But it has some serious limitations, like the number of transactions per second - even with the recent upgrade it still seems dismal. I won't do any predictions though - I am completely mystified by the continuous price increase, I was pretty sure the price would have "corrected" by now...
I beg to differ. There are perfectly safe filters available which you can use to watch the sun indefinitely. Like many into amateur astronomy I've watched the sun for hours using a Baader astrosolar ND5.0 filter (or an ND3.8 + narrowband) even without an eclipse (brighter than an eclipse sun of course) and that filter doesn't even fit the latest stricter ISO (it lets a harmless amount of UV to allow things like CA II K line imaging). And as far as I know at least shade 14 welding masks are also fine. I did order cheap unbranded eclipse specs out of curiosity and they were indeed obviously dangerous, but that doesn't mean there are no safe ways to observe the sun directly.
Thousand Oaks and Baader glasses just got caught up some sort of frantic Amazon response when the retailer realized some people are selling unsafe crap and they don't have the expertise (and don't care enough to source it it seems) to tell the good from the bad. I tried out of curiosity to order a pack of glasses from an ebay seller in the UK (I'll be going to the US in a couple of days). I got glasses with all the marks (CE, ISO...), through which you could see a CFL bulb and its surrounding glow! If they let that much visible light through, who knows about IR/UV - well I could test, but not worth my time... (Note to readers, through real ND5.0 or denser glasses you would only be able to see something as bright as the filament of an incandescent bulb, nothing else - oh, and the sun of course). The experiment done, I got a refund and ordered from a proper retailer:) They will complement my Baader Astrosolar filters for the telescope and Thousand Oaks for the binoculars. It is interesting that Baader had to modify their classic Astrosolar filter that we use in telescopes, in order to get the strict ISO rating, as they allowed a little bit of UV to pass which meant you could take photos at near UV (e.g. Calcium II K-line).
If you go by latitude, Barcelona is at a northerner latitude than NYC. And yet, NYC has lows as cold as -15F (I've been in a couple such winters myself there), while Barcelona has only had 1 day in the last 30 years with a "freezing" temperature (30F). Comparing climate by latitude is like comparing engines by their displacement (car analogy FTW!).
As I said, I was fortunate enough to own a Maemo/Meego N9. It was a full linux machine (I could compile and run any standard package that I'd have on a linux server - even graphical apps but they were not easy to use unless you vnc-ed to the phone, which was of course possible), with an amazing QT-based UI (called "swipe" IIRC) - amazing in that it was as fluid as iOS (well, there were native apps), while having much superior multi-tasking / parallel running and app-switching capabilities, e.g. the apps did not have to pause to go in the background, you could have several of them running at the same time in smaller windows (including video playback, games etc) and easily switch from one to the other. Technically, iOS could be as good as that, it is at heart a bsd-derived OS, but I guess the money is not in tech geeks who'd prefer that to the "dumber" experience it currently provides. And we are stuck with Android, with all its faults (I briefly looked at Tizen, oh, lord, that is much worse).
Is the summary correct, is he claiming that you can do "more" if you don't mass produce something??? If Apple wanted to add some more exotic technology, they could simply lower their industry leading profit margin and instead of selling a $220 device for $650 they could sell a $400-$500 device for $800 or something like that. To answer the question, I only have an iPhone (6 Plus) because my work provides it for development and although I am free to use it as a personal phone, I prefer a $200 Xiaomi Mi5 as it can do so much more. And Android is by far not my ideal mobile OS either (I still miss my Maemo/Meego N9 - damn you Stephen Elop for burying it), but I still find an Android phone more useful than an iOS one, even if I get the latter for free. So, no, $1200 would make it even more unlikely for me to get an iPhone. Which is a shame, as the apps that exist for both iOS and Android are most of the time better on iOS (for rather obvious - to devs at least - reasons), but there are many things you simply cannot do.
