I'm pretty sure that the current obsession with thin-uber-alles started after Steve assumed room temperature. The MacBook Air was designed to be thin. The MacBook Pro was designed to be Pro, but then they decided that thin was more important than pro.
When did they do that? In 2012 they were still using screws... 70 of the tiny bastards! You definitely want a magnet to keep the screws from getting lost when removing them.
I have a late-2011 17" MPB, and one of the things that went out over the years was the keyboard. I was able to find a replacement online for only $15, and while it worked better than the bad one (on which ASD and F would no longer work, and other keys too), the keyboard wasn't very well made, and some of the function key row are very hard to use (not entirely a bad thing), the space bar would get stuck down (not sure when it stopped having problems), and the left shift doesn't always work from certain finger angles. It is literally the hardest thing to repair/replace, short of doing SMD rework (70 tiny screws hold it to the top case, and that's after you take everything else out!) I was not happy to have to go in twice more in an attempt to make it work, but I'm happy now that I don't have to worry about it anymore.
Another problem I had was with my trackpad. Skin oils and food residue on fingers would eventually get under the edge of the trackpad, and the accumulation eventually made it hard to click. I broke my original one trying to repair it the wrong way (with the adjustment screw), but now i know to just remove it and clean the top case around the edge.
I remember there used to be plastic sheets that went the other way, but they were more important as screen protectors over that naked soft LCD plastic, rather than the hard plexiglass covers of the Unibody era of MBPs. I suppose it might be possible to find an adhesive matte filter, but you'd have to look around and probably have to cut it to size yourself. I really don't like the glossy screen when it reflects room light onto the screen, doubly so when it's the lighted keyboard being reflected.
It's long been known that if you make pages too wide the eye skips from line to line instead of reading across. That's why pages are portrait, it's why newspapers put text in columns.
Wide screens aren't stupid, it's using Windows in full-screen mode all the time on a wide screen that is stupid, especially with web browsers. I love my 17" MacBook Pro, but my web browser is normally set to 60% of the width, about 1024x1024 in the content area. On the left half of the screen I have room for a Finder window, a video window, or a text editor window. The 16:10 FHD resolution is roughly equivalent to what used to be called a "two-page" monitor back in the days when they weighed 30 kilos or more. And it works very well when reading PDFs in two-page mode.
Also stupid is stacking a bunch of horizontal strips with a wide monitor: task bar, window title bar, menu bar, the Windows ribbon, and web browsers with a billion toolbars installed. My Dock is on the right side, where it belongs, and is also set to half the default size because I'm not trying to impress people with hi-res icons in advertising photos.
Yes, maybe I just didn't say it well. I think both should be required to call it gambling, but people are so touchy about it that they'll jump at anything that looks even a little bit like it.
This isn't about grinding, but "loot boxes", also known by the Japanese word "gatcha", specifically those that you can buy in the game's cash shop for real-world money, which give you random, sometimes rare, items when you open them. And apparently some of them even give visual effects while opening them, increasing the anticipation. Note that some games sell "keys" in the cash shop, to open locked loot boxes, but that's not much different other than limiting you by how many boxes you've found.
One game I play has loot bags, but they're only in-game drops (no loot boxes or keys from the cash shop), and no special effects when opening (just the list of items in your chat log). Some game items can only be found in the bags, but those are just crafting recipes, and they aren't rare enough to bother selling outside the game. You could, but you'd be better off selling it in-game and trading the game money for real money. I feel like they should be safe, but these days people can get really twitchy about the merest hint of pay-to-win, especially when loot boxes are involved.
You voted for a delegate to represent a candidate, not a candidate. They also had a big chunk of "superdelegates", appointed by the party itself, so that everything wouldn't be left in the hands of smelly, stupid individual voters like yourself.
Do you think they're going to force the entire on-premises wiring to be all fiber right up to the phone? Are you actually retarded or just pretending? They only care about what goes up to the point of presence, where it ends in a VoIP box with a local power supply (with a battery if you're lucky) and a standard analog phone jack.
Back in 2001 or so, the copper in the alley behind my house went to crap. I actually lost analog phone before the DSL gave up, though I learned then and since that TCP/IP isn't very happy with more than 25% or so packet loss.
Next you'll be telling me that gold cables won't help.
Of course not, you need oxygen-free silver, aligned long grain, and with the current direction specified on the cable ends. Just like you can't use aluminum foil for tinfoil hats, you have to use actual tin.
