AT&T stores have a deal going where you can get a Nokia Qi charger for $25, or three for $50. I picked up the three. One for my desk at work, one for my desk at home, and one for my nightstand.
Not having to plug anything in is awesome. They're compatible with all the other Qi devices, including the new Nexus ones. Highly recommend.
Remember, power over USB is negotiated. It doesn't just supply 2A to each port. The USB 3 spec allows for up to 900mA, but will only provide 150mA if the device doesn't ask for more. There is a separate "charging" spec which supplies up to 5A, though it wasn't supported by motherboards until fairly recently.
The phones want a 90 minute charge time; it's just that they communicate their want for more power in a way that not all USB hosts understand -- often they use some non-standard way that only their power adapter understands -- so the host ends up giving them less power than ideal. It looks like this cable is sort of like a universal remote: it has an IC embedded in it that performs power negotiation for the device.
The reason mobile browsers discard pages rather than write them to disk is that they use flash memory. Unlike a SSD which has expensive chips and lots of them, able to spread the writes around and implementing a RAID for speed, the flash in your phones and tablets is a lot more like a microsd card: rather low bandwidth and less useful write cycles.
And they still end up with a single one-size-fits-all controller. If they just made two controllers to fit more of the broad range of hand sizes, they'd be so much better off for it.
I know you're joking, but when you write straight up assembly all the optimizations are up to you, and the fastest way to schedule instructions can change a lot between CPUs. While it probably isn't awful slow, it's also probably not as fast as a compiler-optimized C-based equivalent would be, and maybe even a Java one.
An unfortunate many people don't know or care about the recent NSA stuff. The general populace is apathetic at best. If a news show mentions the content of the leaks at all, it's often just a quick intro leading to their primary story of the dramatic "hunt for Snowden". Lets face it, they've already framed the debate.
For a full rendered-in-the-cloud game, there are tricks you can do to minimize the impact of input latency. They are basically the same tricks that you use in today's multiplayer games. For small camera movements the game can just immediately warp the image client-side. To improve quality of the warp, some basic geometry could be sent in line with the video. For games with a HUD, it can be rendered client-side (think "pushlatency" in Quake-based FPSes).
These of course only help to hide latency, not actually remove any of it, so it wouldn't help for a racing game or FPS that depends on fast, precise reaction times.
Some people kept saying "It's not that bad right now, it'll work eventually!", but Microsoft just (accidentally) tested OnLive's idea for low-latency games by introducing some small input lag into Windows 8.1. Guess what? FPS gamers noticed.
Other game types which don't need super low latency, I'm sure, will eventually get here if only because game companies are still annoyingly DRM-focused and this will make piracy impossible.
As a fellow SourceForge user, I was also outraged when I noticed this. SourceForge used to be the go-to place if you had an Open Source project you wanted hosted. They've lacked focus for some time, making all sorts of failed changes that only bloated their surface area without bringing any actual benefit. Perhaps the screws are to them to become profitable. Slashdot's semi-recent foray into HTML5 randomness and video-ads-as-articles shows similar direction.
They've lost a lot of their user base, are bleeding what they've still got, and potential new users are almost universally going to GitHub and the like. It's a bit depressing.
Sell a Kindle now and get maybe 2-3 years of kickbacks from Amazon. After that time, the user is comfortable with Amazon and just orders their next upgraded Kindle direct. Book store ends up cut out completely.
Could you elaborate? The main differences I see are boot to desktop and a pointless start button that you can't disable.
Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.
on
The Case Against Gmail
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"I don't have to "search" for Excel on my PC, I know that if I click down here, then up and over here, I see the little [X~] icon. I don't open the search bar and type Excel. And I never open the search bar and type Excel.
I rarely use Excel, definitely not enough to commit its location in menus to memory. But I can type winkey+e+x+enter in a fraction of the time it takes for you to "click down here, then up and over here" through menus. I'd say using search to launch applications is the right way to do it -- one of the few additions I think they nailed in Vista.
