True, but it does lead to a question: Why a "tribunal"? Unless you're too physically incapacitated to do it yourself, it's relatively easy to buy an oxygen mask and a bottle of compressed nitrogen... put it on, eat a couple of sleeping pills, fall asleep, never wake up. Relatively zero pain, and no mess... *shrug*
Most suicide reports intentionally fail to mention how exactly they committed suicide, it's a near universally accepted ethics code. Assuming there are suicide attempts that should be stopped, teaching everyone what's effective and painless would be counterproductive, since they're just as likely to be used by the mentally unstable who just learned their girlfriend is breaking up with them as the pain-ridden terminally ill. Of course people figure out ways on their own, but the success rate is not stellar and many probably suffer a lot before they die. They use that fear of a long and painful death and botched attempts to keep people alive more or less against their will.
If all we wanted was suicide booths, we could probably implement those for roughly the cost of a bullet and a hose-down. They want these tribunals as gatekeepers, so a doctor will have to provide you lethal drugs in a controlled environment meaning they are in control of whether your request to die is approved or denied and nobody gets any ideas they can do it outside the system. Except the doctors don't want to touch assistance with a ten foot pole either, because slippery slope. They're pretty much like the Church preaching abstinence, just don't do it. And most world religions also does the same kind of shaming the people who take their own life too.
So why main distribs mainly offer Gnome as a first gui?
Mainly the history of Qt I think. Up until 2009 it was a dual GPL/commercial license until it went LGPL. That meant that other companies felt Trolltech/Nokia would have too much control over proprietary GUI application development. Now that's a while ago, but long enough that both Red Hat and Canonical had already picked Gnome. And once you do it's natural that the pro-Gnome developers gather there and the rest leave, so the internal resistance to switch is too great. Maybe if someone started a fresh distro and made KDE "trendy" since openSUSE doesn't seem to have the right appeal, but I don't see who'd do that today. I think everybody's waiting for Google to get their act together and swoop in with an Android/Chromebook solution that really hurts Microsoft/Apple on the desktop, unless you think you can upstage Google and get there first I wouldn't invest in a Linux distro today.
Total nonsense. Even if you're running Windows today for games. The OSS office suites can be used just as easily on Windows as they can any other platform. (...) There is still little support for non-Windows PCs in the market and most users aren't going to go out of their way to get one of the few pre-builts with Linux already installed.
While in business MS Office is still heavily entrenched, you'd be surprised by how many are now using tablets for their primary entertainment consumption and have found Android/iOS apps to work with basic documents. A steambox for gaming, a tablet for watching movies, browsing and instafacetwittering then why exactly does the average user need a Windows box? Sure there are a few others that have their killer apps but if you ask people what's the one thing you need Windows for then gaming is a huge one. It's going to take a lot more than 20% of the games and 1% of the market though, but it might be getting out of the catch-22 that there's no games because there's no gamers and no gamers because there's no games.
But of course you're now in the Moon's gravity well, which is something like 1/5th of Earth's. Which is a fair advantage if you can build and fuel rockets on the Moon, but launching rockets from Earth to the Moon in order to re-launch from the moon would dwarf those savings. And I don't think moving the whole high-tech supply chain for that is possible, at least not in the next century. So I think you need many things to happen in order to make it even remotely feasible:
1) Reusable rockets, if you can launch once from Earth and do 30 moon-space launches you might have a chance. 2) You need to produce the fuel on site at a reasonable cost compared to earth 3) You need to be able to mine the metals you want at a reasonable cost compared to earth. 4) For more than bulk minerals/metals, you need manufacturing on the moon or in space at a reasonable cost.
The Falcon Heavy will launch 21200 kg to GEO for $85 million, that's $4000/kg. The first point would lower the cost of Earth-based launches too, so you're probably looking at less than $1000/kg. We're not talking about rovers processing a few grams of scientific samples here, what would it cost to mine and refine 20 tons of material, 100t+ of fuel (earth to GEO is 70:1 fuel, 5:1 is very kind), transport it to the launch site and get it into orbit? <$100m from earth looks like a bargain since the materials add almost nothing to the cost here, to me doing it on the moon sounds like a project that'll cost many, many billions.