I read that article a week ago (possibly not from slashdot, so at least it might not be a dupe) and its conclusion seemed preposterous to me. You see sometimes websites or services (e.g. Steam) making claims about "market' behavior by extrapolating their own user data, and to a point you can say that they might represent a limited market - e.g. Steam pretty much has the "gaming market". But a benchmark making claims about market share after the release OF A NEW CPU ARCHITECTURE??? I want AMD to succeed, as without them Intel would charge us an arm and a leg for even their slow CPUs (they once did for those of you old enough to remember) - plus various other reasons - and have historically owned more AMD cpus than Intel ones, but it is obvious people would be benchmarking like crazy an "unknown" such as Ryzen, even compared to new Intel CPUs whose performance is more or less expected...
Prisons have instituted ridiculously expensive phone plans to help pay for their costs.
Well, no, the ridiculously expensive phone plans are there purely for profit, there is no such concept as "help paying for costs" when we are mostly talking about highly profitable private prisons. The whole problem starts by having for-profit prisons in the first place - it is wrong for so many reasons, e.g. they benefit if you are a repeat "customer", what they call "profit" I call state tax dollar waste etc.
The vast majority of websites become crippled when I browse their mobile version, and I am talking about those "responsive designs" (which the summary seems to indicate they are the "good option"), not just AMP. Even on my 5" phone - i.e. a prime target for "mobile web" content - I usually have to switch to the regular website to retain functionality that I consider essential (but the designers apparently do not). I don't mind having to pan & zoom a bit when everything I need is right there on the page - the only difference is that I use landscape mode. And that includes slashdot...
Tabs are for indentation. Everyone can choose how to display them, either as 2, 4, 8 (?!) spaces wide, by setting up their editor appropriately, and yet they all commit the same thing, one tab for each level, so there is no whitespace modification ever. Also, even people who use spaces in practice press the tab button. And the tab button produces spaces. Not OCD friendly. At the same time, ALIGNING things requires spaces. You align things (e.g. operators) that are at the same indent level (denoted with tabs) and everyone sees them the same, just at a different distance from the start of the line depending on their tab setting. At my previous job I had written the style manual, so we went with that. In my current work, it is all spaces and I don't really mind, as at least we use the same width that I'd use to render tabs, so everything looks nice. HOWEVER, it is not very rare for people to re-install, update etc their editor, continue hitting tab without realizing they had lost the spaces configuration, and their first commit changes all the whitespace...
Huh, I remembered something interesting, the reason I got rid of the Atom editor, which is also Electron-based it seems, is because it was sluggish and using a lot of CPU for just an editor (switched to Sublime). And this was on the same iMac:) So an Electron-based app does have the potential to be slow on my machine, but so far slack seems fast. Well, not compared to an IRC client not written in Java of course, but still;)
Hmm, I have not tried it in a browser and have not tried any old versions. So, three months ago I installed the MacOS desktop client on a reasonably spec'd iMac, and it does not even register a blip in my activity monitor's CPU graph. And the Windows guys are also happy it seems (our last "retro" was about comms, and slack got in the "good" list by everyone), so maybe it was some time ago that you tried it? Or it could be the Windows version and our windows guys are just not picky about such stuff so they don't notice - they are not developers after all:) Qapla'!
While I agree that the 9 billion valuation is ludicrous, I use slack at work and I can verify it has great search capabilities (one of its best features), does not have round corners (at least the desktop client I use), there is no slowness in the UI that I can see, and everybody seems to love it at work. And you can easily hook things to it, like continuous integration systems, monitoring systems etc so devops seem to enjoy working on it. I don't know if there's anything similar, i.e. evolved IRC for companies, but I have to admit, despite my original hesitation (in my previous - smaller - company we just used an email-based system for written communication), it does seem to help productivity in a company with groups in different locations. But, again, 9 billion? WTH?
I am still holding on to my Mid 2010 Mac Pro with its 2xCPU, 2xSSDs, 3xHDs, Bluray etc It even has an HD-DVD which can play my HD-DVD (bought for nothing after the "defeat" of HD-DVD), but that requires a boot to Windows, which I haven't done for at least a couple of years I admit... I am also holding on to my Late 2012 Mac Mini with a Quad Core i7 and 16GB RAM. These were my favorite Apple lines, however I can't upgrade since with a newer version I would get a downgrade in either performance, or expandability/function, or both. So, still waiting... Thanks for looking after power users Apple...
