Slashdot Mirror


User: bmuon

bmuon's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
49
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 49

  1. Re:Service still available in Argentina on India To Send World's Last Telegram · · Score: 1

    Yes, but I can't find any information that clarifies if the technology under the legal telegram is still the old telegraph or if it was replaced with something new.

  2. Re:Have someone next to you squeeze your arm on Ask Slashdot: How Can a Blind Singer 'See' the Choirmaster's Baton? · · Score: 1

    You're assuming the tempo doesn't change throughout the piece. This isn't true for a lot of musical pieces. This really needs a technical solution.

  3. Saw it at the movies on New NASA Spacesuit Looks Like Buzz Lightyear's · · Score: 1

    Wasn't there a movie in which space suits were exactly like this? I can't remember which.

  4. Re:Headed for the "Google Graveyard"? on Google's Second Brain: How the Knowledge Graph Changes Search · · Score: 1

    Introductory wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory

  5. Re:Get it from work on Ask Slashdot: The Search For the Ultimate Engineer's Pen · · Score: 2

    He uses regular Bic ballpoint pens (he said so in his DeviantArt page) which is simply amazing. I'm actually a fan of the basic Bic pen. Considering how cheap they are, they're very reliable.

  6. Re:My lenovo laptop on Google Awarded Face-To-Unlock Patent · · Score: 1

    How is that not obvious even under the understanding of obviousness by the USPTO?

  7. Re:Why did they think this would work? on Nokia: the Sun Can't Charge Your Phone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No idea. Mechanical energy -motion and/or sound waves- seems a more likely source of power for a phone.

  8. There was a Google Tech Talk... on Ask Slashdot: Technical Advice For a (Fictional) Space Mission? · · Score: 2

    ...about a trip to "mars". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZo36huahoI Summary:

    "Presented by David D. Levine.

    In January 2010 I spent two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station, a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert. Although the Martian conditions were simulated, the science was real, as were the isolation, hostile environment, and problems faced by the six-person crew. Although my official title was Crew Journalist, I soon found myself repairing space suits, helping to keep the habitat running, and having interplanetary adventures I'd never before imagined. My talk on the experience is profusely illustrated with photographs and has gotten rave reviews. Please see http://bentopress.com/mars/ for more information."

  9. Re:For your own good on Microsoft Upgrading Windows Users To Latest Version of MSIE · · Score: 1

    For that reason it is much better to use a server sent header than the meta tag.

  10. EFF on Ask Slashdot: To Hack Or Not To Hack? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Shouldn't he contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation? Isn't its purpose to provide advice in this cases?

  11. Re:Reflections on Why Everyone Hates the IT Department · · Score: 1

    That is true. Software developers don't know anything about maintaining a network and are probably a pain in the ass to support. But they do have special needs in that they need to be able to use the web freely, to try out software and keep their own up to date. They need to be able to have a nightly version of a browser updated and install the latest version of Node.js. When firewalls and policies get in the way the company is shooting itself in the foot.

  12. Re:photovoltaics require silicon on The Myth of Renewable Energy · · Score: 2

    Silicon can (and should) be recycled.

  13. Re:Observable universe on LHC Research May Help Explain the Universe's Matter/Antimatter Imbalance · · Score: 2

    And where would the unobservable universe be? Unless you're thinking about antimatter being coiled up in extra spatial dimensions, everything points to there being a process by which the symmetry is broken.

  14. Re:Amazon abandoning what was good about their pla on B&N Nook Tablet vs. Amazon Kindle Fire · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure there can be anything done to improve the "support" of PDF files by the Kindle. I think we need better tools for mungling the PDF file and returning a good combination of plain text and images.

  15. Re:What about iOS? on Antitrust Case Over, Microsoft Ties IE 10 To Win 8 · · Score: 2

    It is part of the core system. There are 3 ways you can use Mobile Safari: opening it, using an installed web app and through WebViews inside other apps. All of them are WebKit and to a certain level Mobile Safari. And Apple explicitly forbids the publication of browsers that don't use WebKit or that use another JavaScript runtime. That's why there's even talk about Firefox for jailbroken iOS devices.

