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User: bre_dnd

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Comments · 71

  1. Re:Coffee on Is Too Much Choice Stressing Us Out? (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Yeah. I'm that guy that just orders a double espresso. I'd be happy with fresh black filter coffee too.

  2. Re:CVS or Subversion on Ask Slashdot: Selecting a Version Control System For an Inexperienced Team · · Score: 1

    SVN works well with a single up to date master, but that model eventually breaks if you want to have experimental features. At some point that will become a need -- trying something outside the main branch that is actively being deployed. Git is a bit of a pain at first but you simply can't do the things git does in svn.

  3. Re:CVS or Subversion on Ask Slashdot: Selecting a Version Control System For an Inexperienced Team · · Score: 1

    I use SVN at work and for a small number of developers it works decently well. SVN is quick to set up and to learn -- it somehow feels easy. I agree with the TortoiseSVN as a client -- all of that works quite well. However. Doing merges in SVN is an absolute nightmare. The "cherry picking" model of implementing features and merging them back in, one by one, as code gets ripe is painful in SVN. There is a learning curve for git, but not much more so that for SVN, and the habit of using a feature branch and merging back feels logical and the right thing to do.

  4. Re:Why no diesel hybrids? on Emissions Scandal Expands: Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Mazda, and Mitsubishi (theguardian.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Peugeot makes them: http://www.peugeot.co.uk/hybri...

  5. Re:LOL on Depression: The Secret Struggle Startup Founders Won't Talk About · · Score: 1
  6. Europe's SV on How Silicon Valley Got That Way -- and Why It Will Continue To Rule · · Score: 2

    Try Cambridge, with companies like ARM, Cambridge Silicon Radio/CSR (several billion chips sold) Cambridge University. Plenty of money in London, Europe's financial centre. Plenty of talent around, or attractable due to English being the universal language and European borders being open -- or old colonial ties. Or try Berlin for "frontier living".

  7. Re:The felony wasn't. on Gyrocopter Pilot Appears In Court; Judge Bans Him From D.C. · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is it an African or a European gyrocopter?

  8. Re:Freight on the underground on UK Company Wants To Deliver Parcels Through Underground Tunnels · · Score: 1

    In Berlin, after the war, trams were used to haul freight.

  9. Re:It is more visited than 13 times per year... on Unesco Probing Star Wars Filming In Ireland · · Score: 1

    Irish / English law are often alike: https://www.gov.uk/right-of-wa...

  10. Re:The title of my next stock market guide on High Frequency Trading and Finance's Race To Irrelevance · · Score: 1

    Buy low, sell high.

  11. Re:Comment your damn code on Ask Slashdot: What Do You Consider Elegant Code? · · Score: 1

    Normally a lookup table would be the way to go. There's always a why -- in this case it was a slow microcontroller with 16KByte of codespace, which was already cramped. Table won't fit.

  12. Re:Knuth's TeX and Metafont on Ask Slashdot: What Do You Consider Elegant Code? · · Score: 2
    I live in the UK, about an hour away from London. I have been to New York, but only once.

    London has existed for over a thousand years. It has just grown organically. All recent services (such luxuries as underground, trains, ringroads, mains water, electricity, sewers, communication lines) have been retrofitted on that base -- and it shows. The roads are the wrong size for the amount of traffic -- trains clash and are overfull, high rise offices are planned but foundations have to carefully avoid all the tunneling below.

    New York, in it's current form, is a lot younger than that. A lot of the concepts "we might want sewers" / electricity / rail, to some extend, could be taken into account when the city grid was being laid out. It's a lot easier to build sewers / underground trains before high rise buildings have gone up on top.

    Back to the software world -- if you've got code that was pre-Web / pre-Internet but needs to be brought into the 21st century, inevitably things won't fit. I've worked on some banking code which had punchcard assumptions shine through. Some of that code is 40 years old. You could call it crufty, some would call it rock-solid.

  13. Re:Comment your damn code on Ask Slashdot: What Do You Consider Elegant Code? · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I respectfully disagree.

