The problem is that every window would be free floating and that would be time consuming to manage. I'd be nice to be able to define grids that you can "snap" windows to.
Isn't that what tiling window managers are for? They seemed to be all the rage some time ago.
Personally, I don't really understand the multi-monitor craze. I'm fine with virtual desktops so I can focus properly on one thing at a time. I think the whole point of computers is that you can handle much more information than what's visible at once, and for that to work you need some abstract thinking. In a sense, I want to free my thoughts instead of filling my entire visual field with data. Kind of the same reason why I don't listen to background music and I don't have art on the walls near the workspace.
I have one that's worse than this. The manual for my car has chapters like "EMP", "JJ", "EM", and so on. They're not in alphabetical order. Within each chapter, pages are just numbered starting at 1. Chapter code at the top of the page, number at the bottom. What sort of mental defective thinks this is a good idea?
I think it was about 10 years ago that there was this movement trying to get people to be "real" on the internet because if you are presenting yourself openly you are less likely to be an asshole online. This lead to two significant discoveries; a lot of people are fake as shit online and terrified of their dirty laundry, a lot of people I know are absolute assholes.
Good point. Like any attempt to improve your image, this quickly turns against itself. For instance, a row of lawyers in suits on the website of a hip new startup doesn't exactly instil confidence in its tech.
The early Internet (and BBSes etc.) was nice because it were faceless, and you would be judged by you merits rather than mugshots. Fast forward quarter a century, and it's all about posting polished images of your luxurious lifestyle.
It's not unusual for a developer to turn a large, high-res second display 90 degrees to have a two foot+ tall screen sitting on their desk like a tower, to allow for seeing huge swaths of traces, logs, or source code without having to scroll.
Thus ruining subpixel antialiasing for text. The R, G, B subpixels are normally vertical bars, so they can be used to increase the resolution of text, which has more vertical than horizontal lines. For movies this doesn't matter, so it would make sense to have horizontal subpixels in the "movie" orientation instead. OTOH, with increasing resolutions there's less need for antialiasing tricks overall.
It all depends on what you mean by "fractal." The term has no precise mathematical meaning.
If you're going to dispute something that Mandelbrot himself said about fractals, then please provide some more info. I have merely studied fractal geometry as a part of my advanced math studies. I would say anything with a non-integer dimension is a fractal. Of course, you'll have a bunch of different definitions for dimension, but they generally agree in the sense of defining which objects are fractal. In this case, the edge of the Mandelbrot set has a dimension between 1 and 2.
Mandelbrot's... yes, he is the guy who came up with the Mandelbrot fractal
Not quite! The Mandelbrot set* as the index set for stable/connected Julia sets was known by Fatou and Julia around 1920. It was later named in honour of Benoit Mandelbrot.
*I sat through a three-lecture series by Mandelbrot in 1999 when I was an undergraduate in Cambridge. I distinctly remember him saying "The Mandelbrot set is not a fractal. It's beyond fractals." In simple terms, I think he referred to the fact that it's the edge of the set that is a fractal; like coastlines, the length of the edge depends on how precisely you measure it. But the set itself is "simply" a 2D area. Of course, due to the fractal edge it's hard to define its area exactly, but it doesn't run off into infinity when you increase the precision (as happens with the coastline).
Exactly. The scientific method is all about publishing your methods, so that others can check and duplicate your work. What's worse, "scientists" who use closed software cannot even know what they're doing in their own lab. That's worse than a math exam answer with just the result and "I did it on a calculator".
With determinism, everything is on its set path, so we don't have free will.
But if everything is truly random at a fundamental level, it doesn't get any better. If the outcome of every decision is truly random, you're not actually making the choice.
So IMHO, free will isn't a question of determinism vs. randomness. At least not a binary question.
Another source of RNG is radioactive decay, though that's not terribly commonly used thanks to the hardware requirements.
Radioactive decay is fundamentally a quantum effect, which is why we cannot predict individual decays, only the macroscale statistics. So the article might have a new method per se, but simply using quantum effects wouldn't be new.
they "improved their data" by only looking at sequences where the bits were almost perfectly uniformly 50/50 1 and 0, which is precisely not the right way to ensure good randomness: true random sequences usually don't obey uniformity, except in the limit as the length of the sequence goes to infinity, and requiring uniformity (or near-uniformity) in a "random" sequence reduces the entropy. That tells me they don't really understand randomness, which does not bode well for their claims.
