Can someone tell us what's wrong or deficient with JPEG?
Quoting the post (not even the linked text): "JPEG isn't just limited by needlessly large file sizes. It's also weak when it comes to supporting a wider range of bright and dark tones, a broader spectrum of colors, and graphic elements like text and logos..."
Having people available to ask for help reaching high shelves is not a sign of being accessible, that literally means that it is not accessible for those people. Duh. You need to back off and ask what accessibility is about, instead of reaching off-hand conclusions and presuming that they must be informative.
The obvious difference being that in a regular store, an old lady who can't reach the high shelf can be helped and actually get what she needs. In this store, fellow shoppers can't even help her, because if they pull a product off the shelf, they get charged.
They're elastic enough to be used as socks, so that's not a problem. It's those with smaller genitals that have a problem that OTC condom sizes don't cater to. But at least stores like this might help with the awkwardness some may feel when presenting a cashier with a pack of "extra snug", even though it won't help much with them falling off.
There next to no size difference between over-the-counter condoms in the US, despite what the packaging promises. An "XL" condom is only 56mm wide compared to 53mm for the regular. The manufacturers can't deviate much from the allowed standards, or they won't be allowed OTC status. The only reason there is a difference at all is because the production tolerances are now smaller so they can make a condom that's 56 +- 1mm where they earlier made 53 +- 4mm, and still stay within the 57 mm max width. Similar for smaller condoms.
There are two simple, direct fixes that should be on the table. One is a basic income, the other a jobs guarantee.
A third one is to not discriminate against people just because they're on the wrong side of the Pareto line.
Looking at the pictures, this appears to be the most handicap/elderly unfriendly modern store I have ever seen. All small print, similar packaging, no-one to ask for help reaching the high shelves, no carts for those who cannot carry, not even a chance to fit a wheelchair through the entrance gate. Entitled young healthy people need to back off and think for a moment. With their hearts too.
Well, no. In terms of deltaV, LEO is more than halfway to anywhere. LEO+40% is Terra Escape Speed. LEO doubled is pretty much Solar Escape Speed....
Brute speed isn't the overriding achievement. Achieving the speed needed to go to the moon was the least of the problems fifty years ago. We're nowhere near conquering space, but paddle around in the surf, thinking we've conquered the ocean.
I'd argue that Gentoo is far faster than Slackware. You get to compile everything for your particular CPU (in this case all the extra instructions a Core 2 Duo has compared to a generic x86), can build a kernel with just the hooks for the hardware you actually have, and build packages without things you don't need that only serves to gobble up memory and run extra code. Binary distros, no matter how "light" they are, are going to be compiled to run on anything, with quite liberal guesses for what a user might actually want compiled in.
But you can't have a police force using revolvers going up against criminals with fully automatic weapons.
You can have police that's unarmed until attacked go up against criminals with fully automatic weapons. It is common practice in many countries, and works surprisingly well. Police knocks on the door, and informs them that they're under arrest, and surrounded. By police who are currently unarmed, but will get authorization to break out their sealed arms the minute they hear a gunshot. When the criminals don't feel their lives are threatened, and no one points a weapon at them, there's no strong drive for them to start shooting. In fact, there's less, because they have a good chance go get a far lighter sentence. But when cops go in with drawn guns, their hands are forced and you do get shootouts.
I'm a law-abiding fellow, and the only reason I would want a gun is to be able to protect myself from the police. I have never had a "criminal" point a gun at me, but I have had cops do it twice. That's reality in the US these days.
These are not "mistakes". They did this deliberately. It's how modern police operates. They think they are military, and that everyone else are hostiles. Don't ever think that modern plod are your friends or even public servants. There's nothing servile at all in the way they operate.
Getting Low Earth Orbit is the hardest part of getting anywhere in the solar system. Until you can demonstrate you can do this, everything else is a waste.
No, it's certainly a hard part for land dwelling animals, but it's immensely easier to toss stuff into LEO than it is to do most stuff in space. Going to Mars is a different ballpark. Not to say anything about leaving the solar system.
And tossing small objects into low orbits is not very new either, and doesn't require today's technology. Sputnik was 1958. Slide rules and telegraph messages.
It's a step, but a step does not establish the journey. We have a long ways to go before we even can say where we're heading or when we expect to get there. People hopping islands in sail boats several thousand years ago didn't usher in the Age of Sail.
