>. If it was easy enough for a crook to climb a ladder and get in a second floor window,
And if the crook just broke the window, picked the front door lock, or just came in though the wall instead? Physical security is after all almost entirely about making unauthorized entry inconvenient enough that other people are easier targets - not about actually making it terribly difficult to enter. Unpickable locks are almost nonexistent, most can be picked in well under a minute with only moderate skill. Digital locks are generally even less secure. And any criminal worth their salt knows that the door is usually the most secure part of the house anyway, and won't even bother with the lock.
Perfect security doesn't exist, in any form, because perfect *anything* doesn't exist.
>I know I can't turn my mind off. > that part of my mind I have no control over
That can change. You have no control, because you've never *learned* control. Perhaps you have some condition that makes it more difficult, but more likely it's just that, like most people, you were never taught how to do it. Purely internal mental discipline is not something our society values or teaches.
Even the boundaries of "the conscious you" are, to a large extent, self-imposed. You can learn to extend your consciousness far into the dark reaches of your mind - right down to asserting conscious control over normally autonomous functions like your digestion, heartbeat, or thermogenesis, if you so desire. (I actually learned the last one, and it's glorious)
There was a time you knew you couldn't read, or whistle, or ride a bike, or do basic addition. And then (I'm assuming) eventually, probably after lots of practice and failed attempts, something finally "clicked" for each of those. And soon thereafter doing them felt so completely easy and natural that it was hard to believe that you used to have so much trouble.
I suggest meditation in part because it's one of the few areas of mental discipline that has had a LOT of time and energy across thousands of years put into developing effective teaching techniques for purely internal self-discipline. Most other areas of mental discipline focus instead on the results - math and logic education for example almost always focus on a rigorous process that reduces the mind to little more than an inefficient computer. While the discipline to function that way, to say nothing of the non-conscious intuitive "big picture" understanding that lets you readily leap to solutions, is left for you to develop for yourself. Or not, for most people.
That, and stopping the mind really is meditation 101, so if an out-of-control mind is a problem for you, it probably is the best possible place to start.
Ah, but looking younger *can* help you feel younger....younger women, younger men... whatever your taste. Or at least that seems to be the central, sometimes unspoken, marketing pillar for most of these kinds of products and surgeries.
And yes, triple buffering is no longer super memory intensive, though it used to be. 24MB for three 32-bit 1080p frames, 96MB for 3x4k... I've gone through a LOT of video cards that had far less RAM than that.
Triple buffering does though add a variable amount of lag though - which can futz with your reflexes. Just look at the time between starting to render a frame (last input actions processed), and the frame being displayed (visual feedback received)
It also carries that extra full frame of lag when you *can* render frames fast enough, since you're rendering two frames ahead of the monitor instead of only one (at least it used to - though it seems to me that it would be easy enough to only use the third buffer when actually needed)
Okay, so I'm specifically talking about rendering *without* tearing - which means that you can never alter the front framebuffer while it's active, only during the brief pause between when the monitor finishes displaying one frame and begins displaying the next. That includes no swapping buffers. Do so, and the screen will tear, displaying the top part of the old frame buffer, and the bottom part of the new one.
No buffering means that the only way to avoid tearing is to render the entire frame during that brief pause between refreshes, while the frame buffer is not in use. That was the standard procedure all through the pre-VGA days, and very often with VGA and early SVGA (VGA and early SVGA cards didn't have enough memory for a second buffer at higher resolutions). Obviously though that means that you can only use the small fraction of each 1/60th of a second for rendering - not ideal if rendering is a big part of the per-frame workload. There was actually a lot of effort spent on techniques to render the screen from the top down to buy more time - after all you didn't actually have to finish rendering a line until just before it was fed to the monitor. That was quite successful for most 2D games, but mostly didn't work for 3D games which required the screen to be rendered in a somewhat arbitrary order for efficiency reasons.
Double buffering was a way to address that, and means that you can render a second frame into the back buffer while the front buffer is being fed to the monitor, and can thus use the entire 1/60th of a second for rendering without any render-sequencing tricks. You can't instantly switch buffers when you're done with the next frame though, or you'll cause tearing. You have to wait until the next vsync so that the front buffer is no longer in use.