I've written a HWRNG for FPGAs, and it was frustrating to test and tweak it to pass the tests in rng-tools based on FIPS 140-2. One of the tests fails upon too long stretches of 0s or 1s, for example. I guess for practical purposes you want something like short-term randomness; if your 10-second sample of white noise is all DC, it doesn't Bode well for your frequency response curve.
Assuming the study is valid, the real question is whether it's unhealthy to be a night owl, or that it's unhealthy to be a night owl with the structure of our society.
The way I read the article, it's the latter, though it's not very clear.
In general, I find it amazing how governments and businesses are willing to sacrifice the working performance of people in the name of conforming office hours. All this talk about increasing competition and efficiency, and yet only a few companies are letting people work in ways they perform the best.
but not my Phenom II 840 (quad-core) from 2010. Both are still going strong after all these years.
This is the last non-backdoored x86 CPU available, so that's especially painful.
Which backdoor do you mean? PSP (the equivalent to Intel Management Engine) is not found on the Bulldozer family, which was being developed and sold until Ryzen came out (and it's probably still available). On the mobile and low-power market, they were quicker to change into a new architecture (Bobcat to Jaguar) so PSP appeared there around 2013.
Jesus tits, not this again. Spend a second on wikipedia. 'Unsprung mass'
I'm not the original AC, but I like to have a wider perspective on things than some 100-year-old tradition of car design. I imagine some people at Tesla have actually considered the pros and cons with an open mind, as they seem pretty innovative in general.
Electric motors don't have similar scaling issues as ICEs, so it might be a good tradeoff to have one small motor per wheel. I imagine it's a plus when you get rid of a mechanical drive train, along with friction and other losses. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
Things are much the same now - there are so many things that computers can do, it's hard to actually see them as new or interesting and they are completely un-understandable for a developing mind.
Computers themselves are boring in this way, but there's an infinity of things that get really exciting when you apply computers to them. To me, some of the biggest things are music and math.
After playing in a youth orchestra for a couple of years, one of the fellow musicians introduced me to music trackers (this was in the early 90s). Suddenly I could make entire pieces myself, rather than just playing one voice in a huge band. I've ended up composing entire musical plays in the past years.
As for math, I've always been interested in it, but I ended up with a more applied-science career due to a number of other interests. About a decade ago, I was stuck for a couple of summer months with nothing to do, and I discovered Project Euler. I regained some early interest in pure math, and eventually I went back to the university for its math department. I completed all the coursework for a secondary Master's degree, but in another twist of fate I never finished my thesis. From a course of fractal geometry, I got lost into doing math art, and got myself a publication which kind of makes it up for the thesis. I continue to make this into another career, which would never have been possible without applying computers to the math problems.
So I have these two wonderful "art" things going on, all thanks to these nerdy and completely non-artsy computers. But more generally, thanks to a few different disciplines put together. I also work with a playwright/director who has a background in a few natural sciences besides a few arts, and it shows compared to those writers that only went to art school.
Windows is all about binary compatibility, so it doesn't help much if just the OS is ported. Meanwhile, those using open source software on Linux will have a much easier time, since it's already well supported on ARM.
If Apple switches to ARM based A-series processors then people dual booting macs with Windows/Linux will be out of luck.
Are you seriously suggesting Linux doesn't run on ARM? I'm not sure where to even begin, but I guess you could begin with your router, phone etc. and any other ARM device you can think of, and guess what they're running right now.
Linux probably won't boot immediately when the first Apple Risc Machine comes out, but the issues are relatively minor. The same issues were solved for Linux on PPC/x86 Macs in the past. OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple put in some extra barriers against dual booting.
If you're a government or a business, ask yourself which is more important: (a) being early at work, or (b) good performance at work. Because in all likelihood you can't have both.
Slashdot Mirror
For a brief moment I wondered if this move was intended to restore primality, for 99 surely isn't prime. But 119 = 7*17, so nope.
I'm a £inuk$ fanboi, spelled thusly because of all the money it saves and lets me make.
The problem is that every window would be free floating and that would be time consuming to manage. I'd be nice to be able to define grids that you can "snap" windows to.
Isn't that what tiling window managers are for? They seemed to be all the rage some time ago.