I can't really blame Prometheus here. When you have your liver eaten by raptors every day, I think it's understandable if you eventually trade the secret for a little respite.
It seems to me, that we are at long last ACTUALLY entering the Space Age - a label given too prematurely.
Personally, I don't think polluting Low Earth Orbit qualifies us for the Space Age. It's like saying we entered industrial age when someone first wove reeds or knapped flint.
Once we have people living on Titan, or have a probe orbiting a different star, I think we're a bit closer. Neither will happen for quite a few generations yet.
and on the internet in general do no seem to understand what flat-earther movement is aimed at. It is supposed to be there to help you engage your critical thinking first and not immediately deride everything you have been told is true by laughing at it.
Except that I think that most people accept that the Earth isn't flat because it explains quite a few things. Like how there can be midnight sun, why you can't see across a sea on a clear day, or why GPS works.
So why is the winter Sun weak and yellower than the summer sun at the same altitude in the sky?
Based on your ignorance, you must be from the American South. I grew up in the far North, and can tell you that the sun is not any more yellow during winter at high latitudes; if anything it is more white. At least at latitudes where there is a little bit of sun during winter. Where I started out at 70 degrees North, there are weeks with no sun, and the day the sun would finally peek up above the ocean to the South is celebrated. That was yesterday, this year, in my mother's town. Explain how that happens with a flat earth...
The sunshine is slightly weaker during winter, but that is in part due to the temperature: a colder atmosphere is quite a bit denser. And in part because the Earth is not a sphere, it's slightly pear shaped, so when the sun is closer to the South, it traverses more atmosphere than when it's closer to the East or West.
Microcode is non-persistent. It is loaded by either the motherboard or the OS at boot time.
Most commonly either through a initramfs that loads it directly, or a udev rule that loads it when the devices are set up early in boot. But also after boot, by calling micocode_ctl or iucode_tool specifying what microcode update should be loaded, or signaling the kernel by writing 1 to/sys/devices/system/cpu/microcode/reload if there is a/lib/firmware/intel-ucode/ file that matches the family/model/stepping, or by writing the extracted firmware directly into/dev/cpu/microcode
I prefer to do it with microcode_ctl or iucode_tool, so I retain full control, and maintain a way to boot without it. So far no problems on any system, but we'll see.
Each file is a microcode update for one CPU.family-model-stepping, not different versions for the same CPU.
If you set MICROCODE_SIGNAURES="-S" in make.conf before you emerge sys-firmware/intel-microcode, it only installs the one for your CPU (or should have - it's slightly broken and will install all the steppings for the same family/model)
But anyhow, you can only load one file. They're signed and the CPU will refuse to load anything else, whether you use the full microcode.dat or the ff-mm-ss file.
To avoid the latest microcode without any of the Spectre fixes, you need to download and install an older version (and for gentoo, mask newer versions).
Quality headphones frequently come with 3.5mm jack as standard with a screw on 1/4" adaptor.
That depends on your definition of "quality headphones". High ends intended for plugging into a pre-amp have 1/4" plugs because that's what the pre-amps have. They may or may not come with an adapter, depending on whether most 3.5mm devices can drive them or not. It saves on support calls to not deliver an adapter and get calls from people who can't drive them with their phones or other underpowered devices.
No, it doesn't. A standard headphone jack takes a 1/4" plug. The Switch has a standard mini jack taking a 3.5mm plug. And it's not a standard headphone jack either, because it is TRRS headset jack and not a TRS headphone jack. Depending on where the connectors are, it may not work. It's a "works with most", not "works with all".
Because I don't want batteries in my god damned headphones.
Especially not for on-ear headphones, where you really don't want weight causing them to slide off if you move. But any tolerable weight is better spent on better drivers than batteries.
Except that Bluetooth headphones require batteries, both for the transceiver and for powering the drivers. And you cannot play analogue music through Bluetooth. So they're essentially only for short term portable listening.
You can have my Grado RS-1 cans when you pry them from my cold dead ears...
Errr-merrr-gerd, my phone is 5-6mm thick, but I can replace the battery in 15 seconds, add storage using an SD card, and use any set of headphones made in the last few decades.
Not without a converter, you can't. It won't take a quarter inch plug, which is still the standard for better than average cans. Nor a dual 3.5mm airplane/theatre plug, I'm sure.