That's not the important problem with open source hardware. Actually making hardware is a fairly straightforward, albeit costly, proposition. I should know since I run a manufacturing company. Give me a design and an adequate amount of cash and I can get any product made and delivered wherever you want it. That's not the real obstacle to open source hardware.
That is fine for customization, but not for being able to inspect what the hardware really does. With some effort people are able to reproduce build environments and prove that yes, this source code leads to this binary. Or you can compile it yourself if you need stronger tin foil. Validating that the chip/board I get back from you is the same blueprint I sent in right down to the circuit level is an equally unfeasible task as manufacturing it myself. Would you really trust a chip design sent to say China or USA for manufacture not to be tampered with? I wouldn't.
Of course that probably means I shouldn't really trust Intel, AMD, nVidia, any of the chipset, motherboard or graphics card manufacturers either but I see that's a risk I can't do much about. And I'm guessing the cost of doing a tiny production run is so high that it'll lose on price/performance every time compared to just running it on a standard CPU/GPU, even Bitcoin miners need to produce custom ASICs in volume. Which means you can't effectively change anything anyway unless you manage to convince 100-1000 other people to join you.
So you put a minimalist and a maximalist together, one wants to remove pretty much every button, option and checkbox to go with "sane defaults" that'll work for 90% of the people 90% of the time. The other wants to give you a zillion controls to cover 99.99% of the people 99.99% of the time but it'll take a rocket scientist to tune every detail and corner case. Both directions have merit, but you can be sure at least one of them will be unhappy and call you a moron. Not to mention if you're known to compromise, people start taking absurd positions so the compromise is roughly where they wanted to end up. There's very often not one solution to make everybody happy.
Back in the day Apple was about bringing computers to the masses, and simplifying them to make them accessible. Selling a $10K watch just proves Apple only cares about profits now. Apple has become the ultimate iHipster.
What age was that? As far back as I can remember Macs were aiming for graphics artists, designers, sound artists, movie workstations, every kind of hip, creative industry. The "boring" segment bought PCs. There were nerdier and in many cases better audio players before the iPod, but the white earphones quickly became the telltale sign of a hipster. They've never ever released a cheap product trying to undercut others on price. They did have a runaway success with the iPhone but I think you're giving Jobs more credit than he deserves if you think breaking out of the "hipster" segment and becoming mainstream was part of the plan.
They launched a $599 phone in 2007 and after seeing it sell well beyond expectations they lowered it to $399 just a few months later realizing they could make up for it on volume and it boomed. I don't think that was planned at all, they just saw the opportunity and ran with it. Hell, they even got people so pissed by lowering the price so much they gave store credit so they could buy accessories that cost Apple almost nothing to produce, but I digress. And with the app store, they were sitting on a gold mine of more users -> more apps, more apps -> more users as well as the FairPlay near-monopoly. But they're still hipsters at heart, you can just look at their iMacs and the "trash can" Mac Pro.
If anything, I think this is an attempt to make a more exclusive Apple product again, because an iPhone just isn't very hip if your mom has one too. If they can't create a new "must-have" item that's cool I think they'll stagnate. Like I broke my iPhone and decided to give a cheap Android phone a spin, mainly because I'm missing an iPhone 6 Mini. It's not impressive in any way but it does most of what my old iPhone did at a much lower cost. They need to keep pushing new and better, because I don't think they can stay and compete on price. They need to justify a $500+ sticker price.
I definitely disagree here. All features of C++ have their uses and it's possible and necessary to master them all. This language is focused on getting the job done. Thus some of its design decisions don't look very nice. But it's the most usable language in its niche.
Yes, but they have the defaults all wrong. They hand you a scalpel and tell you 99.99% of the time you'll use this as a kitchen knife, because in the 0.01% corner case nothing short of scalpel will do. For example "int i; printf( "%d", i );" and you have a code with undefined behavior. At runtime it'll print a random number even though you never called rand() to indicate that's what you wanted. By default it should be deterministic, if you need that behavior for some reason make it "uninitialized int i; printf( "%d", i );" then. In a switch statement you very often want to do one thing per case and you must remember to break every one of them. If you have fallthrough that's part of the logic so spelling it out makes much more sense. It's a minefield just daring you to prove your C++ mastery. And I really wish they'd implement int?. Databases, nobody works with those anymore...
