Most people use lighting at night, before going to bed. There's a fair bit of research to the effect that high-temperature light before sleep interferes with sleep quality.
Office lighting is another matter entirely -- there, high temperature light is not only good for vision but increases alertness.
There is a limit to miniaturization. If you don't realize that, then pause for a moment and think how hard it would be to browse the internet using a device that is 1 inch x 1 inch.
You're saying this to someone who's been using progressively stronger bifocals since before/. existed. Trust me, I get it.
However, that's an argument regarding display technology -- and there are plenty of ways to do that (e.g. direct to retina) that don't require large hardware.
Can you guys elaborate for the history challenged?
The mainframe crowd (mainly IBM, but also GE, Control Data, and the five other Dwarfs) dismissed minicomputers when they appeared as not being anything more than toys for academics (because even minis weren't in anyone's household budget).
Later, the microcomputer (early Altairs and other 8086, systems with the S-100 bus, the Apple II, the TRS-80, Sinclair, etc.) got the same response from minicomputer companies like DEC. They were, in fact, toys -- but they didn't stay toys.
With the introduction of each successive generation, the previous generation didn't die. After all, we still have mainframes today for jobs that handle godawful amounts of data and/or need to have lotsanines of uptime. What happened, though, was that their markets stopped being real growth segments. We still have minicomputers (although we tend to call them "servers" now.) And we'll always have personal computers. That doesn't mean that they'll resemble today's, just as today's mainframes don't look like those of the 60s. However, there's no reason to be sure that tomorrow's personal computers will be ubiquitous like those from ten years ago, because a lot of the tasks from 2003 (like wasting time on/.) can be done by something more convenient like a phone or a tablet.
That when Mankind actually launches ships to other star systems, the computers on board will be running a descendent of the x86 ISA, even if it's running 1024-bit words on superconducting molecular circuitry.
And also that the geeks who know anything about them will be bitching about the <expletive> ancient POS instruction set.
Intel is still the major manufacturer of laptop, desktop, workstation and server chips...
What if they're not the main provider for cheap toys?
If you weren't around for IBM's reaction to the arrival of minicomputers, or for Digital Equipment's reaction to microcomputers, you wouldn't understand why I'm cleaning up the coffee I just spewed all over my desk. Let's just say that last sentence isn't exactly new.
All holidays should be abolished. At least at the federal level anyway.
Sounds like a plan -- that way, we can get more work out of everyone and make them take their holidays out of their ten days of vacation a year.
Of course, that does make it a bit difficult to schedule coverage for the office when you can't be sure how many people will be available to cover and, conversely, whether there will be demand for services from the ones who are there. Kind of like Wall Street during the major Jewish holidays: not a legal holiday, but don't bother trying to call your brokerage.
Funny that the majority of the world runs on Keynesian economics and is suffering badly for it.
Say what? Whatever basis the world's large economies (Europe, the USA, Japan especially) are using, Keynes wouldn't recognize it. Please watch Krugman, deLong, and company rip their hair out over "austerity" before making comments like that.
You are right that as a comparison between countries the usual rankings work tolerably well -- except, of course, for the countries that have totally shitty economies verging on peonage, but whose schools only take the very healthy children of the (small) upper classes. Those countries suck regardless, although we're trying to become one.
However, the major use of these educational comparisons is to belittle the United States' school systems. Which are not really set up to correct for the consequences of our neofeudal politicoeconomic system, which sends lots of kids to school totally unprepared (not to mention ill-fed, poorly clothed, cold, sick, etc.) The objective being to justify reducing the resources provided to those same school systems.
It's no secret that the US education system is a joke, regardless of our "place", we need to improve it.
Uh, no. RTFA and all that, but the US Educational system does reasonably well to quite well -- when you control for exogenous factors such as kids who come to school ill-dressed, ill-fed, in poor health, sleep-deprived, etc. Other countries either don't send such kids to school at all (Turkey) or don't have nearly so many of them (Northern Europe.)
Keeping up the price of the final product. If the production cost gets to the point where it's totally dominated by the CPU and operating system, the competitive advantage for ARM or other processors running Linux becomes compelling. Therefore, load up the basic system with enough other high-cost features to hide the "Microsoft tax" and "Intel tax."
Those of us who remember netbooks will recognize the intended series of events.
BTW, the hospital where I stay now (as a patient) does not require immunization of their staff.
You have the absolute right to refuse to be cared for by someone not immunized -- they're potentially a threat to you, personally.
