I second this. Students in dorms cover their walls with all sorts of things—when I was in college, one of my friends had 99% of his wall surface area covered with tin-foil (not kidding; his stated purpose was to drive his roommate away, but... oO; ).
Indeed, the "cover walls with soundproof foam" idea actually seems rather more practical in a dorm than elsewhere because of the typically small size of dorm rooms...
If that is your problem at least with Samsung you have the mini models.
The problem is that the mini models aren't just smaller screens, they're lower-spec generally. I suspect that most people that don't like the current bloat-o-phone/phablet trend actually want a nice fast processor, high-resolution display, lots of memory, a good camera, etc, they just don't want the ridiculously oversized phones. I know I certainly don't.
It isn't just Samsung, this sort of simple-minded "bigger = better, smaller = old phone for kids" mindset seems very common amongst all the smartphone manufacturers. [Samsung perhaps deserves a bit more of the blame, though, as they're an industry leader, so other makers probably tend to follow what they're doing to some extent.]
I'm generally in agreement that using 'orthogonal' outside of mathematical contexts is a bit off; but it's hardly a synonym for 'tangential'.
In a computer software context, "orthogonal" has the huge advantage that it's idiomatic. People will immediately understand your meaning... (with "tangential" they'd just go "huh?")
Most people I hear using "orthogonal" outside that context are involved in computers, so for them, it's perfectly normal.
Er, more correctly, some Chinese hate Japan. Many Chinese do not, of course, particularly amongst the younger generations (I live in Japan and know quite a few Chinese people). The same is true of Korea (a younger Korean I know described the well-publicized antipathy towards Japan as "sort of true, but kind of an old-person thing").
In any case, Japan does a lot of business with China (not only does Japan outsource huge amounts of manufacturing to China, but China is Japan's biggest export market, by far), and if this sort of project had gone through, it would be "strictly business," not based on mutual admiration....
Do you think Japan would ever risk becoming reliant on China for any significant amount of their energy supply, at least while China has its current political system?
It'd be neat as an optional "top up" source of power, but it seems a non-starter for anything more, at least in the short/medium term. For now, Japan's gotta figure something out on their own.
Lua by itself is pretty abysmal, performance wise and IMHO
This is wrong. The standard Lua implementation is one of the fastest widely used scripting languages out there, by a long shot. It blows python, ruby, etc, out of the water.
LuaJIT can be even faster (sometimes on par with optimized C), particularly number-crunching loops, but in many cases, it doesn't really offer much speedup over standard Lua. [and of course LuaJIT has some drawbacks compared to normal Lua, like increased complex, reduced portability (if you rely on LuaJIT specific features), and a smaller maximum memory limit due to details of its nan-encoded object representation.]
... insanely complex for no apparent reason (like trying to use libpng...)
This is just wrong.
libpng isn't entirely trivial, but it's actually very simple to use, and quite flexible as well—e.g., it's easy to make the library handle all the weird cases automatically itself, but the option exists for you to handle them too if desired. All in all, I'd say it nicely hits the sweet spot between ease-of-use and power.
It's vastly better designed than many other image libraries (e.g. all the horrid examples that only support whole-image I/O into some awful least-common-denominator image format).
From what I read, they've currently got four Iron Dome batteries, with a fifth due to be delivered soon. However that isn't enough to cover all the areas at risk, so they're moving them around randomly and in secret.
Although this means that Hamas doesn't know which areas are currently not protected, they sometimes get lucky and target such an area by chance. According to the story (sorry, I can't remember where it was), almost all the rockets that make it through are such chance shots into unprotected areas.
they say a plane is efficient compared to a car but forget that cars and planes don't use the same fuel so it's bullshit, but I'm hoping their numbers are right
The numbers you give for the 747 don't look unreasonable to me, but it seems worth noting that jet airplane efficiency is downright awful compared to other mass-transit. While jet planes are the only practical solution in many cases (overseas, extremely long haul), they're overused in the U.S., where poorly developed regional transit leads to an over-reliance on inefficient (in terms of fuel usage, landling slots, etc) regional jets. It would be a good idea to better develop regional and medium-distance rail, and concentrate on using air-travel for cases where it works better (many countries have already done this of course).
5 gallons of jet fuel per mile is around 450MJ/km; if we assume a 747 holds 450 seats, that's about 1MJ/seat-km. A bit of googling suggests that this is roughly accurate, but probably based on cruising efficiency only; takeoff/landing is much less efficient, and regional jets are signficantly less efficient than large ones.
Modern HSR (and modern non-HSR electric rail) uses around 0.15MJ/seat-km or better....
It also depends on what you're doing with it—sometimes anti-aliasing does the job (even if it's a little uglier), but sometimes you really do want high-resolution.
For instance, Japanese phones with very high DPI displays (approx the same as the apple retina) take advantage of the high resolution by displaying complex Japanese characters at extremely small sizes to fit more on the screen. For instance, when displaying a dictionary completion screen, when there are potentially hundreds of completions, it's far more convenient to scan a bunch of characters on one screen (even at small sizes) than to page though a bunch of screens; lower-resolution+anti-aliasing doesn't work well in this application because many characters simply become indistinguishable blobs, and one doesn't have the context that usually allows one to recognize poorly rendered characters.
Regardless of which side it favors, this is very unprofessional behavior coming from a judge presiding over a very influential case that could result in millions, even billions, of dollars in damages.
No it's not.
There's no requirement that judges stick to mild language; it's not at all unusual for judges to be frustrated with obviously stupid games played by lawyers arguing a case, and using harsh language does not indicate prejudice. That it didn't indicate prejudice in this case is abundantly clear from the context of the statement—Apple's request was simply bizarre, and her remark simply reflected that (using a standard epithet which means exactly that).
If Apple wants to be treated more "professionally," it's very clear how they should precede: act more professionally themselves and stop playing stupid games in court.
I once took a bus from Seattle to Pittsburgh, about 3500km.
Sitting on a bus for three days, non-stop, was... not so fun...:(
[Very long-distance trains, by contrast, are actually quite fun, even in the U.S. and Canada where they're pretty slow; rail's great way to travel if you've got some time...]
It just seems wrong that a product EULA can make you forfeit your rights like this.
Can it? Such terms may not have any legal force. There are certain rights you cannot sign away (especially with something as dodgy as an EULA, rather than a real contract).
They're free to write whatever they want in hope of scaring people away from doing certain things, of course, but that does not make what they write true...
LOL! Reminds of when everyone jumped on the "translucent plastic" bandwagon. I recall seeing microwaves, and even irons, in blueberry iMac colours. I was amused.
That particular look in housewares was popular way before the first imac, in japan at least...
[I've no doubt the imac's popularity had some effect, but it's pretty likely that retailers could just order existing products that fit the "look"...]
I like the gnome shell (and I was previously a gnome 2 user). It was originally (years ago) very buggy and flaky, but now it works quite well, and is actually very nice... nicer, I think, than the er, "classic" style panel. It keeps out of my way more, and is easier and quicker to use when I need it.
People are often quite conservative when it comes to a familiar environment, and will react negatively to any change, and I think regardless of any merits, it was inevitable that there would be a lot of moaning about a change as drastic as you see in gnome 3. On the other hand, it's really quite nice to see somebody actually trying out new ideas instead of just blindly sticking with the same creaky old stuff, which was hardly perfect, even if it had the benefit of familiarity.
So far the comment all seem to lean toward "Al Franken is a liberal idiot so his idea much be awful no matter how much I might applaud if Ron Paul had said it".
... which is particularly bizarre, as Franken has a reputation as one of the smartest and most thoughtful senators out there...
Slashdot Mirror
I second this. Students in dorms cover their walls with all sorts of things—when I was in college, one of my friends had 99% of his wall surface area covered with tin-foil (not kidding; his stated purpose was to drive his roommate away, but ... oO; ).
Indeed, the "cover walls with soundproof foam" idea actually seems rather more practical in a dorm than elsewhere because of the typically small size of dorm rooms...
If that is your problem at least with Samsung you have the mini models.