With vinyl, it tends to be a compromise between volume and running time. That is, if you need more bass or a louder signal, it requires wider grooves which take more space.
Audiophool fluff aside, I think this is really cool. With mechanical mastering, the recording engineer had to have an instinct on how to set the groove tracking, and since it was a "one-take" operation, there was no way to optimize it. Creating the master via CAM techniques means that the optimal groove spacing can be used across the whole disc, and excessive cutting that could bump the needle out of the track can be avoided, before ever moving an atom on the master.
And this is the problem with Vinyl, if you ever had a "phono" input on any device ever, the audio is very quiet, and thus plugging a record player into something without a phono input would generate a lot of hiss as it has to be amplified. The Phono input on the device actually had specific pre-amplification.
That was for two reasons. One, on most turntables*, the output is literally a direct connection to the pickup. Two, the pre-amp compensates for the RIAA curve. You don't want to use a Phono input on an amp for anything but a turntable, and you don't want to connect an ordinary turntable to an ordinary analog input.
*recent turntables with USB will likely have a pre-amp, and thus present a line-level signal at the analog outputs
You can get a player that uses a laser on vinyl, but it's even more of a pain in the ass than you would expect, because while a needle may easily move the smallest bits of dust out of the way, a laser will happily pick it up as noise. The discs have to be kept extremely clean. They mostly get used for archival purposes, and I guess also for the few people who are willing to pay the price just for the geekiness of having one.
I also had several that with a tiny scratch became unplayable.
As long as the scratch is not parallel to the track, in my experience, this is more a function of how good the player is. In particular, discs that wouldn't play on an old clamshell CD player play fine and can be ripped perfectly in a slot or tray CD-ROM drive. I find it more surprising when this happens with a CD that has had damage to the reflective layer on top. Apparently there is still enough reflectivity that when the disc is fully enclosed in a slot or tray player, that a good laser can still read the data.
Americans still use cheques - sorry, checks, and they actually get physically moved around between banks, and eventually returned to the writer.
That hasn't been true for over 15 years. Once it was allowed to pass around just the image of the check (back in 2001 or so), they got scanned and shredded early in the clearing process, and the monthly statement includes a few pages of the images of the front of the checks. The rear side (signatures and a lot of rubber stamping) is no longer available to mortals.
The modem/gateway for my Uverse does some screwy shit on the LAN that completely hoses anything running 10.4. I had a couple of old PPC computers (mostly an original Mac Mini) that I wanted to run 10.4 on, but they would go zombie after just a few hours. It does other screwy shit to my LAN (like capriciously refusing to forward packets between wired and wifi, caching ancient IPv6 temporary addresses, and applying the WAN speed limits when I talk to my static IP computers) that I'm going to go back to running my own 10.x.x.x LAN when I have the time.
But muh run anywhere! There's no reason that a JRE couldn't use an interpreter compiled for 64-bit, at which point the host CPU becomes irrelevant. Apple is just trying to kick out x86, not everything that is in some way "32-bit".
If I had to bet on one or the other, I think Apple would be more likely to switch to AMD than ARM, at least if the adults are in charge, which the past few years of non-phone hardware has not demonstrated.
Despite all the brainwashing from Microsoft and Intel, it is possible to run 64-bit apps with a 32-bit kernel on a properly-designed CPU architecture. Preferably one that has a 32-bit mode worth using.
Guess what, you can still install older versions of the OS to run on older machines to run your older software. You might have to set the clock back to 2014 during the install (*cough*10.10*cough*) because of digital certificates, but it still works.
Without knowing any details, it's hard to say what stupid thing they did. I remember that MacBasic (the one that wasn't from Microsoft) used this system variable called BasicGlob that got deprecated, but MacBasic was never released, presumably due to Microsoft being Microsoft and threatening something like not making Microsoft Word unless it was killed and buried in the back yard. It couldn't have been "popular" if it was never released, and it wasn't a compiler anyhow.
More likely it was doing HLock/HUnlock by setting bits in the handle, which broke things hard when 32-bit mode came around.
I've no idea why you'd want to buy a display that didn't have a standard DisplayPort or HDMI interface.
I could understand if it had an external GPU with it and... oh hey, look, that's exactly what Apple has started supporting. But I'd still prefer the GPU to be a box in between the two, with a standard connector for the monitor, so that one breaking or becoming out-of-date doesn't mean both have to be thrown away, and they can be upgraded separately.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure that the current obsession with thin-uber-alles started after Steve assumed room temperature. The MacBook Air was designed to be thin. The MacBook Pro was designed to be Pro, but then they decided that thin was more important than pro.
