Is it enough for a glorified 2000€ Chromebook with a nicer UI? Yeah, kind of. But that's a lot of money for a Chromebook (ok, also with a nicer screen). Is it enough for IT people who run Java IDEs, virtual machines, Docker containers, or even Kubernetes or local AI models? Hell no, it's not, period. 16GB might work, 32GB would be more useful. I'm currently running an M1 Pro with 32GB and most of the time it's OK. Yes, I am aware of the architectural difference between a random Intel or AMD vs Apple Silicon. Yes, it's better. No, the base RAM is not enough, not even for the Air, and 8GB is insulting for Pro models. They should make a new MacBook Lite with 8GB for at least 300€ less and bump all the other models to 16GB keeping the prices.

I'm going to be more specific: all the bits involved will be either zero or one ðY£

The apps are designed to push the content they want you to watch. Because they want to push it commercially, and because their CDNs and caches are more efficient when everyone is watching the same. The problem is, I refuse to do that. So I'm all the time fighting the interface. The only useful part for me most of the time is the "continue watching" section, which is very limited. I'd like to be able to manage my streaming content like I manage my Kindle library, or better: my email inbox. When I've found content I want to watch, that's what I want to watch. If it's Family Guy (21 seasons) it's going to take a while. If I'm watching 3 series and I'm interested in 4 movies I want all that together somewhere until I've watched it, then "archive" it. I definitely don't want to fight three screens of new crap just to reach the content I really want. Every single time I open the app. That's what makes me waste several minutes per day. When I'm looking for new content I'm aware of that and it's a totally different activity and I should be able to choose to do it in the interface. It shouldn't be the only thing the interface allows me to do.

Why not standardize optical fiber? We did it in Mallorca. I know I'm comparing a small Mediterranean island to the whole US ðY... but it was a good move. The average speed now is 300 to 800 Mbps symmetric *everywhere* , and speeds up to 1Gbps are available. Not above 1Gbps simply because multi-gigabit routers are more expensive and very few people actually need more than 1Gbps at home, but the infrastructure will support it in the future.

The biggest issue with nuclear isn't safety (at least in the G20). The biggest issue is development and deployment time. If we started a massive nuclear plant building program, the first plants would be coming on-line in 15 to 20 years. In the meantime we will have had to build solar, wind, and hydro to fill in the gap. Long term, nuclear can be part of the mix. But energy solutions need to arrive faster than nuclear can.

So exactly who is paying you Anonymous Cowards to claim it will just be moved to NOAA? There's no evidence to that effect, and plenty of statements from Lord Trump and his mouthpieces to indicate that no money will be spent on climate change research in the future.

No, it doesn't. It just shuts it down.

You apparently didn't notice that Trump was elected by a minority of the voters, the Republicans in the House of Representatives were elected by a minority of the voters, and the Republicans in the Senate were elected by a minority of the voters.

It's not surprising. Authoritarians rarely have much regard for the will of the majority. But minority rule can't last for long. The real majority will have its way, one way or another.

Welcome to permanent minority status, white man. You'd better hope the majority doesn't treat you as badly as you treated them when you had power

You do realize that most of what you posted is a lie, right? Of course you do. Lying is what you do.

The earth has been cooler for the entire period during which anything resembling human beings evolved. Antarctica wasn't in its current position when it was warmer than it is now. And, without human carbon releases the planet maintains a relatively temperate climate over long periods of time through the action of the carbonate-silicate cycle. Of course when you dig up half a billion years worth of stored organic carbon and burn in in a century, the carbonate-silicate cycle ain't gonna fix that.

And of course, continuing to release more CO2, that's your fault, not mine.

NASA is doing climate research because 4 decades of political leaders decided NASA should be doing climate research. If you are deluded enough to think Trump is just going to move things around to NOAA rather than eliminating inconvenient research, you deserve what you get. Good luck with that.