That works great so long as you can render each frame before the next vsync happens. It breaks down if you can't though. If you start rendering a frame the instant the vsynced buffer flip frees up the old front buffer, and it takes you just slightly longer than 1/60th of a second to render, then the next monitor refresh will have already begun before you're finished. That means that you can't flip buffers immediately or you'll cause tearing, so you have to wait until the NEXT vsync, halving your frame rate for that frame. And then you're stalled out - you can't start rendering a third frame during that time, because you only have two buffers - one currently being displayed, and one waiting to be. You just have to wait until the next vsync to free up a framebuffer - which means you'll start the next frame in the same situation, and continue rendering each frame just slightly too late, so that the previous frame always has to be displayed for two monitor refreshes, and your animation frame rate drops to half the monitor refresh rate. In that case it's probably better to just deal with the tearing (unless your monitor refresh rate is high enough that the animation rate can step down more gradually)
Triple buffering solves the problem by giving you a third buffer to work with, so that when you finish rendering a frame just slightly too late, you can at least immediately start rendering a third frame so that you've got a head start on the next cycle. You still drop one frame of animation, but you'll be almost done rendering frame 3 by the time frame 2 gets displayed.
Timing diagram starting at having just swapped frame zero to the front buffer and started rendering frame 1. Rendering a frame takes 6 ticks, monitor refreshes every 5 ticks
Double buffering halves frame rate since only two buffers can be in use at a time Render-- 11111 1xxxx 22222 2xxxx 33333 3xxxx... Display- 00000 00000 11111 11111 22222 22222...
v(ertical)sync's original meaning is the once-per-frame signal between monitor and video card that lets them stay coordinated and display a stable image (in combination with h(orizontal)sync, which happens once per line)
Then there's the more modern usage where you "turn on vsync" in a game. But what that's actually turning on is "vsynced rendering", or perhaps better expressed "sync the framebuffer update to the monitor vsync signal"
And yes,"turning on vsync" does stop the tear line, because waiting for vsync to flip the framebuffer means the buffer doesn't change while the monitor is refreshing. But it does so at the expense of drastically reducing the frame rate, at least intermittently. Framerate can only be adjusted in integer multiples of frames, so if you're only able to render at 57Hz, then syncing the rendering engine to vsync will drop the frame rate to 60/2 = 30Hz, either permanently or as "stuttering", depending on exactly how the synchronization is implemented.
(Hmm, I'm a bit rusty, but I think you need triple-buffering to only see stuttering - pretty sure that double-buffering requires you to wait until vsync to free up the "old" framebuffer before you can start rendering the next frame, which means *every* new frame will take slightly too long to render, and thus *every* old frame will be displayed for an extra refresh while your computer sits idle, dropping you to 1/2 your montors refresh rate. Triple buffering lets you render one frame while a second waits for the monitor to finish displaying the third. Can anyone confidently confirm or correct me?)
That's actually one of the big draws for high frame rate monitors - smoother vsynced rendering. If your monitor refreshes at 120Hz instead of 60Hz, then a 57Hz rendering engine will cause the framerate to stutter between 120/2=60Hz and 120/3=40Hz. Or alternately, your game might be able to lock to a slower refresh rate - e.g. a nice stable 40 Hz in this case (which is kind of slow, and probably probably why rates like 144Hz are more popular - you can run that at 72 or 48Hz, either of which is pretty solidly above the motion perceptual threshold)
Except that's not how it works. Screen updates are not instantaneous, and vsync originates with the monitor, not the video card - you can think of it as the monitor saying "okay, I'm drawing the next frame, start feeding me the data NOW", and the video card is expected to comply and start sending whatever is in the frame buffer, because the monitor is already busy displaying it.
What Gsync and Freesync essentially do is let the computer say back "Wait, not yet... okay now", so that if your rendering engine is only rendering at 57fps, while your monitor updates at 60fps, then every frame you get the monitor saying "Feed Me!", the computer says "wait...okay, now" and then starts sending sending that frame's image data. The result being that the monitor cleanly refreshes the full screen at 57 Hz, rather than creating a crawling horizontal "tear line", wherever it was at in the update cycle when you flipped the buffer - with the old frame being displayed above the tear line, and the new frame below.
I'm all for efficiency, but if money is your concern, lets look at the numbers... 100W difference * 365 days/year * what, an average of 5 hours per day of use? = ~183kWh/year difference. Times the U.S. average of $0.12/kWh = $22/year.
Yes, it does add up - but it's going to have to add up for a long time before it's more than a minor factor in the total cost of ownership. And if you're buying a cutting-edge video card today, you're probably going to buy a replacement long before the difference in power costs add up to a substantial total difference.
What stands out to me as the major difference between civilization and slavery is two major factors: 1) you get some substantial choice in what work you do to pay your debts 2) you're not property, and thus your masters can't legally sell you, beat you, rape you, or feed you to their dogs.
>I guess the basket weaving degrees will go away right? I assume so, though I suspect many of the best classes from such programs would continue as electives, in order to attract more capable students away from the competition. After all, if you're not paying with money, then the opportunity cost is your investment: How do the job prospects for graduates of various schools compare? What are the terms of the salary-garnishing (percentage, duration, and "grace" limits)? And how does the school compare in student experience and "Renaissance" education?
