If I can't get it through an RSS feed, I don't read it. When Google Reader went away I tried a few alternatives, and settled on InoReader. It's not perfect (ads, a bit too intrusive for me to leave off my ad blocker), but it is serviceable. Keyboard navigation of entries is laudable.
Remember that your router is limited to 1W output (FCC limits in the US for all 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz devices), fired in every direction. At a mere 1 meter away from the router, even if your cell is placed facing the router (to have maximim surface area), and assuming 100% efficiency... your cell would harvest about 0.0004 watts of charging power.
But it will not be 100% efficient. Your cell will not be within 1 meter of the router most of the time. This entire idea is ludicrous, and anyone thinking that it's a great idea does not know much about physics.
This is true in the same way that auto-tune removes the need for musical singing ability. Sure, you can force a certain note, but it sounds artificial. Similarly this tool can replicate a voice at standard timbres and emotions well enough to be recognizable, but not well enough to be undetectable as a digital emulation.
It's not until it's undetectable (such as some of the best modern CGI) that we'll actually have made actors obsolete. Except... amazingly, CGI costs more than the actors, it's less flexible, and slower. I think it will be quite a while before we have something that is both on-par for quality and cheaper than a skilled live human.
Not much beat having a REPL loop be the OS boot prompt. But BASIC is a crappy language to learn programming in. Similarly, fuck JavaScript. A language you teach with should not be full of surprises and exceptions. It should be consistent and simple. How about LUA?
While few things that Trump has done so far has inspired any confidence in me, this is one change I'm glad of. H1-B immigrants are the modern version of indentured slaves, and I'll be glad when the process is revamped or replaced.
Now, I would prefer that it was replaced with relaxed immigration controls allowing more new blood to legally join our nation... we are a country if immigrants (barring the sadly marginal population of native indians), and I think it is short-sighted of us to assume that a native-born american is somehow superior to a foreigner who upended their entire life to take a risk in a new land. Immigrants have historically been more successful at creating new businesses than native born, because they have already self-selected to be risk takers.
But baby steps. Removing the downward wage-pressure of a large population of indentured slaves is a good start. If I get few nice things from this idiotic presidency I'll be pleasantly surprised.
They specifically mention the YouTube feature in other articles, along with comparison videos. The feature added to Photos is far superior to the implementation in YouTube.
Tools like Fiverr, Mechanical Turk, etc are an amazing way to create positive trade with low-income nations. They get a living wage, we get cheap labor, everyone wins.
They are an abysmal way to run a sustainable first-world economy, due to all the problems listed in the many comments above.
But don't let the shittiness of a gig economy in the US, EU, and other prosperous areas overshadow the value they have in allowing poor areas of the world an instant economic advantage. The Internet has allowed us a way to provide aid without creating beggers, to create a cash flow where value is moving in the both directions, and to allow for economic success in developing nations without sweatshops and mines, without employers siphoning off most of the wealth, or warlords stealing the crops.
Five dollars for an hour of work is shitty here, but when five dollars can be a days wage (or a weeks) in many places it's amazing. If they can get Internet access (and that's a big if...) then it opens up a huge economic opportunity for many of the poorest nations. This kind of opportunity is why Google projects to get the Internet out to rural Africa, India, and South America are so vital.
So yes, it sucks for us here. It should be fought. But the idea itself has merit, it's just where it's being applied that is inappropriate.
Often performance issues are caused by a sub-optimal algorithm. It works, but a different approach would be better. A recent dev post about the game Factorio highlighted a more straightforward issue:
Finally the blueprint tooltip preview: this one stumped me for a while. I've known it was slow since I first started with Factorio 2+ years ago but could never pin-point exactly what was causing it. The drawing of the blueprint preview is near identical to what happens when you view the normal game but would always take 4-5 times as much time to render. Finally recently I found that we did zero batching of sprites to be drawn when rendering the GUI: for every sprite that we would draw it would go out to the graphics card and tell it to draw it. Fixing that was as simple as turning a flag on and now it has no measurable impact on performance when rendered.
A one-parameter fix to a long-standing bug. Gotta love it.
That's a silly comment. GitLab is buying Gitter so it can be incorporated into their own platform eventually. They're buying a well-made codebase to improve own product. They could have written it themselves, but they decided that their time to create an equal feature would have been longer or cost more that buying it.
GitLab needs to compete on features with GitHub, who is winning the popularity contest by a wide margin.
Also, "will not be adding it directly now" is not the same as never. I still think the long term goal is to improve GitLab using features borrowed from Gitter.