I like the Qt dialect of C++, but I realize it's a huge patchwork to put features on top of C++ that it doesn't have by default, using a ton of generated classes, macros and so on. If you wanted to start over with a new OOP language, I'd take a long look at Java, Swift and C# for design elements, with as few C-isms as possible.
Looks like one of few digital media that might survive. Apparently if you want film to last this long you'd better make separate black and white recordings of the RGB channels, since the color dyes are much less stable and probably won't last more than like 30 years (methods B-D).
Method A: Let's begin with extended life expectancy records-those film documents that need to last for a very long time. Nothing can last forever, but hundreds of years or longer is possible. Color originals should be made on high-quality camera-color-negative film such as EASTMAN EXR Color Negative Film, having a set of properly exposed and processed black-and-white separation positives made for the red, green, and blue records onto EASTMAN Panchromatic Separation Film on ESTAR Base. Then you should store the original negative and separation positives and the master positive and duplicate negative, that were made from the original negative, at the keeping conditions specified earlier.
And encrypted container with no access to the data is NOT physical evidence. If it were we'd see prisons bursting with people jailed on the basis of unseen contents in sealed black boxes. (...) Lesson for all: if you're accused of causing harm or damage, DEMAND THAT JURY AND DO NOT BACK DOWN.
I'm not sure how you think a jury would help or the law works. In the UK failing to decrypt an encrypted container is illegal under the RIP act, having a sealed black box is the crime. That's what they need proof of, not what crime they really suspect you of committed. The rest is just dragging you through the mud so the jury won't be looking very hard to find any reasonable doubt or question that you're convicted for having a locked box which by itself doesn't sound like an offense at all. The jury will be out to hang you and there's enough legal rope to do it so they will, even though they probably could have found reasonable doubt if they wanted to. In case you haven't heard of "victimless crimes", harm is not a prerequisite for a conviction.
I'm guessing most of these game developers are looking to get a contract with a big studio and in that case showing your understanding of a major commercial engine is almost as important as the game itself. Using an open source engine nobody's heard off is like making an application in Ruby to get a job as a C++ developer, sure it proves some talent but 9 out of 10 recruiters will go with the C++ guy.
Chrome is by definition, spyware. (...) If you don't realize that the entire existence of Chrome and Chromium is to get information about you, you're an idiot with your head in the sand.
And? They produce a product/service you want in exchange for some information they want. I realize this comes as a shock to/.ers but most of the world don't have a problem with what Facebook and Google is doing, nor do they think it's a secret. If it's not secret, it's not spyware. If you want to claim half the Internet-browsing computers out there is running spyware by using Google you're just diluting the term until it becomes meaningless and you have the credibility of a loon.
In other words business as usual, same attitude I got when my "Wintendo" box had trouble accessing a Linux share. Quite many people in the open source community will act like you just insulted your mother if you ask for any help that in any way involves proprietary software. The Church of Stallman wants to maintain the purity of their faith.
I'm not going to pretend it's a skill I couldn't learn to some degree, But to me it's a chore like vacuuming, dusting, washing clothes, using the dishwasher and so on. Without saying I'm some luddite who wants to send women back to the kitchen, my ideal is that dinner's on the table when I get home. Sure, you can have cooking as a hobby but it's not my idea of a good time loitering over pots and pans. So this needs to boil and stir regularly. Okay, I'm waiting... booooooooooring, I'll do something else for two minutes while I wait. Two minutes end up being ten and the dish goes to hell. Or you've spent an hour cooking and realize the taste is just mediocre. To me that's like watching a bad movie, I want a microwave dinner and that hour of my life back.
I know what good food tastes like, I know what great food tastes like. I'd certainly value it if somebody else would make it for me, but it won't be me doing it. Sure I do simple cooking but it's a limited selection of "good enough" simple dishes, nothing that requires any real effort.
So while approaching DT performance might be a proper analysis, i dont think laptops can replace desktops
Not to be mean, but it already did. Far more people have a laptop and no desktop than the other way around. If you add tablets too they together have 80% of the market, desktops 20%. Apart from the performance, you can always hook up a laptop to a keyboard, mouse and external screen. And as for performance, it's probably equal to a 2005 desktop which is plenty for most people. Sure it won't replace my gaming rig or anyone else doing "serious" computing at home, but we're in a very tiny minority. Heck, I think that apart from the interface a smartphone has enough computing power for a lot of people. If you look at the Steam Hardware Survey 19% now use Intel, even among gamers it's not all hardcore.