>those that do better than average will pay way more than they would otherwise since they have to cover the cost of all the people that got the degrees but were unfortunate. Well, more than their under-performing peers, certainly. More than at an administration heavy research school whose only financial incentive is to wring you for as much as possible? Not necessarily. Especially when you consider that you've eliminated the student loan financiers who would otherwise be pocketing a healthy percentage of the take.
There's also the fact that the school has far more incentive to use its connections to find you a good paying job, rather than kicking you out the door to fend for yourself after graduating, so the depths of misfortune are likely to be radically lower. It's a gamble - if you're confident that you will become a top-tier earner, you might be better off with the traditional system - otherwise the fact that the university has substantial incentive to use its connections to get you into the highest-paying job you're qualified for, for as long as you're paying them back, is likely to pay off substantially for you.
>what happens if you fail to graduate? That is a good question. I see a few obvious possible answers: 1: the school doesn't accept any students they don't believe will finish the program. 2: They do everything they can to keep you from dropping out (and what would be your incentive for doing so?) 3: You're still on the hook for paying for the education you did get - i.e. having taken half the credits needed for a degree means you pay back half the agreed percentage of your salary until the agreed end date. Doesn't help with go-nowhere dropouts, any more than students who get hit by a bus on Spring Break, but neatly addresses "3 years here, then transfer to Princeton to graduate", as well as "got an awesome job offer that promises to be more valuable than finishing my degree" 4: College costs (to the college) usually scale very non-linearly with time. Having an assistant professor lecture for a 100-level class to a classroom of a hundred students whose multiple-choice assignments can be graded by computer is MUCH cheaper per student-hour than teaching a 400-level class to maybe a few dozen students, whose essays or other assignments will likely need to be hand-graded by at least competent assistants with a good command of the topic.
>if I'm hiring someone to come in I want them to know more than the IT guys I already have which to me means more education than them not 1/8th albeit highly focused. That sounds like an incompetent manager problem to me. A new graduate will *never* know even a fraction as much as an experienced professional. Full Stop. At best they'll know more about a few recent developments that your professionals haven't kept up with, while being hopelessly ignorant and naive across most of the field. I do agree that a brief, highly focused program is unlikely to be nearly as useful as a longer, more in-depth education - but if there's market demand for warm bodies that know the basics and hopefully won't fuck up too badly... well that's probably an ideal target market to address with an untested new education business model. Minimize the outlay before you start collecting the payout and all that. It'd take a LOT of capital to fund a school for 4 years before earning your first dime from new graduates.
I agree with your disagreement - however, so long as colleges are *marketed* primarily as work-training schools, it would be nice if they actually delivered. Nobody is going several years salary (if they're lucky) into debt to acquire valuable sociological perspective.
The wording sucks, but here's a clue: the quotes around "remember" means it's a bad analogy rather than a literal truth.
Here's a trick - first take an ice cube out of the freezer. Now look at it carefully - is it made out of ice? Wow! Clearly it still remembers having been in the freezer!
Lets try one a little more directly applicable - Find a nice sunny warm spot right at the base of a tall snow-covered mountain with a river flowing down it. Now check the water temperature. Practically ice cold? Amazing! Clearly the water "remembers" that it was snow only a short time ago!
Now, for the situation in the article: picture that river is radically larger, and flowing for thousands of miles, incredibly slowly since it's displacing very-slightly-less-dense warmer water rather than 800x less dense air. There'll be some heating due to mixing and conduction with the slightly warmer water above it, but not actually nearly as much as you might expect.
Little bit of physics for you - warm fluids are less dense than cold ones, so they rise, not sink. The lowest reaches of the ocean will contain the coldest water that's managed to reach it. And while water flows very rapidly on ground, where it displaces air that's 800x less dense, it flows *much* slower while displacing water that's only a bit warmer, and minuscule less dense (even a 20C temperature difference amounts to less than 0.5% density difference, salinity probably makes a bigger difference.)
On the plus side, that means if we stop heating the upper surface of the oceans the surface heat won't "settle" into the deepest parts, we'd have to inputenough heat that conduction between adjacent water bodies could warm the water all the way down. Unfortunately, the methane hydrates (that we know of) are in relatively shallow ocean where the response time to surface changes is much faster.
But yeah, we *really* don't want those hydrates to melt - like permafrost, they're part of the "tipping point" that researchers talk about not wanting to cross - once something else warms the Earth enough to thaw them, the massive release of greenhouse gasses will very likley catapult the Earth out of the ice age it's been in for the last 2.6 million years, and into it's alternative hot-house state. Which will probably be great once life recovers, but the transition is pretty much always a "world-ending" extinction event that takes many thousands of years to recover from.
And yeah, it might already be too late to stop it (without very expensive and risky geoengineering at least), so why bother trying. Lets throw up our hands and party instead, we'll fiddle while Rome burns, and our descendants can get bent.
