Comment Re:Unicomp keyboards (Score 1) 190
I have taken apart a black endura pro and
Comment Re:Syntax looks gnarly (Score 1) 194
What I'm saying is
Comment Re:Cures whatever ails ya (Score 4, Insightful) 194
The author has worked on SML/NJ internals, has a strong background in type theory, and has written similarish software in the past. I'd say he was able to solve those problems. Those problems are not even particularly complicated to solve once you have an expressive type system.
Comment Re:Syntax looks gnarly (Score 1) 194
It would have killed them, because (n) is a tuple of one element.
The current syntax has a few benefits. A big one is that you can write things like fun mul n m = n * m; fun double = mul 2; double 4 (* = 8 *);. Automagic currying is good.
Comment Related: Indistingishable From Magic (Score 4, Interesting) 21
Back at HOPE9, there was a really awesome presentation on semiconductor manufacturing. It's worth the entire 90 minutes and IMHO was the best part of the conference. I've ended up showing the video of it to a few folks now, and it never becomes less awesome.
Comment Re:Conservation and smart practices (Score 1) 652
Now look at how many people in the world have no access to reliable power, and think about what happens when they want it. It's unfair to tell them "sorry, but you and your children and their children unto the end of time get to live in a hut because you were born in an area without an established industrial base."
Comment Re:Good luck with that. (Score 1) 652
You know how the U.S. economy is in shambles? The cost of living is skyrocketing? Well, we have less energy available. Energy is the fundamental limiter all economic development, and cutting to 1/10th of current consumption would destroy modern technological society. And there's no reason... just build tons of nuclear, work on fourth gen reactors, and dump what is effectively a pittance (I mean, how much do we blow on securing an oil supply? Trillions and trillions.. for what?) into fusion research in the hopes that it is feasible. And then everyone can enjoy a high quality of life.
Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 171
Yeah, I just got a grooveshark anywhere account a few months ago. It integrates nicely with Clementine (KDE music player) and XBMC. The nice part of the xbmc extension is that you can queue whatever in with your local music in party mode, keeping party guests from axing the playlist and throwing a keyboard around to listen to music using youtube videos (kids these days...). Unlike spotify, there's no proprietary library and DRM. Just an authenticated REST api and rate limited mp3s (+ api calls to keep it streaming). Which is how it should be (ideally with Vorbis, but that's because I'm a no good fsfnik).
Comment Re:launchd (Score 1) 469
Not content to reinvent jack and init poorly, Poettering has decided to reinvent microkernels poorly as well. We're doomed.
Ask Slashdot: How To Avoid Becoming a Complacent Software Developer? 275
An anonymous reader writes: Next year will be the start of my 10th year as a software developer. For the last nice years I've worked for a variety of companies, large and small, on projects of varying sizes. During my career, I have noticed that many of the older software developers are burnt out. They would rather do their 9-5, get paid, and go home. They have little, if any, passion left, and I constantly wonder how they became this way. This contradicts my way of thinking; I consider myself to have some level of passion for what I do, and I enjoy going home knowing I made some kind of difference.
Needless to say, I think I am starting to see the effects of complacency. In my current job, I have a development manager who is difficult to deal with on a technical level. He possesses little technical knowledge of basic JavaEE concepts, nor has kept up on any programming in the last 10 years. There is a push from the upper echelon of the business to develop a new, more scalable system, but they don't realize that my manager is the bottleneck. Our team is constantly trying to get him to agree on software industry standards/best practices, but he doesn't get it and often times won't budge. I'm starting to feel the effects of becoming complacent. What is your advice?
Needless to say, I think I am starting to see the effects of complacency. In my current job, I have a development manager who is difficult to deal with on a technical level. He possesses little technical knowledge of basic JavaEE concepts, nor has kept up on any programming in the last 10 years. There is a push from the upper echelon of the business to develop a new, more scalable system, but they don't realize that my manager is the bottleneck. Our team is constantly trying to get him to agree on software industry standards/best practices, but he doesn't get it and often times won't budge. I'm starting to feel the effects of becoming complacent. What is your advice?
Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 314
Because utmp totally does not exist.
Scientists Craft Seamless 2D Semiconductor Junctions 49
vinces99 (2792707) writes Scientists have developed what they believe is the thinnest-possible semiconductor, a new class of nanoscale materials made in sheets only three atoms thick. The University of Washington researchers have demonstrated that two of these single-layer semiconductor materials can be connected in an atomically seamless fashion known as a heterojunction. This result could be the basis for next-generation flexible and transparent computing, better light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, and solar technologies.
"Heterojunctions are fundamental elements of electronic and photonic devices," said senior author Xiaodong Xu, a UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering and of physics. "Our experimental demonstration of such junctions between two-dimensional materials should enable new kinds of transistors, LEDs, nanolasers, and solar cells to be developed for highly integrated electronic and optical circuits within a single atomic plane."
"Heterojunctions are fundamental elements of electronic and photonic devices," said senior author Xiaodong Xu, a UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering and of physics. "Our experimental demonstration of such junctions between two-dimensional materials should enable new kinds of transistors, LEDs, nanolasers, and solar cells to be developed for highly integrated electronic and optical circuits within a single atomic plane."
Comment Re:The moment of truth (Score 2) 126
Netflix imposes onerous DRM and just doesn't work on GNU/Linux. The way they backdoored DRM into HTML5 is pretty disguisting too.
Google Buys Zync Cloud Graphics Rendering Service 20
mpicpp (3454017) writes To beef up its cloud platform with more specialized packages, Google is acquiring Zync for its large scale rendering service for movie special effects, called Zync Render. Google plans to offer the Zync service on its Google Cloud Platform, where it can be used by motion picture studios that do not want to build their own rendering farms.
GOG Introduces DRM-Free Movie Store 126
Via Engadget comes news that GOG, the DRM-free game store platform, has launched a DRM-free movie store. The initial set of movies are gamer oriented, and you won't find major studio releases (yet, and not for a lack of trying on the part of GOG). From GOG: Our goal is to offer you cinema classics as well as some all-time favorite TV series with no DRM whatsoever, for you to download and keep on your hard drive or stream online whenever you feel like it. We talked to most of the big players in the movie industry and we often got a similar answer: "We love your ideas, but we do not want to be the first ones. We will gladly follow, but until somebody else does it first, we do not want to take the risk". DRM-Free distribution is not a concept their lawyers would accept without hesitation.
We kind of felt that would be the case and that it's gonna take patience and time to do it, to do it, to do it right. That's quite a journey ahead of us, but every gamer knows very well that great adventures start with one small step. So why not start with something that feels very familiar? We offer you a number of gaming and Internet culture documentaries - all of them DRM-Free, very reasonably priced, and presenting some fascinating insight into topics close to a gamer's heart. Videos are mostly 1080p (~8GB for a 90 minute film) and can be acquired for about $6. They're using h.264/mp4 and not VP9/Matroska, but you can't have everything ;). If you don't want to download that much data, it looks like all of the videos are also available in 720p and 576p.
We kind of felt that would be the case and that it's gonna take patience and time to do it, to do it, to do it right. That's quite a journey ahead of us, but every gamer knows very well that great adventures start with one small step. So why not start with something that feels very familiar? We offer you a number of gaming and Internet culture documentaries - all of them DRM-Free, very reasonably priced, and presenting some fascinating insight into topics close to a gamer's heart. Videos are mostly 1080p (~8GB for a 90 minute film) and can be acquired for about $6. They're using h.264/mp4 and not VP9/Matroska, but you can't have everything ;). If you don't want to download that much data, it looks like all of the videos are also available in 720p and 576p.
