That's how you get something like systemd. In Open Source, developers scratch what itches. If you want to pay for a development monoculture Microsoft and Apple will be happy to take your money.
Not sure why you're gettng so much AC hate...you nailed it. No, Android/iOS is not going to become a desktop OS, because we're talking about two VASTLY DIFFERENT userbases. All those kids now using phones and tablets who will grow up to become corporate drones or plumbers won't need desktops because they have their phones and tablets. In the corporate world they're more likely to have thin clients with fullscreen browsers running webapps than some desktop workstation running Android/iOS. Desktops will be used by those who need 2^X cores, watercooled GPUs and 256 lanes of PCIe, and those folks are not going to be installing some eToy operating system.
I switched to the vanishing zinc oxide sunscreen because the Oxybenzone stuff creates terrible stains on my clothing due to the iron in my water (which runs through a cast iron pipe from the water company). I haven't noticed any decrease in sunscreen effectiveness, but there is certainly a significant increase in price for the zinc oxide stuff. Since I live 3000 miles from Key West I guess I'm doing my part for the coral reefs too.
The impacts are going to hit those on food stamps, housing subsidies and the like the hardest.
The Democrats are the party of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. For example, it's Trump that is doing something about the wholesale replacement of American technology workers with H-1Bs, not the Democrats who lined their campaign coffers with dollars from the CEOs importing them here by the boatload. There's plenty wrong with Trump, but at least he's not the sell-out the Democrats have been. How many bankers did Obama jail?
As for which party is going to implode first, that's a good question, given that the only folks younger than 70 in the Democratic party are more or less full-tilt Socialists. That tends not to play well in Iowa.
This appears to be an enhancement to the AVX instructions, and a 16-bit "brain floating point". Are there any real applications for this on a PC, or is this just a marketing buzzword for toy applications? Personally, if Intel has transistors to burn, I'd rather they burn them finding ways to speed up context switching. That would make for noticeable improvements in PC responsiveness even with clock speeds remaining the same, particularly as the number of cores increase.
Absolutely correct. Most of slashdot is trying to frame this as ethical or unethical behaviour, when that's not the point. Ethical or unethical is just a political position which depends on which side of the divide you're on and how seriously your ox is being gored. This is more in the realm of "no good deed goes unpunished". Folks like Snowden can explain that concept well.
Both the summary and the article imply this has something to do with smart fabric. However, you're right--follow the links all the way to the patent and this is nothing more than a particular configuration of fabric, with no mention of anything smart whatsoever. That's not a design patent, it's a fabric pattern patent. Why is the U.S.P.T.O. even patenting something that silly. That's a copyright concern, at most.
Same here. I've had my own static-content website for over two decades. I've owned my own personal domain for nearly that long. Static HTML pages are easy to maintain, I control the look and feel and the contents (mostly engineering-related stuff, shop projects and experimental aircraft build logs), and updating the site takes just a few seconds running a bash script. Links to my very minimal FB and LinkedIn pages solve the problem of finding the few family and acquaintances I care to interact with. Otherwise, I prefer not to be found, unless of course you're interested in my particular engineering and shop projects. Owning my own domain also makes it easy for me to use unique email addresses for every contact I have and every web logon, allowing me to identify quickly which contact/company has been hacked, who's selling my contact info, and to spamfilter them as necessary.
What's to do better?
As for Facebook, more power to them. Facebook allows the rest of the world to share cat pictures without my having to participate, they allow me to monitor the chitchat of my family without my having to participate (I'm the "non-technical" one as far as the younger generation is concerned), and by corralling the vast herd of socialites elsewhere allows the rest of us to surf the web in peace.
Agreed. Few things I hate worse than a company that ships a Linux-enabled product (the Gnu copyright buried in the back of the manual is a usual clue) but is only provided with Windows, and maybe Mac, software. What did they do, lay off the Linux guy as soon as they got the kernel booted up? Of course, the real reason is that the desktop software is mostly just an ad-injection platform anyway, so it's better to just toss it and use the reverse-engineered tool you downloaded from github in any case.