Increased CO2 does improve plant growth, but also lowers nutritional value, which is a bit of a problem for anything that eats it.
And the biggest problem with global warming is not so much that it's happening, but that our best understanding is that if we continue on as we are we're going to make it happen FAST - and every time that happens in the geologic record we see mass extinction events - typically upwards of 90% of all species go extinct, and it takes thousands of years for the ecology to recover. That's not a good time for anyone.
That sounds like the crux of most of your problems. As a developer you've probably spent a lot of time learning to use your mind efficiently, now may I suggest you spend some serious time investing in learning how to manage it more effectively? For starters, it sounds like you've got 1-3 hours per day of currently wasted time that you could productively spend practicing.
As someone who tends to get mentally fixated myself, I found meditation very useful for that - once you learn to simply turn your mind *off* on command, it's a lot easier to get it focused on something else when you turn it back on.
They used to be pretty excellent - not nearly as excellent as the substantial price premium would suggest, but still really well-made hardware and a well-polished OS. If you could afford it, and didn't need any Windows-only software, then they made for an arguably great deal.
Heck, I've got one of the last MacBooks with a DVD drive, admittedly running Linux because I'm not fond of MacOS, but it's a really nice piece of hardware nonetheless. However, the recent ever-diminishing capabilities of their new computers, combined with the user-hostile anti-upgrade policies like soldered-in RAM is unforgivable.
I have heard from some people that the integration between MS Office and Outlook allows for some very handy features - I've never heard such a claim in person though, and have only rarely met anyone who uses Outlook for anything that couldn't be done just as easily with Gmail, or any number of other alternatives.
Yes, if you need to use specific software then Linux may not be for you - but MacOS is in the same boat, and nobody mocks "the year of the MacOS desktop"
When you get right down to it, most people don't actually need much software to get their job done. A web browser, a word processor, maybe a spreadsheet and a smattering of other job-specific programs. Linux has all of that, just maybe not the exact same software you're used to using on Windows.
But that has nothing to do with Linux, or MacOS. That has to do with a certain company engaging in decades of often illegal abuse of their monopolistic position. If you insist on supporting their monopoly, then no - Linux is not for you.
I do - existing law restricts the behavior of public officials - they are employees and must obey "company policy"
You would almost certainly need a separate law to control the behavior of companies providing a forum that public officials are using are using as a public forum, even if the final result is the same.
That said, if the situation arose where a forum provider was obviously playing favorites in a "public" forum, I would expect an investigation into any illegal collusion on the part of the public officials involved, and quite possibly the passage of a law that at least outlawed any public official from using a "public" forum that engaged in such practices. The forum provider would be under no obligation to comply of course, unless they wanted public officials to be able to continue using their platform.
The separation of powers is not there to keep the branches of government from stepping on each other's toes, quite the opposite in fact - it's there to make sure no one branch of government can get anything done without the cooperation of the others. The Executive has the power to command the military, but only Congress has the power to declare war, or pay the soldiers (admittedly, Congress has let the President get away with effectively declaring war unilaterally for a number of decades now), and the Supreme court can shut the whole thing down on constitutional grounds if it so chooses (though it needs a volunteer with standing to bring a relevant case against the government).
This ruling would seem to have no effect on the owners of the forums - rather it's focused on the *users* of the forum. If you're a user using the forum for official government business/public communication, then you are not allowed to unilaterally silence your political rivals there, any more than you can do so with ads on privately owned television networks.
If on the other hand it's the owners of the forum who decide to block your rivals - that's a different issue, but you should probably expect an investigation to make sure there was no collusion on your part.
The screen consumes a great deal of power displaying backlit pictures with a fixed outer frame size - not necessarily the aesthetic (or environmental) ideal
Shelves - you're telling me you actively all your shelves while watching TV? Personally I very rarely look at my bookshelves while watching TV. I also have display shelves that I rarely touch at all, I wouldn't mind them vanishing while the TV is on either.
I am assuming "TV is off" also means "TV is rolled up" (Why wouldn't it? Being rolled up both hides it and protects it from damage), and that most of the time the TV is off. If you live in front of the TV, then there's admittedly not much point in having one that "disappears".
And so it has been. The Linux desktop has been thriving, it just hasn't gained dramatic market share, persistently hovering around the same tiny fraction as MacOS, for reasons that have very little to do with the Linux desktop itself.
Slashdot Mirror
>. If it was easy enough for a crook to climb a ladder and get in a second floor window,
And if the crook just broke the window, picked the front door lock, or just came in though the wall instead? Physical security is after all almost entirely about making unauthorized entry inconvenient enough that other people are easier targets - not about actually making it terribly difficult to enter. Unpickable locks are almost nonexistent, most can be picked in well under a minute with only moderate skill. Digital locks are generally even less secure. And any criminal worth their salt knows that the door is usually the most secure part of the house anyway, and won't even bother with the lock.
