The basic unit of measurement is arbitrary but the manner in which it scaled / divided makes perfect sense. That's the main difference between metric and imperial. Also, the mere fact that the rest of the world uses the system means there is a hidden and not so hidden cost for countries which choose not to.
I expect however if the US did try to push for metric that it would encounter the same kind of stupid resistance seen in the UK, e.g. "metric martyrs" who continued to use old weights and measures despite breaking the law by doing so.
I agree source code and specifications would be really really nice, and ideally should be available. I just wouldn't beat myself up over using a closed driver if that's all there is. It's not bothered me in the Windows world and and I don't see a reason to be bothered about it in the Linux world.
An HP Mini 210. OpenGL ES 2.0 driver is totally broken - I'm on holiday and using it for development and the driver just crashes whenever glLinkProgram is called. Seems to be a widespread issue so I assume it's a driver fault.
Do we as geeks and IT professionals need to worry about this?
Absolutely. WebGL allows any random website to tap your hardware through the browser. WebGL is essentially OpenGL ES 2.0 give or take a few APIs and is supported by just about every modern browser except IE. Some enable WebGL by default on suitable hardware, some have it disabled by default. When it is enabled a page has carte blanche to abuse the chipset six ways to sunday. The only protection afforded by browsers is the driver has to implement a GL extension called GL_EXT_robustness which says the driver promises, fingers crossed to be really good about checking and recovering from errors.
ActiveX had something similar called the "safe for scripting" bit. IE wouldn't load a page unless the control said it was safe and look what happened there. While there are less graphics drivers than activeX controls, it's easy to imagine a driver version claiming it's robust when in fact it isn't. It's easy to imagine a malicious site using that fact to break a lot of machines. I assume browsers could implement a whitelist of "good" drivers and update the list in addition to checking for the extension but it's obviously imperfect and offers additional browser exploits where none existed before.
Laptop driver support can be *horrible* because manufacturers twiddle with the chipsets params so that means their drivers are machine specific and certified. I'm writing this on an old netbook with Intel IGP. The OpenGL implementation is bugged so I want to install a later driver which is up on Intel's site. Can I install this driver? No because it decides "the driver being installed is not validated for this computer". And HP don't give a fuck about providing a certified version.
Now people can stop bitching about how "free" a driver is and just concentrate on how well it works.
Or just use an OS that actually works with modern hardware
Or just buy hardware from manufacturers that release open source drivers, so your OS choice isn't limited by your hardware choices.
Or cut off your nose to spite your face. Since essentially that's what it boils down to. While it is highly desirable to have the source to a hardware driver, if the choice is between accepting inferior hardware with source, or superior hardware without source, I'll take the latter every time.
But seriously, is there all that much difference between any of them? Just because we can trace these two churches back to their wacko founders, doesn't mean the other older churches weren't founded by wackos too.
Well quite. I bet virtually every religion started off as a cult revolving around a narcissistic lunatic with his disciples embellishing or flat out lying about his life and accomplishments. The only difference is the amount of time they've been around and the ability for people to check out the claims.
Sadly for scientology L Ron Hubbard's life and accomplishments as claimed by the church can be compared to court documents, contemporary newspaper reports, war records and so on and the lies are obvious. The church would have us believe he was a decorated war hero, a renowned explorer, nuclear physicist, etc. In reality he was a narcissistic, paranoid, wife beating, pathological liar. The cult managed to acquire many of these traits which is why it is so batshit insane and such an easy target for mockery. Doesn't explain why anyone would be attracted to join but clearly some people do.
What Ubuntu did was obviously going to annoy people and there was no need for it either.
Browsers have supported mycroft plugins for years - those things that power the search box in Firefox / Opera etc. It should not be hard to implement them behind a search lens (using an HTML scraper for sites which don't return XML if necessary) and present the results in a uniform way. Or introduce a plugin format v2 which returns richer results and metadata and encourage prominent sites like Wikipedia to support it. Then stick a simple UI in the control panel where plugins can be added, removed or disabled from the lens.
It wouldn't stop Ubuntu offering sponsored search plugins (I expect some default browser plugins to Amazon, ebay etc are affiliate links) but it would mean they reside in a framework where they could be removed easily or disabled.