Just 'get a new skill' will soon be an ineffective solution. I work in technical customer service, so I think I'll last a bit longer than some jobs, but nearly any job has the potential to be on the chopping block. By 2050 I bet an AI system will be able to take calls and assist users with every program under the sun faster and cheaper than I can, 24/7, while always being friendly and never needing a lunch break.
I know it's a joke, but just for the sake of discussion I'd like to address it.
Finding out that life took 'only' 100 million years to appear after the formation of liquid oceans makes it a lot more likely that life (as we know it) is ubiquitous in favorable conditions. It means that if we are ever able to investigate the cosmos, we may find that most worlds that have liquid water have at least primitive life on them (rather than 'some' or 'occasional'). And there is always the possibility of life as we don't know it; life in gas giants, on neutron stars, in the gluon soup of the first moments of the cosmos (Stephen Baxter, but I can't remember which story), in the accretion disks of black holes, in the photosphere of stars.
There are so many ways that organization could form out of chaos, and that life would be invisible to us. If there was a form of life that lived in our sun's photosphere how would we tell it existed? We only recently learned that there are microbes in our upper atmosphere that is evolved to survive there permanently... and we flew through it for decades!
The more alien life is, the easier it is for us to overlook or not recognize the signs of its existence. Not only that, but the less likely we are to visit (or closely investigate) the environment it lives in because that environment is inhospitable to us.
So yeah... finding out that life evolved early on on Earth is fascinating, and it really lends weight to the possibility of life being all over the place... even where we have not tried to look.
Some people go to a couple movies a month. $50 a month, easy, with tickets and concessions. More if you're not alone. Others go cycling on a $2000 cycle. Some hit the bar... $30 a night (or more).
And others buy an expensive video card so they can play the newest games at the best settings. Seriously... you're right it'll be obsolete in a couple years, but are you simultaneously making fun of what everyone does on their time off? That tequila shot costs $8 and all you get is a buzz for half an hour.
You may not like gaming. That's fine. You might not have a lot of money lying around. Also fine. But millions of people spend much more than the cost of that video card every few months on their personal past-times and hobbies. A gaming computer, especially one built yourself, is a pretty inexpensive investment to play games that you can't get anywhere else.
There are thousands of games you can only play on a computer, and dozens of AAA titles every year that just don't work on any other platform. A console is not a substitute for a PC for many gamers. It's not worse... it's just different. Stop being a hobby bigot.:-) Let people enjoy their technology any way they like it.
So you're saying that if EA stopped putting out regular-remakes of their sports franchises, and instead only released a game when it was good, worthwhile, and offered something new... that would be a bad thing? If they just put out 'Madden' and upgraded it for free every year without charging customers a dime? If they made their money with optional DLC that didn't affect the core game?
I'm sorry, but you've failed to convince me that switching away from a 'release drek on schedule' model to a 'only release when it's good' model is a bad thing.
Tell that to Valve, who have hit over 400 employees, and they don't just lack a CEO... they lack any managers at all. Somehow they muddle on, barely scraping by on over a billion a year in revenue.
Gabe never 'positions' himself. You are confusing him with normal 'people in high positions'. He is not a spokesman, or a mouthpiece, or even a manager. He built the entire company of Valve in a way so he doesn't have to be the decider. He's just a smart dude at a company on the forefront of VR, and like any new and risky technology, it could fail. Like John Carmack, he pulls no punches... if something sucks, he says it sucks. If he fires someone, he publicly calls them an ass (not necessarily his best moment).
He is not in Marketing, and he doesn't really care what consumers think about his verbiage. In fact, his lack of a filter is part of why Valve as a company is so reticent to talk to the consumers directly, as his quotes have been used against him many times in the past.
So I'm not saying your options are false, I'm just saying that you ascribe too much forethought into his choice of wording.
California law overrides DNC clauses for anyone but partners or equity stakeholders in a business. So you can't bar an employee from going to a competing business, but you can bar a partner from dissolving the partnership and opening up a competing company.
Our attention span has not reduced to 8 seconds. Heavy consumers of media and tech do not pay attention to non-interactive content (TV, ads), but are better at paying attention to interactive content (games, software). This is a shift of attention from passive consumers to active participants. When presented with passive content, tech users tune out... no surprise. But that's not the same as a globally reduced attention span.
While I agree that 'gluten sensitive' people are mostly full of bullshit, I'm all for making the lives of the small percentage with real allegies to wheat better.
A small portion of the population is crippled, but we have parking and mandatory accessibility for them. It's a significant expense for businesses, but it makes their lives notably better. Having a more widely available (and cheaper) gluten free grain would improve the lives of those suffering from celiac; even if a large chunk of other people unnecessarily take advantage of it too, what's the harm? I've been known to push the 'door open' button and I'm not in a wheelchair.