The last time I tried that I spent TWO SOLID DAYS at Staples trying to find a laptop that would boot with my Linux "live cd" flash drive.
You need to go into the BIOS and disable secure boot, then it should load on all of them. If it would boot your Linux distro it'd also boot whatever malware was trying to trojan Windows and that's exactly what they're trying to avoid. At least so far I haven't heard of any x86 machine where you can't do that, I'm sure that'd be major news both here and elsewhere if they started to block that.
Uh, what? In theory, a car would go any distance at constant speed ignoring air resistance and friction except the curving of the earth as it's not really a straight line. But in the real world, you will have friction against the ground and that will generate a lot of heat. Part of that heat can be converted into more engine power. Unlike regenerative breaking you're not adding a resistance to the wheel, you just siphon off what's already happening. Sure if you could reduce friction that'd be nicer, but physics get in the way and you'd rather have some grip to be able to change direction. So it's energy you need to spend, but you don't have to let all of it go to waste.
Almost all the problems they suggest could be negated by embedding an RFID tag indicating what program it's suitable for. If you throw it in the laundry bin, it's due for laundry. The number of items is equal to the number of tags. It's the stuff they don't mention that's hard, like checking my pockets, don't wash my shirts with the buttons unbuttoned or the jeans with the outside out. But those could be part of my job, if I throw it in the "ready to wash" bin it'd better be. I'm not sure I care though, because at the end of the day it's just going to be the same washing machine doing the same job.
If you want my #1 desire for a home bot these days it'd be a robot chef. I admit it, I suck at home cooking. Most of the time I can't even beat takeaway, and a good restaurant? No chance in hell. Now I realize part of that is the ingredients, but even with the good stuff you can undercook it, overcook it, burn it and in general make a mess. For a bot that could cook a gourmet meal for me every day for the next 10+ years I'd pay $100k. I'd rather drive a trash can and eat like a king than drive a Ferrari and eat microwave dinners, no question about it.
Looks like they jumped over an inch high bar, yes. The requirements pretty much seem to be:
1) Do you use an OSI approved license? 2) Do you have ideas for improvement? 3) Can you provide mentors? 4) Are you a somewhat popular, established project?
Then you're good. I mean there's many obscure mentoring organizations there I've never heard about.
DST assumes you're working outside and will have some benefit from the sunlight. I'm up roughly 16 out of every 24 hours, even though the sunlight here varies from 4,5 hours to 20.5 hours of the day. What it usually means is that in the winter I work through all the natural light hours in the office during the day and stay up during the pitch dark hours of the evening in artificial light. Why? I'd much rather work in artificial light at the office and have the opportunity to choose between being in or out during the natural light. Office and retail workers are now the majority, agriculture, construction and transport workers the minority. It's leisure time that should be daylight time, not business hours.
Well, yes and no. If you look at Roman Emperors like Augustus and Tiberius they became 75 and 77 years old, respectively and those dates are fairly certain. For sure they're not representative but there were certainly those who lived longer. Looking at modern mortality tables here in Norway some 23% and 27% of the population would already be dead at this age. And 50% will be dead by 85, 90% by 95, 98% by 100. Far fewer people die young, but 2000 years of medicine has bought us maybe 20 years of life span, in fact it seems less likely they'd live to be 95 and 97 today.
I think that's a bit underwhelming. Even more so because in those final decades you're so old and frail a light breeze will blow you over, the main reason they live longer is basically because they're "bubble wrapped" in a nursery. Can't we invent medicine to rejuvenate the body and I don't mean hair transplants for baldness but to genuinely restore strength, dexterity, endurance and so on? You see it in pretty much all professional sports that depend on physical prowess, around 35 give or take a few they all retire. After that it's all "in good shape for an X year old" but not if you were 20.