There was an interesting article in SMPTE Journal recently about 8K (dead tree magazine or paywalled, so no link), pointing out two problems with 8K TV beyond the obvious ones of lack of bandwidth to the home and content.
The first is motion blur. Still images on an 8K monitor look stunning, particularly if WCG (wide color gamut) and HDR (high dynamic range) are also part of the display. However, once the image starts moving (which is the point of TV after all) motion blur becomes a real problem. If you keep the same frame rate (say 60Hz) and the same angular field of view of the camera, a motion that jumps 1 pixel in HD jumps four pixels in 8K, causing the motion blur effect. The only way to fix it is to speed up the shutter, which reduces low-light sensitivity and creates a stuttering motion artifact, or speed up the frame rate. The author of the article estimated that about 300Hz would be needed to mostly eliminate motion blur at 8K. Given that 8K at 60Hz already requires 16X the bandwidth of HD, 300 Hz is 80 times HD bandwidth. Ouch. This is a real problem when one of the primary uses for that high resolution is to watch sporting events where people and objects move around a lot.
The second issue has to do with human perception and psychology. Humans have intimate space (touching, noses rubbing, all that) reserved mostly for spouses and young children, intermediate space (handshakes, greetings), and far space (strangers passing by). Filmmakers have similar compositional views: far shots to establish place, middle shots for most of the action, and close-ups for expressing emotion. With 8K the resolution is so high that close-ups reveal too much detail, and that is disturbing to many viewers as it appears too similar to 'intimate space'. A related issue is the imperfections of the actors, actresses and other on-air talent. Apparently quite a few of the Hollywood folks now have clauses in their contracts mandating 'smearing' or touch-up of high-definition close-ups.
Not that any of this will stop the inexorable march of 8K to a Best Buy near you, of course.
Phones, emails, fax (remember that), text,..., they all suffer from the same problem--verification of the sender and the recepient. The solution was invented decades ago with public/private key signatures, key exchanges, and the like (PGP and equivalent tech). Universal use of this technology would solve a lot of these problems. The problem is getting the other 99.9% of the population that doesn't read Slashdot to understand and use it.
To be fair, a lot of the opportunities of the past are now gone. I designed and built my own 6800 computer in high school using wire wrap and TTL parts and, of course, a 40-pin 6800 microprocessor, and wrote my own assembler for it (cue the AC old-guy diatribes). That was in the late '70s. My brother and I also blue-printed and hot-rodded a 350 V8 Camero from the frame up a few years later.
I still design and program electronic things for a living, but soldering up a Beagleboard is not something you can do at home and it would now take a lifetime for a single programmer to program the Linux stack on that Beaglebone. Likewise, modern cars have so many fly-by-wire systems, emission controls, and other assorted complexities that you just about need a degree in half-a-dozen related engineering fields to fix the things.
Recently I had to pour gas from a gas can into a new Honda, and discovered the tank pipe was blocked by some sort of emissions-control flap. I had to read the manual in order to figure out that a 'flap bypass' adapter for use with gas cans was buried next to the spare tire in the trunk.
The sheer pace of change and the complexity of the systems these days makes understanding and curiousity an exhausting marathon race that never ends.
Slashdot Mirror
That's how you get something like systemd. In Open Source, developers scratch what itches. If you want to pay for a development monoculture Microsoft and Apple will be happy to take your money.
Not sure why you're gettng so much AC hate...you nailed it. No, Android/iOS is not going to become a desktop OS, because we're talking about two VASTLY DIFFERENT userbases. All those kids now using phones and tablets who will grow up to become corporate drones or plumbers won't need desktops because they have their phones and tablets. In the corporate world they're more likely to have thin clients with fullscreen browsers running webapps than some desktop workstation running Android/iOS. Desktops will be used by those who need 2^X cores, watercooled GPUs and 256 lanes of PCIe, and those folks are not going to be installing some eToy operating system.
