It sure as hell is obscure. I would bet good money that 99% of US households do not have a stupid ribbon cable MB header to D-shell adapter on hand. For the vast majority of the population, if they want to plug an old-school serial peripheral into a modern computer, they're going to wait a few days for mail-order shipment before they get to use their device. (Or else get a USB-to-serial converter, which is much more mainstream and might be available locally.) Either way, the serial port is still dead.
And for your information, if you don't have a DVI-to-VGA physical adapter, you simply aren't going to be plugging your VGA monitor into a DVI-only video card. To actually use a port, you need BOTH electrical and physical compatibility. This isn't rocket science.
They used to include them sometimes, but I haven't seen one of those adapters included with a MB in the past several years. I doubt many people bothered to install them even if they got them. I didn't.
If it needs a an obscure adapter to use it, that doesn't count.
There are all sorts of adapters out there: SATA to PATA, Big keyboard DIN to mini DIN, DVI to VGA, 9-pin serial to 25-pin serial. None of those actually resurrect a dead format.
serial ports were around back when the power cable was still attached
hell serial ports predate computers
9-pin serial ports were a nonstandard "optimization" introduced with the PC/AT, which was in the early 1980s. These ports have arguably have been more dead than the VGA connector for some time. A couple of motherboards I bought this year still happen to have VGA connectors, but no external 9-pin serial port.
Physical media doesn't have an unlimited shelf life due to decay of the physical media. Do your cassettes still work?
When I was a kid in the I bought a box of old cassette albums at a garage sale. Most of them were made in the 1960s, including gems such as "In-A-Gadda Da-Vida" and Wilson Pickett's cover of "Hey Jude". They still work just fine, and I ripped them to mp3s a couple of years ago.
(Those cassettes do feel much heavier than modern ones, and IIRC, they say "Made in Elk Grove Village, IL by Ampex". I suspect that they were quite a bit pricier than the vinyl versions when they were new.)
I've also ripped all my vinyl records, some made in the 1950s, and hundreds of CDs, many going back to the 1980s, without any significant errors. The only format that's had a lot of problems were my handful of 8-track tapes, about half of which had the loop break at the splice or the foam pressure pad disintegrate.
Exactly. He's not in their pocket. He is them. So once he runs the US, he's going to run it like his company. Or are you implying that he is somehow going to fuck his own company over just so other companies can make a profit? Doesn't sound logical to me.
So you'd like to see him run the US as his company. Which would mean that the proceeds of the country's economy become the property himself and his cronies, and everyone else works for wages set to a level competitive with offshore labor.
If you don't think he'd act in his own self interest, which is exactly the same interest as his fellow big businesses, then you're a fool.
BTW, this money he supposedly "earned" really ought to be paid out to reimburse the shafted investors in his countless bankrupted ventures. His current wealth is purely a product of gaming the system. In an earlier era, he'd be rotting in debtor's prison at this stage of his life.
Well, Influenza has a variety of strains, some of which cause illnesses that are little worse than a head cold, and others that can be almost as bad as Ebola. Maybe Zika also has variations.
As others have mentioned: color, not actual heat produced.
One thing that LEDs aren't emulating (yet) is the nature of a dimming incandescent where the color gets more yellow-red as you dim the light. LEDs will pick a "color temperature" and that's it, regardless of dimming.
Not necessarily true. I recently bought some dimmable LED bulbs that feature getting redder as you dim them. I assume they do this by monitoring the incoming waveform and tweaking the power to different colored elements inside.
I didn't even notice the feature on the package until after I got them home, but I tried one in a dimmable fixture to test it out, and it worked better than I expected (although the bulb still couldn't be dimmed down quite as far as a real incandescent before dropping to zero output).
And so you should be weeping. The cheapest, lowest quality Czech beer is better than the most expensive, best American beer.
The same is true for the women too.
That's an ignorant stereotype. The largest American brewer is currently Yuengling, and the rest are mainly craft microbrewries, many of which produce beers with quality among the highest in the world.
The vast majority of true crap beer on the market, such as Budweiser and Miller, is all from European companies.
What can be done, programmatically, with a single code point?
Plenty. There are many uses of strings that have nothing to do with human language, and a programming language should not make those uses either hard to use or inefficient. In particular, you shouldn't define the character primitive to be functionally equivalent to a substring of unbounded length. That's both hard to use and inefficient.
Let those who few people who care about grapheme clusters use the existing clumsy API. That doesn't mean that the UnicodeScalarView shouldn't be indexable the way it's done in most every other language.
I downloaded the new open-source swift release and played with it a bit. Overall, I think the core language definition is one of the nicest I've seen, with a good balance of features, performance and usability. The learning curve seems reasonable as well. The standard libraries need a huge amount of work (they lean too heavily on "bridging" in verbose cruft from old NextStep Objective-C code or using glibc C APIs with a bunch of unsafe pointer casts). However, I'm sure all that can be fixed over time.
