It looks like every other blog site out there, too many images, too much white space, no comment filter and comments are much harder to read and understand who is replying to what. If you switch to this new layout with no option for the classic one, I will stop visiting slashdot. It won't be much of a sacrifice at that point, this site would have already lost what I liked about it, focus on stuff that matters, the comments and information.
I was concerned with scientific studies as absolute proof but then I realized that when it comes down to it, it only matters with what *I* can hear. So I used the ABX comparator plugin in foobar2000 to test my ability to discern FLAC vs 320kbps. You select two tracks you want to compare and then it presents them as blind tracks labeled A,B,X,Y and you need to pair up tracks A and B to X and Y. So I found out I can hear a difference. On select things. I'd have to listen to almost the entirety of the song and only at certain points does the difference become apparent to me. Things like ending a song with a rattling of a drums hi-hat sounds more distorted with 320kbps MP3 than FLAC. Music like the Beatles ends up sounding the same from even at 256kbps to me. So I believe that a person can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3. It might not apply to all music across all equipment for all people but there is a difference. Personally, the majority of my music is encoded in 256kbps MP3.
For home use I recommend Window Switch. You could roll your own DIY solution with a combination of xpra, X11, vnc, rdesktop, ssh and so on but WinSwitch already does all that for you.
IANAL but No, the M1 Garand or any other gun from WW2 or even WW1 is not considered a "relic" or "antique" firearm in the United States. The M1 Garand was not made before 1899, is not a replica of a gun from before 1899, is not muzzle loading and is capable of firing "modern" (rim/center fire) ammunition. The law regarding antique firearms is to allow people to own and collect them without needing to register. Of course the finer details varies from state to state but here's us code
18 USC 921 (a)(16). (A) any firearm (including any firearm with a matchlock, flintlock, percussion cap, or similar type of ignition system) manufactured in or before 1898; and (B) any replica of any firearm described in subparagraph (A) if such replica -- (i) is not designed or redesigned for using rimfire or conventional centerfire fixed ammunition, or (ii) uses rimfire or conventional centerfire fixed ammunition which is no longer manufactured in the United States and which is not readily available in the ordinary channels of commercial trade.
No it's not worth investing in a high efficiency power supply for your computer if you're trying to save money or the environment. Yes it's worth buying a 80 Plus Gold or Platinum power supply if you want to reduce noise as many of them now run fanless or have a fan that generally doesn't need to turn on.
Shipping via free local pick up only. Looks like I'll have to pass. There's also the issue of me not having $25k to spend on 721 SNES titles but the shipping clearly is the bigger problem since I don't live in Ohio.
I would be plenty happy if Steam would just redirect and store all the games files to a specific folder in the steam directory, much less implement a hypervisor. As it is now, installing a number of games from steam poops data all over my hard drive. I have game saves, settings and common files in My Document, "My Documents\My Games", AppData\Local, AppData\Roaming, AppData\Saved Games, steamapps\user and probably in other places I discovered yet.
While i'm at it, another nice feature would be for steam to be a unified DRM scheme. Install steam and buy a game and install only the game (and necessary libraries such as XNA for windows). Somewhere along the line I didn't pay enough attention and now I have junk like SecureROM and that Rockstar Social Club crap.
Pencil and paper is unbeatable as the main medium for recording notes. Pencil on paper feels nice and I like to think that writing things down helps me process the information better later on. I like using plain white paper (or engineering pads but those are expensive) since I like to take notes on notes and have blocks of notes all over the page with arrows pointing every which way.
I tried other things and the most useful companion to pencil and paper is a decent camera for taking pictures of diagrams or poor handwriting to be deciphered later. I guess you can just use a smart phone for that now. I also recorded lecture audio but almost never listened to them again. There are the rare occasions where typing on a laptop is better and emacs + org-mode would be my note taker of choice. But yeah, in general, pencil + paper.
Can we, as a community, get over Betteridge's Law of Headlines? Please? I'm seeing it all over slashdot recently and it really is just the latest incarnation of FIRST POST. While "no" may end up as a valid answer to the headline, it kills the discussion by religiously applying an adage instead of introducing replies to the summary with new facts, anecdotes or questions. Sure the headline might be crap but that doesn't mean we need to reply back with crap.
