It actually very much was like Apple had a private, Shadowrun-esque paramilitary force on call in San Jose. It was not the normal police force that conducted the raid, but the Rapid Enforcement computer team (http://www.reacttf.org/), which apparently will kick down any door in the Bay Area that Apple says needs kicking down.
You got it in one. But just because tech writers love the walled garden, doesn't mean there's a market demand for throwing PCs away. When I get stuck with nothing but a smartphone for a week (like right now) the shitty-ass browser and poor support for mobile sites (Slashdot, I'm looking at you) makes it a relief to return home.
There may be some question if tablets will kill the LAPTOP, but they're still not ready yet for primetime. Honeycomb is a hackish mess, and iPads are iPads.
Pingflooding dialup users was like shooting ducks in a barrel.
Personally, I loved messing with my friends by echoing TTY control codes into their (heh) world-writable dev/tty file. If you wanted to be a dick, you could just pipe a binary file into it, which basically made their session unusable, but it was much more fun to change their font or temporarily blank their screen.
Xwindows games were fun, too. Very little security back in the day meant you could play audio files to come out of their speakers (always fun to play embarassing songs when they're near other people) or launch xv with a photo of Mike Tyson biting off an ear when they're chatting up a girl. Xscreensaver was always fun to launch, too, on someone else's session.
Yeah, I was just at a workshop today where the presenter was bitterly remarking that some history-related search function she was going to show us had just been yanked by Google.
App Inventor always seemed like a toy to me, not really capable of even making, say, an app for checkers. That said, it provided a really nice GUI for doing event/handler coding, easy enough for kids to understand.
I was debating teaching it to teachers... glad I didn't now.
Guessing what the author intended to communicate is one thing. What the reader interpreted is another. The reader's reaction to it is yet another.
They commonly talk about seven layers of response to art (visceral, emotional, intellectual, reflective, etc). Anyhow, the point is that all these different things are valid, and worth talking about in an analysis piece.
I always find it amusing to read Song Meanings.com and see the wild theories on there (usually about sex, drugs, or nonsense) with what the artists say a song is about.
One of my old BJJ instructors always carries a knife to make emergency exits through drywall. Kept his ads from being jumped by a gang of guys in Brazil, once.
Fallout and Oblivion both had terrible UIs due to their console origins. Having only one hotkey for your Pipboy, IIRC, meant that instead of being able to tap I for inventory like with most RPGs, you had to hit Tab and then click on the relevent submenu.
They weren't the worst ports, but they weren't good by amy strech of the imagination.
Plenty of White friends of mine stated they wished they could be minorities, especially when applying for college.
And that bit about no one ever being discriminated against because they were white is just willful stupidity. If you prioritize one race in admissions,the non-prioritized race is logically being discriminated against. Look up Bakke or the Michigan lawsuits some time.
At a personal level, I have a friend who was told he was only admitted to Columbia because he was black... but he's white. They were shocked when he rolled in... he was going to have been expelled, but he was able prove it was an error on the application.
I might lose my nerd card for saying this, but I think it's a mistake to decouple athletics and academics (and the arts), and believe excellence in any field should be worth a scholarship. Honestly, I think a lot of ADD problems are caused by lack of exercise - the literature shows activity benefits concentration... a number of Japanese firms start their days with a morning workout.
I agree that things like football science are problems, though.
Race isn't (just) a social construct. If DNA testing can tell the difference, and there's identified disease clusters within people of certain races, then they're more than just social constructs.
Sickle cell, alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme levels, etc., correlate well with our notions of race.
Might not be PC to mention this, since are supposed to be living in the Bright Future, but I always get baited to respond to people spreading urban myths.
The SmartMeter (that pretty much every house in California has now) will show you instantaneous power consumption. If you're willing to do easy arithmetic and tromp out to the side of your house, you can figure out what the power draws are for everything in your house, without needing to buy anything.
If you know what's on in your house, then, you know your draw. You can even test things under heavy load.
In my house, the AC uses 4x as much power as the rest of the house combined.
That said, I do have a widget hooked up that reports the amount of power my solar system generates, which gets fed to a website I can check from my phone. PVwatch. It's kind of fun.
>>I'd rather never choose between "the irradiator control is stuck in a for(;;) loop" and "let's get out of the irradiator control loop by using a default radiation of 99999.99999".
Right (hence my "yikes"). But if you're in a failstop engineered system, you don't want your code falling into an infinite loop while the radiation gun is on... probably the right way to do it would be to have the Jolt thing throw an exception which the code could trap and safely shut everything down instead of just blithely continuing to execute the code.
But nothing is an excuse for not writing code that doesn't fall into an infinite loop in the first place.
>>My thought exactly. Not to mention that other operations performed by the loop (that are obviously malfunctioning) may be necessary for the program to proceed correctly even if they don't affect the loop invariant.
I guess MAYBE if you write code defensively throughout your codebase, it might work. Though it seems a recipe for disaster unless it'd be a worse disaster for your code to freeze up. (Medical equipment, maybe? Yikes.) But programmers that are cautious to validate all their input and output are also going to be not writing loops that fall into infinite loops.