The issue with 3D is that many films which claim 3D were actually shot 2D and then stretched over a crude 3D model of the same scene to produce a 3D effect. So essentially you're watching a bastardized 2D print and paying more money for the privilege. The nearest analogue are colorized black and white movies. Of course it looks awful.
When a movie is genuinely shot in 3D as some films are, either CG or live action, AND the director is mindful of the limitations AND avoids the cliches of the format it can be watchable and add something. Of course if the movie itself is trash then making it in 3D just means it stinks in another dimension.
I think however that a higher framerate combined with digital projection has more to offer the cinema going experience than 3D, although 3D would benefit too from a higher frame rate so it's not an and / or kind of thing.
If you want to see how a good idea can brought to its knees by politics, correctness and an extreme lack of pragmatism then look no further than Hurd. Here is a project which started before Linux and development was so glacial and bogged down in politics that Linus Torvalds preferred to write his own kernel from scratch than wait any longer. It seems a lot of other people agreed with him which is why Linux is practically ubiquitous and Hurd isn't. It's not the only GNU project infamous for its extreme lack of progress so perhaps there is a stigma attached to the name.
I'm sure it's decked out with all sorts of cool innovations but god does it look ugly. I can't put my finger on the wrongness except to say the boat looks like the bastard offspring of some 7 year old's first experiments designing a boat with only straight lines and a 1970's prefab building.
Don't be ludicrous. People would still shop in supermarkets but they'd pay with this card, not with cash or a credit card. Indeed it could be more attractive than credit card to stores if they incurred lower or no fees for the transaction or could claim some of it back.
As for the rest of your rant, you have grossly misunderstood what I said or didn't RTFA so I see no point in addressing any of it.
Which is why I said "calculate a sum of money that represents a minimum that an adult person would expect to spend on food in a week and issue a card with that amount on it". The rest being discretionary.
It wouldn't affect a normal person on welfare - they just buy food with the card instead of the other cash and being minimum they could supplement the amount if they wanted or save it. It might stop chronic addicts from shooting it or drinking it when they should be using it to feed themselves or their family.
The second benefit is that if someone is NOT spending the money on their card, the state can start to wonder why, and ultimately reclaim the money. An electronic trail of transactions could be used for the detection and prosecution of fraudsters e.g. a person with 5 fraudulently obtained cards has the additional burden of going into Tescos 5 times with a substantial risk of revealing their fraud. More so if the card was protected by a fingerprint scanner.
So I can ride out an "apocalypse" which was pulled out of some numerologists ass, or I can pay a lot of money to seal myself underground with a group of end-of-the-world whackjobs? Hmm, it's a tough call.
How is it tightening the noose? Providing you spend the money on food as you are meant to, you are no worse off. However if you are a chronic alcoholic, or drug user or smoker the state should not be funding your habit and providing the benefit as a payment card puts a barrier in the way of using it as such. Second, aside from people abusing the money it could also discourage benefit fraud (since there is less discretionary money available) and detect patterns of fraud since it would go through electronic payment systems.
It should quite straightforward to calculate a sum of money that represents a minimum that an adult person would expect to spend on food in a week and issue a card with that amount on it. The government could even issue sample shopping lists and recipes that make the amount go further. The rest would be received in the normal fashion so someone can spend more if they wish. But unless you can live off sunlight and air, you would spend the minimum amount on food anyway.
I'm failing to see the issue. If someone is claiming state benefit then the state is entirely within its rights to withhold or limit payments if it believes someone is deliberately not doing all they could regain employment. This is not a new concept. That said, the original article sounds sensational and credits the state with more intelligence than it possesses. I expect if they do anything at all it will be to run a nightly batch job that adds a few rows to the existing unemployment records of a person which say the last time they visited the site, how many jobs they looked at and how many they applied for. It might provide ammunition during an interview and help a decision stick but it's not going to tell welfare officers anything they probably didn't know from talking to a person.
I think a payment card (which the article also discussed) is way overdue and would cut down benefit fraud and stop people using money they should be spending on food using it to spend on drugs, booze, cigarettes or the geegees.
Scientists can clone high order animals right now including mammals. What exactly is the issue from a scientific standpoint of cloning a human? I'm sure there are issues but mostly they relate to ethics than the actual science. I wouldn't be surprised if some labs could clone a human right now and would if they thought they could withstand the onslaught of controversy and legal issues that it would bring with it.
