Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment It's not totally insane but wouldn't work (Score 1) 56

I mean, you could very inexpensively integrate a GPS chip on there. You could put it into the firmware that the signal has a private key that encrypts said signal. It would likely get hacked eventually but by then probably not be export limited. So from a hardware perspective this isn't impossible.

So it's not impossible. But it wouldn't work because a Server GPU, inside of a rack at the bottom wouldn't get signal. You could maybe... maybe... build a big enough antenna into every GPU that it would at least pickup what continent it's on within a margin of error. So mayyyyybeeee it's possible it would still work. But probably not.

Comment Re:Let me guess: The carrier will attempt to bill (Score 1) 62

The risk is relatively high. Because a lot of lost phones end up in the seat back hinge area. So, you move a seat up for landing and now you have a lever practically designed for bending fragile phone cases in half. A lost phone just sitting on the floor is one level of risk. A lost phone potentially inside a levered lamp is another order of magnitude risk of fire.

Comment Re:Lmao (Score 1) 62

You would be surprised. My wife lost her phone on a flight last year. It fell out of her pocket and into the seat crack. As required, we had the flight attendant help find it. It took a surprisingly long time to find. It turns out it wasn't in the seat at all, it had managed to slip out the bottom and the people behind us must have then accidentally kicked it another row back and it was kind of bounced/wedged against one of the seat legs on the outer wall side upright. Very tricky because we weren't looking in the right row even. It wasn't somewhere that was inaccessible, we just could not find it.

I guess the reason they care so much is because if it got into a hinge mechanism someone putting their seat back would definitely crack it open. The chances of a phone randomly igniting are nearly zero. The chances of a phone getting pried in half catching fire are very high.

Comment Re:List of countries with sovereign wealth funds (Score 3, Interesting) 227

It makes no sense for the US. Sovreign wealth funds make a lot of sense because they can take surplus income from tax revenues and invest it in a productive country like the US. Or they can be used even out income from a limited resource so that one generation doesn't get all of the oil revenue while future generations have to make up the deficit in revenue once that literally dries up.

But the US is in a very different position because we have such a large and diverse economy that if we need dividends from successful business enterprises, we can simply tax our domestic businesses and citizens.

Look at two scenarios.

1A) The government gives you $200 tax break thanks to tariff revenues.
2A) You put that $200 into an S&P500 fund.
3A) You get taxed $20 later to pay for a new aircraft carrier.

1B) The government puts $200 of tarrif money into an S&P 500 fund.
2B) The government takes $20 out of the S&P 500 fund to pay for their new aircraft carrier.

Scenario A is actually the traditionally conservative argument: the state should give people any left over money and the people should decide how to spend/invest it.

The problem with Scenario B (The fund) is it's practically engineered to funnel money to the wealthy. IF the government gives me $200, I might spend it on a SPY etf, or I might go down to my local small business and buy $200 in books and "invest" in their business by boosting their sales.

The only organizations that a US Wealth Fund would invest in are going to be public traded large corporations who probably don't even need any higher valuations and will only serve to boost the stock portfolios of the upper class. Aka they're going to boost the likes of Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla and Apple.... hmmm, who was it at the inauguration? Coincidence? The CEOs will see their stock options blossom. The small business that could use local cash being spent will get nothing.

Why would a country like Singapore though have a wealth fund? Because as a micro-nation they have a lot of cash from their ports coming in but not a lot of opportunities to invest domestically. The US can just tax Google profits. Singapore can't just tap Google profits for tax revenue.

Comment Re:Won't work... (Score 1) 120

Microsoft Remote Desktop Services have been working well for enterprises for like 30 years.

Most high end VFX houses doing the work for blockbuster films have substantial Virtualized Desktop infrastructure (mostly from Teradici and less Parsec).

"Won't work" is silly. Especially because most of these will be going to people who just use an internally hosted extremely basic win32 application where latency could be measured in seconds and nobody would notice. And the vast majority of these will be deployed to office buildings which already have multiple multi-gig fiber dedicated ethernet connections.

Comment Re:Uh huh (Score 1) 82

Imagine you want to test someone's lockpicking ability--they claim they can unlock a combination lock just by feel. But here's the wrinkle, you can't do it in person, you have to mail them the lock and then they do it by video call.

The problem with this plan is that between the time that they receive the lock in the mail and the video call they could brute force it with a machine that spins the lock through every combination and then just memorizes the answer and on the video call this supposed lock picker can put on a bit of theatrics to pretend to do it by feel.

The solution is you have to test them on a lock with like 64 numbers. If they are really doing it the way that they say they are then it should be a linear-time problem. They just go number by number. But if they're trying to bruteforce it then it'll take millenia.

Yes it's way harder than a normal lock, but it has to be in order to test what you're really trying to test even if a brute force combination lock breaker is something that's "useful".

Comment Python 2 Deprecation Blocker (Score 1) 55

The real story here isn't about an image editor it's about Python. Some Linux distros have been keeping Python 2.x afloat for ages after EOL because it was a Gimp Dependency and they wanted to include Gimp with their distro.

Gimp 3.0 also eliminates its Python 2.x dependency so this is the true end of Python 2.

Comment Re:Does it matter? (Score 1) 94

Microsoft lost a pretty major anticompetitive case over being the default web browser.

And it's been argued that Google gains massive search quality gains by being popular. Not from R&D spend but being able to have reinforcement training from users selecting results.

You have pagerank from who links to who... but you also have user behavior which some are arguing is now more important. A user searches for "Tulip Bulbs" and then clicks on a link. Now you have a powerful signal that they found their search and to promote that link to the top of the results for the next person search for flower bulbs. The more users the more likely you are to cover more keywords and get more people digging deeper into your results to uncover stronger results that weren't weighted correctly using page-rank type ranking.

Comment Re:I would not be surprised... (Score 1) 94

You can have a monopoly. You can pay people to promote your product.

The trouble is when you have a monopoly, and you use the profits from your monopoly to maintain your monopoly.

It would be like if Pepsi didn't exist and Coke paid every major grocery store to only carry Pepsi products. Then it becomes a chicken/egg situation, nobody else can outbid Coke to get on store shelves because they have no money, and they have no money because they can't get onto store shelves.

The fact that Pepsi exists and Coke doesn't have a monopoly means that there is a competitive market where both companies can bid on exclusivity deals.

Note that in Europe, Coke's dominance has risen to a level that drew Anticompetitive scrutiny.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fid%2Fwbn...

Comment Re:The forced obsolescence continues (Score 4, Insightful) 16

Microsoft: "Don't worry, you can still buy Xbox 360 games through the Website or an Xbox One/X/S. You can also continue to download your games to your Xbox 360 and you can keep playing online with matchmaking. Literally the only thing you can't do anymore is buy new games through the Xbox 360 console."
Slashdot: "OMG MICROSOFT IS BRICKING MY XBOX 360!! Something something late stage capitalism!"

Slashdot Top Deals

System restarting, wait...

Working...