As near as I can figure, the Japanese government mostly continues to support the whaling industry out of spite. They keep whaling because other countries try to tell them they aren't allowed to do it.
Scalia is mostly just a conservative hack these days, but sometimes he remembers that he used to have actual principles. Good for him – on this issue, he's absolutely right on the merits.
The majority decision is terrible because it means that if the authorities want your DNA for whatever reason, all they have to do is come up with some excuse to arrest you. They don't have to make the arrest stick, just get you into the system.
Whales are considerably more intelligent than most food species, so I think that makes a real difference. I have no problem eating hamburger, but I'd find eating ape meat, for instance, to be morally problematic.
Japan's economy has actually been doing fairly well since Shinzo Abe took over as PM and started dishing out the Keynesian stimulus.
That said, you're right about the whaling – it's a dumb boondoggle that is very difficult to come up with any rational justification for. If it's just about the jobs, there are a lot more productive things they could be having these people do than catch endangered animals to get meat that no one wants to eat.
TL;DR: Haswell is OK on the desktop, but nothing special; roughly 5%-10% better than Ivy Bridge. If you're on Sandy Bridge or better already, it's probably not worth upgrading. This architecture was designed for laptops first and foremost. Light power consumption/TDP on mobile parts, and a better GPU, are the big selling points. Apple will get much better integrated graphics so they don't need a Nvidia chip for their top rMBP, but they'll pay out the nose for it.
This is what all the rumors and leaks over the past couple months said and it's now officially confirmed.
Ok, so 4K is marketable as a PPI gambit. This makes a lot more sense with your application. The problem is that 4K has to be mass market to drive down the price of such a thing and as we saw with 90s Apple hardware, the application won't drive it.
Why are you citing incidents from the 1990s? Look at the last couple of years. Apple already has driven high-DPI "Retina" displays into the mainstream. Yes, they are currently a premium product on laptops, but on tablets and smartphones, DPI far higher than the desktop norm is now standard across the industry. And Samsung is preparing a 3200x1800 laptop display – clearly they think there is some demand here.
I think portable devices really have changed the game. Once you've used a iPad 4 for a while, the low DPI on a PC monitor really looks blurry and crappy in comparison. I don't think it's a stretch that desktop and laptop users going forward will want the same high display quality that they have gotten used to on their smartphones and tablets.
Actually, it is an issue. I don't see DisplayPort on a GTX560 or HD6770 nor a lot of other recent graphics cards that can drive such resolution. So yeah, it's still an issue.
At this point, the technology is still cutting-edge. Even if Asus manages to pull a rabbit out of their hat and releases this monitor at a $999 price point, that's still a premium product, and if the buyer doesn't already have a current-generation video card, he/she probably won't balk too much at spending an extra $100-$200 for one with DP 1.2 support.
By the time 4K becomes mainstream, the cards you mention will be completely outdated and integrated GPUs will routinely support 4K @ 60 Hz through DisplayPorts on the motherboard. Intel already has the silicon ready as of Ivy Bridge, though I don't think the firmware is fully implemented yet due to lack of demand.
But this is more than just a PC problem. It's also a hurdle in the home theater space as well.
Not really. Virtually all 4K video content will be sourced from film. This is true of 1080p content on current Blu-Rays; even most TV shows in the HD era are shot on film, not video. This means the frame rate will be 23.976 frames per second, which the current version of HDMI can handle at that resolution just fine. It's only PCs that really need 4K @ 60 Hz.
The question is... what content will take advantage of this?
Anyone who edits (or views) photos should appreciate the higher resolution. Even a cheap modern digital camera can usually take a picture with a resolution about as high as this monitor.
But the biggest advantage is in smooth text (and vector UI elements where available). You aren't supposed to run this at standard DPI and squint at tiny boxes; you're supposed to run it at 200% scaling and get far smoother text than usual, since it gets 4x the number of pixels at the same point size.
