Posts by DropBear 4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
...just how much science and technology has really been lost in the past and why
That's all neatly explained in a brochure you're most welcome to pick up at the souvenir shop in the Atlantis Visitor Centre - a word of warning though, you'll have to bring your own scuba gear...
No humans on your side in the battle zone., just humans with google glasses on, somewhere 100 miles away.
...then the opposing force turns on a wide-band high-power RF jammer, giggling all the way, and the drones are left to fend for themselves (if they have any onboard intelligence at all).
...that Game of Thrones is more or less just Dune not-in-spaaaaace (perhaps sans the Bene Gesserit but complete with fremen with worms and a charismatic leader unsullied with dragons and a charismatic leader) and my mind instantly imploded. Ehhh, maybe I shouldn't drink all that "water of life"...
I'm getting old, aren't I?
No, you just haven't watched enough Knight Rider - especially now when Google might actually give you a car that might actually show up and pick you up...
Anyway, jokes aside - I'm no fan of talking to stuff either; tapping is way more discreet, I have no desire to advertise to all and sundry what I'm doing with my smartphone.
Since I have always built my PCs out of parts myself this never really was an issue I encountered, but I do find it interesting that Eastern Europe doesn't seem to have the problem at all - usually you can just walk into a shop and buy an OS-free PC if you wish (nominally sold with FreeDOS or some such installed). I won't comment on what OS gets installed on 99% of these about five minutes after the purchase, but I do find it remarkable that - even if for the wrong reasons - for once we managed to steer completely clear of what is a legitimate issue.
I cannot help but wonder whether a fairly heavy (within reason, obviously) spoon suspended in some sort of gimballed handle would not do the same thing merely by virtue of its inertia, no motors at all (well, there's always the fully green solution of sticking said spoon to a chicken's head and holding the chicken itself - guaranteed zero movement, just make sure you don't use it to eat chicken soup)...
You do have a point. I have a Galaxy S2 and see no practical reason whatsoever to upgrade to anything newer (ok, except that the S2 doesn't have Bluetooth LE - but so far I have nothing that would hinge on the distinction). Seriously, there's nothing wrong with the performance - it's fluid enough for me, and the software "features" added since the S2 are of zero interest to me. Why upgrade any time soon...? It's working perfectly fine...
Well, various priced-stunningly-close-to-cost eastern phones have been trickling into western markets for a while now, many of them boasting hardware that is not appreciably behind anything traditional, brand-name mid- and high-range ones have to offer. I'm not sure die-hard Apple fans will be swayed by any of that, but it seems to me that a lot of people are really starting to wonder why they should pay "x" hundred Euro for a phone that can easily be had (sans the brand) for a quarter or third of that...
Not to argue the point of the article (I prefer to run my own CardDAV/CalDAV server too), but 'taming' Dropbox is no hassle whatsoever - it only takes one click: "install EncFS / EncFS4Win". I never fail to giggle looking at Dropbox's popups alerting me that file !@#^%er57$E%$Vfdvgd^$%gf has just been synced...
The whole "I'll let you work with it but you must promise not to make use of what you'll see" angle sound rather daft - filming the thing is somewhat redundant if you let people see it at all. WTF, you don't just authorize people you fear might compete with you to work hands-on with your allegedly closely guarded secret! Or is this about "but you promised!"...? Not very nice of Huawei if true of course, but come on...
That's what I'd use it for too - to see caller ID on incoming calls / silence the ring / reject the call, see subject and sender for mail, read an SMS scrolling by, and making sure I know about missed calls / messages (right now there's no way for me to know whether I missed anything unless I pull my phone and wake it up - and frankly, getting my phone out of its belt-worn holder is generally way, way more hassle than glancing at my wrist...). Granted, it would have to last at least a week for me to get interested - but that would be easily achievable with Bluetooth LE and an e-paper display.
Exactly, and mobile carriers demonstrate this quite vividly - I do NOT have access to multiple ISPs, but I DO have a choice of several carriers for my phone: except it makes not a damn bit of difference because what one does all do, and what one does not do, none of them do. And please don't even bother arguing there is any meaningful competition in action here - that's simply BS; it's the plain old "I don't need to provide a better service as long as you do the same, and that favours both of us".
As Starcraft so aptly demonstrated so long ago, it's always about the details - the setting, the tactics, the strategy: a good player could beat a poor one with any choice of race vs. any other. You can't just say "paper beats rock, always". The line-up here clearly isn't THAT perfectly balanced, but it's still impossible to say "this or this player cannot be beaten by any of the others, in any possible circumstance". Sorry, Guv...
I'm still waiting for the pipeline to purge - the moment when there'll be no-one left alive who looks at a mouse or a file explorer or a matrix of icons with that insultingly lazy, dismissing "How do you use that? Oh, never mind, it's too complicated for me" attitude. Not being quite able to set up the WiFi or the VPN or whatever is one thing - you'll likely find someone to do it for you, once. But daily use, too complicated? Poking icons, too complex? Oh, go pull the other one...
