Note that there's some subtle discrepancy between that paper (or at least title, I haven't read the paper) and GGP's claim. Your paper refers to girls, while GGP made the claim for children generally. If a similar result were found concerning boys and time with their mothers, that would refute GGP, while being nicely symmetric with your paper.
(I'm no student of the field, even on an amateur basis, so I have no idea whether such a result has been found or looked for...)
Gmail counts foo.bar.baz.bot@gmail.com, foobarbazbot@gmail.com, foobar.bazb.ot@gmail.com, and any such variations as the same. (BTW, none of those is mine.) If you own one of those as your gmail account, you own all of them, and nobody else owns any of them. Whoever entered that email was being stupid one way or another.
Anyway, whatever their reason, they put down an address that wasn't theirs but is in fact yours. This means when you were forwarding it to the "correct" address*, you were just forwarding it to yourself. They didn't thank you because they never got it.
* From your post, I infer you sent it to f.m.last@gmail.com -- if you mean you googled about and identified the individual from personal information included in the email, found an actual email address of theirs, and sent it on to there, that's different. (And IMO, that's way too much work to spend helping somebody who can't be arsed to double-check their email address on a form, and/or can't comprehend how email works in the first place.)
For the time being, there is no single higher-productivity display for a programmer.
You can currently buy a 2560x1440 27" display for around $350.
Okay, but he didn't say no cheaper display, he said no higher-productivity display. The assumption is that productivity matters more than cost, because it's multiplied with a big number. e.g., if you're paying someone $100,000 per year, and you can boost their productivity even 1% with a different monitor, and that monitor will last 3 years, you come out ahead whether that monitor's $100 or $1000.
The Seiki display they refer to is actually two 1920x2160 panels stitched together and limited to a painful 30hz.
So? It still beats two 1920x2160 monitors (or, since you can't buy those, 1600x2560 is about the same pixel count) with fat bezels jammed between them -- and if (as I think you mean to imply) the two panels require separate inputs, it's not like development workstations typically lack the ability to drive two monitors.
As for "painful" 30 Hz -- you may not have noticed, but the dotcom bubble burst a while ago, and it's no longer hip to let your coders play Quake instead of coding. For most types of actual work that programmers do, 30Hz refresh rates aren't painful -- remember that unlike CRTs, LCDs don't flicker at the refresh rate. Yeah, 30Hz would be a problem for CAD work or whatever, but that's not what we're talking about, is it?
Second, the monitor is not 4k, it's 3840x2160 which is only UHD. 4k is 4096x2160.
I'm so tired of the silly dickering over this. 4k is a marketing term, not a number. You can tell, because if it were an exact number, with "k" being as an abbreviation for the SI prefix kilo-, it would denote 4000 pixels, not 4096. (4096 pixels would be 4ki -- we're finally getting over the 1000/1024 wars by adding the alternate prefixes, let's not fuck it up now.) Since it's a marketing term, the marketers get to define it, and any sort of logic need not apply -- and the marketers have decided that 3840 pixels counts as 4k. Any arguing, no matter how logical it might be, is a waste of time and effort.
But in honesty, this is one of the more sensible decisions ever to come from marketers, because it (purely accidental, I'm sure) does make sense -- there's only one significant figure, so it's a correct, though imprecise, representation for anything from 3500 to 4500 pixels!
Finally, this is a nearly 40 inch display. They look ridiculous as a computer monitor and the ergonomics suck.
Remind me again, did he say less-ridiculous-looking? or higher-productivity?
Ah, ergonomics; finally a point that might have something to do with the productivity. I assume you mean that one might have to tip one's head too far to see the top (if one's desk isn't deep enough to push it back far enough to make the vertical angle reasonable). So use the bottom ~1500 pixels, and leave the top ~600 blank -- now it's the same height, with the same ergonomics, as the 27" monitor you proposed. But it's 1.5x as many pixels wide... Can you explain what magic feature of your 27" makes it a contender for "single higher-productivity display" when you can only put 1/3 as much stuff on it? (As another reply pointed out, those with 2x2 monitor arrays have long known that, rather than leaving the top empty, you can put less-frequently-accessed info up there. You reduce the neck-strain, while still benefitting from the extra space. In my case, as I am sufficiently myopic to need glasses even at desktop distances, I've also used bold graphics and larger text on the upper displays so I can get at least a summary over my glasses, and only tilt my head the whole way if I need to read more; htop is quite handy this way.)
Just give us 4k in a 27-30" form factor for people that aren't blind.
about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls 'worldwide,' an effort that 'allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.'
Yes, it's essential to national security that we "look for", identify, and if necessary kill, any and all "unknown associates" of Ms. Merkel!