I think this is a bit misleading. I those numbers are based on linear pixel density divided by FOV (for the DK2, 1080 pixels/100 degrees). That is OK to a first approximation, but the LEEP optics in the rift do not evenly map the pixels. The pixels near the center of the screen are much less stretched than the pixels at the edges. This is appropriate because our eyes have better resolution near the center of our retina. If you are principally looking forward as you are when using your real monitor, the effective pixel density of the HMD is going to be much higher than stated above. If you are looking out of the corner of your eye, it will be much worse. Assuming HMD continue to use flat panels with LEEP optics, a proper 4k panel may be adequate to allow proper desktop representations. Of course, all of this math changes once we start using curved OLEDs, etc.

There is also probably some subpixel rendering improvements that can be done as well. I continue to be amazed at how much readability improves when using ClearType or similar subpixel font rendering even on high DPI monitors. Of course, the same subpixel ideas/antialiasing ideas may need to be applied to the entire windowing system allowing LEEP distortion/viewing angle compensation for borders, widgets, etc. There are lots of opportunities here to design a 3D windowing interface and get all of these things right. I'd love to have the 27" and 30" monitors on my desk to be the last I ever buy.

Ninite.com is the only place I go for software on a new Windows installation. Select what you want and it gives you one installer. And you get exactly what you asked for. No search bars or crapware. It has been working great for years now.

But that was not my question. I fully understand how to use lookup tables/Chebyshev expansions of exp(x) and ln(x) to implement pow(x,a)--I have implemented these many times. My question was specifically on your assertion that any differentiable function could be evaluated with as a Newton-style iterative correction and thus provide arbitrarily precise results. I asked specifically to see how that is accomplished for pow(). There is no corrective mechanism in the algorithm you have stated above. The precision you get is a function of the precision that you've baked into your lookup table--and then it become the space/accuracy trade-off. On desktop/server CPUs, that trade-off is more often than not won by Chebyshev expansions, especially in a world of SSE/AXV vector instructions.

So, if there is a technique that does allow me to start with an initial guess x[0] of pow(a,b) and then create corrections of the form: x[i+1] = x[i] - f(x[i]) where f() uses only intrinsic math operations (+,-,*,/,etc) but not transcendentals, then I am quite anxious to see it.

No, you can't. I know this was done in Quake3 fastInvSqrt(), but that is the exception, not the rule in my experience. x = pow(a,b) is a differentiable function. How can you assemble a root function/Newton iteration to successively correct an initial guess for x to arbitrary precision--without actually calling pow() or other transcendental function? I have built Newton (and Halley and Householder) iterations to successively correct estimates for pow(a,b) when b is a particular rational number. You can re-arrange the root function to only have integer powers of the input a and of the solution value x, and those can be computed through successive multiplication. These can be fast, but they are certainly not useful when b is something other than a constant rational number. And even if the exponent value has only a few significant digits, the multiplication cascade starts to get expensive (that was the reason to use Halley/Householder because once you have f' calculated, f'' and f''' are almost free.)

If you know otherwise, please let me know. My current fast pow() function leverages IEEE floating point formats and Chebyshev polynomial expansions to get reasonable results. If there is way to polish an approximate pow() result with Newton (or higher order) iteration, I would be happy to learn it.

Because in a system that allocates GPA fairly (where the average GPA is 2 and the standard deviation is 1) a single grade point in a single class is insignificant, so the difference between an A and a B is 0.02 in you final GPA

That's the problem with people who think that knowing a subject makes it possible to get every answer correct. Some of the best courses I took had questions on exams that were not possible to answer correctly without access to a supercomputer and a few hundred CPU months, where the instructor was looking for depth of knowledge and technique rather than "the right answer". It makes me wonder if those that advocate for absolute grading have ever had to do anything difficult in their lives. Or ever considered that two exams on exactly the same material could have different difficulties.

It's also not true that scores are proportional to knowledge. An obvious example is the multiple choice, multiple answer test where negative scores are quite possible.

Typically I design upper division exams for an average of 50%. I could easily design for 84% "standard," but it would tell me and my students less, because there would be less distinction at the upper end. It would be more difficult for students to know what they do and don't understand well. Yet you would have me punish my students for making the people with As work a little harder and maybe learn a little more.