When I was a kid, I fell from a bike going high speed down a slope. I scraped my knee and arm pretty badly. I also hit my head. Luckily I was wearing a helmet.
Without the 5 cm (two inches) wide edge of styrofoam, I would have scraped the side of the head, possibly scarring me for life. I also got a light concussion, which made the left of my head numb for the rest of the day. The helmet broke apart into two pieces. If I had not worn a helmet I would probably have got a much worse concussion.
The future is not all about telecommunications. Make the building energy efficient, where it can be. The price of energy is going to go up in the next 50 years. It is much cheaper to design a building to be energy efficient than to retrofit it later. Of course, dedicated server room(s) needing cooling is a special matter.
I think that a machine shop could be much helped by having a central vac system.
Network wiring is not as important as having conduits for whatever wires that you are going to need in the future. Keep good documentation of where these conduits are. There needs to be wires in the conduits that can be used for pulling other wires through them.
Conduits wells submerged in the floor are much more convenient than having them in the ceiling.
A programmer does not have to be a good writer, but a good programmer is a person who has good organizational skills, someone who can write lists of topics and subtopics that the documentation should include. A good programmer is also good at reading and spotting errors in code.. and in documentation.
Therefore, a programmer could very well cooperate with a professional writer, where the writer does not have to be a good programmer: The programmer could start writing a terse, stilted documentation. The writer could turn that into something that is more readable. Last, the programmer could work with the writer to correct any errors or misunderstandings in the work. The result would be better documentation than if either did it on his/her own.
There is also the probability that the outcome would have been gruesome in some other way. There could have been an accident where people would have been hurt or killed, or the cops or the perp could have used violence against the other side. Fox News knows this.
Showing a car chase live is only sensationalist entertainment. It has no real news value. If you learn anything from it, it may be afterwards, or not at all. If it should be shown on TV at all, it should be shown in the context of something with a substance.
The Metro APIs were designed for web front-end programmers, not people who write for real GUI toolkits. You can build quite competent Metro apps in HTML and Javascript, and if you reach any limits, your web shop could hire a third party to write a module in C# or C++ to work around it.
The API for web programmers includes also rules that that apps should be made for a finite set of fixed screen sizes. Not resolutions -- screen sizes. Metro was never designed to be scalable.
This is not only a Windows problem, though. MacOS X on Retina(tm) displays is just as bad, but there the OS draws everything twice as big to begin with and scales down if needed when compositing windows. Apple never cared about hinting anyway, so all controls and labels are just as fuzzy scaled to 125% as always.
This isn't exactly a new finding. Typographers have known this for over a century, if not multiple centuries. Why do you think newspapers are printed in seriffed typefaces?
Anodized aluminium - "aluma" - is actually a quite hard material. It is harder than aluminium itself.
The issue here, is that the outer layer of aluma just appears to be quite thin on the iPhone 5. If the parameters of the anodizing process had been just a little bit different, they could have made the layer thicker, and therefore more scuff-resistant.
Another thing they could have done would have been to round off the sharp beveled edges. That appears to be the part that is most easily scuffed.
Is there anybody but me who thinks that Apple should have made the "clock" look like a watch instead of a clock? Watches are what people are using the iPhone clock for anyway...
There was a moment in the early days when the site went through some technical difficulties and everyone who wanted to post had to re-register. I think that I did that the same day that it happened. I got a much lower user ID when I had re-registered than what I had had before.
Being a Star Wars fan, I wish that I had registered only a fraction of a section later...
It is worse. It is split in three parts. A lot of things from the Lord of the Rings appendices that happen during the same time as The Hobbit are being put into the movies.
Personally, I am considering waiting for the inevitable 2015 fan-edit that follows just the story of the book "The Hobbit". I don't know who will make it, but probably several people will try doing it.
Seeing it at home will probably also be the only way that I am going to be able to see it in a good threatre, in high resolution in 2D. Yes, I have 20/20 vision and the inter-eye crosstalk and lack of depth of field in so called "3D" movies bugs the hell out of me. Where I live, movies are not shown in 2D, (takes me an hour to travel to the closest 2D theatre, which is a shoebox) so watching it at home after the BluRays have come out is likely going to be my only option if I want a good movie experience.