As I said, it can take over a decade to get a green card, and longer to get citizenship. It's not easy. We have an unknown number of H1-B workers, but it's probably over 600,000 (as of 2011), probably more now. So saying that green cards and citizenship are 'available' is ignoring reality. Most workers on H1-B are trapped in that status, and as long as they are they cannot fight back against poor working conditions or unequal pay... and that is depressing wages more than any other single factor.
I think we should abandon H1-B completely. If someone wants to work in the US, and has a job lined up here, then we should allow them to become a citizen within a year assuming they jump through the necessary hoops (take a night class, pass the citizenship exam, etc). This idiocy of requiring people to wait years, sometimes over a decade, to become a citizen while they work in the US at a well paying job is stupid.
We are a nation of immigrants. It's in most of our blood. Immigrants start businesses far more than native born Americans because they are risk takers... if they are willing to uproot themselves and move to a foreign land, they are likely willing to take other risks as well. That kind of risk taking is what built our nation, and shutting it out only harms us in the long run.
The H1-B program creates trapped workers who have to toe the line and rock no boats, lest they be fired and deported. This allows companies to abuse them in ways citizens would not put up with. An immigrant with citizenship is less of a threat to the livelihood of tech workers than an H1-B visitor, as companies would not be in a position to deport them if they asked for a raise; they could look for other jobs with impunity, and thus would compete on equal footing... and similarly, would not have to put up with artificially depressed wages.
So open up immigration, and fuck the stupid fake 'work' visas.
Predictions are not worth the toilet paper they are printed on.
Apple has suffered from a lack of progress ever since Jobs died. They are treading water... it took them 5 years to update the MacBook, and what we got was lackluster. 'Predicting' that they will succeed and Microsoft will falter is dubious.
The only real winner is Google, with Over 3/4 of the market for device operating systems.
This sounds more practical that the typical announcement about 'breakthrough in carbon shaped like a sheet/tube/ball'. It doesn't require ultra-pure, pristine, 1cm by 1cm by 1 atom, made-from-the-ashes-of-the one-pure-angel type graphene. It's boring 'let's have the undergrads play around with carbon so they feel like their doing real science' quality graphene. That's pretty awesome, and makes this far more likely to go from a lab experiment to a practical invention with patents, profits, and benefits to daily life.
New to/. maybe, but this was revealed over a year ago. Extra Credits did a pretty good video covering the dystopian system from a game developer point of view.
Slashdot Mirror
If I can't get it through an RSS feed, I don't read it. When Google Reader went away I tried a few alternatives, and settled on InoReader. It's not perfect (ads, a bit too intrusive for me to leave off my ad blocker), but it is serviceable. Keyboard navigation of entries is laudable.
Remember that your router is limited to 1W output (FCC limits in the US for all 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz devices), fired in every direction. At a mere 1 meter away from the router, even if your cell is placed facing the router (to have maximim surface area), and assuming 100% efficiency... your cell would harvest about 0.0004 watts of charging power.
But it will not be 100% efficient. Your cell will not be within 1 meter of the router most of the time. This entire idea is ludicrous, and anyone thinking that it's a great idea does not know much about physics.
This is true in the same way that auto-tune removes the need for musical singing ability. Sure, you can force a certain note, but it sounds artificial. Similarly this tool can replicate a voice at standard timbres and emotions well enough to be recognizable, but not well enough to be undetectable as a digital emulation.
It's not until it's undetectable (such as some of the best modern CGI) that we'll actually have made actors obsolete. Except... amazingly, CGI costs more than the actors, it's less flexible, and slower. I think it will be quite a while before we have something that is both on-par for quality and cheaper than a skilled live human.
Not much beat having a REPL loop be the OS boot prompt. But BASIC is a crappy language to learn programming in. Similarly, fuck JavaScript. A language you teach with should not be full of surprises and exceptions. It should be consistent and simple. How about LUA?
While few things that Trump has done so far has inspired any confidence in me, this is one change I'm glad of. H1-B immigrants are the modern version of indentured slaves, and I'll be glad when the process is revamped or replaced.
Now, I would prefer that it was replaced with relaxed immigration controls allowing more new blood to legally join our nation... we are a country if immigrants (barring the sadly marginal population of native indians), and I think it is short-sighted of us to assume that a native-born american is somehow superior to a foreigner who upended their entire life to take a risk in a new land. Immigrants have historically been more successful at creating new businesses than native born, because they have already self-selected to be risk takers.
But baby steps. Removing the downward wage-pressure of a large population of indentured slaves is a good start. If I get few nice things from this idiotic presidency I'll be pleasantly surprised.
