Eric Holder is a horrible authoritarian shitsack. I remember hearing the news that Obama picked Holder as AG not long after he was first elected, it was the first and strongest sign that Obama's campaign promises were 100% bullshit.
And here I was thinking that Obama's selection of Joe Biden as his running mate was a strong sign that he didn't intend to do any real "hope" and "change."
This is a relatively boring app. It's drawing circles on Google Maps based only on estimates of yield, height, and level of destruction. I wanted to see the effects of geography and prevailing weather patterns on the distribution of destruction.
I strongly believe special traits can be developed, including spacial ability. If you believe Geoff Calvin, there's no such thing as talent or innate ability.
Well, I don't believe Geoff Colvin. It's a combination of innate ability and drive, for the people lucky enough to live in that region of Maslow's hierarchy. And I suspect that drive is at least partially innate, too.
I mean, without technological cheating, a blind person is never going to be an expert race car driver. A severely autistic individual is never going to be a great salesman. Though pitch identification can be trained, perfect pitch seems to be independent of musical ability. (Perfect pitch can sometimes be a hindrance, as most musicians are not bothered by different tuning systems or transposition.)
Colvin says great performance requires motivation, driven by passion, and he says the passion is trained. I think he's playing games with semantics. Since passion originates in our biological brains, it's subject to the same rules as any other biological ability. I suspect that to be really great requires a certain degree of insanity, actually, to get through all the setbacks.
I'm not saying he's wrong in the broad sense. Talent is overrated, and you need good practice to develop your abilities. But you need abilities to develop, and those abilities are not evenly distributed.
And here in lies the problem. What if the computer fails and you find yourself in a situation where your driving ability is the only thing that can save you.
Way to miss his point. Sooner or later, you will run into a situation where your driving ability cannot ensure your safety. Often, we survive by blind luck. It would be nice if we could use computers to improve our chances.
BTW, in case you missed it in the first post, I avoid dangerous situations rather then rely on my car to compensate for my lack of driving ability.
Cars are, by their nature, inhumanly powerful and fast. If you would "avoid dangerous situations," you should avoid interacting with them at all.
Total non-issue. If you're still using Windows XP, then you're also stuck on DirectX 9 and all the other outdated technologies. New code means new risks, which you're avoiding by sticking to Windows XP, anyway. Also, the submission is wrong; this affects only the Catalyst drivers, which handle video and HDMI audio.
Then I noticed that this is a timothy story. Sometimes I think he posts the most inane story submissions just to get the Slashdot readers all riled up and posting comments, thus generating hits and ad revenues.
opera mobile works better, in my limited experience
Not anymore! Since they decided to quit developing their own browser engine, the new Opera runs quite poorly. Especially on older/cheaper hardware, which used to be their strong suite.
But once W3C makes it part of HTML5, then anything w/o DRM support is not standards compliant.
Well, actually, I'm not sure the W3C has ever been relevant to developing new standards that get implemented.
With such a low UID, I'm guessing you were around for the whole HTML4/XHTML debacle. And SVG. And MathML. Part of the problem was that for much of the W3C's history, IE6 was the dominant browser, but the XML madness was madness.
The only way we got to HTML5 is by having a bunch of companies go off and make their own WhatWG, and as soon as HTML5 got into the W3C they announced they were working on the next HTML standards. Outside the W3C.
Some people would say the Firefox button is Opera-ish (as the Big O had it first) and Chrome's tabs are Operaish (as the Big O had tabs first).
And yet Opera has always gone out of their way to violate Fitts' Law. It doesn't matter on Macs, where the top of the screen is reserved for the menu bar, but on Windows they keep putting space between the tab and the top of the screen.
Originally, the tab bar went under the menu bar, first in Opera and then Firefox and others. Then Google showed the world the menubar at the top, and Mozilla and Opera copied it. But while Google and Mozilla put the tab bar at the very top of the screen, Opera put a minuscule space in between. Furthermore, while Chrome and Firefox preserve the behavior of the minimize/maximize/close button cluster, Opera put a miniscule space between those and the top of the screen too. I know it's bad design, leave it to Microsoft to make a destructive action have the greatest Fitts Law area, but it's standard and Opera is non-standard.