Passwords are not treated as user side authorization, and that's the problem. They're treated as authentication, which they are not. I can give you my password, but you don't become me.
In a saner world, passwords would be treated as the user side authorization, and not as authentication at all.
No, something you know does not authenticate you. This is the entire problem with the standard approach to authentication. Too many people think this is the case, but like so many things that everybody knows, it's just plain wrong.
The standard username/password query is: Username: yadda Password: foobarbaz
Ok, you have now told that you know the foobarbaz passphrase, but who are you?. It's authorization, because it can be shared. I can authorize someone to act on my behalf. But they don't become me.
Biometrics is like the username. It only tells who you are. A two factor authentication is just that - authentication, helping verify who you are. not what you allow. A password is something you know, and authorizes the action, whether it is you or someone else.
The common approach of bundling the two together is what causes all these problems. It's convenience, pure and simple. But not secure.
How is this different than a buffer overflow? that it can be down in all languages?
Isn't the fixing of buffer overflows a similar situation?
It's quite different, alas.
An example (if I understand this correctly, which may not be the case):
volatile char *bar; char *foo = somesharedaddress; if foo[0] {
bar=foo[0]; } else {
bar = NULL; } Here, bar might temporarily be set to foo[0] due to a speculative prediction that foo[0] is non-zero. Other threads with access might, if the timing is right, see the speculative value. The fix is to move the value first, before testing.
I.e. the code isn't doing anything wrong, like with a buffer overflow. The CPU is.
No, passwords are authorization. It's something you know, and which can only be given with your approval. Biometrics and RSA keys are something you are or have, and thus authentication. It's something that can be given without your approval.
Clicking "OK" when authenticated does not imply authorization, although that's how most systems are designed. It's wrong, wrong, wrong.
The problem is that we are too lazy to give authorization, and bind the two together as if they were the same thing. They aren't, and "two-factor" is not the solution, it's propagating the problem of not keeping the two separate. Making authentication more safe does nothing for the problem of authorization, and vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone tell us what's wrong or deficient with JPEG?
Quoting the post (not even the linked text):
"JPEG isn't just limited by needlessly large file sizes. It's also weak when it comes to supporting a wider range of bright and dark tones, a broader spectrum of colors, and graphic elements like text and logos..."
Having people available to ask for help reaching high shelves is not a sign of being accessible, that literally means that it is not accessible for those people. Duh. You need to back off and ask what accessibility is about, instead of reaching off-hand conclusions and presuming that they must be informative.
The obvious difference being that in a regular store, an old lady who can't reach the high shelf can be helped and actually get what she needs.
In this store, fellow shoppers can't even help her, because if they pull a product off the shelf, they get charged.
They're elastic enough to be used as socks, so that's not a problem. It's those with smaller genitals that have a problem that OTC condom sizes don't cater to.
But at least stores like this might help with the awkwardness some may feel when presenting a cashier with a pack of "extra snug", even though it won't help much with them falling off.
There next to no size difference between over-the-counter condoms in the US, despite what the packaging promises. An "XL" condom is only 56mm wide compared to 53mm for the regular.
The manufacturers can't deviate much from the allowed standards, or they won't be allowed OTC status. The only reason there is a difference at all is because the production tolerances are now smaller so they can make a condom that's 56 +- 1mm where they earlier made 53 +- 4mm, and still stay within the 57 mm max width. Similar for smaller condoms.
There are two simple, direct fixes that should be on the table. One is a basic income, the other a jobs guarantee.
A third one is to not discriminate against people just because they're on the wrong side of the Pareto line.
Looking at the pictures, this appears to be the most handicap/elderly unfriendly modern store I have ever seen. All small print, similar packaging, no-one to ask for help reaching the high shelves, no carts for those who cannot carry, not even a chance to fit a wheelchair through the entrance gate. Entitled young healthy people need to back off and think for a moment. With their hearts too.
Well, no. In terms of deltaV, LEO is more than halfway to anywhere. LEO+40% is Terra Escape Speed. LEO doubled is pretty much Solar Escape Speed....
Brute speed isn't the overriding achievement. Achieving the speed needed to go to the moon was the least of the problems fifty years ago.
We're nowhere near conquering space, but paddle around in the surf, thinking we've conquered the ocean.
