demallien

Memory bus bandwidth - moving large chunks of data around just got twice as fast. That means loading textures for games, or hauling photos up from flash memory will be substantially faster now.

It's a mistake to think that this whole exercise was about changing the logo. Mayer has inherited a demotivated and dispirited team of developers and designers that she has to forge into a company capable of competing with Google.

One of the things that she can do to motivate her teams is to take an interest in what they are doing - a weekend retreat for the design of the logo? Great! Marissa cares about what I'm doing, I'm important to the company!

On the other hand, having your CEO show an interest in what you are doing is generally speaking a huge motivator for people. It's cold indifference to anything you do that will drive people away.

I'm willing to bet that the actual target for the logo redesign story was internal. Mayer is sending a very clear signal to all Yahoos that yes, they are good enough, and no, she isn't going to get external help to do the things that are core to Yahoo's business.

It does actually happen to me - do you never do that? But I agree, it was an inelegant expression of my argument. I was trying to get across the idea that a phone will do everything for you - you don't have to buy a separate gadget for games, and many people won't buy a separate gadget, either for money, or because they don't want the hassle of having to recharge yet another device each evening, or whatever. I know plenty of people that used to use Nintendo DSes all of the time, that have ended up leaving theirs in a drawer for these sorts of reasons...

The thing is, if you have to walk out of the house with only one gadget on you, you don't take a Nintendo DS, you take your telephone - it'll give you some gaming on the go, whilst keeping you connected, allowing you to take photos and have a GPS.

Nintendo has to compete against that, and it is not easy. On the other hand, Nintendo could make an absolute killing by selling a gamepad accessory for the iPhone - extra battery life plus a decent d-pad/thumbsticks would be an easy sell for gamers. You could probably even price it at a pretty steep mark-up and make nearly as much profit as they must be making on the DS. Make all Nintendo games compatible with it, and run a licensing scheme so that other game companies can list themselves as compatible with the hardware.

This strategy allows Nintendo to continue innovating where they have successfully done so in the past - specifically with clever input devices. It's been a long time since Nintendo could claim to rule the roost for things like raw processing power, so leave Apple to do the heavy lifting there.

I Thought I'd repost some of losethos's comment, seeing as he is hell-banned, but the comment was quite relevant.

losethos: Smart American kids my age had C64s and Apple IIs. We all entered 6502 machine code into DATA statements in BASIC programs. Everyone did it. It seems so fantastical and primitive to a monkey, doesn't it. Generally, we used monitor program to disassemble and assemblers, though you had to buy an assembler. Every store had magazines with BASIC programs full of DATA statements with graphic and machine code data. People typed it in. We had xsum bytes on blocks.

Exactly. My very first thought was why on Earth would you even bother trying to program using that? Write an assembler, and then write a C compiler, for goodness sake!

Oh quite some time I would expect. The current system actually suits the wealthy quite nicely - on the surface it seems like it's a fair system allowing for admissions to be done based on merit. But as the article indicates, in reality the wealthy can buy a ticket for their children. So the proles are happy because they think the system is fair, and the rich are happy because a) they know it's not, b) they know the proles think it is, which gives them social cover.

BSD-licensed, not GPL? For some people that's important.

I don't think that it's useful to be talking about Obama specifically. Before Obama there was Bush Jr, who was the sitting president when most of these programs were put in place. It should be clear now that it's not one specific President, or one specific party, but the whole political class that has been corrupted. Thinking things will get better at the next election will absolutely not help things, unless the issue du jour of the next election is privacy, and the new president chosen based on their commitment to privacy. Even then it's not sure whether such a President could successfully make meaningful change.

"easily destroyed by much cheaper drones"

To a certain extent, this has been true for more than two decades. I used to work as a radar engineer for the RAAF, and every time we went on exercises against US forces (both teams flying F 18s, but with different missile payloads, we had AIM9s, the Americans had AMRAAM), we would see our aircraft swatted from the sky before we could even get the bogeys on weapons-system radar. Talk about dog-fighting maneuverability and visibility is just ridiculous - if you're using those characteristics, you've already lost the battle. In the control room we used to joke that the USN could have sent P51s equipped with AMRAAMs and AWACS support and they would still win.

Modern fighter aircraft need to:

a) not be seen b) be fast (time to target is still important!) c) carry a decent payload of weapons.

Ideally target selection should be provided by AWACS, and missile-sensors provide the final kill guidance, allowing the fighter (AKA missile-launch platform) to remain stealthy. In the absence of AWACS, the fighter will need to carry it's own sensor suite.

Modern air warfare is all about sensors, ECM and stealth. The airframe is almost inconsequential.

Yup, when I was young and naive, I would not initialize structs to zero explicitly when they were allocated on the stack. One day I had a bug that only appeared in production code, which is bad, as I was working on an embedded system, so production code = no debugger. Took me a while to figure that one out! The compiler writer that thought that it would be a good idea to zero out stack variables, but only if the code was -O0 deserves to be taken out back and shot!

Hmmm, it's an interesting point. I think the reason people don't even try is because they recognize that they can't tell the difference between something that might take them 15 minutes of monkeying around to fix, and something that is beyond their competency. Worse, they are not sure that they won't make things when trying to fix the problem.

I'm sure it must be similar to the feeling I get when I'm working on a new code base that I'm not familiar with, and I need to make a modification in a function so that it calls another module correctly for some new functionality. But I can't tell if that change isn't going to break something somewhere else, so making that change becomes quite scary.