Well it's Phoronix... if a mouse farts in the open source GPU department, it's an article there. Even when it's pretty much non-news they got like ten articles of "one step closer to major news" before the major news actually happens. It's almost a blog in the shape of a site.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but it does lead to a question: Why a "tribunal"? Unless you're too physically incapacitated to do it yourself, it's relatively easy to buy an oxygen mask and a bottle of compressed nitrogen... put it on, eat a couple of sleeping pills, fall asleep, never wake up. Relatively zero pain, and no mess... *shrug*
Most suicide reports intentionally fail to mention how exactly they committed suicide, it's a near universally accepted ethics code. Assuming there are suicide attempts that should be stopped, teaching everyone what's effective and painless would be counterproductive, since they're just as likely to be used by the mentally unstable who just learned their girlfriend is breaking up with them as the pain-ridden terminally ill. Of course people figure out ways on their own, but the success rate is not stellar and many probably suffer a lot before they die. They use that fear of a long and painful death and botched attempts to keep people alive more or less against their will.
If all we wanted was suicide booths, we could probably implement those for roughly the cost of a bullet and a hose-down. They want these tribunals as gatekeepers, so a doctor will have to provide you lethal drugs in a controlled environment meaning they are in control of whether your request to die is approved or denied and nobody gets any ideas they can do it outside the system. Except the doctors don't want to touch assistance with a ten foot pole either, because slippery slope. They're pretty much like the Church preaching abstinence, just don't do it. And most world religions also does the same kind of shaming the people who take their own life too.
Well, he talked quite a bit in Choosing to Die in 2011, but that is quite a bit earlier.
So why main distribs mainly offer Gnome as a first gui?
Mainly the history of Qt I think. Up until 2009 it was a dual GPL/commercial license until it went LGPL. That meant that other companies felt Trolltech/Nokia would have too much control over proprietary GUI application development. Now that's a while ago, but long enough that both Red Hat and Canonical had already picked Gnome. And once you do it's natural that the pro-Gnome developers gather there and the rest leave, so the internal resistance to switch is too great. Maybe if someone started a fresh distro and made KDE "trendy" since openSUSE doesn't seem to have the right appeal, but I don't see who'd do that today. I think everybody's waiting for Google to get their act together and swoop in with an Android/Chromebook solution that really hurts Microsoft/Apple on the desktop, unless you think you can upstage Google and get there first I wouldn't invest in a Linux distro today.
Total nonsense. Even if you're running Windows today for games. The OSS office suites can be used just as easily on Windows as they can any other platform. (...) There is still little support for non-Windows PCs in the market and most users aren't going to go out of their way to get one of the few pre-builts with Linux already installed.
While in business MS Office is still heavily entrenched, you'd be surprised by how many are now using tablets for their primary entertainment consumption and have found Android/iOS apps to work with basic documents. A steambox for gaming, a tablet for watching movies, browsing and instafacetwittering then why exactly does the average user need a Windows box? Sure there are a few others that have their killer apps but if you ask people what's the one thing you need Windows for then gaming is a huge one. It's going to take a lot more than 20% of the games and 1% of the market though, but it might be getting out of the catch-22 that there's no games because there's no gamers and no gamers because there's no games.
But of course you're now in the Moon's gravity well, which is something like 1/5th of Earth's. Which is a fair advantage if you can build and fuel rockets on the Moon, but launching rockets from Earth to the Moon in order to re-launch from the moon would dwarf those savings. And I don't think moving the whole high-tech supply chain for that is possible, at least not in the next century. So I think you need many things to happen in order to make it even remotely feasible:
1) Reusable rockets, if you can launch once from Earth and do 30 moon-space launches you might have a chance.
2) You need to produce the fuel on site at a reasonable cost compared to earth
3) You need to be able to mine the metals you want at a reasonable cost compared to earth.
4) For more than bulk minerals/metals, you need manufacturing on the moon or in space at a reasonable cost.
The Falcon Heavy will launch 21200 kg to GEO for $85 million, that's $4000/kg. The first point would lower the cost of Earth-based launches too, so you're probably looking at less than $1000/kg. We're not talking about rovers processing a few grams of scientific samples here, what would it cost to mine and refine 20 tons of material, 100t+ of fuel (earth to GEO is 70:1 fuel, 5:1 is very kind), transport it to the launch site and get it into orbit? <$100m from earth looks like a bargain since the materials add almost nothing to the cost here, to me doing it on the moon sounds like a project that'll cost many, many billions.