No male brain can interpret a female brain, as evidenced by male/female relationships everywhere. The AI male brain had an impossible task.
I switched to the vanishing zinc oxide sunscreen because the Oxybenzone stuff creates terrible stains on my clothing due to the iron in my water (which runs through a cast iron pipe from the water company). I haven't noticed any decrease in sunscreen effectiveness, but there is certainly a significant increase in price for the zinc oxide stuff. Since I live 3000 miles from Key West I guess I'm doing my part for the coral reefs too.
Explaining that all your insects have been temporarily airlifted to Florida isn't the approved scientific narrative that gets your paper published.
My flip-phone did that for a decade. Replaceable battery too.
But I guess that's the problem.
Here's an idea...let's put more cameras on them. Everyone needs more selfie cameras.
Sorry. There's only two of us moderates left.
Wrong on most counts.
The impacts are going to hit those on food stamps, housing subsidies and the like the hardest.
The Democrats are the party of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. For example, it's Trump that is doing something about the wholesale replacement of American technology workers with H-1Bs, not the Democrats who lined their campaign coffers with dollars from the CEOs importing them here by the boatload. There's plenty wrong with Trump, but at least he's not the sell-out the Democrats have been. How many bankers did Obama jail?
As for which party is going to implode first, that's a good question, given that the only folks younger than 70 in the Democratic party are more or less full-tilt Socialists. That tends not to play well in Iowa.
This appears to be an enhancement to the AVX instructions, and a 16-bit "brain floating point". Are there any real applications for this on a PC, or is this just a marketing buzzword for toy applications? Personally, if Intel has transistors to burn, I'd rather they burn them finding ways to speed up context switching. That would make for noticeable improvements in PC responsiveness even with clock speeds remaining the same, particularly as the number of cores increase.
Absolutely correct. Most of slashdot is trying to frame this as ethical or unethical behaviour, when that's not the point. Ethical or unethical is just a political position which depends on which side of the divide you're on and how seriously your ox is being gored. This is more in the realm of "no good deed goes unpunished". Folks like Snowden can explain that concept well.
Both the summary and the article imply this has something to do with smart fabric. However, you're right--follow the links all the way to the patent and this is nothing more than a particular configuration of fabric, with no mention of anything smart whatsoever. That's not a design patent, it's a fabric pattern patent. Why is the U.S.P.T.O. even patenting something that silly. That's a copyright concern, at most.
Since pretty much every issue includes prior art of makers creating fabric items with electronic sensors for exactly these purposes.
Same here. I've had my own static-content website for over two decades. I've owned my own personal domain for nearly that long. Static HTML pages are easy to maintain, I control the look and feel and the contents (mostly engineering-related stuff, shop projects and experimental aircraft build logs), and updating the site takes just a few seconds running a bash script. Links to my very minimal FB and LinkedIn pages solve the problem of finding the few family and acquaintances I care to interact with. Otherwise, I prefer not to be found, unless of course you're interested in my particular engineering and shop projects. Owning my own domain also makes it easy for me to use unique email addresses for every contact I have and every web logon, allowing me to identify quickly which contact/company has been hacked, who's selling my contact info, and to spamfilter them as necessary.
What's to do better?
As for Facebook, more power to them. Facebook allows the rest of the world to share cat pictures without my having to participate, they allow me to monitor the chitchat of my family without my having to participate (I'm the "non-technical" one as far as the younger generation is concerned), and by corralling the vast herd of socialites elsewhere allows the rest of us to surf the web in peace.
You beat me to the only 100% true comment in this thread. +5 insightful if I had mod points.
This stupidity won't stop until businesses give up this "SMS as 2FA" nonsense and use GPG-style public key cryptography for authentication.
Yup. Stir that in with Agile methods and it explains a lot.
