Why? One large 2560x1440 monitor is generally fine (at least for creating hardware and software designs). I have two monitors at work, but that's only because they won't spring for a 2560x1440 monitor and I could get a cast-off 4x3 aspect monitor that no one was using to make my desktop adequately sized. I'd far prefer a larger higher resolution monitor and not have quite so much cabling than two smaller monitors (not to mention the extra vertical resolution).
Saying you shouldn't make changes in area A because people will still die in area B is a bit disingenous. It's like saying we shouldn't bother having breaker boxes on the electrical system in a house because people will still die in car crashes.
The United States has on the order of 10,000 gun murders a year. No other Western country (that has strict gun control) gets even close to this murder rate (by any means, let alone firearms).
The fluorides use have a very high boiling point (one which won't be reached even in the worst disaster, short of a direct hit by a nuclear weapon - in which case there are far bigger worries). They won't evaporate as a volatile compound.
I suspect language variety will survive. Franco's totalitarian regime tried for decades to eradicate the Catalan language (and Basque, and all the other languages in Spain except for Castillian Spanish). As soon as Franco carked it, Catalan suddenly reasserted itself to such a degree that it's almost as big (in the Iberian peninsula) as Portuguese, with millions of native speakers. Even the Basque language which is a weird non Indo-European language island with Ts and Xs where there ought not be Ts and Xs now has hundreds of thousands of fluent speakers.
Trying to suppress a language tends to make its speakers more determined than ever to keep it going, as it gives the people who speak it a reason to keep it alive (because it represents resistance against the opressor).
It's not difficult, it's *very very* time consuming. Learning language (even as an adult) comes naturally to us. If it's difficult, you're doing it wrong. However, you'll never get away from the need to spend a great deal of time learning it. A 45-minute lesson a week and 45 minutes homework (like they think they can teach it in school) just won't work. I've been learning Spanish for four and a half years - for the last four and a half years, I've done at least some learning every single day without exception. Am I fluent? I dunno - I think I'd have to live in Spain a few months to reach that level, but I have given talks in Spain (in Spanish) and when I'm in Spain I don't speak any English nor do I think in English (and most of my Spanish friends have a decent level of English but I avoid resorting to it!), and I can even use the phone in Spanish (and a typical GSM connection with 1 bar of signal makes understanding English difficult, let alone your second language).
Well, it works but badly. If I suspect something's chewing up lots of CPU time on my computer and take a look at what's running, it is almost always Flash that's maxing out one or more cores. Closing the browser tabs with Flash applications isn't enough to stop it, either - the browser must be closed to kill off all the flash processes.
But what is a real name? A nickname is just as much my real name as the name given to me by my parents. Facebook wants to be the arbiter of what's a real name, which is not really practical. I know people (in meatspace, at my actual workplace) which are not known by the names their parents gave them. The name they choose to be known by is their real name, just as much as their given name is because it's what they are known by. If Facebook forces them to only use their "legal" name, no one would be able to connect to them. I also have a friend who when he got married took his wife's surname (basically because his wife's surname is awesome, and his birth surname is terrible, nothing to do with political correctness). I'm certain the legal documentation uses his surname though. What's his real name? What's his wife's real name? What should Facebook force him to use, the name he's actually known by, or the name on some bit of paperwork?
It's actually quite common to have an alias by which all your friends know you by. These aliases are more commonly known as "nicknames". Some people are better known by their nickname than the name given to them by their parents.
The thing is - it just doesn't end up happening. The first bits of automation decades ago was supposed to cause a massive unemployment problem. The coming of the microprocessor was supposed to mean by the mid 90s we would all have to be working no more than 20 hours per week to keep enough people employed. Look up a TV programme called "The Mighty Micro" (all of it is on YouTube) - it was a 6 part series made in 1979 about the then upcoming microprocessor and what it would mean. They made this prediction in that programme. Since 1979, the workforce has doubled in size in Britain (at least), and unemployment in absolute numbers is lower than in 1979 (which means the actual unemployment rate is less than half what it was in the late 70s) despite us being in the middle of the worst recession since the 1930s. We work longer hours than ever despite all this extra automation we have.
So the next time someone complains when I cannon rush them in Stacraft 2, I can tell them not to be so mad, cheesing has been going on for 7500 years already...
I think monitor and TV makers really liked the move to 16:9 from 4:3 - for example, a 27in 16:9 monitor is smaller (has less surface area) than a 27in 4:3 monitor. Similarly, this new monitor allows LG to make a monitor "the same size" (in other words, same diagonal inches) as a competitors 16:9 monitor, but with an LCD panel that's actually smaller.