The problem is that the mini models aren't just smaller screens, they're lower-spec generally. I suspect that most people that don't like the current bloat-o-phone/phablet trend actually want a nice fast processor, high-resolution display, lots of memory, a good camera, etc, they just don't want the ridiculously oversized phones. I know I certainly don't.
It isn't just Samsung, this sort of simple-minded "bigger = better, smaller = old phone for kids" mindset seems very common amongst all the smartphone manufacturers. [Samsung perhaps deserves a bit more of the blame, though, as they're an industry leader, so other makers probably tend to follow what they're doing to some extent.]
I'm generally in agreement that using 'orthogonal' outside of mathematical contexts is a bit off; but it's hardly a synonym for 'tangential'.
In a computer software context, "orthogonal" has the huge advantage that it's idiomatic. People will immediately understand your meaning... (with "tangential" they'd just go "huh?")
Most people I hear using "orthogonal" outside that context are involved in computers, so for them, it's perfectly normal.
Also the Chinese hate Japan.
Er, more correctly, some Chinese hate Japan. Many Chinese do not, of course, particularly amongst the younger generations (I live in Japan and know quite a few Chinese people). The same is true of Korea (a younger Korean I know described the well-publicized antipathy towards Japan as "sort of true, but kind of an old-person thing").
In any case, Japan does a lot of business with China (not only does Japan outsource huge amounts of manufacturing to China, but China is Japan's biggest export market, by far), and if this sort of project had gone through, it would be "strictly business," not based on mutual admiration....
Do you think Japan would ever risk becoming reliant on China for any significant amount of their energy supply, at least while China has its current political system?
It'd be neat as an optional "top up" source of power, but it seems a non-starter for anything more, at least in the short/medium term. For now, Japan's gotta figure something out on their own.
Lua by itself is pretty abysmal, performance wise and IMHO
This is wrong. The standard Lua implementation is one of the fastest widely used scripting languages out there, by a long shot. It blows python, ruby, etc, out of the water.
LuaJIT can be even faster (sometimes on par with optimized C), particularly number-crunching loops, but in many cases, it doesn't really offer much speedup over standard Lua. [and of course LuaJIT has some drawbacks compared to normal Lua, like increased complex, reduced portability (if you rely on LuaJIT specific features), and a smaller maximum memory limit due to details of its nan-encoded object representation.]
This is just wrong.
libpng isn't entirely trivial, but it's actually very simple to use, and quite flexible as well—e.g., it's easy to make the library handle all the weird cases automatically itself, but the option exists for you to handle them too if desired. All in all, I'd say it nicely hits the sweet spot between ease-of-use and power.
It's vastly better designed than many other image libraries (e.g. all the horrid examples that only support whole-image I/O into some awful least-common-denominator image format).
or (c) the story on RT wasn't true. Given RT's usual really, really, bad fact-checking, (c) seems pretty likely...
From what I read, they've currently got four Iron Dome batteries, with a fifth due to be delivered soon. However that isn't enough to cover all the areas at risk, so they're moving them around randomly and in secret.
Although this means that Hamas doesn't know which areas are currently not protected, they sometimes get lucky and target such an area by chance. According to the story (sorry, I can't remember where it was), almost all the rockets that make it through are such chance shots into unprotected areas.
The numbers you give for the 747 don't look unreasonable to me, but it seems worth noting that jet airplane efficiency is downright awful compared to other mass-transit. While jet planes are the only practical solution in many cases (overseas, extremely long haul), they're overused in the U.S., where poorly developed regional transit leads to an over-reliance on inefficient (in terms of fuel usage, landling slots, etc) regional jets. It would be a good idea to better develop regional and medium-distance rail, and concentrate on using air-travel for cases where it works better (many countries have already done this of course).
5 gallons of jet fuel per mile is around 450MJ/km; if we assume a 747 holds 450 seats, that's about 1MJ/seat-km. A bit of googling suggests that this is roughly accurate, but probably based on cruising efficiency only; takeoff/landing is much less efficient, and regional jets are signficantly less efficient than large ones.
Modern HSR (and modern non-HSR electric rail) uses around 0.15MJ/seat-km or better....
