NASA were if not the one, then one of the first who discovered the "hole" in the Ozone layer and raised alarm about it.
This discovery was a tremendously important piece of weather science. You can't argue with that.
I would say that "The Queen's English" is the reference.
French was the language of the French king and the region in which he lived, not of all of his subjects within France. There were many widely differing dialects all over France when the king formed the French Academy.
There has been some speculation that the name would have something to do with AMD. AMD has their own low(er)-level graphics API called Mantle, referring to the Earth's mantle. Vulkan is the work for volcano in some languages, and a volcano spews out magma from Earth's innards.
When Vulkan became public, AMD announced right then that they are stopping development on Mantle to focus on Vulkan.
It has been speculated that spurring the creation of Vulkan and the low-level API in DirectX 12 would have been AMDs intention with Mantle all along.
PowerVR is the #1 GPU on mobile phones and tablets. For instance, all Apple iPhones and iPads have had embedded PowerVR GPUs in their SoCs.
Imagination Technologies (PowerVR) posted this today with more in-depth info:
http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr...
The purpose of Vulkan is apparently to be a low-level alternative to the high-level APIs OpenGL and OpenGL ES.
Game consoles such as the Playstation series have had both high-level and low-level graphics API:s for many years. Using the low-level API means that you can squeeze out more performance, perhaps at the expense of more developer time. The application takes over more duties, such as resource management etc.
If your app is a game, then your resource management and shaders are often pretty much static anyway.
C++ isn't really one language. The language has evolved in several ways over the years. C++11 is vastly different from the first incarnation.
In real-world programming you might therefore encounter many different styles: C++ used as a better C, C++ but with the coding style dictated by the C libraries that are used, C++ as "C with classes", C++ with STL, C++ with STL and Boost, and then C++11.
I would suggest C++11 or at least C++ with Boost. C++11 is the most modern, and shares some traits with other modern languages such as C#, Python and Ruby but which older versions of C++ lack. Also, several of the more recent additions to C++'s standard library have come from Boost.
C++ is also an incredibly complex language, with many workings that are more or less implicit. An assignment, parameter passing or return could involve several calls to virtual functions into the classes being used.
But once you have learned the philosophy behind programming in C++ and how to do it correctly, you will find that C++'s way is very powerful.
Objective-C is like "C + Smalltalk", and is mainly used by Apple because of historical reasons.
The biggest problem with the new icons is not lack of beauty but that the overly stylistic design has made them more difficult to visually parse.
The purpose of icons is to make recognition of objects on the screen easier. The use of three dimensions, contrasting edges, shading and shadows are significant visual aids - and those are the things that these new icons lack the most. It takes more than Photoshop skills to earn the title of UX Designer.
It is not about having ads, but the nature of the ads. Ads that blink, flash, have lots of moving objects
There is a reason why some browsers have had the feature to disable GIF animation for many years. Until recently, the majority of animated ads were made in Adobe Flash, which you could have configured as click-to-play.
With HTML5 and the most popular browsers, there is no click-to-play.
Different schools of touch-typing assign the digit 6 key to different hands. This goes back a long way.
We talked about this at a keyboard-oriented discussion forum recently and one user had found two different touch-typing manuals in English from 1889 and 1893 that were different about this key.
The original Scholes and Glidden QWERTY layout used the letter I as the digit 1. The numeric row started with the digit 2, so the whole row was shifted one step to the left compared to modern keyboards.
So originally, the number 6 was truly on the left side but moved to the right when the numeric row got a proper 1-key.
I once did a survey of split ergonomic keyboards. The most popular series: the Microsoft Natural Keyboards, has it on the left.
Out of 24 keyboard models, 16 had the number-6 key on the left side, 7 had it on the right side and one even had it on both.
Most people don't use the number pad on a full-size keyboard.
The function keys are largely superfluous if you are using anything but MS Windows.
Most people press the Space bar in exact the position where it is located on this keyboard.
Using the mouse too far to the right, past arrow and numpad contributes to shoulder problems.
This form factor is actually quite popular among professionals who do a lot of typing. Just look at the Happy Hacking Keyboard, Poker and Ducky Mini, to name a few. They are small premium keyboards, and they sell.
The big feature of this keyboard that separates it from others is that it splits into two. I can tell you from having tried many ergonomic keyboards that just separating the hands a bit is the most significant feature that an ergonomic keyboard could have. Besides that, you can position and tilt the halves the way you want.
You could view this keyboard as a more portable alternative to the Microsoft Natural Keyboard if you will.
3D-printing is overkill.
When I buy a new mouse, I remove the mousewheel. Then I build a middle mouse button that fits in its place. I cut pieces of styrene and put them together with plastic cement ("model glue").
I use the middle mouse button mostly to open new tabs/windows in web browsing where invoking the scroll wheel inadvertently causes the page to scroll away from where I'm clicking. That is very annoying.
Most mice I have used use the same type of microswitch for the "middle button" as for the left and right buttons, but in most mice the buttons are levers with a rod on the microswitch.
These levers are usually the same on the left and right buttons, but very different on the middle press so the sensation is very different.
Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel
