There are various recycling methods, depending on how well you can separate the goods(If a given synthetic type is isolated well enough, you can melt it back to pellets, some fibers are long enough that you can shred and re-process them into rag, or industrial felt, or similar low quality fiber aggregate stuff. If you can screen enough of the synthetics out, it is probably compostable, and I'm sure that baled fabric is hardly the worst fuel that we've ever burned for energy); but it isn't exactly as clean and sustainable as recycling aluminum cans...
I'm pretty sure that the optimal strategy with Magic is just to wait until Wizards of the Coast is feeling a bit pinched and decides to release a new, more powerful, bunch of cards that you just can't stay competitive without buying and then go buy those...
Why come up with fancy marketing when you can just quote to the media: "Unlike traditional VPN solutions that don't work on mobile phones, this one does." That's some graceful stuff right there.
It must really make you reconsider your worthless existence when your 'breakthrough' is a VPN that works on mobile phones after essentially all the mobile phones that matter to VPN users have switched to near-full desktop/OS networking stacks...
It's an 84" touchscreen. Hard to see why you'd want the touchscreen in a device you typically control from several arm lengths away.
I guess you could tie one of those capacitive styli to the end of a broom pole and use that as a remote...
If it didn't cost a fucking fortune(har, har, right..) and it had software and sensors to back it; a touchscreen that big would make a cool replacement for the 'tabletop coated with maps that the brass are standing around and being dramatic' from every sci-fi and/or war movie ever....
That's the thing: if 'touch' were free, there are probably all sorts of neat applications that you could come up with for it. As it is, though, we still don't have anything resembling a cheap, competent, and standardized "Smart Home" light switch.
I just want to know when they will invent pockets on a normal pair of blue jeans large enough to comfortably hold these giant phones.
You sound like one of those repulsive luddite enemies of progress who don't have their phone(or, 'phablet', to us cool kids) out and in use 100% of the time...
The one upside of the (otherwise largely bullshit) '3D headachevision shutterglasses' nonsense is that it has substantially increased the number of TVs in the wild that can handle refresh rates twice as high as the various ATSC/NTSC oddities in order to allow a traditional framerate for each eye even when the shutter glasses are only giving each eye every-other frame.
This doesn't necessarily apply in the cheap seats; but the '3D' fad means that you can purchase hardware in the 60-120hz range, some of which isn't even entirely lying about its abilities...
There are probably niche exceptions; but in most of clothing it's been quite some time since disrepair, rather than disuse, has been the driving factor behind consumption.
Even relatively easy and low-tech techniques like 'patching' and 'darning' and assorted flavors of mending have fallen out of fashion, and those aren't exactly the height of material science...
Why are all these '4k' displays being introduced as TVs, rather than marketed as monitors(possibly in slightly smaller sizes, ~36 inches, say) that just happen to have a bunch of types of video input?
On the TV side there is zip, zero, zilch, nada, fuck-all available at that resolution. An entire ecosystem of foot-dragging broadcasters, STBs, impractically high demands for streaming, no disk format, etc. stands in the way. As a monitor? Even relatively proasic PCs should be able to drive the thing(and a video card that costs more than a couple hundred bucks can probably even keep the frame rates up) and 'retina' is all the rage these days.
Obviously, unless they specifically break the connectors in some way contrary to spec, these "TVs" will work as monitors; but why aren't they being sold as such?
Java comes preinstalled on a lot of PCs (or at least it used to). Also, some browsers prompt you to install Java when you encounter an applet (or at least they used to).
The result is that a buttzillion users have Java installed even if they don't want or need it.
The one that really pisses me off is when the official Java autoupdate utility decides that you must not have meant it when you disabled the browser plugin, and helpfully re-installs it for you...
So they give you something for free, choose to dictate how they will support this something and you complain?
No wonder these companies gouge on the licensing where they can,ppl like you will demand an inch and take a mile.
Nobody said that owning a 'platform' was a fun job. It's high blame, low praise, your undemanding customers have a willingness to pay hovering around $0, your customers who are willing to pay have a list of whiny demands about 'compatibility' and such. That's just how these things roll. Is it worth it to you to suck it up and reap the rewards, or is a different category of software a better fit?
It honestly looks like (consumer) in-browser java is nearly dead, and the JVM isn't as lively on the client side as it once was, so Oracle might not have to decide whether they are in the 'platform' business in that area. The general point still stands. "Platform" is not a pretty category of software to be responsible for, it just sometimes happens to be lucrative enough to be worth it.