The historical significance of this of course is that Linux was originally written to specifically target the 80386, and it was written with the 386 with *no* portability in mind. So it no longer supports the CPU it was originally written for.
There was no iron clad guarantee that the Iraq war would be a success (and by many measures, it's been a complete waste of time) but we still went ahead and spent $800bn on it anyway (the direct cost to the DOD, the actual complete costs are probably much greater).
Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.
The reason it had to seemingly be beat out of them was because the documentation didn't actually exist. Microsoft were busy writing the documentation as fast as possible by reading the source. I'm certain that the internal documentation on Windows is (or at least was) terrible to non existent.
I have actual evidence to support this. A few years ago I was working on a bespoke product that had to basically hide Windows from the user, it was essentially a custom cash register that had to do a lot more than just sell stock items. We needed to write a full replacement GINA (the GINA is the thing that up to and including Windows XP handled the login, basically winlogon.exe loads msgina.dll, and msgina.dll contains all the stuff needed to present the user interface and get everything set up right so you log in correctly. It also handled the secure attention sequence - ie ctrl-alt-del on most people's boxes). The documentation was lightweight and that's making an understatement. The documentation only had the most basic coverage of how to write a stub GINA (i.e. continue using msgina.dll but adding some of your own authentication stuff). But we were writing a replacement GINA which basically had to do everything that msgina.dll did. In the anticipation of needing support, we had quite an expensive support contract with Microsoft, at the time I think it was on the order of US$40K per year.
When we used our support contract, we ended up talking to the actual Windows devs. It turns out they had exactly the same nearly useless Windows help file that we already had. There was *no* other documentation on the GINA within Microsoft as far as we could tell, and with such an expensive support contract, I would hope the devs weren't flat out lying to us - I suspect they were being 100% honest when they said they had no more documentation than we did (well, other than the source code). The support contract was actually pretty useless, we ended up having to reverse engineer the msgina.dll (we didn't go quite as far as disassembling it, but it wasn't far from our minds - we managed to find out enough by looking at registry and environment changes and comparing it to what our GINA was doing). A year later, we weren't entirely surprised to see the GINA documentation significantly expanded, probably written by the guys who were trying to help us as they discovered how the code worked.
The thing is, Google have effectively bought something. They are using all the public infrastructure, roads, public education, the military to provide defence, up to including the development of the Internet itself. to provide them with things they must have or they cannot exist at all, but then they don't pay for them. They have bought a whole lot of stuff that they don't want to pay for.
If they don't want this stuff provided for them, then they should move their entire operation to a country that doesn't provide it, for example Somalia.
Large airliners also have inertial navigation (certainly if they are going trans-ocean). Works just fine with no GPS.
Also IFR-capable GPS receivers, whether they are in a small single engine plane or a state-of-the-art B787 have RAIM (receiver autonomous integrity monitoring). The pilots *will* know if the GPS is getting bad data, because the GPS will detect this condition.
The Tea Party is just a fringe of the Republicans. Amongst the Republican mainstream, they want ever stronger copyright just as much as the Democrats. So yes, it's also mostly a Republican problem.
I have a nearly 30 year old Sinclair ZX Spectrum connected to my ethernet LAN (yes, really, there's an ethernet card for the Speccy - OK, so I had to design and make it, but you can buy them now:-)). It can run the old favorite games (and there's new ones still being developed for the machine) by loading them from a network file server. There's also a multiplayer capture the flag game for the machine, and a way of loading games and programs directly from World of Spectrum:-)
I don't think heat will be such a problem. While the temperature of the "air" on Mars near the surface may only reach a daytime high of about -20 deg F, the surface temperature gets much higher (70 deg F recorded max). A greenhouse type structure on Mars with a breathable atmosphere will get pretty toasty and warm. Open the roof to allow the sun to shine through the glass during the day, and close it at night to reduce the amount of heat radiating out at night.
You're not taking the long view. In perhaps 500M-750M years from now, the sun's output will have increased sufficiently to have evaporated most of the oceans. The ensuing runaway greenhouse effect will make Earth like Venus. This would have been the case had humans not existed. Life on Earth has almost run its course; if we destroy ourselves and all higher mammals (eg. in a global nuclear war) there's not enough time for another intelligent life to evolve a second time from cockroaches.