Low power? Maybe compared to traditional vacuum tubes. TFA says the nano vacuum tubes have a threshold voltage of 10V. Modern FETs are a magnitude less.
I went over the limit once and the worse part is that they threaten to disconnect the service for repeated offenses. No excessive charge fo each GB over, they will just disconnect the internet. And of course my only option for broadband is comcast.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that the reported FPS in a video game is more easily noticeable because it's not only showing how limited the picture you're seeing being updated but also as a function of mouse input. Since you're directly control the picture and expecting it to change a certain way a lack of smoothness in transition becomes more apparent.
But with more "modern" games I'm having a harder time determining between 30fps and 60fps especially since a lot of them are trying to go for that cinematic look and add in all sorts of things like motion blurring. As someone who loves classic death math of quake and unreal tournament the motion blurring in newer games drives me nuts since it limits how fast I can move a viewpoint without it going blurry.
I put together a nice charging station for all my 5V devices (a fairly efficient AC to DC 5V adapter and a lot of custom cables) and found the PS3 controller to be particularly annoying. The easy USB charging devices just want to see 5V. The slighltly less easy ones (like phones) will want to see a certain value resistor placed between various pins of the usb device. The playstation 3 controller comes in as super annoying because you can't get it to charge with the above two techniques, it needs to go through the whole USB protocol to establish a connection and negotiation before it will start charging.
Watts is a unit of power. Multiplying voltage by current gives you power. Multiplying time by power gets you energy. More precisely integrating power over time gets you energy because power might not necessarily be constant over the duration of time.
It works for light bulbs because you assume a lot of things. If we were a more scientifically inclined society then light bulbs would be measured in Watt-hours and not watts. Light bulbs are mostly linear regarding their power usage which is why a 60 watt light bulb that runs for an hour uses less energy than a 120 watt light bulb ran for an hour.
The video in the article mentions that the computer does most of the counting and I get the feeling that surveying animal count from aerial photographs might only work with penguins in Antarctica. It's relatively easy to distinguish between snow, poop and penguin from a computer vision algorithm stand point seeing how it boils down to distinguishing between black or brownish spots with little noise from other unwanted objects. Not that I'm trying to say it's trivial to program it but it it's a lot simpler problem than say counting people in a city from space or cars.
Even though the final decision and final barrier to a premature death is a personal choice there's still more than enough blame to be distributed. We should be better than to say "personal choice" is reason enough to shove ALL the responsibility to a single person. Our society is no where near perfect or utopian and can have the right combination of shit to push a person to thinking incorrectly. For example: suicide attempts among LGBT youths are significantly higher than that of the general population. Are we gonna just blame it all on the LGBT youths and ignore the deeper issues of how they receive no support from their peers, teachers or family? I hope not.
And in this specific case TFA says his sister claims that his ex-wife their disabled 20 year old daughters gets all of hims money for support and the ex-wife never lets him see his daughter. It also mentions she told him to 'fuck off and die already'. Given those facts are true I would put a decent amount of blame on his ex-wife. While I wouldn't put blame on the reddit users to the extent of wrongful death I would still say they deserve enough blame to where they hopefully will reflect on their actions.
One time at my university the engineering department had this paper airplane competition, everyone was given a sheet of 8.5x11" paper and a paper clip. It was particularly windy that day and the event had been organized for better weather so we ended up having to throw the planes directly into the wind from ground level. The distance of the various planes people built ranged from -10 feet to 20 feet from launch point. Taking this into account I decided to modify my design at the last second. I stepped up to the launch area with my plane, aimed it at a 45 degree angle, crumbled it up into a ball and threw it as hard as I could. I got something like 40 feet and had the furthest distance. I kept saying that it was designed to minimize air resistance but In the end I was disqualified for being a smart ass.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like every other blog site out there, too many images, too much white space, no comment filter and comments are much harder to read and understand who is replying to what. If you switch to this new layout with no option for the classic one, I will stop visiting slashdot. It won't be much of a sacrifice at that point, this site would have already lost what I liked about it, focus on stuff that matters, the comments and information.