Perfect security doesn't exist, in any form, because perfect *anything* doesn't exist.
An abacus.
Or any of the above, on a computer not connected to a network. Can't exploit a flaw you can't access.
>I know I can't turn my mind off.
> that part of my mind I have no control over
That can change. You have no control, because you've never *learned* control. Perhaps you have some condition that makes it more difficult, but more likely it's just that, like most people, you were never taught how to do it. Purely internal mental discipline is not something our society values or teaches.
Even the boundaries of "the conscious you" are, to a large extent, self-imposed. You can learn to extend your consciousness far into the dark reaches of your mind - right down to asserting conscious control over normally autonomous functions like your digestion, heartbeat, or thermogenesis, if you so desire. (I actually learned the last one, and it's glorious)
There was a time you knew you couldn't read, or whistle, or ride a bike, or do basic addition. And then (I'm assuming) eventually, probably after lots of practice and failed attempts, something finally "clicked" for each of those. And soon thereafter doing them felt so completely easy and natural that it was hard to believe that you used to have so much trouble.
I suggest meditation in part because it's one of the few areas of mental discipline that has had a LOT of time and energy across thousands of years put into developing effective teaching techniques for purely internal self-discipline. Most other areas of mental discipline focus instead on the results - math and logic education for example almost always focus on a rigorous process that reduces the mind to little more than an inefficient computer. While the discipline to function that way, to say nothing of the non-conscious intuitive "big picture" understanding that lets you readily leap to solutions, is left for you to develop for yourself. Or not, for most people.
That, and stopping the mind really is meditation 101, so if an out-of-control mind is a problem for you, it probably is the best possible place to start.
Ah, but looking younger *can* help you feel younger. ...younger women, younger men... whatever your taste. Or at least that seems to be the central, sometimes unspoken, marketing pillar for most of these kinds of products and surgeries.
Well, time wasted on my reply then I guess.
And yes, triple buffering is no longer super memory intensive, though it used to be. 24MB for three 32-bit 1080p frames, 96MB for 3x4k... I've gone through a LOT of video cards that had far less RAM than that.
Triple buffering does though add a variable amount of lag though - which can futz with your reflexes. Just look at the time between starting to render a frame (last input actions processed), and the frame being displayed (visual feedback received)
Double buffering: 10,10,10...
Triple buffering: 10,9,8,7,6,5,10,9,8...
It also carries that extra full frame of lag when you *can* render frames fast enough, since you're rendering two frames ahead of the monitor instead of only one (at least it used to - though it seems to me that it would be easy enough to only use the third buffer when actually needed)
Okay, so I'm specifically talking about rendering *without* tearing - which means that you can never alter the front framebuffer while it's active, only during the brief pause between when the monitor finishes displaying one frame and begins displaying the next. That includes no swapping buffers. Do so, and the screen will tear, displaying the top part of the old frame buffer, and the bottom part of the new one.
No buffering means that the only way to avoid tearing is to render the entire frame during that brief pause between refreshes, while the frame buffer is not in use. That was the standard procedure all through the pre-VGA days, and very often with VGA and early SVGA (VGA and early SVGA cards didn't have enough memory for a second buffer at higher resolutions). Obviously though that means that you can only use the small fraction of each 1/60th of a second for rendering - not ideal if rendering is a big part of the per-frame workload. There was actually a lot of effort spent on techniques to render the screen from the top down to buy more time - after all you didn't actually have to finish rendering a line until just before it was fed to the monitor. That was quite successful for most 2D games, but mostly didn't work for 3D games which required the screen to be rendered in a somewhat arbitrary order for efficiency reasons.
Double buffering was a way to address that, and means that you can render a second frame into the back buffer while the front buffer is being fed to the monitor, and can thus use the entire 1/60th of a second for rendering without any render-sequencing tricks. You can't instantly switch buffers when you're done with the next frame though, or you'll cause tearing. You have to wait until the next vsync so that the front buffer is no longer in use.
That works great so long as you can render each frame before the next vsync happens. It breaks down if you can't though. If you start rendering a frame the instant the vsynced buffer flip frees up the old front buffer, and it takes you just slightly longer than 1/60th of a second to render, then the next monitor refresh will have already begun before you're finished. That means that you can't flip buffers immediately or you'll cause tearing, so you have to wait until the NEXT vsync, halving your frame rate for that frame. And then you're stalled out - you can't start rendering a third frame during that time, because you only have two buffers - one currently being displayed, and one waiting to be. You just have to wait until the next vsync to free up a framebuffer - which means you'll start the next frame in the same situation, and continue rendering each frame just slightly too late, so that the previous frame always has to be displayed for two monitor refreshes, and your animation frame rate drops to half the monitor refresh rate. In that case it's probably better to just deal with the tearing (unless your monitor refresh rate is high enough that the animation rate can step down more gradually)
Triple buffering solves the problem by giving you a third buffer to work with, so that when you finish rendering a frame just slightly too late, you can at least immediately start rendering a third frame so that you've got a head start on the next cycle. You still drop one frame of animation, but you'll be almost done rendering frame 3 by the time frame 2 gets displayed.