So, I'm just checking out Opera Next, and at least the Firefox-like menu bar and the Windows minimize/maximize/close are at the very top of the window. However, despite being a customized version of Chrome, they still added a 1-pixel border above the tab bar. This is madness.
I think Dyson is a bit too pessimistic about AI. AI hasn't fulfilled the promises of human-level conversational intellect, but those promises were unrealistic. I think the problem is that people want computers to emulate human minds and human souls, when we don't even know how humans work. The solution is that computers are their own type of device, with a so-far unconscious intelligence that far exceeds human intelligence. There's even a Wikipedia article about the challenge in the perception of AI.
For example:
Calculating trigonometric values. Used to require teams of careful researchers. Now it's done by cheap pocket calculators.
Translating source code to machine code and optimizing it. Used to be done by hand, now the best compilers are more clever than all but the most insane of programmers.
Finding complicated derivatives and integrals. Used to require big teams to calculate, now it's a loss leader for a SaaS product.
Learning complicated tasks. Used to be a unique human trait, now computers use it to play video games. They just get no enjoyment out of the process.
Computers can't do what humans do, but what they do well, they do far faster, more cheaply, and more accurately than humans ever could.
A lot of "professional" users of computers (doctors, lawyers, bankers, etc) seem to think that they gotta have really special software to handle everything they do, because everything they do is so special.
Oh, how far we've come.
In the old days, every computer was custom-programmed because there were no standards, but also because programmable computers could be programmed for specific uses.
And then came closed source software, and now people are arguing that you shouldn't develop special software for that specific thing you do.
Nothing wrong with netware and pentium 4s. The former's stability record might only come in danger once somebody bothers to leave NetBSD running for over a decade. And the latter is one of the most efficient ways to convert electricity to heat, no need for central heating when you have a pentium 4!
No, it's usually more efficient to use a heat pump. A Pentium 4 can only heat your house by using the energy coursing through it. A heat pump can extract heat from the outdoors, bringing up to 4 times as much heat into your building for the same amount of electricity.
To get real uptimes, you need a mainframe. That Netware system in the news with an epic uptime? It wasn't doing anything useful for the last several years. It just sat in the corner wasting electricity and accumulating numbers in its uptime counter.
I set up performance logging and came back 2 weeks later to see, what did I find? 45%.... I thought "Well yeah, its a quad, surely that older dual core i built for the shop has to be ready for the pasture"...nope, biggest spikes around 70% but only when he is loading something up and after that its nothing, 20s and 30s during background tasks.
So it all comes down to one simple fact...The MHz war was a bubble.
Or, maybe, your father is a relatively undemanding computer user.
It has always been the case that some people just do not stress their computers, so they are happy with what they have. Back in the 1980s, Jean-Louis Gassée bought the Apple engineers a high-end Cray supercomputer to design the next Mac, but Seymour Cray bought a Mac to design his next Cray supercomputer.
I would argue what we are seeing now is NOT "The death of the PC" anymore than the housing bubble popping meant the death of houses, its just a return to a more normal state. before laptops were getting replaced every other year and desktops around every 3
That's not what I remember. It's a major point in Cringely's book, Accidental Empires, that the PC industry comes out with new systems every 18 months. Back then, even ordinary software was so close to the limits of the hardware that we needed new hardware to run new software at acceptable speeds. This era, when basic software runs at acceptable speeds on old computers, is new.
I think the major new frontier is in responsiveness. When you're doing those measurements, with the CPU usage at 40%, how many times was the CPU usage so low because it was waiting for the hard drive? IMHO, people should not ever wait for computers, and as long as they do, then computers are not fast enough. SSDs should replace hard drives. Even without an SSD, I recently set up a Sandy Bridge i7 system, and it was so much faster at booting up and UI responsiveness than any Core 2 system that I've encountered. We should continue to upgrade, if for no other reason, then to wait less on our computers.
