Nonetheless, CFLs are not exactly harmless or carefree either; e.g., from the EPA recommendations for "Cleaning Up a Broken CFL":
"If clothing or bedding materials come in direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from inside the bulb that may stick to the fabric, the clothing or bedding should be thrown away. Do not wash such clothing or bedding because mercury fragments in the clothing may contaminate the machine and/or pollute sewage."
[snopes quotes much of this same text, but for some reason that particular section ("4. Clean-up Steps for Clothing, Bedding, etc.") was omitted from the snopes story.]
Bulbs do break, and it's pretty much guaranteed that a large proportion of such breakages in the home won't follow the recommended cleanup procedures.
If you don't like bluish CFLs, get yellowish ones. There are 3 colors, one is very yellow.
Hmm, the thing is, all of the "yellow" CFLs I've seen haven't been a very good replacement for incandescents -- the yellow seemed "sickly and weird" rather than "warm" like incandescents.
I dunno, maybe they'll eventually come up with phosphor formulations that are more pleasant, but until they do, I rather like my incandescent lamp (only one, and only 60w, but it's so nice and relaxing...).
Of course, this program almost certainly has nothing to do with improving education or lowering costs.
There's a lot of incentive for apple and the publishers to try and get school systems locked-in to their proprietary DRM-laden yearly-subscription-fee-encrusted formats and standards before the schools figure out that they could do much better with more open materials and formats, and cheaper more generic hardware. Given that, it seems pretty likely there were "incentives" involved ("the first one is free"...)
Mix that with gullible school administrators that aren't really up to speed on this whole "technology" thing, but have been exposed to the ipad hype-machine, and...
The students, meanwhile, will be happy (if not better educated), as they'll have a shiny toy they can show off at the mall and use for games and chatting during class.
Why is it that we here at/. are frothing at the mouth when companies use false DMCAtakedownnotices but apparently have no such anger directed at other companies using false patent information
Because the first causes real damage in practice, whereas the second causes none.
Nobody cares about a company's lying if it causes no actual harm.
"Surface" is yet another piece of slightly-interesting-in-theory-but-kind-of-meh-in-reality tech that microsoft has been trying to get people enthused about for ages -- and consistently failing. You know, kind of like tablet computers before Apple actually made people want them.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple suddenly teams up with Ikea and has every living room in the country computing with their coffee-table within 3 months though.
"Surface" is yet another piece of slightly-interesting-in-theory-but-kind-of-meh-in-reality tech that microsoft has been trying to get people enthused about for ages -- and consistently failing. You know, kind of like tablet computers before Apple actually made people want them.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple suddenly teams up with Ikea and has every living room in the country computing with their coffee-table within 3 months though.
Maybe pay-for subscribers have newer imagery of the site and can repost. The clear picture is odd: can't distinguish ANY antenna shadows from all the building shadows. The long straight lines on the grass are just ground partitions of some sort and are unlikely to be parallel to the antenna's clock-like moving shadow exactly as the imaging satellite passed by. If you're in doubt, notice even gravestone cross's shadows are easily picked up from satellites
That gravestone is probably a massive solid hunk of stone, and has a solid continuous shadow.
An antenna, on the other hand, is typically constructed as a truss or mesh of rather thin metal pieces, perhaps supported by guy-wires -- it's mostly air, and the shadow, accordingly, will be composed of very thin lines widely separated by areas of no shadow. That may well not be noticeable from a satellite.
Reading through the comments, there's a lot of people who are still whining traditional anti-ATI whines, but AMD is being very smart about things, and is thinking in the long term. Nvidia will eventually follow, I'd wager, but Nvidia upper management is very stubborn and fixed in their ways, so it may take a while (in my experience, Nvidia engineering is much more enlightened in their views, but they don't set the company's policies).
Just curious, given all these advances in JS speed, are there technical reasons why stuff like Python, Ruby and Perl aren't getting similar improvements in speed?
Just needs someone to do the work...
One non-JS language that has seen some excellent tracing JIT development is Lua, in the form of Mike Pall's LuaJIT project.
