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Re:Web Bluetooth Community Group by Anonymous Coward · 2016-08-10 05:41 · Score: 0 · on Chrome Is Nearly Ready To Talk To Your Bluetooth Devices (engadget.com)

That would be nice if the W3C wasn't such a terrible standards body. It has done nothing but create shitty buggy standards that _nobody_ can implement fully and correctly. They have no fucking clue what they're doing.

https://brendaneich.com/2004/0...

https://www.nothings.org/writi...

Re:Minesweeper by JMJimmy · 2014-04-09 03:24 · Score: 1 · on Study: Video Gamer Aggression Result of Game Experience, Not Violent Content

While it's not a 50/50 chance like the AC suggested, it does come down to probabilities in some cases give this a read and you'll see what I was talking about: http://nothings.org/games/mine...

Re:Just buy the game like everyone else... by X0563511 · 2013-10-21 03:41 · Score: 1 · on The Dark Mod 2.0 Standalone: Id Tech 4 GPL Yields a Free Thief-a-Like Game

Try a few -thousand- FPS. There's not much eye candy to turn on...

I get the feeling you (and Black LED) know nothing about Thief 1 and 2?

Re:Oh thank ${DIETY} by mypalmike · 2013-07-01 05:52 · Score: 1 · on Firefox OS Smartphones Launching, But Will Anyone Buy One?

The "I before E" exceptions are so many, they needed a poem.

http://nothings.org/writing/tb/ie.html

Re:Finish it by nothings · 2012-04-24 11:35 · Score: 1 · on Firefox 12 Released — Introduces Silent, Chrome-like Updater

I've been wondering that for more than 8 years.

Worse yet, Opera and Mozilla and Apple aren't saying, "Goddamn this stuff is just already too complicated. Let's just freeze what we've got and really consider it a standard, so we can just fix all the damn bugs and work on interactivity." Instead, it seems they've bought whole hog into W3C's "what's good for the web is constant generation of new standards", and they're happily generating more and more! Yay!

Re:Will educating lamens help change the climate? by nothings · 2011-07-23 12:39 · Score: 1 · on When Patents Attack — the NPR Version

Yep, I've been thinking that the lawyers are the real problem for a decade.

"The software programming community seems largely against patents. When the only people defending software patents are patent holders who make money from licensing, patent lawyers who make money from patent applications and patent litigation, and the Patent and Trademark Office who make money from granting patents, is there any reason to believe patents are in the public interest?" -- me, in 1999 (slightly edited for clarity)

Re:Interesting link on the history of HTML5 by Anonymous Coward · 2011-03-03 13:03 · Score: 0 · on Firefox 4 Web Demos: Web O' Wonder

Here's a good read on why the web sucks:

http://nothings.org/writing/websucks.html

For some critical views of the language... by leonbloy · 2010-10-14 09:01 · Score: 5, Interesting · on Bjarne Stroustrup Reflects On 25 Years of C++

C++ FQA (frequently questioned answers)
(Defective C++ is a summary)

'There are only two things wrong with C++: The initial concept and the implementation' - and other quotes

Why C++ sucks

And, previsibly: http://cplusplussucks.com/

Re:Yeah, but look in a mirror. by Terje+Mathisen · 2008-03-24 03:35 · Score: 1 · on The P.G. Wodehouse Method of Refactoring

Thanks for making my day! :-)

You're Terje Mathisen.

For most of us the brilliant flash of insight that allows us to fully integrate a problem is an epiphany - that rare and fleeting moment where our brilliance truly shines. It's neither frequent nor persistent enough to build a plan on which we must rely.

For you it's more like the rising and setting of the sun. It most certainly isn't anything like that, great code is almost always a result of Edison-like effort:

"10% inspiration, 90% perspiration."

Great code, at least for me, depends on being willing to "try & try again", something that's only possible when I have the luxury of not working to a deadline.

Last fall I wrote the worlds fastest Ogg Vorbis decoder, starting from Sean T Barret's public domain code:

To get the last 30% of speed (to beat the best existing decoder) I had to throw away at least 75-80% of all my optimization attempts, since they turned out to slow it down instead of speeding it up like my insight told me it should do.

I.e. even when working on what I really love, I can be wrong a lot more often than I'm right. :-(

Terje

Re:What's so great about Ogg? by kb · 2007-12-09 16:18 · Score: 1 · on Nokia Claims Ogg Format is "Proprietary"

It's used heavily in gaming because of the ultra high nearly lossless compression

That's not the reason. IAAGD (I Am A Game Developer) and I can tell you that it's used mostly because of the simple fact that it's free and there are tons of codec libraries out there (stb_vorbis being my current favourite ;) which you can simply plug in and use and don't need to bother with any licensing hassle except perhaps acknowledging your use of that library in some part of the documentation.

That's the whole point. Simple as that. All other compressed formats are either more cost intensive (patent fees) or take way more time to implement, which is basically the same. Of course quality is a bonus, but with Theora that quality isn't great at all, and Vorbis takes quite a bit of CPU compared to eg. MP3 or AAC. Still no good idea if you're about to stream 100 audio channels simultaneously.

Re:Wrong in so many ways by tqbf · 2007-07-29 18:45 · Score: 1 · on Don't Overlook Efficient C/C++ Cmd Line Processing

Judy arrays are kind of silly, but I used to think tries were a great answer for parsing, because they provide O(m) abbreviation matching and access to ambiguous options. But then I realized: it's 1998 (hey, I'm old); why am I optimizing something that will run in individual milliseconds even if I search linearly?

hypocrites by nothings · 2007-06-19 20:00 · Score: 1 · on W3C Bars Public From Public Conference

Even if this whole article is stupid, I still have to love the idea of the w3c--a consortium of big companies that "care" about the web (to the extent that the browser creators went off and formed their own w3c-independent working group to make new standards)--caring about transparency, about public accessibility.