    I've written code that computes a CRC. It's been done before. The naive/reference implementation works but isn't fast. The optimized version, and how the heck that came about from the naive implementation to those magic few lines of code, looks nothing like it. Now rather than you glazing over "what the?", I figure that *if* you have to overhaul this code, you'd like to know *why* this code looks like it does. So I explained why. In the code. In a full page of comments.

  14. Knuth's TeX and Metafont on Ask Slashdot: What Do You Consider Elegant Code? · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Interesting code, serves a real purpose, solves a real problem.

    A lot of "real world" code out there has not been designed, it has grown, and that's part of the problem. Think of cities that have grown (London?) rather than be designed according to some grand master plan (New York?) and major reengineering exercises need to be undertaken (in the case of London, as one example, sewage pipes were fitted in underneath). Inevitably there's some shortcuts taken or real reasons that you could not quite do the best job.

    Codewise, the oldest running code probably lives in the banking system or the telephony system. Typically code that has grown over time and can't just be shut down for an upgrade -- "what do you mean close the bank for a week?". Now whatever code runs there has been kept running (bodged?) for decades, but pretty it probably isn't.

  15. Possibly diverted to the Nicobar / Andaman islands on Engine Data Reveals That Flight 370 Flew On For Hours After It "Disappeared" · · Score: 3, Informative
  16. Re:this is not the future. on Walmart Unveils Turbine-Powered WAVE Concept Truck · · Score: 1

    Build your Walmart store with the back facing the railtracks.

  17. Re:The Problem on Marc Andreessen On Why Bitcoin Matters (And A Critique) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd say that that works in favour. As bitcoin get more valuable / scarce the tendency to protect them increases. So as more of them get lost the rate of them getting lost will decrease. Note that "gold" also has a finite amount available that gets progressively harder/more expensive to mine.

  18. Re:Good, the Chinese will have something to grow on NASA Will Send Seeds to the Moon In 2015 · · Score: 2

    For a man perhaps not yet -- but you did see this one right? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25178299

  19. Re:Estimation on Ask Slashdot: What Are the Hardest Things Programmers Have To Do? · · Score: 3, Informative
    inc ax

    shl ax,2

    would be slightly faster and use less memory :)

  20. As Henry Ford said... on How BlackBerry Blew It · · Score: 3, Interesting
    If I asked my customers what they wanted, they'd say they wanted a faster horse. Innovation comes from thinking out of the box.

    I worked on some mobile e-mail product some 8 years ago. Call it a Blackberry competitor -- it ran on phones like the Palm Treo, Nokia E61 and various Windows Mobile devices. There was rumours of Apple making a phone -- and when it came out, it had no keys... I remember thinking -- how are you ever going to type a message without keys? Well...

  21. How much!?! You made my day. on Crunching the Numbers On Shared Cellphone Contracts · · Score: 1
    Dear o dear you're getting fleeced over in the US. I paid for my phone outright. One off cost. A humble Galaxy S3 mini. £180 / US$ 280 including all sales tax, new, unlocked. Add a SIM-only deal. I pay £8 / US$12.50 for 500 minutes, unlimited messages and 1GB of data. there. Oh, and I don't pay for incoming calls.

    Looks like prices in the UK are around 25% of the prices you quote...

  22. Re:Blame the Ben Bernank! on How Much Beef Is In Your Burger? · · Score: 1

    And acidity. Nothing wrong with Robusta beans, but you can't sell the resulting product as "Arabica coffee".

  23. Re:Blame Visa Debit Cards and Electronic Payments on Bloomberg: Steve Jobs Behind NYC Crime Wave · · Score: 1
    Sushi, fishy -- I can see the connection.

    Not seen the place, not been there, but I can't see a reason a restaurant won't take cards.

  24. Re:80386... on Ask Slashdot: Old Technology Coexisting With New? · · Score: 2
    I'll mark you points if you can open a telnet or ssh connection to a Unix shell account somewhere. Packet drivers and NCSA Telnet would get you there, and you could run a commandline webclient from there.

    For another starting point look on http://users.ohiohills.com/fmacall/ or http://sshdos.sourceforge.net/index.html

    Your next challenge: do it on an 8088.

  25. Re:8-bit to 64 on Ask Slashdot: Old Technology Coexisting With New? · · Score: 1