The tube should ameliorate some of the dangerous effects of repeated exposure to gastric acids by the sensitive tissues and teeth of the mouth and throat, so there is that...
I get the impression that, while Tahoe LAFS is the good option, the submitter of TFS is looking for the super-cheap option. He wants some sort of terrifying 'RAID-0-over-a-handful-of-different-interfaces-to-a-half-dozen-free-services-so-I-can-scrape-together-a-couple-gigs-here-and-a-couple-there' amalgamation. Unless he's planning some redundancy, that sounds like a recipe for data loss even if it were simple to set up, and you'd still be looking at a relatively paltry amount of storage space.
It sounds to me like the submitter needs to decide whether he wants to step up and pay for some actual hosts(for which Tahoe LAFS would probably be a good option), or one of the more paranoid dropbox-clones, or whether this is simply an exercise in cobbling scrap together because that can be amusing sometimes...
The surprising thing, in both this Android case and the assorted car-widgets, is not that the placebo effect works; but that the "If it was that easy, why didn't it come from the factory that way" argument hasn't held more sway.
In the case of the 'vortex' device you link to, the argument is essentially that ~$1 worth of stamped metal could markedly improve the performance and fuel economy of most vehicles without other notable modifications. Short of a full-scale Petroleum-industrial-complex coverup, why aren't these things being bolted on at the factory?
In the Android case, it's not like entropy related issues are news to linux users or hardware makers. Devices that do lots of crypto(ie. network gear designed to support a lot of VPN users, http load balancers designed to serve a lot of SSL sessions, etc.) are frequently provided with dedicated hardware RNGs precisely to prevent performance issues on entropy depletion. VIA's more recent CPUs come with an on-die hardware RNG, and you can buy assorted RNGs for various expansion busses if your applications require it.
The issue isn't so much that you can entropy-starve a system and cause it to respond badly; but that(against a background of people already knowing that) Google went and released an OS that is somehow radically more demanding on/dev/random than most linux variants and didn't even notice? That would be a bit of a surprise.
If the problem is that they can't generate "random" number fast enough, maybe they could just return 42 when the entropy pool is empty.
It depends on what you are doing with that entropy. Cryptographic applications, probably best not to mess with. Mathematical simulation work? Please consult your handy local PHd, spawning little spaceships in your arcade game clone? Probably not an issue.
Because it's really application dependent, Linux has two ways of asking the kernel for entropy: Reading/dev/random will pull from the kernel entropy pool and block if the pool is empty. How fast the pool refills depends on the hardware platform, presence/absence of dedicated cryptographic hardware, interrupts and network activity, etc. Reading/dev/urandom will never block; but the results may be unsatisfactorily random if the entropy pool is low.
In either case, applications are also free to use material from/dev/random or/dev/urandom to seed their own PRNGs.
Managing memory better so I don't have to keep shutting down web browsers every day or two. Most power users have many windows and many tabs up, and some are relevant for weeks, but most are unused and could be backgrounded much more effectively in terms of processor and memory use. Hint: Replace with a URL and a snapshot image updated infrequently.
Have you seen the amount of state information that website commonly carry these days? It's been years since you could safely assume that if a user has "URL X" open, they will be OK with the browser just re-loading "URL X" at some point in the future. There's form data to consider, cookie stuff, URLs that don't point to any persistent resource on the server and are intended to time out fairly quickly, sites that are really picky about referrer strings(common on shitty multipage forms, breaks 'forward' and 'back' nice and hard).
It would certainly be nice to have a good mechanism for browsers to put unused tabs on ice; but this isn't the 90's anymore, putting a web page to sleep(in a reliable, universally workable, way) is a lot closer to "Now, put the OS into suspend without causing any user applications to panic or die" rather than "Just kill the page and reload the URL later"...
My understanding is that the silent update mechanism checks in with the mothership periodically, either as-scheduled or with some consideration for system load/onbattery vs. on AC/etc. The Chrome release team has their own schedule that the update mechanism has no knowledge of.
So, if your silent update mechanism is active, you will automatically receive the newest release; but only when the updater next phones home. Depending on when it last phoned home and when the release occurs, this might be a matter of several days. If you force a check it should happen about as fast as bandwidth allows.
It's not that it's necessarily an objectively bad product(reports are that 'metro' is actually an OK interface on the devices it was designed for), just that 'Windows RT' is the biggest break with backwards compatibility in the history of Windows, yet it is sold in a package barely distinguishable from Windows 8 devices that have roughly the behavior and backwards compatibility that people expect from 'Windows'.
