Seriously, though, proper cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are backed by math, not some silly agreements between people. But I'm not sure if those Tether tokens count as proper cryptocurrency.
I'm afraid we're too late trying to turn back the clock. Videos on webpages are some of the worst kind of this problem, and they're been popular at least since Youtube started around 2005. At the time, I thought it was idiotic to watch videos on a tiny part of a webpage vs. full screen with a proper player, but I guess that's what people wanted. Or perhaps normal people are completely helpless with their own computers, so everything has to be ready-made for the browser. And the advertisers must love the fact of autoplaying video clips.
PDF readers have their own stigma, IMHO, with websites urging you to download the one official Acrobat Reader, as if no free/open readers existed. So I can understand how the in-browser reader may feel like a better choice -- it's often open source anyway. And there's some logic in having a document renderer in an application that already renders documents. Still, the near history of computing looks like one worse choice after another, with the better choices being phased away.
It only choked on the pdf from this article where cpu went nuts
So the real problem is using a browser to render PDFs. We're using browsers to do half-assed duplicate work while proper tools for the job already exist.
As a tech community, I believe we should ensure victory for one of these less popular candidates:
(a) Nils Torvalds, Linus's father
(b) Petrus Pennanen, the Pirate Party candidate
It's a tough choice between the two, but I think we'll be happy either way, so let's start the social media engineering right away. Alas, we still use paper ballots, so no machines to hack there.
Or as I recently posted in another/. discussion, the g-factor is kind of like the master clock frequency of your brain. I don't think I'm alone with such computing analogies of cognition; for another example, learning things by heart remains a useful skill in the era of Google etc., due to caching and I/O latency. Memory and I/O analogies also explain issues in large organizations (e.g. SMP vs. clustering vs. globally distributed computing).
I also don't have much interest in measuring my own IQ. If it turns out very low, I'll be disappointed. If high, I'll be disappointed for not being highly succesful in academic/business life despite the potential. So I'll rather try and measure my success with actual success, rather than any potential indicators.
I still need to recompile for my primary desktop (Ubuntu 16.04).
Well, that seems weird. I use Gentoo and FF 57 was available as a binary.
But on the topic, I only switched from FF to Chromium fairly recently, and there's one simple feature I miss from FF and many other browsers: middle click pasting of the URL anywhere on the page. Having to carefully paste it into the address bar now feels idiotic in the same way that moving windows in Windows requires grabbing by the title bar (apparently, they missed the part of the desktop metaphor where you can move a paper document by poking it anywhere you like).
This! I also think there's unused potential in the number pad that's often crammed into larger laptops. I wouldn't want a number pad otherwise, but it could provide proper Home/End/PgUp/PgDn -- if only it implemented something like the classical layout. You'd get lots of useful keys with NumLock off, no need for Fn modifiers.
Also agree with the empty space issue. There's so much wrong with keyboards these days, probably related to how mice and touch screens are used; as if PgUp/Dn were made redundant by scroll wheels.
The smaller the laptop, the tighter the key spacing.
I wish this were true. Instead, I see 15'' laptops with the same keyboard as 12'' ones, and empty space on the sides. Or a numeric keypad crammed in to keep the keys small, and offset the typing area towards the left.
Numeric keypads on laptops are a special annoyance for another reason -- they often break the tradition where you can use keys 7/1/9/3 as Home/End/PgUp/PgDn when NumLock is off. These days, you generally need to press down Fn to access keys like PgUp/Dn, if you're lucky to have them at all.
Yes, it's a pet peeve of mine. As laptop keyboards, I prefer the Thinkpads from a few years back such as the x220, but it's hard to get anything like that with modern guts inside.
I prefer Julia to Matlab for everything other then debugging - the Matlab debugger is great compared to what is available for Julia.
As much as I love Julia, I agree it has its rough spots, but I think it's mostly because it's still under heavy development. Some of the other annoyances include
Slow to start, as it compiles the script every time. If you need batch processing of items in a loop, better write the loop within Julia.
Slow string handling. I need to output huge lists of numbers, and it's much faster to just print one at a time, and let the shell/OS concatenate them into a file.
I second Julia. It's basically Fortran updated for this decade; the block syntax is actually from Fortran, which IMHO is better than Python's indentation issue, without all the C-style line noise of punctuations.
(Shameless plug: see my math-art homepage, the static images are all created in Julia and gnuplot. For OpenGL animations, I use Python, as the OpenGL interface of Julia didn't seem quite ready when I started, though it might have improved since. Python is a nicer all-around language, but for math-heavy work, it's much nicer to have a native math syntax than having to use np.something() for every simple thing.)
