As I am trying to understand it, if the OEM sets up UEFI and SB properly, I should be able to insert my own signing key, not just one that's been pre-authorized, whomever I got it from.
I hope that finding an OEM that does this right when I get my next mobo rather than just drinking Remond-flavored Kool-Aid is not going to be too much of a hassle, but I suspect otherwise.
Indeed; I had one of the last versions of GFA, I think, 3.5u or somesuch. Very nice language I thought, run interpreted, compile for export and standalone. From my feeble attempts at Mark William's C, GFA had a lot of similar stuff. Although it could get confusing I like that one could deal with several levels, TOS, GDI, AES. While the verdammt event_multi was set up with all the fancy GUI stuff, one could even get down to bare metal in the functions and subs if needed. And agreed, the IDE was clean, simple, easy to use, and if memory serves let one customize it a bit as well. I certainly wasn't very good at it but I miss trying to use GFA. For that matter, I miss my STs also; I really have to get some emulators up and running.
GFA was becoming my favorite after Shepardson Basic on the 800. Btw, re the rev A lockup, I called Atari and spoke with an engineer who gave me the location to poke to reset the line counter - so no more lockups right in the middle of writing code. Rather than try to remember how many lines of code I'd done, a very smart friend helped me write a little routine that executed during the VBI to reset the pointer - a counter would keep track of the number of deleted lines and then issue the poke before the lock up limit. Just had to remember to run the usr call in immediate mode at the start of every coding session.
I've never seen Nedit. --fifteen minutes later-- Well, now I have. I installed it on my Ubuntu desktop. Looks very old fashioned. Also looks very good; I just took a quick gander at preferences and it looks as though I could spend some time in there all by itself. Neat. Thanks for pointing it out.
Yeah, it'd be nice. One problem, I think, was timing. By the time open source started becoming reputable and acceptable by business the EFI was too far along. Another, related, was the amount of effort going into OpenBoot couldn't begin to match the industry-group efforts. I think it's a shame, but too little, too late (not the work itself, but the acceptance of it as valid).
You can get your own signing key from Verisign. It is up to each OEM to properly implement UEFI on its motherboards; the EFI and later UEFI standard and its revisions have been open and freely available from the start.
IF an OEM properly implements UEFI and the secure boot portion then you will be able to boot any OS which ships with a valid key, or use your personal signing key to vouchsafe any OS you choose. Far as I can tell the problem lies entirely with OEMs that have lazy, improper, or incompetent implementations of open specs.
Of course, even if OEMs do everything correctly there will still be plenty of end-users who'll screw up. At least that part will never change. What Descartes really said was, "I fuck up, therefore I'm human." but his editor made him change it.
"The Unified EFI Forum or UEFI Forum (where UEFI stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is an alliance between several leading technology companies to modernize the booting process. The board of directors includes representatives from eleven "Promoter" companies: AMD, American Megatrends, Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, Insyde Software, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Phoenix Technologies."
and
"The non-profit corporation has assumed responsibility for the management and promotion of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification, a bootloader and runtime interface between platform firmware and an operating system. The original EFI specification was developed by Intel and was used as the starting point from which the UEFI version(s) were developed. The goal of the organization is to replace the aging PC BIOS."
If by proprietary you mean there are companies involved in it, yeah, well, ok. If you mean they do it to achieve some kind of lock-in, nefarious or no, then what the companies are doing doesn't seem to me to rise to the definition.
Also, on secure boot, Microsoft is pushing their own implementation of it; the real problem is and will be getting OEMs to not lock their machines to the need for a Microsoft key and properly furnishing the UEFI and secure boot provisions. In other words, we have to depend on the various OEMs to not screw things up. Best I can figure, secure boot itself - provided that there is not indeed an inherent, un-fixable security hole, can be useful in helping to prevent one's machine from getting owned by miscreants (or mal-doers or villains, et al.)