Actually, prior to Rotten Tomatoes we had IMDB, you just had to wait at least until after the first weekend to get a valid rating. And the IMDB rating (esp. with the demographic breakdowns) is a much better judge of quality/entertainment etc. If you want to go before IMDB, we still had the critics and the critic aggregators. I would buy a magazine the day before the new movies were out and it would have a sum of the reviews of all the critics, which was similar to Rotten Tomatoes, just with a smaller sample. Even better, I had a specific critic whom I followed and who did not really have the same taste as me, but having read him enough I had figured out where we differed and I could understand whether I would like something from his review, regardless of the rating he gave at the end which might not be relevant to me. But you are right in that the effect of streaming, big-screen TVs etc is great. I used to go to the cinema almost every week in the 90s - I'd say I averaged about 40 films/year. And I know that many of those were not that good beforehand, via the methods described even though RT was not available. Now, I have so many sources and a home theater to watch them that cinema is not really required. In fact, regular cinema is worse both in audio and video (smaller in angular size) than my living room setup, so I wouldn't waste my money on getting a worse experience and when I go, I only go to a giant IMAX screen.
It is actually "(Late) Spring bank holiday". The UK has depoliticized and dereligionized most of their holidays (notable exceptions are Christmas and Easter), so there is a bunch of "bank holidays" around the year that fall on Mondays (to provide extended weekends). This particular holiday seems to have replaced "Whit Monday" (day after Pentecost), which was a moveable Christian holiday. So, as you should expect, it is not related to the US Memorial Day. The equivalent to the US Memorial Day for the UK (and Commonwealth nations) is the "Remembrance day" on November 11th (end date of WWI), which is not a bank holiday (so you normally go to work that day, usually wearing a poppy).
Back to the topic, I was under the impression that Apple had made it a big deal a while ago that unlike other manufacturers who used Gorilla Glass, they were going to use something better - sapphire glass or something like that?
I would personally prefer the attacker to be able to replace the home button than e,g, to sever my finger, but then again I would not use a fingerprint as any sort of "security";) But, in seriousness, if, despite how easy it is to get someone's fingerprints, you decide to have it as an option for login, yes, it makes perfect sense to have the reader/home button locked to the device and tamper-proof. I can find many many things to call Apple out on, this is not one of them.
Similar experience, I thought maybe I'd look up at Tizen apps "for fun" and after about a day or so I was certain it was not going to be any sort of fun! Well, unless S&M is your thing... And here is an educational article about the EFL libraries you get to use when designing native Tizen apps.
Yeah, it is not clear from the summary, reading it I thought it was about hybrid drives, but the sizes don't make sense. So, these are M.2 expansion cards which offer a big and very fast cache for your existing hard drive.
- Limit H1bs per company, preferably limit in proportion to company's US tax contribution (or total US tax contribution of company's employees if you prefer). - Prioritize people with grad degrees from US universities. (taxpayers often partly subsidize the education of top students in state universities - it makes no sense to not try to keep them afterwards). - Make H1bs more desirable by making switching company easier, giving dependents work status. Currently the restrictions don't help attracting truly highly-skilled (thus highly-paid) workers who would easily find opportunities (and be treated better) in other countries - rather they are only appealing to the average Indian outsourcing firm low-pay employee.
Bad code is already perversive, it is much more common than good code. So, you write an AI that takes various snippets of, more likely than not, bad code and combines them. And this AI is still written by coders who, more likely than not, are not the best coders themselves, so the sum will probably be even worse than the parts... If Microsoft has great engineers working on fancy stuff like that, perhaps they should instead throw a couple to the Skype team for example (I don't know what they are doing, but they are slowly degrading what was a useful service). In any case, good coders already reuse libraries etc and end up doing the job of several coders that are inventing the wheel. And it is much easier for the non-technical person to communicate with a coder to describe the requirements, because an AI system would still need a specification language to describe things - it would just be a higher level programming language in a way. I remember I was told that when SQL first came out (SEQUEL) there was the idea that business users would be able to communicate with databases so db programmers wouldn't be needed... yeah, right.
Slashdot Mirror
But it has some serious limitations, like the number of transactions per second - even with the recent upgrade it still seems dismal. I won't do any predictions though - I am completely mystified by the continuous price increase, I was pretty sure the price would have "corrected" by now...
