Because for something like a cell phone, decoding DTS-III in CPU would be very demanding and would drain your battery pretty damn fast.
So put it in the audio codec, then pipe the decoded output to the device.
Which part of "decoding DTS-III in CPU would be very demanding" didn't make sense?
I'm not aware of a cell phone that has DTS-III decoding hardware built in; you'd have to do it in software. That's the "codec" part, and that's the part that will put a lot of demand on the CPU to decode.
You could put decoding hardware in the phone for each of those audio formats, but it's going to be easier to offload that to the device instead. Phones are already pretty crammed for space on the logic board; adding more chips (or processor circuitry) to decode all of those formats in hardware would be sub-optimal. It's better to leave this to the audio device on the other end of the USB-C connection.
Besides which, AFAIK PCM IEC60958 is only capable of output in one or two channels. There wouldn't be any way to decode DTS-III and stick it into a PCM stream without losing most of the channels. This isn't a big deal for headphones on a mobile device, but it would make it impossible to output surround sound to an audio receiver.
So what is why support any of those formats? Why not just PCM in the first place?
Because for something like a cell phone, decoding DTS-III in CPU would be very demanding and would drain your battery pretty damn fast.
There will also be a certain amount of savings in needed bus bandwidth, especially for multi-channel audio. Decompressing a 5.1 or 7.2 stream into its components and then sending it across the bus would be very bandwidth intensive, and may have an impact on other USB devices on the same bus (or the other devices might have an impact on the digital audio). Vorbis, ALAC, and FLAC (I'm not familiar with opus) tend to be one or two-channel where this would be much less of a problem.
Currently in order to support any of these standards for output to headphones, you need to decode to PCM in the CPU, and then send it to the DAC for playback. It seems to me that won't change here -- you'll still be able to playback all of your Vorbis files via USB-C digital audio; you'll just have to decode to PCM first and then output the PCM.
Sure, that means that you won't be able to offload the decoding to your headphones or an external audio receiver, but that's already the situation we have for these filetypes. Thus, in effect, nothing will change.
How does it get between machines logged-in to the same iCloud account if not through the Internet?
Bluetooth and/or local WiFi. The WiFi login isn't used for communication between the devices, but only for pairing the devices together locally (that is, the devices find each other via Bluetooth and/or WiFi on the local network. A handshake is done to verify that both have successfully authenticated against the same account ID on iCloud. Then local communications is permitted. iCloud isn't involved in the data transfer, nor in the setup of a communications channel between devices).
Please tell me "optimized storage" can be turned off wholesale. If there is one thing I definitely don't need it's a "whole bunch" more of background processes uploading random files to the remote server and deleting them from my local drive. I will manage what I store and where, thank you very much.
I guess I am sounding like an old fart I am, but MacOS is going too far in dumbing it down.
During the first post-install reboot, the OS configuration assistant asked me if I wanted to enable this (well, at least the part that makes your desktop available to other Macs and iOS devices via iCloud). For the rest I had to find the configuration in "About this Mac" -> Storage (which seems an odd place to put such a thing).
I agree with you and that's part of my question above where I mentioned policy wonks but I should have mentioned politics directly. This is part of what puzzles me as how we end up with the political priorities we have as I don't get the feeling they match what the *people* want. I realize we live in a Republic so it's consent to govern and once in Washington, representatives make all sorts of decisions that don't have anything to do with the interests of the people in their district much less people in general.
The world is made up of thousands of different governments, each of which has its own system. We have dictatorships, theocracies, monarchies, communism, and democracy. And while the latter form of government is generally considered the most representative of the people, some democracies are rife with corruption, intimidation, sexism, racism, oppression of minority populations, etc. All of the above types of government really aren't particularly concerned with "what the people want" -- indeed, in some situations (such as theocracies), the government is able to tell the people what they should and shouldn't want for themselves (and are often able to get them to believe it too). You're not going to solve big problems in such countries, when the governments of those countries work against the solutions. No technology or company is going to solve poverty in North Korea, for example, when the government is happy keeping their people poor and hungry so they can chase other priorities (like nuclear weapons).
So let's narrow the discussion going forward to just that of the Unites States.
(FWIW, I'm neither a US citizen nor a US resident. I'm Canadian.)
How could that be true with all the money inputs into the system? There's massive distortion. That was intended as part of what I'm puzzled about, so we have this system and people routinely claim to be reformers BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT yet nobody delivers.
I don't think we're in an era where anyone can really determine "what the people want" in the United States, as the US is very highly polarized. How can you tackle poverty when, on the one hand you have nearly half the countries population believing that poverty is the fault of the people who experience it? When a prevailing attitude is "It's they're own fault they're poor -- why should my tax dollars go to help them?"?
I'll go so far as to say that right now the US has no general sense of agreement or consensus on solutions to any of the "big problems" that plague the country (or even the world). So given that, how do you determine "what the people want"? Do you placate one group and alienate the other (only for the next government to change things back)? Do you try to find a middle ground that makes nobody happy (and in the end may not actually solve any problems)? Do you throw your hands up in the air at being unable to reach a useful consensus and give up? It seems to me all of these have been "solutions" used in US politics so far in this century, with the expected results.
Again, you don't fix this with technology. You need to gain consensus on the dimensions of the problem class first, and then reach consensus on a solution. Without that, you're going to get nowhere.
Don't forget either that the biggest social and humanitarian problems facing the world hit the people with the least resources the hardest. These are usually the people with the least political clout, and with the lowest level of access to technology and education. By definition helping rid the world of these problems involves wealth redistribution -- and in the US, that is often political suicide.
Some people say take all money out of politics other than some modest public funds. How could there not be loopholes in this thing that would allow organizations to route around the regulations and find a way spend those dollars for policy influence.
I agree with all this and that's sort of part of what I was getting at with my question. Some of the problems are market failures and there's no obvious way to directly profit from working on the problem so if we are going to spend money it'll likely be through the political process. . The government's likely to be the one investing in technology directed at these problems. Even if it's contractors doing the work, the funding comes from the government. Certain domains, such as military get plenty of resources, but other critical domains do not. I'm not even suggesting that our military spending is bad, by the way. I'll forever be grateful to ARPA (DARPA) for inventing the Internet.:-)
Yeah, but my point is more having to do with political will rather than a lack of monetary or technical resources. And some of the solutions don't even require technology -- just effort (and thus money).
As I pointed out, the political issues are greater than just that of political will. It requires all governments in all countries respect human rights, minority rights, and uphold the rule of law. It requires removing government corruption where it exists. And then it requires a ground-up push from The People to push their political masters to prioritize and push solutions to these big issues.
Technology can somewhat help when it comes to implementation, but you have to have the political will first. Without the political will, no amount of technology is going to help, now matter how great the ideas are. If you have a corrupt government that isn't interested in fighting poverty in minority populations in their country (and perhaps has a vested interest in oppressing those people), technology and ideas aren't going to fix it on their own.
So what sorts of problems does the submitter think we should focus on? World hunger? Poverty? Disease? War?
These are very hard problems to solve. All of these have been around since the dawn of humanity, and nobody has come up with an all-encompassing solution yet.
The problems with the big problems are more than technological -- they're political. No amount of technology is going to be able to solve poverty in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (for example), when the government is corrupt and the rule of law and human rights aren't being observed. Even in a Western country like the United States, you can't fix poverty when many people blame the poor for their own situation and there is no political will to provide a minimal level of social assistance.
That said, where there is a political will, technology is already helping solve big problems. Solar cells are bringing inexpensive electricity to villages in poor countries. Software hoping with resource allocation helps aid agencies ensure they have food stocks of adequate quantities where they are needed most. Vaccines and modern medical technology are having a major impact on disease -- we've rid the world of smallpox, and we're really close to eradicating polio.
Hard problems are hard. I know we in technology like to think of ourselves as solving hard problems, but pervasive political problems are way bigger than what technology alone can resolve.
Do you have a really old/cheap TV? If not, you can probably enable HDMI-CEC (known as "HDMI Device Link" on the PS4) and then just use your TV remote to control the PS4. As the logic for this actually happens in the TV itself, you can use whatever universal remote you want.
It sure is better than having to have a separate remote for your TV and PlayStation. In some of the older firmware revisions I recall that some of the video apps supported this while others didn't, but that seems to have been a thing of the past for at least the last 6 months.
Web apps IMO are a near-complete failure from both a development and user perspective, and it's this failure that has caused the rise of apps:
- The web was designed around a document model, not an application model. We're trying to shoehorn apps into a model that wasn't really designed for application needs.
- Web UIs can take a huge amount of time to develop and get right. Even ignoring how different browsers can render the same data slightly differently, getting many standard UI elements working correctly in a web app either requires significant effort, or that you sell your soul to some third-party library to handle the difficult details for you. And int hat latter case, you generally lose much of the ability to specify the elements you want in the DOM in HTML, and have to suffice with just creating a bunch of DIVs and then using JavaScript to populate them with the widgets you want. Yuck. Contract this with something like Apple's Interface Builder, where you lay out live objects and then simply serialize them to a XIB, and you're pretty much done. I've seen web app UIs take weeks to debug that would take less than a day to design and layout in a native UI dev environment.
- JavaScript. Single threaded and garbage collected. The former limits some of the interesting things you can otherwise do pretty easily in standard desktop applications, while the latter completely sucks for a memory and processor constrained environment like mobile web apps.
