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Comment Re:never? (Score 1) 44

Apple didn't want to use resistive touch which was very precise

I've owned a lot of resistive touch devices. Zero of them were "very precise". Most of them had a lot of depth so you'd struggle to pick pixels even when they were big enough to easily count. Palm Pilots and Visors, Zoomer/GRiDPad 2390, an HTC phone, blah blah blah. Phones had plastic screens because gorilla glass hadn't been invented yet. Jobs was irritated by his scratched plastic screen at exactly the right time and yes, made the right call. Yes, a plastic stylus on a resistive screen is more precise than your finger, but it's also either irritatingly tiny or you are just having to carry around more shit.

In fact, the most precise non-wacom screen device I've ever used was the capacitive glass screen on the GRiDPad 1910... also a device where a well-sighted (or near-sighted) person can count pixels, but there you can also actually touch them. But then that's got a tethered pen. I have GEOS on mine, with Graffiti. That is precise... But still not as precise as my lady's Fujitsu tablet with Wacom. That's what you'd use now if you needed precision, a radio pen. There was a company which sold an IBM 486SLC-based portable called Dauphin which had one that ran on batteries, how tragic... but it was precise. Unfortunately it was also as thick as a pretty good-sized hardback book.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How do you feel about derivative fiction? (google.com)

shanen writes: Some thoughts on derivative fiction featuring Dreaming Spies by Laurie King with special guest character Sherlock Holmes.

So the first meta-comment is that the subtitle (as in the above paragraph) should have some special attribute, but not an option on today's Slashdot. A larger size is popular, but...

Next meta-comment is that I'm too easily motivated by negative reactions. But maybe that's my own fault for reading so many books and just some kind of entropy law that there are more bad books than good?

Fastest way to deal with this book might be in the way of a suggested solution approach. Using generative AI, of course? From that perspective I think the biggest problem is that Sherlock Holmes is barely present. More of a background character. The story line is also pretty implausible and the Japanese aspects seem mangled, too. On the Japanese problems I'm not the expert to ask, but I noticed a lack of Japanese names in the acknowledgments. So the AI fix would be a prompt like "rewrite this book to make Sherlock Holmes into the hero with the Russell character more in a role like Dr Watson's and shift the writing style to be closer to Arthur Conan Doyle's style.

However I also got to thinking about the more general topic of derivative fiction. There are so many characters who are based on Sherlock Holmes. Some that come to mind as ultimately based on Holmes are Perry Mason, Jules Maigret, Hercule Poirot, Spenser, and Nero Wolfe and I'm sure I'll remember some others before I can finish writing this... However returning to the feature book, there is a lot of stuff about ninja in there, and I think they are mostly just as fictional as Sherlock Holmes with the same tenuous linkage to sources in the real world... So what goes around comes back to the same place?

Next I started thinking about quantifying the derivative works and we're back to stuff the AIs could help with. I feel like running a query something like this:

"What is the total volume of Holmes stuff written by Arthur Conan Doyle, both before and after the death of Holmes? Appropriate units would be tens of thousands of words. How does that compare to the Laurie King novels with Holmes? The comparison should include ratios. Now extend the analysis to other fictional characters that can be compared to Holmes."

The above list of characters could be included in the question, though it might be better to see what the AI comes up with and then add any of my favorites that get missed. Also, the query should be fed to several AIs so as to compare their answers... (I seem to have a talent for writing prompts that push the AIs into hallucinations.)

Closing meta-comment is to note that King has written about 15 of these novels as of 2015... Pretty sure that's well ahead of Doyle.

Comment Re: US government (Score 2) 64

"Security weenies claim security via obscurity doesn't work, but it absolutely does if you like to use data and respect what it tells you. Check the number of security CVEs for operating systems like OpenVMS, MPE/IX, and see how they compare with Linux or Windows. By volume, the most popular OSes get the most attacks and successful exploits."

That is not security by obscurity. It's security by unpopularity.

Comment Re:OpenWRT (Score 1) 63

The OpenWRT folks improved a lot their web interface and how to find the right - easy to install - router.

It's still too complicated for the average person.

You can also choose a GL.iNET router which runs OpenWRT natively

That doesn't address how difficult it is to configure. Again, for a normal person who doesn't know what any of those settings mean. If you want normal people to be able to do this you're going to need to develop a config wizard for luci.

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