First of all, the alleged price of $5000 is pure speculation. None of the other sources reporting on the Asus 4K monitor have mentioned it, and the Extreme Tech article describes the price as "our guess".
Secondly, the article is flat-out wrong when it says that Sharp's 4K monitor "doesnâ(TM)t seem to have been released" so far. In fact, the PN-K321 has been released and you can buy one on Amazon for $4900. A few other online retailers have it, too, for slightly lower prices. There is one weird caveat; you currently need an AMD card for it to work properly, because it uses DisplayPort 1.2 with MST and basically shows up to the OS as two 1920x2160 monitors. You have to use Eyefinity to get the OS to treat it as one large screen. This Youtube video (not mine - I only wish I could afford this thing!) shows how it's done.
The Sharp monitor isn't even the cheapest 4K device currently on the market. That distinction belongs to a 50 inch Seiki Digital TV which costs $1,399.99 on Amazon. But this device can only take a 30 Hz input, due to the limitations of the HDMI protocol. I've also heard some criticisms of the panel quality.
What I and many others are hoping is that the Asus 4K monitor can lower the price point on this technology. If it sells for the same $5000 as the Sharp monitor, it's a non-event since it does nothing to advance the state of the art. But if they can get it down to $2500 or lower, then we'll start to see it show up in "extreme" gaming rigs and some professional workspaces, and maybe in a year or two they will be affordable for mainstream power users.
One investigator finally reproduced the problems. You know what it took to reproduce the problem? Trying to punch through a stack of multiple ballots. The ballots near the bottom were not punched all the way through and often had either dimples or hanging chads.
What happened was that the "butterfly ballot" was supposed to have been placed on a template, and then the voter was supposed to use the stylus to punch the ballot. The chad would then fall off into a groove in the template (the ballot holes were in the center of the sheet of paper). The problem was that the groove got clogged up from the large number of chads (remember, people don't just vote for POTUS, but for two dozen or so state and local positions as well). Once the groove was clogged, it blocked the chads from coming out of the ballot.
This is all we use in Canada for every election at every level. It works fine. You have 100% paper trail, electronic tallying speed, no "hanging chaff" nonsense. It's a tried and true technology that has been around for decades and decades and decades.
Handwritten voting can work, but what do they do when the voter is physically unable to hold a pencil? Or, for that matter, if they're illiterate?
It's important because when you "grok" it, your mind is different than before you grokked. Garridan's comment (http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3805139&cid=43874611) is right on: you'll "sharpen your skills in symbolic manipulation". Pushups and bicep curls and stretching aren't sports: athletes do those things to condition their bodies for the real sports where nary a pushup is involved.
Prove it. 100 years ago they said the same thing about Greek and Latin. But when those courses were dropped from the requirements list, there's no evidence that the average quality of thought processes of college graduates went down. I doubt there will be with advanced math, either.
These are specialized skills, nothing more or less. A few people need them; most don't. If you don't like them and aren't going to be in one of the few jobs that require them, then learning these skills is a waste of time and money.
How can the NSL process possibly be construed as anything other than a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment? It's basic, black-letter law: warrants have to be issued by the judicial branch, not the cops themselves. Are the courts really going to allow the Fourth Amendment to be read out of the Constitution by a meaningless invocation of "national security"?
In terms of the actual work: Most application programmers and web developers won't need any kind of advanced mathematics. They might be tasked at collecting statistics, though, so it's a good idea to have a general understanding of that. Systems programmers are more likely to need advanced math. You will definitely need some strong mathematical skills if you're going to directly work on software that handles data compression (including audio and video formats, like JPEG and MP3) or error correction/redundancy. But most programmers don't ever have to do this; if you want to decode a JPEG file, you probably use libjpeg or your toolkit's built-in decoding functions.
