really do is fuck anyone who bought into a platform they've purchased.

It’s applying the private-equity model to existing infrastructure: user lock-in, cut labor, reduce service, and monetize the inconvenience of leaving... but they cut out all of the innovation aspect by not even providing the value associated with the initial lock-in. They just skip the first step and buy companies to screw.

Comment Ford, too. (Score 2) 160

I bought a Ford F-150 XLT (the full-hybrid pickup) and was very disappointed to find that several of the features (Including Blue Cruise and navigation) were subscription-based with an initial free period of a year or so.

Other than that the vehicle is fantastic - but was very pricey when I bought it, so having to pay over and over for the features was a very annoying surprise. (They quit working rather than quit updating when the subscriptions run out.)

Comment Maybe not to individual people, but ... (Score 2) 14

... a bunch of cancer progression theories based on cell culture progression had to be thrown out when it was discovered that the cultures were being contaminated by a particularly robust and aggressive cancer cell culture, HeLa, which had contaminated lab equipment like environmental chambers or survived equipment sterilization and eventually took over culture lines in labs.

Comment Foccused ultrasound but yes. (Score 1) 37

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

Comment Re:No, but you see, I don't want any commission... (Score 1) 10

Apple is hosting the app store. There are *some* costs with this.

So, some commissions are appropriate here.

10% sounds good.

If end-users could use multiple stores, and there was actual competition there, the commissions there would drop a LOT. But Apple has a monopoly.

Note that Google is planning on locking down Google Play, so they're little better.

 

Comment Re:I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids but .. (Score 1) 135

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Slashdot Top Deals

Your mode of life will be changed to EBCDIC.

Working...