This might be helpful. On the left is YouTube stabilization. The right is Photos stabilization. They are not the same.
They specifically mention the YouTube feature in other articles, along with comparison videos. The feature added to Photos is far superior to the implementation in YouTube.
Tools like Fiverr, Mechanical Turk, etc are an amazing way to create positive trade with low-income nations. They get a living wage, we get cheap labor, everyone wins.
They are an abysmal way to run a sustainable first-world economy, due to all the problems listed in the many comments above.
But don't let the shittiness of a gig economy in the US, EU, and other prosperous areas overshadow the value they have in allowing poor areas of the world an instant economic advantage. The Internet has allowed us a way to provide aid without creating beggers, to create a cash flow where value is moving in the both directions, and to allow for economic success in developing nations without sweatshops and mines, without employers siphoning off most of the wealth, or warlords stealing the crops.
Five dollars for an hour of work is shitty here, but when five dollars can be a days wage (or a weeks) in many places it's amazing. If they can get Internet access (and that's a big if...) then it opens up a huge economic opportunity for many of the poorest nations. This kind of opportunity is why Google projects to get the Internet out to rural Africa, India, and South America are so vital.
So yes, it sucks for us here. It should be fought. But the idea itself has merit, it's just where it's being applied that is inappropriate.
Often performance issues are caused by a sub-optimal algorithm. It works, but a different approach would be better. A recent dev post about the game Factorio highlighted a more straightforward issue:
A one-parameter fix to a long-standing bug. Gotta love it.
That's a silly comment. GitLab is buying Gitter so it can be incorporated into their own platform eventually. They're buying a well-made codebase to improve own product. They could have written it themselves, but they decided that their time to create an equal feature would have been longer or cost more that buying it.
GitLab needs to compete on features with GitHub, who is winning the popularity contest by a wide margin.
Also, "will not be adding it directly now" is not the same as never. I still think the long term goal is to improve GitLab using features borrowed from Gitter.
You replied to the wrong article.
Just 'get a new skill' will soon be an ineffective solution. I work in technical customer service, so I think I'll last a bit longer than some jobs, but nearly any job has the potential to be on the chopping block. By 2050 I bet an AI system will be able to take calls and assist users with every program under the sun faster and cheaper than I can, 24/7, while always being friendly and never needing a lunch break.
No job is safe.
I know it's a joke, but just for the sake of discussion I'd like to address it.
Finding out that life took 'only' 100 million years to appear after the formation of liquid oceans makes it a lot more likely that life (as we know it) is ubiquitous in favorable conditions. It means that if we are ever able to investigate the cosmos, we may find that most worlds that have liquid water have at least primitive life on them (rather than 'some' or 'occasional'). And there is always the possibility of life as we don't know it; life in gas giants, on neutron stars, in the gluon soup of the first moments of the cosmos (Stephen Baxter, but I can't remember which story), in the accretion disks of black holes, in the photosphere of stars.
There are so many ways that organization could form out of chaos, and that life would be invisible to us. If there was a form of life that lived in our sun's photosphere how would we tell it existed? We only recently learned that there are microbes in our upper atmosphere that is evolved to survive there permanently... and we flew through it for decades!
The more alien life is, the easier it is for us to overlook or not recognize the signs of its existence. Not only that, but the less likely we are to visit (or closely investigate) the environment it lives in because that environment is inhospitable to us.
So yeah... finding out that life evolved early on on Earth is fascinating, and it really lends weight to the possibility of life being all over the place... even where we have not tried to look.
Some people go to a couple movies a month. $50 a month, easy, with tickets and concessions. More if you're not alone. Others go cycling on a $2000 cycle. Some hit the bar... $30 a night (or more).
And others buy an expensive video card so they can play the newest games at the best settings. Seriously... you're right it'll be obsolete in a couple years, but are you simultaneously making fun of what everyone does on their time off? That tequila shot costs $8 and all you get is a buzz for half an hour.
You may not like gaming. That's fine. You might not have a lot of money lying around. Also fine. But millions of people spend much more than the cost of that video card every few months on their personal past-times and hobbies. A gaming computer, especially one built yourself, is a pretty inexpensive investment to play games that you can't get anywhere else.
There are thousands of games you can only play on a computer, and dozens of AAA titles every year that just don't work on any other platform. A console is not a substitute for a PC for many gamers. It's not worse... it's just different. Stop being a hobby bigot. :-) Let people enjoy their technology any way they like it.