When did they do that? In 2012 they were still using screws... 70 of the tiny bastards! You definitely want a magnet to keep the screws from getting lost when removing them.
I have a late-2011 17" MPB, and one of the things that went out over the years was the keyboard. I was able to find a replacement online for only $15, and while it worked better than the bad one (on which ASD and F would no longer work, and other keys too), the keyboard wasn't very well made, and some of the function key row are very hard to use (not entirely a bad thing), the space bar would get stuck down (not sure when it stopped having problems), and the left shift doesn't always work from certain finger angles. It is literally the hardest thing to repair/replace, short of doing SMD rework (70 tiny screws hold it to the top case, and that's after you take everything else out!) I was not happy to have to go in twice more in an attempt to make it work, but I'm happy now that I don't have to worry about it anymore.
Another problem I had was with my trackpad. Skin oils and food residue on fingers would eventually get under the edge of the trackpad, and the accumulation eventually made it hard to click. I broke my original one trying to repair it the wrong way (with the adjustment screw), but now i know to just remove it and clean the top case around the edge.
I remember there used to be plastic sheets that went the other way, but they were more important as screen protectors over that naked soft LCD plastic, rather than the hard plexiglass covers of the Unibody era of MBPs. I suppose it might be possible to find an adhesive matte filter, but you'd have to look around and probably have to cut it to size yourself. I really don't like the glossy screen when it reflects room light onto the screen, doubly so when it's the lighted keyboard being reflected.
It's long been known that if you make pages too wide the eye skips from line to line instead of reading across. That's why pages are portrait, it's why newspapers put text in columns.
Wide screens aren't stupid, it's using Windows in full-screen mode all the time on a wide screen that is stupid, especially with web browsers. I love my 17" MacBook Pro, but my web browser is normally set to 60% of the width, about 1024x1024 in the content area. On the left half of the screen I have room for a Finder window, a video window, or a text editor window. The 16:10 FHD resolution is roughly equivalent to what used to be called a "two-page" monitor back in the days when they weighed 30 kilos or more. And it works very well when reading PDFs in two-page mode.
Also stupid is stacking a bunch of horizontal strips with a wide monitor: task bar, window title bar, menu bar, the Windows ribbon, and web browsers with a billion toolbars installed. My Dock is on the right side, where it belongs, and is also set to half the default size because I'm not trying to impress people with hi-res icons in advertising photos.
Yes, maybe I just didn't say it well. I think both should be required to call it gambling, but people are so touchy about it that they'll jump at anything that looks even a little bit like it.
Would the API for this be called FoundationDBFoundation?
This isn't about grinding, but "loot boxes", also known by the Japanese word "gatcha", specifically those that you can buy in the game's cash shop for real-world money, which give you random, sometimes rare, items when you open them. And apparently some of them even give visual effects while opening them, increasing the anticipation. Note that some games sell "keys" in the cash shop, to open locked loot boxes, but that's not much different other than limiting you by how many boxes you've found.
One game I play has loot bags, but they're only in-game drops (no loot boxes or keys from the cash shop), and no special effects when opening (just the list of items in your chat log). Some game items can only be found in the bags, but those are just crafting recipes, and they aren't rare enough to bother selling outside the game. You could, but you'd be better off selling it in-game and trading the game money for real money. I feel like they should be safe, but these days people can get really twitchy about the merest hint of pay-to-win, especially when loot boxes are involved.
You voted for a delegate to represent a candidate, not a candidate. They also had a big chunk of "superdelegates", appointed by the party itself, so that everything wouldn't be left in the hands of smelly, stupid individual voters like yourself.
Do you think they're going to force the entire on-premises wiring to be all fiber right up to the phone? Are you actually retarded or just pretending? They only care about what goes up to the point of presence, where it ends in a VoIP box with a local power supply (with a battery if you're lucky) and a standard analog phone jack.
Back in 2001 or so, the copper in the alley behind my house went to crap. I actually lost analog phone before the DSL gave up, though I learned then and since that TCP/IP isn't very happy with more than 25% or so packet loss.
Next you'll be telling me that gold cables won't help.
Of course not, you need oxygen-free silver, aligned long grain, and with the current direction specified on the cable ends. Just like you can't use aluminum foil for tinfoil hats, you have to use actual tin.
With vinyl, it tends to be a compromise between volume and running time. That is, if you need more bass or a louder signal, it requires wider grooves which take more space.
