• 24 Posts
  • 1.69K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@beehaw.org•'Autofocus' specs promise sharp vision, near or far - BBC NewsEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    Consumer acceptability is key, acknowledges Mr Eiden. Most people don’t want to look like cyborgs: “We need to make our products actually look like existing eyewear.”

    looks dubious

    I can believe that most people want something that they consider stylish. However, I’m skeptical that most people specifically want something to look like existing stuff. Clothing has shifted a lot over the years and centuries; it’s not as if every person putting something on their body said “it has to look like the stuff that’s come before”, or present-day vision equipment would look like this:

    Or this:

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•Finland notifies UN of withdrawal from landmine ban treatyEnglish
    14·
    3 days ago

    You typically need to notify other members of a treaty of your withdrawal, and then there’s some time delay until you’re no longer bound by the terms. You can’t just secretly withdraw, or treaties wouldn’t be very meaningful.

    EDIT: Yeah. The submitted article says that it happens in six months from today, and here’s the treaty text on withdrawal:

    https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.44_convention antipersonnel mines.pdf

    Article 20

    Duration and withdrawal

    1. This Convention shall be of unlimited duration.

    2. Each State Party shall, in exercising its national sovereignty, have the right to withdraw from this Convention. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other States Parties, to the Depositary and to the United Nations Security Council. Such instrument of withdrawal shall include a full explanation of the reasons motivating this withdrawal.

    3. Such withdrawal shall only take effect six months after the receipt of the instrument of withdrawal by the Depositary. If, however, on the expiry of that six- month period, the withdrawing State Party is engaged in an armed conflict, the withdrawal shall not take effect before the end of the armed conflict.

    4. The withdrawal of a State Party from this Convention shall not in any way affect the duty of States to continue fulfilling the obligations assumed under any relevant rules of international law.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoComic Strips@lemmy.world•When life was full of wonderEnglish
    41·
    3 days ago

    IIRC, they no longer print it, but you can probably buy used collections.

    kagis

    Yeah. The final print edition was 2010:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica

    The Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for ‘British Encyclopaedia’) is a general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. since 1768, although the company has changed ownership seven times. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes[1] and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition. Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia at the website Britannica.com

    Printed for 244 years, the Britannica was the longest-running in-print encyclopaedia in the English language. It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland, in three volumes.

    Copyright (well, under US law, and I assume elsewhere) also doesn’t restrict actually making copies, but distributing those copies. If you want to print out a hard copy of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica website for your own use in the event of Armageddon, I imagine that there’s probably software that will let you do that.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoComic Strips@lemmy.world•When life was full of wonderEnglish
    371·
    3 days ago

    I mean, the bar to go get a reference book to look something up is significantly higher than “pull my smartphone out of my pocket and tap a few things in”.

    Here’s an article from 1945 on what the future of information access might look like.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm

    The Atlantic Monthly | July 1945

    “As We May Think”

    by Vannevar Bush

    Eighty years ago, the stuff that was science fiction to the people working on the cutting edge of technology looks pretty unremarkable, even absurdly conservative, to us in 2025:

    Like dry photography, microphotography still has a long way to go. The basic scheme of reducing the size of the record, and examining it by projection rather than directly, has possibilities too great to be ignored. The combination of optical projection and photographic reduction is already producing some results in microfilm for scholarly purposes, and the potentialities are highly suggestive. Today, with microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and still produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for examination. The limits are set by the graininess of the film, the excellence of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light sources employed. All of these are rapidly improving.

    Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of 10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.

    Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The material for the microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would it cost to print a million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large edition, costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the cost of materials.

    If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same control backwards.

    A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•Some TODO app called Emacs?English
    3·
    4 days ago

    How to look it up:

    M-x org-mode RET

    That’s “Meta-X” (Alt-X), then “org-mode” and Enter, switches the major mode of the current buffer to org-mode so that we have the org-mode keybindings active.

    C-h k C-c C-x C-l

    C-h, Control-H, is the “help” prefix. “C-h k” is describe-key, tells you what a given key sequence runs. C-h k C-c C-x C-l will say what C-c C-x C-l does. It gives the following output:

    C-c C-x C-l runs the command org-latex-preview (found in
org-mode-map), which is an interactive native-comp-function in
‘org.el’.

It is bound to C-c C-x C-l.

(org-latex-preview &optional ARG)

Toggle preview of the LaTeX fragment at point.

If the cursor is on a LaTeX fragment, create the image and
overlay it over the source code, if there is none.  Remove it
otherwise.  If there is no fragment at point, display images for
all fragments in the current section.  With an active region,
display images for all fragments in the region.

With a ‘C-u’ prefix argument ARG, clear images for all fragments
in the current section.

With a ‘C-u C-u’ prefix argument ARG, display image for all
fragments in the buffer.

With a ‘C-u C-u C-u’ prefix argument ARG, clear image for all
fragments in the buffer.