Perhaps relevant, from the first article, "Several major Linux distributions have developed different implementations for secure boot. Matthew Garrett himself developed a minimal bootloader known as shim; a pre-compiled, signed bootloader that allows the user to individually trust keys provided by distributors.[57] Ubuntu 12.10 uses an older version of shim pre-configured for use with Canonical's own key that only verifies the bootloader and allows unsigned kernels to be loaded: developers believed this practice of only signing the bootloader is more feasible, since a trusted kernel is only effective at securing user space and not the pre-boot state (which secure boot is designed to protect). This also allows users to build their own kernels and use custom kernel modules as well, without needing to re-configure the system.[58][40][59] Canonical also maintains its own private key to sign installations of Ubuntu pre-loaded on certified OEM computers that run the operating system, and also plans to enforce a secure boot requirement as well—requiring both a Canonical key and a Microsoft key (for compatibility reasons) to be included in their firmware. Fedora also uses shim, but requires that both the kernel and its modules be signed as well.[58]"
Btw, Microsoft is not who furnishes the keys - one gets them from Verisign for ~$100 for an individual, just like Microsoft did. If I get accepted into senior housing I'll be able to afford to get my very own key, which I intend doing.
Even Jim Sensenbrenner, the senator who introduced the act, voted for the Amash amendment, and stated that he wished to undo at least portions of the act.
I don't think you understand what the term means - not that your point is not taken. Create a false crisis might serve; a bit of thought by my betters would likely find a more apropos term.
Of course an attack would serve even better to drive their point home. Question: Why would a fanatic individual or group decide, after all the publicity of security alerts and evacuation of personnel, that now is a politically, terroristically, useful time to attack? As I understand it, one of the mechanisms of terror, indeed a central point, is to inflict damage on a group of unsuspecting people, the more the merrier. Even Ludlum wouldn't stoop so low as to set off a bomb near an empty building, unless it was done in service to one of his wheels-within-wheels plot elements.
Dunno 'bout that. There were certainly articles on it, here and there, online and print, even hearings in Congress. I still had television then and saw mention of it a few times on the national news shows. Then as now the people that cared about it are the ones who... care.
Best I can figure is that most people care about little that doesn't immediately and directly affect their daily personal lives, with some occasional exceptions for tax deductions and increases and the like. It's part of "human nature" and the long slide to even lower involvement in civic duty. Yet the non-participation by the bulk of the electorate in local and national affairs affecting them was lamented even before, during, and after the revolution of the 13 colonies, so it's not like some issue arising from new cloth.
Look around - unless it's some large proposed change in assessments or zoning or new ordinance, about the only people who regularly attend city or school board meetings are those for whom it's essentially a hobby or a vociferous minority of single-issue fans. (As a small personal example, when I was a lad the participation of at least one parent at PTA meetings was presumed. If neither attended, within days there would be a phone call or knock on the door with concerns expressed, offers of reminders via a phone call or postcard, even extending to offers of a ride and babysitters. Nowadays?)
There is no year 0. You've got a starting point, from which you proceed timewise to reach a full year. The period from start to end is year 1. 0 is a point, not a duration. This is very, very, simple counting, not even rising to arithmetic, really. Arithmetic can, and is, used for doing calculations - "I'm two years older than you." and the like.
Think of a calendar as a measuring stick, such a yardstick or ruler that just gets longer. The end of it, from which you read off to get to 3 1/4, is your 0. If you want to go backwards from an event, in this case the reference event, take another ruler and abut it to the first. Again notice there is no distance of 0, it's just a reference point, the end of the stick.
How all those folks ended up saying 2000 was the end of the 20th Century was simply because they couldn't be bothered to think about counting but got hung up on trying to fancify it with arithmetic; that, and the fascination with big round numbers - same thing happened in A.D. 1000. (It bothered me a bit at the time, still does in some ways, but then I figured that I had two millenium parties to attend, and I became less bothered;-)
Another quick way to illustrate this: give someone a bunch of pebbles or whatnot, ask him to count out aloud ten into a separate area. Most people will say "One, two, three," etc. How many people do you know will well and truly pick up the first object and say, "Zero"? None, unless maybe he's the sysadmin detailed in the old joke from rec.humor.funny. Ergo, no year 0. Again, the years are counting, not math. Calendars are all just and only about counting the tick tocks of the existence and duration of something.
(That's another thing: if one wants to get really pedantic about it, dates ought to be given as [year]B.C. before the birth, and A.D.[year], since A.D. is Anno Domini - "In the year of Our Lord." Very old texts get it correctly; I haven't looked into it but guess it changed over the past couple hundred years.)
I'm glad you found it interesting. I've been trying to tell people about this since '91. There's one huge caveat, tho: for someone who wants to really try it, the catch is that there is stuff to learn; until one has incorporated the keyboard shortcuts (and mentally mapped them to functional use of formatting, manipulation, and the like) it's not going to get them the speed and versatility desired.