Audiophool fluff aside, I think this is really cool. With mechanical mastering, the recording engineer had to have an instinct on how to set the groove tracking, and since it was a "one-take" operation, there was no way to optimize it. Creating the master via CAM techniques means that the optimal groove spacing can be used across the whole disc, and excessive cutting that could bump the needle out of the track can be avoided, before ever moving an atom on the master.
And this is the problem with Vinyl, if you ever had a "phono" input on any device ever, the audio is very quiet, and thus plugging a record player into something without a phono input would generate a lot of hiss as it has to be amplified. The Phono input on the device actually had specific pre-amplification.
That was for two reasons. One, on most turntables*, the output is literally a direct connection to the pickup. Two, the pre-amp compensates for the RIAA curve. You don't want to use a Phono input on an amp for anything but a turntable, and you don't want to connect an ordinary turntable to an ordinary analog input.
*recent turntables with USB will likely have a pre-amp, and thus present a line-level signal at the analog outputs
You can get a player that uses a laser on vinyl, but it's even more of a pain in the ass than you would expect, because while a needle may easily move the smallest bits of dust out of the way, a laser will happily pick it up as noise. The discs have to be kept extremely clean. They mostly get used for archival purposes, and I guess also for the few people who are willing to pay the price just for the geekiness of having one.
I also had several that with a tiny scratch became unplayable.
As long as the scratch is not parallel to the track, in my experience, this is more a function of how good the player is. In particular, discs that wouldn't play on an old clamshell CD player play fine and can be ripped perfectly in a slot or tray CD-ROM drive. I find it more surprising when this happens with a CD that has had damage to the reflective layer on top. Apparently there is still enough reflectivity that when the disc is fully enclosed in a slot or tray player, that a good laser can still read the data.
Americans still use cheques - sorry, checks, and they actually get physically moved around between banks, and eventually returned to the writer.
That hasn't been true for over 15 years. Once it was allowed to pass around just the image of the check (back in 2001 or so), they got scanned and shredded early in the clearing process, and the monthly statement includes a few pages of the images of the front of the checks. The rear side (signatures and a lot of rubber stamping) is no longer available to mortals.
(ideally not connected to the internet)
The modem/gateway for my Uverse does some screwy shit on the LAN that completely hoses anything running 10.4. I had a couple of old PPC computers (mostly an original Mac Mini) that I wanted to run 10.4 on, but they would go zombie after just a few hours. It does other screwy shit to my LAN (like capriciously refusing to forward packets between wired and wifi, caching ancient IPv6 temporary addresses, and applying the WAN speed limits when I talk to my static IP computers) that I'm going to go back to running my own 10.x.x.x LAN when I have the time.
32 bit java
But muh run anywhere! There's no reason that a JRE couldn't use an interpreter compiled for 64-bit, at which point the host CPU becomes irrelevant. Apple is just trying to kick out x86, not everything that is in some way "32-bit".
If I had to bet on one or the other, I think Apple would be more likely to switch to AMD than ARM, at least if the adults are in charge, which the past few years of non-phone hardware has not demonstrated.
Despite all the brainwashing from Microsoft and Intel, it is possible to run 64-bit apps with a 32-bit kernel on a properly-designed CPU architecture. Preferably one that has a 32-bit mode worth using.
Guess what, you can still install older versions of the OS to run on older machines to run your older software. You might have to set the clock back to 2014 during the install (*cough*10.10*cough*) because of digital certificates, but it still works.
Without knowing any details, it's hard to say what stupid thing they did. I remember that MacBasic (the one that wasn't from Microsoft) used this system variable called BasicGlob that got deprecated, but MacBasic was never released, presumably due to Microsoft being Microsoft and threatening something like not making Microsoft Word unless it was killed and buried in the back yard. It couldn't have been "popular" if it was never released, and it wasn't a compiler anyhow.
More likely it was doing HLock/HUnlock by setting bits in the handle, which broke things hard when 32-bit mode came around.
I've no idea why you'd want to buy a display that didn't have a standard DisplayPort or HDMI interface.
I could understand if it had an external GPU with it and... oh hey, look, that's exactly what Apple has started supporting. But I'd still prefer the GPU to be a box in between the two, with a standard connector for the monitor, so that one breaking or becoming out-of-date doesn't mean both have to be thrown away, and they can be upgraded separately.
You forgot to add things breaking in every Mac OS release, like security and external display drivers.