I beg to differ. There are perfectly safe filters available which you can use to watch the sun indefinitely. Like many into amateur astronomy I've watched the sun for hours using a Baader astrosolar ND5.0 filter (or an ND3.8 + narrowband) even without an eclipse (brighter than an eclipse sun of course) and that filter doesn't even fit the latest stricter ISO (it lets a harmless amount of UV to allow things like CA II K line imaging). And as far as I know at least shade 14 welding masks are also fine.
I did order cheap unbranded eclipse specs out of curiosity and they were indeed obviously dangerous, but that doesn't mean there are no safe ways to observe the sun directly.
Thousand Oaks and Baader glasses just got caught up some sort of frantic Amazon response when the retailer realized some people are selling unsafe crap and they don't have the expertise (and don't care enough to source it it seems) to tell the good from the bad. :) They will complement my Baader Astrosolar filters for the telescope and Thousand Oaks for the binoculars.
I tried out of curiosity to order a pack of glasses from an ebay seller in the UK (I'll be going to the US in a couple of days). I got glasses with all the marks (CE, ISO...), through which you could see a CFL bulb and its surrounding glow! If they let that much visible light through, who knows about IR/UV - well I could test, but not worth my time... (Note to readers, through real ND5.0 or denser glasses you would only be able to see something as bright as the filament of an incandescent bulb, nothing else - oh, and the sun of course).
The experiment done, I got a refund and ordered from a proper retailer
It is interesting that Baader had to modify their classic Astrosolar filter that we use in telescopes, in order to get the strict ISO rating, as they allowed a little bit of UV to pass which meant you could take photos at near UV (e.g. Calcium II K-line).
Not only that. This study may simply indicate that football players tend to develop CTE when they die, which isn't that worrying.
If you go by latitude, Barcelona is at a northerner latitude than NYC. And yet, NYC has lows as cold as -15F (I've been in a couple such winters myself there), while Barcelona has only had 1 day in the last 30 years with a "freezing" temperature (30F).
Comparing climate by latitude is like comparing engines by their displacement (car analogy FTW!).
The simple truth is there are two Americas. There is the one you live in, and the one they live in.
Wait, I thought it's North America and South America?
As I said, I was fortunate enough to own a Maemo/Meego N9. It was a full linux machine (I could compile and run any standard package that I'd have on a linux server - even graphical apps but they were not easy to use unless you vnc-ed to the phone, which was of course possible), with an amazing QT-based UI (called "swipe" IIRC) - amazing in that it was as fluid as iOS (well, there were native apps), while having much superior multi-tasking / parallel running and app-switching capabilities, e.g. the apps did not have to pause to go in the background, you could have several of them running at the same time in smaller windows (including video playback, games etc) and easily switch from one to the other. Technically, iOS could be as good as that, it is at heart a bsd-derived OS, but I guess the money is not in tech geeks who'd prefer that to the "dumber" experience it currently provides. And we are stuck with Android, with all its faults (I briefly looked at Tizen, oh, lord, that is much worse).
Is the summary correct, is he claiming that you can do "more" if you don't mass produce something??? If Apple wanted to add some more exotic technology, they could simply lower their industry leading profit margin and instead of selling a $220 device for $650 they could sell a $400-$500 device for $800 or something like that.
To answer the question, I only have an iPhone (6 Plus) because my work provides it for development and although I am free to use it as a personal phone, I prefer a $200 Xiaomi Mi5 as it can do so much more. And Android is by far not my ideal mobile OS either (I still miss my Maemo/Meego N9 - damn you Stephen Elop for burying it), but I still find an Android phone more useful than an iOS one, even if I get the latter for free. So, no, $1200 would make it even more unlikely for me to get an iPhone. Which is a shame, as the apps that exist for both iOS and Android are most of the time better on iOS (for rather obvious - to devs at least - reasons), but there are many things you simply cannot do.
I read that article a week ago (possibly not from slashdot, so at least it might not be a dupe) and its conclusion seemed preposterous to me. You see sometimes websites or services (e.g. Steam) making claims about "market' behavior by extrapolating their own user data, and to a point you can say that they might represent a limited market - e.g. Steam pretty much has the "gaming market". But a benchmark making claims about market share after the release OF A NEW CPU ARCHITECTURE???