- There is a ton of stuff you just can't do in a web app. Anything with advanced graphics is pretty much out. VoIP is out (even on desktop Google needs to rely on native browser plug-ins to make things like Google Earth and Google Talk to work). There are entire classes of applications that you just can't do on the web, which necessitates a native application.
Those are just some examples of the problems with web applications. Anything beyond the most simple sorts of applications is difficult and expensive to do, with limited performance.
Now where the web can really shine is for REST-style data services. Put the business logic on a server (or set of servers) somewhere, do major processing on the backend, and pass data back and forth statelessly over HTTP. The web is great for that. Or for rendering things that are actually documents. But as a UI system for applications the web has failed big time -- even Google produces a number of native apps to get around the web's serious limitations.
It's collusion when the Auto manufacturer makes an agreement with the Auto shops to stop carrying the
proper replacement parts that fit your older cars.
Yeah, but it's not collusion if it's the case that the auto manufacturer was paying the parts manufacturer to build old parts, but then decided to stop paying them once the new model was released, and the parts manufacture then decided to stop making the old parts.
I suspect in the background that is what has happened here. Microsoft has probably been paying Intel and AMD to write chipset drivers for Windows for the last two decades, and has decided they don't want to pay them to write drivers for old OS's anymore. So AMD and Intel simply aren't going to do it without getting paid.
If you had read the article you would know that the pattern of broken bones matches what happens when someone falls from a height of about 12 meters: broken legs on landing, then broken wrists and shoulders as the person tries to protect themself, then broken ribs and skull. Lucy had all of those; the broken wrists are especially interesting.
Yes, and if you read some of the critique, you'd know that Lucy's skeleton is riddled with cracks and broken bones due to the process of fossilization and millions of years of compression. There are questions as to why the team decided to focus only on specific fractures, and seemed to ignore the others.
I'll admit I haven't read the paper itself yet to see if some of these were indeed death with, but I have read some critique from other researchers in this field, and it seems they have concerns as to methodology.
It's not clear to me as to why 'getting trampled by a large animal' is ruled out. At just over 3-1/2 feet tall, she probably didn't weigh much. From what height would she have fallen from in order to break all of those bones?
I was thinking more along the lines of: how do they know it was the fall that killed her? She could have had a brain aneurysm, died, and then fell out of a tree.
If the "evidence" is to be believed (and I see many experts argue against it), all it shows proof of is the bones were broken. The locations and orientations of the fractures may indicate they were caused by a fall, but there is no way to know whether the breaks happened pre- or post-mortem.
The only bias I see is that for some reason, Facebook seems to think I'm in any way interested in celebrity gossip, because that's about all that ever shows up in the "Trending" section for me.
I'm interested in science and technology, but every "trending" topic I seem to see is something about what Britney Spears ate for breakfast, or whose dress Catelyn Jenner wore to the mall, or some other equally banal and useless piece of "news" about some celebrity that I don't give a crap about.
I'm not even exaggerating. My current "trending" topics include:
- What's coming up on Netflix next month (US Netflix, that is. I'm Canadian and watch Canadian Netflix, and we don't get the same new movies the US does, so it's even more useless)
- "Go topless day"
- Some sort of conspiracy theory about Herman Cain and Epi Pens
- Some nonsense about whether or not some pastor endorsed Donald Trump or not
- Something about some guy I've never heard of who got roasted by Twitter due to his hairstyle
- Five reasons to see some movie I've never heard of
- The 77th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz
- Something about Britney Spears doing karaoke
As you can see, my "trending" doesn't have a Liberal or Conservative slant -- it just has a inanely stupid slant.
"Trending" is the least useful part of Facebook, and personally I wish they'd just get rid of it altogether.
That being the case, why the hell is this Windows exclusive? Why not open it to Macs and desktop Linux?
A Sony rep mentioned on the PlayStation Blog today that they were evaluating Mac support. Obviously they can do it, because they are already doing it withPS4 Remote Play for Mac (interesting side note: the PS4 Remote Play for Mac app is significantly smaller than the Windows version. One of these days I'm meaning to look into why this is).
"With a Windows laptop or tablet, you aren't tethered to a big-screen TV. You could theoretically take these PlayStation games anywhere"
The article says it requires a DualShock 4 controller. I don't see how that will work with all Windows tablets, especially seeing as ARM-based Windows tablets (like the Surface 1 and 2 non-Pro) allow only XInput controllers (that is, Xbox 360 controllers and one Logitech model).
Sony also announced today a USB dongle for Mac and Windows that permits wireless DS4 connections. Assuming the tablet has a USB port you could presumably use that (although as of yet there is no word if it requires any special drivers or not).
I'm not so sold on the evils of writing passwords down as it requires the Evil Actor to have physical access in order to exploit it. And as we all know, once you have physical access it is pretty well game over for security in general.
That depends entirely on the purpose of the Evil Actor. If Evil Actor's purpose is to break into your corporate network and steal data from the outside, you're probably correct.