For any complex piece of electronics this is true even if you live in China, or Taiwan or wherever. Wherever you live, and wherever the "Made in..." says, where it was made in had to import the majority of the parts. The last device I designed, every IC on that board came from a different country so basically there is nowhere in the world (not even China) you can assemble some electronics and not end up importing most of the semiconductors.
I've been doing some electronic design and assembly recently, and you'd be (probably) absolutely wrong. Not a single semiconductor part I used came from China. The only Chinese part was a connector (Tyco Mag45 ethernet magjack). The chips came from Korea, the UK, Taiwan and Japan.
The problem for Portugal, Spain and Italy in particular is the way the euro is set up (note that the UK's problems aren't even 10% as severe as most of the eurozone's). During the boom years for example, the eurozone's interest rate policy was set to suit the German and French economies, but completely unsuitable for the periphery. Spain in particular was actually complying with EU rules over deficit size (while France and Germany flouted them) and was behaving much better than virtually the rest of Europe. The problem came because the absurdly low interest rates (from the point of Spain) caused a huge real estate bubble which has since done catastrophic damage to the Spanish banking system and the Spanish economy when it popped. The eurozone still hasn't learned, with interest rates still being set to suit Germany in the main but being bad for everyone else.
The second problem is one of positive feedback loops - which are almost always bad. The UK's economy has been much more stable than Spain or Ireland's because as the UK has its own currency, when lenders to the UK pull out they are also selling pound sterling and devaluing the pound a little, which acts as a stabilizing negative feedback loop, so you don't end up with a gross increase of risk of default and lenders fleeing. However, in the eurozone lenders have been fleeing Spanish and Italian (etc) bonds to buy German ones - but the Spanish and Italians being stuck in the same currency lack this feedback mechanism. This means the interest rate that Spain must pay to sell bonds has to go up, making it more likely that Spain will default, leading to more investors fleeing for Germany, meaning the bond rate must go up more, and the risk default goes up further, meaning more investors flee...etc. until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy even though when Spain started out their spending was well within the eurozone rules and they were one of the governments actually acting responsibly within the eurozone. Germany, who was flouting the rules gets away with it because it's where everyone's capital is fleeing to.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? One large 2560x1440 monitor is generally fine (at least for creating hardware and software designs). I have two monitors at work, but that's only because they won't spring for a 2560x1440 monitor and I could get a cast-off 4x3 aspect monitor that no one was using to make my desktop adequately sized. I'd far prefer a larger higher resolution monitor and not have quite so much cabling than two smaller monitors (not to mention the extra vertical resolution).
Saying you shouldn't make changes in area A because people will still die in area B is a bit disingenous. It's like saying we shouldn't bother having breaker boxes on the electrical system in a house because people will still die in car crashes.
The United States has on the order of 10,000 gun murders a year. No other Western country (that has strict gun control) gets even close to this murder rate (by any means, let alone firearms).
The fluorides use have a very high boiling point (one which won't be reached even in the worst disaster, short of a direct hit by a nuclear weapon - in which case there are far bigger worries). They won't evaporate as a volatile compound.
I suspect language variety will survive. Franco's totalitarian regime tried for decades to eradicate the Catalan language (and Basque, and all the other languages in Spain except for Castillian Spanish). As soon as Franco carked it, Catalan suddenly reasserted itself to such a degree that it's almost as big (in the Iberian peninsula) as Portuguese, with millions of native speakers. Even the Basque language which is a weird non Indo-European language island with Ts and Xs where there ought not be Ts and Xs now has hundreds of thousands of fluent speakers.
Trying to suppress a language tends to make its speakers more determined than ever to keep it going, as it gives the people who speak it a reason to keep it alive (because it represents resistance against the opressor).
It's not difficult, it's *very very* time consuming. Learning language (even as an adult) comes naturally to us. If it's difficult, you're doing it wrong. However, you'll never get away from the need to spend a great deal of time learning it. A 45-minute lesson a week and 45 minutes homework (like they think they can teach it in school) just won't work. I've been learning Spanish for four and a half years - for the last four and a half years, I've done at least some learning every single day without exception. Am I fluent? I dunno - I think I'd have to live in Spain a few months to reach that level, but I have given talks in Spain (in Spanish) and when I'm in Spain I don't speak any English nor do I think in English (and most of my Spanish friends have a decent level of English but I avoid resorting to it!), and I can even use the phone in Spanish (and a typical GSM connection with 1 bar of signal makes understanding English difficult, let alone your second language).