I want AMD to succeed, as without them Intel would charge us an arm and a leg for even their slow CPUs (they once did for those of you old enough to remember) - plus various other reasons - and have historically owned more AMD cpus than Intel ones, but it is obvious people would be benchmarking like crazy an "unknown" such as Ryzen, even compared to new Intel CPUs whose performance is more or less expected...
Prisons have instituted ridiculously expensive phone plans to help pay for their costs.
Well, no, the ridiculously expensive phone plans are there purely for profit, there is no such concept as "help paying for costs" when we are mostly talking about highly profitable private prisons.
The whole problem starts by having for-profit prisons in the first place - it is wrong for so many reasons, e.g. they benefit if you are a repeat "customer", what they call "profit" I call state tax dollar waste etc.
The vast majority of websites become crippled when I browse their mobile version, and I am talking about those "responsive designs" (which the summary seems to indicate they are the "good option"), not just AMP. Even on my 5" phone - i.e. a prime target for "mobile web" content - I usually have to switch to the regular website to retain functionality that I consider essential (but the designers apparently do not). I don't mind having to pan & zoom a bit when everything I need is right there on the page - the only difference is that I use landscape mode.
And that includes slashdot...
Tabs are for indentation. Everyone can choose how to display them, either as 2, 4, 8 (?!) spaces wide, by setting up their editor appropriately, and yet they all commit the same thing, one tab for each level, so there is no whitespace modification ever. Also, even people who use spaces in practice press the tab button. And the tab button produces spaces. Not OCD friendly.
At the same time, ALIGNING things requires spaces. You align things (e.g. operators) that are at the same indent level (denoted with tabs) and everyone sees them the same, just at a different distance from the start of the line depending on their tab setting.
At my previous job I had written the style manual, so we went with that. In my current work, it is all spaces and I don't really mind, as at least we use the same width that I'd use to render tabs, so everything looks nice. HOWEVER, it is not very rare for people to re-install, update etc their editor, continue hitting tab without realizing they had lost the spaces configuration, and their first commit changes all the whitespace...
Huh, I remembered something interesting, the reason I got rid of the Atom editor, which is also Electron-based it seems, is because it was sluggish and using a lot of CPU for just an editor (switched to Sublime). And this was on the same iMac :) So an Electron-based app does have the potential to be slow on my machine, but so far slack seems fast. Well, not compared to an IRC client not written in Java of course, but still ;)
Hmm, I have not tried it in a browser and have not tried any old versions. So, three months ago I installed the MacOS desktop client on a reasonably spec'd iMac, and it does not even register a blip in my activity monitor's CPU graph. And the Windows guys are also happy it seems (our last "retro" was about comms, and slack got in the "good" list by everyone), so maybe it was some time ago that you tried it? Or it could be the Windows version and our windows guys are just not picky about such stuff so they don't notice - they are not developers after all :)
Qapla'!
While I agree that the 9 billion valuation is ludicrous, I use slack at work and I can verify it has great search capabilities (one of its best features), does not have round corners (at least the desktop client I use), there is no slowness in the UI that I can see, and everybody seems to love it at work. And you can easily hook things to it, like continuous integration systems, monitoring systems etc so devops seem to enjoy working on it.
I don't know if there's anything similar, i.e. evolved IRC for companies, but I have to admit, despite my original hesitation (in my previous - smaller - company we just used an email-based system for written communication), it does seem to help productivity in a company with groups in different locations. But, again, 9 billion? WTH?
I am still holding on to my Mid 2010 Mac Pro with its 2xCPU, 2xSSDs, 3xHDs, Bluray etc It even has an HD-DVD which can play my HD-DVD (bought for nothing after the "defeat" of HD-DVD), but that requires a boot to Windows, which I haven't done for at least a couple of years I admit... I am also holding on to my Late 2012 Mac Mini with a Quad Core i7 and 16GB RAM. These were my favorite Apple lines, however I can't upgrade since with a newer version I would get a downgrade in either performance, or expandability/function, or both. So, still waiting... Thanks for looking after power users Apple...