Because for the same price ($500) I got the same RAM, a 3.8ghz quad core APU capable of playing last years games and able to crossfire to double it's GPU for $80 (later), and a much larger hard (500GB).
I think LVSlushdat got the better deal.
By nearly every metric, a modern Intel Xeon is better than an AMD A10. Performance per watt, instructions per clock, peak clock speed, framerates, responsiveness. AMD only challenges Intel on price by having desperately low margins, and they don't even win at that consistently. The one place where AMD has an advantage is the GPU, and LVSlushdat got a pretty powerful GPU that works especially well with professional applications, not games.
A dinky consumer hard drive is noticeably slower than a 10,000 RPM enterprise hard drive, and probably less reliable. You can pirate more movies onto 500GB, but you'll spend more time every day waiting for data to come on and off that drive. Though, both of you should be getting modern SSDs.
And then the Precision workstation comes in an attractive case with good airflow. I don't know how loud this particular machine is, but in my experience the Dell systems, on average, tend to be less noisy than the cheap computers that are built from parts. This is a workstation, so it also doesn't suffer from an anemic power supply.
Microsoft loves you as a customer. You bought their product and trashed it, thus making it not necessary for them to support you. (Not that they would ever do such a thing.) Microsoft only cares about the number of units sold, and you contributed to that.
"A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software." That's Microsoft's original slogan.
Microsoft cares about the license fees, but they also care about the power to define the industry. As long as the vast majority of PCs are running Windows, then Microsoft technologies will dominate, which makes it easier to convince companies to install Windows. It's a vicious cycle.
Also, they have direct financial incentive to keep you running Windows. As long as you run Windows, you are eligible for Microsoft Office license fees, and Microsoft Support fees, and advertisement dollars connected with the Windows Live account that they want you to get. If you have Windows 8, then they also benefit when you use the Windows Store to get apps.
And then, a few weeks ago, AT&T decided that the middle of the day on Saturday was a swell time to update the U-verse firmware and reboot all the customer modems.
Suddenly, I and almost the entire neighborhood had no Internet for close to an hour. If we had this next-generation Xbox, we wouldn't have been able to play games or look at our Facebooks. I guess this guy is trying to drive us into using our iPhones and Galaxies instead of the Microsoft devices.
I don't think it's a fraud. They're not calling it a Momentus XT. It's a relatively cheap hard drive that happens to be much faster than other cheap drives at booting and launching programs, and much cheaper than SSDs of similar capacity. (Also, faster than the Momentus XT at certain tasks, while being thinner but taking more power.)
So, it turns out to be slower than a WD Scorpio Black at copying folders full of lots of big files. How often do you actually wait on that? On the other hand, it's much faster than a WD Scorpio Black at booting up and launching programs. Now, how often you do for that? I think the average person would be better served by a Laptop Thin SSHD than a Scorpio Black.
Wow... I can't believe the ethnicity breakdown listed for that school... 74% of students are Asian, 12% Latino and only 3.4% Caucasian!
And from the Wikipedia article... "Math scores remain one of Galileo's best academic strengths"... Lol.
Well, among the kids in San Francisco, Galileo is known as a "fob" school. I haven't actually gone to verify it, but a lot of the students may not even speak English that well.
The socially adjusted kids want to go to Lincoln or Washington or Balboa. The smart kids' parents force them to go to Lowell. (64% Asian, 8% Latino, 14% Caucasian)
The ethnic breakdown is a little misleading. San Francisco has a lot of Asian immigrants, and immigrants have more children than native United States citizens, so there are way more Asian kids than normal. SFUSD as a whole is 35% Asian, 24% Latino, and 12% Caucasian.
Even so, it continues to amaze me that people conflate computer science with coding.
Could it be that the reason people conflate computer science with coding is because professors, test makers, and the entire industry conflate computer science with coding? (That's a rhetorical question.)
