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Comment Trying to be fair (Score 1) 84

There is the old adage that there are three major problems in software development, being:

1. Time
2. Names
3. Off-by-one errors

As for the first one, which seems relevant to the question, number formatting, as well as time formatting is locale-based and, unfortunately, sometimes decoupled from whatever one might choose as language.

As for myself, time and number formatting seems most intuitive for me in the Danish form, which is also followed elsewhere, whereas I prefer my UI language to be English (whatever that might mean).

Hence, my advice is to decouple language and number formatting completely, offering whatever choice of language the user might want, and whatever number-or-date locale the user might want, independently.

See also https://jira.atlassian.com/bro....

Graphics

Khronos Group Announces Release of Vulkan 1.0 (phoronix.com) 77

An anonymous reader writes: Vulkan 1.0 was released this morning as a surprise for those looking towards a high-performance, cross-platform (everyone but Apple) API. In a lengthy overview of Vulkan 1.0, the stage is set for making Vulkan what it's been talked up to be, but it's not there yet for end-users to fully enjoy: NVIDIA has conformant drivers out for major platforms, AMD doesn't have any conformant driver yet, and Intel only has a conformant Linux driver. The lone launch title for Vulkan 1.0 is Talos Principle, but don't expect it to perform better than the OpenGL port at this time. While it's easy for many game developers to port to Vulkan, it will require significant investment to make the engines really much faster than their OpenGL/DirectX11-geared code-bases while new games should be much better from the start when designed around this lower-level API. The spec will be available at Khronos.org and the Vulkan SDK is available from LunarG.com.
Crime

Submission + - 14 Dead, 50 Injured In Denver Theatre Shooting (9news.com)

beaverdownunder writes: A masked gunman has shot dead at least 14 people and wounded up to 50 others at a premiere showing of the new Batman movie in Colorado.

A man wearing body armour and a gas mask began shooting during the screening at a mall in the Denver suburb of Aurora.

One person has been taken into custody as police sweep the theatre and determine whether a second person was involved.

Comment Re:Nice distro but they messed up the desktop (Score 1) 244

Are you telling me - in all seriousness - that Unity doesn't work with a multi-head setup? How the hell can they put it as default, then?

Good thing I only run 11.10 on my laptop for now (where I switched to XFCE), so I guess I'll switch to XFCE even before upgrading my desktop, or look into E17, so thank you for the heads-up.

Supercomputing

Could Wikipedia Become a Supercomputer? 165

An anonymous reader writes "Large websites represent an enormous resource of untapped computational power. This short post explains how a large website like Wikipedia could give a tremendous contribution to science, by harnessing the computational power of its readers' CPUs and help solve difficult computational problems." It's an interesting thought experiment, at least — if such a system were practical to implement, what kind of problems would you want it chugging away at?
Cellphones

Apple Camera Patent Lets External Transmitters Disable Features 268

sticks_us writes with news of an Apple patent application, recently published by the USPTO, for an on-board camera system that would include circuitry for processing external infrared signals. The data received from these signals could then be used to present information to the user of the device, or even to modify the device's operation. "For example, an infrared emitter could be located in areas where picture or video capture is prohibited, and the emitter could generate infrared signals with encoded data that includes commands to disable the recording functions of devices. An electronic device could then receive the infrared signals, decode the data and temporarily disable the device's recording function based on the command. ... In some embodiments, a device may apply a watermark to detected images as an alternative to completely disabling a recording function."
IT

Ask Slashdot: Best Certifications To Get? 444

Hardhead_7 writes "Our recent discussion about how much your degree is worth got me thinking. I've been working in the IT field for several years now, but I don't have anything to my name other than an A+ certificate and vendor specific training (e.g., Dell certified). Now I'm looking to move up in the IT field, and I want some stuff on my resume to demonstrate to future employers that I know what I'm doing, enough that I can get in the door for an interview. So my question to Slashdot is this: What certifications are the most valuable and sought-after? What will impress potential employers and be most likely to help land a decent job for someone who doesn't have a degree, but knows how to troubleshoot and can do a bit of programming if needed?"

Comment Re:Is this still... (Score 1) 138

Typical for /., I could just have checked - it's still here, but still without excercises.
It does remind me, though, of someone I have bought some hardware from, from time to time. He is a long time Mac user (i.e. before OSX), as his eyesight is bordering on complete blindness, and where the older Mac OS' (as OSX, I imagine) and for some time now also Linux has built-in tools for extreme screen magnification, the Windows versions of the day would only let you select higher contrast colour schemes, unless you shelled out DKK 5,000.- (approx. $1,000,-) for a commercial solution.
I imagine that the Wins are somewhat up to speed nowadays, but the habit of buying things that should be built in appears to die hard...

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