People who can't tell a 'Surface' and a 'Surface Pro' tablet apart; but see that one is thinner and cheaper... Never you mind about those return rates.
coding quickly does NOT indicate a better programmer - for an undergraduate level coding assignment, it only indicates that you've been programming for a while and that it does not take you long to complete simple logic tasks.
It certainly isn't the only skill or(if the applicant pool is any good, even a distinguishing skill); but demonstrating familiarity and facility with your tools is a good thing...
Unless the problem is so easy, or the time limit so relaxed as to be irrelevant, testing speed definitely tests some sort of skill(it sure as hell isn't joe codemonkey who wins those speed-coding competitions); but whether it tests a relevant skill is somewhat less clear and more job-dependent.
If you are hiring people to program something of any significant size, you will have time/deadline issues; but they will be less of the "Bob can't get a bubble sort written in less than 40 minutes!" and more of the 'as our morass of legacy complexity grows, the time needed to make any significant change approaches infinity because changing anything potentially changes almost anything else in unpredictable ways' type problem. There are people who are more and less skilled in the art of designing complex systems such that they don't(to the degree possible) turn into spaghetti, and such that you can change just one thing without discovering surprise changes everywhere; but that is a very different kind of 'speed', and probably a more valuable one.
They certainly aren't; but they don't seem to be doing the sales of PSPs or Vitas any favors, and there is a sales number below which the availability of worthwhile titles for the premium portable consoles starts to drop, which gets to be a vicious circle fairly quickly. Because of the relatively high fixed costs of developing a console and a stable of good games, possibly some exclusives, you don't need to wipe out the die-hards in order to kill the platform, you just need to lower sales enough that there are no longer enough units sold to reasonably amortize the costs. Once that happens, even the die-hards get priced out.
True enough. I figured that, if they had to specify the speaker and mic that most of that wasn't being handled automagically(though, in retrospect, it wouldn't be a huge surprise to learn that networking is rock solid and pulseaudio is fucked again...)
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There are various recycling methods, depending on how well you can separate the goods(If a given synthetic type is isolated well enough, you can melt it back to pellets, some fibers are long enough that you can shred and re-process them into rag, or industrial felt, or similar low quality fiber aggregate stuff. If you can screen enough of the synthetics out, it is probably compostable, and I'm sure that baled fabric is hardly the worst fuel that we've ever burned for energy); but it isn't exactly as clean and sustainable as recycling aluminum cans...
I'm pretty sure that the optimal strategy with Magic is just to wait until Wizards of the Coast is feeling a bit pinched and decides to release a new, more powerful, bunch of cards that you just can't stay competitive without buying and then go buy those...
The classier fibreglass suppliers usually have Kevlar, carbon-fiber, and sometimes aramid(or various mixtures of the above) in woven sheets.
More expensive than basic fibreglass; but sometimes you just need the extra strength and/or butch aesthetics.
If your plan involves less boating and more getting shot, ballistic-grade kevlar fabrics are also pretty easily available.
Why come up with fancy marketing when you can just quote to the media: "Unlike traditional VPN solutions that don't work on mobile phones, this one does." That's some graceful stuff right there.
It must really make you reconsider your worthless existence when your 'breakthrough' is a VPN that works on mobile phones after essentially all the mobile phones that matter to VPN users have switched to near-full desktop/OS networking stacks...
It's an 84" touchscreen. Hard to see why you'd want the touchscreen in a device you typically control from several arm lengths away.
I guess you could tie one of those capacitive styli to the end of a broom pole and use that as a remote...
If it didn't cost a fucking fortune(har, har, right..) and it had software and sensors to back it; a touchscreen that big would make a cool replacement for the 'tabletop coated with maps that the brass are standing around and being dramatic' from every sci-fi and/or war movie ever....
That's the thing: if 'touch' were free, there are probably all sorts of neat applications that you could come up with for it. As it is, though, we still don't have anything resembling a cheap, competent, and standardized "Smart Home" light switch.
I just want to know when they will invent pockets on a normal pair of blue jeans large enough to comfortably hold these giant phones.
You sound like one of those repulsive luddite enemies of progress who don't have their phone(or, 'phablet', to us cool kids) out and in use 100% of the time...
The one upside of the (otherwise largely bullshit) '3D headachevision shutterglasses' nonsense is that it has substantially increased the number of TVs in the wild that can handle refresh rates twice as high as the various ATSC/NTSC oddities in order to allow a traditional framerate for each eye even when the shutter glasses are only giving each eye every-other frame.