It's yet another problem with teaching introductory computer science using Java. Abelson and Sussman used a pretty but impractical programming language, and Dijkstra specifically forbade making a compiler for his language. The rest of the industry insists on teaching the students a "useful" programming language. The College Board actually insists on using Java for AP Computer Science, if you're in a school with a competent CS instructor.
And then, because you're starting out using Java, you spend most of the introductory course on Java's insane syntax, obtuse type system, and complicated runtime. No wonder normal people avoid CS.
And no router, hub or any other network connection anywhere? Not in either image?
A lot of home and small business ISPs are providing modems with integrated routers. No visible network hardware could just mean everything is using the Wi-Fi signal from the ISP's modem.
Hah, the AT&T-supplied modem that he used to have is horrible. I hate it. In the article, he says that he had both the AT&T combination modem-router-WiFi device and a crappy Netgear router, but he replaced the Netgear with an Apple router and he replaced the modem with a subscription to Webpass. Note that he needed his apartment's owner to subscribe to Webpass before he could get Internet from it.
To be fair, I guess I should say that the Motorola modem-router-WiFi things that AT&T is buying now are better than what they used to send. It's still a somewhat annoying device. And plenty of 2Wire modems are still out there, because AT&T is definitely not going to spend money to replace them if they can get away with it.
In 2013 he does not have a microwave anymore? Seriously?
He updated the post to say that he still has a microwave, but it's now built into the wall.
And no router, hub or any other network connection anywhere? Not in either image?
Well, in the text, he says he used to have a DSL modem, but now he doesn't. That's because he replaced the horrible AT&T service and the expensive Comcast service with a nice Webpass account, that the apartment building's owner had to install. And he stopped paying for cable TV, so that's a major lifestyle change.
More amusingly, he replaced the unreliable Netgear crap with an Apple router, not in the picture.
Where has the microwave gone? I'm not aware of any technological developments since 2005 that has "converged" the microwave into any other device.
He updated the post to say that he still has a microwave; it has converged with the wall. So he's not able to pull it out for the photo shoot.
This is important. Mature technology becomes invisible. The microwave is not gone; it's part of the wall. The Internet adapter is not gone; the DSL modem has been replaced by the Webpass router in the apartment building's wiring closet. And we are gradually getting more of this, like networked lights and programmable washing machines.
You might get a good keyboard, but you're very likely to get something that doesn't work properly.
Last week, I got a coupon for a Cooler Master keyboard with Cherry MX Blue switches. It was a very good price, but then I looked at the reviews. Concentrating on the negative reviews, I saw mention of keyboards with one or two broken keys, and keyboards with delicate USB connectors that break, and keyboards that stop working entirely after one year, after one month, after one week. Sometimes the customer would RMA keyboards several times before getting a keyboard that worked reliably. This is not what I imagine when I read claims of "50 million life cycle."
- Let's ride down the middle of an actual highway... yeh, nothing bad will happen here. (Seriously, saw that and went WTF)
Well, I actually rode on a highway on my bicycle, but I kept to the right. It's actually legal in California. I checked.
In California, you are allowed to ride a bicycle on a highway if there are no streets that you can take to go the same way. But you should remain on the right half of the road, unless you're passing somebody.
Freeways, on the other hand, are suicidal and illegal. And it's illegal to go in the opposite direction of traffic.
On Windows, it's horrible because ClearType doesn't respect rotated pixels. So, it keeps the color fringes on the sides, and it acts as a colorful whole-pixel anti-aliasing instead of proper sub-pixel rendering. Furthermore, in most applications, it's impossible to have anti-aliasing without color fringes, with Internet Explorer having its own uniquely distracting sub-pixel rendering. Even with color fringes, I prefer having some anti-aliasing to having none, so I put up with it.
This is why I switched to Firefox for my reading. I installed the Anti-Aliasing Tuner extension in Firefox, and set its anti-aliasing mode to greyscale. Now my text is not quite as sharp, but it doesn't have distracting colors at the sides. With a big screen, I can increase the font size, reducing eye strain and making the blurriness irrelevant.
I'm curious about how MacOS X and Freetype handle vertical sub-pixels.