In intelligence studies, there is a widely known concept of "general intelligence" or the g-factor. Basically, studies show that all of the different classes of intelligence (musical, mathematical, linguistic, etc.) are correlated to some extent. It can be interpreted as the master clock frequency of your brain, but as with different CPU architectures, it doesn't explain all of the differences in intelligence.
To me, the article seemed to imply there's absolutely no correlation between visual and other skills. This doesn't seem plausible with either the g-factor theory or everyday experience. Besides, like any other specific skill, it wouldn't be of much use in complete isolation without any other skills.
And my Seiko Kinetic has been running continuously for almost 10 years not needing any www connection to keep good time, nor battery changes, winding etc. All it needs is that I wear it at least 10 days every month.
Older AMD CPUs (read: Phenom 2 and earlier) do not have any kind of management processor. I don't know about the desktop versions of the earthmover cores (the FX-series), but a fair few of the mobile chips (the A-series) have it
The FX series don't have it, as they are family 15, and the PSP is only there starting from family 16: https://libreboot.org/faq.html... I think you can continue to buy FX CPUs for a while, as the (Ry)?Zen series is only now starting to make an impact in the marketplace.
More generally, how can I install my own OS on this hardware I bought? It's not like we're talking about a game console or some other appliance you don't really own...
Your type is always presenting false dichotomies.
Abolish capitalism is ALWAYS the 3rd option.
Please read my post again, especially the part "rich or otherwise highly successful". I think new technology can be a great tool in both abolishing capitalism, and in the daily post-capitalist life. You don't have to get back to living in caves (unless you're the type who is always presenting false dichotomies).
its the same damn shit over and over again that no one really wants but gets shoved onto us, then praised as a "technical innovation"
My two favourite examples: hoverboards that don't actually hover, and androids that aren't exactly humanoid robots. Image means everything, actual new technology not so much, unless it helps improve the image. In fact this already happened years ago: Google and Lucasfilm threatened to sue an actual robotics company with "droid" in its name. The company changed its name from Zendroid to Zenrobotics to avoid a lawsuit.
In a way, this is part of a larger quest of a vocabulary Nazi. For example, "cybernetics" used to have a specific technical meaning in control and feedback theory, but now "cyber" just means anything you do on a computer or teh internets. Along with "android" and "bandwidth", everything is collapsing into this vague computer/internet thingy, as if nothing of interest happened outside of them. New technical terms are only coined to describe a new piece of software (which in all likelihood reimplements something already discovered by 60s/70s programmers).
Can't we just ignore it until it becomes either established, obsolete, or discarded technology? We have protocols (however poor) for handling those things.
You can, be my guest. However, if you want to become rich or otherwise highly successful with a technology, you'll need to get involved with it way before this stage. Not necessarily embrace it in the same sense -- for example, you could write Android apps without wasting your life hooked on a phone, but not if you completely disregard them. I guess technically it would be possible to ignore everything around you and invent something brilliant that other people want, but in practice you'd need to know something about what's going on around you.
SMS developers were concerned that digital text traffic from cell users would disrupt voice communication and imposed a character limit.
Not quite. SMS was originally a kind of by-product of voice-only GSM, using the control channel for extra message data when it was free of other signals. Basically empty slots between the voice packets. This also explains why they are relatively expensive, since there's a lot of total data traffic per each actual message.
The initial concept also didn't involve phone-to-phone messages, it was more about broadcasting things like weather or traffic reports. In fact, my first GSM phone could only receive, not send any messages. For such uses, single short messages were considered long enough. Later, when phones could compose longer messages, they would be split into multiple proper SMS messages (which would show in your phone bill).
In a sense, it's possible that SMS flooding might disrupt the control signals, but from the basic concept it seems they really prioritized voice. Of course, this might be different in later systems since basic GSM.
If this problem continues to grow, it will make sense to 'segment' my computer technology. Keep the high-horsepower processers securely firewalled, and put older more secure hardware out 'on the perimeter' to do communications.
Incidentally, I currently have my Intel machines behind firewalls that run older AMD CPUs, i.e. no AMD equivalents of the hidden processors there. So I should be safe, right?
Its a good move for them, as they'll move more units.
People that want Ryzen will get Ryzen - Joe Consumer will get Intel with Radeon built in, because Joe Consumer buys Intel because GeekSquad told him to.
Good point -- it's about marketing awareness of AMD, in a way. Eventually the JCs might realize, if the integrated AMD GPU is good enough for them, then why not the entire AMD package deal, as it's cheaper than the Intel combo anyway.
For those who need discrete GPUs it won't matter either way. Frankly, my experience of AMD APUs hasn't been exactly stellar, and I'm not expecting a huge improvement this time. Integrated GPUs have their inherent limitations in power envelope and shared memory, so you won't get the best of Radeon anyway.
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You want to give me goats, are you insane?
Seriously, though, proper cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are backed by math, not some silly agreements between people. But I'm not sure if those Tether tokens count as proper cryptocurrency.
