I've been watching this for years and, frequently, Apple stock value goes down after the company announces it has met or exceeded expectations. I have no idea why this happens.
Someone told me that market behavior is anticipatory. Makes sense I guess. So everyone must be assuming that because expectations are up now (because of new stuff), that they will be down next quarter (no new stuff coming)?
I have found spamming Google for LaTeX solutions to be really unsatisfactory and recently decided that I'd rather just learn my tools properly. This very very quickly led me away from LaTeX and over to plain TeX.
I have read through about 2/3 of the TeXbook so far and currently am writing my thesis in it. So far it's been really enjoyable! That's not something I could say about my past struggles with LaTeX.
Maybe once I have TeX down really pat, I'll peek back over into LaTeX, but for now I really don't see a need.
Getting a handle on the typographic primitives that TeX offers makes a huge difference. I've actually found it surprisingly easy to handcraft whatever macros I need. Though I do also use a the amstex macros.
Admittedly, it's easy to end up with a horrid mess of macros if you're not careful, but a bit of forethought and experience with frontend design patterns goes a long way.
One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to deal with CJK languages nicely.
I've played a bit with plain TeX last year[1] because I wanted to find an alternative to do PDF slides using a simple text-based formatting.
Deckset is cool but I can't customize much of the layout, and I don't love HTML-based solutions. I don't love Beamer either because you have to write a lot of ceremony for a single slide, and most styles feel very "old" (lots of side/top bars).
Here's an example of what you can do using the `lecturer` package:
I use Plain TeX for short and simple documents (which is pretty much most of my needs), it is often simpler than coercing LaTeX to do the layout I need.
Considering that most people cannot tell the difference between a high bitrate MP3 and source, it would seem to me that this will be wasted on most people (myself included). That said, it is nice to have the option.
Yes, and if for some reason then you clear the CMOS (BIOS configuration error, discharged battery, or whatever) you can no longer boot your PC because the boot information regarding the parameters to pass to the kernel is lost...
Ah the lovely naming hacks of UEFI. :-P I remember the troubles it took to boot Ubuntu on a Lenovo laptop because the EFI was 32 bit, while the system supported 64 bit.
I was going to spend a little while spitballing about how it shouldn't be all that hard to build a wall-hangable replica without all the creepy cloud-bound spy smarts - and then I found this [1], which does a better job than I could. I'd probably clean up the sides and use something nicer than veroboard for the grille, if I were making this myself, but it's a very good first approximation to say the least.
And Adafruit's method solves the major problem, of where to find a suitable lens to replace the rather expensive [2] original prop part, very handily! Unfortunately, they're out of stock of the rather crucial button, but Sparkfun appears [3] to have no trouble sourcing them.
ETA: On further reading, I wouldn't follow this Adafruit method; I don't have access to a laser cutter, and even if I did, having the tabs stick out the side, and the whole thing sort of jigsawed together that way, doesn't appeal.
Instead, I'd work up a frame from aluminum bar stock, which isn't all that much harder to work with than plastic, and build the faceplate to mount picture-frame-style in a groove milled into the inside face of the bar. If you've got access to a laser cutter, you probably also have, or can easily enough get access to, a milling machine, whether CNC or manual - they even make mini-XY tables with Dremel mounts, which might actually be preferable for a small job like this to something more like a Bridgeport machine. (If you do want some smarts in there, you can have as much room for them as you need - just pick a suitably sized bar stock. The groove will be near the front edge in any case, since the prop doesn't have a lot of depth there; the rest is just trading off between how much space you have behind the faceplate, and how proud of the wall you want the finished item to be.)
Also, since I (again) don't have access to a laser cutter, I'd cut down the grille from the door RF shield out of a scrap-heap microwave. If you don't have one of those lying around - and why would you? - your local junkyard does, and who doesn't love a trip to the junkyard? Shouldn't cost more than a few bucks; if you bring your dikes and don't mind maybe having to stitch up a hole in a pocket, you can probably cut the piece you need and smuggle it out without paying a cent, although you probably want to be paying for something else at the same time so it doesn't look too sketchy.
Looks like a fun project, in any case, laser cutter or no!
I'd also be curious of numbers from people who DO run ECC about how many times it's saved them. Some things it's really necessary for (financial transactions comes to mind). That said, it should be much easier to get ECC in consumer hardware. Major props to AMD for their recent chips that allow it. Hopefully Intel follows suit.
I run ECC everywhere possible. I know of two instances when it mattered (detected a failing chip), and suspect it was correcting single-bit errors for a while before that in those cases. I've also resurrected someone's laptop by determining it failed due to bad RAM and replacing that. (Easy enough diagnosis - intermittent, random-seeming hard-lockups and corrupted data on disk.)
ECC also thwarts Rowhammer and similar attacks, if that matters to you.
Note that it isn't enough for AMD to restore ECC support in consumer kit; you also need motherboard support, and the MB makers are also complicit in raising ECC costs.
The problem is that it is unsupported, so getting a board where the BIOS can enable it & you can count on it working is a bit of a crap shoot. I had the same problem ~8 years ago when a friend and I built new desktops. You've got to do a lot of manual reading, forum reading and review reading before buying a board. Or buy it locally from a place with a good return policy. This is quite a bit different from server grade kit where ECC is fully supported.
Also, it's quite depressing when you need to change the motherboard especially if you are obsessed with cable management and invested so much time ensuring great air flow.
I had a K6/2 with ECC back in the late 90's. So, yes.
But for whatever reason, AMD never seems to put ECC in the bullet lists for why you should buy their parts. I guess as someone else mentioned its because the motherboard manufactures don't enable/qualify it even though its likely just a matter of firmware tweaks ever since the DRAM controller moved on chip. I got it working on a cheap phenom II/gigabyte motherboard (IIRC) some time ago as well. In that case I don't think the motherboard even advertised it, but I had some unbuffered ECC DIMMs lying around and I plugged them in, and they worked. Of course the only real indication besides booting the machine that it was actually working was a kernel blurb during boot about it. I don't think I got the EDAC reporting to give me soft error rates at the time.
I don't have the numbers handy but here's a basic explanation. Due to the amount of RAM we all run today the probability of having a RAM error is surprisingly high. IIRC it's at least once per year.
Google at the time was buying memory chips that had failed manufacturer QA, stuffing them on to DIMMs themselves, and then running whatever seemed to pass.
That number was consistent on-the-ground pre-launch and post-launch (with the exception of a short period of higher error instances due to a solar flare).
It's not just Windows that is bloated; so is macOS, Android, and iOS. The wastefulness annoys me and I don't want to hear its okay because we have tons of disk space and RAM - it is still wasteful.
I understand why they kitchen-sink operating systems - its mainly so they can crow about new features when releasing new versions of the OS. But I wish they would offer alternate installs for those of us who are proficient.
On android I'm still severely limited by disk space and RAM, the waste is very noticeable. It still is on PC for most users too, cheap SSD's are still quite small, there are a lot of new laptops sold with 64GB SSD's and 2GB RAM. Good luck running anything in node.
I would really like to have a Linux-style OS on my smartphone and not the bloated Android Java which looks like the Win32 API re-engineered for smartphones.