Even though the standard Lua interpreter is already amazingly fast (far faster than the standard python/ruby/perl implementations), LuaJIT makes many programs run much faster yet.
The awesome bar is one of two things I miss after switching to Chrome. Chrome tries to pack too much into the URL dropdown (search history, suggestions, etc) without doing any of it well. For instance on Firefox, I can type Q[tab] and have my comments page up. sl[tab] is slashdot. c[tab] is my bank site. f[tab] is the firehose journal search I use. Just about any site I go to is four keystrokes max counting hitting enter to load the site. On chrome, I have to type sl[right arrow]/[down arrow][right arrow] to get to my comments page. Note that moving the hand between the arrow keys and the main keyboard adds extra effort.
Yeah I agree about those annoyances. What I find even more irritating about chrome's "awesome bar" variant is the delays -- when you type something into the address bar, it will immediately show you some possible completions... and then will add others over time, often taking as long as 3-4 seconds to really generate the whole list; almost always I find the most-used completions are the last ones added! With FF, you don't get this sort of delay at all, it basically generates everything almost immediately, which together with its better keyboard handling (compared to chrome) and better search algorithms (like you, I find one or two letters is usually enough with FF; chrome often takes multiple words), makes FF's AB far more usable than chrome's.
[And this is not a minor issue -- despite the stupid name, the AB is a hugely important feature: it basically can replace bookmarks for most uses, and is far faster and more convenient.]
As an early adopter of FF, I'm now considering a switch to Chrome. Ugh.
I know chrome is very hyped right now, and by all means you should try it out, but don't think it's some cure-all that will solve all your problems with FF and have none of its own. It's not, and won't.
Maybe on average it will prove the best for you, but chrome isn't a magic bullet.
[I use both FF and chrome; both manage to annoy me on a daily basis...]
This implies that by using sun and wind to create electricity somehow oil usage will drop. While I heavily support the switch to alternative fuels, this is just not true. Most oil is used for transportation rather than electricity. So the only way to save oil by switching to solar or wind is to use electric car.
Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
Ok, so quitting the car habit is a hard task in the sprawltastic U.S., but much of Europe is quite suited to better transportation mechanisms.
The problem is that you live in an area with crappy theaters and crappy theater patrons; I guess maybe you live in the U.S. For you maybe it makes sense to watch at home.
I, on the other hand, live in an area where theaters are large, very clean and well maintained, with comfortable seats, and the patrons are quiet and respectful (and thin!). Yes, even the kids. The theater experience here blows away any home system unless you have agoraphobia...
Going to a theater is more than just technical superiority, it's a social experience. That can be bad if the other patrons are all jerks (or if you are a recluse), but it can very much enhance the experience if they're not -- shared laughter, the pleasant buzz of conversation on a summer's night before a late horror show begins (as you sip your beer!), the collective gasp of the crowd when the hero makes a narrow escape in an action movie. Even if you have friends over, it's an experience you simply don't get in a "home theater," and (along with a better viewing experience) makes seeing a movie in a real theater very much worth the price in many cases.
... and of course there's usually not much stopping you from wearing them much long than that -- I've worn my current frames for ~15 years just 'cause I really like them, and I knew a girl that wore frames she inherited from her father!
As for aesthetics, that's obviously very subjective; I kinda dig chicks with glasses... I just... like them. (a friend recently got lasik and stopped wearing glasses, and it was a little sad... something distinctive was lost.)
This man is a blight upon humanity... He wasn't just some tangential person either, he was deep into that shit running their propaganda errands. Explain to me why we'd ever listen to this analcyst?
Sure Rob Enderle is a world-class idiot, but are there any "analysts" which aren't idiots?
Pretty much everything I've ever seen attributed in the press to "an analyst," was quite clearly clueless bullshit puked out by someone who's figured out that the press isn't picky about certain subjects, and that he can just randomly spout whatever nonsense he wants without any research or thought, and get paid for it.
