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Comment Re:why ads as articles on slashdot (Score 1) 78

not technical news

I appreciate the defogging I get from the /.crowd turning PR-speak into technical news. I don't live close to the chip anymore, so I've lost my ability to compare TSMC nm to Intel nm, other than the general knowledge that they aren't 1:1. Thanks to kurkosdr, at least now I know it's "planar equivalent" and that Intel might adopt the same measure.

Comment confirmation bias (Score 1) 160

why should [math] "fit" so well with what we observe in nature...?

That's called confirmation bias. It "fits" so well with our observations of nature because we crafted it to do just that.

Math is a tool we created along the way toward understanding nature and creating society. It's not magic that this tool we created just happens to be valuable not just in counting bits and grains but also planning roads and predicting orbits. We made it that way, and we continue to extend it as needed for work and for play and for wonderment.

Comment help make the water rise for all (Score 2) 64

"This is helping maintain US dominance, particularly from a technological perspective... That's really critical for national and economic security. It also democratizes the technology by making it available to the planet in a way that allows the level of the water to rise for all."

Just wanted to highlight that last bit. I can't tell whether that statement is pro humanity or a threat to exacerbate climate change. It's probably the former, but I hesitate to make the assumptions that requires.

Comment insert proprietary layer here (Score 1) 31

So... a layer between the OS and the application? To make the applications more consistent from device to device? Don't we already have a bunch of those?

I read it as another attempt to wedge themselves between the device (usually a web browser) and the applications. Tack on authentication services and integrate office applications and there you go, all the MS embedded sales operatives disguised as sysadmins are happy again.

Comment Somebody's gotta sweat the details. (Score 1) 283

Somebody's gotta sweat the details. That's where a professional comes in.

But hey, gotta start somewhere. Use whatever tools you understand to handle the problem simply. Maybe it'll be good enough for long enough to gather resources to handle the creeping corner cases. And hey, maybe that journey will inspire some to enter the field and later handle the messes we old-timers leave for them.

Here's some pithy comments to mock the arguments.

Sure, I could build a calculator application in middle school after teaching myself Basic, but I [s]would've hit a wall[/s] wish I would've made that another opportunity to learn once I needed to handle fractional values in arbitrary bases. These days there's a library for that.

If you don't know the field well enough to argue that Perl is the right language for writing a Linux kernel module, you're not a real programmer. And if you're doing that because you believe it, I hope you have a friend nearby to talk you down before you're laughed out of town. Just be ready for the hero's welcome when utf8 and regexes are supported in the kernel.

Who's going to teach the codeless tools how to handle all those different ways people unfamiliar with ISO-8601 write dates and times?

Who's going to research and implement even a small fraction of the way the many cultures handle names? Go ahead, try that for data entry, then try it for search. Then interoperate with all the other hacks people in other jurisdictions have cobbled together to deal with that headache.

Now who's going to go back and do it right, then retrofit that mess?

Comment Dewey Inconceivable Hypothesis (Score 1) 209

A news organization had a deadline and made a prediction based on data then available to it. The organization's proxy considered the prediction sufficiently likely that they made an editorial decision to proclaim Dewey as a fact. Another observer observed an incompatible likelihood. How was reality reconciled?

Comment Re:americans will have to learn how to pronounce . (Score 1) 237

Airlines aren't special. All of the economy is hurting and going to hurt more. Support the people through tough times and we'll bounce back just fine.

All those terrible things the parent mentioned? we should not have to care. Give people a lifeline, not corps. Corps are a gamble, whether they are private or traded publicly. Weren't ready for the disaster? tough. Invested in the gamble? tough. Loaned to the corp? that was a gamble too, so tough. There's no reason the people at large should be on the hook for others' gambles.

People out of work? This is an excellent opportunity for governments to get back to their jobs of building and maintaining infrastructure, regulating markets so they cannot take the rest of us down with them when they fail.
  Jobs needed? Hunt down and repair infrastructure debt. Find and fix the structural fails that let some subvert our openness against us. When the old system fails, adjust and try again; don't go throwing good money chasing the bad.

That said, we are stuck with messes like that for the time being. If businesses need bailouts, force them to restructure so that the public doesn't bear the brunt of their next big failure. We should've done that with the banks. We should be doing that as a prerequisite for all special considerations we give to any companies.

Comment They didn't review the state of the art first. (Score 1) 391

The researchers should've reviewed the state of the art first. They lumped together a whole bunch of different concepts and drew irrelevant conclusions. And their methodology was sloppy even given their assumptions-- but that's been discussed.

There's typesetting. There's a distinction between en-space and em-space. There's leading, a similar issue for vertical spacing between lines. There's ligatures, where some characters next to each other merge for readability. There's justification, where the space between words, sentences, and even letters varies just to make lines flush on both right and left. And others. Perhaps start by asking yourself, what would \LaTeX do.

Then there's those of us who type mostly in fixed-width fonts. For me, that's mostly because I code a lot. But when I write a long bit of text I will often write it in a fixed-width font just so I can use a decent editor, then copy+paste. Yes, I consistently double-space! because it's the only way to make fixed-width fonts have a readable sentence separator when I write comments and inline documentation. (And yes, that lower case "b" in "because" after the bang and space is proper. I'll leave the research to you.)

So no, the original article doesn't even ask a valid question.

Comment Re:New UI is crap (Score 1) 137

Also:

* High contrast theme is even less high contrast than the prior iteration. In the list of emails, read emails have a slight grey tinge compared to the blinding white of unread emails.

* Zooming to 200% changes the list of emails from one line to two lines, even with compact density setting.

* Changing the theme doesn't change the blinding white background of emails. Go to the dark or terminal theme, let your eyes adjust, then try to read an email. Instant retina burn.

It's like they're progressively trying to sabotage usability ever more with each UI iteration. Google, please bring back the original, even if just as a theme.

I guess I'm going to have to find a real email application again and use imap. Gmail was wonderful when it first came out, but now it's just sad.

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