Even the oldest, slowest PC that have any kind of keyboard and can run Windows 95 or up would probably do.
The PCs don't have to be the same type. Some can be slower than others. The keyboard layout has not changed significantly over the years. There were many typing tutor programs for Windows 95, and programs for Windows 95 still work on even the newest PCs. (Of course, you could go even back to 80188 cpu's and DOS, but I find it unlikely that you will find used PCs that are that old. Besides, it would be better to sell those to collectors and buy more cheap PCs for the money)
Yep, on NeWS the client could upload Postscript code for widgets that would execute as entities on the server, responding to user input without any round-trip to the client as in X (and Wayland).
NeXTStep and MacOS X Quartz used Postscript only for rendering. BTW, the core of PDF is an extended subset of Postscript, so a lot of it is the same.
The iPad is not a phone? I have used it lots of times as a speaker phone with Skype and 3G (UMTS). Are you telling me that Skype and UMTS are not phone protocols?
At least they let Skype continue to be its own brand after they bought it. It is not "Microsoft Skype", thankfully.
I think that Microsoft should have continued to use the word "Metro" to refer to the touch-interface on Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Rename the Metro interface on Windows 8 to "Metro" and rename the "Windows 8 Phone" to "Metro Phone". Done.
It is just because the first iPhone was so significant, and showed the competition how to make a smartphone "right" that the tech world is so important. If Apple does something in a new model, then the competition will react with similar functions in their phones.
The "Retina Display" in iPhone 4, "The New" iPad (3) and in the latest Mac Book "Pro" is something that I think could potentially be as significant as the first iPhone. Power users have been screaming for decades that they want ultrahigh resolutions and a fully scalable GUI. Now there is finally one general purpose computer that has it. You can bet your ass that Microsoft is going to incorporate support for ultrahigh resolutions in the next major release of Windows.
If I had been Apple, I would not have made the phone taller. I would have removed the hardware Home button (which always breaks) and made it a software button. Then old apps would work as before and new apps that wanted the extra space could use a new API for that. However, the new iOS would also have had to force the home button to appear whenever there is any touch in that area, but that is no biggie.
Microsoft chose the same approach for the Metro-style apps on windows 8. I was quite disappointed in them when I heard that. However, MS does force apps to support a number of standard resolutions, not just one.
There is also a lot of communication that is not done directly, or where it should be done but isn't. For instance, if I modify my network settings in a GNOME app, then the details of those settings should not be stored hidden away in some configuration database that belongs to GNOME. I should be able to open a KDE app and change the same network settings from there.
The problem is not that there are two APIs. The problem is that the two desktop environments are vertically designed "environments": the user has to choose between the two and can not mix apps between them. That is contrary to the Unix Philosophy that each program should do precisely one thing, and do it well.
The desktop environments should be broken up into apps that are more independent of one-another. The environments should agree on using the same underpinnings: not just the Linux kernel, but also what lies between the kernel and the GNOME/KDE libraries. They should also make sure that they are interoperable. Distributions should be made so that you should be able to install and use whatever software from which camps that you want. The user should be able to use whatever window manager he wants and different root window app, file manager and launcher apps if he wants to. Then, the desktop will be the user's choice and they don't have to switch distribution because they don't like Unity or Gnome 3's file manager. The developers will not develop their apps for GNOME or KDE, only using the GNOME or KDE libraries for making apps for the platform that GNOME and KDE shares.
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When I was a kid, I fell from a bike going high speed down a slope. I scraped my knee and arm pretty badly. I also hit my head. Luckily I was wearing a helmet.
Without the 5 cm (two inches) wide edge of styrofoam, I would have scraped the side of the head, possibly scarring me for life.
I also got a light concussion, which made the left of my head numb for the rest of the day. The helmet broke apart into two pieces. If I had not worn a helmet I would probably have got a much worse concussion.
So, no, there was a difference for the head.
The future is not all about telecommunications.
Make the building energy efficient, where it can be. The price of energy is going to go up in the next 50 years. It is much cheaper to design a building to be energy efficient than to retrofit it later.