Personally, I don't really understand the multi-monitor craze. I'm fine with virtual desktops so I can focus properly on one thing at a time. I think the whole point of computers is that you can handle much more information than what's visible at once, and for that to work you need some abstract thinking. In a sense, I want to free my thoughts instead of filling my entire visual field with data. Kind of the same reason why I don't listen to background music and I don't have art on the walls near the workspace.
aka Spectrometer, Near-Infrared Integral Field.
I have one that's worse than this. The manual for my car has chapters like "EMP", "JJ", "EM", and so on. They're not in alphabetical order. Within each chapter, pages are just numbered starting at 1. Chapter code at the top of the page, number at the bottom. What sort of mental defective thinks this is a good idea?
EMP? Man, that's a bad ass-car.
I think it was about 10 years ago that there was this movement trying to get people to be "real" on the internet because if you are presenting yourself openly you are less likely to be an asshole online. This lead to two significant discoveries; a lot of people are fake as shit online and terrified of their dirty laundry, a lot of people I know are absolute assholes.
Good point. Like any attempt to improve your image, this quickly turns against itself. For instance, a row of lawyers in suits on the website of a hip new startup doesn't exactly instil confidence in its tech.
You've got one er too many there. The word for both the person and the act is tinker. Sure, you can use tinkerer these days, but it's unnecessary.
"Tinker" is someone who makes tin cans. I guess "tinkerer" would be a mother of many in a family of tinkers.
The early Internet (and BBSes etc.) was nice because it were faceless, and you would be judged by you merits rather than mugshots. Fast forward quarter a century, and it's all about posting polished images of your luxurious lifestyle.
It's not unusual for a developer to turn a large, high-res second display 90 degrees to have a two foot+ tall screen sitting on their desk like a tower, to allow for seeing huge swaths of traces, logs, or source code without having to scroll.
Thus ruining subpixel antialiasing for text. The R, G, B subpixels are normally vertical bars, so they can be used to increase the resolution of text, which has more vertical than horizontal lines. For movies this doesn't matter, so it would make sense to have horizontal subpixels in the "movie" orientation instead. OTOH, with increasing resolutions there's less need for antialiasing tricks overall.
It all depends on what you mean by "fractal." The term has no precise mathematical meaning.
If you're going to dispute something that Mandelbrot himself said about fractals, then please provide some more info. I have merely studied fractal geometry as a part of my advanced math studies. I would say anything with a non-integer dimension is a fractal. Of course, you'll have a bunch of different definitions for dimension, but they generally agree in the sense of defining which objects are fractal. In this case, the edge of the Mandelbrot set has a dimension between 1 and 2.
Mandelbrot's ... yes, he is the guy who came up with the Mandelbrot fractal
Not quite! The Mandelbrot set* as the index set for stable/connected Julia sets was known by Fatou and Julia around 1920. It was later named in honour of Benoit Mandelbrot.
*I sat through a three-lecture series by Mandelbrot in 1999 when I was an undergraduate in Cambridge. I distinctly remember him saying "The Mandelbrot set is not a fractal. It's beyond fractals." In simple terms, I think he referred to the fact that it's the edge of the set that is a fractal; like coastlines, the length of the edge depends on how precisely you measure it. But the set itself is "simply" a 2D area. Of course, due to the fractal edge it's hard to define its area exactly, but it doesn't run off into infinity when you increase the precision (as happens with the coastline).
Exactly. The scientific method is all about publishing your methods, so that others can check and duplicate your work. What's worse, "scientists" who use closed software cannot even know what they're doing in their own lab. That's worse than a math exam answer with just the result and "I did it on a calculator".
I remember news about plastic-eating bacteria back in the 90s. The local newspaper had a cartoon with bugs munching on credit cards.
They [AMD] never hold up in real world tests
like Meltdown, for example.
So we do have free will after all.
With determinism, everything is on its set path, so we don't have free will.
But if everything is truly random at a fundamental level, it doesn't get any better. If the outcome of every decision is truly random, you're not actually making the choice.
So IMHO, free will isn't a question of determinism vs. randomness. At least not a binary question.
Another source of RNG is radioactive decay, though that's not terribly commonly used thanks to the hardware requirements.