It doesn't prove Snowden is in the right, but when the NSA's proponents can't string together one paragraph summarizing the "good" programs Snowden's compromised without this sort of thing, you can be pretty damn sure NSA is so far wrong it's not funny.
There are arrays of microphones installed in indoor arenas that can isolate the words of individuals in the audience of 10s of 1000s. One assumes the audio stream can be split to allow isolating more than one person simultaneously.
So it isn't impossible, tho it may require a lot of DSP equipment.
This.
All the people going on about putting a mic on each person, or all around the table, or whatever are way off. Those mics will pick up everyone else's voice as well, and speech-to-text capability goes way down with extra voices at even low volumes. Phased arrays are where it's at -- with enough mics, you can do a much better job at getting the voice you want, and at nulling out any other concurrent speakers -- and of course, as you say, you can use the same mic array to simultaneously monitor several speakers. However, there's two notes to remember:
The physical resolution of any such system, even in the near field, is more-or-less limited by wavelength, so if the lowest frequency of interest is, say, 300 Hz, you'll have difficulty resolving much less than a meter.
And a living room or whatever is merry hell for multipath. Establishing the correct delays and amplitudes needed to resolve each speaker (or conversely to null them out) is simple enough in the static case (just have everyone speak a sentence or so in turn for calibration at the beginning of the event -- if you're a religious family, perhaps you can integrate this with saying grace over the food...), but when somebody gets up and walks around, everyone's coefficient matrix changes. With the burden of keeping up with that in realtime, it's a bit more of a challenge than it might at first appear.
when phones people care about still have less than 4GB of RAM/memory mapped peripherals,
suggests you may not understand the issue. x32 lets you have lots of RAM, but each process only has a 4GB address space. So if you have 8GB of RAM, you can have a half-dozen processes occupying 1-2GB each.
Maybe you're aware of this and just discount the importance. After all, Android seems to be designed to ensure every app is periodically killed and has to be reloaded from disk periodically -- I'm not sure if this is a proactive defense against memory leaks, an effort to ensure programmers don't neglect proper state-saving just because their device has a lot of RAM, or what -- so the obvious benefit of leaving multiple apps resident so you can swap quickly doesn't materialise on that platform. But it could make sense for > 4GB with OSes that aren't Android, or with a hypothetical future version of Android that's more gentle with the task-killing.
Nonsense, you could set it up against a backdrop and use it like a regular monitor.
Or you could use a regular monitor which will be cheaper and easier to set up...
It makes sense any place workers have to wear gloves, such as restaurants, hospitals, auto shops, etc.
Not sure what you think gloves have to do with the display tech -- these all sound like excellent uses for ordinary LCD monitors.. If your concern's actually about the touch-sensing side, on the basis that "My iPad's touch sensor doesn't work with gloves on, therefore no touch sensor works with gloves on -- except the method they use with this mist-screen", then you're being silly. Optical touchscreens of various sorts have been used on stationary computers for decades, though they turn out not to be suited (due to thickness/parallax, power consumption, etc.) for mobile computers. And to the extent that the optical qualities of fingers are much like the optical qualities of fingers in gloves (mostly, they're both rather opaque), they work just fine with gloves on.
It would be particularly nice for mechanics as you could put interactive 3D guides and even take the display underneath the car itself.
Another thing desktop UI has over iOS/Android is Home and End keys to go to the top and bottom of a page respectively, and a scroll bar with a draggable thumb to go to a specific percentage of the distance down the page.
Good point, though again, pinch-zoom can mitigate the problem to some degree. Only really helps if the browser permits zooming out beyond page-width = screen-width, though.
That and there's a lot more context around a big textarea like the one into which I'm typing this comment. On desktop, I see the parent post and the textarea, and the keyboard is a few inches below the bottom of the monitor. On mobile, I see the textarea and the on-screen keyboard, with no parent post unless I scroll back and forth
Fair enough. My perspective is probably skewed because my mobile use has mainly been on the N900 and various tablets -- I've not spent much time with only an on-screen keyboard and small screen.
and Slashdot's mobile version appears to hide the parent post completely, making scrolling impossible.
Well, yeah, but/.'s mobile site looks like a completely horrible piece of shit next to anything but/.'s beta site.;)
When high-end mobiles had EDGE and QVGA, and many people were stuck with GPRS and 160px screens, mobile sites were absolutely necessary. But with today's phones, the question is not why mobile sites suck, but why we need mobile sites at all.
Over the past decade, the actual functionality of websites, aside from streaming video (which is huge, to be sure) has barely changed at all. Over the same decade, mobile hardware and software have advanced to match the low-end desktops of 2003. If video streaming is handled by separate apps (as it mostly is), there's little reason one website shouldn't work for both desktop and mobile use.