I agree that the new kindle is very enticing, and I also think the article is stupid: the kindle is definitely not a "tablet computer," nor should it be, and the two markets are not going to "slam together" any more than people are going to start replacing their cellphones with ipads. The ipad, at least, is a very different thing, with very different strengths and weaknesses and it's useful for a very different set of tasks. Trying to make the kindle into one would be stupid, because it would entail giving up most of the advantages of the current kindle, regardless of new display tech. Even ignoring the non-optimal-for-reading display, the size of the ipad, the weight, the CPU power necessary to run general apps, the battery power required to run it all, and the high price, are all attributes that make some sense given Apple's target, but which do not make sense for an e-reader.
Luckily Amazon (unlike Rob Enderle) is smart enough to realize that, and seem to be focusing relentlessly on making the kindle as good an e-reader as they can.
Yeah, and there are certainly places where FF is better than chrome -- e.g., both have similar "awesome bar" things, but FF's is hugely faster and better at coming up with appropriate matches than chrome's. This is not a small issue for me -- I've come to rely on the AB instead of using bookmarks (chrome's "blank page menu" thing is more user-friendly, but vastly more limiting).
I use both browsers -- FF at home, where my machine has lots of memory, and chrome at work, where memory restrictions make the ability to reclaim memory by closing tabs hugely convenient (though, despite that convenience, chrome seem to actually use a fair bit more memory than FF for equivalent tasks) -- so I think I have a generally balanced view of the two.
I'd say that although chrome is a slick browser with some really nice features (process-per-tab being the obvious one), it's kind of over-hyped in general, and it's hardly unambiguously better than FF (as many comments in this thread seem to be suggesting). Both are great browsers, and both will get better in the future; google's made it clear that they've no problem with FF stealing chrome's best features, and indeed hopes they do.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonetheless, CFLs are not exactly harmless or carefree either; e.g., from the EPA recommendations for "Cleaning Up a Broken CFL":
"If clothing or bedding materials come in direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from inside the bulb that may stick to the fabric, the clothing or bedding should be thrown away. Do not wash such clothing or bedding because mercury fragments in the clothing may contaminate the machine and/or pollute sewage."
[snopes quotes much of this same text, but for some reason that particular section ("4. Clean-up Steps for Clothing, Bedding, etc.") was omitted from the snopes story.]
Bulbs do break, and it's pretty much guaranteed that a large proportion of such breakages in the home won't follow the recommended cleanup procedures.
If you don't like bluish CFLs, get yellowish ones. There are 3 colors, one is very yellow.
Hmm, the thing is, all of the "yellow" CFLs I've seen haven't been a very good replacement for incandescents -- the yellow seemed "sickly and weird" rather than "warm" like incandescents.
I dunno, maybe they'll eventually come up with phosphor formulations that are more pleasant, but until they do, I rather like my incandescent lamp (only one, and only 60w, but it's so nice and relaxing...).
OTOH, pretty much every MS dev I know seems to have an iphone...
(and of course MS even does iphone development, e.g., for Bing!)
Of course, this program almost certainly has nothing to do with improving education or lowering costs.
There's a lot of incentive for apple and the publishers to try and get school systems locked-in to their proprietary DRM-laden yearly-subscription-fee-encrusted formats and standards before the schools figure out that they could do much better with more open materials and formats, and cheaper more generic hardware. Given that, it seems pretty likely there were "incentives" involved ("the first one is free"...)
Mix that with gullible school administrators that aren't really up to speed on this whole "technology" thing, but have been exposed to the ipad hype-machine, and...
The students, meanwhile, will be happy (if not better educated), as they'll have a shiny toy they can show off at the mall and use for games and chatting during class.
Hey, who doesn't love Caturday?!
Stop making up scenarios that make no sense.
Why is it that we here at /. are frothing at the mouth when companies use false DMCA takedown notices but apparently have no such anger directed at other companies using false patent information
Because the first causes real damage in practice, whereas the second causes none.
Nobody cares about a company's lying if it causes no actual harm.
(sorry about the dup comment; slashdot was being its usual flaky-ass self -- and of course, no comment deletion!)