Well I think if their console does appear eventually that Steam on Linux may as well exist as well. I just question the economics of it existing just all by itself. The number of desktop Linux users with gaming capable machines as a % has to be very small - it' be lucky to be 1% and I expect its considerably less. However if Linux ports fall out of the work to make a console, or a cloud service then possibly it's justifiable.
I think the goal here is to fix that, but credit where credit's due, I laughed.
I think the goal is for Linux users to act as guinea pigs for Valve's console / cloud gaming service in whatever form it takes. I doubt the number of Linux users / games would justify the existence of the service for any other reason.
I think it's more likely that someone using an alias is more likely to value their privacy and therefore the amount of information that they give to Facebook or permit Facebook to give out.
Anyway I think it's stupid to force such people to use their real name since there is absolutely no way to verify it is their real name. If I found myself forced to use a "real" name on Facebook I would just pick John Smith, Paul Brown or something so common that it is utterly useless information to either Facebook, or for the people they might hope for me to connect to. I would be literally lost in a sea of John Smiths. Tens of thousands of them, possibly hundreds of thousands of them. Short of them requiring all users to verify their ID with government servers or documentation, there is no way they can prevent it.
Maybe that's what Germans should do register their protest - register accounts using variations of the top 3 surnames, and boy/girl firstnames and render the service useless. I wonder how long it would be before the next time they logged in Facebook offered a "would you like to use a unique alias?" option.
Let's guess what excuses the nuts will use on 22 Dec when the event conspicuously fails to happen:
"We all suffered a spiritual death, not a physical one"
"The space aliens decided to give us one more chance"
"The calculations were wrong, it's going to happen in 2020 / 2021 / some other date I pulled out of my numerlogical ass."
"The prophecy was actually referring to (insert-some-news-of-the-day-here)"
"The end of the world has started but it doesn't happen overnight, it might take years, decades, centuries, enough time to write a series of books about it."
"I never meant the prediction to be taken literally"
"My positive mind beams averted the disaster"
What you won't hear:
"What a fucking ass I was to have believed this nonsense and promoted fear and possibly a few deaths through my ignorance."
It's not a myth. It is quite easy to notice judder and excessive blurring in a 24fps movie. This is especially pronounced in new movies which tend to move the camera more freely since they are less restricted by the weight of the equipment - CG doesn't even have physical equipment. And so the scene pans so fast the screen turns to mush. And image has blur since it contains everything that occurred in 1/24th second. Doubling the frame rate has obvious advantages for fast motion and CG and 3D.
Now perhaps Jackson is a cynic but pretending 24fps is the end of the matter is complete and demonstrable nonsense. Also, as I pointed out there could be other reasons for people not reacting too well, most likely to do with the post processing making which makes the picture too bright / sharp / clean and therefore somehow uncanny or unfamiliar without bringing frame rate into it. Funnily enough it brings to mind the exact opposite situation that happened on UK TV a few years ago when a TV show called Casuality slapped a shot-on-film effect and people complained it didn't look like the TV show any more.
What is certain to me is most of the 24fps defence is snobbery rather than anything rational. People are used to it one way and are not prepared to tolerate anything else. I wonder if there were people like that when "talkies" came in, or stereo, or technicolor, or 60mm, or cinemascope, or IMAX etc. Cinema has always been experimenting. The choice of 35mm and 24fps is more down to it being "good enough" than the best presentation. More frames or wider film (e.g. 60mm) means reels take up 2-3x the space and they break more. None of that is especially relevant in the age of digital projection.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect however if the US did try to push for metric that it would encounter the same kind of stupid resistance seen in the UK, e.g. "metric martyrs" who continued to use old weights and measures despite breaking the law by doing so.
I agree source code and specifications would be really really nice, and ideally should be available. I just wouldn't beat myself up over using a closed driver if that's all there is. It's not bothered me in the Windows world and and I don't see a reason to be bothered about it in the Linux world.
An HP Mini 210. OpenGL ES 2.0 driver is totally broken - I'm on holiday and using it for development and the driver just crashes whenever glLinkProgram is called. Seems to be a widespread issue so I assume it's a driver fault.
Do we as geeks and IT professionals need to worry about this?