If, however, the Evil Actor is the guy at the next desk who wants to do something nefarious and pin it on you, then all they have to do is offer you a nice tall beverage, and wait for you to leave to use the washroom.
I honestly have yet to figure out what the fuck the point in most of these emojis is. In the past everybody just used a combination of existing ascii symbols to show the mood of your message, and I am still trying to figure out what the new emojis solve that that system didn't solve.
You need to understand a bit about where and why emoji's started showing up in the first place. And to do that, we go back to pre-millennium Japan.
Japanese is, to put it bluntly, an insanely crazy written language. Modern Japanese uses no less than four different scripts/alphabets, and in any given sentence different types of words may need to be in different alphabets!. They are:
- Kanji: logographic elements taken from Chinese. These are symbols that stand for a word, phrase, or idea on their own. There are several thousand in modern use in Japan
- Hiragana: a set of 46 symbols indicating syllables. These are typically used for native Japanese words that don't have a Kanji equivalent.
- Katakana: a set of 48 symbols also indicating syllables. Indeed, many of these syllables are identical to those available in Hiragana, but with completely different symbols. These are used for loan-words, scientific terms, names of plants and animals, and for emphasis.
- Romaji: as if all that isn't bad enough, some words (loanwords and trademarks) are written in the standard Latin script we use in English ([A-Za-z]).
And if all that wasn't bad enough, there is also hentaigana, which are obsolete kana sometimes used to give things like restaurants and such an old-timey feel (something akin to 'Ye Olde...' in English). And because the different scripts in Japanese are used for different types of words, you frequently have to switch between one and the others in a single sentence. In short, written Japanese is f'd up.
This is where Emoji came from. Imagine a late 1990's cell phone with the 12 standard buttons, and having to send text messages to someone in Japanese. How do you use those 12 buttons to select from thousands of Kanji symbols? How do you switch between Katakana and Hiragana and Romanji? I'll admit I'm not a Japanese speaker (I've studied the symbology, but not the language itself), but I'd think even typing "Hey, let's meet up with Akira at the McDonalds" would take a week on a standard flip-phone keypad. Thus emoji was invented to provide visual shortcuts for writing things that would otherwise be a major PITA to type in Japanese.
So basically, because written Japanese is so incredibly f'd up with four simultaneous scripts in modern usage...the Japanese decided to get around it by adding another script system.
Early iOS releases implemented Emoji to satisfy the Japanese market, but in can you don't recall that far back, it was originally only available if you set your system language to Japanese. In those early days, someone figured out how to write an app to enable the emoji keyboard in other languages, and eventually due to demand (which I'm assuming was mostly 12 to 14 year-olds) Apple eventually opened it up to everyone. At which point, hundreds of millions of people with sane written languages that use compact alphabets decided they were cute, and that they had to use them as much as possible.
Like yourself, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon about the whole Emoji thing. I can understand why the Japanese needed to invent it, as their writing system is horrendous. I don't tend to directly use it myself, preferring to use old-style emoticons in personal correspondence; however, at this point most e-mail and chat systems will "upgrade" typed emoticons to emoji.
I've been a developer on some pretty damn big projects. The kind of projects used by Fortune 500 companies -- everything from end-user facing applications all the down to low-level infrastructure projects.
If there's one thing I've noticed about all of these large projects over the years, it's that there is rarely ever only one programming language in use. Web apps will use Javascript on the front end and one or more language son the back-end. Large scale C/C++ apps will have a variety of scripts surrounding them. Every project needs an installer, some form of scripting for the build processes, deployment, automated QA, and (frequently) database management. There may even be a mobile app attached to the project. I've had to switch between C/C++, Bash scripting, Java (with JNI), SQL, and REXX, all in the same project.
The point being, if you work on a large enough project, and aren't a junior developer, you're probably switching between a bunch of different languages already. Those languages are probably fairly stable (i.e: you probably won't see too often where you change a massive project from Java to C#), although I've certainly introduced new languages and processes to big projects to make "dumb" processes smarter. The ability to do that, however, often comes when you get to a point in your career where you can specify and/or contribute to significant architectural changes.
I've also been fortunate enough to work at a few places where you can spend 10% of your time working on personal interest projects. If you're fortunate enough to be in such an organization, this is a great time to try out new languages that interest you. If not, find (or start) a project in the interesting language of your choice, and work on it in your own time. If you make it Open Source, and put it on GitHub or the like, you can include it as experience on a resume.
There are lose-lose situations. But someone who is actually worried about self defense isn't whipping their gun out as soon as they hear a shot. They are going to take cover and assess who the shooter is before drawing a weapon.