I was concerned with scientific studies as absolute proof but then I realized that when it comes down to it, it only matters with what *I* can hear. So I used the ABX comparator plugin in foobar2000 to test my ability to discern FLAC vs 320kbps. You select two tracks you want to compare and then it presents them as blind tracks labeled A,B,X,Y and you need to pair up tracks A and B to X and Y. So I found out I can hear a difference. On select things. I'd have to listen to almost the entirety of the song and only at certain points does the difference become apparent to me. Things like ending a song with a rattling of a drums hi-hat sounds more distorted with 320kbps MP3 than FLAC. Music like the Beatles ends up sounding the same from even at 256kbps to me. So I believe that a person can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3. It might not apply to all music across all equipment for all people but there is a difference. Personally, the majority of my music is encoded in 256kbps MP3.
For home use I recommend Window Switch. You could roll your own DIY solution with a combination of xpra, X11, vnc, rdesktop, ssh and so on but WinSwitch already does all that for you.
IANAL but No, the M1 Garand or any other gun from WW2 or even WW1 is not considered a "relic" or "antique" firearm in the United States. The M1 Garand was not made before 1899, is not a replica of a gun from before 1899, is not muzzle loading and is capable of firing "modern" (rim/center fire) ammunition. The law regarding antique firearms is to allow people to own and collect them without needing to register. Of course the finer details varies from state to state but here's us code
18 USC 921 (a)(16). (A) any firearm (including any firearm with a matchlock, flintlock, percussion cap, or similar type of ignition system) manufactured in or before 1898; and (B) any replica of any firearm described in subparagraph (A) if such replica -- (i) is not designed or redesigned for using rimfire or conventional centerfire fixed ammunition, or (ii) uses rimfire or conventional centerfire fixed ammunition which is no longer manufactured in the United States and which is not readily available in the ordinary channels of commercial trade.
No it's not worth investing in a high efficiency power supply for your computer if you're trying to save money or the environment. Yes it's worth buying a 80 Plus Gold or Platinum power supply if you want to reduce noise as many of them now run fanless or have a fan that generally doesn't need to turn on.
Shipping via free local pick up only. Looks like I'll have to pass. There's also the issue of me not having $25k to spend on 721 SNES titles but the shipping clearly is the bigger problem since I don't live in Ohio.
I would be plenty happy if Steam would just redirect and store all the games files to a specific folder in the steam directory, much less implement a hypervisor. As it is now, installing a number of games from steam poops data all over my hard drive. I have game saves, settings and common files in My Document, "My Documents\My Games", AppData\Local, AppData\Roaming, AppData\Saved Games, steamapps\user and probably in other places I discovered yet.
While i'm at it, another nice feature would be for steam to be a unified DRM scheme. Install steam and buy a game and install only the game (and necessary libraries such as XNA for windows). Somewhere along the line I didn't pay enough attention and now I have junk like SecureROM and that Rockstar Social Club crap.
Pencil and paper is unbeatable as the main medium for recording notes. Pencil on paper feels nice and I like to think that writing things down helps me process the information better later on. I like using plain white paper (or engineering pads but those are expensive) since I like to take notes on notes and have blocks of notes all over the page with arrows pointing every which way.
I tried other things and the most useful companion to pencil and paper is a decent camera for taking pictures of diagrams or poor handwriting to be deciphered later. I guess you can just use a smart phone for that now. I also recorded lecture audio but almost never listened to them again. There are the rare occasions where typing on a laptop is better and emacs + org-mode would be my note taker of choice. But yeah, in general, pencil + paper.
Can we, as a community, get over Betteridge's Law of Headlines? Please? I'm seeing it all over slashdot recently and it really is just the latest incarnation of FIRST POST. While "no" may end up as a valid answer to the headline, it kills the discussion by religiously applying an adage instead of introducing replies to the summary with new facts, anecdotes or questions. Sure the headline might be crap but that doesn't mean we need to reply back with crap.
Unless they decided to change it in Windows 8 from the previous iterations, Ctrl+Esc brings up the start menu.
As a gamer I generally care more about latency than bandwidth.
Low power? Maybe compared to traditional vacuum tubes. TFA says the nano vacuum tubes have a threshold voltage of 10V. Modern FETs are a magnitude less.