I only really see four differences between today's 1136x640 or 1280x720 phone and yesterday's 1024x768 desktop, as far as web browsing goes:
mouse motion (without a button state change) - generally, depending on either mouseover or drag is bad practice (it fails not only with touchscreens, but also with software for people with disabilities), but of course they can also be very convenient (provided you actually have a mouse). The right solution is for websites to provide the same functionality another way (e.g. m.xkcd.com's alt-text show/hide link -- note that while this is a mobile site, I and many others use it on desktops; it's a good example of one site working well for both.) Sadly we can't expect such accommodation, so the next alternative is to patch over it in the browser -- the N900's browser does this tolerably well (only permits drags, but most mouse-over stuff works ok by dragging in from an inactive area), but most other mobile browsers don't even try, and I really can't understand why.
right click - it's mostly mapped to long-touch and works as you'd expect in a lot of mobile browsers. But in some it doesn't work at all. If one does a good fix for allowing separate position/button control, it's trivial to add support for right mouse button.
screen size - there's a factor of 5 between a 15-20" display and a 3-4" display, so unless you use your phone at one-fifth the distance you use your monitor, you can fit less readable text on it despite the comparable or better number of pixels. But you can always move the phone temporarily closer to see tiny text, and pinch-zooming is so easy on (most) mobiles, it's a mostly solved problem for most sites. For the sites where this doesn't work well, maybe a mobile site really is the answer.
fat-finger syndrome - UI elements that are to be clicked have to be big. Since one clicks hyperlinks, this means hyperlinks have to be big. But again, zoom fixes this well enough.
It seems like a tiny fraction of the effort spent on mobile sites (making a few changes to mobile browsers) could permit many existing sites to work just fine on both mobiles and desktops, and an additional fraction (making changes to those websites) would fix almost all the remaining ones. Fiddling with mouseover emulation and zooming clearly costs the user time vs. a good mobile-only site, but it's not at all clear to me that that's really true vs. an average mobile site (which, on average, is what you'll get) or that if it is, that the cost in wasted user time is less than the cost in developer time expended on creating and maintaining a mobile site.
Of course, this is all built on the assumption that a website that does A, B, and C today should be no more complicated and require no more resources than a website doing A, B, and C in 2003. While this may appear reasonable enough, Wirth's law says it's too much to expect. But a guy can dream, no?
You could have a 4K resolution on a laptop screen, and it's not going to solve the fundamental problem. The capabilities of the human eye and the physical size of the thing that you are carrying around with you are the limiting factors here, not the resolution.
Maybe you have bad eyes, and so this is true for you -- it certainly is for some people. However, for nominal 20/20 vision, the usual resolutions are the limiting factor, because normal people can read printed words substantially smaller than can be displayed (in reasonable fonts) on a 15" 1920x1080 laptop display. And if one accepts unreasonable fonts (~20px* TT fonts and smaller) to try to cram more lines in, the text is less readable than printed text of the same size -- which is, of course, why those fonts are unreasonable in the first place.
* Why 20px? Obviously it's an approximation, and the exact number depends on what font you use and how your font rendering system is configured, but basically, you need to be able to show stroke widths as small as ~1/10th the height, and strokes need to be at least 2px wide for good clarity. If they're less, you either get distorted shape (the strokes get hinted to one pixel or the other and drawn with no anti-aliasing) or indistinct strokes (because no central pixels of full brightness remain between the anti-alias blur at each edge).
Eh, I've heard that argument, but I'm not convinced it's a very big problem.
(To be clear, I agree that passing with a decent speed differential is best practice -- I'm just arguing as to whether it's substantially more dangerous to pass at 1 or 2 mph, even though that's already a bad idea for other reasons.)
First, when you change lanes, you're supposed to check your blind spot by turning your head. (Not everyone does, but quite a portion do.) Second, people don't change lanes all that often, so the odds of it happening while you're passing them are quite low, even for slow passes. When they do, it's likely because of a slower vehicle in front of them, which makes the situation eminently foreseeable by the slow-passer, giving them time to get their foot over to the gas pedal and speed up (like they should have to start with). Third, if you're going almost the same speed, then the relative velocity is quite small and almost entirely sideways, and unless the car who changes lanes while the slow-passer is rear-wheel drive (increasingly less common, at least in the US), they're unlikely to PIT themselves -- both vehicles really have a very good chance to remain more-or-less in control. As collisions go, it's not the safest, but far from the worst.
Of course, the existence of a law against slow passing is not evidence that it's dangerous -- the law could just as well exist due to the frustration and/or traffic flow problems that it causes.
As for slow passing, that's mostly a fallacy, because every cruise control allows driver over-ride, and passing a slower vehicle at one mph difference in speed is not some how more dangerous than passing at 5 or 10 mph.