Now in terms of actually finding a job, that can be a different story. The underlying problem is that many HR departments think that "Computer Science" is programming, and that anyone they hire as a coder should have a CS degree. But the professors who teach CS think that CS is a branch of applied mathematics, with only a tangential relationship to programming. Given the current balance of power, I suspect the corporations are eventually going to kick the universities in the ass until they start teaching CS the way they want it to be taught. But that hasn't happened yet. Which means that anyone who wants to become a programmer, but isn't that good at math, has a real problem breaking into the business world.
You're probably right that FreeBSD would make a better substrate than Linux for trying to clone the Apple userland experience. It would also offer the advantage of being able to use native ZFS (which OSX was originally slated to support, but doesn't).
One thing I think is clear is that if any FOSS operating system is going to wind up on the end-user desktop, it must have strong binary compatibility with either Windows or OSX. There is just not enough software available on Linux to satisfy the average desktop user (especially now that the browser/email-only crowd has largely moved on to tablet and smartphones). And it's a chicken-and-egg problem; the software won't be there until the users are, but the users won't come until the software is there. A *good* compatibility layer is the only way to cut that Gordian knot. WINE could conceivably do it, but isn't anywhere near good enough at this point and may never be.
Trust me, they aren't going to stop selling RoundUp anytime soon. Every suburban garage in the US has a container of that stuff on hand for every spring when the weeds start coming up through the cracks and in the middle of the landscaping where they don't belong.
These people are selfish bastards who are willing to contaminate the soil and groundwater for purely aesthetic reasons.
Common sense indicates that the repeated use of glyphosate would eventually give rise to "Roundup Ready" weeds through the mechanism of Darwinian selection. A quick Google search indicates that this has indeed happened. Presumably Monsanto intends to move on to the next poison once glyphosate is played out.
No, Monsanto is a Poison company that started getting into the food business. But their primary focus is still poison. Did you know they own both Coke and Pepsi?
Really? Coke and Pepsi are publicly traded companies (KO and PEP, respectively, both on NYSE). And both of them have market caps more than double Monsanto's (NYSE: MON). Where did you read this assertion?
Re:Why aren't there more contributors to this proj
on
ReactOS 0.3.15 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
And its entire life, started as a single-user system, means the whole damn thing is broken as far as multi-user goes.
That was only true of Win9x, and the last version of that was discontinued about 10 years ago. Windows NT (which includes 2K, XP, Vista, 7, and 8) was built from the ground up as a modern, multi-user OS with full support for security built in. In fact, the NT security model is slightly more sophisticated than the Unix model (though not as good as SE Linux). Both do share the same flaw: from a security POV, the program is the user and can do whatever the user wants. This is something Android got right, granting permissions on a per-app rather than per-user basis.
A lot of people ignored the NT security provisions up through XP by running as admin all the time, but UAC mostly killed that. People hated it, but it gave the developers a much needed kick in the butt to stop breaking stuff by requiring root.
Why should anyone care about making an open source Windows now, anyway?
Because Windows owns the business world, most of the power-user world, and most of the PC gamer world. If you want OSS to make any inroads on the business desktop or with gamers, it has to run their software on their terms. And that means Windows binary compatibility.
What do your employees do? I suppose if you have something like a call center where most operations can be done through the browser (including a web-based CRM system) and where you don't want your employees going off on tangents, it might work. Assuming they can resist the urge to claw their eyeballs out after staring at the horrendous font rendering all day. But for anything more than that, it's just a total nonstarter.
And AutoCAD and Photoshop are the easy ones. They have a wide audience and it's generally understood, at least in a broad sense, what they're supposed to do and why it's important. Good luck rewriting a million different industry-specific niche applications for Linux. Better luck finding the coders willing to volunteer on obscure projects that neither they nor anyone outside the industry in question cares about.
Re:Why aren't there more contributors to this proj
on
ReactOS 0.3.15 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The registry gets a lot of hate, but I don't see how it is worse than the alternative, which is tons of different.ini files (or equivalent) for each application and setting. At least on Windows, it's generally understood that settings should be exposed in some way in the GUI and that for all but the most advanced features, saying "go edit the registry" isn't really a good solution. On Linux, forcing users to manually edit config files is routine.