Nazis (or whatever you fear) might use your fonts, too.
Pro tip: don't design Fraktur fonts.
I'm afraid we're too late trying to turn back the clock. Videos on webpages are some of the worst kind of this problem, and they're been popular at least since Youtube started around 2005. At the time, I thought it was idiotic to watch videos on a tiny part of a webpage vs. full screen with a proper player, but I guess that's what people wanted. Or perhaps normal people are completely helpless with their own computers, so everything has to be ready-made for the browser. And the advertisers must love the fact of autoplaying video clips.
PDF readers have their own stigma, IMHO, with websites urging you to download the one official Acrobat Reader, as if no free/open readers existed. So I can understand how the in-browser reader may feel like a better choice -- it's often open source anyway. And there's some logic in having a document renderer in an application that already renders documents. Still, the near history of computing looks like one worse choice after another, with the better choices being phased away.
It only choked on the pdf from this article where cpu went nuts
So the real problem is using a browser to render PDFs. We're using browsers to do half-assed duplicate work while proper tools for the job already exist.
As a tech community, I believe we should ensure victory for one of these less popular candidates:
(a) Nils Torvalds, Linus's father
(b) Petrus Pennanen, the Pirate Party candidate
It's a tough choice between the two, but I think we'll be happy either way, so let's start the social media engineering right away. Alas, we still use paper ballots, so no machines to hack there.
Or as I recently posted in another /. discussion, the g-factor is kind of like the master clock frequency of your brain. I don't think I'm alone with such computing analogies of cognition; for another example, learning things by heart remains a useful skill in the era of Google etc., due to caching and I/O latency. Memory and I/O analogies also explain issues in large organizations (e.g. SMP vs. clustering vs. globally distributed computing).
I also don't have much interest in measuring my own IQ. If it turns out very low, I'll be disappointed. If high, I'll be disappointed for not being highly succesful in academic/business life despite the potential. So I'll rather try and measure my success with actual success, rather than any potential indicators.
I still need to recompile for my primary desktop (Ubuntu 16.04).
Well, that seems weird. I use Gentoo and FF 57 was available as a binary.
But on the topic, I only switched from FF to Chromium fairly recently, and there's one simple feature I miss from FF and many other browsers: middle click pasting of the URL anywhere on the page. Having to carefully paste it into the address bar now feels idiotic in the same way that moving windows in Windows requires grabbing by the title bar (apparently, they missed the part of the desktop metaphor where you can move a paper document by poking it anywhere you like).
Well, I wanted a robot servant and all I got was a stupid phone.
This! I also think there's unused potential in the number pad that's often crammed into larger laptops. I wouldn't want a number pad otherwise, but it could provide proper Home/End/PgUp/PgDn -- if only it implemented something like the classical layout. You'd get lots of useful keys with NumLock off, no need for Fn modifiers.
Also agree with the empty space issue. There's so much wrong with keyboards these days, probably related to how mice and touch screens are used; as if PgUp/Dn were made redundant by scroll wheels.
The smaller the laptop, the tighter the key spacing.
I wish this were true. Instead, I see 15'' laptops with the same keyboard as 12'' ones, and empty space on the sides. Or a numeric keypad crammed in to keep the keys small, and offset the typing area towards the left.
Numeric keypads on laptops are a special annoyance for another reason -- they often break the tradition where you can use keys 7/1/9/3 as Home/End/PgUp/PgDn when NumLock is off. These days, you generally need to press down Fn to access keys like PgUp/Dn, if you're lucky to have them at all.
Yes, it's a pet peeve of mine. As laptop keyboards, I prefer the Thinkpads from a few years back such as the x220, but it's hard to get anything like that with modern guts inside.
I prefer Julia to Matlab for everything other then debugging - the Matlab debugger is great compared to what is available for Julia.
As much as I love Julia, I agree it has its rough spots, but I think it's mostly because it's still under heavy development. Some of the other annoyances include
I second Julia. It's basically Fortran updated for this decade; the block syntax is actually from Fortran, which IMHO is better than Python's indentation issue, without all the C-style line noise of punctuations.
(Shameless plug: see my math-art homepage, the static images are all created in Julia and gnuplot. For OpenGL animations, I use Python, as the OpenGL interface of Julia didn't seem quite ready when I started, though it might have improved since. Python is a nicer all-around language, but for math-heavy work, it's much nicer to have a native math syntax than having to use np.something() for every simple thing.)
In intelligence studies, there is a widely known concept of "general intelligence" or the g-factor. Basically, studies show that all of the different classes of intelligence (musical, mathematical, linguistic, etc.) are correlated to some extent. It can be interpreted as the master clock frequency of your brain, but as with different CPU architectures, it doesn't explain all of the differences in intelligence.