Actually, it probably is a little more dangerous. People in too big a hurry* do get mad about this, and some of those people are mad enough/have poor enough impulse control that they'll take out their anger in unsafe manuevers (starting with tailgating and unreasonably close passing once it is clear, all the way up to actually attempting to run the slow-passer off the road).
The same driver that will allow the CC to take them slowly around another car would pass slowly if managing their speed manually.
That's mostly true -- while I imagine some drivers would pass faster if they were already controlling speed, but just don't care enough to move their foot back to the gas pedal if they're already on cruise, this is probably a far smaller effect than the one where many drivers would have their speed varying widely as they go up and down hills, also angering people and potentially endangering you by way of their response, so I think it does refute GP's argument that cruise control causes slow passing and thus is unsafe.
*If you're in a big enough hurry that waiting an additional 30 seconds to pass a vehicle is really enough problem to get mad about, you're in a big enough hurry to say "damn the law" and pass on the shoulder instead of sitting there stewing. Almost all the time, though, application of a little perspective will reveal you're not in that big a hurry.
I don't want a 7" TV remote, thats fucking stupid. The TV is a display, why the fuck do you have a display on your remote? Because you've over complicated it to the point of stupidity.
Or maybe because you want to browse the program guide and configure the DVR without interrupting the show you're currently watching? (Before you say just pause it, consider that in family situations, someone else may be watching TV, or playing a game, and it may be deemed inconsiderate to interrupt their entertainment just because you feel like frobbing the remote. Doesn't apply to everyone, but it's a legitimate use case.)
Granted, these days one should just use a HTPC instead of a TV+DVR, but the same argument for being able to control your HTPC without interrupting or obscuring the display still applies.
Are you serious? Companies pay fines all the time -- even big companies. Being a big company can mean you get to buy laws and control fines (ideally, set them so they're effectively a wrist-slap for you, but a body-slam to some upstart competitor), but once a court decides against you (and you've exhausted appeals, if applicable), you pay the fine.
If you're trying to stifle companies and drive them out of business, or make them go elsewhere, this is a good way to do it.
Well... yeah.
But I guess living in your nanny state, that's the only way to get companies to produce better code.
"My" nanny state? Are you so deep in an us-or-them mind-state that you're unable to consider that someone who does not support it could possibly criticise someone arguing against it? When I criticised jddeluxe for seeming to completely ignore the "compulsory" bit, I said exactly what I meant. I did not say I supported any such compulsory-bounty scheme, for the simple reason that I don't support it.
I think it's a horrible idea, but "good luck getting companies to sign up" is not only not the most horrible thing about it, it's not even an issue -- if such a compulsory-bounty measure is ever adopted, it will be because interests with lots of money/power (read: big software houses that can afford the bounties, and/or those with an interest in moving most of the software industry overseas) want it bad enough to throw their weight behind it. And if they do, you can bet they'll also throw their weight behind setting fines for non-compliance high enough to to make it effective.
Good luck getting many of the software corporations to sign up for this...
You know what "compulsory" means? It means you get to jail/fine any software companies who don't sign up for it, so I don't think much luck will be needed.
My guess is that many Slashdotters, myself included, feel that the current U.S. convention for the use of punctuation vis-Ã-vis quotation isn't technically accurate enough anyway.
FTFY. It's my understanding that the Brits currently use logical punctuation placement.
Well, there's enough variance in both groups to make it hard to tell in many particular cases. But on average, it can be demonstrated that the poorly-written AI is slightly more intelligent and rather more civilized.
Is there no standard in place by which a website can communicate that it only wishes to be trawled for indexing once per hour, once per day, or such? I can imagine Google f.ex trawls the same website dozens of times per day.
Crawl-delay isn't exactly what you describe, but maybe that will help? (For such spiders as actually respect it -- that's the great thing about ad-hoc standards.)
Anyway, I'm pretty sure Google and other major search engines use algorithms based on how often your site's content has changed in the past to decide how often to crawl it in the future, so there shouldn't be unduly high traffic from this -- I suspect the 61% is mainly due to a lot of sites (personal blogs of non-popular people) with practically zero non-spider traffic.
Correct answer: Yes, robots like cat videos too! (Well, a few of them. Most of them are actually big DOGGY!! fans.)
Serious answer: Note the phrase "website traffic" -- if this study attempts to measure traffic to a "typical website" (thus excluding the half-dozen that represent almost all video streaming) and/or measures in terms of page loads, rather than data transferred, there'd be no contradiction. (Of course I've not RTFAed, so I'm just spewing reasonable-sounding explanations.)
In the so-called DrÃssel-Schwabl-rossdee model, Ford Pintos sprout at random on a square grid like a vast checkerboard. Once the traffic jam gets dense enough, a minor collision sets a random Pinto on fire, and fire spreads instantaneously among Pintos that occupy adjacent squares. The conflagration continues until there are no more neighbors to jump to. Then, the process starts all over again.
