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Comment Re:Photo synthesis is not all that efficient. (Score 2) 80

Photosynthesis isn't very efficient, but it is very convenient. If you want the maximum possible conversion rate from solar energy, it's a terrible choice. If, however, you want something that can be cheaply deployed, then something that can self-assemble from light, water, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and a few trace nutrients is quite attractive in comparison to photovoltaics.

Comment Re:misuse of the term redshirt (Score 1) 147

If you're telling your students that grades don't matter, then you're lying to them. Their grades are going to be important when they try to get their first job. The education is more of a long-term investment - it's something that will benefit them over their entire life. It's important to balance both at university. Make sure that you do enough work to get good grades but, as Mark Twain said, don't let it interfere with your education.

Comment Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire? (Score 1) 147

This usage is confined to the USA, so 50% (last published numbers) of the audience will have had to look it up. It's one confined to a traditionally non-geeky niche in the USA, so at least half of the remainder will have needed to look it up. When you are using a term that you would anticipate that 75% of your target audience will need to look up, it's generally a good idea to define it.

Comment Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire? (Score 1) 147

The problem is, we don't have good metrics for selecting students. If we did, university admittance would be much easier. We've found that there is very little correlation between students results in their last year at school and their final mark. We have a lot of data at Cambridge because each college has different admittance criteria: none of them consistently manages to pick the best students.

Comment Re:Good (Score 2) 466

No it doesn't. PC-BSD has had this model for application installs for ages. The installer hard links duplicate libraries and so on together. Hard links are already reference counted, and have been since the early days of UNIX, so you end up with one copy of each library. The logic in the installer is relatively complicated, but the uninstaller just has to delete the tree.

The way that the packages in the repository are built ensures that programs using the same library ship the same binary. If you upgrade just one program, then you'll have two copies of the library, until you upgrade all of them and then the old one's reference count will hit 0 and it will be gone from disk.

Comment Re:And... (Score 1) 618

No. Most modern displays (even TVs) can take HDMI input. You need VGA output to connect to the old CRT monitor that you don't want to upgrade. The issue isn't that the new tablet doesn't work in random places, it's that it doesn't work in a single specific place. The fix for that is to add an adaptor in that specific place, not to carry one everywhere.

Comment Re:Too late? (Score 2) 77

Pretty much any vaguely modern API is resolution independent. Cocoa was even back when it was called OpenStep - everything is done in units of PostScript points, not pixels. The problem is that the display server has a fixed resolution. Before Xinerama, X11 was better at this, as each screen would report its own DPI and the toolkit could render windows at different sizes depending on which screen they were on. Unfortunately, the down side of this was that it didn't support windows spanning multiple screens. To do it properly, the toolkit has to be able to render different rectangles of each window at different resolutions. This isn't especially hard to do. With the OpenStep APIs, every view responds to a message that tells it to render the subset that overlaps a specific rectangle into the current graphics context, so you could just call that once for each rectangle and then composite the result. Or you could go for the really rough solution of having each overlapping window rendered 2 (or more) times, once for display and then cropping the result. The problem is that a lot of custom views do things like loading bitmap images depending on the resolution of the display, and these would end up looking ugly on the different screens.

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