Timing diagram starting at having just swapped frame zero to the front buffer and started rendering frame 1. Rendering a frame takes 6 ticks, monitor refreshes every 5 ticks
Double buffering halves frame rate since only two buffers can be in use at a time ...
Render-- 11111 1xxxx 22222 2xxxx 33333 3xxxx...
Display- 00000 00000 11111 11111 22222 22222
Triple Buffering has stutter
Render-- 11111 12222 22333 33344 44445 55555 66666 67777 77888...
Display- 00000 00000 11111 22222 33333 44444 55555 55555 66666...
I'm fairly certain that's correct
There's a bit of a terminology snafu here:
v(ertical)sync's original meaning is the once-per-frame signal between monitor and video card that lets them stay coordinated and display a stable image (in combination with h(orizontal)sync, which happens once per line)
Then there's the more modern usage where you "turn on vsync" in a game. But what that's actually turning on is "vsynced rendering", or perhaps better expressed "sync the framebuffer update to the monitor vsync signal"
And yes,"turning on vsync" does stop the tear line, because waiting for vsync to flip the framebuffer means the buffer doesn't change while the monitor is refreshing. But it does so at the expense of drastically reducing the frame rate, at least intermittently. Framerate can only be adjusted in integer multiples of frames, so if you're only able to render at 57Hz, then syncing the rendering engine to vsync will drop the frame rate to 60/2 = 30Hz, either permanently or as "stuttering", depending on exactly how the synchronization is implemented.
(Hmm, I'm a bit rusty, but I think you need triple-buffering to only see stuttering - pretty sure that double-buffering requires you to wait until vsync to free up the "old" framebuffer before you can start rendering the next frame, which means *every* new frame will take slightly too long to render, and thus *every* old frame will be displayed for an extra refresh while your computer sits idle, dropping you to 1/2 your montors refresh rate. Triple buffering lets you render one frame while a second waits for the monitor to finish displaying the third. Can anyone confidently confirm or correct me?)
That's actually one of the big draws for high frame rate monitors - smoother vsynced rendering. If your monitor refreshes at 120Hz instead of 60Hz, then a 57Hz rendering engine will cause the framerate to stutter between 120/2=60Hz and 120/3=40Hz. Or alternately, your game might be able to lock to a slower refresh rate - e.g. a nice stable 40 Hz in this case (which is kind of slow, and probably probably why rates like 144Hz are more popular - you can run that at 72 or 48Hz, either of which is pretty solidly above the motion perceptual threshold)
Except that's not how it works. Screen updates are not instantaneous, and vsync originates with the monitor, not the video card - you can think of it as the monitor saying "okay, I'm drawing the next frame, start feeding me the data NOW", and the video card is expected to comply and start sending whatever is in the frame buffer, because the monitor is already busy displaying it.
What Gsync and Freesync essentially do is let the computer say back "Wait, not yet... okay now", so that if your rendering engine is only rendering at 57fps, while your monitor updates at 60fps, then every frame you get the monitor saying "Feed Me!", the computer says "wait...okay, now" and then starts sending sending that frame's image data. The result being that the monitor cleanly refreshes the full screen at 57 Hz, rather than creating a crawling horizontal "tear line", wherever it was at in the update cycle when you flipped the buffer - with the old frame being displayed above the tear line, and the new frame below.
I'm all for efficiency, but if money is your concern, lets look at the numbers... 100W difference * 365 days/year * what, an average of 5 hours per day of use? = ~183kWh/year difference. Times the U.S. average of $0.12/kWh = $22/year.
Yes, it does add up - but it's going to have to add up for a long time before it's more than a minor factor in the total cost of ownership. And if you're buying a cutting-edge video card today, you're probably going to buy a replacement long before the difference in power costs add up to a substantial total difference.
>That just sounds like slavery with extra steps.
Welcome to civilization! When did you arrive?
What stands out to me as the major difference between civilization and slavery is two major factors:
1) you get some substantial choice in what work you do to pay your debts
2) you're not property, and thus your masters can't legally sell you, beat you, rape you, or feed you to their dogs.
Especially #2, that's a big one.
>I guess the basket weaving degrees will go away right?
I assume so, though I suspect many of the best classes from such programs would continue as electives, in order to attract more capable students away from the competition. After all, if you're not paying with money, then the opportunity cost is your investment: How do the job prospects for graduates of various schools compare? What are the terms of the salary-garnishing (percentage, duration, and "grace" limits)? And how does the school compare in student experience and "Renaissance" education?