I'd argue that Gentoo is far faster than Slackware. You get to compile everything for your particular CPU (in this case all the extra instructions a Core 2 Duo has compared to a generic x86), can build a kernel with just the hooks for the hardware you actually have, and build packages without things you don't need that only serves to gobble up memory and run extra code.
Binary distros, no matter how "light" they are, are going to be compiled to run on anything, with quite liberal guesses for what a user might actually want compiled in.
But you can't have a police force using revolvers going up against criminals with fully automatic weapons.
You can have police that's unarmed until attacked go up against criminals with fully automatic weapons.
It is common practice in many countries, and works surprisingly well. Police knocks on the door, and informs them that they're under arrest, and surrounded. By police who are currently unarmed, but will get authorization to break out their sealed arms the minute they hear a gunshot.
When the criminals don't feel their lives are threatened, and no one points a weapon at them, there's no strong drive for them to start shooting. In fact, there's less, because they have a good chance go get a far lighter sentence. But when cops go in with drawn guns, their hands are forced and you do get shootouts.
I'm a law-abiding fellow, and the only reason I would want a gun is to be able to protect myself from the police. I have never had a "criminal" point a gun at me, but I have had cops do it twice. That's reality in the US these days.
It is sad to see such mistakes
These are not "mistakes". They did this deliberately. It's how modern police operates. They think they are military, and that everyone else are hostiles.
Don't ever think that modern plod are your friends or even public servants. There's nothing servile at all in the way they operate.
Getting Low Earth Orbit is the hardest part of getting anywhere in the solar system. Until you can demonstrate you can do this, everything else is a waste.
No, it's certainly a hard part for land dwelling animals, but it's immensely easier to toss stuff into LEO than it is to do most stuff in space. Going to Mars is a different ballpark. Not to say anything about leaving the solar system.
And tossing small objects into low orbits is not very new either, and doesn't require today's technology. Sputnik was 1958.
Slide rules and telegraph messages.
It's a step, but a step does not establish the journey. We have a long ways to go before we even can say where we're heading or when we expect to get there. People hopping islands in sail boats several thousand years ago didn't usher in the Age of Sail.
I can't really blame Prometheus here. When you have your liver eaten by raptors every day, I think it's understandable if you eventually trade the secret for a little respite.
It seems to me, that we are at long last ACTUALLY entering the Space Age - a label given too prematurely.
Personally, I don't think polluting Low Earth Orbit qualifies us for the Space Age. It's like saying we entered industrial age when someone first wove reeds or knapped flint.
Once we have people living on Titan, or have a probe orbiting a different star, I think we're a bit closer. Neither will happen for quite a few generations yet.
and on the internet in general do no seem to understand what flat-earther movement is aimed at. It is supposed to be there to help you engage your critical thinking first and not immediately deride everything you have been told is true by laughing at it.
Except that I think that most people accept that the Earth isn't flat because it explains quite a few things. Like how there can be midnight sun, why you can't see across a sea on a clear day, or why GPS works.
So why is the winter Sun weak and yellower than the summer sun at the same altitude in the sky?
Based on your ignorance, you must be from the American South. I grew up in the far North, and can tell you that the sun is not any more yellow during winter at high latitudes; if anything it is more white.
At least at latitudes where there is a little bit of sun during winter. Where I started out at 70 degrees North, there are weeks with no sun, and the day the sun would finally peek up above the ocean to the South is celebrated. That was yesterday, this year, in my mother's town.
Explain how that happens with a flat earth...
The sunshine is slightly weaker during winter, but that is in part due to the temperature: a colder atmosphere is quite a bit denser.
And in part because the Earth is not a sphere, it's slightly pear shaped, so when the sun is closer to the South, it traverses more atmosphere than when it's closer to the East or West.
Microcode is non-persistent. It is loaded by either the motherboard or the OS at boot time.
Most commonly either through a initramfs that loads it directly, or a udev rule that loads it when the devices are set up early in boot. /sys/devices/system/cpu/microcode/reload if there is a /lib/firmware/intel-ucode/ file that matches the family/model/stepping, or by writing the extracted firmware directly into /dev/cpu/microcode
But also after boot, by calling micocode_ctl or iucode_tool specifying what microcode update should be loaded, or signaling the kernel by writing 1 to
I prefer to do it with microcode_ctl or iucode_tool, so I retain full control, and maintain a way to boot without it. So far no problems on any system, but we'll see.