Slashdot Mirror
Eric Holder is a horrible authoritarian shitsack. I remember hearing the news that Obama picked Holder as AG not long after he was first elected, it was the first and strongest sign that Obama's campaign promises were 100% bullshit.
And here I was thinking that Obama's selection of Joe Biden as his running mate was a strong sign that he didn't intend to do any real "hope" and "change."
This is a relatively boring app. It's drawing circles on Google Maps based only on estimates of yield, height, and level of destruction. I wanted to see the effects of geography and prevailing weather patterns on the distribution of destruction.
I strongly believe special traits can be developed, including spacial ability. If you believe Geoff Calvin, there's no such thing as talent or innate ability.
Well, I don't believe Geoff Colvin. It's a combination of innate ability and drive, for the people lucky enough to live in that region of Maslow's hierarchy. And I suspect that drive is at least partially innate, too.
I mean, without technological cheating, a blind person is never going to be an expert race car driver. A severely autistic individual is never going to be a great salesman. Though pitch identification can be trained, perfect pitch seems to be independent of musical ability. (Perfect pitch can sometimes be a hindrance, as most musicians are not bothered by different tuning systems or transposition.)
Colvin says great performance requires motivation, driven by passion, and he says the passion is trained. I think he's playing games with semantics. Since passion originates in our biological brains, it's subject to the same rules as any other biological ability. I suspect that to be really great requires a certain degree of insanity, actually, to get through all the setbacks.
I'm not saying he's wrong in the broad sense. Talent is overrated, and you need good practice to develop your abilities. But you need abilities to develop, and those abilities are not evenly distributed.
I am a completely mediocre driver
And here in lies the problem. What if the computer fails and you find yourself in a situation where your driving ability is the only thing that can save you.
Way to miss his point. Sooner or later, you will run into a situation where your driving ability cannot ensure your safety. Often, we survive by blind luck. It would be nice if we could use computers to improve our chances.
BTW, in case you missed it in the first post, I avoid dangerous situations rather then rely on my car to compensate for my lack of driving ability.
Cars are, by their nature, inhumanly powerful and fast. If you would "avoid dangerous situations," you should avoid interacting with them at all.
Total non-issue. If you're still using Windows XP, then you're also stuck on DirectX 9 and all the other outdated technologies. New code means new risks, which you're avoiding by sticking to Windows XP, anyway. Also, the submission is wrong; this affects only the Catalyst drivers, which handle video and HDMI audio.
Then I noticed that this is a timothy story. Sometimes I think he posts the most inane story submissions just to get the Slashdot readers all riled up and posting comments, thus generating hits and ad revenues.
opera mobile works better, in my limited experience
Not anymore! Since they decided to quit developing their own browser engine, the new Opera runs quite poorly. Especially on older/cheaper hardware, which used to be their strong suite.
But once W3C makes it part of HTML5, then anything w/o DRM support is not standards compliant.
Well, actually, I'm not sure the W3C has ever been relevant to developing new standards that get implemented.
With such a low UID, I'm guessing you were around for the whole HTML4/XHTML debacle. And SVG. And MathML. Part of the problem was that for much of the W3C's history, IE6 was the dominant browser, but the XML madness was madness.
The only way we got to HTML5 is by having a bunch of companies go off and make their own WhatWG, and as soon as HTML5 got into the W3C they announced they were working on the next HTML standards. Outside the W3C.
Some people would say the Firefox button is Opera-ish (as the Big O had it first) and Chrome's tabs are Operaish (as the Big O had tabs first).
And yet Opera has always gone out of their way to violate Fitts' Law. It doesn't matter on Macs, where the top of the screen is reserved for the menu bar, but on Windows they keep putting space between the tab and the top of the screen.
Originally, the tab bar went under the menu bar, first in Opera and then Firefox and others. Then Google showed the world the menubar at the top, and Mozilla and Opera copied it. But while Google and Mozilla put the tab bar at the very top of the screen, Opera put a minuscule space in between. Furthermore, while Chrome and Firefox preserve the behavior of the minimize/maximize/close button cluster, Opera put a miniscule space between those and the top of the screen too. I know it's bad design, leave it to Microsoft to make a destructive action have the greatest Fitts Law area, but it's standard and Opera is non-standard.