Well, it works but badly. If I suspect something's chewing up lots of CPU time on my computer and take a look at what's running, it is almost always Flash that's maxing out one or more cores. Closing the browser tabs with Flash applications isn't enough to stop it, either - the browser must be closed to kill off all the flash processes.
But what is a real name? A nickname is just as much my real name as the name given to me by my parents. Facebook wants to be the arbiter of what's a real name, which is not really practical. I know people (in meatspace, at my actual workplace) which are not known by the names their parents gave them. The name they choose to be known by is their real name, just as much as their given name is because it's what they are known by. If Facebook forces them to only use their "legal" name, no one would be able to connect to them. I also have a friend who when he got married took his wife's surname (basically because his wife's surname is awesome, and his birth surname is terrible, nothing to do with political correctness). I'm certain the legal documentation uses his surname though. What's his real name? What's his wife's real name? What should Facebook force him to use, the name he's actually known by, or the name on some bit of paperwork?
It's actually quite common to have an alias by which all your friends know you by. These aliases are more commonly known as "nicknames". Some people are better known by their nickname than the name given to them by their parents.
The thing is - it just doesn't end up happening. The first bits of automation decades ago was supposed to cause a massive unemployment problem. The coming of the microprocessor was supposed to mean by the mid 90s we would all have to be working no more than 20 hours per week to keep enough people employed. Look up a TV programme called "The Mighty Micro" (all of it is on YouTube) - it was a 6 part series made in 1979 about the then upcoming microprocessor and what it would mean. They made this prediction in that programme. Since 1979, the workforce has doubled in size in Britain (at least), and unemployment in absolute numbers is lower than in 1979 (which means the actual unemployment rate is less than half what it was in the late 70s) despite us being in the middle of the worst recession since the 1930s. We work longer hours than ever despite all this extra automation we have.
So the next time someone complains when I cannon rush them in Stacraft 2, I can tell them not to be so mad, cheesing has been going on for 7500 years already...
I think monitor and TV makers really liked the move to 16:9 from 4:3 - for example, a 27in 16:9 monitor is smaller (has less surface area) than a 27in 4:3 monitor. Similarly, this new monitor allows LG to make a monitor "the same size" (in other words, same diagonal inches) as a competitors 16:9 monitor, but with an LCD panel that's actually smaller.
The historical significance of this of course is that Linux was originally written to specifically target the 80386, and it was written with the 386 with *no* portability in mind. So it no longer supports the CPU it was originally written for.
There was no iron clad guarantee that the Iraq war would be a success (and by many measures, it's been a complete waste of time) but we still went ahead and spent $800bn on it anyway (the direct cost to the DOD, the actual complete costs are probably much greater).
Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.
The reason it had to seemingly be beat out of them was because the documentation didn't actually exist. Microsoft were busy writing the documentation as fast as possible by reading the source. I'm certain that the internal documentation on Windows is (or at least was) terrible to non existent.
I have actual evidence to support this. A few years ago I was working on a bespoke product that had to basically hide Windows from the user, it was essentially a custom cash register that had to do a lot more than just sell stock items. We needed to write a full replacement GINA (the GINA is the thing that up to and including Windows XP handled the login, basically winlogon.exe loads msgina.dll, and msgina.dll contains all the stuff needed to present the user interface and get everything set up right so you log in correctly. It also handled the secure attention sequence - ie ctrl-alt-del on most people's boxes). The documentation was lightweight and that's making an understatement. The documentation only had the most basic coverage of how to write a stub GINA (i.e. continue using msgina.dll but adding some of your own authentication stuff). But we were writing a replacement GINA which basically had to do everything that msgina.dll did. In the anticipation of needing support, we had quite an expensive support contract with Microsoft, at the time I think it was on the order of US$40K per year.
When we used our support contract, we ended up talking to the actual Windows devs. It turns out they had exactly the same nearly useless Windows help file that we already had. There was *no* other documentation on the GINA within Microsoft as far as we could tell, and with such an expensive support contract, I would hope the devs weren't flat out lying to us - I suspect they were being 100% honest when they said they had no more documentation than we did (well, other than the source code). The support contract was actually pretty useless, we ended up having to reverse engineer the msgina.dll (we didn't go quite as far as disassembling it, but it wasn't far from our minds - we managed to find out enough by looking at registry and environment changes and comparing it to what our GINA was doing). A year later, we weren't entirely surprised to see the GINA documentation significantly expanded, probably written by the guys who were trying to help us as they discovered how the code worked.