Each file is a microcode update for one CPU.family-model-stepping, not different versions for the same CPU.
If you set MICROCODE_SIGNAURES="-S" in make.conf before you emerge sys-firmware/intel-microcode, it only installs the one for your CPU (or should have - it's slightly broken and will install all the steppings for the same family/model)
But anyhow, you can only load one file. They're signed and the CPU will refuse to load anything else, whether you use the full microcode.dat or the ff-mm-ss file.
To avoid the latest microcode without any of the Spectre fixes, you need to download and install an older version (and for gentoo, mask newer versions).
Quality headphones frequently come with 3.5mm jack as standard with a screw on 1/4" adaptor.
That depends on your definition of "quality headphones".
High ends intended for plugging into a pre-amp have 1/4" plugs because that's what the pre-amps have.
They may or may not come with an adapter, depending on whether most 3.5mm devices can drive them or not. It saves on support calls to not deliver an adapter and get calls from people who can't drive them with their phones or other underpowered devices.
The Switch uses a standard headphone jack.
No, it doesn't. A standard headphone jack takes a 1/4" plug. The Switch has a standard mini jack taking a 3.5mm plug.
And it's not a standard headphone jack either, because it is TRRS headset jack and not a TRS headphone jack. Depending on where the connectors are, it may not work. It's a "works with most", not "works with all".
Because I don't want batteries in my god damned headphones.
Especially not for on-ear headphones, where you really don't want weight causing them to slide off if you move. But any tolerable weight is better spent on better drivers than batteries.
Except that Bluetooth headphones require batteries, both for the transceiver and for powering the drivers. And you cannot play analogue music through Bluetooth.
So they're essentially only for short term portable listening.
You can have my Grado RS-1 cans when you pry them from my cold dead ears...
Errr-merrr-gerd, my phone is 5-6mm thick, but I can replace the battery in 15 seconds, add storage using an SD card, and use any set of headphones made in the last few decades.
Not without a converter, you can't. It won't take a quarter inch plug, which is still the standard for better than average cans. Nor a dual 3.5mm airplane/theatre plug, I'm sure.
Passwords are not authorization.
Passwords are not treated as user side authorization, and that's the problem. They're treated as authentication, which they are not. I can give you my password, but you don't become me.
In a saner world, passwords would be treated as the user side authorization, and not as authentication at all.
No, something you know does not authenticate you. This is the entire problem with the standard approach to authentication. Too many people think this is the case, but like so many things that everybody knows, it's just plain wrong.
The standard username/password query is:
Username: yadda
Password: foobarbaz
Ok, you have now told that you know the foobarbaz passphrase, but who are you?. It's authorization, because it can be shared. I can authorize someone to act on my behalf. But they don't become me.
Biometrics is like the username. It only tells who you are.
A two factor authentication is just that - authentication, helping verify who you are. not what you allow.
A password is something you know, and authorizes the action, whether it is you or someone else.
The common approach of bundling the two together is what causes all these problems. It's convenience, pure and simple. But not secure.
How is this different than a buffer overflow? that it can be down in all languages?
Isn't the fixing of buffer overflows a similar situation?
It's quite different, alas.
An example (if I understand this correctly, which may not be the case):
volatile char *bar;
char *foo = somesharedaddress;
if foo[0] {
bar=foo[0];
} else {
bar = NULL;
}
Here, bar might temporarily be set to foo[0] due to a speculative prediction that foo[0] is non-zero. Other threads with access might, if the timing is right, see the speculative value.
The fix is to move the value first, before testing.
I.e. the code isn't doing anything wrong, like with a buffer overflow. The CPU is.
No, passwords are authorization. It's something you know, and which can only be given with your approval.
Biometrics and RSA keys are something you are or have, and thus authentication. It's something that can be given without your approval.
Clicking "OK" when authenticated does not imply authorization, although that's how most systems are designed. It's wrong, wrong, wrong.
The problem is that we are too lazy to give authorization, and bind the two together as if they were the same thing. They aren't, and "two-factor" is not the solution, it's propagating the problem of not keeping the two separate. Making authentication more safe does nothing for the problem of authorization, and vice versa.