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As near as I can figure, the Japanese government mostly continues to support the whaling industry out of spite. They keep whaling because other countries try to tell them they aren't allowed to do it.
Scalia is mostly just a conservative hack these days, but sometimes he remembers that he used to have actual principles. Good for him – on this issue, he's absolutely right on the merits.
The majority decision is terrible because it means that if the authorities want your DNA for whatever reason, all they have to do is come up with some excuse to arrest you. They don't have to make the arrest stick, just get you into the system.
Whales are considerably more intelligent than most food species, so I think that makes a real difference. I have no problem eating hamburger, but I'd find eating ape meat, for instance, to be morally problematic.
Japan's economy has actually been doing fairly well since Shinzo Abe took over as PM and started dishing out the Keynesian stimulus.
That said, you're right about the whaling – it's a dumb boondoggle that is very difficult to come up with any rational justification for. If it's just about the jobs, there are a lot more productive things they could be having these people do than catch endangered animals to get meat that no one wants to eat.
TL;DR: Haswell is OK on the desktop, but nothing special; roughly 5%-10% better than Ivy Bridge. If you're on Sandy Bridge or better already, it's probably not worth upgrading. This architecture was designed for laptops first and foremost. Light power consumption/TDP on mobile parts, and a better GPU, are the big selling points. Apple will get much better integrated graphics so they don't need a Nvidia chip for their top rMBP, but they'll pay out the nose for it.
This is what all the rumors and leaks over the past couple months said and it's now officially confirmed.
Ok, so 4K is marketable as a PPI gambit. This makes a lot more sense with your application. The problem is that 4K has to be mass market to drive down the price of such a thing and as we saw with 90s Apple hardware, the application won't drive it.
Why are you citing incidents from the 1990s? Look at the last couple of years. Apple already has driven high-DPI "Retina" displays into the mainstream. Yes, they are currently a premium product on laptops, but on tablets and smartphones, DPI far higher than the desktop norm is now standard across the industry. And Samsung is preparing a 3200x1800 laptop display – clearly they think there is some demand here.
I think portable devices really have changed the game. Once you've used a iPad 4 for a while, the low DPI on a PC monitor really looks blurry and crappy in comparison. I don't think it's a stretch that desktop and laptop users going forward will want the same high display quality that they have gotten used to on their smartphones and tablets.
Actually, it is an issue. I don't see DisplayPort on a GTX560 or HD6770 nor a lot of other recent graphics cards that can drive such resolution. So yeah, it's still an issue.
At this point, the technology is still cutting-edge. Even if Asus manages to pull a rabbit out of their hat and releases this monitor at a $999 price point, that's still a premium product, and if the buyer doesn't already have a current-generation video card, he/she probably won't balk too much at spending an extra $100-$200 for one with DP 1.2 support.
By the time 4K becomes mainstream, the cards you mention will be completely outdated and integrated GPUs will routinely support 4K @ 60 Hz through DisplayPorts on the motherboard. Intel already has the silicon ready as of Ivy Bridge, though I don't think the firmware is fully implemented yet due to lack of demand.
But this is more than just a PC problem. It's also a hurdle in the home theater space as well.
Not really. Virtually all 4K video content will be sourced from film. This is true of 1080p content on current Blu-Rays; even most TV shows in the HD era are shot on film, not video. This means the frame rate will be 23.976 frames per second, which the current version of HDMI can handle at that resolution just fine. It's only PCs that really need 4K @ 60 Hz.
DisplayPort 1.2 can already do 4K @ 60 Hz. What's so special about HDMI?
The question is... what content will take advantage of this?
Anyone who edits (or views) photos should appreciate the higher resolution. Even a cheap modern digital camera can usually take a picture with a resolution about as high as this monitor.
But the biggest advantage is in smooth text (and vector UI elements where available). You aren't supposed to run this at standard DPI and squint at tiny boxes; you're supposed to run it at 200% scaling and get far smoother text than usual, since it gets 4x the number of pixels at the same point size.