>those that do better than average will pay way more than they would otherwise since they have to cover the cost of all the people that got the degrees but were unfortunate.
Well, more than their under-performing peers, certainly. More than at an administration heavy research school whose only financial incentive is to wring you for as much as possible? Not necessarily. Especially when you consider that you've eliminated the student loan financiers who would otherwise be pocketing a healthy percentage of the take.
There's also the fact that the school has far more incentive to use its connections to find you a good paying job, rather than kicking you out the door to fend for yourself after graduating, so the depths of misfortune are likely to be radically lower. It's a gamble - if you're confident that you will become a top-tier earner, you might be better off with the traditional system - otherwise the fact that the university has substantial incentive to use its connections to get you into the highest-paying job you're qualified for, for as long as you're paying them back, is likely to pay off substantially for you.
>what happens if you fail to graduate?
That is a good question. I see a few obvious possible answers:
1: the school doesn't accept any students they don't believe will finish the program.
2: They do everything they can to keep you from dropping out (and what would be your incentive for doing so?)
3: You're still on the hook for paying for the education you did get - i.e. having taken half the credits needed for a degree means you pay back half the agreed percentage of your salary until the agreed end date. Doesn't help with go-nowhere dropouts, any more than students who get hit by a bus on Spring Break, but neatly addresses "3 years here, then transfer to Princeton to graduate", as well as "got an awesome job offer that promises to be more valuable than finishing my degree"
4: College costs (to the college) usually scale very non-linearly with time. Having an assistant professor lecture for a 100-level class to a classroom of a hundred students whose multiple-choice assignments can be graded by computer is MUCH cheaper per student-hour than teaching a 400-level class to maybe a few dozen students, whose essays or other assignments will likely need to be hand-graded by at least competent assistants with a good command of the topic.
>if I'm hiring someone to come in I want them to know more than the IT guys I already have which to me means more education than them not 1/8th albeit highly focused.
That sounds like an incompetent manager problem to me. A new graduate will *never* know even a fraction as much as an experienced professional. Full Stop. At best they'll know more about a few recent developments that your professionals haven't kept up with, while being hopelessly ignorant and naive across most of the field.
I do agree that a brief, highly focused program is unlikely to be nearly as useful as a longer, more in-depth education - but if there's market demand for warm bodies that know the basics and hopefully won't fuck up too badly... well that's probably an ideal target market to address with an untested new education business model. Minimize the outlay before you start collecting the payout and all that. It'd take a LOT of capital to fund a school for 4 years before earning your first dime from new graduates.
I agree with your disagreement - however, so long as colleges are *marketed* primarily as work-training schools, it would be nice if they actually delivered. Nobody is going several years salary (if they're lucky) into debt to acquire valuable sociological perspective.
The wording sucks, but here's a clue: the quotes around "remember" means it's a bad analogy rather than a literal truth.
Here's a trick - first take an ice cube out of the freezer. Now look at it carefully - is it made out of ice? Wow! Clearly it still remembers having been in the freezer!
Lets try one a little more directly applicable - Find a nice sunny warm spot right at the base of a tall snow-covered mountain with a river flowing down it. Now check the water temperature. Practically ice cold? Amazing! Clearly the water "remembers" that it was snow only a short time ago!
Now, for the situation in the article: picture that river is radically larger, and flowing for thousands of miles, incredibly slowly since it's displacing very-slightly-less-dense warmer water rather than 800x less dense air. There'll be some heating due to mixing and conduction with the slightly warmer water above it, but not actually nearly as much as you might expect.
Little bit of physics for you - warm fluids are less dense than cold ones, so they rise, not sink. The lowest reaches of the ocean will contain the coldest water that's managed to reach it. And while water flows very rapidly on ground, where it displaces air that's 800x less dense, it flows *much* slower while displacing water that's only a bit warmer, and minuscule less dense (even a 20C temperature difference amounts to less than 0.5% density difference, salinity probably makes a bigger difference.)
On the plus side, that means if we stop heating the upper surface of the oceans the surface heat won't "settle" into the deepest parts, we'd have to inputenough heat that conduction between adjacent water bodies could warm the water all the way down. Unfortunately, the methane hydrates (that we know of) are in relatively shallow ocean where the response time to surface changes is much faster.
But yeah, we *really* don't want those hydrates to melt - like permafrost, they're part of the "tipping point" that researchers talk about not wanting to cross - once something else warms the Earth enough to thaw them, the massive release of greenhouse gasses will very likley catapult the Earth out of the ice age it's been in for the last 2.6 million years, and into it's alternative hot-house state. Which will probably be great once life recovers, but the transition is pretty much always a "world-ending" extinction event that takes many thousands of years to recover from.