(Yes, I'm aware that Pintos weren't in reality the blazing firetraps I'm using them as here. Artistic license ftw!)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, to me combat sports can show a lot about a person's real personality and what it showed of women fighters is not that good.
I submit that women fighters may not be a representative sample of women...
Note that there's some subtle discrepancy between that paper (or at least title, I haven't read the paper) and GGP's claim. Your paper refers to girls, while GGP made the claim for children generally. If a similar result were found concerning boys and time with their mothers, that would refute GGP, while being nicely symmetric with your paper.
(I'm no student of the field, even on an amateur basis, so I have no idea whether such a result has been found or looked for...)
Gmail counts foo.bar.baz.bot@gmail.com, foobarbazbot@gmail.com, foobar.bazb.ot@gmail.com, and any such variations as the same. (BTW, none of those is mine.) If you own one of those as your gmail account, you own all of them, and nobody else owns any of them. Whoever entered that email was being stupid one way or another.
Anyway, whatever their reason, they put down an address that wasn't theirs but is in fact yours. This means when you were forwarding it to the "correct" address*, you were just forwarding it to yourself. They didn't thank you because they never got it.
* From your post, I infer you sent it to f.m.last@gmail.com -- if you mean you googled about and identified the individual from personal information included in the email, found an actual email address of theirs, and sent it on to there, that's different. (And IMO, that's way too much work to spend helping somebody who can't be arsed to double-check their email address on a form, and/or can't comprehend how email works in the first place.)
For the time being, there is no single higher-productivity display for a programmer.
You can currently buy a 2560x1440 27" display for around $350.
Okay, but he didn't say no cheaper display, he said no higher-productivity display. The assumption is that productivity matters more than cost, because it's multiplied with a big number. e.g., if you're paying someone $100,000 per year, and you can boost their productivity even 1% with a different monitor, and that monitor will last 3 years, you come out ahead whether that monitor's $100 or $1000.
The Seiki display they refer to is actually two 1920x2160 panels stitched together and limited to a painful 30hz.
So? It still beats two 1920x2160 monitors (or, since you can't buy those, 1600x2560 is about the same pixel count) with fat bezels jammed between them -- and if (as I think you mean to imply) the two panels require separate inputs, it's not like development workstations typically lack the ability to drive two monitors.
As for "painful" 30 Hz -- you may not have noticed, but the dotcom bubble burst a while ago, and it's no longer hip to let your coders play Quake instead of coding. For most types of actual work that programmers do, 30Hz refresh rates aren't painful -- remember that unlike CRTs, LCDs don't flicker at the refresh rate. Yeah, 30Hz would be a problem for CAD work or whatever, but that's not what we're talking about, is it?
Second, the monitor is not 4k, it's 3840x2160 which is only UHD. 4k is 4096x2160.
I'm so tired of the silly dickering over this. 4k is a marketing term, not a number. You can tell, because if it were an exact number, with "k" being as an abbreviation for the SI prefix kilo-, it would denote 4000 pixels, not 4096. (4096 pixels would be 4ki -- we're finally getting over the 1000/1024 wars by adding the alternate prefixes, let's not fuck it up now.) Since it's a marketing term, the marketers get to define it, and any sort of logic need not apply -- and the marketers have decided that 3840 pixels counts as 4k. Any arguing, no matter how logical it might be, is a waste of time and effort.
But in honesty, this is one of the more sensible decisions ever to come from marketers, because it (purely accidental, I'm sure) does make sense -- there's only one significant figure, so it's a correct, though imprecise, representation for anything from 3500 to 4500 pixels!
Finally, this is a nearly 40 inch display. They look ridiculous as a computer monitor and the ergonomics suck.
Remind me again, did he say less-ridiculous-looking? or higher-productivity?
Ah, ergonomics; finally a point that might have something to do with the productivity. I assume you mean that one might have to tip one's head too far to see the top (if one's desk isn't deep enough to push it back far enough to make the vertical angle reasonable). So use the bottom ~1500 pixels, and leave the top ~600 blank -- now it's the same height, with the same ergonomics, as the 27" monitor you proposed. But it's 1.5x as many pixels wide... Can you explain what magic feature of your 27" makes it a contender for "single higher-productivity display" when you can only put 1/3 as much stuff on it? (As another reply pointed out, those with 2x2 monitor arrays have long known that, rather than leaving the top empty, you can put less-frequently-accessed info up there. You reduce the neck-strain, while still benefitting from the extra space. In my case, as I am sufficiently myopic to need glasses even at desktop distances, I've also used bold graphics and larger text on the upper displays so I can get at least a summary over my glasses, and only tilt my head the whole way if I need to read more; htop is quite handy this way.)