I have to love it, because it was almost 10 years ago I noticed a problem with an algorithm recommended in the HTML specification and went to w3c.org and couldn't figure out any way to tell them about the problem. And, sure enough, browsers still use that algorithm today.

Judy Arrays by sgowkanapalli · 2006-10-08 04:23 · Score: 1 · on Advanced Data Structures?

I have had enough of the hashes and B-trees.. Any thoughts on Judy arrays http://judy.sourceforge.net/ I think it is an interesting concept.. There are some concerns about it at http://www.nothings.org/computer/judy/ . I think the concept it good.. Do you think it is a feasible solution for a highly scalable data structure?

Judy Arrays - Very interesting by Anonymous Coward · 2006-10-06 04:29 · Score: 0 · on Advanced Data Structures?

any thoughts on Judy arrays http://judy.sourceforge.net/

I think it is an interesting concept.. There are some concerns about it at http://www.nothings.org/computer/judy/

I think the concept is good.. Do you think it is a feasible solution for a highly scalable data structure?

Re:Obfuscated code compiler? by nothings · 2005-11-08 21:49 · Score: 1 · on Winners of the 18th IOCCC

One of my winning entries did something like that; because the judges would c-preprocess the file while judging it, I wrote the program in a high-level assembly language as macros, and let the c-preprocessor "compile" it to (obfuscated) two-opcode machine language inspired by the Analytical Engine. (However, the program wasn't a compiler at all.)

The after-expansion version was too large for me to submit it directly, but it's definitely more impressive than the original entry. If I had done something simpler, I might have just been able to submit the post-processed code, but I doubt it would have won.

Re:Moore's Law is probably being exceeded at... by Anonymous Coward · 2005-04-05 23:53 · Score: 1, Informative · on Forty Years of Moore's Law

I post this every six months or so when a moore's law article comes up... (anonymizing to avoid karma whoring)

. 8086. . . . .: 0.03 million transistors (1978) . 80286 . . . .: 0.13 million transistors (1982) . 80386DX . . .: 0.27 million transistors (1985) . 486 . . . . .: 1.2 million transistors . Pentium . . .: 3 . million transistors . Pentium Pro .: 5.5 million transistors . Pentium 2 . .: 7.5 million transistors * Nvidia TNT2 .: 9 . million transistors . Alpha 21164 .: 9.3 million transistors (1994) . Alpha 21264 .: 15.2 million transistors (1998) . PPC G3. . . .: 22 . million transistors * Geforce 256 .: 23 . million transistors . Pentium 3 . .: 28 . million transistors . PPC G4. . . .: 33 . million transistors . Pentium 4 . .: 42 . million transistors . PPC G5. . . .: 52 . million transistors . P4 Northwood : 55 . million transistors * GeForce 3 . .: 57 . million transistors * GeForce 4 . .: 63 . million transistors * Radeon 9700 .: 110. million transistors * GeForce FX. .: 125. million transistors . P4 Prescott .: 125. million transistors * Radeon X800 .: 160. million transistors . P4 EE . . . .: 178. million transistors * GeForce 6800 : 220. million transistors

properly formatted at http://nothings.org/trans.txt

I wish I'd bothered to keep citations for all these numbers, but I didn't realize when I started this how long it was going to go.

transistor counts through the ages by nothings · 2004-05-08 20:42 · Score: 5, Informative · on Using GPUs For General-Purpose Computing

Transistor counts keep growing, so I keep updating this and reposting it about once a year.

486 : 1.2 million transistors Pentium : 3 million transistors Pentium Pro : 5.5 million transistors Pentium 2 : 7.5 million transistors Nvidia TNT2 : 9 million transistors Alpha 21164 : 9.3 million (1994) Alpha 21264 : 15.2 million (1998) Geforce 256 : 23 million transistors Pentium 3 : 28 million transistors Pentium 4 : 42 million transistors P4 Northwood : 55 million transistors GeForce 3 : 57 million transistors GeForce 4 : 63 million transistors Radeon 9700 : 110 million transistors GeForce FX : 125 million transistors P4 Prescott : 125 million transistors Radeon X800 : 160 million transistors P4 EE : 178 million transistors GeForce 6800 : 220 million transistors

here's the non-sucky version since <ecode> doesn't actually preserve spacing like <pre>.

Re:Adjustment Layers by nothings · 2004-05-01 10:41 · Score: 1 · on The Gimp from the Eyes of a Photoshop User

Yes. Adjustment layers allow you to tweak an image 'under' the adjustment. And they allow non-destructive editing. Very powerful. For example, in this image I used a hue/saturation adjustment layer to desaturate the cardboard photo, allowing me to continually refine it for the exact look I wanted. Moreover, I could now drop any other photograph in, and automatically get the same cardboard-multiply followed by desaturation.

In combination with layer sets, adjustment layers are superpowerful. And it only took me a year of infrequent use of Photoshop before I discovered them! Sadly, at least in PS 6, there are no filter layers for applying filters non-destructively. I'd kill for those. I guess they'd be slow, though.

transistor counts by nothings · 2003-11-10 14:41 · Score: 1 · on Video Card History

transitor counts for newer GPUs and old and new CPUs.

I don't actually have anything before TNT2 on here, but I think it's still interesting.

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