First of all, the alleged price of $5000 is pure speculation. None of the other sources reporting on the Asus 4K monitor have mentioned it, and the Extreme Tech article describes the price as "our guess".
Secondly, the article is flat-out wrong when it says that Sharp's 4K monitor "doesnâ(TM)t seem to have been released" so far. In fact, the PN-K321 has been released and you can buy one on Amazon for $4900. A few other online retailers have it, too, for slightly lower prices. There is one weird caveat; you currently need an AMD card for it to work properly, because it uses DisplayPort 1.2 with MST and basically shows up to the OS as two 1920x2160 monitors. You have to use Eyefinity to get the OS to treat it as one large screen. This Youtube video (not mine - I only wish I could afford this thing!) shows how it's done.
The Sharp monitor isn't even the cheapest 4K device currently on the market. That distinction belongs to a 50 inch Seiki Digital TV which costs $1,399.99 on Amazon. But this device can only take a 30 Hz input, due to the limitations of the HDMI protocol. I've also heard some criticisms of the panel quality.
What I and many others are hoping is that the Asus 4K monitor can lower the price point on this technology. If it sells for the same $5000 as the Sharp monitor, it's a non-event since it does nothing to advance the state of the art. But if they can get it down to $2500 or lower, then we'll start to see it show up in "extreme" gaming rigs and some professional workspaces, and maybe in a year or two they will be affordable for mainstream power users.
One investigator finally reproduced the problems. You know what it took to reproduce the problem? Trying to punch through a stack of multiple ballots. The ballots near the bottom were not punched all the way through and often had either dimples or hanging chads.
What happened was that the "butterfly ballot" was supposed to have been placed on a template, and then the voter was supposed to use the stylus to punch the ballot. The chad would then fall off into a groove in the template (the ballot holes were in the center of the sheet of paper). The problem was that the groove got clogged up from the large number of chads (remember, people don't just vote for POTUS, but for two dozen or so state and local positions as well). Once the groove was clogged, it blocked the chads from coming out of the ballot.
This is all we use in Canada for every election at every level. It works fine. You have 100% paper trail, electronic tallying speed, no "hanging chaff" nonsense. It's a tried and true technology that has been around for decades and decades and decades.
Handwritten voting can work, but what do they do when the voter is physically unable to hold a pencil? Or, for that matter, if they're illiterate?
It's important because when you "grok" it, your mind is different than before you grokked. Garridan's comment (http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3805139&cid=43874611) is right on: you'll "sharpen your skills in symbolic manipulation". Pushups and bicep curls and stretching aren't sports: athletes do those things to condition their bodies for the real sports where nary a pushup is involved.
Prove it. 100 years ago they said the same thing about Greek and Latin. But when those courses were dropped from the requirements list, there's no evidence that the average quality of thought processes of college graduates went down. I doubt there will be with advanced math, either.
These are specialized skills, nothing more or less. A few people need them; most don't. If you don't like them and aren't going to be in one of the few jobs that require them, then learning these skills is a waste of time and money.
How can the NSL process possibly be construed as anything other than a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment? It's basic, black-letter law: warrants have to be issued by the judicial branch, not the cops themselves. Are the courts really going to allow the Fourth Amendment to be read out of the Constitution by a meaningless invocation of "national security"?
In terms of the actual work: Most application programmers and web developers won't need any kind of advanced mathematics. They might be tasked at collecting statistics, though, so it's a good idea to have a general understanding of that. Systems programmers are more likely to need advanced math. You will definitely need some strong mathematical skills if you're going to directly work on software that handles data compression (including audio and video formats, like JPEG and MP3) or error correction/redundancy. But most programmers don't ever have to do this; if you want to decode a JPEG file, you probably use libjpeg or your toolkit's built-in decoding functions.