All the tessellation needed is possible in shaders. The GPU's job is to provide primitives, I don't see any reason to expect it to dedicate hardware to every little step -- we got rid of fixed-function ages ago (mostly). Windows' Direct2D and DirectWrite are examples of high-quality 2D and font rendering done on the GPU -- they're just wrappers for Direct3D. There is also OpenVG, but as far as I know there are no desktop drivers available for this.
All of the 3D rendering APIs are capable of proper, full-featured 2D rendering. The same hardware accelerates both just as well. The problem is that most apps are just not using it and/or that they are CPU bound for other reasons. PDFs, for instance, are rather complex to decode.
I am a developer and I hold no degrees. In anything. Every other developer or admin I know and work with has a degree. Some are good, some are bad.
We've had some conversations about it and my general thoughts are that I was hurt a bit in communication (not knowing what "X Pattern" or "Y method" means, despite doing it for years because I thought it was good design), and they were hurt a bit when it comes to thinking outside the box. Over time, I learned the name of "X pattern" and they learned when to go outside of the "X pattern" box. Minimal difference in the end.
It's pretty clear to anyone in the field that a CS degree really only guarantees that someone will be able to speak (perhaps outdated) office lingo. When trying to gauge someone's ability, simple enthusiasm is easy and effective to measure, and far more valuable than a degree.
I use HTML when I just want a document that works everywhere. When I want to impress or actually care about typography, I use InDesign and render to PDF—nothing beats its optical margins and paragraph-optimized justification.
Markdown strikes me as something really great for people who don't know HTML. Otherwise, it doesn't really save you a significant amount of typing and it is significantly less powerful.
She was right to want to say something and discuss the issue, but stuff like that belongs somewhere that clearly labels it an op-ed piece. It was not an article about science.
SciAm was wrong for removing it without notifying her of why. Perhaps they should have just moved it to an op-ed section for her. Or maybe it's against their policy to comment about competing websites, though that'd be weird. They tweeted this:
Re blog inquiry: @sciam is a publication for discovering science. The post was not appropriate for this area & was therefore removed.
Everyone has moments, hopefully not many, where they are slighted professionally. Having an audience placed in front of you does not mean you get to neglect them and use it as a soapbox for your issues.
Is that if some scientist decides they've discovered X through Y, some dude across the world who's already gone down that path and found a flaw with Y can chime in. And then another one who found a fix to the flaw can also chime in. Thus science wins.
Probability that this actually occurs on a popular website and that the original scientist reads it? I'd assume slim to none. Still, you're taking away the most globally significant feature of the internet by limiting communication.
I'd guess the practical benefit to comments is that kids too young to decide their future might be able to get excited and participate in a discussion here. Nurturing excitement in STEM is always a good thing.
The idea is that operating systems introduce a huge amount of overhead in the name of security. Being general purpose, they view their primary role as protecting all the other apps from your unstable app. And, lets face it, even AAA games these days are plagued with issues -- I'm really not sure I want games to have low-level access to my system. Going back to the days of Windows 98's frequent bluescreens isn't on my must-have list of features.
John Carmack has been complaining about this for years, saying this puts PCs at such a tremendous disadvantage that consoles were able to run circles around PCs when it came to raw draw calls until eventually they simply brute-forced their way past the problem.
Graphics APIs have largely gone a route that encourages keeping data and processing out of the OS. That's definitely the right call, but there are always things you'll need to touch the CPU for. I'm curious exactly how much of a benefit we'll see in modern games.
Slashdot Mirror
You have your own wallet in bitcoin right? It can be as secure as you make it. Why are people trusting their coins to a bank?
One might say id was modded into Oblivion.
AT&T stores have a deal going where you can get a Nokia Qi charger for $25, or three for $50. I picked up the three. One for my desk at work, one for my desk at home, and one for my nightstand.