I've actually been bitten in the ass by watchdog timers before. No, I'm not in an infinite loop, thank you very much, I'm just running a complicated calculation. It sounds like this will be a little bit more sophisticated, maybe.
>>High quality voxel graphics with dynamic deformation would allow a whole new level of user-generated content.
Yeah, that would actually be pretty damn neat. None of what they showed was dynamic, though.
About 10 years ago, when I was doing a lot of work with voxels, I'd arrange all the voxels in an octree and could adjust the framerate/detail simply by how far down each object's octree I'd traverse. I could have large, coarse voxels, or small, precise ones, adjust for distance from the viewer, and so forth. It worked out pretty well. They even made hardware voxel accelerators.
These Australian guys are claiming they're doing doing voxels, but whatever the hell their "little bitty atoms" tech means then, it looks awfully familiar to me.
>>But Vista/7? What's the big benefit compared to XP?
64-bit support, and the internals are better / more stable than XP's. Better profiling tools, and so forth.
But XP's GUI is better. Whoever thought that Win7's control panel should be alphabetized in row/zigzag fashion is an idiot. I.e. if you're not using Simple mode, it alphabetizes like this: ABCD EFGH IJKL MNOP QRST UVWX YZ
And you can't change it. By design, apparently - from a support thread on the topic: "The items in the control panel are alphabetized by row and it is by design. You cannot alphabetize by column. Mouneshwar R â" Microsoft Support"
Also, breadcrumbs can fail sometimes, and they removed the up-arrow in the Windows Explorer, which is kind of annoying. The new start menu is also terrible, but Classic Shell can fix both these problems (http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/).
>>However, very few people need more than 2GB per application, so 32-bit with PAE is all the vast majority of computer users really need.
Err... games? How much memory does a high-end FPS use these days, anyway?
Hell, a nethack-ish game I've been enjoying recently (Dungeons of Dredmore) uses 1GB of RAM. While it's fun, it just looks like any other roguelike with a cheesy tileset added.
Slashdot Mirror
Gizmodo called up Apple and tried to return it. That's exculpatory enough for me.
It actually very much was like Apple had a private, Shadowrun-esque paramilitary force on call in San Jose. It was not the normal police force that conducted the raid, but the Rapid Enforcement computer team (http://www.reacttf.org/), which apparently will kick down any door in the Bay Area that Apple says needs kicking down.
You are far too optimistic about the impracticality of states setting up internet filters / censors. They can; they have; they will.
Even America, sad to say, is getting on the internet censorship bandwagon.
You got it in one. But just because tech writers love the walled garden, doesn't mean there's a market demand for throwing PCs away. When I get stuck with nothing but a smartphone for a week (like right now) the shitty-ass browser and poor support for mobile sites (Slashdot, I'm looking at you) makes it a relief to return home.
There may be some question if tablets will kill the LAPTOP, but they're still not ready yet for primetime. Honeycomb is a hackish mess, and iPads are iPads.
Pingflooding dialup users was like shooting ducks in a barrel.
Personally, I loved messing with my friends by echoing TTY control codes into their (heh) world-writable dev/tty file. If you wanted to be a dick, you could just pipe a binary file into it, which basically made their session unusable, but it was much more fun to change their font or temporarily blank their screen.
Xwindows games were fun, too. Very little security back in the day meant you could play audio files to come out of their speakers (always fun to play embarassing songs when they're near other people) or launch xv with a photo of Mike Tyson biting off an ear when they're chatting up a girl. Xscreensaver was always fun to launch, too, on someone else's session.
Yeah, I was just at a workshop today where the presenter was bitterly remarking that some history-related search function she was going to show us had just been yanked by Google.
App Inventor always seemed like a toy to me, not really capable of even making, say, an app for checkers. That said, it provided a really nice GUI for doing event/handler coding, easy enough for kids to understand.
I was debating teaching it to teachers... glad I didn't now.
TFA makes it sound like syching between threads is an open problem.
It's not.
And pipelining / OOO execution has next to nothing to do with synching between two cores, which operate on a much, much coarser level of granularity.
He doesn't know how to disaggregate subgroups.
Guessing what the author intended to communicate is one thing.
What the reader interpreted is another.
The reader's reaction to it is yet another.
They commonly talk about seven layers of response to art (visceral, emotional, intellectual, reflective, etc). Anyhow, the point is that all these different things are valid, and worth talking about in an analysis piece.
I always find it amusing to read Song Meanings.com and see the wild theories on there (usually about sex, drugs, or nonsense) with what the artists say a song is about.
It is a recognition of excellence / arete, though.
You never passed a stats class, did you?
One of my old BJJ instructors always carries a knife to make emergency exits through drywall. Kept his ads from being jumped by a gang of guys in Brazil, once.
Limited dev time? A UI fix for Oblivion was available like the next day after the release.
TweakUI? Was called something like that.
Fallout and Oblivion both had terrible UIs due to their console origins. Having only one hotkey for your Pipboy, IIRC, meant that instead of being able to tap I for inventory like with most RPGs, you had to hit Tab and then click on the relevent submenu.