So, I'm just checking out Opera Next, and at least the Firefox-like menu bar and the Windows minimize/maximize/close are at the very top of the window. However, despite being a customized version of Chrome, they still added a 1-pixel border above the tab bar. This is madness.
I think Dyson is a bit too pessimistic about AI. AI hasn't fulfilled the promises of human-level conversational intellect, but those promises were unrealistic. I think the problem is that people want computers to emulate human minds and human souls, when we don't even know how humans work. The solution is that computers are their own type of device, with a so-far unconscious intelligence that far exceeds human intelligence. There's even a Wikipedia article about the challenge in the perception of AI.
For example:
Computers can't do what humans do, but what they do well, they do far faster, more cheaply, and more accurately than humans ever could.
A lot of "professional" users of computers (doctors, lawyers, bankers, etc) seem to think that they gotta have really special software to handle everything they do, because everything they do is so special.
Oh, how far we've come.
In the old days, every computer was custom-programmed because there were no standards, but also because programmable computers could be programmed for specific uses.
And then came closed source software, and now people are arguing that you shouldn't develop special software for that specific thing you do.
This is a sad state of affairs.
Nothing wrong with netware and pentium 4s. The former's stability record might only come in danger once somebody bothers to leave NetBSD running for over a decade. And the latter is one of the most efficient ways to convert electricity to heat, no need for central heating when you have a pentium 4!
No, it's usually more efficient to use a heat pump. A Pentium 4 can only heat your house by using the energy coursing through it. A heat pump can extract heat from the outdoors, bringing up to 4 times as much heat into your building for the same amount of electricity.
To get real uptimes, you need a mainframe. That Netware system in the news with an epic uptime? It wasn't doing anything useful for the last several years. It just sat in the corner wasting electricity and accumulating numbers in its uptime counter.
I set up performance logging and came back 2 weeks later to see, what did I find? 45%. ... I thought "Well yeah, its a quad, surely that older dual core i built for the shop has to be ready for the pasture"...nope, biggest spikes around 70% but only when he is loading something up and after that its nothing, 20s and 30s during background tasks.
So it all comes down to one simple fact...The MHz war was a bubble.
Or, maybe, your father is a relatively undemanding computer user.
It has always been the case that some people just do not stress their computers, so they are happy with what they have. Back in the 1980s, Jean-Louis Gassée bought the Apple engineers a high-end Cray supercomputer to design the next Mac, but Seymour Cray bought a Mac to design his next Cray supercomputer.
I would argue what we are seeing now is NOT "The death of the PC" anymore than the housing bubble popping meant the death of houses, its just a return to a more normal state. before laptops were getting replaced every other year and desktops around every 3
That's not what I remember. It's a major point in Cringely's book, Accidental Empires, that the PC industry comes out with new systems every 18 months. Back then, even ordinary software was so close to the limits of the hardware that we needed new hardware to run new software at acceptable speeds. This era, when basic software runs at acceptable speeds on old computers, is new.
I think the major new frontier is in responsiveness. When you're doing those measurements, with the CPU usage at 40%, how many times was the CPU usage so low because it was waiting for the hard drive? IMHO, people should not ever wait for computers, and as long as they do, then computers are not fast enough. SSDs should replace hard drives. Even without an SSD, I recently set up a Sandy Bridge i7 system, and it was so much faster at booting up and UI responsiveness than any Core 2 system that I've encountered. We should continue to upgrade, if for no other reason, then to wait less on our computers.
Why buy a new system, I ask??
Because for the same price ($500) I got the same RAM, a 3.8ghz quad core APU capable of playing last years games and able to crossfire to double it's GPU for $80 (later), and a much larger hard (500GB).
I think LVSlushdat got the better deal.