Of course, dedicated server room(s) needing cooling is a special matter.
I think that a machine shop could be much helped by having a central vac system.
Network wiring is not as important as having conduits for whatever wires that you are going to need in the future. Keep good documentation of where these conduits are. There needs to be wires in the conduits that can be used for pulling other wires through them.
Conduits wells submerged in the floor are much more convenient than having them in the ceiling.
A programmer does not have to be a good writer, but a good programmer is a person who has good organizational skills, someone who can write lists of topics and subtopics that the documentation should include. .. and in documentation.
A good programmer is also good at reading and spotting errors in code
Therefore, a programmer could very well cooperate with a professional writer, where the writer does not have to be a good programmer:
The programmer could start writing a terse, stilted documentation. The writer could turn that into something that is more readable.
Last, the programmer could work with the writer to correct any errors or misunderstandings in the work. The result would be better documentation than if either did it on his/her own.
There is also the probability that the outcome would have been gruesome in some other way. There could have been an accident where people would have been hurt or killed, or the cops or the perp could have used violence against the other side. Fox News knows this.
Showing a car chase live is only sensationalist entertainment. It has no real news value. If you learn anything from it, it may be afterwards, or not at all. If it should be shown on TV at all, it should be shown in the context of something with a substance.
... that frivolous sending of cease-and-desist letters would become illegal.
The Metro APIs were designed for web front-end programmers, not people who write for real GUI toolkits. You can build quite competent Metro apps in HTML and Javascript, and if you reach any limits, your web shop could hire a third party to write a module in C# or C++ to work around it.
The API for web programmers includes also rules that that apps should be made for a finite set of fixed screen sizes. Not resolutions -- screen sizes. Metro was never designed to be scalable.
This is not only a Windows problem, though. MacOS X on Retina(tm) displays is just as bad, but there the OS draws everything twice as big to begin with and scales down if needed when compositing windows. Apple never cared about hinting anyway, so all controls and labels are just as fuzzy scaled to 125% as always.
This isn't exactly a new finding. Typographers have known this for over a century, if not multiple centuries. Why do you think newspapers are printed in seriffed typefaces?
Anodized aluminium - "aluma" - is actually a quite hard material. It is harder than aluminium itself.
The issue here, is that the outer layer of aluma just appears to be quite thin on the iPhone 5. If the parameters of the anodizing process had been just a little bit different, they could have made the layer thicker, and therefore more scuff-resistant.
Another thing they could have done would have been to round off the sharp beveled edges. That appears to be the part that is most easily scuffed.
Is there anybody but me who thinks that Apple should have made the "clock" look like a watch instead of a clock?
Watches are what people are using the iPhone clock for anyway...
There was a moment in the early days when the site went through some technical difficulties and everyone who wanted to post had to re-register. I think that I did that the same day that it happened. I got a much lower user ID when I had re-registered than what I had had before.
Being a Star Wars fan, I wish that I had registered only a fraction of a section later ...
It is worse. It is split in three parts. A lot of things from the Lord of the Rings appendices that happen during the same time as The Hobbit are being put into the movies.
Personally, I am considering waiting for the inevitable 2015 fan-edit that follows just the story of the book "The Hobbit". I don't know who will make it, but probably several people will try doing it.
Seeing it at home will probably also be the only way that I am going to be able to see it in a good threatre, in high resolution in 2D. Yes, I have 20/20 vision and the inter-eye crosstalk and lack of depth of field in so called "3D" movies bugs the hell out of me. Where I live, movies are not shown in 2D, (takes me an hour to travel to the closest 2D theatre, which is a shoebox) so watching it at home after the BluRays have come out is likely going to be my only option if I want a good movie experience.
Even the oldest, slowest PC that have any kind of keyboard and can run Windows 95 or up would probably do.
The PCs don't have to be the same type. Some can be slower than others. The keyboard layout has not changed significantly over the years. There were many typing tutor programs for Windows 95, and programs for Windows 95 still work on even the newest PCs.