The thing is, Google have effectively bought something. They are using all the public infrastructure, roads, public education, the military to provide defence, up to including the development of the Internet itself. to provide them with things they must have or they cannot exist at all, but then they don't pay for them. They have bought a whole lot of stuff that they don't want to pay for.
If they don't want this stuff provided for them, then they should move their entire operation to a country that doesn't provide it, for example Somalia.
Large airliners also have inertial navigation (certainly if they are going trans-ocean). Works just fine with no GPS.
Also IFR-capable GPS receivers, whether they are in a small single engine plane or a state-of-the-art B787 have RAIM (receiver autonomous integrity monitoring). The pilots *will* know if the GPS is getting bad data, because the GPS will detect this condition.
The Tea Party is just a fringe of the Republicans. Amongst the Republican mainstream, they want ever stronger copyright just as much as the Democrats. So yes, it's also mostly a Republican problem.
I have a nearly 30 year old Sinclair ZX Spectrum connected to my ethernet LAN (yes, really, there's an ethernet card for the Speccy - OK, so I had to design and make it, but you can buy them now :-)). It can run the old favorite games (and there's new ones still being developed for the machine) by loading them from a network file server. There's also a multiplayer capture the flag game for the machine, and a way of loading games and programs directly from World of Spectrum :-)
Don't know where you're from, but no one in our entire nation (well, apart from old fogeys) call wind turbines windmills.
I don't think heat will be such a problem. While the temperature of the "air" on Mars near the surface may only reach a daytime high of about -20 deg F, the surface temperature gets much higher (70 deg F recorded max). A greenhouse type structure on Mars with a breathable atmosphere will get pretty toasty and warm. Open the roof to allow the sun to shine through the glass during the day, and close it at night to reduce the amount of heat radiating out at night.
You're not taking the long view. In perhaps 500M-750M years from now, the sun's output will have increased sufficiently to have evaporated most of the oceans. The ensuing runaway greenhouse effect will make Earth like Venus. This would have been the case had humans not existed. Life on Earth has almost run its course; if we destroy ourselves and all higher mammals (eg. in a global nuclear war) there's not enough time for another intelligent life to evolve a second time from cockroaches.
For any complex piece of electronics this is true even if you live in China, or Taiwan or wherever. Wherever you live, and wherever the "Made in..." says, where it was made in had to import the majority of the parts. The last device I designed, every IC on that board came from a different country so basically there is nowhere in the world (not even China) you can assemble some electronics and not end up importing most of the semiconductors.
I've been doing some electronic design and assembly recently, and you'd be (probably) absolutely wrong. Not a single semiconductor part I used came from China. The only Chinese part was a connector (Tyco Mag45 ethernet magjack). The chips came from Korea, the UK, Taiwan and Japan.
Yay! I'm most likely neurotypical :-)
The problem for Portugal, Spain and Italy in particular is the way the euro is set up (note that the UK's problems aren't even 10% as severe as most of the eurozone's). During the boom years for example, the eurozone's interest rate policy was set to suit the German and French economies, but completely unsuitable for the periphery. Spain in particular was actually complying with EU rules over deficit size (while France and Germany flouted them) and was behaving much better than virtually the rest of Europe. The problem came because the absurdly low interest rates (from the point of Spain) caused a huge real estate bubble which has since done catastrophic damage to the Spanish banking system and the Spanish economy when it popped. The eurozone still hasn't learned, with interest rates still being set to suit Germany in the main but being bad for everyone else.
The second problem is one of positive feedback loops - which are almost always bad. The UK's economy has been much more stable than Spain or Ireland's because as the UK has its own currency, when lenders to the UK pull out they are also selling pound sterling and devaluing the pound a little, which acts as a stabilizing negative feedback loop, so you don't end up with a gross increase of risk of default and lenders fleeing. However, in the eurozone lenders have been fleeing Spanish and Italian (etc) bonds to buy German ones - but the Spanish and Italians being stuck in the same currency lack this feedback mechanism. This means the interest rate that Spain must pay to sell bonds has to go up, making it more likely that Spain will default, leading to more investors fleeing for Germany, meaning the bond rate must go up more, and the risk default goes up further, meaning more investors flee...etc. until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy even though when Spain started out their spending was well within the eurozone rules and they were one of the governments actually acting responsibly within the eurozone. Germany, who was flouting the rules gets away with it because it's where everyone's capital is fleeing to.