By nearly every metric, a modern Intel Xeon is better than an AMD A10. Performance per watt, instructions per clock, peak clock speed, framerates, responsiveness. AMD only challenges Intel on price by having desperately low margins, and they don't even win at that consistently. The one place where AMD has an advantage is the GPU, and LVSlushdat got a pretty powerful GPU that works especially well with professional applications, not games.
A dinky consumer hard drive is noticeably slower than a 10,000 RPM enterprise hard drive, and probably less reliable. You can pirate more movies onto 500GB, but you'll spend more time every day waiting for data to come on and off that drive. Though, both of you should be getting modern SSDs.
And then the Precision workstation comes in an attractive case with good airflow. I don't know how loud this particular machine is, but in my experience the Dell systems, on average, tend to be less noisy than the cheap computers that are built from parts. This is a workstation, so it also doesn't suffer from an anemic power supply.
Microsoft loves you as a customer. You bought their product and trashed it, thus making it not necessary for them to support you. (Not that they would ever do such a thing.) Microsoft only cares about the number of units sold, and you contributed to that.
"A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software." That's Microsoft's original slogan.
Microsoft cares about the license fees, but they also care about the power to define the industry. As long as the vast majority of PCs are running Windows, then Microsoft technologies will dominate, which makes it easier to convince companies to install Windows. It's a vicious cycle.
Also, they have direct financial incentive to keep you running Windows. As long as you run Windows, you are eligible for Microsoft Office license fees, and Microsoft Support fees, and advertisement dollars connected with the Windows Live account that they want you to get. If you have Windows 8, then they also benefit when you use the Windows Store to get apps.
Well, I did get Internet, and it is awesome.
And then, a few weeks ago, AT&T decided that the middle of the day on Saturday was a swell time to update the U-verse firmware and reboot all the customer modems.
Suddenly, I and almost the entire neighborhood had no Internet for close to an hour. If we had this next-generation Xbox, we wouldn't have been able to play games or look at our Facebooks. I guess this guy is trying to drive us into using our iPhones and Galaxies instead of the Microsoft devices.
I don't think it's a fraud. They're not calling it a Momentus XT. It's a relatively cheap hard drive that happens to be much faster than other cheap drives at booting and launching programs, and much cheaper than SSDs of similar capacity. (Also, faster than the Momentus XT at certain tasks, while being thinner but taking more power.)
So, it turns out to be slower than a WD Scorpio Black at copying folders full of lots of big files. How often do you actually wait on that? On the other hand, it's much faster than a WD Scorpio Black at booting up and launching programs. Now, how often you do for that? I think the average person would be better served by a Laptop Thin SSHD than a Scorpio Black.
It all has to do with what you use the drive for.
Wow... I can't believe the ethnicity breakdown listed for that school... 74% of students are Asian, 12% Latino and only 3.4% Caucasian!
And from the Wikipedia article... "Math scores remain one of Galileo's best academic strengths"... Lol.
Well, among the kids in San Francisco, Galileo is known as a "fob" school. I haven't actually gone to verify it, but a lot of the students may not even speak English that well.
The socially adjusted kids want to go to Lincoln or Washington or Balboa. The smart kids' parents force them to go to Lowell. (64% Asian, 8% Latino, 14% Caucasian)
The ethnic breakdown is a little misleading. San Francisco has a lot of Asian immigrants, and immigrants have more children than native United States citizens, so there are way more Asian kids than normal. SFUSD as a whole is 35% Asian, 24% Latino, and 12% Caucasian.
Even so, it continues to amaze me that people conflate computer science with coding.
Could it be that the reason people conflate computer science with coding is because professors, test makers, and the entire industry conflate computer science with coding? (That's a rhetorical question.)
It's yet another problem with teaching introductory computer science using Java. Abelson and Sussman used a pretty but impractical programming language, and Dijkstra specifically forbade making a compiler for his language. The rest of the industry insists on teaching the students a "useful" programming language. The College Board actually insists on using Java for AP Computer Science, if you're in a school with a competent CS instructor.