Just give us 4k in a 27-30" form factor for people that aren't blind.
about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls 'worldwide,' an effort that 'allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.'
Yes, it's essential to national security that we "look for", identify, and if necessary kill, any and all "unknown associates" of Ms. Merkel!
It doesn't prove Snowden is in the right, but when the NSA's proponents can't string together one paragraph summarizing the "good" programs Snowden's compromised without this sort of thing, you can be pretty damn sure NSA is so far wrong it's not funny.
There are arrays of microphones installed in indoor arenas that can isolate the words of individuals in the audience of 10s of 1000s. One assumes the audio stream can be split to allow isolating more than one person simultaneously.
So it isn't impossible, tho it may require a lot of DSP equipment.
This.
All the people going on about putting a mic on each person, or all around the table, or whatever are way off. Those mics will pick up everyone else's voice as well, and speech-to-text capability goes way down with extra voices at even low volumes. Phased arrays are where it's at -- with enough mics, you can do a much better job at getting the voice you want, and at nulling out any other concurrent speakers -- and of course, as you say, you can use the same mic array to simultaneously monitor several speakers. However, there's two notes to remember:
The physical resolution of any such system, even in the near field, is more-or-less limited by wavelength, so if the lowest frequency of interest is, say, 300 Hz, you'll have difficulty resolving much less than a meter.
And a living room or whatever is merry hell for multipath. Establishing the correct delays and amplitudes needed to resolve each speaker (or conversely to null them out) is simple enough in the static case (just have everyone speak a sentence or so in turn for calibration at the beginning of the event -- if you're a religious family, perhaps you can integrate this with saying grace over the food...), but when somebody gets up and walks around, everyone's coefficient matrix changes. With the burden of keeping up with that in realtime, it's a bit more of a challenge than it might at first appear.
This bit:
when phones people care about still have less than 4GB of RAM/memory mapped peripherals,
suggests you may not understand the issue. x32 lets you have lots of RAM, but each process only has a 4GB address space. So if you have 8GB of RAM, you can have a half-dozen processes occupying 1-2GB each.
Maybe you're aware of this and just discount the importance. After all, Android seems to be designed to ensure every app is periodically killed and has to be reloaded from disk periodically -- I'm not sure if this is a proactive defense against memory leaks, an effort to ensure programmers don't neglect proper state-saving just because their device has a lot of RAM, or what -- so the obvious benefit of leaving multiple apps resident so you can swap quickly doesn't materialise on that platform. But it could make sense for > 4GB with OSes that aren't Android, or with a hypothetical future version of Android that's more gentle with the task-killing.
You're running a Python script and you care about L1/L2 cache efficiency??
Your system is probably context switching between hundreds of MB.
Amongst.
Your system is context-switching amongst hundreds of MB.
Frohe Weihnachten from das Grammer-SS!
Nonsense, you could set it up against a backdrop and use it like a regular monitor.
Or you could use a regular monitor which will be cheaper and easier to set up...
It makes sense any place workers have to wear gloves, such as restaurants, hospitals, auto shops, etc.
Not sure what you think gloves have to do with the display tech -- these all sound like excellent uses for ordinary LCD monitors.. If your concern's actually about the touch-sensing side, on the basis that "My iPad's touch sensor doesn't work with gloves on, therefore no touch sensor works with gloves on -- except the method they use with this mist-screen", then you're being silly. Optical touchscreens of various sorts have been used on stationary computers for decades, though they turn out not to be suited (due to thickness/parallax, power consumption, etc.) for mobile computers. And to the extent that the optical qualities of fingers are much like the optical qualities of fingers in gloves (mostly, they're both rather opaque), they work just fine with gloves on.
It would be particularly nice for mechanics as you could put interactive 3D guides and even take the display underneath the car itself.
LOL. Just LOL.
Another thing desktop UI has over iOS/Android is Home and End keys to go to the top and bottom of a page respectively, and a scroll bar with a draggable thumb to go to a specific percentage of the distance down the page.
Good point, though again, pinch-zoom can mitigate the problem to some degree. Only really helps if the browser permits zooming out beyond page-width = screen-width, though.
That and there's a lot more context around a big textarea like the one into which I'm typing this comment. On desktop, I see the parent post and the textarea, and the keyboard is a few inches below the bottom of the monitor. On mobile, I see the textarea and the on-screen keyboard, with no parent post unless I scroll back and forth
Fair enough.
My perspective is probably skewed because my mobile use has mainly been on the N900 and various tablets -- I've not spent much time with only an on-screen keyboard and small screen.
and Slashdot's mobile version appears to hide the parent post completely, making scrolling impossible.
Well, yeah, but /.'s mobile site looks like a completely horrible piece of shit next to anything but /.'s beta site. ;)
http://m.xkcd.com/869/
(I use m.xkcd.com on mobile and desktop alike, FWIW.)