They weren't the worst ports, but they weren't good by amy strech of the imagination.
Foreskin Man already exists. He battles the Monster Mohel in one of the most anti-semitic things to come out of San Francisco this year.
http://theweek.com/article/index/216001/foreskin-man-proof-that-anti-circumcision-activists-are-anti-semitic
Plenty of White friends of mine stated they wished they could be minorities, especially when applying for college.
And that bit about no one ever being discriminated against because they were white is just willful stupidity. If you prioritize one race in admissions,the non-prioritized race is logically being discriminated against. Look up Bakke or the Michigan lawsuits some time.
At a personal level, I have a friend who was told he was only admitted to Columbia because he was black... but he's white. They were shocked when he rolled in... he was going to have been expelled, but he was able prove it was an error on the application.
Look up the Greek thoughts on this some time. Specifically, google "gymnasium", "arete" and "paideia". ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paideia)
I might lose my nerd card for saying this, but I think it's a mistake to decouple athletics and academics (and the arts), and believe excellence in any field should be worth a scholarship. Honestly, I think a lot of ADD problems are caused by lack of exercise - the literature shows activity benefits concentration... a number of Japanese firms start their days with a morning workout.
I agree that things like football science are problems, though.
Race isn't (just) a social construct. If DNA testing can tell the difference, and there's identified disease clusters within people of certain races, then they're more than just social constructs.
Sickle cell, alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme levels, etc., correlate well with our notions of race.
Might not be PC to mention this, since are supposed to be living in the Bright Future, but I always get baited to respond to people spreading urban myths.
The SmartMeter (that pretty much every house in California has now) will show you instantaneous power consumption. If you're willing to do easy arithmetic and tromp out to the side of your house, you can figure out what the power draws are for everything in your house, without needing to buy anything.
If you know what's on in your house, then, you know your draw. You can even test things under heavy load.
In my house, the AC uses 4x as much power as the rest of the house combined.
That said, I do have a widget hooked up that reports the amount of power my solar system generates, which gets fed to a website I can check from my phone. PVwatch. It's kind of fun.
>>I'd rather never choose between "the irradiator control is stuck in a for(;;) loop" and "let's get out of the irradiator control loop by using a default radiation of 99999.99999".
Right (hence my "yikes"). But if you're in a failstop engineered system, you don't want your code falling into an infinite loop while the radiation gun is on... probably the right way to do it would be to have the Jolt thing throw an exception which the code could trap and safely shut everything down instead of just blithely continuing to execute the code.
But nothing is an excuse for not writing code that doesn't fall into an infinite loop in the first place.
>>My thought exactly. Not to mention that other operations performed by the loop (that are obviously malfunctioning) may be necessary for the program to proceed correctly even if they don't affect the loop invariant.
I guess MAYBE if you write code defensively throughout your codebase, it might work. Though it seems a recipe for disaster unless it'd be a worse disaster for your code to freeze up. (Medical equipment, maybe? Yikes.) But programmers that are cautious to validate all their input and output are also going to be not writing loops that fall into infinite loops.
I've actually been bitten in the ass by watchdog timers before. No, I'm not in an infinite loop, thank you very much, I'm just running a complicated calculation. It sounds like this will be a little bit more sophisticated, maybe.
>>High quality voxel graphics with dynamic deformation would allow a whole new level of user-generated content.
Yeah, that would actually be pretty damn neat. None of what they showed was dynamic, though.
About 10 years ago, when I was doing a lot of work with voxels, I'd arrange all the voxels in an octree and could adjust the framerate/detail simply by how far down each object's octree I'd traverse. I could have large, coarse voxels, or small, precise ones, adjust for distance from the viewer, and so forth. It worked out pretty well. They even made hardware voxel accelerators.
These Australian guys are claiming they're doing doing voxels, but whatever the hell their "little bitty atoms" tech means then, it looks awfully familiar to me.
>>But Vista/7? What's the big benefit compared to XP?
64-bit support, and the internals are better / more stable than XP's. Better profiling tools, and so forth.
But XP's GUI is better. Whoever thought that Win7's control panel should be alphabetized in row/zigzag fashion is an idiot. I.e. if you're not using Simple mode, it alphabetizes like this:
ABCD
EFGH
IJKL
MNOP
QRST
UVWX
YZ
And you can't change it. By design, apparently - from a support thread on the topic: "The items in the control panel are alphabetized by row and it is by design. You cannot alphabetize by column. Mouneshwar R â" Microsoft Support"
Also, breadcrumbs can fail sometimes, and they removed the up-arrow in the Windows Explorer, which is kind of annoying. The new start menu is also terrible, but Classic Shell can fix both these problems (http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/).
>>However, very few people need more than 2GB per application, so 32-bit with PAE is all the vast majority of computer users really need.
Err... games? How much memory does a high-end FPS use these days, anyway?
Hell, a nethack-ish game I've been enjoying recently (Dungeons of Dredmore) uses 1GB of RAM. While it's fun, it just looks like any other roguelike with a cheesy tileset added.
Seriously, if "Slide to Lock" deserves a patent, someone in the USPTO should be hit over the head with a hammer. Repeatedly.