It's pretty easy on Linux with the compose key. To get "≠", you just hit compose, then "/", then "=". That's actually the same number of keystrokes as "!=" (since "!" requires the shift key).
For whatever reason, the OS documentation lacks a list of allowed compose key sequences. But they are intuitive enough that you can find many of them through experimentation. For example:
A bank card is a type of card. Credit cards and debit cards are both bank cards. Prepaid cards are another type.
With any type of bank card, there's a bank that guarantees to a merchant that they will later receive a payment. With a debit card, the guarantee is backed by money you have on deposit. With a credit card, it's backed by the bank's money, which is higher risk for the bank.
Two US companies, VISA and Mastercard, have big networks for processing transactions with bank cards. These networks act as intermediaries to connect merchants (who want to accept payments) and banks (who issue cards) together. It's much simpler for a merchant to send a request to (say) VISA than to figure out which bank issued each customer's card. The payment networks also define, publish, and enforce standards and rules for the payment process.
These networks aren't banks. But they are, in a sense, bank card companies because they are part of the bank card system.
So in other words, European consumers have an account at a European bank that issues them a card they can use for purchases at European businesses, but US networks connect it all together.
This says the main reason for four-tube is image registration. Basically, the incoming light is optically split up into red, green, and blue, and these go to separate sensors. Being separate sensors, they may not be physically aligned. So if you sum R + G + B together to get luminance, the picture will not be sharp.
You can solve this by adding a fourth (black and white) tube for luminance. Since it's just one tube, there is no alignment issue for the luminance part of the picture. And the eye is less sensitive to color, so while the color alignment issues remain, they aren't very noticeable.
At first when I read this, I assume the camera must have to somehow combine the fourth tube's signal with the other three tubes' signals. But since both NTSC and PAL encode luminance and chrominance separately, apparently this isn't necessary. It's the TV that combines them. With a three-tube camera, the sensor signals have to be split into luminance and chrominance. With a four-tube camera, you just take luminance from one sensor and chrominance from the other three sensors.
Seems like if Lore wants to reduce space usage, they could apply something like Git's delta compression (as used in packfiles) to the chunks.
Suppose you make a 1 kB change in a 50 MB file. That causes a 64 kB chunk to be created and stored. Disk space is wasted.
But since the 50 MB file was already stored as a sequence of 64 kB chunks, there is an existing 64 kB chunk that is very similar to your new 64 kB chunk. You can store your new chunk as a delta to that, so only ~1 kB of disk space is used.
Admittedly, it's complicated and inelegant. But it allows both deduplication between files (one of the reasons Lore chose chunks, apparently) and efficient space usage for small changes.
> Three decades later, with the release of macOS 26.5, Apple caught up: you can finally set your Mac to 'Always' boot whenever power is restored, regardless of how it was shut down.
Back in the 1990s, a Mac sysadmin showed me a clever trick for this.
Get one specific Apple Desktop Bus keyboard that has a soft power key on it, I believe the Apple Extended Keyboard[1]. Then get a Bic pen[2]. Push down the power key on the keyboard, and while it's still down, wedge the pen cap between the key and the keyboard case.
The pen cap is the perfect size and shape to hold the key down, and Bic pens are easy to find. There are no ill effects from having the power key down all the time, and the Mac will boot up after a power failure. So you don't have to drive to work just to push the power button.
This was especially handy considering you sometimes needed to use Macs as servers (file server, printing, certain Mac-only applications, etc.), but Apple did not make servers.
It's a minor perk for sure. From their perspective, it probably costs essentially nothing, so why not.
But I can see it being useful if they're expanding to a nearby city. Waymo is in Los Angeles already and will expand into San Diego this year. If you live in LA, you might have friends, family, or business in San Diego and visit fairly often. Or maybe a group of people want to ride in one car for a weekend trip there but don't want to spend every moment together.
Because quicksort is like a worst case scenario for branch prediction.
Branch prediction works when the CPU can detect some kind of pattern in the program behavior, like if the branch usually goes one way and rarely goes the other way. If it predicts correctly, the CPU pipeline keeps going without stalling. If it predicts incorrectly, the CPU wastes time doing work that it has to throw away. Therefore, being able to predict correctly is essential.
In quicksort, you partition an array into two halves based on whether each element is smaller or larger than the pivot value. The key to good quicksort performance is to choose a good pivot which divides the values in half about equally. This means (assuming you're sorting randomly-ordered data) that the branching behavior will be totally unpredictable, like flipping a coin. So branch prediction will be basically useless.
Copying small chunks of data is OK if it all fits in cache, especially if it all fits in L1 cache. It's not ideal to copy data unnecessarily, but if it allows you to keep the CPU pipeline running at full speed with no stalls, it can be a good trade-off.
OK, you bring up a very good point. If the eggs fail to hatch because they are never fertilized, then the mosquitoes are not acting as a vector because they do not transmit the disease. I didn't even consider that possibility.
That wikipedia article says that there are embryos, but the embryos die.
However, the real question to ask, I guess, is whether the embryo is infected. As I read that article, it sounds like it isn't. Instead, the male parent is infected and this creates sperm which can fertilize the egg but in a way that creates an embryo that can't survive. In other words, the male parent has an infectious disease which causes the embryo to have a fatal genetic disease.
So this also brings up another question: what exactly is a vector? In this scenario, the embryo has a disease it would not otherwise have gotten, if it weren't for this germ. However, the embryo doesn't have the germ itself. Is being a vector defined by whether some disease is caused, or is it defined by whether the germ is spread? I don't know.
The symmetry is amusing. This is really fighting fire with fire.
Mosquitoes are a vector that spreads disease-causing germs to a population. The proposed solution is to use different mosquitoes as different vector that spreads a different disease-causing germ to a different population.
Also, cleaning kitchens is a huge part of the job. Hotel rooms either have no kitchen or a very minimal one. You're not going to learn how to clean an oven or load a dishwasher in a hotel room. (And loading a dishwasher requires categorizing thousands of things as dishwasher safe or not! Stainless steel skillet, yes; cast iron skillet, no; etc.)
Maybe I'm weird, but I believe in the theory that (all else equal) it's good for business to minimize how much your users hate your product/service.
In other words, users dislike the feeling of not knowing whether things are ads. I can't see any real downside to labeling them, so you're better off doing it so you don't drive users away.
Have a rod that pivots in its center and has objects of equal mass at each end, like a balanced seesaw. But make one of the objects very low density (less than water) and other high density.
Since the densities differ, water will cause the rod to rotate. But since the masses are the same, bumps will create no net torque around the pivot point and thus no rotation.
ASCII art diagram:
F------(x)------C
(x): pivot point
F: float
C: counterbalance
Also include a small spring to keep the float in the down position.
I'm sure there are other ways like sensing the electrical resistance of the water.
Or just let the float sensor bounce. It's underwater when it stops bouncing and is continuously in the up position.
Waymos are fleet vehicles. Recalls go to the owners, just like with other fleet vehicles such as rental cars, taxis, limos, delivery services, utilities, and city/state/federal government. It doesn't really matter who is whose customer.
The article mentions this: "A few years back, Linux added a way for software to wait on several events at once, which is something Windows had built in for decades, but Linux didn't."
Oops, I got one wrong.
Copyright("©"): compose + "c" + "o".
The one I had is bigger: Ⓒ vs. ©.