To me, the article seemed to imply there's absolutely no correlation between visual and other skills. This doesn't seem plausible with either the g-factor theory or everyday experience. Besides, like any other specific skill, it wouldn't be of much use in complete isolation without any other skills.
I'm playing this text adventure game called Linux, and I keep getting eaten by a GNU.
as far as I'm concerned solar is proven.
[citation needed]
I live in my mother's basement, you insensitive clod!
And my Seiko Kinetic has been running continuously for almost 10 years not needing any www connection to keep good time, nor battery changes, winding etc. All it needs is that I wear it at least 10 days every month.
Or one special Saturday night every now and then.
Older AMD CPUs (read: Phenom 2 and earlier) do not have any kind of management processor. I don't know about the desktop versions of the earthmover cores (the FX-series), but a fair few of the mobile chips (the A-series) have it
The FX series don't have it, as they are family 15, and the PSP is only there starting from family 16: https://libreboot.org/faq.html... I think you can continue to buy FX CPUs for a while, as the (Ry)?Zen series is only now starting to make an impact in the marketplace.
More generally, how can I install my own OS on this hardware I bought? It's not like we're talking about a game console or some other appliance you don't really own...
Your type is always presenting false dichotomies. Abolish capitalism is ALWAYS the 3rd option.
Please read my post again, especially the part "rich or otherwise highly successful". I think new technology can be a great tool in both abolishing capitalism, and in the daily post-capitalist life. You don't have to get back to living in caves (unless you're the type who is always presenting false dichotomies).
its the same damn shit over and over again that no one really wants but gets shoved onto us, then praised as a "technical innovation"
My two favourite examples: hoverboards that don't actually hover, and androids that aren't exactly humanoid robots. Image means everything, actual new technology not so much, unless it helps improve the image. In fact this already happened years ago: Google and Lucasfilm threatened to sue an actual robotics company with "droid" in its name. The company changed its name from Zendroid to Zenrobotics to avoid a lawsuit.
In a way, this is part of a larger quest of a vocabulary Nazi. For example, "cybernetics" used to have a specific technical meaning in control and feedback theory, but now "cyber" just means anything you do on a computer or teh internets. Along with "android" and "bandwidth", everything is collapsing into this vague computer/internet thingy, as if nothing of interest happened outside of them. New technical terms are only coined to describe a new piece of software (which in all likelihood reimplements something already discovered by 60s/70s programmers).
Can't we just ignore it until it becomes either established, obsolete, or discarded technology? We have protocols (however poor) for handling those things.
You can, be my guest. However, if you want to become rich or otherwise highly successful with a technology, you'll need to get involved with it way before this stage. Not necessarily embrace it in the same sense -- for example, you could write Android apps without wasting your life hooked on a phone, but not if you completely disregard them. I guess technically it would be possible to ignore everything around you and invent something brilliant that other people want, but in practice you'd need to know something about what's going on around you.
Ah, the old "we can never solve all problems completely, so let's do nothing" argument.
SMS developers were concerned that digital text traffic from cell users would disrupt voice communication and imposed a character limit.
Not quite. SMS was originally a kind of by-product of voice-only GSM, using the control channel for extra message data when it was free of other signals. Basically empty slots between the voice packets. This also explains why they are relatively expensive, since there's a lot of total data traffic per each actual message.
The initial concept also didn't involve phone-to-phone messages, it was more about broadcasting things like weather or traffic reports. In fact, my first GSM phone could only receive, not send any messages. For such uses, single short messages were considered long enough. Later, when phones could compose longer messages, they would be split into multiple proper SMS messages (which would show in your phone bill).
In a sense, it's possible that SMS flooding might disrupt the control signals, but from the basic concept it seems they really prioritized voice. Of course, this might be different in later systems since basic GSM.
If this problem continues to grow, it will make sense to 'segment' my computer technology. Keep the high-horsepower processers securely firewalled, and put older more secure hardware out 'on the perimeter' to do communications.
Incidentally, I currently have my Intel machines behind firewalls that run older AMD CPUs, i.e. no AMD equivalents of the hidden processors there. So I should be safe, right?
Its a good move for them, as they'll move more units.
People that want Ryzen will get Ryzen - Joe Consumer will get Intel with Radeon built in, because Joe Consumer buys Intel because GeekSquad told him to.
Good point -- it's about marketing awareness of AMD, in a way. Eventually the JCs might realize, if the integrated AMD GPU is good enough for them, then why not the entire AMD package deal, as it's cheaper than the Intel combo anyway.
For those who need discrete GPUs it won't matter either way. Frankly, my experience of AMD APUs hasn't been exactly stellar, and I'm not expecting a huge improvement this time. Integrated GPUs have their inherent limitations in power envelope and shared memory, so you won't get the best of Radeon anyway.