This doesn't necessarily apply in the cheap seats; but the '3D' fad means that you can purchase hardware in the 60-120hz range, some of which isn't even entirely lying about its abilities...
There are probably niche exceptions; but in most of clothing it's been quite some time since disrepair, rather than disuse, has been the driving factor behind consumption.
Even relatively easy and low-tech techniques like 'patching' and 'darning' and assorted flavors of mending have fallen out of fashion, and those aren't exactly the height of material science...
Why are all these '4k' displays being introduced as TVs, rather than marketed as monitors(possibly in slightly smaller sizes, ~36 inches, say) that just happen to have a bunch of types of video input?
On the TV side there is zip, zero, zilch, nada, fuck-all available at that resolution. An entire ecosystem of foot-dragging broadcasters, STBs, impractically high demands for streaming, no disk format, etc. stands in the way. As a monitor? Even relatively proasic PCs should be able to drive the thing(and a video card that costs more than a couple hundred bucks can probably even keep the frame rates up) and 'retina' is all the rage these days.
Obviously, unless they specifically break the connectors in some way contrary to spec, these "TVs" will work as monitors; but why aren't they being sold as such?
Java comes preinstalled on a lot of PCs (or at least it used to). Also, some browsers prompt you to install Java when you encounter an applet (or at least they used to).
The result is that a buttzillion users have Java installed even if they don't want or need it.
The one that really pisses me off is when the official Java autoupdate utility decides that you must not have meant it when you disabled the browser plugin, and helpfully re-installs it for you...
So they give you something for free, choose to dictate how they will support this something and you complain?
No wonder these companies gouge on the licensing where they can,ppl like you will demand an inch and take a mile.
Nobody said that owning a 'platform' was a fun job. It's high blame, low praise, your undemanding customers have a willingness to pay hovering around $0, your customers who are willing to pay have a list of whiny demands about 'compatibility' and such. That's just how these things roll. Is it worth it to you to suck it up and reap the rewards, or is a different category of software a better fit?
It honestly looks like (consumer) in-browser java is nearly dead, and the JVM isn't as lively on the client side as it once was, so Oracle might not have to decide whether they are in the 'platform' business in that area. The general point still stands. "Platform" is not a pretty category of software to be responsible for, it just sometimes happens to be lucrative enough to be worth it.
The tube should ameliorate some of the dangerous effects of repeated exposure to gastric acids by the sensitive tissues and teeth of the mouth and throat, so there is that...
I get the impression that, while Tahoe LAFS is the good option, the submitter of TFS is looking for the super-cheap option. He wants some sort of terrifying 'RAID-0-over-a-handful-of-different-interfaces-to-a-half-dozen-free-services-so-I-can-scrape-together-a-couple-gigs-here-and-a-couple-there' amalgamation. Unless he's planning some redundancy, that sounds like a recipe for data loss even if it were simple to set up, and you'd still be looking at a relatively paltry amount of storage space.
It sounds to me like the submitter needs to decide whether he wants to step up and pay for some actual hosts(for which Tahoe LAFS would probably be a good option), or one of the more paranoid dropbox-clones, or whether this is simply an exercise in cobbling scrap together because that can be amusing sometimes...
The surprising thing, in both this Android case and the assorted car-widgets, is not that the placebo effect works; but that the "If it was that easy, why didn't it come from the factory that way" argument hasn't held more sway.
In the case of the 'vortex' device you link to, the argument is essentially that ~$1 worth of stamped metal could markedly improve the performance and fuel economy of most vehicles without other notable modifications. Short of a full-scale Petroleum-industrial-complex coverup, why aren't these things being bolted on at the factory?
In the Android case, it's not like entropy related issues are news to linux users or hardware makers. Devices that do lots of crypto(ie. network gear designed to support a lot of VPN users, http load balancers designed to serve a lot of SSL sessions, etc.) are frequently provided with dedicated hardware RNGs precisely to prevent performance issues on entropy depletion. VIA's more recent CPUs come with an on-die hardware RNG, and you can buy assorted RNGs for various expansion busses if your applications require it.
The issue isn't so much that you can entropy-starve a system and cause it to respond badly; but that(against a background of people already knowing that) Google went and released an OS that is somehow radically more demanding on /dev/random than most linux variants and didn't even notice? That would be a bit of a surprise.
If the problem is that they can't generate "random" number fast enough, maybe they could just return 42 when the entropy pool is empty.