Which in this specific case wouldn't have been of any help, which was my point. From across a dark club with dance floor lighting filled with panicking people, you're not going to be able to assess squat. Indeed, reports now have it that two security guards on site did indeed have guns on them, and it helped them not one whit. And the shooter in this case doesn't have the same consideration for the safety of others that you do; the scenario is already lopsided in their favour by the facts that a) they already intend on killing as many people as possible, and b) they may not have the intention to get out of the situation alive to being with.
Sorry to break it to you, but sometimes there are lose-lose situations.
Sorry to break it to YOU, but abject helplessness is an idiotic survival strategy. If you can't return fire, you're done for. If you can return fire, your chances of stopping the attack go from nil to non-nil.
Evidence from this very incident proves you wrong. Nobody fired back, and yet many people survived, many with no injuries at all. That's certainly not a mathematical definition of 'nil'.
Slashdot Mirror
Because for something like a cell phone, decoding DTS-III in CPU would be very demanding and would drain your battery pretty damn fast.
So put it in the audio codec, then pipe the decoded output to the device.
Which part of "decoding DTS-III in CPU would be very demanding" didn't make sense?
I'm not aware of a cell phone that has DTS-III decoding hardware built in; you'd have to do it in software. That's the "codec" part, and that's the part that will put a lot of demand on the CPU to decode.
You could put decoding hardware in the phone for each of those audio formats, but it's going to be easier to offload that to the device instead. Phones are already pretty crammed for space on the logic board; adding more chips (or processor circuitry) to decode all of those formats in hardware would be sub-optimal. It's better to leave this to the audio device on the other end of the USB-C connection.
Besides which, AFAIK PCM IEC60958 is only capable of output in one or two channels. There wouldn't be any way to decode DTS-III and stick it into a PCM stream without losing most of the channels. This isn't a big deal for headphones on a mobile device, but it would make it impossible to output surround sound to an audio receiver.
Yaz
So what is why support any of those formats? Why not just PCM in the first place?
Because for something like a cell phone, decoding DTS-III in CPU would be very demanding and would drain your battery pretty damn fast.
There will also be a certain amount of savings in needed bus bandwidth, especially for multi-channel audio. Decompressing a 5.1 or 7.2 stream into its components and then sending it across the bus would be very bandwidth intensive, and may have an impact on other USB devices on the same bus (or the other devices might have an impact on the digital audio). Vorbis, ALAC, and FLAC (I'm not familiar with opus) tend to be one or two-channel where this would be much less of a problem.
Yaz
So what?
Currently in order to support any of these standards for output to headphones, you need to decode to PCM in the CPU, and then send it to the DAC for playback. It seems to me that won't change here -- you'll still be able to playback all of your Vorbis files via USB-C digital audio; you'll just have to decode to PCM first and then output the PCM.
Sure, that means that you won't be able to offload the decoding to your headphones or an external audio receiver, but that's already the situation we have for these filetypes. Thus, in effect, nothing will change.
Yaz
I got better...
Ugh -- sorry for the bad HTML tag -- the link should be to RFC 597
.
If we went back in time to when there only was 28 domains, I'd bet you a Mars Bar that there were only 28 websites.
You'd lose that bet, if only because from 1973 defines 81 existing hostnames on the Internet, and the Web wasn't online until 1991.
Thus if you did go back in time to when there were only 28 domains, there wouldn't be a web, and hence no websites.
FYI, I prefer the traditional Mars bar (no almonds or peanut butter or whatever). Snack-size is acceptable.
Yaz
How does it get between machines logged-in to the same iCloud account if not through the Internet?
Bluetooth and/or local WiFi. The WiFi login isn't used for communication between the devices, but only for pairing the devices together locally (that is, the devices find each other via Bluetooth and/or WiFi on the local network. A handshake is done to verify that both have successfully authenticated against the same account ID on iCloud. Then local communications is permitted. iCloud isn't involved in the data transfer, nor in the setup of a communications channel between devices).
Yaz
Please tell me "optimized storage" can be turned off wholesale. If there is one thing I definitely don't need it's a "whole bunch" more of background processes uploading random files to the remote server and deleting them from my local drive. I will manage what I store and where, thank you very much.
I guess I am sounding like an old fart I am, but MacOS is going too far in dumbing it down.
During the first post-install reboot, the OS configuration assistant asked me if I wanted to enable this (well, at least the part that makes your desktop available to other Macs and iOS devices via iCloud). For the rest I had to find the configuration in "About this Mac" -> Storage (which seems an odd place to put such a thing).
Yaz
I agree with you and that's part of my question above where I mentioned policy wonks but I should have mentioned politics directly. This is part of what puzzles me as how we end up with the political priorities we have as I don't get the feeling they match what the *people* want. I realize we live in a Republic so it's consent to govern and once in Washington, representatives make all sorts of decisions that don't have anything to do with the interests of the people in their district much less people in general.