Seems pretty obvious to me: The Pilot HI-TEC-C 0.25mm
Super thin, extremely consistent, line (no blobbing, faint-spots, or slow starts), widely available in a range of colors, and rather cheap.
The HI-TEC-C line has been around for ages, and there's a reason it remains popular in the crazily volatile world of mass-market pens...
larger animal often 'toy' with smaller until they die. eg: Cats.
"Well I planned to eat it, but ooooooooh, string! STring! String!"
It also depends on what you're doing with it—sometimes anti-aliasing does the job (even if it's a little uglier), but sometimes you really do want high-resolution.
For instance, Japanese phones with very high DPI displays (approx the same as the apple retina) take advantage of the high resolution by displaying complex Japanese characters at extremely small sizes to fit more on the screen. For instance, when displaying a dictionary completion screen, when there are potentially hundreds of completions, it's far more convenient to scan a bunch of characters on one screen (even at small sizes) than to page though a bunch of screens; lower-resolution+anti-aliasing doesn't work well in this application because many characters simply become indistinguishable blobs, and one doesn't have the context that usually allows one to recognize poorly rendered characters.
Regardless of which side it favors, this is very unprofessional behavior coming from a judge presiding over a very influential case that could result in millions, even billions, of dollars in damages.
No it's not.
There's no requirement that judges stick to mild language; it's not at all unusual for judges to be frustrated with obviously stupid games played by lawyers arguing a case, and using harsh language does not indicate prejudice. That it didn't indicate prejudice in this case is abundantly clear from the context of the statement—Apple's request was simply bizarre, and her remark simply reflected that (using a standard epithet which means exactly that).
If Apple wants to be treated more "professionally," it's very clear how they should precede: act more professionally themselves and stop playing stupid games in court.
... "Sexual harassment" typically come from young introvert males with weak social antennas.
Er, but that's completely untrue. Sexual harrassment has always been the perview of type-A and extrovert "guy culture."
Hmm, how about vertical text layout?
So does the kindle support ePub yet ...?
(or non-latin scripts?)
I once took a bus from Seattle to Pittsburgh, about 3500km.
Sitting on a bus for three days, non-stop, was ... not so fun... :(
[Very long-distance trains, by contrast, are actually quite fun, even in the U.S. and Canada where they're pretty slow; rail's great way to travel if you've got some time...]
Hmmm, "nobody can use an ad-blocker in an app"...?
It just seems wrong that a product EULA can make you forfeit your rights like this.
Can it? Such terms may not have any legal force. There are certain rights you cannot sign away (especially with something as dodgy as an EULA, rather than a real contract).
They're free to write whatever they want in hope of scaring people away from doing certain things, of course, but that does not make what they write true...
No, no, it's Carmack that slashdot loves, 'cause he was the smart one.
Romero is the other guy, the one who was trying to look like Fabio.
LOL! Reminds of when everyone jumped on the "translucent plastic" bandwagon. I recall seeing microwaves, and even irons, in blueberry iMac colours. I was amused.
That particular look in housewares was popular way before the first imac, in japan at least...
[I've no doubt the imac's popularity had some effect, but it's pretty likely that retailers could just order existing products that fit the "look"...]
I like the gnome shell (and I was previously a gnome 2 user). It was originally (years ago) very buggy and flaky, but now it works quite well, and is actually very nice ... nicer, I think, than the er, "classic" style panel. It keeps out of my way more, and is easier and quicker to use when I need it.
People are often quite conservative when it comes to a familiar environment, and will react negatively to any change, and I think regardless of any merits, it was inevitable that there would be a lot of moaning about a change as drastic as you see in gnome 3. On the other hand, it's really quite nice to see somebody actually trying out new ideas instead of just blindly sticking with the same creaky old stuff, which was hardly perfect, even if it had the benefit of familiarity.
that's really pretty cool...
So far the comment all seem to lean toward "Al Franken is a liberal idiot so his idea much be awful no matter how much I might applaud if Ron Paul had said it".
... which is particularly bizarre, as Franken has a reputation as one of the smartest and most thoughtful senators out there...