When high-end mobiles had EDGE and QVGA, and many people were stuck with GPRS and 160px screens, mobile sites were absolutely necessary. But with today's phones, the question is not why mobile sites suck, but why we need mobile sites at all.
Over the past decade, the actual functionality of websites, aside from streaming video (which is huge, to be sure) has barely changed at all. Over the same decade, mobile hardware and software have advanced to match the low-end desktops of 2003. If video streaming is handled by separate apps (as it mostly is), there's little reason one website shouldn't work for both desktop and mobile use.
I only really see four differences between today's 1136x640 or 1280x720 phone and yesterday's 1024x768 desktop, as far as web browsing goes:
It seems like a tiny fraction of the effort spent on mobile sites (making a few changes to mobile browsers) could permit many existing sites to work just fine on both mobiles and desktops, and an additional fraction (making changes to those websites) would fix almost all the remaining ones. Fiddling with mouseover emulation and zooming clearly costs the user time vs. a good mobile-only site, but it's not at all clear to me that that's really true vs. an average mobile site (which, on average, is what you'll get) or that if it is, that the cost in wasted user time is less than the cost in developer time expended on creating and maintaining a mobile site.
Of course, this is all built on the assumption that a website that does A, B, and C today should be no more complicated and require no more resources than a website doing A, B, and C in 2003. While this may appear reasonable enough, Wirth's law says it's too much to expect. But a guy can dream, no?
You could have a 4K resolution on a laptop screen, and it's not going to solve the fundamental problem. The capabilities of the human eye and the physical size of the thing that you are carrying around with you are the limiting factors here, not the resolution.
Maybe you have bad eyes, and so this is true for you -- it certainly is for some people. However, for nominal 20/20 vision, the usual resolutions are the limiting factor, because normal people can read printed words substantially smaller than can be displayed (in reasonable fonts) on a 15" 1920x1080 laptop display. And if one accepts unreasonable fonts (~20px* TT fonts and smaller) to try to cram more lines in, the text is less readable than printed text of the same size -- which is, of course, why those fonts are unreasonable in the first place.
* Why 20px? Obviously it's an approximation, and the exact number depends on what font you use and how your font rendering system is configured, but basically, you need to be able to show stroke widths as small as ~1/10th the height, and strokes need to be at least 2px wide for good clarity. If they're less, you either get distorted shape (the strokes get hinted to one pixel or the other and drawn with no anti-aliasing) or indistinct strokes (because no central pixels of full brightness remain between the anti-alias blur at each edge).
Eh, I've heard that argument, but I'm not convinced it's a very big problem.
(To be clear, I agree that passing with a decent speed differential is best practice -- I'm just arguing as to whether it's substantially more dangerous to pass at 1 or 2 mph, even though that's already a bad idea for other reasons.)
First, when you change lanes, you're supposed to check your blind spot by turning your head. (Not everyone does, but quite a portion do.) Second, people don't change lanes all that often, so the odds of it happening while you're passing them are quite low, even for slow passes. When they do, it's likely because of a slower vehicle in front of them, which makes the situation eminently foreseeable by the slow-passer, giving them time to get their foot over to the gas pedal and speed up (like they should have to start with). Third, if you're going almost the same speed, then the relative velocity is quite small and almost entirely sideways, and unless the car who changes lanes while the slow-passer is rear-wheel drive (increasingly less common, at least in the US), they're unlikely to PIT themselves -- both vehicles really have a very good chance to remain more-or-less in control. As collisions go, it's not the safest, but far from the worst.
Of course, the existence of a law against slow passing is not evidence that it's dangerous -- the law could just as well exist due to the frustration and/or traffic flow problems that it causes.
As for slow passing, that's mostly a fallacy, because every cruise control allows driver over-ride, and passing a slower vehicle at one mph difference in speed is not some how more dangerous than passing at 5 or 10 mph.
Actually, it probably is a little more dangerous. People in too big a hurry* do get mad about this, and some of those people are mad enough/have poor enough impulse control that they'll take out their anger in unsafe manuevers (starting with tailgating and unreasonably close passing once it is clear, all the way up to actually attempting to run the slow-passer off the road).
The same driver that will allow the CC to take them slowly around another car would pass slowly if managing their speed manually.
That's mostly true -- while I imagine some drivers would pass faster if they were already controlling speed, but just don't care enough to move their foot back to the gas pedal if they're already on cruise, this is probably a far smaller effect than the one where many drivers would have their speed varying widely as they go up and down hills, also angering people and potentially endangering you by way of their response, so I think it does refute GP's argument that cruise control causes slow passing and thus is unsafe.