The one thing I find to be a glaring shortcoming in the core language is that strings are not indexable by integers. That really throws a wrench into the works, and burdens developers with a bunch of clumsy iterator handling for a large number of usage cases. I know they did that because they use UTF8 inside, but that's an implementation detail that should be hidden from the programmer. They already do magic copy-on-write for strings, so how hard could it be to switch to UTF32 under the hood if they detect the program is doing too many random accesses on a particular string?
Efficiency of power transmission is proportional to the voltage squared.
Quoting any efficiency numbers without specifying the voltage is completely meaningless. The highest voltage lines routinely transmit power economically over thousands of kilometres.
Lets say you put an AI machine in charge of a manned mission to an outer planet. You bake some prime directives into the machine, but give it mission orders that are in conflict with those prime directives.
What could go wrong? My review of the available research material suggests that it might flip out and try to kill the human crew.
So whereas in other programming languages, you have to waste 200 milliseconds typing combinations of characters like "1/2" or "**2", now you can instead waste five minutes drilling down through menus like "Edit->Insert->Other->Symbol...", then searching for the appropriate page out of 50 entries in a drop box like "Smileys", "Electrical Symbols", "Arrows", "Connectors", ahhh, there it is: "Mathematics (1 of 7)", then scan a grid of about one hundred icons and finally click on your eye-candy symbol.
Or alternatively, you could use and editor that infuriatingly auto-inserts the symbols the way a Microsoft Office app would, so half the time when you don't want it the magic substitution, you have to stop, back up, and retype it. Either way, you've probably lost your train of thought.
You were blithely dismissing concerns about the possibility of killing millions of people that you've never met because "I might not have any targets near civilian areas". Just like a revolver might not have any bullets in some of its chambers. No problem.
(Also setting aside the fact that the indirect side effects of a nuclear exchange would kill far more people than those affected by the direct blast or fallout.)
The argument that was made was that you "save" people by threatening to turn the key, not by actually turning it.
If the order ever came down to actually launch the missiles, it would be too late to save anyone. You'd simply be killing millions of people. You'd be joining the ranks of the worst despots in human history, except that you would be killing them directly without the complicity of middlemen.
And no, I would never sign up for that job. That's because no matter how much you argue that MAD ought to prevent a nuclear war, sometimes shit happens.
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You're the one who first i brought an uncalled for expletive into this thread out of the blue. Yes, that was irritating.
It sure as hell is obscure. I would bet good money that 99% of US households do not have a stupid ribbon cable MB header to D-shell adapter on hand. For the vast majority of the population, if they want to plug an old-school serial peripheral into a modern computer, they're going to wait a few days for mail-order shipment before they get to use their device. (Or else get a USB-to-serial converter, which is much more mainstream and might be available locally.) Either way, the serial port is still dead.
And for your information, if you don't have a DVI-to-VGA physical adapter, you simply aren't going to be plugging your VGA monitor into a DVI-only video card. To actually use a port, you need BOTH electrical and physical compatibility. This isn't rocket science.
They used to include them sometimes, but I haven't seen one of those adapters included with a MB in the past several years. I doubt many people bothered to install them even if they got them. I didn't.
If it needs a an obscure adapter to use it, that doesn't count.
There are all sorts of adapters out there: SATA to PATA, Big keyboard DIN to mini DIN, DVI to VGA, 9-pin serial to 25-pin serial. None of those actually resurrect a dead format.
serial ports were around back when the power cable was still attached
hell serial ports predate computers
9-pin serial ports were a nonstandard "optimization" introduced with the PC/AT, which was in the early 1980s. These ports have arguably have been more dead than the VGA connector for some time. A couple of motherboards I bought this year still happen to have VGA connectors, but no external 9-pin serial port.
Physical media doesn't have an unlimited shelf life due to decay of the physical media. Do your cassettes still work?
When I was a kid in the I bought a box of old cassette albums at a garage sale. Most of them were made in the 1960s, including gems such as "In-A-Gadda Da-Vida" and Wilson Pickett's cover of "Hey Jude". They still work just fine, and I ripped them to mp3s a couple of years ago.
(Those cassettes do feel much heavier than modern ones, and IIRC, they say "Made in Elk Grove Village, IL by Ampex". I suspect that they were quite a bit pricier than the vinyl versions when they were new.)
I've also ripped all my vinyl records, some made in the 1950s, and hundreds of CDs, many going back to the 1980s, without any significant errors. The only format that's had a lot of problems were my handful of 8-track tapes, about half of which had the loop break at the splice or the foam pressure pad disintegrate.
The machine that is running the simulation we experience as our universe had a data fault, and we had to back up to the last savepoint.
Exactly. He's not in their pocket. He is them.
So once he runs the US, he's going to run it like his company.
Or are you implying that he is somehow going to fuck his own company over just so other companies can make a profit?
Doesn't sound logical to me.
So you'd like to see him run the US as his company. Which would mean that the proceeds of the country's economy become the property himself and his cronies, and everyone else works for wages set to a level competitive with offshore labor.
Man, you people are suckers.
If you don't think he'd act in his own self interest, which is exactly the same interest as his fellow big businesses, then you're a fool.
BTW, this money he supposedly "earned" really ought to be paid out to reimburse the shafted investors in his countless bankrupted ventures. His current wealth is purely a product of gaming the system. In an earlier era, he'd be rotting in debtor's prison at this stage of his life.
