Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:So, why has nobody reverse engineered it? (Score 2) 42

It's not a matter of the knowledge not existing, it's that in order to make an HDMI port you need to license a package of patents and agree to them. Random hacker might not care, but Valve, unfortunately, would be sued up the wazoo if it didn't license the package or broke the agreement that goes with it.

A DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 dongle is the way to go, and honestly I'd either put it in the box, or if it's not legal to do that, advise people to order one at the same time, preferably using language along the lines of "to connect your console to a legacy television or monitor that doesn't support DisplayPort, you can buy this adapter here." If the HDMI group is going to impose arbitrary and nasty conditions, encourage people to switch to DisplayPort. It's better anyway.

Comment Re:Ah yes (Score 1) 115

My favorite is Gill Sans which, like Calibri, is sans but is extremely readable on both screen and print. It in turn is based on Johnston, the London Underground font, which had to be readable given it was being used for signage and notices throughout the LU system. British Rail also had a variant of Helvetica intended for the same purpose and again ability-to-read-quickly was considered critical.

The thing is the whole "Serif is easier to read" is more of a spectrum than a hard rule. There are very readable sans fonts, and God-knows some pretty awful seriffed fonts.

In addition to Rubio's motives (you want to make it harder for people with poor vision to read? What a fucking asshole), Rubio is fucking up for one other reason: In the mid-1980s Times Roman and Helvetica were pretty much the only fonts going that weren't computer fonts, thanks to the influence of the Apple Macintosh and Adobe Postscript. Variants came with most operating systems, and these were translated to Times or Helvetica. There were a tiny number of other fonts that also came with PCs/Macs but they were rarely useful for anything but logos and titles. Only a handful of people actually bought other fonts and used them.

The result is that nothing says "Tired, no effort" than Times Roman. Think of the reaction you probably have when you see a 404 message in Times Roman. Which is an absolute tragedy because it's a classic font.

So, that's what Rubio wants, America to appear lazy and tech illiterate, all to own the libs^H^H^H^Hsight impaired. What the fuck? I once voted for that asshole. I was impressed by his work trying to make a legal path to residency for Dreamers. I genuinely thought he wasn't a typical conservative, he was the type of conservative I wanted to encourage to thrive in that party. What a dumbass I was.

Comment Re:Ah yes (Score 1) 115

Yeah, Calibri isn't serifed but I believe a design goal was to make it readable on screen (hence sans) and off screen (hence more elegant lettering and differentiation of widths)

Rubio's a fucking idiot, but what do you expect from a group that constantly demonstrates it has no idea why woke (which literally just means "aware of racism") and DEI (which literally just means "Remove artificial barriers that discriminate against certain groups, rather than imposing quotas") are not bad things or even the things they claim they are.

Well, OTOH, they can't get their head around antifa either. Being against "antifa" is such an obvious confession I don't know why they get offended when we point out they're fa.

Comment Re: Isn't this what we wanted? (Score 1) 42

I said "Way North", not "Slightly North".

A typical basic package, sans Internet and phone service, from a typical ISP is well over $100. And that's for something that's all ads with the exception, maybe, of C-SPAN.

Now compare that to a bundle of ad-free streaming services. I can get HBO Max, Hulu, and Disney+ as a bundle for slightly over $30. That leaves Paramount+ and Peacock I believe, which maybe adds $30 to that if you don't want the ads, and much, much cheaper if you're OK with them. No cable package compares to that.

Like I said though, the streaming equivalent of basic cable is $0. There are many, many, free, ad-supported, services with huge libraries. Just add them to your Roku.

Comment Re:WTF (Score 1) 16

No, absolutely fucking not.

AI may or may not go away, but it's at the "Everything will be a touchscreen!" stage of hype. Just as Windows 8 was a bad idea, so is trying to graft an "Agentic OS" onto a desktop OS. It's fucking stupid.

And AI isn't going to become open until the processing and storage requirements are within normal parameters, which is at least 10-20 years off, possibly longer given Moore's law is what it is. Some people are running it locally, but they're not getting responses that are quick, and they are extremely limited in the data they can use. In reality, LLMs will continue to be something cloud based for the foreseeable future, and if you can't see the dangers in that, the control it gives to others, the spying, and so on, then you've been asleep the last 15 years.

Fuck AI anyway because it's fucking everything up right now, but fuck the Linux Foundation in particular for trying to tie Linux to cloud based services that are, literally, destroying knowledge.

Comment Re:Wayland? Who cares. (Score 1) 44

> 99.9/100 Wayland beefs are based on ignorance and regurgitation of others' ignorance

That's irony right there.