The world is made up of thousands of different governments, each of which has its own system. We have dictatorships, theocracies, monarchies, communism, and democracy. And while the latter form of government is generally considered the most representative of the people, some democracies are rife with corruption, intimidation, sexism, racism, oppression of minority populations, etc. All of the above types of government really aren't particularly concerned with "what the people want" -- indeed, in some situations (such as theocracies), the government is able to tell the people what they should and shouldn't want for themselves (and are often able to get them to believe it too). You're not going to solve big problems in such countries, when the governments of those countries work against the solutions. No technology or company is going to solve poverty in North Korea, for example, when the government is happy keeping their people poor and hungry so they can chase other priorities (like nuclear weapons).
So let's narrow the discussion going forward to just that of the Unites States.
(FWIW, I'm neither a US citizen nor a US resident. I'm Canadian.)
How could that be true with all the money inputs into the system? There's massive distortion. That was intended as part of what I'm puzzled about, so we have this system and people routinely claim to be reformers BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT yet nobody delivers.
I don't think we're in an era where anyone can really determine "what the people want" in the United States, as the US is very highly polarized. How can you tackle poverty when, on the one hand you have nearly half the countries population believing that poverty is the fault of the people who experience it? When a prevailing attitude is "It's they're own fault they're poor -- why should my tax dollars go to help them?"?
I'll go so far as to say that right now the US has no general sense of agreement or consensus on solutions to any of the "big problems" that plague the country (or even the world). So given that, how do you determine "what the people want"? Do you placate one group and alienate the other (only for the next government to change things back)? Do you try to find a middle ground that makes nobody happy (and in the end may not actually solve any problems)? Do you throw your hands up in the air at being unable to reach a useful consensus and give up? It seems to me all of these have been "solutions" used in US politics so far in this century, with the expected results.
Again, you don't fix this with technology. You need to gain consensus on the dimensions of the problem class first, and then reach consensus on a solution. Without that, you're going to get nowhere.
Don't forget either that the biggest social and humanitarian problems facing the world hit the people with the least resources the hardest. These are usually the people with the least political clout, and with the lowest level of access to technology and education. By definition helping rid the world of these problems involves wealth redistribution -- and in the US, that is often political suicide.
Some people say take all money out of politics other than some modest public funds. How could there not be loopholes in this thing that would allow organizations to route around the regulations and find a way spend those dollars for policy influence.
There are a lot of countri
I agree with all this and that's sort of part of what I was getting at with my question. Some of the problems are market failures and there's no obvious way to directly profit from working on the problem so if we are going to spend money it'll likely be through the political process. . The government's likely to be the one investing in technology directed at these problems. Even if it's contractors doing the work, the funding comes from the government. Certain domains, such as military get plenty of resources, but other critical domains do not. I'm not even suggesting that our military spending is bad, by the way. I'll forever be grateful to ARPA (DARPA) for inventing the Internet. :-)
Yeah, but my point is more having to do with political will rather than a lack of monetary or technical resources. And some of the solutions don't even require technology -- just effort (and thus money).
As I pointed out, the political issues are greater than just that of political will. It requires all governments in all countries respect human rights, minority rights, and uphold the rule of law. It requires removing government corruption where it exists. And then it requires a ground-up push from The People to push their political masters to prioritize and push solutions to these big issues.
Technology can somewhat help when it comes to implementation, but you have to have the political will first. Without the political will, no amount of technology is going to help, now matter how great the ideas are. If you have a corrupt government that isn't interested in fighting poverty in minority populations in their country (and perhaps has a vested interest in oppressing those people), technology and ideas aren't going to fix it on their own.
Yaz
So what sorts of problems does the submitter think we should focus on? World hunger? Poverty? Disease? War?
These are very hard problems to solve. All of these have been around since the dawn of humanity, and nobody has come up with an all-encompassing solution yet.
The problems with the big problems are more than technological -- they're political. No amount of technology is going to be able to solve poverty in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (for example), when the government is corrupt and the rule of law and human rights aren't being observed. Even in a Western country like the United States, you can't fix poverty when many people blame the poor for their own situation and there is no political will to provide a minimal level of social assistance.
That said, where there is a political will, technology is already helping solve big problems. Solar cells are bringing inexpensive electricity to villages in poor countries. Software hoping with resource allocation helps aid agencies ensure they have food stocks of adequate quantities where they are needed most. Vaccines and modern medical technology are having a major impact on disease -- we've rid the world of smallpox, and we're really close to eradicating polio.
Hard problems are hard. I know we in technology like to think of ourselves as solving hard problems, but pervasive political problems are way bigger than what technology alone can resolve.
Yaz
Do you have a really old/cheap TV? If not, you can probably enable HDMI-CEC (known as "HDMI Device Link" on the PS4) and then just use your TV remote to control the PS4. As the logic for this actually happens in the TV itself, you can use whatever universal remote you want.
