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Not to mention that the article author apparently likes dark-on-light coloration (“light mode”), whereas I like light-on-dark (“dark mode”).
Traditionally, most computers were light-on-dark. I think that was the Mac that really shifted things to dark-on-light.
My understanding from past reading was that that was because of the observation that people were generally working with computer representations of paper documents, which for ink economy reasons (ink costs something, so normally you’d rather put ink on 5% of the page rather than 95% of the page) were normally dark-on-light. If you had a computer showing a light-on-dark image of a document that would be dark-on-light on paper, that’d really break the WYSIWYG paradigm. So word processors and the like drove that decision to move to dark-on-light:
Technically, I suppose it wasn’t the Mac where that originated, just where it was popularized. The Apple IIgs had some kind of optional graphical environment that looked like a proto-Mac environment, though I rarely saw it used:
The Mac derived from the Lisa at Apple (which never became very widespread):
And that derived from the Xerox Alto:
But for practical purposes, I think that it’s reasonably fair to say that the Mac was really what spread dark-on-light. Then Windows picked up the convention, and it was really firmly entrenched:
Prior to that, MS-DOS was normally light-on-dark (with the basic command line environment being white-on-black, though with some apps following a convention of light on blue):
Apple ProDOS, widely used on Apple computers prior to the Mac, was light-on-dark:
The same was true of other early text-based PC environments, like the Commodore 64:
When I used VAX/VMS, it was normally off a VT terminal that would have been light-on-dark, normally green, amber, or white on black, depending upon the terminal:
And as far as I can recall, terminals for Unix were light-on-dark.
If you go all the way back before video terminals to teleprinters, those were going back to paper, so the ink issue comes up again, and they were dark-on-light:
But I think that there’s a pretty good argument that absent ink economy constraints, the historical preference has been to be light-on-dark on video displays.
There’s also some argument that for OLED displays – and, one assumes, any future displays, where you only light up what needs to be light, rather than the LCD approach of lighting the whole thing up and then blocking and converting to heat what you don’t want to be light – draw somewhat less power for light-on-dark, which provides some battery benefits, though in most cases, that’s probably not a huge issue compared to eye comfort.
1·2 days agoThe President can’t amend the Constitution. In fact, the entire federal government’s only role – not talking just the Executive Branch, but also the Legislative and Judicial – is, in one of the two amendment routes, to propose the amendment. In the other, they have no involvement at all. The amending process is really a process done by the states.
34·2 days agoI can see it now: “New worm infects PDFs, causes users viewing them to mine Bitcoin.”
4·2 days agoThere are small devices with directional antennas, often gun-shaped, intended to jam the datalink. Not really “electromagnetic pulse”, though.
16·2 days agoI think that it’s more likely that the other half of the dev team probably knew about the charges, saw this sentence likely coming and didn’t want to sink more time into the project. Which, I mean, I can understand if it’s a two person company. If you’re doing a company like this, you’re betting that the product is going to be successful, and “maybe half the company will vanish” is kind of a huge risk factor.
Frankly, if Musk were President instead of Trump, I’d be rather happier about this upcoming four years.
He can’t be President absent amending the US Constitution, though, as he’d run afoul of the “natural-born citizen” requirement for the office.
I’m very much interested in what they intend to use to shoot the drones. Missiles? Way to expensive.
Well, if we’re talking about a policing role, it may be fine.
In war, if Country A and Country B are arm-wrestling, and Country A can launch a drone that costs a tenth of what Country B’s missiles do, you can probably guess that Country A is going to keep sending drones, because that’s a pretty favorable exchange. Gotta worry about what happens if it scales up.
But if we’re talking a policing role and don’t expect hundreds or thousands of drones to be sent out – like, the aim is countering espionage or sabotage – that might be okay.
Now, granted, one possibility is that someone might try to figure out a way to send large numbers of drones to do the above, but then that starts to stand out. I think that the current situation is probably more of one where the concern is that malicious drone operators are trying to hide in the noise created by benign drone operators. We don’t easily know whether a given drone is just some random person flying a drone where it shouldn’t be, or whether it’s someone trying to gather intelligence. But if spies start launching a hundred drones at a go, it’s going to be pretty obvious that it’s not just some random person making a mistake.
EDIT:
Not sure the Bundeswehr got any and if not it’ll take fives years of debate if this is technology we actually need and another ten to procure the necessary equipment.
I remember just reading about some kind of programmable-airburst SPAAG that Germany’s sending Ukraine, think it was on a Boxer chassis. Assuming that Germany isn’t sending every one of those that they have, they probably have some to stick around sensitive areas of their own.
kagis
https://mil.in.ua/en/news/ukraine-is-likely-to-receive-boxer-infantry-fighting-vehicles/
The Boxer RCT30 combat module combines the unmanned turret from KNDS Germany with the proven Boxer control module from ARTEC – a joint venture between Rheinmetall and KNDS Germany. The module is armed with the MK 30-2/ABM 30×173 mm stabilized automatic cannon from Rheinmetall. It provides accurate engagement of moving targets both on the ground and in motion.
The German army intends to purchase about 150 systems of this type, and the Netherlands – 72 systems.