*If you're in a big enough hurry that waiting an additional 30 seconds to pass a vehicle is really enough problem to get mad about, you're in a big enough hurry to say "damn the law" and pass on the shoulder instead of sitting there stewing. Almost all the time, though, application of a little perspective will reveal you're not in that big a hurry.
The OP, tero, posted a link to a Google+ post. Then GP gman003 posted a rant about Google+'s screen layout. Then you ask
WTF, are you reading this in Google+?
Well, yeah, he was reading that Google+ post in Google+; where else would one read a Google+ post?
We have a threaded discussion system to make stuff like this clear. Perhaps you should try using it...
I don't want a 7" TV remote, thats fucking stupid. The TV is a display, why the fuck do you have a display on your remote? Because you've over complicated it to the point of stupidity.
Or maybe because you want to browse the program guide and configure the DVR without interrupting the show you're currently watching? (Before you say just pause it, consider that in family situations, someone else may be watching TV, or playing a game, and it may be deemed inconsiderate to interrupt their entertainment just because you feel like frobbing the remote. Doesn't apply to everyone, but it's a legitimate use case.)
Granted, these days one should just use a HTPC instead of a TV+DVR, but the same argument for being able to control your HTPC without interrupting or obscuring the display still applies.
And good luck getting a company to pay a fine.
Are you serious? Companies pay fines all the time -- even big companies. Being a big company can mean you get to buy laws and control fines (ideally, set them so they're effectively a wrist-slap for you, but a body-slam to some upstart competitor), but once a court decides against you (and you've exhausted appeals, if applicable), you pay the fine.
If you're trying to stifle companies and drive them out of business, or make them go elsewhere, this is a good way to do it.
Well... yeah.
But I guess living in your nanny state, that's the only way to get companies to produce better code.
"My" nanny state? Are you so deep in an us-or-them mind-state that you're unable to consider that someone who does not support it could possibly criticise someone arguing against it? When I criticised jddeluxe for seeming to completely ignore the "compulsory" bit, I said exactly what I meant. I did not say I supported any such compulsory-bounty scheme, for the simple reason that I don't support it.
I think it's a horrible idea, but "good luck getting companies to sign up" is not only not the most horrible thing about it, it's not even an issue -- if such a compulsory-bounty measure is ever adopted, it will be because interests with lots of money/power (read: big software houses that can afford the bounties, and/or those with an interest in moving most of the software industry overseas) want it bad enough to throw their weight behind it. And if they do, you can bet they'll also throw their weight behind setting fines for non-compliance high enough to to make it effective.
Good luck getting many of the software corporations to sign up for this...
You know what "compulsory" means? It means you get to jail/fine any software companies who don't sign up for it, so I don't think much luck will be needed.
My guess is that many Slashdotters, myself included, feel that the current U.S. convention for the use of punctuation vis-Ã-vis quotation isn't technically accurate enough anyway.
FTFY. It's my understanding that the Brits currently use logical punctuation placement.
(The thread's still doomed.)
Well, there's enough variance in both groups to make it hard to tell in many particular cases. But on average, it can be demonstrated that the poorly-written AI is slightly more intelligent and rather more civilized.
Is there no standard in place by which a website can communicate that it only wishes to be trawled for indexing once per hour, once per day, or such? I can imagine Google f.ex trawls the same website dozens of times per day.
Crawl-delay isn't exactly what you describe, but maybe that will help? (For such spiders as actually respect it -- that's the great thing about ad-hoc standards.)
Anyway, I'm pretty sure Google and other major search engines use algorithms based on how often your site's content has changed in the past to decide how often to crawl it in the future, so there shouldn't be unduly high traffic from this -- I suspect the 61% is mainly due to a lot of sites (personal blogs of non-popular people) with practically zero non-spider traffic.
Mea culpa, link fix.
Not paying attention + using a different browser than normal don't really go well together...
Correct answer: Yes, robots like cat videos too! (Well, a few of them. Most of them are actually big DOGGY!! fans.)
Serious answer: Note the phrase "website traffic" -- if this study attempts to measure traffic to a "typical website" (thus excluding the half-dozen that represent almost all video streaming) and/or measures in terms of page loads, rather than data transferred, there'd be no contradiction. (Of course I've not RTFAed, so I'm just spewing reasonable-sounding explanations.)
do a car analogy instead?
Very well.
In the so-called DrÃssel-Schwabl-rossdee model, Ford Pintos sprout at random on a square grid like a vast checkerboard. Once the traffic jam gets dense enough, a minor collision sets a random Pinto on fire, and fire spreads instantaneously among Pintos that occupy adjacent squares. The conflagration continues until there are no more neighbors to jump to. Then, the process starts all over again.
(Yes, I'm aware that Pintos weren't in reality the blazing firetraps I'm using them as here. Artistic license ftw!)