Agreed. Few things I hate worse than a company that ships a Linux-enabled product (the Gnu copyright buried in the back of the manual is a usual clue) but is only provided with Windows, and maybe Mac, software. What did they do, lay off the Linux guy as soon as they got the kernel booted up? Of course, the real reason is that the desktop software is mostly just an ad-injection platform anyway, so it's better to just toss it and use the reverse-engineered tool you downloaded from github in any case.
There was an interesting article in SMPTE Journal recently about 8K (dead tree magazine or paywalled, so no link), pointing out two problems with 8K TV beyond the obvious ones of lack of bandwidth to the home and content.
The first is motion blur. Still images on an 8K monitor look stunning, particularly if WCG (wide color gamut) and HDR (high dynamic range) are also part of the display. However, once the image starts moving (which is the point of TV after all) motion blur becomes a real problem. If you keep the same frame rate (say 60Hz) and the same angular field of view of the camera, a motion that jumps 1 pixel in HD jumps four pixels in 8K, causing the motion blur effect. The only way to fix it is to speed up the shutter, which reduces low-light sensitivity and creates a stuttering motion artifact, or speed up the frame rate. The author of the article estimated that about 300Hz would be needed to mostly eliminate motion blur at 8K. Given that 8K at 60Hz already requires 16X the bandwidth of HD, 300 Hz is 80 times HD bandwidth. Ouch. This is a real problem when one of the primary uses for that high resolution is to watch sporting events where people and objects move around a lot.
The second issue has to do with human perception and psychology. Humans have intimate space (touching, noses rubbing, all that) reserved mostly for spouses and young children, intermediate space (handshakes, greetings), and far space (strangers passing by). Filmmakers have similar compositional views: far shots to establish place, middle shots for most of the action, and close-ups for expressing emotion. With 8K the resolution is so high that close-ups reveal too much detail, and that is disturbing to many viewers as it appears too similar to 'intimate space'. A related issue is the imperfections of the actors, actresses and other on-air talent. Apparently quite a few of the Hollywood folks now have clauses in their contracts mandating 'smearing' or touch-up of high-definition close-ups.
Not that any of this will stop the inexorable march of 8K to a Best Buy near you, of course.
Phones, emails, fax (remember that), text, ..., they all suffer from the same problem--verification of the sender and the recepient. The solution was invented decades ago with public/private key signatures, key exchanges, and the like (PGP and equivalent tech). Universal use of this technology would solve a lot of these problems. The problem is getting the other 99.9% of the population that doesn't read Slashdot to understand and use it.
Spaceships, lots of weapons fire, scantily-clad women. Otherwise not worth my money seeing on the large screen.
No expensive AI needed.
Nothing wrong with a nuclear-powered bike. I'd buy one. I power my current chain-driven one with banana carbs; why not use the rest of the fruit?
Apparently you've never lived in a town with train track crossings.
Now the Russians and the Chinese get to be as confused as we are about U.S. policy.
I suspect the kids meant to say "Playstation", not "computer".
To be fair, a lot of the opportunities of the past are now gone. I designed and built my own 6800 computer in high school using wire wrap and TTL parts and, of course, a 40-pin 6800 microprocessor, and wrote my own assembler for it (cue the AC old-guy diatribes). That was in the late '70s. My brother and I also blue-printed and hot-rodded a 350 V8 Camero from the frame up a few years later.
I still design and program electronic things for a living, but soldering up a Beagleboard is not something you can do at home and it would now take a lifetime for a single programmer to program the Linux stack on that Beaglebone. Likewise, modern cars have so many fly-by-wire systems, emission controls, and other assorted complexities that you just about need a degree in half-a-dozen related engineering fields to fix the things.
Recently I had to pour gas from a gas can into a new Honda, and discovered the tank pipe was blocked by some sort of emissions-control flap. I had to read the manual in order to figure out that a 'flap bypass' adapter for use with gas cans was buried next to the spare tire in the trunk.
The sheer pace of change and the complexity of the systems these days makes understanding and curiousity an exhausting marathon race that never ends.