That's not the important problem with open source hardware. Actually making hardware is a fairly straightforward, albeit costly, proposition. I should know since I run a manufacturing company. Give me a design and an adequate amount of cash and I can get any product made and delivered wherever you want it. That's not the real obstacle to open source hardware.
That is fine for customization, but not for being able to inspect what the hardware really does. With some effort people are able to reproduce build environments and prove that yes, this source code leads to this binary. Or you can compile it yourself if you need stronger tin foil. Validating that the chip/board I get back from you is the same blueprint I sent in right down to the circuit level is an equally unfeasible task as manufacturing it myself. Would you really trust a chip design sent to say China or USA for manufacture not to be tampered with? I wouldn't.
Of course that probably means I shouldn't really trust Intel, AMD, nVidia, any of the chipset, motherboard or graphics card manufacturers either but I see that's a risk I can't do much about. And I'm guessing the cost of doing a tiny production run is so high that it'll lose on price/performance every time compared to just running it on a standard CPU/GPU, even Bitcoin miners need to produce custom ASICs in volume. Which means you can't effectively change anything anyway unless you manage to convince 100-1000 other people to join you.
So you put a minimalist and a maximalist together, one wants to remove pretty much every button, option and checkbox to go with "sane defaults" that'll work for 90% of the people 90% of the time. The other wants to give you a zillion controls to cover 99.99% of the people 99.99% of the time but it'll take a rocket scientist to tune every detail and corner case. Both directions have merit, but you can be sure at least one of them will be unhappy and call you a moron. Not to mention if you're known to compromise, people start taking absurd positions so the compromise is roughly where they wanted to end up. There's very often not one solution to make everybody happy.
Back in the day Apple was about bringing computers to the masses, and simplifying them to make them accessible. Selling a $10K watch just proves Apple only cares about profits now. Apple has become the ultimate iHipster.
What age was that? As far back as I can remember Macs were aiming for graphics artists, designers, sound artists, movie workstations, every kind of hip, creative industry. The "boring" segment bought PCs. There were nerdier and in many cases better audio players before the iPod, but the white earphones quickly became the telltale sign of a hipster. They've never ever released a cheap product trying to undercut others on price. They did have a runaway success with the iPhone but I think you're giving Jobs more credit than he deserves if you think breaking out of the "hipster" segment and becoming mainstream was part of the plan.
They launched a $599 phone in 2007 and after seeing it sell well beyond expectations they lowered it to $399 just a few months later realizing they could make up for it on volume and it boomed. I don't think that was planned at all, they just saw the opportunity and ran with it. Hell, they even got people so pissed by lowering the price so much they gave store credit so they could buy accessories that cost Apple almost nothing to produce, but I digress. And with the app store, they were sitting on a gold mine of more users -> more apps, more apps -> more users as well as the FairPlay near-monopoly. But they're still hipsters at heart, you can just look at their iMacs and the "trash can" Mac Pro.
If anything, I think this is an attempt to make a more exclusive Apple product again, because an iPhone just isn't very hip if your mom has one too. If they can't create a new "must-have" item that's cool I think they'll stagnate. Like I broke my iPhone and decided to give a cheap Android phone a spin, mainly because I'm missing an iPhone 6 Mini. It's not impressive in any way but it does most of what my old iPhone did at a much lower cost. They need to keep pushing new and better, because I don't think they can stay and compete on price. They need to justify a $500+ sticker price.
On the bright side, this does make me feel better about not RTFA...
I definitely disagree here. All features of C++ have their uses and it's possible and necessary to master them all. This language is focused on getting the job done. Thus some of its design decisions don't look very nice. But it's the most usable language in its niche.
Yes, but they have the defaults all wrong. They hand you a scalpel and tell you 99.99% of the time you'll use this as a kitchen knife, because in the 0.01% corner case nothing short of scalpel will do. For example "int i; printf( "%d", i );" and you have a code with undefined behavior. At runtime it'll print a random number even though you never called rand() to indicate that's what you wanted. By default it should be deterministic, if you need that behavior for some reason make it "uninitialized int i; printf( "%d", i );" then. In a switch statement you very often want to do one thing per case and you must remember to break every one of them. If you have fallthrough that's part of the logic so spelling it out makes much more sense. It's a minefield just daring you to prove your C++ mastery. And I really wish they'd implement int?. Databases, nobody works with those anymore...