It sure is better than having to have a separate remote for your TV and PlayStation. In some of the older firmware revisions I recall that some of the video apps supported this while others didn't, but that seems to have been a thing of the past for at least the last 6 months.
Yaz
Mod parent up.
Web apps IMO are a near-complete failure from both a development and user perspective, and it's this failure that has caused the rise of apps:
Those are just some examples of the problems with web applications. Anything beyond the most simple sorts of applications is difficult and expensive to do, with limited performance.
Now where the web can really shine is for REST-style data services. Put the business logic on a server (or set of servers) somewhere, do major processing on the backend, and pass data back and forth statelessly over HTTP. The web is great for that. Or for rendering things that are actually documents. But as a UI system for applications the web has failed big time -- even Google produces a number of native apps to get around the web's serious limitations.
Yaz
It's collusion when the Auto manufacturer makes an agreement with the Auto shops to stop carrying the proper replacement parts that fit your older cars.
Yeah, but it's not collusion if it's the case that the auto manufacturer was paying the parts manufacturer to build old parts, but then decided to stop paying them once the new model was released, and the parts manufacture then decided to stop making the old parts.
I suspect in the background that is what has happened here. Microsoft has probably been paying Intel and AMD to write chipset drivers for Windows for the last two decades, and has decided they don't want to pay them to write drivers for old OS's anymore. So AMD and Intel simply aren't going to do it without getting paid.
Yaz
I'm pretty sure people here are used to using (and certainly aren't afraid of) alpha-numeric strings.
Yaz
If you had read the article you would know that the pattern of broken bones matches what happens when someone falls from a height of about 12 meters: broken legs on landing, then broken wrists and shoulders as the person tries to protect themself, then broken ribs and skull. Lucy had all of those; the broken wrists are especially interesting.
Yes, and if you read some of the critique, you'd know that Lucy's skeleton is riddled with cracks and broken bones due to the process of fossilization and millions of years of compression. There are questions as to why the team decided to focus only on specific fractures, and seemed to ignore the others.
I'll admit I haven't read the paper itself yet to see if some of these were indeed death with, but I have read some critique from other researchers in this field, and it seems they have concerns as to methodology.
Yaz
It's not clear to me as to why 'getting trampled by a large animal' is ruled out. At just over 3-1/2 feet tall, she probably didn't weigh much. From what height would she have fallen from in order to break all of those bones?
I was thinking more along the lines of: how do they know it was the fall that killed her? She could have had a brain aneurysm, died, and then fell out of a tree.
If the "evidence" is to be believed (and I see many experts argue against it), all it shows proof of is the bones were broken. The locations and orientations of the fractures may indicate they were caused by a fall, but there is no way to know whether the breaks happened pre- or post-mortem.
Yaz
The only bias I see is that for some reason, Facebook seems to think I'm in any way interested in celebrity gossip, because that's about all that ever shows up in the "Trending" section for me.
I'm interested in science and technology, but every "trending" topic I seem to see is something about what Britney Spears ate for breakfast, or whose dress Catelyn Jenner wore to the mall, or some other equally banal and useless piece of "news" about some celebrity that I don't give a crap about.
I'm not even exaggerating. My current "trending" topics include:
As you can see, my "trending" doesn't have a Liberal or Conservative slant -- it just has a inanely stupid slant.
"Trending" is the least useful part of Facebook, and personally I wish they'd just get rid of it altogether.
Yaz
That being the case, why the hell is this Windows exclusive? Why not open it to Macs and desktop Linux?
A Sony rep mentioned on the PlayStation Blog today that they were evaluating Mac support. Obviously they can do it, because they are already doing it withPS4 Remote Play for Mac (interesting side note: the PS4 Remote Play for Mac app is significantly smaller than the Windows version. One of these days I'm meaning to look into why this is).
Yaz
"With a Windows laptop or tablet, you aren't tethered to a big-screen TV. You could theoretically take these PlayStation games anywhere"
The article says it requires a DualShock 4 controller. I don't see how that will work with all Windows tablets, especially seeing as ARM-based Windows tablets (like the Surface 1 and 2 non-Pro) allow only XInput controllers (that is, Xbox 360 controllers and one Logitech model).
Sony also announced today a USB dongle for Mac and Windows that permits wireless DS4 connections. Assuming the tablet has a USB port you could presumably use that (although as of yet there is no word if it requires any special drivers or not).
Yaz
I'm not so sold on the evils of writing passwords down as it requires the Evil Actor to have physical access in order to exploit it. And as we all know, once you have physical access it is pretty well game over for security in general.
That depends entirely on the purpose of the Evil Actor. If Evil Actor's purpose is to break into your corporate network and steal data from the outside, you're probably correct.
If, however, the Evil Actor is the guy at the next desk who wants to do something nefarious and pin it on you, then all they have to do is offer you a nice tall beverage, and wait for you to leave to use the washroom.