This isn't academic to me: a friend is currently undergoing chemotherapy, and is severely immunocompromised in the meantime (not to mention bald as an egg, nauseated to the extent that she needs IVs to prevent dehydration, etc.) I could theoretically visit her, but given that flu is communicable before it's symptomatic I won't take the chance even though I've been vaccinated. The hospital she's in has an absolute "vaccinated or don't work here" rule, like the one in question; otherwise she'd be at a different hospital.
Tighter, faster code from the Modula-2 compiler. Which might well have been just a matter of Logitech having a better compiler than Lattice, so it's hardly generalizable to today (which is why I didn't mention the results of an N=1 experiment from 25 years ago.)
Bottom line, to the extent that there is one: don't rely on "everyone knows" in situations like this.
About 25 years ago, working in an embedded product company, I had a friendly little argument with my software colleagues (me design hardware, UGH!) They insisted that there was nothing around that could compete with the C-compiler-that-later-became-Microsoft's for tight compiled code. So we had a little contest: they wrote a chunk of our kind of code in C, and I did it in Modula-2 (Logitech's compiler.) In both cases we were building reusable code with object methods.
Quite enlightening.
How the comparison would go today, given the advances in compiler optimization, I couldn't guess.
I've been using it since KDE 1.1, after all. But I don't know what gives with it any more.
It used to be the compatibility champ -- all of its message stores were open format. Now it's all stashed in a binary database.
It used to be blinding quick. Now it takes minutes to switch between one local folder and another.
It used to update flawlessly, but the last couple of upgrades have hosed the previous mail repositories and anything that wasn't backed up offline was gone.
KMail has some very nice features (including excellent spam filters) but the usability factor is heading for zero real fast. If there were a decent alternative that doesn't have the same problems I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Slashdot Mirror
I just wish more came in 4000K rather than 3200K.
Most people use lighting at night, before going to bed. There's a fair bit of research to the effect that high-temperature light before sleep interferes with sleep quality.
Office lighting is another matter entirely -- there, high temperature light is not only good for vision but increases alertness.
There is a limit to miniaturization. If you don't realize that, then pause for a moment and think how hard it would be to browse the internet using a device that is 1 inch x 1 inch.
You're saying this to someone who's been using progressively stronger bifocals since before /. existed. Trust me, I get it.
However, that's an argument regarding display technology -- and there are plenty of ways to do that (e.g. direct to retina) that don't require large hardware.
Can you guys elaborate for the history challenged?
The mainframe crowd (mainly IBM, but also GE, Control Data, and the five other Dwarfs) dismissed minicomputers when they appeared as not being anything more than toys for academics (because even minis weren't in anyone's household budget).
Later, the microcomputer (early Altairs and other 8086, systems with the S-100 bus, the Apple II, the TRS-80, Sinclair, etc.) got the same response from minicomputer companies like DEC. They were, in fact, toys -- but they didn't stay toys.
With the introduction of each successive generation, the previous generation didn't die. After all, we still have mainframes today for jobs that handle godawful amounts of data and/or need to have lotsanines of uptime. What happened, though, was that their markets stopped being real growth segments. We still have minicomputers (although we tend to call them "servers" now.) And we'll always have personal computers. That doesn't mean that they'll resemble today's, just as today's mainframes don't look like those of the 60s. However, there's no reason to be sure that tomorrow's personal computers will be ubiquitous like those from ten years ago, because a lot of the tasks from 2003 (like wasting time on /.) can be done by something more convenient like a phone or a tablet.
I'm not convinced history will repeat itself with that one.
You're in good company. Ken Olsen would have agreed with you.
That when Mankind actually launches ships to other star systems, the computers on board will be running a descendent of the x86 ISA, even if it's running 1024-bit words on superconducting molecular circuitry.
And also that the geeks who know anything about them will be bitching about the <expletive> ancient POS instruction set.
Why would they want to kill it off when they're still making money hand over fist with it?
Try reading "The Innovator's Dilemma."
Intel is still the major manufacturer of laptop, desktop, workstation and server chips... What if they're not the main provider for cheap toys?
If you weren't around for IBM's reaction to the arrival of minicomputers, or for Digital Equipment's reaction to microcomputers, you wouldn't understand why I'm cleaning up the coffee I just spewed all over my desk. Let's just say that last sentence isn't exactly new.
Well, so much for open-source W3C-compliant browsers.
All holidays should be abolished. At least at the federal level anyway.
Sounds like a plan -- that way, we can get more work out of everyone and make them take their holidays out of their ten days of vacation a year.
Of course, that does make it a bit difficult to schedule coverage for the office when you can't be sure how many people will be available to cover and, conversely, whether there will be demand for services from the ones who are there. Kind of like Wall Street during the major Jewish holidays: not a legal holiday, but don't bother trying to call your brokerage.