And yeah, it might already be too late to stop it (without very expensive and risky geoengineering at least), so why bother trying. Lets throw up our hands and party instead, we'll fiddle while Rome burns, and our descendants can get bent.
Increased CO2 does improve plant growth, but also lowers nutritional value, which is a bit of a problem for anything that eats it.
And the biggest problem with global warming is not so much that it's happening, but that our best understanding is that if we continue on as we are we're going to make it happen FAST - and every time that happens in the geologic record we see mass extinction events - typically upwards of 90% of all species go extinct, and it takes thousands of years for the ecology to recover. That's not a good time for anyone.
I've been through Silicon Valley - certainly far better than LA, but you have no idea what clean air is.
>1-3 hours to switch gears
That sounds like the crux of most of your problems. As a developer you've probably spent a lot of time learning to use your mind efficiently, now may I suggest you spend some serious time investing in learning how to manage it more effectively? For starters, it sounds like you've got 1-3 hours per day of currently wasted time that you could productively spend practicing.
As someone who tends to get mentally fixated myself, I found meditation very useful for that - once you learn to simply turn your mind *off* on command, it's a lot easier to get it focused on something else when you turn it back on.
They used to be pretty excellent - not nearly as excellent as the substantial price premium would suggest, but still really well-made hardware and a well-polished OS. If you could afford it, and didn't need any Windows-only software, then they made for an arguably great deal.
Heck, I've got one of the last MacBooks with a DVD drive, admittedly running Linux because I'm not fond of MacOS, but it's a really nice piece of hardware nonetheless. However, the recent ever-diminishing capabilities of their new computers, combined with the user-hostile anti-upgrade policies like soldered-in RAM is unforgivable.
Microsoft Office integration perhaps?
I have heard from some people that the integration between MS Office and Outlook allows for some very handy features - I've never heard such a claim in person though, and have only rarely met anyone who uses Outlook for anything that couldn't be done just as easily with Gmail, or any number of other alternatives.
Yes, if you need to use specific software then Linux may not be for you - but MacOS is in the same boat, and nobody mocks "the year of the MacOS desktop"
When you get right down to it, most people don't actually need much software to get their job done. A web browser, a word processor, maybe a spreadsheet and a smattering of other job-specific programs. Linux has all of that, just maybe not the exact same software you're used to using on Windows.
But that has nothing to do with Linux, or MacOS. That has to do with a certain company engaging in decades of often illegal abuse of their monopolistic position. If you insist on supporting their monopoly, then no - Linux is not for you.
> I don't see why Facebook can block them.
I do - existing law restricts the behavior of public officials - they are employees and must obey "company policy"
You would almost certainly need a separate law to control the behavior of companies providing a forum that public officials are using are using as a public forum, even if the final result is the same.
That said, if the situation arose where a forum provider was obviously playing favorites in a "public" forum, I would expect an investigation into any illegal collusion on the part of the public officials involved, and quite possibly the passage of a law that at least outlawed any public official from using a "public" forum that engaged in such practices. The forum provider would be under no obligation to comply of course, unless they wanted public officials to be able to continue using their platform.
The separation of powers is not there to keep the branches of government from stepping on each other's toes, quite the opposite in fact - it's there to make sure no one branch of government can get anything done without the cooperation of the others. The Executive has the power to command the military, but only Congress has the power to declare war, or pay the soldiers (admittedly, Congress has let the President get away with effectively declaring war unilaterally for a number of decades now), and the Supreme court can shut the whole thing down on constitutional grounds if it so chooses (though it needs a volunteer with standing to bring a relevant case against the government).
This ruling would seem to have no effect on the owners of the forums - rather it's focused on the *users* of the forum. If you're a user using the forum for official government business/public communication, then you are not allowed to unilaterally silence your political rivals there, any more than you can do so with ads on privately owned television networks.
If on the other hand it's the owners of the forum who decide to block your rivals - that's a different issue, but you should probably expect an investigation to make sure there was no collusion on your part.
The screen consumes a great deal of power displaying backlit pictures with a fixed outer frame size - not necessarily the aesthetic (or environmental) ideal
Shelves - you're telling me you actively all your shelves while watching TV? Personally I very rarely look at my bookshelves while watching TV. I also have display shelves that I rarely touch at all, I wouldn't mind them vanishing while the TV is on either.
I am assuming "TV is off" also means "TV is rolled up" (Why wouldn't it? Being rolled up both hides it and protects it from damage), and that most of the time the TV is off. If you live in front of the TV, then there's admittedly not much point in having one that "disappears".
And so it has been. The Linux desktop has been thriving, it just hasn't gained dramatic market share, persistently hovering around the same tiny fraction as MacOS, for reasons that have very little to do with the Linux desktop itself.