Not having to plug anything in is awesome. They're compatible with all the other Qi devices, including the new Nexus ones. Highly recommend.
Remember, power over USB is negotiated. It doesn't just supply 2A to each port. The USB 3 spec allows for up to 900mA, but will only provide 150mA if the device doesn't ask for more. There is a separate "charging" spec which supplies up to 5A, though it wasn't supported by motherboards until fairly recently.
The phones want a 90 minute charge time; it's just that they communicate their want for more power in a way that not all USB hosts understand -- often they use some non-standard way that only their power adapter understands -- so the host ends up giving them less power than ideal. It looks like this cable is sort of like a universal remote: it has an IC embedded in it that performs power negotiation for the device.
The reason mobile browsers discard pages rather than write them to disk is that they use flash memory. Unlike a SSD which has expensive chips and lots of them, able to spread the writes around and implementing a RAID for speed, the flash in your phones and tablets is a lot more like a microsd card: rather low bandwidth and less useful write cycles.
And they still end up with a single one-size-fits-all controller. If they just made two controllers to fit more of the broad range of hand sizes, they'd be so much better off for it.
Not a gaming tablet, but one of the Mullins CPUs, to build a new low-power fanless home server.
This sounds like it could be an excellent Atom competitor.
I know you're joking, but when you write straight up assembly all the optimizations are up to you, and the fastest way to schedule instructions can change a lot between CPUs. While it probably isn't awful slow, it's also probably not as fast as a compiler-optimized C-based equivalent would be, and maybe even a Java one.
An unfortunate many people don't know or care about the recent NSA stuff. The general populace is apathetic at best. If a news show mentions the content of the leaks at all, it's often just a quick intro leading to their primary story of the dramatic "hunt for Snowden". Lets face it, they've already framed the debate.
For a full rendered-in-the-cloud game, there are tricks you can do to minimize the impact of input latency. They are basically the same tricks that you use in today's multiplayer games. For small camera movements the game can just immediately warp the image client-side. To improve quality of the warp, some basic geometry could be sent in line with the video. For games with a HUD, it can be rendered client-side (think "pushlatency" in Quake-based FPSes).
These of course only help to hide latency, not actually remove any of it, so it wouldn't help for a racing game or FPS that depends on fast, precise reaction times.
No need to imagine. It's already happened plenty.
Some people kept saying "It's not that bad right now, it'll work eventually!", but Microsoft just (accidentally) tested OnLive's idea for low-latency games by introducing some small input lag into Windows 8.1. Guess what? FPS gamers noticed.
Other game types which don't need super low latency, I'm sure, will eventually get here if only because game companies are still annoyingly DRM-focused and this will make piracy impossible.
As a fellow SourceForge user, I was also outraged when I noticed this. SourceForge used to be the go-to place if you had an Open Source project you wanted hosted. They've lacked focus for some time, making all sorts of failed changes that only bloated their surface area without bringing any actual benefit. Perhaps the screws are to them to become profitable. Slashdot's semi-recent foray into HTML5 randomness and video-ads-as-articles shows similar direction.
They've lost a lot of their user base, are bleeding what they've still got, and potential new users are almost universally going to GitHub and the like. It's a bit depressing.
Sell a Kindle now and get maybe 2-3 years of kickbacks from Amazon. After that time, the user is comfortable with Amazon and just orders their next upgraded Kindle direct. Book store ends up cut out completely.
8.1 fixes some of the Windows 8 brain damage
Could you elaborate? The main differences I see are boot to desktop and a pointless start button that you can't disable.
"I don't have to "search" for Excel on my PC, I know that if I click down here, then up and over here, I see the little [X~] icon. I don't open the search bar and type Excel. And I never open the search bar and type Excel.
I rarely use Excel, definitely not enough to commit its location in menus to memory. But I can type winkey+e+x+enter in a fraction of the time it takes for you to "click down here, then up and over here" through menus. I'd say using search to launch applications is the right way to do it -- one of the few additions I think they nailed in Vista.
All the tessellation needed is possible in shaders. The GPU's job is to provide primitives, I don't see any reason to expect it to dedicate hardware to every little step -- we got rid of fixed-function ages ago (mostly). Windows' Direct2D and DirectWrite are examples of high-quality 2D and font rendering done on the GPU -- they're just wrappers for Direct3D. There is also OpenVG, but as far as I know there are no desktop drivers available for this.
All of the 3D rendering APIs are capable of proper, full-featured 2D rendering. The same hardware accelerates both just as well. The problem is that most apps are just not using it and/or that they are CPU bound for other reasons. PDFs, for instance, are rather complex to decode.
What I mean is: Is it forbidden by law to say "It's got USB" if it's not certified as USB compliant?
USB is a trademark. They don't let you use it if you're not compliant.
I am a developer and I hold no degrees. In anything. Every other developer or admin I know and work with has a degree. Some are good, some are bad.
We've had some conversations about it and my general thoughts are that I was hurt a bit in communication (not knowing what "X Pattern" or "Y method" means, despite doing it for years because I thought it was good design), and they were hurt a bit when it comes to thinking outside the box. Over time, I learned the name of "X pattern" and they learned when to go outside of the "X pattern" box. Minimal difference in the end.
It's pretty clear to anyone in the field that a CS degree really only guarantees that someone will be able to speak (perhaps outdated) office lingo. When trying to gauge someone's ability, simple enthusiasm is easy and effective to measure, and far more valuable than a degree.
I use HTML when I just want a document that works everywhere. When I want to impress or actually care about typography, I use InDesign and render to PDF—nothing beats its optical margins and paragraph-optimized justification.
Markdown strikes me as something really great for people who don't know HTML. Otherwise, it doesn't really save you a significant amount of typing and it is significantly less powerful.
She was right to want to say something and discuss the issue, but stuff like that belongs somewhere that clearly labels it an op-ed piece. It was not an article about science.
SciAm was wrong for removing it without notifying her of why. Perhaps they should have just moved it to an op-ed section for her. Or maybe it's against their policy to comment about competing websites, though that'd be weird. They tweeted this:
Re blog inquiry: @sciam is a publication for discovering science. The post was not appropriate for this area & was therefore removed.
Everyone has moments, hopefully not many, where they are slighted professionally. Having an audience placed in front of you does not mean you get to neglect them and use it as a soapbox for your issues.
OH GOD OH GOD WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE.
I am a Nissan Leaf on the wind, watch how I soar.
Is that if some scientist decides they've discovered X through Y, some dude across the world who's already gone down that path and found a flaw with Y can chime in. And then another one who found a fix to the flaw can also chime in. Thus science wins.
Probability that this actually occurs on a popular website and that the original scientist reads it? I'd assume slim to none. Still, you're taking away the most globally significant feature of the internet by limiting communication.
I'd guess the practical benefit to comments is that kids too young to decide their future might be able to get excited and participate in a discussion here. Nurturing excitement in STEM is always a good thing.
The idea is that operating systems introduce a huge amount of overhead in the name of security. Being general purpose, they view their primary role as protecting all the other apps from your unstable app. And, lets face it, even AAA games these days are plagued with issues -- I'm really not sure I want games to have low-level access to my system. Going back to the days of Windows 98's frequent bluescreens isn't on my must-have list of features.
John Carmack has been complaining about this for years, saying this puts PCs at such a tremendous disadvantage that consoles were able to run circles around PCs when it came to raw draw calls until eventually they simply brute-forced their way past the problem.
Graphics APIs have largely gone a route that encourages keeping data and processing out of the OS. That's definitely the right call, but there are always things you'll need to touch the CPU for. I'm curious exactly how much of a benefit we'll see in modern games.