So you're saying that if EA stopped putting out regular-remakes of their sports franchises, and instead only released a game when it was good, worthwhile, and offered something new... that would be a bad thing? If they just put out 'Madden' and upgraded it for free every year without charging customers a dime? If they made their money with optional DLC that didn't affect the core game?
I'm sorry, but you've failed to convince me that switching away from a 'release drek on schedule' model to a 'only release when it's good' model is a bad thing.
Tell that to Valve, who have hit over 400 employees, and they don't just lack a CEO... they lack any managers at all. Somehow they muddle on, barely scraping by on over a billion a year in revenue.
Gabe never 'positions' himself. You are confusing him with normal 'people in high positions'. He is not a spokesman, or a mouthpiece, or even a manager. He built the entire company of Valve in a way so he doesn't have to be the decider. He's just a smart dude at a company on the forefront of VR, and like any new and risky technology, it could fail. Like John Carmack, he pulls no punches... if something sucks, he says it sucks. If he fires someone, he publicly calls them an ass (not necessarily his best moment).
He is not in Marketing, and he doesn't really care what consumers think about his verbiage. In fact, his lack of a filter is part of why Valve as a company is so reticent to talk to the consumers directly, as his quotes have been used against him many times in the past.
So I'm not saying your options are false, I'm just saying that you ascribe too much forethought into his choice of wording.
California law overrides DNC clauses for anyone but partners or equity stakeholders in a business. So you can't bar an employee from going to a competing business, but you can bar a partner from dissolving the partnership and opening up a competing company.
Our attention span has not reduced to 8 seconds. Heavy consumers of media and tech do not pay attention to non-interactive content (TV, ads), but are better at paying attention to interactive content (games, software). This is a shift of attention from passive consumers to active participants. When presented with passive content, tech users tune out... no surprise. But that's not the same as a globally reduced attention span.
The full report is available.
While I agree that 'gluten sensitive' people are mostly full of bullshit, I'm all for making the lives of the small percentage with real allegies to wheat better.
A small portion of the population is crippled, but we have parking and mandatory accessibility for them. It's a significant expense for businesses, but it makes their lives notably better. Having a more widely available (and cheaper) gluten free grain would improve the lives of those suffering from celiac; even if a large chunk of other people unnecessarily take advantage of it too, what's the harm? I've been known to push the 'door open' button and I'm not in a wheelchair.
As I said, it can take over a decade to get a green card, and longer to get citizenship. It's not easy. We have an unknown number of H1-B workers, but it's probably over 600,000 (as of 2011), probably more now. So saying that green cards and citizenship are 'available' is ignoring reality. Most workers on H1-B are trapped in that status, and as long as they are they cannot fight back against poor working conditions or unequal pay... and that is depressing wages more than any other single factor.
I think we should abandon H1-B completely. If someone wants to work in the US, and has a job lined up here, then we should allow them to become a citizen within a year assuming they jump through the necessary hoops (take a night class, pass the citizenship exam, etc). This idiocy of requiring people to wait years, sometimes over a decade, to become a citizen while they work in the US at a well paying job is stupid.
We are a nation of immigrants. It's in most of our blood. Immigrants start businesses far more than native born Americans because they are risk takers... if they are willing to uproot themselves and move to a foreign land, they are likely willing to take other risks as well. That kind of risk taking is what built our nation, and shutting it out only harms us in the long run.
The H1-B program creates trapped workers who have to toe the line and rock no boats, lest they be fired and deported. This allows companies to abuse them in ways citizens would not put up with. An immigrant with citizenship is less of a threat to the livelihood of tech workers than an H1-B visitor, as companies would not be in a position to deport them if they asked for a raise; they could look for other jobs with impunity, and thus would compete on equal footing... and similarly, would not have to put up with artificially depressed wages.
So open up immigration, and fuck the stupid fake 'work' visas.
Predictions are not worth the toilet paper they are printed on.
Apple has suffered from a lack of progress ever since Jobs died. They are treading water... it took them 5 years to update the MacBook, and what we got was lackluster. 'Predicting' that they will succeed and Microsoft will falter is dubious.
The only real winner is Google, with Over 3/4 of the market for device operating systems.
This sounds more practical that the typical announcement about 'breakthrough in carbon shaped like a sheet/tube/ball'. It doesn't require ultra-pure, pristine, 1cm by 1cm by 1 atom, made-from-the-ashes-of-the one-pure-angel type graphene. It's boring 'let's have the undergrads play around with carbon so they feel like their doing real science' quality graphene. That's pretty awesome, and makes this far more likely to go from a lab experiment to a practical invention with patents, profits, and benefits to daily life.
New to /. maybe, but this was revealed over a year ago. Extra Credits did a pretty good video covering the dystopian system from a game developer point of view.