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Comment Re:Apple way or the highway (Score 1) 46

You know you can buy a new iPad for $349 right? You don’t need the Pro version for you use case.

My eyes are not 22 years old anymore. So yeah, I really do need the Pro version.

  • Modern sheet music is usually printed on 9" x 12" paper. This is the equivalent of a 15-inch iPad, if Apple actually made such a thing.
  • The largest iPad Pro, at 13 inches, is about the size of an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper, give or take. That means in many cases, it is only 92% as big as the original, which makes it noticeably more difficult to read music than at full size.
  • The largest non-pro iPad, at 11 inches, is only 82% as big as a standard 8.5" x 11" piece of paper in its smallest dimension, or 74% as big as the original. That's a *lot* smaller.

So even the largest iPad Pro is smaller than I'd like, and is a noticeable compromise, but any standard iPad would be considerably worse.

Also, half the music I play on organ is some poorly scanned public domain music off of IMSLP, and that stuff is hard enough to read even at full page size, even after laser eye surgery. The last thing I would want is a screen that makes things smaller than 8.5" x 11" paper. So from my perspective, anything smaller than the largest iPad Pro model really is a non-starter, and if Apple made a 15-inch tablet, that would be even better.

Comment Re:Uncanny (Score 1) 46

Apple created the different OSes for different use cases that, Apple thought, required different user interfaces.

There is no reason why applications which choose to implement both types of interfaces can't do so. There's also no reason why users should be limited to one type of interface or the other. Both things coexist completely peacefully on Android. You can connect a mouse to your tablet (or even phone) and treat it like a desktop system with shitty storage (practically all phones, it takes a lot of power to have fast storage.)

People forget that tablet computers existed a decade before the iPad, it's good for certain things but creation is NOT one of them.

The primary use case for tablet computers in olden times was data entry and acquisition, for example the military used their magnesium-case gridpads to do inventory.

Comment Care to name them? (Score 1) 61

I would love for you to tell me what of my post represents a thought terminating cliche and for you to actually debunk anything in my post.

And I would love even better for you to explain a path forward for humanity that doesn't involve guys like you getting the shit all over people beneath you on the social ladder. I'm not going to bother pointing out again that you will be at the bottom because there is no way in hell your mental facilities could imagine or envision that happening. You are simply too amazing and too glorious to end up as one of the many billions stuck on the reservations occasionally being fire bombed by drones...

Say hi to the world leaders at G5 this year for me.

Comment Your impression is wrong (Score 0) 54

And it's actually even worse then you think it is. Foreign students can and do get the same loans or sometimes better loans and better government assistance then locals. There are entire programs at major colleges that exist to bring people in from overseas who are basically already trained and ready to go, give them a little bit of specific skills that corporations want and then hand them over to the corporation to make money for that corporation.

If the corporation decides they want to keep the H1B then yeah the loans do get paid off by them or the corporation.

But if they don't keep them here which is not uncommon then the taxpayer just eats it

Meanwhile as an American you simply cannot apply for these programs. I mean technically you can but they're not there for you. I have had H1B coworkers ask me why us Americans aren't taking advantage of these programs only to have to explain that we can't because they're not for us.

You're also missing the point. These programs don't exist to educate those people it's just job training. The actual expensive education is done in their native country. That's typically where they get their bachelors and or masters degrees. That is billions of dollars worth of education spending that happens overseas where American billionaires don't have to pay for it.

That's the real cost savings. They can completely do away with 90% of education funding in America and get other countries to pay for it.

Which is a great deal for the billionaires getting tax cuts but for anyone who has kids and now has to come up with an additional 40 or $50,000 to pay for tuition because your kid is competing with somebody from India or even China good luck with that.

And if you bring this up the left wing will scream at you for being racist and the right wing will try to bury you in the algorithm and the centrists will tell you that it's fine because GDP go up and so line go up and line go up is always good.

Comment Re:And the solution as always is very very (Score 1) 61

EU here... Housing in the city is so expensive that minorities can't find a home there. Hope that helps.

So they end up living in slums. Cities have slums we just don't like to think about them. Occasionally right wing media will talk about them because there's a lot of Filth and crime like you would expect when everybody is dirt poor and being abused. Although honestly they don't even really bother with that anymore because they found they can just make shit up about actual nice cities and right-wing idiots will believe literally anything.

I mean they had a guy on Fox News pretending to be antifa who literally is the same guy who was pretending to be a violent black lives matter protester a few years ago. That is the level we are at people.

The hilarious thing is that the suburbs aren't sustainable. Even though people in the inner city make very little money and get treated like shit there's a lot of them because of how well, population density works and so the poor people in the inner cities subsidize the well-to-do people in the suburbs. Without the subsidies the suburbs can't pay for their roads in schools and cops.

It's basically an elaborate way to keep some form of slavery going even though we're not technically allowed to do that anymore. But again it's not sustainable because we are gradually breaking down the economy so much that there just isn't enough money to go around anymore. Capitalism is being dismantled in favor of a weird feudal system that benefits the very very top 10,000 or so people on the planet

Comment Let them have them (Score 0) 54

It's no coincidence that we began the slash funding to higher education and actively attack higher education as soon as widespread Visa programs existed to bring in trained workers. Why would you as a billionaire want to pay the taxes for local citizens to be educated in college when you can just have another country pay that and pull those people over?

So when I was a kid the government paid 80% of tuition and now they pay about 30%.

Again, this is not a coincidence.

This of course creates enormous amounts of social instability from vast swaths of people who are cut off from middle class living and higher education. So yeah let China have that social instability.

The trade off is that America doesn't get those patents but I don't get anything out of those patents they are owned by billionaires. I can pretend that the companies owning those patents will somehow pump up my 401k but thanks to you multiple economic crashes and a handful of layoffs following those crashes I don't have much in the way of savings and I sure as shit don't have the money to go out buying stocks or the ability to risk buying into a startup that might go tits up.

Now would I like to live in a country where immigration increasing the GDP directly improves my quality of life instead of cutting me off from middle class employment? Yeah I would love to live in that world. I don't. I live in a hyper-competitive world where your entire quality of life is based on the job you get.

If somebody wants to suggest a viable way of changing that I'm all ears but every time I seriously bring it up I get modded down into pulp by people furious at the prospect of paying somebody to not work. Or I get a handful of libertarians talking about Ubi replacing all the other government programs and need to stop and explain, uselessly, why that is not going to work and solves nothing.

So if you don't have a third way I don't want to hear it.

Comment 32 bits 64 bits big-endian little-endian (Score 4, Interesting) 24

I support a legacy app that was written back in the 1990s. It originally ran under VxWorks with custom hardware, variously 68k and PowerPC.

The first port I did was to Solaris. No byte-order issues and I kept the 32 bit ABI. It worked well.

When the Powers That Be decided to ditch Sun hardware and Solaris in favour of x86 and Linux I ported it to Linux. Parts of the code weren't byte-order clean, but I worked through them. The code is heavily 32 bit dependent and I never did create a viable 64 bit version (I tried, believe me...), so it runs on our last 32 bit server in the data center. The service it supports is slowly dying so there's no business case to spend any more time or money on it. If the business case existed I'd apply what I've learned in the meantime and rewrite it from scratch anyway.

The Linux port was initially unstable. It would run for a random time, hours to weeks, then two threads would deadlock. After a couple of years of letting it run and watching it crash I traced the deadlock to an "optimization" that didn't actually do anything, with an if statement that had about a one in a trillion chance of going the wrong way. I removed the optimization and the application has been running fine ever since.

...laura

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