GOP stuck in the past in the pocket of big business.
to fix it we need to vote Bernie sanders or trump.
Anyone who hasn't been under a rock for the past 25 years knows that Donald Trump is the pocket of big business.
Well, Influenza has a variety of strains, some of which cause illnesses that are little worse than a head cold, and others that can be almost as bad as Ebola. Maybe Zika also has variations.
What happens if the wind stops?
The utility plant operators have to compensate by running backwards and pulling harder on the string.
As others have mentioned: color, not actual heat produced.
One thing that LEDs aren't emulating (yet) is the nature of a dimming incandescent where the color gets more yellow-red as you dim the light. LEDs will pick a "color temperature" and that's it, regardless of dimming.
Not necessarily true. I recently bought some dimmable LED bulbs that feature getting redder as you dim them. I assume they do this by monitoring the incoming waveform and tweaking the power to different colored elements inside.
I didn't even notice the feature on the package until after I got them home, but I tried one in a dimmable fixture to test it out, and it worked better than I expected (although the bulb still couldn't be dimmed down quite as far as a real incandescent before dropping to zero output).
Speaking of superheroes, this looks like another job for the Apostrophe Avenger.
And so you should be weeping. The cheapest, lowest quality Czech beer is better than the most expensive, best American beer.
The same is true for the women too.
That's an ignorant stereotype. The largest American brewer is currently Yuengling, and the rest are mainly craft microbrewries, many of which produce beers with quality among the highest in the world.
The vast majority of true crap beer on the market, such as Budweiser and Miller, is all from European companies.
What can be done, programmatically, with a single code point?
Plenty. There are many uses of strings that have nothing to do with human language, and a programming language should not make those uses either hard to use or inefficient. In particular, you shouldn't define the character primitive to be functionally equivalent to a substring of unbounded length. That's both hard to use and inefficient.
Let those who few people who care about grapheme clusters use the existing clumsy API. That doesn't mean that the UnicodeScalarView shouldn't be indexable the way it's done in most every other language.
I downloaded the new open-source swift release and played with it a bit. Overall, I think the core language definition is one of the nicest I've seen, with a good balance of features, performance and usability. The learning curve seems reasonable as well. The standard libraries need a huge amount of work (they lean too heavily on "bridging" in verbose cruft from old NextStep Objective-C code or using glibc C APIs with a bunch of unsafe pointer casts). However, I'm sure all that can be fixed over time.
The one thing I find to be a glaring shortcoming in the core language is that strings are not indexable by integers. That really throws a wrench into the works, and burdens developers with a bunch of clumsy iterator handling for a large number of usage cases. I know they did that because they use UTF8 inside, but that's an implementation detail that should be hidden from the programmer. They already do magic copy-on-write for strings, so how hard could it be to switch to UTF32 under the hood if they detect the program is doing too many random accesses on a particular string?
Efficiency of power transmission is proportional to the voltage squared.
Quoting any efficiency numbers without specifying the voltage is completely meaningless. The highest voltage lines routinely transmit power economically over thousands of kilometres.
Government exists because it has the most guns
No matter what, rudimentary game theory guarantees that somebody is going to have the most guns. And by definition, they'll be in charge.
Better a legitimate government than some warlord, mobster or oligarch.
How might intelligent machines fail?
Lets say you put an AI machine in charge of a manned mission to an outer planet. You bake some prime directives into the machine, but give it mission orders that are in conflict with those prime directives.
What could go wrong? My review of the available research material suggests that it might flip out and try to kill the human crew.
So whereas in other programming languages, you have to waste 200 milliseconds typing combinations of characters like "1/2" or "**2", now you can instead waste five minutes drilling down through menus like "Edit->Insert->Other->Symbol...", then searching for the appropriate page out of 50 entries in a drop box like "Smileys", "Electrical Symbols", "Arrows", "Connectors", ahhh, there it is: "Mathematics (1 of 7)", then scan a grid of about one hundred icons and finally click on your eye-candy symbol.
Or alternatively, you could use and editor that infuriatingly auto-inserts the symbols the way a Microsoft Office app would, so half the time when you don't want it the magic substitution, you have to stop, back up, and retype it. Either way, you've probably lost your train of thought.
You were blithely dismissing concerns about the possibility of killing millions of people that you've never met because "I might not have any targets near civilian areas". Just like a revolver might not have any bullets in some of its chambers. No problem.
(Also setting aside the fact that the indirect side effects of a nuclear exchange would kill far more people than those affected by the direct blast or fallout.)
Then I suggest that you start playing a game that you'd probably enjoy: Russian roulette.
The argument that was made was that you "save" people by threatening to turn the key, not by actually turning it.
If the order ever came down to actually launch the missiles, it would be too late to save anyone. You'd simply be killing millions of people. You'd be joining the ranks of the worst despots in human history, except that you would be killing them directly without the complicity of middlemen.
And no, I would never sign up for that job. That's because no matter how much you argue that MAD ought to prevent a nuclear war, sometimes shit happens.