Radioactive decay is fundamentally a quantum effect, which is why we cannot predict individual decays, only the macroscale statistics. So the article might have a new method per se, but simply using quantum effects wouldn't be new.
they "improved their data" by only looking at sequences where the bits were almost perfectly uniformly 50/50 1 and 0, which is precisely not the right way to ensure good randomness: true random sequences usually don't obey uniformity, except in the limit as the length of the sequence goes to infinity, and requiring uniformity (or near-uniformity) in a "random" sequence reduces the entropy. That tells me they don't really understand randomness, which does not bode well for their claims.
I've written a HWRNG for FPGAs, and it was frustrating to test and tweak it to pass the tests in rng-tools based on FIPS 140-2. One of the tests fails upon too long stretches of 0s or 1s, for example. I guess for practical purposes you want something like short-term randomness; if your 10-second sample of white noise is all DC, it doesn't Bode well for your frequency response curve.
Assuming the study is valid, the real question is whether it's unhealthy to be a night owl, or that it's unhealthy to be a night owl with the structure of our society.
The way I read the article, it's the latter, though it's not very clear.
In general, I find it amazing how governments and businesses are willing to sacrifice the working performance of people in the name of conforming office hours. All this talk about increasing competition and efficiency, and yet only a few companies are letting people work in ways they perform the best.
but not my Phenom II 840 (quad-core) from 2010. Both are still going strong after all these years.
This is the last non-backdoored x86 CPU available, so that's especially painful.
Which backdoor do you mean? PSP (the equivalent to Intel Management Engine) is not found on the Bulldozer family, which was being developed and sold until Ryzen came out (and it's probably still available). On the mobile and low-power market, they were quicker to change into a new architecture (Bobcat to Jaguar) so PSP appeared there around 2013.
Jesus tits, not this again. Spend a second on wikipedia. 'Unsprung mass'
I'm not the original AC, but I like to have a wider perspective on things than some 100-year-old tradition of car design. I imagine some people at Tesla have actually considered the pros and cons with an open mind, as they seem pretty innovative in general.
Electric motors don't have similar scaling issues as ICEs, so it might be a good tradeoff to have one small motor per wheel. I imagine it's a plus when you get rid of a mechanical drive train, along with friction and other losses. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
I win.
Things are much the same now - there are so many things that computers can do, it's hard to actually see them as new or interesting and they are completely un-understandable for a developing mind.
Computers themselves are boring in this way, but there's an infinity of things that get really exciting when you apply computers to them. To me, some of the biggest things are music and math.
After playing in a youth orchestra for a couple of years, one of the fellow musicians introduced me to music trackers (this was in the early 90s). Suddenly I could make entire pieces myself, rather than just playing one voice in a huge band. I've ended up composing entire musical plays in the past years.
As for math, I've always been interested in it, but I ended up with a more applied-science career due to a number of other interests. About a decade ago, I was stuck for a couple of summer months with nothing to do, and I discovered Project Euler. I regained some early interest in pure math, and eventually I went back to the university for its math department. I completed all the coursework for a secondary Master's degree, but in another twist of fate I never finished my thesis. From a course of fractal geometry, I got lost into doing math art, and got myself a publication which kind of makes it up for the thesis. I continue to make this into another career, which would never have been possible without applying computers to the math problems.
So I have these two wonderful "art" things going on, all thanks to these nerdy and completely non-artsy computers. But more generally, thanks to a few different disciplines put together. I also work with a playwright/director who has a background in a few natural sciences besides a few arts, and it shows compared to those writers that only went to art school.
Windows is all about binary compatibility, so it doesn't help much if just the OS is ported. Meanwhile, those using open source software on Linux will have a much easier time, since it's already well supported on ARM.
If Apple switches to ARM based A-series processors then people dual booting macs with Windows/Linux will be out of luck.
Are you seriously suggesting Linux doesn't run on ARM? I'm not sure where to even begin, but I guess you could begin with your router, phone etc. and any other ARM device you can think of, and guess what they're running right now.
Linux probably won't boot immediately when the first Apple Risc Machine comes out, but the issues are relatively minor. The same issues were solved for Linux on PPC/x86 Macs in the past. OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple put in some extra barriers against dual booting.
No can do, McDonalds might sue us for their trademarked "Coffee, hot as hell"...
My hipster friends used to go to McD for their coffee. They wanted to drink it before it was cool.
If you're a government or a business, ask yourself which is more important: (a) being early at work, or (b) good performance at work. Because in all likelihood you can't have both.