In the software development world, we handle this by creating suites of automatic tests that we can run after the change to make sure that what we just did doesn't break things. We also use config managent software so that we can back out any erroneous changes. These things aren't available to nontechnical users - they can't verify that they haven't broken anything, and if they have broken something, they may not be able to put things back the way they were. This pretty much guarantees that people won't experiment with their computer.

Not necessarily - the speech to text just has to be good enough to flag likely use of interesting terms. Those calls could then be fully stored for later analysis by an investigation if it becomes necessary. The vast majority of calls would end up being stored as a text file, but this technique with today's technology would certainly be good enough to flag a reasonably high percentage of calls of interest for audio storage. That phone call from Jimmy to Sally Mae telling her he's going to be late home from work? It doesn't matter if NSA-Siri garbles the translation...

What's the problem with using a fixed mount? I use my bike nearly every day in Paris and have never had any issues in the last two years...

Something like this maybe? : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHepKd38pr0

Buy crossover for Mac from Codeweavers. Codeweavers do a lot of the heavy lifting in Wine, so it's good to support them, plus the UI integration is excellent.

For my personal use, crossover is good enough that I no longer install a windows vm for my occasional windows app usage.

I think the GP makes a valid point - if you're worried about climate change, it's no good being able to say that all your electricity is produced from clean sources if all of your heating / transport energy needs are being met by carbon-intensive sources.

Also, which goal posts do you think were being moved exactly?

Probably not, but I reckon my French would give his English a run for its money :P

No, that is not a typo. Thos is a typo - an error created during the mechanical act of typing. Yours was just a plain mistake, you got the units wrong. Own it and learn from the error instead of excusing it away.

Unless you're suggesting that the girl actually was up to something nefarious, there absolutely is something to see here. Police should not be drawing weapons for anything other than an imminate danger to human life.

Watching the police in action is the one negative experience that I have had in the US. You guys really need to calm your (oversized) police force down - they're thugs in uniform.

Ahhh, good question. Safari.

On a Macbook Air 2012 running Mavericks it sits at 1-2% CPU usage...

Yup. GPU pipelines are another very common example, with the notable difference that pretty much every GPU programmer will optimise for the render pipeline, which is not the case for the CPU.

Actually, I was fairly heavily involved with the Dems at the time (it's the "dem" in my pseudo!), and what actually happened is worse. They had no structure in place at all to gauge what the party rank and file wanted, no structure for debate, and pretty much no structure at all. They got to be the maximum size that a party can be before internal strains make them implode I think. So when the Howard Government proposed the GST, the Democrat Senators achieved a consensus amongst themselves on what would be an acceptable form of the GST (they, in particular Natasha Stott Despoja, added in many of the exemptions, such as on books, fresh food and so on).

There was no mechanism for the rank and file to state their resistance in a timely fashion in a way that the leadership could hear, and of course the membership itself was deeply divided on the issue - once again, there was no mechanism for dissension amongst the membership to be dissipated. The result was that the party blew up in spectacular fashion at the next elections, unable to get the membership enthusiastic enough to put boots on the ground to run election activities, with a consequent massive drop in the polls, leading to a drop in funding, leading to extinction.

I was in the NSW branch and as a result of this mess became policy manager and tried to put in place what we would call a crowd-sourced policy creation system. But this was in the early 2000s, the Internet was still not entirely ubiquitous, and management in NSW decided that we had to do this thing on paper, not on the Web. It was slow, painful, and I moved countries before getting to the end (and anyway, it was too little too late, the writing was on the wall).

All of that to say that I don't think we can use the Australian Democrats as a counterexample for direct democracy. They never really had the processes in place to give such a system a chance. Today the story might very well be different if a direct democracy party was tried with a correct set up of tools to allow the rank and file a chance to meaningfully participate in policy creation. I've often thought about trying to set one up on that basis, but since I live in a country now where I'm not even a citizen, I've never tried.

I can't speak for the op, but I would think that writing linked lists is something that pretty much anyone working in performance constrained environments does. No one solution is perfect for all situations, so you end up writing one that is tweaked for your use case. It's not like they're hard to write, so why wouldnt you roll your own?

The problem isn't with minimum versions, the problem is with maximum versions, which are potentially unknown at the time a project is released, i.e. the code works with the latest real ease of a library, but a future release of the library may break the project.

The only real way to avoid that is for a project to include a bunch of compliance tests, that validate that an underlying library correctly performs the operations the project needs it to do. But this is actually a lot of work, so in reality it will almost never be done. Which leads us back to the discussion about the wisdom of packagers changing libs without understanding the on downstream projects.

It's not clear what that actually means though. Consider this: every iPhone that has an active data connection regularly contacts the App Store to see if there are updates(i) to apps, regardless of whether or not the user actively visits the store. Are these update checks counted by the graph? What about system updates? Are those counted as going through the App Store?

Regardless, we can be relatively sure that that graph is there to help developers when deciding which versions of iOS they should support. It would not be surprising if Apple decided simply to include only active App Store shoppers, because this is the number that actually interests developers.

(i) I'm not actually sure if this is true if you have never installed an app from the App Store - there is maybe an exception where these phones don't check for updates in this case.

I tend to consider "if" statements to be a bit like "goto" statements - that is, they can sometimes be useful, but mostly the intent of your code will be clearer if you can avoid them. Use with parsimony.

Yup, I'm a huge mac fangirl, and then only thing I miss from the linux PC I have at work is a real package manager. apt-get, yum, good grief even gentoo scratches that itch for me better than brew or fink or macports

Weellll, as long as it's only a thought-crime, you probably can't really blackmail the person. It's only when they act on things that they become vulnerable to negative social consequences, and hence blackmailing to avoid said consequences.