Malic

This is somewhat related to a thought experiment of mine.

Suppose you had a means of transmitting information back in time - a one-node network that effectively could email to itself with a timestamp (in the past) being the message's "recipient."

Suppose such a thing existed in the world today. Assume the individuals in possession of such a thing were very intelligent, very careful and very guarded about its use.

Could you still detect that such a thing existed by observing real-world events - stock market changes, tech innovations, amazing coincidences and the like? What evidence would you look for?

Thanks for saving me the click.

A number of big-box stores will let you properly dispose of them at the door - Best Buy and Target are two examples that come to mind.

Basically it means those loyalty apps stores put out? Are you sure you know what that app is doing...?

You are right that disabling bluetooth or being aware of what apps your phone has is what is required.

Snort The idea of the super global £_BISCUIT instead of $_COOKIE - that made my morning.

Or the C64 might be a good choice too.

Jumping into "no-framebuffer/racing-the-beam" 6502 programming on the Atari 2600 for the uninitiated is just ... cruel.

I kinda wish the domain was "rest.standards" instead to set the pattern of "*.standards" would be where you found such things.

> “...You don’t expect them to pull the carpet from beneath you...”

Ah, yes, yes I do.

I work in an agency doing client website development and Google's recent price change for map services caused us to look elsewhere - abruptly. We're all about MapBox now - Google Maps has become too expensive.

Unless I am not seeing a polyfill inclusion, at least some of these are supported in Firefox already (66.0.2) - Color Input and Data Lists, in particular.

(Not trying to dis Webkit/Safari here - just saying that the "Can I Use?" list grows desirably longer.)

"An older person will simply choose to not use the product."

I completely agree. The older you get, the more you realize that patience isn't always a virtue.

I don't know about "under 4096 bytes" but I have heard of not compressing data that is under ~1500 bytes. Part of the thinking is this - if your result data (plus HTTP overhead) is already smaller than the data payload of an IP packet (MTU settings come into play here), then you are spending CPU time that will not save you any network I/O time.

Even Bobby Tables mother would be impressed by such a hack.

Do I read this right? Does this suggest that Chrome will get GPU accelerated rendering, similar to what Firefox's Quantum Renderer will provide?

So... a pull-request to merge a feature branch into ImageMagick is coming soon? :)

This.

Too many clients (from an agency perspective) are implicitly given good advice "Your potential customer base isn't interested in this" but someone has to ask "How do we get them to see it anyway?"

They have forgotten that potential customers don't have to do business with them. They have options. Time for folks to re-read Seth Godin's "Permission Marketing", it seems.

The article is behind a login to a private forum - but I can imagine what the discussion might be like.

I have been recommending this book for web design professionals for years. Understanding that comics (in the BIG view, as McCloud has describes it) have something to teach in regards to communication of ideas in a visual medium, is "Understanding Comics" big contribution.

UX ideas are hard to describe in static wireframe layouts. Comics provide suggestions for a visual non-text language to communicate these designs.

"Understanding Comics" - yes. Web designers, UX designers, and others should take the time to read through it.

Where can I read more about this?

Recommendation: The Extra Credits folks have been doing an Extra Sci Fi series that covers the big names of Sci Fi - and that included Heinlein.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaWMe5nC9SA

I liked it - it was a great primer on an author I was aware of but didn't know much about (yes, I need to catch up on my reading list).

I mostly agree - but just in case, there is https://html5zombo.com/

Honestly, if this were to take off, I could see Microsoft/LinkedIn having some acquisition interest.

One of my favorite software horror stories is the one of $32 _billion_ overdraft by the Bank of New York.

From "Computer-Related Risks" by Peter G. Neumann, published 1994 (REALLY recommended reading)

"One of the most dramatic examples was the $32 billion overdraft experienced by the Bank of New York (BoNY) as the result of the overflow of a 16-bit counter that went unchecked. (Most of the other counters were 32-bits wide.) BoNY was unable to process the incoming credits from security transfers, while the New York Federal Reserve automatically debited BoNY's cash account. BoNY had to borrow $24 billion to cover itself for 1 day (until the software was fixed), the interest on which was about $5 million. Many customers were also affected by the delayed transaction completions."

Additional reference: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1985/12/13/c...

Granted, no one died because of this but ... wow ... that was bad day for some developers somewhere.

Kurzgesagt had some nice summaries of: 1) Why white dwarves might be the last home for life in the universe - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsN1LglrX9s 2) ...or maybe it will be black holes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulCdoCfw-bY

Ok, now that you mention it - that does sound correct. It was a long time ago... ;)

If I recall correctly, Steven Levy's book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" also covered some of this story.

Woz was intimidated by disk controllers because he didn't know much about them, other than they were big complicated things. So starting with his own ignorance as a fresh slate, he ended up with something better than his former employer HP had in their products.

Sometimes (Sometimes! Not always!) not knowing better can be helpful.

Just to chime in with more 68k nostalgia and trivia: The 68000 didn't have cache - but 68010 did.

Three whole instructions worth of cache.

"Wha...?" you might say? Tha' heck good is that? The point was that the 3-instruction cache could cache tight loops, like the kind you would use for mem-to-mem copies, which is a terribly common thing to do. I put one in my Amiga 1000 (geez, did I hack that thing...) and got about a 10% overall system performance increase.

It was neat! More lovely details here: http://www.memphisamigagroup.net/diskmags/198803/68010-kit/M...

A tip of the hat is necessary to John Piña Craven (deceased), the Chief Scientist of the US Navy Special Project Office at the time.

He made mention of his days on the Mississippi River and the occasional "Underwater cable - Do not drag anchor" signs that dot the riverside. When asked, "What? You mean we should look for signs that say 'Underwater cable - Do not drag anchor' written in Russian?"

His answer was pretty much "Yes, that's exactly what we should do."

Craven was a colorful character and worth anyone's time to look up more on his contributions. I'll second the recommendation to the book "Blind Man's Bluff."

Very true but depending on what latitude you live at, it may be impossible to get enough on sunlight alone. There's dermatologist that claims a link between latitude and mortality:

https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_weller_could_the_sun_be_go...

Recommended watching - there is more to sunlight than Vitamin-d.

I forgot to mention - he was also a teacher of his craft and that counts too.

Because being a hacker is about obsessively working to know all there is about a given subject and become better in a chosen craft. Bocuse was cooking hacker.

LOL! Is the submitter trying to use this as a thinly veiled parable for JavaScript Fatigue?