Funny that the majority of the world runs on Keynesian economics and is suffering badly for it.
Say what? Whatever basis the world's large economies (Europe, the USA, Japan especially) are using, Keynes wouldn't recognize it. Please watch Krugman, deLong, and company rip their hair out over "austerity" before making comments like that.
... if it would work better with osmium/iridium instead of platinum? Of course, there's prior art.
... my mistress got "RTFM." The dude at DMV wanted to know what it stood for, she told him it was a Unix command.
You are right that as a comparison between countries the usual rankings work tolerably well -- except, of course, for the countries that have totally shitty economies verging on peonage, but whose schools only take the very healthy children of the (small) upper classes. Those countries suck regardless, although we're trying to become one.
However, the major use of these educational comparisons is to belittle the United States' school systems. Which are not really set up to correct for the consequences of our neofeudal politicoeconomic system, which sends lots of kids to school totally unprepared (not to mention ill-fed, poorly clothed, cold, sick, etc.) The objective being to justify reducing the resources provided to those same school systems.
It's no secret that the US education system is a joke, regardless of our "place", we need to improve it.
Uh, no. RTFA and all that, but the US Educational system does reasonably well to quite well -- when you control for exogenous factors such as kids who come to school ill-dressed, ill-fed, in poor health, sleep-deprived, etc. Other countries either don't send such kids to school at all (Turkey) or don't have nearly so many of them (Northern Europe.)
Keeping up the price of the final product. If the production cost gets to the point where it's totally dominated by the CPU and operating system, the competitive advantage for ARM or other processors running Linux becomes compelling. Therefore, load up the basic system with enough other high-cost features to hide the "Microsoft tax" and "Intel tax."
Those of us who remember netbooks will recognize the intended series of events.
BTW, the hospital where I stay now (as a patient) does not require immunization of their staff.
You have the absolute right to refuse to be cared for by someone not immunized -- they're potentially a threat to you, personally.
This isn't academic to me: a friend is currently undergoing chemotherapy, and is severely immunocompromised in the meantime (not to mention bald as an egg, nauseated to the extent that she needs IVs to prevent dehydration, etc.) I could theoretically visit her, but given that flu is communicable before it's symptomatic I won't take the chance even though I've been vaccinated. The hospital she's in has an absolute "vaccinated or don't work here" rule, like the one in question; otherwise she'd be at a different hospital.
The problem is that "just in case" is not a reasonable argument for taking about people's right to be left alone by an oppressive government.
I take it you missed the part about this being an employer policy, not a law enforced on the public at large.
See below.
What were the results exactly?
Tighter, faster code from the Modula-2 compiler. Which might well have been just a matter of Logitech having a better compiler than Lattice, so it's hardly generalizable to today (which is why I didn't mention the results of an N=1 experiment from 25 years ago.)
Bottom line, to the extent that there is one: don't rely on "everyone knows" in situations like this.
Is Dr. Orient wrong? Is there evidence that immunized workers are less likely to transmit the virus./p>
Yes.
What would people switch to? Forth, Pascal?
About 25 years ago, working in an embedded product company, I had a friendly little argument with my software colleagues (me design hardware, UGH!) They insisted that there was nothing around that could compete with the C-compiler-that-later-became-Microsoft's for tight compiled code. So we had a little contest: they wrote a chunk of our kind of code in C, and I did it in Modula-2 (Logitech's compiler.) In both cases we were building reusable code with object methods.
Quite enlightening.
How the comparison would go today, given the advances in compiler optimization, I couldn't guess.
is not, "Eureka!"
It's "What the fuck?"
"instead of waiting 4-5 seconds to do something, i am interested in spending hours of effort to recreate/relearn it on a different platform"
An engineer is someone who will spend three hours figuring out how to do a two-hour job in one hour.
However it has been improving steadly, even drastically since kde 4.7.
But it's still slower than an arthritic sloth on sopors. Which doesn't seem to even be on the developers' radar.
I've been using it since KDE 1.1, after all. But I don't know what gives with it any more.
It used to be the compatibility champ -- all of its message stores were open format. Now it's all stashed in a binary database.
It used to be blinding quick. Now it takes minutes to switch between one local folder and another.
It used to update flawlessly, but the last couple of upgrades have hosed the previous mail repositories and anything that wasn't backed up offline was gone.
KMail has some very nice features (including excellent spam filters) but the usability factor is heading for zero real fast. If there were a decent alternative that doesn't have the same problems I'd switch in a heartbeat.