Absolutely. WebGL allows any random website to tap your hardware through the browser. WebGL is essentially OpenGL ES 2.0 give or take a few APIs and is supported by just about every modern browser except IE. Some enable WebGL by default on suitable hardware, some have it disabled by default. When it is enabled a page has carte blanche to abuse the chipset six ways to sunday. The only protection afforded by browsers is the driver has to implement a GL extension called GL_EXT_robustness which says the driver promises, fingers crossed to be really good about checking and recovering from errors.
ActiveX had something similar called the "safe for scripting" bit. IE wouldn't load a page unless the control said it was safe and look what happened there. While there are less graphics drivers than activeX controls, it's easy to imagine a driver version claiming it's robust when in fact it isn't. It's easy to imagine a malicious site using that fact to break a lot of machines. I assume browsers could implement a whitelist of "good" drivers and update the list in addition to checking for the extension but it's obviously imperfect and offers additional browser exploits where none existed before.
Laptop driver support can be *horrible* because manufacturers twiddle with the chipsets params so that means their drivers are machine specific and certified. I'm writing this on an old netbook with Intel IGP. The OpenGL implementation is bugged so I want to install a later driver which is up on Intel's site. Can I install this driver? No because it decides "the driver being installed is not validated for this computer". And HP don't give a fuck about providing a certified version.
Now people can stop bitching about how "free" a driver is and just concentrate on how well it works. Or just use an OS that actually works with modern hardware Or just buy hardware from manufacturers that release open source drivers, so your OS choice isn't limited by your hardware choices.
Or cut off your nose to spite your face. Since essentially that's what it boils down to. While it is highly desirable to have the source to a hardware driver, if the choice is between accepting inferior hardware with source, or superior hardware without source, I'll take the latter every time.
But seriously, is there all that much difference between any of them? Just because we can trace these two churches back to their wacko founders, doesn't mean the other older churches weren't founded by wackos too.
Well quite. I bet virtually every religion started off as a cult revolving around a narcissistic lunatic with his disciples embellishing or flat out lying about his life and accomplishments. The only difference is the amount of time they've been around and the ability for people to check out the claims.
Sadly for scientology L Ron Hubbard's life and accomplishments as claimed by the church can be compared to court documents, contemporary newspaper reports, war records and so on and the lies are obvious. The church would have us believe he was a decorated war hero, a renowned explorer, nuclear physicist, etc. In reality he was a narcissistic, paranoid, wife beating, pathological liar. The cult managed to acquire many of these traits which is why it is so batshit insane and such an easy target for mockery. Doesn't explain why anyone would be attracted to join but clearly some people do.
Browsers have supported mycroft plugins for years - those things that power the search box in Firefox / Opera etc. It should not be hard to implement them behind a search lens (using an HTML scraper for sites which don't return XML if necessary) and present the results in a uniform way. Or introduce a plugin format v2 which returns richer results and metadata and encourage prominent sites like Wikipedia to support it. Then stick a simple UI in the control panel where plugins can be added, removed or disabled from the lens.
It wouldn't stop Ubuntu offering sponsored search plugins (I expect some default browser plugins to Amazon, ebay etc are affiliate links) but it would mean they reside in a framework where they could be removed easily or disabled.
When a movie is genuinely shot in 3D as some films are, either CG or live action, AND the director is mindful of the limitations AND avoids the cliches of the format it can be watchable and add something. Of course if the movie itself is trash then making it in 3D just means it stinks in another dimension.
I think however that a higher framerate combined with digital projection has more to offer the cinema going experience than 3D, although 3D would benefit too from a higher frame rate so it's not an and / or kind of thing.
The heirs should count themselves lucky. If the Apple logo had been fixed in place the boat would have been valued at 250 million.
If you want to see how a good idea can brought to its knees by politics, correctness and an extreme lack of pragmatism then look no further than Hurd. Here is a project which started before Linux and development was so glacial and bogged down in politics that Linus Torvalds preferred to write his own kernel from scratch than wait any longer. It seems a lot of other people agreed with him which is why Linux is practically ubiquitous and Hurd isn't. It's not the only GNU project infamous for its extreme lack of progress so perhaps there is a stigma attached to the name.
I'm sure it's decked out with all sorts of cool innovations but god does it look ugly. I can't put my finger on the wrongness except to say the boat looks like the bastard offspring of some 7 year old's first experiments designing a boat with only straight lines and a 1970's prefab building.