"Surface" is yet another piece of slightly-interesting-in-theory-but-kind-of-meh-in-reality tech that microsoft has been trying to get people enthused about for ages -- and consistently failing. You know, kind of like tablet computers before Apple actually made people want them.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple suddenly teams up with Ikea and has every living room in the country computing with their coffee-table within 3 months though.
"Surface" is yet another piece of slightly-interesting-in-theory-but-kind-of-meh-in-reality tech that microsoft has been trying to get people enthused about for ages -- and consistently failing. You know, kind of like tablet computers before Apple actually made people want them.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple suddenly teams up with Ikea and has every living room in the country computing with their coffee-table within 3 months though.
Maybe pay-for subscribers have newer imagery of the site and can repost. The clear picture is odd: can't distinguish ANY antenna shadows from all the building shadows. The long straight lines on the grass are just ground partitions of some sort and are unlikely to be parallel to the antenna's clock-like moving shadow exactly as the imaging satellite passed by. If you're in doubt, notice even gravestone cross's shadows are easily picked up from satellites
That gravestone is probably a massive solid hunk of stone, and has a solid continuous shadow.
An antenna, on the other hand, is typically constructed as a truss or mesh of rather thin metal pieces, perhaps supported by guy-wires -- it's mostly air, and the shadow, accordingly, will be composed of very thin lines widely separated by areas of no shadow. That may well not be noticeable from a satellite.
OTOH, if you can take advantage of many cores (I can), AMD's low, low, prices for lots of pretty fast cores are wonderful!
U.S. lapdog, or corporate lapdog?
Yes.
Reading through the comments, there's a lot of people who are still whining traditional anti-ATI whines, but AMD is being very smart about things, and is thinking in the long term. Nvidia will eventually follow, I'd wager, but Nvidia upper management is very stubborn and fixed in their ways, so it may take a while (in my experience, Nvidia engineering is much more enlightened in their views, but they don't set the company's policies).
big oil is healthy and Ain't gonna let it happen
Why not? Trains run on diesel just like buses and VW TDI cars.
Any new-built HSR system will be electric.
Just curious, given all these advances in JS speed, are there technical reasons why stuff like Python, Ruby and Perl aren't getting similar improvements in speed?
Just needs someone to do the work...
One non-JS language that has seen some excellent tracing JIT development is Lua, in the form of Mike Pall's LuaJIT project.
Even though the standard Lua interpreter is already amazingly fast (far faster than the standard python/ruby/perl implementations), LuaJIT makes many programs run much faster yet.
The awesome bar is one of two things I miss after switching to Chrome. Chrome tries to pack too much into the URL dropdown (search history, suggestions, etc) without doing any of it well. For instance on Firefox, I can type Q[tab] and have my comments page up. sl[tab] is slashdot. c[tab] is my bank site. f[tab] is the firehose journal search I use. Just about any site I go to is four keystrokes max counting hitting enter to load the site. On chrome, I have to type sl[right arrow]/[down arrow][right arrow] to get to my comments page. Note that moving the hand between the arrow keys and the main keyboard adds extra effort.
Yeah I agree about those annoyances. What I find even more irritating about chrome's "awesome bar" variant is the delays -- when you type something into the address bar, it will immediately show you some possible completions ... and then will add others over time, often taking as long as 3-4 seconds to really generate the whole list; almost always I find the most-used completions are the last ones added! With FF, you don't get this sort of delay at all, it basically generates everything almost immediately, which together with its better keyboard handling (compared to chrome) and better search algorithms (like you, I find one or two letters is usually enough with FF; chrome often takes multiple words), makes FF's AB far more usable than chrome's.
[And this is not a minor issue -- despite the stupid name, the AB is a hugely important feature: it basically can replace bookmarks for most uses, and is far faster and more convenient.]
As an early adopter of FF, I'm now considering a switch to Chrome. Ugh.
I know chrome is very hyped right now, and by all means you should try it out, but don't think it's some cure-all that will solve all your problems with FF and have none of its own. It's not, and won't.
Maybe on average it will prove the best for you, but chrome isn't a magic bullet.
[I use both FF and chrome; both manage to annoy me on a daily basis...]