(Of course, you could go even back to 80188 cpu's and DOS, but I find it unlikely that you will find used PCs that are that old. Besides, it would be better to sell those to collectors and buy more cheap PCs for the money)
The cost of shipping at least one typewriter across the ocean is going to cost well over $50. These things are often heavy.
My Commodore 64 had smooth scrolling, and it ran at 1 MHz. Your problem is probably either in the software or in the touch sensor.
It ran on a high-end Laserdisc player from Pioneer?
Yep, on NeWS the client could upload Postscript code for widgets that would execute as entities on the server, responding to user input without any round-trip to the client as in X (and Wayland).
NeXTStep and MacOS X Quartz used Postscript only for rendering. BTW, the core of PDF is an extended subset of Postscript, so a lot of it is the same.
The iPad is not a phone? I have used it lots of times as a speaker phone with Skype and 3G (UMTS).
Are you telling me that Skype and UMTS are not phone protocols?
At least they let Skype continue to be its own brand after they bought it. It is not "Microsoft Skype", thankfully.
I think that Microsoft should have continued to use the word "Metro" to refer to the touch-interface on Windows 8 and Windows Phone.
Rename the Metro interface on Windows 8 to "Metro" and rename the "Windows 8 Phone" to "Metro Phone". Done.
It is just because the first iPhone was so significant, and showed the competition how to make a smartphone "right" that the tech world is so important. If Apple does something in a new model, then the competition will react with similar functions in their phones.
The "Retina Display" in iPhone 4, "The New" iPad (3) and in the latest Mac Book "Pro" is something that I think could potentially be as significant as the first iPhone.
Power users have been screaming for decades that they want ultrahigh resolutions and a fully scalable GUI. Now there is finally one general purpose computer that has it. You can bet your ass that Microsoft is going to incorporate support for ultrahigh resolutions in the next major release of Windows.
If I had been Apple, I would not have made the phone taller. I would have removed the hardware Home button (which always breaks) and made it a software button.
Then old apps would work as before and new apps that wanted the extra space could use a new API for that. However, the new iOS would also have had to force the home button to appear whenever there is any touch in that area, but that is no biggie.
Microsoft chose the same approach for the Metro-style apps on windows 8. I was quite disappointed in them when I heard that.
However, MS does force apps to support a number of standard resolutions, not just one.
I am referring to interoperability more at the level of drag-and-drop, copy-and-paste, pagers, workspaces, Exposé-like functionality, window manager hints, writing macros in one language and make it do stuff in applications (think Rexx, Applescript), etc. A lot of this stuff is codified in ICCCM, but that is an antiquated standard for X and the environments are increasingly getting away from X.
There has also been a lot of inter-app communication stuff developed as part of the desktop environments that do not concern X at all: such as audio frameworks, DCop, dbus, Bonobo etc.. (although luckily some of these seem to be deprecated now.)
There is also a lot of communication that is not done directly, or where it should be done but isn't. For instance, if I modify my network settings in a GNOME app, then the details of those settings should not be stored hidden away in some configuration database that belongs to GNOME. I should be able to open a KDE app and change the same network settings from there.
The problem is not that there are two APIs. The problem is that the two desktop environments are vertically designed "environments": the user has to choose between the two and can not mix apps between them. That is contrary to the Unix Philosophy that each program should do precisely one thing, and do it well.
The desktop environments should be broken up into apps that are more independent of one-another.
The environments should agree on using the same underpinnings: not just the Linux kernel, but also what lies between the kernel and the GNOME/KDE libraries. They should also make sure that they are interoperable.
Distributions should be made so that you should be able to install and use whatever software from which camps that you want.
The user should be able to use whatever window manager he wants and different root window app, file manager and launcher apps if he wants to.
Then, the desktop will be the user's choice and they don't have to switch distribution because they don't like Unity or Gnome 3's file manager.
The developers will not develop their apps for GNOME or KDE, only using the GNOME or KDE libraries for making apps for the platform that GNOME and KDE shares.
I have never bought a cell phone in my life. Do you really think my inaction will make a difference?
(all my cell phones have been gifts or company phones)
They are sharp enough to be able to know how to use money, but they are apparently not sharp enough to spend it wisely.