Actually, prior to Rotten Tomatoes we had IMDB, you just had to wait at least until after the first weekend to get a valid rating. And the IMDB rating (esp. with the demographic breakdowns) is a much better judge of quality/entertainment etc. If you want to go before IMDB, we still had the critics and the critic aggregators. I would buy a magazine the day before the new movies were out and it would have a sum of the reviews of all the critics, which was similar to Rotten Tomatoes, just with a smaller sample. Even better, I had a specific critic whom I followed and who did not really have the same taste as me, but having read him enough I had figured out where we differed and I could understand whether I would like something from his review, regardless of the rating he gave at the end which might not be relevant to me.
But you are right in that the effect of streaming, big-screen TVs etc is great. I used to go to the cinema almost every week in the 90s - I'd say I averaged about 40 films/year. And I know that many of those were not that good beforehand, via the methods described even though RT was not available. Now, I have so many sources and a home theater to watch them that cinema is not really required. In fact, regular cinema is worse both in audio and video (smaller in angular size) than my living room setup, so I wouldn't waste my money on getting a worse experience and when I go, I only go to a giant IMAX screen.
It is actually "(Late) Spring bank holiday". The UK has depoliticized and dereligionized most of their holidays (notable exceptions are Christmas and Easter), so there is a bunch of "bank holidays" around the year that fall on Mondays (to provide extended weekends). This particular holiday seems to have replaced "Whit Monday" (day after Pentecost), which was a moveable Christian holiday. So, as you should expect, it is not related to the US Memorial Day.
The equivalent to the US Memorial Day for the UK (and Commonwealth nations) is the "Remembrance day" on November 11th (end date of WWI), which is not a bank holiday (so you normally go to work that day, usually wearing a poppy).
Eh, what do you mean? Transparent aluminum has already been invented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Back to the topic, I was under the impression that Apple had made it a big deal a while ago that unlike other manufacturers who used Gorilla Glass, they were going to use something better - sapphire glass or something like that?
I would personally prefer the attacker to be able to replace the home button than e,g, to sever my finger, but then again I would not use a fingerprint as any sort of "security" ;)
But, in seriousness, if, despite how easy it is to get someone's fingerprints, you decide to have it as an option for login, yes, it makes perfect sense to have the reader/home button locked to the device and tamper-proof. I can find many many things to call Apple out on, this is not one of them.
Similar experience, I thought maybe I'd look up at Tizen apps "for fun" and after about a day or so I was certain it was not going to be any sort of fun! Well, unless S&M is your thing... And here is an educational article about the EFL libraries you get to use when designing native Tizen apps.
Yeah, it is not clear from the summary, reading it I thought it was about hybrid drives, but the sizes don't make sense.
So, these are M.2 expansion cards which offer a big and very fast cache for your existing hard drive.
- Limit H1bs per company, preferably limit in proportion to company's US tax contribution (or total US tax contribution of company's employees if you prefer).
- Prioritize people with grad degrees from US universities. (taxpayers often partly subsidize the education of top students in state universities - it makes no sense to not try to keep them afterwards).
- Make H1bs more desirable by making switching company easier, giving dependents work status. Currently the restrictions don't help attracting truly highly-skilled (thus highly-paid) workers who would easily find opportunities (and be treated better) in other countries - rather they are only appealing to the average Indian outsourcing firm low-pay employee.
Or, from the classic TDWTF: MUMPS.
No, Visual Basic has nothing on such "brilliant" languages, in fact it is much more pleasant than many other languages as well - e.g. COBOL.
Bad code is already perversive, it is much more common than good code. So, you write an AI that takes various snippets of, more likely than not, bad code and combines them. And this AI is still written by coders who, more likely than not, are not the best coders themselves, so the sum will probably be even worse than the parts... If Microsoft has great engineers working on fancy stuff like that, perhaps they should instead throw a couple to the Skype team for example (I don't know what they are doing, but they are slowly degrading what was a useful service).
In any case, good coders already reuse libraries etc and end up doing the job of several coders that are inventing the wheel. And it is much easier for the non-technical person to communicate with a coder to describe the requirements, because an AI system would still need a specification language to describe things - it would just be a higher level programming language in a way.
I remember I was told that when SQL first came out (SEQUEL) there was the idea that business users would be able to communicate with databases so db programmers wouldn't be needed... yeah, right.