dzamo_norton

The use of \mathbb{R} for floats acts to obscure things for me I'm afraid. It loads up dusty old stuff in my brain about the reals that is not true of floats from the slow tape archive storage in my skull, and _doesn't_ load up stuff in my brain about floats like, say, where the first integer gap occurs[1]. A side note is that \mathbb{Q} would be a closer match to float.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3793838/which-is-the-firs...

You don't need all that many mental tools to reason about TH, TR and TD tags.

s/complement/compliment/g

It could be a nice option to have for people stuck running really old legacy Windows software.

effect

To me this sounds unlikely. The CPU will spend all its time in codec library code here so how much of a role will the OS get to play? More likely the difference is coming from some departure from fairness in how the software codec was compiled

s/tenant/tennet/g

We would want to see what a bluffing shrimp did _when called on its bluff_. If it ran away then what's happened is different to the small dog which appears to actually _believe_ it's bad enough for the fight. And in this case I would say that the shrimp had managed to "tell a lie", while the small dog had managed nothing other than total honesty.

It is parsing text, but that text does have some consistent structure. Contained within it are properties. One can make the same comment of reading JSON or XML but I'll admit those are more like what you'd choose for an API. In general there is a not-entirely-obvious (to me) question of where does "formatted for machines" end, and "formatted for humans" begin? We can't say "it's for machines if and only if it must conform a schema that's defined in advance", not any more.

Yes. Imagine a current flowing exactly as fast as you can swim and you must swim one lap with it and one against it. You cover the lap in half your normal time when it's helping you and then when it's against you you cannot _even_ cover a lap. Total time = infinity.

It's not a necessity that the machine must slow down with each OS update. Boot an XFCE on Linux image to establish a baseline level of performance. Make that your OS and you can _buy_ from guys selling 2012 computers.

You draw a clean divide but be wary of things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism

For a long time I ran Debian in VMware Fusion in fullscreen mode on my iMac. There's a penalty but it's faster than you might think. My interest at the time was an effort to recover some sense of control over data privacy. Gradually I moved bits and pieces into the guest and these days I simply run Debian bare metal on a Lenovo. When my colleague wants to collaborate on a Keynote or Pages document she shares it on iCloud and I do pretty well editing in Firefox.

Adding to your question: who would accept a computer that only executed programs written in a single language? I remember people talking about CPUs that would run Java bytecode natively back when the Java hype cycle was near its peak, say 12-15 years ago. Never saw one on the shelf though, I guess once the JIT compiler started working well people lost interest.

Standards defiance notwithstanding, the web client appears to work as advertised and will surely save many a neck and thumb from premature aging.

It's interesting at this point to think about identity and authentication in WhatsApp. They've never had a username or password and their use of your mobile phone number as your identity seems to have been key to their success (the other factor I'd cite is good cross-platform support).

WhatsApp authn on mobile consists of a once-off SMS verification to confirm you are running WhatsApp on the mobile device hosting the SIM card corresponding to the phone number identity you've claimed for yourself. That said, I recently saw a case of someone using a temporary pre-paid SIM card while she was traveling here in South Africa yet her WhatsApp messages from that phone still appeared to come from her New Zealand number. Not sure how that passed the authn.

The lack of username and password, I believe, is what has led to some of the unnaturalness of the WhatsApp web app. I don't think that their remarks of "the web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device -- this means all of your messages still live on your phone." reveal all of what guided their design choices. I also doubt that they "don't get the web". Instead I think they need the phone there and online because they have no username and password (or other device-independent authn) and they have thought quite carefully about protecting what got them ahead of the myriads of other perfectly functional IM apps out there in the first place.