As for the rest of your rant, you have grossly misunderstood what I said or didn't RTFA so I see no point in addressing any of it.
They could, but there is obviously more effort / risk for a lower reward than just handing cash over to them.
It wouldn't affect a normal person on welfare - they just buy food with the card instead of the other cash and being minimum they could supplement the amount if they wanted or save it. It might stop chronic addicts from shooting it or drinking it when they should be using it to feed themselves or their family.
The second benefit is that if someone is NOT spending the money on their card, the state can start to wonder why, and ultimately reclaim the money. An electronic trail of transactions could be used for the detection and prosecution of fraudsters e.g. a person with 5 fraudulently obtained cards has the additional burden of going into Tescos 5 times with a substantial risk of revealing their fraud. More so if the card was protected by a fingerprint scanner.
So I can ride out an "apocalypse" which was pulled out of some numerologists ass, or I can pay a lot of money to seal myself underground with a group of end-of-the-world whackjobs? Hmm, it's a tough call.
It should quite straightforward to calculate a sum of money that represents a minimum that an adult person would expect to spend on food in a week and issue a card with that amount on it. The government could even issue sample shopping lists and recipes that make the amount go further. The rest would be received in the normal fashion so someone can spend more if they wish. But unless you can live off sunlight and air, you would spend the minimum amount on food anyway.
I think a payment card (which the article also discussed) is way overdue and would cut down benefit fraud and stop people using money they should be spending on food using it to spend on drugs, booze, cigarettes or the geegees.
Scientists can clone high order animals right now including mammals. What exactly is the issue from a scientific standpoint of cloning a human? I'm sure there are issues but mostly they relate to ethics than the actual science. I wouldn't be surprised if some labs could clone a human right now and would if they thought they could withstand the onslaught of controversy and legal issues that it would bring with it.
Well I think if their console does appear eventually that Steam on Linux may as well exist as well. I just question the economics of it existing just all by itself. The number of desktop Linux users with gaming capable machines as a % has to be very small - it' be lucky to be 1% and I expect its considerably less. However if Linux ports fall out of the work to make a console, or a cloud service then possibly it's justifiable.
I think the goal here is to fix that, but credit where credit's due, I laughed.
I think the goal is for Linux users to act as guinea pigs for Valve's console / cloud gaming service in whatever form it takes. I doubt the number of Linux users / games would justify the existence of the service for any other reason.
String makeName() { return firstNames[random(firstNames.length) + " " + lastNames[random(lastNames.length)]; }
Where firstNames and lastNames are a list of names harvested from census data, baby name lists or whatever. It's trivial to roll a fake name.
Anyway I think it's stupid to force such people to use their real name since there is absolutely no way to verify it is their real name. If I found myself forced to use a "real" name on Facebook I would just pick John Smith, Paul Brown or something so common that it is utterly useless information to either Facebook, or for the people they might hope for me to connect to. I would be literally lost in a sea of John Smiths. Tens of thousands of them, possibly hundreds of thousands of them. Short of them requiring all users to verify their ID with government servers or documentation, there is no way they can prevent it.
Maybe that's what Germans should do register their protest - register accounts using variations of the top 3 surnames, and boy/girl firstnames and render the service useless. I wonder how long it would be before the next time they logged in Facebook offered a "would you like to use a unique alias?" option.
What you won't hear:
Now perhaps Jackson is a cynic but pretending 24fps is the end of the matter is complete and demonstrable nonsense. Also, as I pointed out there could be other reasons for people not reacting too well, most likely to do with the post processing making which makes the picture too bright / sharp / clean and therefore somehow uncanny or unfamiliar without bringing frame rate into it. Funnily enough it brings to mind the exact opposite situation that happened on UK TV a few years ago when a TV show called Casuality slapped a shot-on-film effect and people complained it didn't look like the TV show any more.
What is certain to me is most of the 24fps defence is snobbery rather than anything rational. People are used to it one way and are not prepared to tolerate anything else. I wonder if there were people like that when "talkies" came in, or stereo, or technicolor, or 60mm, or cinemascope, or IMAX etc. Cinema has always been experimenting. The choice of 35mm and 24fps is more down to it being "good enough" than the best presentation. More frames or wider film (e.g. 60mm) means reels take up 2-3x the space and they break more. None of that is especially relevant in the age of digital projection.