Mister Wales would do well to keep in mind that Wikipedia is what it is today solely due to the hard work of its contributors - without that it would have stayed a mere "great idea" forever. Unless he's delusional enough to think he patented the concept, he should be aware his role today is but to keep the wheels turning - a task literally anyone with some server hardware or enough determination to drum up the cash to pay for them can do: crowd-sourced knowledge CAN exist without Wikipedia, but Wikipedia CANNOT exist without its contributors and right now it seems to be doing a fine job of pretending it has no need for them. Coming up with an idea and even pushing it to mainstream status DOES NOT grant one ownership of it if it is entirely relying on the perpetual work of volunteers - sadly, Mr. Wales seems to be struggling with that concept which is all the more unfortunate considering an attitude adjustment is long overdue.
Abundance is controlled nuclear fusion. Nothing else has the potential to do that.
Well, I would add actual functioning nanobots to that - with the caveat that even the perpetually just-a-few-decades-away fusion is closer than those are. Anyway, they all ignore the elephant in the room: IoT is just the modern equivalent of classic, venerable Home Automation networks - and as everybody knows, the problem with those is that nobody managed to figure out how to make things talking to each other sum up to anything more than marginally useful.
What's even worse that there is a sort-of-hidden (not really) cost attached to any sort of 'smart' implementation: major loss of predictability. In cars, that means they used to go faster if you stepped on the throttle, slower if you hit the brakes, and that's about it - while now they might react to a fault (real or false) and go into limp mode, override your inputs in all sorts of ways by "ESP" and so on - the bottom line is nobody knows why they do what they do without whipping out a laptop and an OBD2 interface. But while most would probably agree that a car overriding your input in order to save your life is an acceptable price to pay, the same is harder to say about a considerably less life-threatening but potentially much more complexly interacting environment of one's home: stuff that keeps happening (mostly at the wrong moment since the IoT is missing the context) while we're never quite sure why thereby forcing us to constantly override it manually will hardly be a relaxing experience...
Yeah, most of the "problems" mentioned in the article are overstated.
Exactly - and the article tries to make its argument rather anviliciously. Yeah, we get it, you think they're crazy - well, some of us don't really see a problem with anything much in that tenuously assembled heap of 'issues'. It's just a matter of will - drawing some lines on a map inside which drones may fly, assigning a (fairly low) height within these to be kept clear of choppers and other urban aerial bozos, mapping of anything that protrudes into that airspace (really now - even in a city with skyscrapers, those do not make up the bulk of the buildings), and equipping the drones with some ultrasonic ranging sensors and a few itty-bitty pinhole cameras (I wonder where I last saw full-globe covering cameras... oh wait).
To be fair, he did specify "in a text editor"...
NO. Perhaps some people define "coding" (ugh, that word...) as hammering away at letters on a keyboard, but I prefer to define an activity by its result, not by the means employed to achieve it; marking up a text by clicking buttons is no more different from doing it by typing lots of <> than creating a program fitting coloured blocks together in Scratch is different from entering it in C. As far as I'm concerned, the former is simply "designing a layout" (dynamic content / javascript / CGI etc. are a different matter, but that's not what you're going to teach to a beginner is it...), while the latter is "learning about decision making". Technically, writing "2" down as "0x0010" is "coding" too, but in my book both coding and programming are defined as "instructing a machine how to perform task X" - and no, that's not the same as "telling a machine to perform task X by writing <this is X>hello<end of X>".
It takes a bit of mental gymnastics to wrap one's head around the concept of a piece of more-or-less ordinary ice starting to melt out in space (which we were always thought is as cold as it can possibly get). Sure, one knows about the practically perfect insulation provided by the vacuum that leaves only radiation as a way to lose heat (and that a major function of a space suit is to cool its occupant), but still... spaaaaace is weeeeeird.
...and if they're not happy with the mechanical reliability of a big moving object, how about a couple of "sonic shakers" around the panels? All those Youtube videos showing granular stuff neatly grouping into various thin lines on speakers suggests it might even be possible to "wipe" dust off using the right vibration sequence.
There has never been anyone entrusted with any power who hasn't abused it shortly thereafter - any counterexample is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. Which leads to the logical conclusion that no-one, neither individual nor organisation should ever be given more power than the absolute, absolute, absolute minimum they actually need to do their job acceptably (and should they try to pull any "we'll show you we're useless without MOAR power" shenanigans, their head should promptly be relocated onto a spike). That is remarkably different than the current "we need ANY AND ALL power available, or else everybody DIES!" approach: one that I for one DO NOT WANT.
Then looked at a catalogue of backup tools.
Not sure those would help if the malware does indeed encrypt everything in sight including removable storage and network drives. Unless one realizes immediately what's going on, the backups might end up getting encrypted too (or equally bad, backing up encrypted stuff, assuming it's not a multi-version scheme) - then what...?
Even more comical is when a forum like El Reg has people complaining about something which they can easily fix themselves.
Just because I might be able to fix something it does not follow that I feel like having to fix it, or that it working in a shitty manner (or, say, someone arbitrarily proclaiming what I may or may not be irritated by) does not annoy me sufficiently to voice that feeling.
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