I like the Qt dialect of C++, but I realize it's a huge patchwork to put features on top of C++ that it doesn't have by default, using a ton of generated classes, macros and so on. If you wanted to start over with a new OOP language, I'd take a long look at Java, Swift and C# for design elements, with as few C-isms as possible.
Looks like one of few digital media that might survive. Apparently if you want film to last this long you'd better make separate black and white recordings of the RGB channels, since the color dyes are much less stable and probably won't last more than like 30 years (methods B-D).
Method A: Let's begin with extended life expectancy records-those film documents that need to last for a very long time. Nothing can last forever, but hundreds of years or longer is possible. Color originals should be made on high-quality camera-color-negative film such as EASTMAN EXR Color Negative Film, having a set of properly exposed and processed black-and-white separation positives made for the red, green, and blue records onto EASTMAN Panchromatic Separation Film on ESTAR Base. Then you should store the original negative and separation positives and the master positive and duplicate negative, that were made from the original negative, at the keeping conditions specified earlier.
And encrypted container with no access to the data is NOT physical evidence. If it were we'd see prisons bursting with people jailed on the basis of unseen contents in sealed black boxes. (...) Lesson for all: if you're accused of causing harm or damage, DEMAND THAT JURY AND DO NOT BACK DOWN.
I'm not sure how you think a jury would help or the law works. In the UK failing to decrypt an encrypted container is illegal under the RIP act, having a sealed black box is the crime. That's what they need proof of, not what crime they really suspect you of committed. The rest is just dragging you through the mud so the jury won't be looking very hard to find any reasonable doubt or question that you're convicted for having a locked box which by itself doesn't sound like an offense at all. The jury will be out to hang you and there's enough legal rope to do it so they will, even though they probably could have found reasonable doubt if they wanted to. In case you haven't heard of "victimless crimes", harm is not a prerequisite for a conviction.
I'm guessing most of these game developers are looking to get a contract with a big studio and in that case showing your understanding of a major commercial engine is almost as important as the game itself. Using an open source engine nobody's heard off is like making an application in Ruby to get a job as a C++ developer, sure it proves some talent but 9 out of 10 recruiters will go with the C++ guy.
Chrome is by definition, spyware. (...) If you don't realize that the entire existence of Chrome and Chromium is to get information about you, you're an idiot with your head in the sand.
And? They produce a product/service you want in exchange for some information they want. I realize this comes as a shock to /.ers but most of the world don't have a problem with what Facebook and Google is doing, nor do they think it's a secret. If it's not secret, it's not spyware. If you want to claim half the Internet-browsing computers out there is running spyware by using Google you're just diluting the term until it becomes meaningless and you have the credibility of a loon.
In other words business as usual, same attitude I got when my "Wintendo" box had trouble accessing a Linux share. Quite many people in the open source community will act like you just insulted your mother if you ask for any help that in any way involves proprietary software. The Church of Stallman wants to maintain the purity of their faith.
I'm not going to pretend it's a skill I couldn't learn to some degree, But to me it's a chore like vacuuming, dusting, washing clothes, using the dishwasher and so on. Without saying I'm some luddite who wants to send women back to the kitchen, my ideal is that dinner's on the table when I get home. Sure, you can have cooking as a hobby but it's not my idea of a good time loitering over pots and pans. So this needs to boil and stir regularly. Okay, I'm waiting... booooooooooring, I'll do something else for two minutes while I wait. Two minutes end up being ten and the dish goes to hell. Or you've spent an hour cooking and realize the taste is just mediocre. To me that's like watching a bad movie, I want a microwave dinner and that hour of my life back.
I know what good food tastes like, I know what great food tastes like. I'd certainly value it if somebody else would make it for me, but it won't be me doing it. Sure I do simple cooking but it's a limited selection of "good enough" simple dishes, nothing that requires any real effort.
So while approaching DT performance might be a proper analysis, i dont think laptops can replace desktops
Not to be mean, but it already did. Far more people have a laptop and no desktop than the other way around. If you add tablets too they together have 80% of the market, desktops 20%. Apart from the performance, you can always hook up a laptop to a keyboard, mouse and external screen. And as for performance, it's probably equal to a 2005 desktop which is plenty for most people. Sure it won't replace my gaming rig or anyone else doing "serious" computing at home, but we're in a very tiny minority. Heck, I think that apart from the interface a smartphone has enough computing power for a lot of people. If you look at the Steam Hardware Survey 19% now use Intel, even among gamers it's not all hardcore.