So if a house has this copper particle wallpaper (or paint) does that mean the house is more of a hazard in a lightning storm?
I went over the limit once and the worse part is that they threaten to disconnect the service for repeated offenses. No excessive charge fo each GB over, they will just disconnect the internet. And of course my only option for broadband is comcast.
Nope. Minecraft runs on IOS and Android. A Xbox 360 version is suppose to be coming out soon too.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that the reported FPS in a video game is more easily noticeable because it's not only showing how limited the picture you're seeing being updated but also as a function of mouse input. Since you're directly control the picture and expecting it to change a certain way a lack of smoothness in transition becomes more apparent.
But with more "modern" games I'm having a harder time determining between 30fps and 60fps especially since a lot of them are trying to go for that cinematic look and add in all sorts of things like motion blurring. As someone who loves classic death math of quake and unreal tournament the motion blurring in newer games drives me nuts since it limits how fast I can move a viewpoint without it going blurry.
I put together a nice charging station for all my 5V devices (a fairly efficient AC to DC 5V adapter and a lot of custom cables) and found the PS3 controller to be particularly annoying. The easy USB charging devices just want to see 5V. The slighltly less easy ones (like phones) will want to see a certain value resistor placed between various pins of the usb device. The playstation 3 controller comes in as super annoying because you can't get it to charge with the above two techniques, it needs to go through the whole USB protocol to establish a connection and negotiation before it will start charging.
Watts is a unit of power. Multiplying voltage by current gives you power. Multiplying time by power gets you energy. More precisely integrating power over time gets you energy because power might not necessarily be constant over the duration of time.
It works for light bulbs because you assume a lot of things. If we were a more scientifically inclined society then light bulbs would be measured in Watt-hours and not watts. Light bulbs are mostly linear regarding their power usage which is why a 60 watt light bulb that runs for an hour uses less energy than a 120 watt light bulb ran for an hour.
The video in the article mentions that the computer does most of the counting and I get the feeling that surveying animal count from aerial photographs might only work with penguins in Antarctica. It's relatively easy to distinguish between snow, poop and penguin from a computer vision algorithm stand point seeing how it boils down to distinguishing between black or brownish spots with little noise from other unwanted objects. Not that I'm trying to say it's trivial to program it but it it's a lot simpler problem than say counting people in a city from space or cars.
Even though the final decision and final barrier to a premature death is a personal choice there's still more than enough blame to be distributed. We should be better than to say "personal choice" is reason enough to shove ALL the responsibility to a single person. Our society is no where near perfect or utopian and can have the right combination of shit to push a person to thinking incorrectly. For example: suicide attempts among LGBT youths are significantly higher than that of the general population. Are we gonna just blame it all on the LGBT youths and ignore the deeper issues of how they receive no support from their peers, teachers or family? I hope not.
And in this specific case TFA says his sister claims that his ex-wife their disabled 20 year old daughters gets all of hims money for support and the ex-wife never lets him see his daughter. It also mentions she told him to 'fuck off and die already'. Given those facts are true I would put a decent amount of blame on his ex-wife. While I wouldn't put blame on the reddit users to the extent of wrongful death I would still say they deserve enough blame to where they hopefully will reflect on their actions.
One time at my university the engineering department had this paper airplane competition, everyone was given a sheet of 8.5x11" paper and a paper clip. It was particularly windy that day and the event had been organized for better weather so we ended up having to throw the planes directly into the wind from ground level. The distance of the various planes people built ranged from -10 feet to 20 feet from launch point. Taking this into account I decided to modify my design at the last second. I stepped up to the launch area with my plane, aimed it at a 45 degree angle, crumbled it up into a ball and threw it as hard as I could. I got something like 40 feet and had the furthest distance. I kept saying that it was designed to minimize air resistance but In the end I was disqualified for being a smart ass.
Gives new meaning to Intel Inside.
IANAL but I'm pretty sure they're just making a photocopy of the information printed on the license which is perfectly legal, even in Texas.
Car dealerships scan driver licenses all the time for test drives.
Handout iPads.
Non existant due to the large cost of the necessary optics.