I spent an hour a day for just over a week and still had a ways to go. External events intervened and unfortunately I haven't revisited the program.
Anyway, over the years everyone I've talked to who spent the effort to learn it just as one might with touch-typing, for instance, all swore by it for using it as it's intended. I talked with several developers at the time who used it in conjunction with another program called EdHack (a text editor that let one edit anything - including RAM and disk sectors - of any size (chunks limited to available RAM on one's system) for much of their work.
EdHack was interesting because the ST's OS on ROM was shadowed into RAM; if one didn't like something one could edit it in memory to see what happened before committing a change to code for further testing.
Ah, yes; I think to draw the line at using cremains for making stronger concrete, tho. Then again, when I'm done with my bod and whatever use the medical folks can get from it, it might make sense for the remains to end up in a highway bridge or something - might as well get some use for the stuff rather than getting buried in the ground or sitting in an urn on some shelf. Another possibility might be as part of compost.
Thanks for the clarification and info on other, more energy-efficient uses for the material - I hadn't thought to look into it - my bad. I like the way that people are finding more ways to use things that otherwise would be sent to the dump. (I recall from the late 70's a push to look into ways to scavenge and re-use stuff for fun and profit, and it looks like that mindset is paying off.)
You should see SuddenView. It's almost a paint program for words; each line is its own format, among other things, and its _fast_. It's the most radical text editor I've seen. Designed and written by Rod Coleman originally for the Atari ST. For anyone who does a lot of writing, especially for a living, it can be one hell of a helpful tool. I met Rod at an Atarifest in '91 where he demo'ed SuddenView, and yes, consider this a plug, if you want, because for what it is and what it lets you do, it's freaking awesome.
"excepting luminosity, what value is there to >24-bit color?"
Fidelity: see True Color, Deep Color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth#True_color_.2824-bit.29 from what I gather it's more than simply luminosity, although it may be down to language. As I understand it, having more bits per pixel/channel allows greater depth of rendering - larger gamut, greater range of lighting - basically, more true to what one's eyes might see, after allowing for metamerics.*
*"Absolute true-color rendering is impossible.[3] There are three major sources of color error ("metameric failure"): Different spectral sensitivities of the human eye and of an image capture device (e.g. a "camera") Different spectral emissions/reflections of the object and of the image render process (e.g. a "printer" or "monitor") Differences in spectral irradiance in the case of reflective images (e.g. photo prints) or reflective objects – see color rendering index (CRI) for details"
I'm with you and the others, I want high pixels per inch. For me this means that if I view what's on my monitor (currently a 20.5" 1920x1080 @ 101ppi) from 16-24 inches when reading or watching something or stick my nose six inches from the screen it's gonna look good and I won't see any damn grid or dots. My being able to afford a larger monitor at 300dpi is another matter, but I still want one.
For the wag who said to increase font size - sure, got that. Whatever the mix of hardware, software, and font design, so long as I can set it to a comfortable size and it is smooth and easy to read, yeah.
This is good tech stuff, for real-world use and valid "news for nerds, stuff that matters" - oops, we don't do that here anymore. It's one of the ways tech is supposed to work.
Somebody had a thought, "I wonder..." or "What if..." and tested it. It worked; in fact, it worked very well. The need is not restricted to China, either.
Being able to customize every aspect of UI is wonderful and indispensable - and try to find it in a "modern" current OS.
As you say, all the hard-won lessons in GUI design are being lost. The original research done over a decade which led to the early work on GUI largely came about from studies done at the behest of the armed forces and nuclear industry - they needed the most efficient way of presenting often complex data for pilots and operators to be able to easily and quickly make correct selections. All the hand-eye studies backing the design of icons - size, colors, style - again, forgotten. It's sad, and however unknowingly, end-users are paying for it. (And don't even get me started on useful configuration of mouse movement - nothing I've seen comes close to Silkmaus or what the Codeheads did.)
Navigate to your application in Nautilus or whatever your file manager is. Right-click, select "Make Link". Then drag shortcut to your desktop. Works.
Or, from Unity or similar, use the search widget in launchbar, drag to desktop. Works.
It's different, some, but simple and about the same amount of doing as on Windows. The second method above is in some ways the simplest - because on either OS it can be a hassle finding where the executable is.