It depends on what you are doing with that entropy. Cryptographic applications, probably best not to mess with. Mathematical simulation work? Please consult your handy local PHd, spawning little spaceships in your arcade game clone? Probably not an issue.
Because it's really application dependent, Linux has two ways of asking the kernel for entropy: Reading /dev/random will pull from the kernel entropy pool and block if the pool is empty. How fast the pool refills depends on the hardware platform, presence/absence of dedicated cryptographic hardware, interrupts and network activity, etc. Reading /dev/urandom will never block; but the results may be unsatisfactorily random if the entropy pool is low.
In either case, applications are also free to use material from /dev/random or /dev/urandom to seed their own PRNGs.
Managing memory better so I don't have to keep shutting down web browsers every day or two. Most power users have many windows and many tabs up, and some are relevant for weeks, but most are unused and could be backgrounded much more effectively in terms of processor and memory use. Hint: Replace with a URL and a snapshot image updated infrequently.
Have you seen the amount of state information that website commonly carry these days? It's been years since you could safely assume that if a user has "URL X" open, they will be OK with the browser just re-loading "URL X" at some point in the future. There's form data to consider, cookie stuff, URLs that don't point to any persistent resource on the server and are intended to time out fairly quickly, sites that are really picky about referrer strings(common on shitty multipage forms, breaks 'forward' and 'back' nice and hard).
It would certainly be nice to have a good mechanism for browsers to put unused tabs on ice; but this isn't the 90's anymore, putting a web page to sleep(in a reliable, universally workable, way) is a lot closer to "Now, put the OS into suspend without causing any user applications to panic or die" rather than "Just kill the page and reload the URL later"...
My understanding is that the silent update mechanism checks in with the mothership periodically, either as-scheduled or with some consideration for system load/onbattery vs. on AC/etc. The Chrome release team has their own schedule that the update mechanism has no knowledge of.
So, if your silent update mechanism is active, you will automatically receive the newest release; but only when the updater next phones home. Depending on when it last phoned home and when the release occurs, this might be a matter of several days. If you force a check it should happen about as fast as bandwidth allows.
It's not that it's necessarily an objectively bad product(reports are that 'metro' is actually an OK interface on the devices it was designed for), just that 'Windows RT' is the biggest break with backwards compatibility in the history of Windows, yet it is sold in a package barely distinguishable from Windows 8 devices that have roughly the behavior and backwards compatibility that people expect from 'Windows'.
People who can't tell a 'Surface' and a 'Surface Pro' tablet apart; but see that one is thinner and cheaper... Never you mind about those return rates.
coding quickly does NOT indicate a better programmer - for an undergraduate level coding assignment, it only indicates that you've been programming for a while and that it does not take you long to complete simple logic tasks.
It certainly isn't the only skill or(if the applicant pool is any good, even a distinguishing skill); but demonstrating familiarity and facility with your tools is a good thing...
Unless the problem is so easy, or the time limit so relaxed as to be irrelevant, testing speed definitely tests some sort of skill(it sure as hell isn't joe codemonkey who wins those speed-coding competitions); but whether it tests a relevant skill is somewhat less clear and more job-dependent.
If you are hiring people to program something of any significant size, you will have time/deadline issues; but they will be less of the "Bob can't get a bubble sort written in less than 40 minutes!" and more of the 'as our morass of legacy complexity grows, the time needed to make any significant change approaches infinity because changing anything potentially changes almost anything else in unpredictable ways' type problem. There are people who are more and less skilled in the art of designing complex systems such that they don't(to the degree possible) turn into spaghetti, and such that you can change just one thing without discovering surprise changes everywhere; but that is a very different kind of 'speed', and probably a more valuable one.
They certainly aren't; but they don't seem to be doing the sales of PSPs or Vitas any favors, and there is a sales number below which the availability of worthwhile titles for the premium portable consoles starts to drop, which gets to be a vicious circle fairly quickly. Because of the relatively high fixed costs of developing a console and a stable of good games, possibly some exclusives, you don't need to wipe out the die-hards in order to kill the platform, you just need to lower sales enough that there are no longer enough units sold to reasonably amortize the costs. Once that happens, even the die-hards get priced out.
Walk away. Just walk away. And live.
Australia is pleased and proud to announce that the number of horrid and lethally venomous creatures per hectare has reached historic lows!
True enough. I figured that, if they had to specify the speaker and mic that most of that wasn't being handled automagically(though, in retrospect, it wouldn't be a huge surprise to learn that networking is rock solid and pulseaudio is fucked again...)