Virtually every criticism of X11, that it's "inefficient" or "insecure" is based upon ignorance and regurgitation of other's ignorance. And it was that ignorance that lead it to be left unmaintained and developed for 15 years while the former devs worked instead on an awful, less efficient, replacement that only has superficial compatibility and still, today, lacks critical features - some of which the devs are actually opposed to like applications giving hints as to where their windows should be positioned upon opening.

Basically we have a bunch of clowns who replaced the experienced X11 developers who were leaving, who didn't understand the code because it was old fashioned C and part of an application that, after 15 years, had inevitably become a little rough to maintain, who decided the protocol, not the code base, was the problem, and who really only had one legitimate reason - in the mid-2000s - for criticizing the protocol, which was back then it was difficult to add much in the way of security to the protocol so applications can't spy on each other.

And why was that? Because 15 years ago it wasn't possible to give applications unique identifiers that could be used to give them different privileges without integrating X11 into the OS itself.

So they waste 15 years developing an entirely new X11 replacement that cuts out functionality users actually use because "it's insecure" and create new ways to do the same thing but in an awkward kludgy way, only for the rest of the GNU/Linux community to wholly embrace containerization for desktop applications, and, woah, wouldn't you know, but containerization makes it possible to give applications their own individual identifiers so they can now tell an X server that they're Firefox, OpenOffice, and program-pretending-to-be-firefox, and the X server could - if they'd added the protocol - determine these are three different applications and should have different rights, preventing the latter from getting Firefox's privileges.

Nobody has implemented that extension because it'd literally blow all the serious reasons for Wayland out of the water. But it is now possible to implement.

So what's left? "Efficiency"? Wayland is less efficient, it has measurably poorer latency, and this is a design issue, not an implementation issue. The only reason this might be a surprise to anyone is there are still Slashdotters unaware that X11 generally doesn't run over a network and hasn't been reliant upon network protocols since the early 1990s. Memory usage? A traditional Wayland stack is a bigger memory hog than X11 ever was. Better maintainability? Wayland isn't modular and the entire protocol, not just the code base, and everything reliant upon it will need to be thrown out the next time a major change happens - by comparison it took a few months to add compositing to X11.

But sure, it's the Wayland critics who are "misinformed". Your entire shitty windowing system is based upon misinformation. It's literally why it exists - people being unaware of the implications of X11's SHM extension or not realizing that user space security improvements over the last few years had even made the (already less than convincing) X11-can't-have-security argument obsolete.

Go away, and take your crappy functionalty-impaired windowing stack with you.

Comment Re:You're addressing a very important detail (Score 2) 95

Nuclear Fission isn't cost effective ... _unless_ you price in the full eco-balance of electricity production. Then the numbers look significantly different and fission could just be a real thing once again. At least until renewables and energy storage have gained significant portions of the energy mix.

No. This is nonsense. Nuclear fuel production has a massive ecological impact. Nuclear only looks good when compared to coal. Stop doing that.

Submission + - The rise of the electrostate (www.cbc.ca)

AmiMoJo writes: China’s massive lead in clean technologies has shifted the global climate fight from one of big pledges and international diplomacy toward a technological revolution in cheaper energy, analysts say.
The accelerated adoption of clean technologies — particularly solar and wind power, as well as electric vehicles — has challenged long-held assumptions about how central fossil fuels are to modern industrial development, as well as which countries would lead the world in the climate fight.
The contrast between countries embracing clean technologies and countries still dependent on producing and burning fossil fuels is also becoming wider. Countries like the U.S., now the world's largest oil producer, could be left behind in the race for the energy sources of the future.

Comment Re:Isn't this what we wanted? (Score 2) 42

It's been 10-15 years, and people still don't really understand streaming. "There are too many services" - too many compared to what? I'd rather pay $30 a month to three of five providers for an ad-free service, each of which providing way more content than HBO or Cinemax ever did, than $100 a month to one monopoly. "It now costs more than cable did", no, you can subscribe to just what you want, and supplement it with free services like Tubi or Pluto. Also basic cable may have cost $40 in the 1990s, but it's been a while since it cost anything close to that. Try way north of double that, if you're lucky, once the fees are tacked on.

Now, if we can somehow stave off or cancel completely the enshittification...

Comment Re:Never learned Excel and never will (Score 1) 73

You probably should familiarize yourself with or, if you have an allergy to Microsoft, OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc. It's a good general purpose data manipulation tool. There are things it does badly, but other things that are better than anything else in its class.

I definitely wouldn't brag about not knowing it, that's like boasting you've never used a personal computer.

Slashdot Top Deals

Memory fault -- core...uh...um...core... Oh dammit, I forget!

Working...