For some folks, especially on a wide-screen monitor, it can be handy to have a vertical line of programs or file shortcuts on the desktop. But yeah, a sea of icons covering the desktop is weird. I once had an XP install with maybe two dozen desk icons, grouped by function, but there I mostly ran one thing at a time, so it actually was not a bad way to go. On my current install of Ubuntu I usually have a half dozen things running at once, and end up using the desk mostly as a scratch pad. (It's not so bad 'cuz I've got the windows to roll up with a right-click on the title bar or can hit the "show desktop" thing on the launchbar if I need to. I certainly don't claim to have a well-organized system; heck, I'm not well-organized anyway.)
Were I to need to run Windows, or could afford the license, I'd definitely run 7. I make it the proper successor to XP, and it fixes things that simply could not be done with another service pack, as best I can figure.
One thing that'd hold me back is the annoyance of having to spend the time to set it up. I ran 7 on a decent laptop at the time, in '09, and installed the usual stuff (some of it less needful than on XP, to be sure): unlocker, teracopy, erunt, ccleaner, vlc, Firefox, Opera, Foxit or similar, Irfanview, Spybot Search&Destroy (I've got a soft spot for it, it saved my systems several times, and still has some utility), an AV or two to second-guess Windows Defender or whatever it's called now, perhaps a third-party software firewall (really maybe not needed inside my own LAN behind a router...), and then another half-dozen or so favorite utilities and applications that I prefer to what comes with a default Win install.
Anyway, sorry for the ramble; long story short, if folks need Windows, they might should run 7 - unless there's some program that absolutely won't run on it somehow.
Left out, of course, is all the de-crapification that needs done if the machine is bought from one of the normal OEMs; if one install it oneself, then no problem.
Finally there's the configuration stuff - sprucing up the services, for instance, and the monitoring and logging stuff.
I've been running Linux for five years now as main OS, with XP in a vm for a few things. I end up spending about the same amount of time setting up a Linux install as for Windows, so it's mostly a trade-off. (As a wise old fellow once remarked years back, "All operating systems suck, each in their own way." I've been looking for the exact quote and its author but haven't found it; the sentiment seems correct, tho. I think it goes back to a fellow on usenet in the 80's, perhaps quoting one of his profs. I first came across it around '91.) I think one of my main beefs with Windows is the amount of Digital Restriction Management that's baked in, as a trade-off for the included codecs, best I can figure.
"....a human will be aware enough to never jab the needle all the way through your arm."
Through one's arm, yes. Through the vein, though? No. From two separate incidents, I can attest otherwise.
This is one of those "it depends" things. A properly designed and built robot (and I'd need some convincing) I'd accept just a well as a competent nurse who's not in a rush. Anything or anyone else, no.
I've no idea, from what little I've read (my intro to wolf culture was Mowat's book and later his original paper and notes) how they develop their various hunting techniques. I'd guess that a few are practised by play, but where the playbook comes from is up for grabs. The idea that anything that complicated can be carried as some sort of gene memory is frowned upon, but it's still an easy thing to pick for an explanation. (How the hell else does a bird know how to build a nest, for instance?)
I mean, what's left? Divine guidance? Telepathy? The latter, weird and outlandish as it is, would not surprise me at all, were it so. And then there's the bit about communication - given all the ways we use posture, gesture, little changes in the face, to convey things, I'd expect them to be doing no less. But there's still the matter of where the maneuvers come from.
Someday I should maybe tell the story of Spot, Best Rabbit Dog on the Hill.
What's tough about it? Far as I can tell, the submitter was going with what info was presented in the article. Perhaps due diligence would have required him to call the town mayor and ask for precise numbers?
One sentence says it lights up a circle of about 2000 sq. ft. In another sentence, the mirrors total 538 sq. ft. Onward, a more precise figure is given for the area of the circle, 2150 sq. ft. (From the middle slide, it's more like an ellipse, but that's kinda irrelevant; what matters, I think, is that there will be a place in the town square where folks can stand in a pool of reflected sunlight. Not enough to tan, but enough maybe to feel good on the face in the middle of winter. If you've ever lived with real winter then you know how good that can feel.)
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely agreed.
As I am trying to understand it, if the OEM sets up UEFI and SB properly, I should be able to insert my own signing key, not just one that's been pre-authorized, whomever I got it from.
I hope that finding an OEM that does this right when I get my next mobo rather than just drinking Remond-flavored Kool-Aid is not going to be too much of a hassle, but I suspect otherwise.