The vehicle also has a landing compartment that can accommodate up to six fully equipped infantrymen. However, as the publication notes, the name “command support vehicle” may indicate that these combat vehicles will not be used as an infantry fighting vehicle, but can be used to protect the RCH 155 self-propelled howitzers from drones.
Within a range up to 3,000 metres the MK30-2/ABM delivers maximum effectiveness against land-, air- and sea targets.
So if you plonk one of those in the middle of a military base or whatever, you’ve got a sphere of something like 3km radius.
looks further
It also looks like there’s some fancier thing that has both a gun and missiles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyranger_30
The Skyranger 30 is a short range air defense turret system developed by Rheinmetall Air Defence AG (formerly Oerlikon) and first revealed in March 2021. Its role is to provide ground units with a mobile system capable of engaging fixed and rotary-wing aircraft, Group I and II unmanned aerial systems (UAS), loitering munitions and cruise missiles.[1][2]
Assuming that the “Group I” here is the same as the US classification scheme for UASes and Germany isn’t doing some unrelated-but-similarly-named classification system, it’s intended for use against fairly small drones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicle#Terminology
Group 1: Max take-off weight: < 20 lb (9.1 kg)
Group 2: Max take-off weight: > 20 & < 55
81·4 days agoFor portable air conditioners, many inexpensive units have only a single hose (hot air exhaust) rather than a dual hose (outside air intake and hot air exhaust) which is going to cause inefficiency (like, you’re going to be pulling air from outside into the house by creating a pressure difference).
122·4 days agoIt looks like the Hulu subreddit is full of unhappy people complaining about it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Hulu/comments/1i1km60/hulu_just_logged_itself_out_on_my_roku_now_trying/
Doesn’t appear to be a Hulu Threadiverse community.
After this removed support of two libraries from curl, there is still support for ten different TLS libraries.
That’s bonkers. I didn’t even know that curl supported more than OpenSSL and GnuTLS.
I think that Tetris is probably the oldest game that I’ll play some implementation of occasionally. I don’t know if I’d call it my favorite, but it’s aged very gracefully over the decades.
I think that a more accurate statement is that some people don’t enjoy using instruments. I mean, I don’t, but I’m sure that there are people who do.
Musk lost a lot of money on his last social media company purchase, Twitter, after spending some time in court trying to abort the purchase. I’m not at all sure that he wants to buy another social media company.
Bethesda has said that they aren’t going to do one until after the next Elder Scrolls game, so if anything in the Fallout world is going to come out on any kind of a near-term schedule, it’s going to have to be via someone with available bandwidth licensing it.
If you ever want a great collection of more fun stories from early Apple days, check out folklore.org. It’s earlier than this stuff, but covers a lot of shennanigans.
In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.
I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.
I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn’t ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive.
They created a pretty handy app that was bundled with the base OS, and which I remember having fun using. So it’s probably just as well that Apple didn’t hassle them. But in all seriousness, that’s not the most amazing building security ever.
reads further
Hah!
We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security.
518·5 days agoThat’s a pretty large tax. People here in the US have nearby access to other sunny, warm places, but that’d suck for the Brits.
considers
Didn’t Spain have some massive property boom some years back, put way too many resources into construction, then had things pop? What happened to all the construction capacity?
kagis
Yeah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_property_bubble
The Spanish property bubble is the collapsed overshooting part of a long-term price increase of Spanish real estate prices. This long-term price increase has happened in various stages from 1985 up to 2008.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] The housing bubble can be clearly divided in three periods: 1985–1991, in which the price nearly tripled; 1992–1996, in which the price remained somewhat stable; and 1996–2008, in which prices grew astonishingly again. The 2008–2014 Spanish real estate crisis caused prices to fall. In 2013, Raj Badiani, an economist at IHS Global Insight in London, estimated that the value of residential real estate has dropped more than 30 percent since 2007 and that house prices would fall at least 50 percent from the peak by 2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008–2014_Spanish_real_estate_crisis
The measures adopted so far by the Spanish Government have not been able to tackle the Spanish real estate crisis of 2008. The suppression of the Ministry of Housing was related to this failure and at the beginning of 2010 the Ministry of Development proposed to accompany the sector in its gradual normalization, creating a Working Commission for the promotion of the Real Estate Sector.[42] The government agreed to lower the VAT for new homes in order to help the banks to bring to the market the immense stock of homes owned by developers and builders,[43] but it is not effective.[
Well, I guess their oversupply problem got addressed since then.
Ehhh. If I were Zelenskyy, I’d probably stay out of US domestic politics as far as I’m able. Potential downside, little potential upside.
I mean, yes, it’s a nice offer, but Ukraine doesn’t want to get in the middle of US political spatting.
Plus, Ukraine really needs their own firefighting capacity due to the fact that they’re getting sporadically attacked by weapons that cause fires.
To be fair, US sales may be growing faster, but EV sales in the EU – driven by hefty financial incentives, like tax exemptions – had also been somewhat-larger in the US.
China, on the other hand, is doing a lot of EVs.
I was looking at a graph the other day. Let me see if I can find it or something comparable.
kagis
Yeah:
I’m sure that Mercedes-Benz can do the math, but one thing that certainly weighed on my mind after glancing at those charts is that one expects that China’s going to have substantial economy-of-scale advantages, as they’re selling more units.