  16. Re:Speaking of missing the point... on Siri Envy? Iris Brings Some Voice-Assistant Features to Android · · Score: 2

    I think the ones that missed the point were the developers and reporters. The whole point of an AI helper is that it behaves as if it were alive, and there is absolutely no way you can accomplish that in 8 hours of work. It's the details that matter for the life-like experience, not the general idea.

  17. Re:Hopefully on DNA Sequenced of Woman Who Lived To 115 · · Score: 1

    States already make vaccination mandatory, including some during pregnancy. It's not that crazy to imagine a "vaccine" for Alzheimer's.

  18. Re:I hope this JavaScript fad blows over soon. on Linux In JavaScript, With Persistent Storage · · Score: 2

    News flash: it won't and it will only get better.

  19. Re:Who, exactly, is losing money? on MS Buying Yahoo? Bad Idea, Even At a Discount · · Score: 2

    Remember that most users are not technologically literate.

    That used to be true. People are getting more and more tech savvy and everyone in the tech industry is aware of it.

  20. Re:can you patent a hypothetical material? on Algorithm Predicts New Superhard Materials · · Score: 2

    It will probably be patentable, and even the algorithm could be patented, but that would hardly be a useful patent. See what the creators of Graphene said about it

    We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, "We've got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?" It's quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, "We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it's really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us." That's a direct quote.

    http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101008/09595411336/why-this-year-s-physics-nobel-winner-never-patented-graphene.shtml

  21. Performance tips on Inside Netflix's WebKit-Based UI For TV Devices · · Score: 2

    Some performance tips make sense. CSS transforms basically paint an image into GPU memory, so this makes a lot of sense:

    Keep layers small
    – Don’t inadvertently create gigantic layers
    – Memory consumption = width x height x 4 (bit depth)

    However, other tips don't make as much sense:

    Use closures sparingly & only where necessary

    Closures are in the heart of JavaScript. You can't avoid them even if you want to. Instead, learn to write destruction lifecycles for your objects in which you expressively remove references that may cause leaks.

  22. Re:Slides? Slides?! on Inside Netflix's WebKit-Based UI For TV Devices · · Score: 1
  23. Re:please please please on Google To Introduce New Programming Language — Dart · · Score: 1

    Maybe they need to come up with some kind of "use sanity" mode to build on the existing "use strict",

    That's the idea. You'll be able to set "application/ecmascript-6" or something similar to the type attribute of the script tag.

    I think in the context of a discussion related to a (not even published) new language that aims to fix front-end development, the future of JavaScript is more relevant than its present.

  24. Re:please please please on Google To Introduce New Programming Language — Dart · · Score: 2

    Global-by-default-unless-declared for variables is a recipe of disaster.

    ES5 strict mode already disallows that.

    If I declare a "var" inside a pair of curly braces, it should only be visible in those curly braces

    The "let" keyword will fix that. It has block scope. Eventually all variables should be declared with "let".

    Syntax for lambdas is overly verbose

    There is still no agreement in the ECMAScript comitee about which option to take, but there are two very good proposals:
    - Arrow function syntax taken from CoffeeScript: (x) -> x * x;
    - Block lambdas, which allow you to treat chunks of code as data
    Personally, I love arrow functions.

    "new Boolean(false)" is considered true in a conditional expression..

    I never heard of that particular example and trying "true == new Boolean(false)" always evaluates to false in a console. But yes, the == type coercing operand is the worst part of JavaScript. The === operator solves 99% of cases. For the 1% that it doesn't help with, ECMAScript 6 will have an "is" operator, and before that probably an Object.is() function.

    While we're at it, what's up with the whole separation into primitives and objects?

    I agree with you, everything should've been an object from the start. That's probably because of the Java legacy.

  25. Re:good luck with that on Pakistan Bans Encryption · · Score: 1

    Maybe the question should be how to promote policies that prevent software engineers from going to the evil dictator side.