Indeed; I had one of the last versions of GFA, I think, 3.5u or somesuch. Very nice language I thought, run interpreted, compile for export and standalone. From my feeble attempts at Mark William's C, GFA had a lot of similar stuff. Although it could get confusing I like that one could deal with several levels, TOS, GDI, AES. While the verdammt event_multi was set up with all the fancy GUI stuff, one could even get down to bare metal in the functions and subs if needed. And agreed, the IDE was clean, simple, easy to use, and if memory serves let one customize it a bit as well. I certainly wasn't very good at it but I miss trying to use GFA. For that matter, I miss my STs also; I really have to get some emulators up and running.
GFA was becoming my favorite after Shepardson Basic on the 800. Btw, re the rev A lockup, I called Atari and spoke with an engineer who gave me the location to poke to reset the line counter - so no more lockups right in the middle of writing code. Rather than try to remember how many lines of code I'd done, a very smart friend helped me write a little routine that executed during the VBI to reset the pointer - a counter would keep track of the number of deleted lines and then issue the poke before the lock up limit. Just had to remember to run the usr call in immediate mode at the start of every coding session.
I've never seen Nedit. --fifteen minutes later-- Well, now I have. I installed it on my Ubuntu desktop. Looks very old fashioned. Also looks very good; I just took a quick gander at preferences and it looks as though I could spend some time in there all by itself. Neat. Thanks for pointing it out.
OpenBoot/OpenFrimware
Yeah, it'd be nice. One problem, I think, was timing. By the time open source started becoming reputable and acceptable by business the EFI was too far along. Another, related, was the amount of effort going into OpenBoot couldn't begin to match the industry-group efforts. I think it's a shame, but too little, too late (not the work itself, but the acceptance of it as valid).
You can get your own signing key from Verisign. It is up to each OEM to properly implement UEFI on its motherboards; the EFI and later UEFI standard and its revisions have been open and freely available from the start.
IF an OEM properly implements UEFI and the secure boot portion then you will be able to boot any OS which ships with a valid key, or use your personal signing key to vouchsafe any OS you choose. Far as I can tell the problem lies entirely with OEMs that have lazy, improper, or incompetent implementations of open specs.
Of course, even if OEMs do everything correctly there will still be plenty of end-users who'll screw up. At least that part will never change. What Descartes really said was, "I fuck up, therefore I'm human." but his editor made him change it.
UEFI proprietary? Since when?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_EFI_Forum
from the latter:
"The Unified EFI Forum or UEFI Forum (where UEFI stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is an alliance between several leading technology companies to modernize the booting process. The board of directors includes representatives from eleven "Promoter" companies: AMD, American Megatrends, Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, Insyde Software, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Phoenix Technologies."
and
"The non-profit corporation has assumed responsibility for the management and promotion of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification, a bootloader and runtime interface between platform firmware and an operating system. The original EFI specification was developed by Intel and was used as the starting point from which the UEFI version(s) were developed. The goal of the organization is to replace the aging PC BIOS."
If by proprietary you mean there are companies involved in it, yeah, well, ok. If you mean they do it to achieve some kind of lock-in, nefarious or no, then what the companies are doing doesn't seem to me to rise to the definition.
Also, on secure boot, Microsoft is pushing their own implementation of it; the real problem is and will be getting OEMs to not lock their machines to the need for a Microsoft key and properly furnishing the UEFI and secure boot provisions. In other words, we have to depend on the various OEMs to not screw things up. Best I can figure, secure boot itself - provided that there is not indeed an inherent, un-fixable security hole, can be useful in helping to prevent one's machine from getting owned by miscreants (or mal-doers or villains, et al.)
Perhaps relevant, from the first article,
"Several major Linux distributions have developed different implementations for secure boot. Matthew Garrett himself developed a minimal bootloader known as shim; a pre-compiled, signed bootloader that allows the user to individually trust keys provided by distributors.[57] Ubuntu 12.10 uses an older version of shim pre-configured for use with Canonical's own key that only verifies the bootloader and allows unsigned kernels to be loaded: developers believed this practice of only signing the bootloader is more feasible, since a trusted kernel is only effective at securing user space and not the pre-boot state (which secure boot is designed to protect). This also allows users to build their own kernels and use custom kernel modules as well, without needing to re-configure the system.[58][40][59] Canonical also maintains its own private key to sign installations of Ubuntu pre-loaded on certified OEM computers that run the operating system, and also plans to enforce a secure boot requirement as well—requiring both a Canonical key and a Microsoft key (for compatibility reasons) to be included in their firmware. Fedora also uses shim, but requires that both the kernel and its modules be signed as well.[58]"
Btw, Microsoft is not who furnishes the keys - one gets them from Verisign for ~$100 for an individual, just like Microsoft did. If I get accepted into senior housing I'll be able to afford to get my very own key, which I intend doing.
Even Jim Sensenbrenner, the senator who introduced the act, voted for the Amash amendment, and stated that he wished to undo at least portions of the act.
a false flag
I don't think you understand what the term means - not that your point is not taken. Create a false crisis might serve; a bit of thought by my betters would likely find a more apropos term.
Of course an attack would serve even better to drive their point home. Question: Why would a fanatic individual or group decide, after all the publicity of security alerts and evacuation of personnel, that now is a politically, terroristically, useful time to attack? As I understand it, one of the mechanisms of terror, indeed a central point, is to inflict damage on a group of unsuspecting people, the more the merrier. Even Ludlum wouldn't stoop so low as to set off a bomb near an empty building, unless it was done in service to one of his wheels-within-wheels plot elements.
Dunno 'bout that. There were certainly articles on it, here and there, online and print, even hearings in Congress. I still had television then and saw mention of it a few times on the national news shows. Then as now the people that cared about it are the ones who... care.
Best I can figure is that most people care about little that doesn't immediately and directly affect their daily personal lives, with some occasional exceptions for tax deductions and increases and the like. It's part of "human nature" and the long slide to even lower involvement in civic duty. Yet the non-participation by the bulk of the electorate in local and national affairs affecting them was lamented even before, during, and after the revolution of the 13 colonies, so it's not like some issue arising from new cloth.
Look around - unless it's some large proposed change in assessments or zoning or new ordinance, about the only people who regularly attend city or school board meetings are those for whom it's essentially a hobby or a vociferous minority of single-issue fans. (As a small personal example, when I was a lad the participation of at least one parent at PTA meetings was presumed. If neither attended, within days there would be a phone call or knock on the door with concerns expressed, offers of reminders via a phone call or postcard, even extending to offers of a ride and babysitters. Nowadays?)
Precisely. And a punny reference as well into the bargain.
There is no year 0. You've got a starting point, from which you proceed timewise to reach a full year. The period from start to end is year 1. 0 is a point, not a duration. This is very, very, simple counting, not even rising to arithmetic, really. Arithmetic can, and is, used for doing calculations - "I'm two years older than you." and the like.
Think of a calendar as a measuring stick, such a yardstick or ruler that just gets longer. The end of it, from which you read off to get to 3 1/4, is your 0. If you want to go backwards from an event, in this case the reference event, take another ruler and abut it to the first. Again notice there is no distance of 0, it's just a reference point, the end of the stick.
How all those folks ended up saying 2000 was the end of the 20th Century was simply because they couldn't be bothered to think about counting but got hung up on trying to fancify it with arithmetic; that, and the fascination with big round numbers - same thing happened in A.D. 1000. (It bothered me a bit at the time, still does in some ways, but then I figured that I had two millenium parties to attend, and I became less bothered;-)
Another quick way to illustrate this: give someone a bunch of pebbles or whatnot, ask him to count out aloud ten into a separate area. Most people will say "One, two, three," etc. How many people do you know will well and truly pick up the first object and say, "Zero"? None, unless maybe he's the sysadmin detailed in the old joke from rec.humor.funny. Ergo, no year 0. Again, the years are counting, not math. Calendars are all just and only about counting the tick tocks of the existence and duration of something.
(That's another thing: if one wants to get really pedantic about it, dates ought to be given as [year]B.C. before the birth, and A.D.[year], since A.D. is Anno Domini - "In the year of Our Lord." Very old texts get it correctly; I haven't looked into it but guess it changed over the past couple hundred years.)
small question - Heinlein or Asimov? I can easily feature either one saying it, and my memory is shot. As for mcgrew's law, tasty, and thanks.
I'm glad you found it interesting. I've been trying to tell people about this since '91. There's one huge caveat, tho: for someone who wants to really try it, the catch is that there is stuff to learn; until one has incorporated the keyboard shortcuts (and mentally mapped them to functional use of formatting, manipulation, and the like) it's not going to get them the speed and versatility desired.