This implies that by using sun and wind to create electricity somehow oil usage will drop. While I heavily support the switch to alternative fuels, this is just not true. Most oil is used for transportation rather than electricity. So the only way to save oil by switching to solar or wind is to use electric car.
Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
Ok, so quitting the car habit is a hard task in the sprawltastic U.S., but much of Europe is quite suited to better transportation mechanisms.
The problem is that you live in an area with crappy theaters and crappy theater patrons; I guess maybe you live in the U.S. For you maybe it makes sense to watch at home.
I, on the other hand, live in an area where theaters are large, very clean and well maintained, with comfortable seats, and the patrons are quiet and respectful (and thin!). Yes, even the kids. The theater experience here blows away any home system unless you have agoraphobia...
Going to a theater is more than just technical superiority, it's a social experience. That can be bad if the other patrons are all jerks (or if you are a recluse), but it can very much enhance the experience if they're not -- shared laughter, the pleasant buzz of conversation on a summer's night before a late horror show begins (as you sip your beer!), the collective gasp of the crowd when the hero makes a narrow escape in an action movie. Even if you have friends over, it's an experience you simply don't get in a "home theater," and (along with a better viewing experience) makes seeing a movie in a real theater very much worth the price in many cases.
... and of course there's usually not much stopping you from wearing them much long than that -- I've worn my current frames for ~15 years just 'cause I really like them, and I knew a girl that wore frames she inherited from her father!
As for aesthetics, that's obviously very subjective; I kinda dig chicks with glasses ... I just ... like them. (a friend recently got lasik and stopped wearing glasses, and it was a little sad... something distinctive was lost.)
To summarize: Glasses rule!
This man is a blight upon humanity... He wasn't just some tangential person either, he was deep into that shit running their propaganda errands. Explain to me why we'd ever listen to this analcyst?
Sure Rob Enderle is a world-class idiot, but are there any "analysts" which aren't idiots?
Pretty much everything I've ever seen attributed in the press to "an analyst," was quite clearly clueless bullshit puked out by someone who's figured out that the press isn't picky about certain subjects, and that he can just randomly spout whatever nonsense he wants without any research or thought, and get paid for it.
I agree that the new kindle is very enticing, and I also think the article is stupid: the kindle is definitely not a "tablet computer," nor should it be, and the two markets are not going to "slam together" any more than people are going to start replacing their cellphones with ipads. The ipad, at least, is a very different thing, with very different strengths and weaknesses and it's useful for a very different set of tasks. Trying to make the kindle into one would be stupid, because it would entail giving up most of the advantages of the current kindle, regardless of new display tech. Even ignoring the non-optimal-for-reading display, the size of the ipad, the weight, the CPU power necessary to run general apps, the battery power required to run it all, and the high price, are all attributes that make some sense given Apple's target, but which do not make sense for an e-reader.
Luckily Amazon (unlike Rob Enderle) is smart enough to realize that, and seem to be focusing relentlessly on making the kindle as good an e-reader as they can.
works great in iceweasel (aka firefox) 3.6.7 though
Keep in mind that Nick Gillespie's entire career has been devoted to making the unreasonable sound reasonable...
Yeah, and there are certainly places where FF is better than chrome -- e.g., both have similar "awesome bar" things, but FF's is hugely faster and better at coming up with appropriate matches than chrome's. This is not a small issue for me -- I've come to rely on the AB instead of using bookmarks (chrome's "blank page menu" thing is more user-friendly, but vastly more limiting).
I use both browsers -- FF at home, where my machine has lots of memory, and chrome at work, where memory restrictions make the ability to reclaim memory by closing tabs hugely convenient (though, despite that convenience, chrome seem to actually use a fair bit more memory than FF for equivalent tasks) -- so I think I have a generally balanced view of the two.
I'd say that although chrome is a slick browser with some really nice features (process-per-tab being the obvious one), it's kind of over-hyped in general, and it's hardly unambiguously better than FF (as many comments in this thread seem to be suggesting). Both are great browsers, and both will get better in the future; google's made it clear that they've no problem with FF stealing chrome's best features, and indeed hopes they do.