The last time I tried that I spent TWO SOLID DAYS at Staples trying to find a laptop that would boot with my Linux "live cd" flash drive.
You need to go into the BIOS and disable secure boot, then it should load on all of them. If it would boot your Linux distro it'd also boot whatever malware was trying to trojan Windows and that's exactly what they're trying to avoid. At least so far I haven't heard of any x86 machine where you can't do that, I'm sure that'd be major news both here and elsewhere if they started to block that.
Uh, what? In theory, a car would go any distance at constant speed ignoring air resistance and friction except the curving of the earth as it's not really a straight line. But in the real world, you will have friction against the ground and that will generate a lot of heat. Part of that heat can be converted into more engine power. Unlike regenerative breaking you're not adding a resistance to the wheel, you just siphon off what's already happening. Sure if you could reduce friction that'd be nicer, but physics get in the way and you'd rather have some grip to be able to change direction. So it's energy you need to spend, but you don't have to let all of it go to waste.
Almost all the problems they suggest could be negated by embedding an RFID tag indicating what program it's suitable for. If you throw it in the laundry bin, it's due for laundry. The number of items is equal to the number of tags. It's the stuff they don't mention that's hard, like checking my pockets, don't wash my shirts with the buttons unbuttoned or the jeans with the outside out. But those could be part of my job, if I throw it in the "ready to wash" bin it'd better be. I'm not sure I care though, because at the end of the day it's just going to be the same washing machine doing the same job.
If you want my #1 desire for a home bot these days it'd be a robot chef. I admit it, I suck at home cooking. Most of the time I can't even beat takeaway, and a good restaurant? No chance in hell. Now I realize part of that is the ingredients, but even with the good stuff you can undercook it, overcook it, burn it and in general make a mess. For a bot that could cook a gourmet meal for me every day for the next 10+ years I'd pay $100k. I'd rather drive a trash can and eat like a king than drive a Ferrari and eat microwave dinners, no question about it.
Looks like they jumped over an inch high bar, yes. The requirements pretty much seem to be:
1) Do you use an OSI approved license?
2) Do you have ideas for improvement?
3) Can you provide mentors?
4) Are you a somewhat popular, established project?
Then you're good. I mean there's many obscure mentoring organizations there I've never heard about.
DST assumes you're working outside and will have some benefit from the sunlight. I'm up roughly 16 out of every 24 hours, even though the sunlight here varies from 4,5 hours to 20.5 hours of the day. What it usually means is that in the winter I work through all the natural light hours in the office during the day and stay up during the pitch dark hours of the evening in artificial light. Why? I'd much rather work in artificial light at the office and have the opportunity to choose between being in or out during the natural light. Office and retail workers are now the majority, agriculture, construction and transport workers the minority. It's leisure time that should be daylight time, not business hours.
Well, yes and no. If you look at Roman Emperors like Augustus and Tiberius they became 75 and 77 years old, respectively and those dates are fairly certain. For sure they're not representative but there were certainly those who lived longer. Looking at modern mortality tables here in Norway some 23% and 27% of the population would already be dead at this age. And 50% will be dead by 85, 90% by 95, 98% by 100. Far fewer people die young, but 2000 years of medicine has bought us maybe 20 years of life span, in fact it seems less likely they'd live to be 95 and 97 today.
I think that's a bit underwhelming. Even more so because in those final decades you're so old and frail a light breeze will blow you over, the main reason they live longer is basically because they're "bubble wrapped" in a nursery. Can't we invent medicine to rejuvenate the body and I don't mean hair transplants for baldness but to genuinely restore strength, dexterity, endurance and so on? You see it in pretty much all professional sports that depend on physical prowess, around 35 give or take a few they all retire. After that it's all "in good shape for an X year old" but not if you were 20.
And apparently it's not even out yet so this is just the pre-release article about what will be coming in a minor point release. Yawn.
Well it's Phoronix... if a mouse farts in the open source GPU department, it's an article there. Even when it's pretty much non-news they got like ten articles of "one step closer to major news" before the major news actually happens. It's almost a blog in the shape of a site.