I spent an hour a day for just over a week and still had a ways to go. External events intervened and unfortunately I haven't revisited the program.
Anyway, over the years everyone I've talked to who spent the effort to learn it just as one might with touch-typing, for instance, all swore by it for using it as it's intended. I talked with several developers at the time who used it in conjunction with another program called EdHack (a text editor that let one edit anything - including RAM and disk sectors - of any size (chunks limited to available RAM on one's system) for much of their work.
EdHack was interesting because the ST's OS on ROM was shadowed into RAM; if one didn't like something one could edit it in memory to see what happened before committing a change to code for further testing.
Ah, yes; I think to draw the line at using cremains for making stronger concrete, tho. Then again, when I'm done with my bod and whatever use the medical folks can get from it, it might make sense for the remains to end up in a highway bridge or something - might as well get some use for the stuff rather than getting buried in the ground or sitting in an urn on some shelf. Another possibility might be as part of compost.
Thanks for the clarification and info on other, more energy-efficient uses for the material - I hadn't thought to look into it - my bad. I like the way that people are finding more ways to use things that otherwise would be sent to the dump. (I recall from the late 70's a push to look into ways to scavenge and re-use stuff for fun and profit, and it looks like that mindset is paying off.)
re innovate a text editor
You should see SuddenView. It's almost a paint program for words; each line is its own format, among other things, and its _fast_. It's the most radical text editor I've seen. Designed and written by Rod Coleman originally for the Atari ST. For anyone who does a lot of writing, especially for a living, it can be one hell of a helpful tool. I met Rod at an Atarifest in '91 where he demo'ed SuddenView, and yes, consider this a plug, if you want, because for what it is and what it lets you do, it's freaking awesome.
http://www.sudden.net/view/
"excepting luminosity, what value is there to >24-bit color?"
Fidelity: see True Color, Deep Color
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth#True_color_.2824-bit.29
from what I gather it's more than simply luminosity, although it may be down to language. As I understand it, having more bits per pixel/channel allows greater depth of rendering - larger gamut, greater range of lighting - basically, more true to what one's eyes might see, after allowing for metamerics.*
*"Absolute true-color rendering is impossible.[3] There are three major sources of color error ("metameric failure"):
Different spectral sensitivities of the human eye and of an image capture device (e.g. a "camera")
Different spectral emissions/reflections of the object and of the image render process (e.g. a "printer" or "monitor")
Differences in spectral irradiance in the case of reflective images (e.g. photo prints) or reflective objects – see color rendering index (CRI) for details"
I'm with you and the others, I want high pixels per inch. For me this means that if I view what's on my monitor (currently a 20.5" 1920x1080 @ 101ppi) from 16-24 inches when reading or watching something or stick my nose six inches from the screen it's gonna look good and I won't see any damn grid or dots. My being able to afford a larger monitor at 300dpi is another matter, but I still want one.
For the wag who said to increase font size - sure, got that. Whatever the mix of hardware, software, and font design, so long as I can set it to a comfortable size and it is smooth and easy to read, yeah.
After 6.0 glasses I'm not doing much reading.
This is good tech stuff, for real-world use and valid "news for nerds, stuff that matters" - oops, we don't do that here anymore. It's one of the ways tech is supposed to work.
Somebody had a thought, "I wonder..." or "What if..." and tested it.
It worked; in fact, it worked very well. The need is not restricted to China, either.
What's not to like? Where's the applause?
Bingo.
Being able to customize every aspect of UI is wonderful and indispensable - and try to find it in a "modern" current OS.
As you say, all the hard-won lessons in GUI design are being lost. The original research done over a decade which led to the early work on GUI largely came about from studies done at the behest of the armed forces and nuclear industry - they needed the most efficient way of presenting often complex data for pilots and operators to be able to easily and quickly make correct selections. All the hand-eye studies backing the design of icons - size, colors, style - again, forgotten. It's sad, and however unknowingly, end-users are paying for it. (And don't even get me started on useful configuration of mouse movement - nothing I've seen comes close to Silkmaus or what the Codeheads did.)
Navigate to your application in Nautilus or whatever your file manager is.
Right-click, select "Make Link".
Then drag shortcut to your desktop. Works.
Or, from Unity or similar, use the search widget in launchbar, drag to desktop. Works.
