I don't use anything full-screen. The point of the big monitor is to fit lots of stuff, not to make a little bit of stuff really big. My 30" monitor normally contains nothing but terminal and editor windows, using a small font.

My desktop machine actually has three monitors connected. A 30" in the middle, in landscape orientation and 24" monitors on the side, in portrait orientation. I do have to move my head to look at all of this screen space, including to look at different areas of the 30". I will replace the 30" with a 40" sometime soon, and won't move further back from it, or increase the font size... I'll just be able to fit more windows.

Right next to you. And she's just waiting for something to do...

The limit of visual perception is measured in pixels per angular distance. It doesn't depend on the number of pixels, but on their size and distance... at least until you get to the level where your entire field of view is covered by pixels that are small enough to be invisible at their given distance.

At the distance from my eyes to my desktop monitor (about 20 inches), I expect I can resolve pixels down do about 200 pixels per inch. My 30" monitor is about 26" wide by about 16" tall, which means that to reach the limit of my visual perception (assuming my estimate of 200 ppi is accurate; it may be a little low), I need 5200 horizontal pixels, about 5K. I'm hoping that within the next couple of years I can upgrade to a 40" monitor, though, and 8K would be about right for a display that size.

More pixels would be good if I sometimes want to lean closer to see fine details (and I do).

And, really, we absolutely do want sufficient resolution that pixels are indistinguishable, so we can have what appear to be perfectly smooth curves and arbitrarily fine lines. Smooth text, in particular, is much easier on the eyes. I have a MacBook Pro with a high-resolution display on my desk right next to my big monitor and it is sooo much more pleasant to look at.

These days I use git for that, too.

This is only tangentially-related, but a good story, and it's been a few years since I posted it.

About 20 years ago, I worked for a company which I shall not name, which used CVS as its source repository. All of the developers' home directories were NFS mounted from a central Network Appliance shared storage (Network Appliance was the manufacturer of the NAS device), so everyone worked in and built on that one central storage pool. The CVS repository also lived in that same pool. Surprisingly, this actually worked pretty well, performance-wise.

One of the big advantages touted for this approach was that it meant that there was a single storage system to back up. Backing up the NA device automatically got all of the devs' machines and a bunch more. Cool... as long as it gets done.

One day, the NA disk crashed. I don't know if it was a RAID or what, but whatever the case, it was gone. CVS repo gone. Every single one of 50+ developers' home directories, including their current checkouts of the codebase, gone. Probably 500 person-years of work, gone.

Backups to the rescue! Oops. It turns out that the sysadmin had never tested the backups. His backup script hadn't had permission to recurse into all of the developers' home directories, or into the CVS repo, and had simply skipped everything it couldn't read. 500 person-years of work, really gone.

Almost.

Luckily, we had a major client running an installation of our hardware and software that was an order of magnitude bigger and more complex than any other client. To support this big client, we constantly kept one or two developers on site at their facility on the other side of the country. So those developers could work and debug problems, they had one of our workstations on-site, and of course *that* workstation used local disk. The code on that machine was about a week old, and it was only the tip of the tree, since CVS doesn't keep a local copy of the history, only a single checked-out working tree.

But although we lost the entire history, including all previous tagged releases (there were snapshots of the releases of course... but they were all on the NA box), at least we had an only slightly outdated version of the current source code. The code was imported into a new CVS repo, and we got back to work.

In case you're wondering about the hapless sysadmin, no he wasn't fired. That week. He was given a couple of weeks to get the system back up and running, with good backups. He was called on the carpet and swore on his mother's grave to the CEO that the backups were working. The next day, my boss deleted a file from his home directory and then asked the sysadmin to recover it from backup. The sysadmin was escorted from the building two minutes after he reported that he was unable to recover the file.

Do a lot of the bars you go to put roofies in your drinks? If so... you might want to consider frequenting a higher caliber of establishment. Note that this doesn't make the victim not a victim, or the perpetrator any less wrong. It just means that the victim should consider making safer choices.

You don't have to rely on society/technology to keep you safe.

That makes a nice slashdot karma-generating soundbite, but it really doesn't answer the question. The companies in question stand to benefit from net neutrality, and aren't likely to be rewarding an opponent unless they felt like there was some other reason to do it.

Luckily, if you RTFA (I know, I know), you find "Theran pointed to the role McCarthy played in advancing a key tech-industry priority: patent reform. Under McCarthy's floor leadership, the House passed the Innovation Act 325-91 in December 2013. Tech companies hope that the bill, which is designed to cut back on frivolous lawsuits from so-called "patent trolls," will soon pass the Senate."

So there's the answer to the headline: Because he helped with patent reform, which the Internet Association also cares about. They're probably also hoping that by giving him the award they can build some goodwill which may allow them to influence his future opposition to neutrality -- or they may figure that with the Title II change, neutrality is no longer a concern, so they can butter him up for other battles where he might be on their side.

I suppose. However, I'd say that if your life choices make this a question you find yourself asking regularly, you might want to think about why that is... Just sayin'

Apple's SecureVault achieves it reasonably well, I think, as will the Trusted Execution Environment-based solution I'm building for Android. Perfect security is, in general, impossible, and it's particularly difficult on mass-produced consumer hardware, but useful levels are achievable.

Productive activity and retirement are not mutually exclusive.

Do you spend every waking minute playing, to the exclusion of all productive activity?

Heavy reading of non-graphic material is strongly correlated with lots of positive cognitive ability development, and it's almost independent of the type of book, though a variety is best. There can also be a great deal of value in gaming, but it depends heavily on the nature of the game. Most of the games people play for 14 hours per day are highly repetitive electronic Skinner boxes, and as far as I've seen there is no evidence of significant benefit from their play. Other than enjoyment, of course, which is well and good in moderation.

Sure it can. There's no practical upper bound on the amount of functionality that can be packed into a single instruction. CISC instruction sets with incredibly powerful instructions have been developed and used. The VAX instruction set is perhaps the best example. It enabled an assembler language that was darned near a high-level language, with single instructions that took up to a half dozen arguments and implemented sophisticated looping and searching operations in single instructions. Some of my favorite were the linked list management instructions. A common introductory programming assignment is to write a function to insert an element into a linked list. When writing in VAX assembler there's no need for such a function because there's an instruction that does it.

A more modern -- and highly relevant to this article -- example is the AES-NI instructions, which exist on essentially all modern desktop and laptop CPUs, and many of the newest mobile CPUs as well. They implement a full round of AES encryption or decryption in a single instruction.

As long as the key is as long as the message, and all of the key is unpredictable, and is never reused, then you have a provably unbreakable encryption system called a one-time pad. However, if you ever reuse the key someone can XOR the two ciphertexts together and the result will be the XOR of the two plaintexts, which can often be disentangled. Also, if the key is somewhat predictable, plaintext can be recovered. The US actually managed to decrypt some texts encrypted with a Russian one-time pad system, because the keys were produced by humans pounding "randomly" on typewriters... except humans aren't very good at generating random keystreams.

To be precise, it's illegal to bypass flimsy methods intended to enforce copyright. Since this tool isn't marketed as a DRM system, the DMCA doesn't apply.