And then, because you're starting out using Java, you spend most of the introductory course on Java's insane syntax, obtuse type system, and complicated runtime. No wonder normal people avoid CS.
And no router, hub or any other network connection anywhere? Not in either image?
A lot of home and small business ISPs are providing modems with integrated routers. No visible network hardware could just mean everything is using the Wi-Fi signal from the ISP's modem.
Hah, the AT&T-supplied modem that he used to have is horrible. I hate it. In the article, he says that he had both the AT&T combination modem-router-WiFi device and a crappy Netgear router, but he replaced the Netgear with an Apple router and he replaced the modem with a subscription to Webpass. Note that he needed his apartment's owner to subscribe to Webpass before he could get Internet from it.
To be fair, I guess I should say that the Motorola modem-router-WiFi things that AT&T is buying now are better than what they used to send. It's still a somewhat annoying device. And plenty of 2Wire modems are still out there, because AT&T is definitely not going to spend money to replace them if they can get away with it.
In 2013 he does not have a microwave anymore? Seriously?
He updated the post to say that he still has a microwave, but it's now built into the wall.
And no router, hub or any other network connection anywhere? Not in either image?
Well, in the text, he says he used to have a DSL modem, but now he doesn't. That's because he replaced the horrible AT&T service and the expensive Comcast service with a nice Webpass account, that the apartment building's owner had to install. And he stopped paying for cable TV, so that's a major lifestyle change.
More amusingly, he replaced the unreliable Netgear crap with an Apple router, not in the picture.
Where has the microwave gone? I'm not aware of any technological developments since 2005 that has "converged" the microwave into any other device.
He updated the post to say that he still has a microwave; it has converged with the wall. So he's not able to pull it out for the photo shoot.
This is important. Mature technology becomes invisible. The microwave is not gone; it's part of the wall. The Internet adapter is not gone; the DSL modem has been replaced by the Webpass router in the apartment building's wiring closet. And we are gradually getting more of this, like networked lights and programmable washing machines.
You might get a good keyboard, but you're very likely to get something that doesn't work properly.
Last week, I got a coupon for a Cooler Master keyboard with Cherry MX Blue switches. It was a very good price, but then I looked at the reviews. Concentrating on the negative reviews, I saw mention of keyboards with one or two broken keys, and keyboards with delicate USB connectors that break, and keyboards that stop working entirely after one year, after one month, after one week. Sometimes the customer would RMA keyboards several times before getting a keyboard that worked reliably. This is not what I imagine when I read claims of "50 million life cycle."
- Let's ride down the middle of an actual highway... yeh, nothing bad will happen here. (Seriously, saw that and went WTF)
Well, I actually rode on a highway on my bicycle, but I kept to the right. It's actually legal in California. I checked.
In California, you are allowed to ride a bicycle on a highway if there are no streets that you can take to go the same way. But you should remain on the right half of the road, unless you're passing somebody.
Freeways, on the other hand, are suicidal and illegal. And it's illegal to go in the opposite direction of traffic.
On Windows, it's horrible because ClearType doesn't respect rotated pixels. So, it keeps the color fringes on the sides, and it acts as a colorful whole-pixel anti-aliasing instead of proper sub-pixel rendering. Furthermore, in most applications, it's impossible to have anti-aliasing without color fringes, with Internet Explorer having its own uniquely distracting sub-pixel rendering. Even with color fringes, I prefer having some anti-aliasing to having none, so I put up with it.
This is why I switched to Firefox for my reading. I installed the Anti-Aliasing Tuner extension in Firefox, and set its anti-aliasing mode to greyscale. Now my text is not quite as sharp, but it doesn't have distracting colors at the sides. With a big screen, I can increase the font size, reducing eye strain and making the blurriness irrelevant.
I'm curious about how MacOS X and Freetype handle vertical sub-pixels.
No, what you want is an expensive USB keyboard. Like a nice Unicomp version of the Model M, or maybe a nice capacitive switch keyboard. There are so many (pricey!) options.
Also, I hate cables moving around getting tangled, so I got a wireless mouse.