It's different, some, but simple and about the same amount of doing as on Windows. The second method above is in some ways the simplest - because on either OS it can be a hassle finding where the executable is.
For some folks, especially on a wide-screen monitor, it can be handy to have a vertical line of programs or file shortcuts on the desktop. But yeah, a sea of icons covering the desktop is weird. I once had an XP install with maybe two dozen desk icons, grouped by function, but there I mostly ran one thing at a time, so it actually was not a bad way to go. On my current install of Ubuntu I usually have a half dozen things running at once, and end up using the desk mostly as a scratch pad. (It's not so bad 'cuz I've got the windows to roll up with a right-click on the title bar or can hit the "show desktop" thing on the launchbar if I need to. I certainly don't claim to have a well-organized system; heck, I'm not well-organized anyway.)
Were I to need to run Windows, or could afford the license, I'd definitely run 7. I make it the proper successor to XP, and it fixes things that simply could not be done with another service pack, as best I can figure.
One thing that'd hold me back is the annoyance of having to spend the time to set it up. I ran 7 on a decent laptop at the time, in '09, and installed the usual stuff (some of it less needful than on XP, to be sure): unlocker, teracopy, erunt, ccleaner, vlc, Firefox, Opera, Foxit or similar, Irfanview, Spybot Search&Destroy (I've got a soft spot for it, it saved my systems several times, and still has some utility), an AV or two to second-guess Windows Defender or whatever it's called now, perhaps a third-party software firewall (really maybe not needed inside my own LAN behind a router...), and then another half-dozen or so favorite utilities and applications that I prefer to what comes with a default Win install.
Anyway, sorry for the ramble; long story short, if folks need Windows, they might should run 7 - unless there's some program that absolutely won't run on it somehow.
Left out, of course, is all the de-crapification that needs done if the machine is bought from one of the normal OEMs; if one install it oneself, then no problem.
Finally there's the configuration stuff - sprucing up the services, for instance, and the monitoring and logging stuff.
I've been running Linux for five years now as main OS, with XP in a vm for a few things. I end up spending about the same amount of time setting up a Linux install as for Windows, so it's mostly a trade-off. (As a wise old fellow once remarked years back, "All operating systems suck, each in their own way." I've been looking for the exact quote and its author but haven't found it; the sentiment seems correct, tho. I think it goes back to a fellow on usenet in the 80's, perhaps quoting one of his profs. I first came across it around '91.) I think one of my main beefs with Windows is the amount of Digital Restriction Management that's baked in, as a trade-off for the included codecs, best I can figure.
What's wrong with it? Renders fine in Opera; it's easy to read and the links work.
"....a human will be aware enough to never jab the needle all the way through your arm."
Through one's arm, yes. Through the vein, though? No. From two separate incidents, I can attest otherwise.
This is one of those "it depends" things. A properly designed and built robot (and I'd need some convincing) I'd accept just a well as a competent nurse who's not in a rush. Anything or anyone else, no.
That's one neat story. Thanks.
I've no idea, from what little I've read (my intro to wolf culture was Mowat's book and later his original paper and notes) how they develop their various hunting techniques. I'd guess that a few are practised by play, but where the playbook comes from is up for grabs. The idea that anything that complicated can be carried as some sort of gene memory is frowned upon, but it's still an easy thing to pick for an explanation. (How the hell else does a bird know how to build a nest, for instance?)
I mean, what's left? Divine guidance? Telepathy? The latter, weird and outlandish as it is, would not surprise me at all, were it so. And then there's the bit about communication - given all the ways we use posture, gesture, little changes in the face, to convey things, I'd expect them to be doing no less. But there's still the matter of where the maneuvers come from.
Someday I should maybe tell the story of Spot, Best Rabbit Dog on the Hill.
What's tough about it? Far as I can tell, the submitter was going with what info was presented in the article. Perhaps due diligence would have required him to call the town mayor and ask for precise numbers?
One sentence says it lights up a circle of about 2000 sq. ft.
In another sentence, the mirrors total 538 sq. ft.
Onward, a more precise figure is given for the area of the circle, 2150 sq. ft. (From the middle slide, it's more like an ellipse, but that's kinda irrelevant; what matters, I think, is that there will be a place in the town square where folks can stand in a pool of reflected sunlight. Not enough to tan, but enough maybe to feel good on the face in the middle of winter. If you've ever lived with real winter then you know how good that can feel.)