Yaz
I honestly have yet to figure out what the fuck the point in most of these emojis is. In the past everybody just used a combination of existing ascii symbols to show the mood of your message, and I am still trying to figure out what the new emojis solve that that system didn't solve.
You need to understand a bit about where and why emoji's started showing up in the first place. And to do that, we go back to pre-millennium Japan.
Japanese is, to put it bluntly, an insanely crazy written language. Modern Japanese uses no less than four different scripts/alphabets, and in any given sentence different types of words may need to be in different alphabets!. They are:
And if all that wasn't bad enough, there is also hentaigana, which are obsolete kana sometimes used to give things like restaurants and such an old-timey feel (something akin to 'Ye Olde...' in English). And because the different scripts in Japanese are used for different types of words, you frequently have to switch between one and the others in a single sentence. In short, written Japanese is f'd up.
This is where Emoji came from. Imagine a late 1990's cell phone with the 12 standard buttons, and having to send text messages to someone in Japanese. How do you use those 12 buttons to select from thousands of Kanji symbols? How do you switch between Katakana and Hiragana and Romanji? I'll admit I'm not a Japanese speaker (I've studied the symbology, but not the language itself), but I'd think even typing "Hey, let's meet up with Akira at the McDonalds" would take a week on a standard flip-phone keypad. Thus emoji was invented to provide visual shortcuts for writing things that would otherwise be a major PITA to type in Japanese.
So basically, because written Japanese is so incredibly f'd up with four simultaneous scripts in modern usage...the Japanese decided to get around it by adding another script system.
Early iOS releases implemented Emoji to satisfy the Japanese market, but in can you don't recall that far back, it was originally only available if you set your system language to Japanese. In those early days, someone figured out how to write an app to enable the emoji keyboard in other languages, and eventually due to demand (which I'm assuming was mostly 12 to 14 year-olds) Apple eventually opened it up to everyone. At which point, hundreds of millions of people with sane written languages that use compact alphabets decided they were cute, and that they had to use them as much as possible.
Like yourself, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon about the whole Emoji thing. I can understand why the Japanese needed to invent it, as their writing system is horrendous. I don't tend to directly use it myself, preferring to use old-style emoticons in personal correspondence; however, at this point most e-mail and chat systems will "upgrade" typed emoticons to emoji.
So there you go. A brief history of emoji.
Yaz
I've been a developer on some pretty damn big projects. The kind of projects used by Fortune 500 companies -- everything from end-user facing applications all the down to low-level infrastructure projects.
If there's one thing I've noticed about all of these large projects over the years, it's that there is rarely ever only one programming language in use. Web apps will use Javascript on the front end and one or more language son the back-end. Large scale C/C++ apps will have a variety of scripts surrounding them. Every project needs an installer, some form of scripting for the build processes, deployment, automated QA, and (frequently) database management. There may even be a mobile app attached to the project. I've had to switch between C/C++, Bash scripting, Java (with JNI), SQL, and REXX, all in the same project.
The point being, if you work on a large enough project, and aren't a junior developer, you're probably switching between a bunch of different languages already. Those languages are probably fairly stable (i.e: you probably won't see too often where you change a massive project from Java to C#), although I've certainly introduced new languages and processes to big projects to make "dumb" processes smarter. The ability to do that, however, often comes when you get to a point in your career where you can specify and/or contribute to significant architectural changes.
I've also been fortunate enough to work at a few places where you can spend 10% of your time working on personal interest projects. If you're fortunate enough to be in such an organization, this is a great time to try out new languages that interest you. If not, find (or start) a project in the interesting language of your choice, and work on it in your own time. If you make it Open Source, and put it on GitHub or the like, you can include it as experience on a resume.
Yaz
There are lose-lose situations. But someone who is actually worried about self defense isn't whipping their gun out as soon as they hear a shot. They are going to take cover and assess who the shooter is before drawing a weapon.
Which in this specific case wouldn't have been of any help, which was my point. From across a dark club with dance floor lighting filled with panicking people, you're not going to be able to assess squat. Indeed, reports now have it that two security guards on site did indeed have guns on them, and it helped them not one whit. And the shooter in this case doesn't have the same consideration for the safety of others that you do; the scenario is already lopsided in their favour by the facts that a) they already intend on killing as many people as possible, and b) they may not have the intention to get out of the situation alive to being with.
Yaz
Sorry to break it to you, but sometimes there are lose-lose situations.
Sorry to break it to YOU, but abject helplessness is an idiotic survival strategy. If you can't return fire, you're done for. If you can return fire, your chances of stopping the attack go from nil to non-nil.
Evidence from this very incident proves you wrong. Nobody fired back, and yet many people survived, many with no injuries at all. That's certainly not a mathematical definition of 'nil'.
Yaz