Now in terms of actually finding a job, that can be a different story. The underlying problem is that many HR departments think that "Computer Science" is programming, and that anyone they hire as a coder should have a CS degree. But the professors who teach CS think that CS is a branch of applied mathematics, with only a tangential relationship to programming. Given the current balance of power, I suspect the corporations are eventually going to kick the universities in the ass until they start teaching CS the way they want it to be taught. But that hasn't happened yet. Which means that anyone who wants to become a programmer, but isn't that good at math, has a real problem breaking into the business world.
You're probably right that FreeBSD would make a better substrate than Linux for trying to clone the Apple userland experience. It would also offer the advantage of being able to use native ZFS (which OSX was originally slated to support, but doesn't).
One thing I think is clear is that if any FOSS operating system is going to wind up on the end-user desktop, it must have strong binary compatibility with either Windows or OSX. There is just not enough software available on Linux to satisfy the average desktop user (especially now that the browser/email-only crowd has largely moved on to tablet and smartphones). And it's a chicken-and-egg problem; the software won't be there until the users are, but the users won't come until the software is there. A *good* compatibility layer is the only way to cut that Gordian knot. WINE could conceivably do it, but isn't anywhere near good enough at this point and may never be.
Trust me, they aren't going to stop selling RoundUp anytime soon. Every suburban garage in the US has a container of that stuff on hand for every spring when the weeds start coming up through the cracks and in the middle of the landscaping where they don't belong.
These people are selfish bastards who are willing to contaminate the soil and groundwater for purely aesthetic reasons.
Common sense indicates that the repeated use of glyphosate would eventually give rise to "Roundup Ready" weeds through the mechanism of Darwinian selection. A quick Google search indicates that this has indeed happened. Presumably Monsanto intends to move on to the next poison once glyphosate is played out.
No, Monsanto is a Poison company that started getting into the food business. But their primary focus is still poison. Did you know they own both Coke and Pepsi?
Really? Coke and Pepsi are publicly traded companies (KO and PEP, respectively, both on NYSE). And both of them have market caps more than double Monsanto's (NYSE: MON). Where did you read this assertion?
And its entire life, started as a single-user system, means the whole damn thing is broken as far as multi-user goes.
That was only true of Win9x, and the last version of that was discontinued about 10 years ago. Windows NT (which includes 2K, XP, Vista, 7, and 8) was built from the ground up as a modern, multi-user OS with full support for security built in. In fact, the NT security model is slightly more sophisticated than the Unix model (though not as good as SE Linux). Both do share the same flaw: from a security POV, the program is the user and can do whatever the user wants. This is something Android got right, granting permissions on a per-app rather than per-user basis.
A lot of people ignored the NT security provisions up through XP by running as admin all the time, but UAC mostly killed that. People hated it, but it gave the developers a much needed kick in the butt to stop breaking stuff by requiring root.
Why should anyone care about making an open source Windows now, anyway?
Because Windows owns the business world, most of the power-user world, and most of the PC gamer world. If you want OSS to make any inroads on the business desktop or with gamers, it has to run their software on their terms. And that means Windows binary compatibility.
What do your employees do? I suppose if you have something like a call center where most operations can be done through the browser (including a web-based CRM system) and where you don't want your employees going off on tangents, it might work. Assuming they can resist the urge to claw their eyeballs out after staring at the horrendous font rendering all day. But for anything more than that, it's just a total nonstarter.
And AutoCAD and Photoshop are the easy ones. They have a wide audience and it's generally understood, at least in a broad sense, what they're supposed to do and why it's important. Good luck rewriting a million different industry-specific niche applications for Linux. Better luck finding the coders willing to volunteer on obscure projects that neither they nor anyone outside the industry in question cares about.
The registry gets a lot of hate, but I don't see how it is worse than the alternative, which is tons of different .ini files (or equivalent) for each application and setting. At least on Windows, it's generally understood that settings should be exposed in some way in the GUI and that for all but the most advanced features, saying "go edit the registry" isn't really a good solution. On Linux, forcing users to manually edit config files is routine.