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fortybillion

73 karma · joined February 5, 2009

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fortybillion··on Orbital's Hartnoll brothers look back
Orbital and Banco de Gaia on repeat soundtracked my CS degree. Both artists’ work from that era still hold up.
fortybillion··on Orbital's Hartnoll brothers look back
I remember discovering there was a 2CD version of In Sides that featured The Box with lyrics. Still gives me chills.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQM12GbZHKk

fortybillion··on Google Decides to Monetize Maps
Settings -> Sounds & Haptics -> Change With Buttons: OFF. Now the volume controls will only ever change the audio volume and never the ringer volume.
fortybillion··on All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware
This is legal in California.
fortybillion··on Wine tasting is bullshit
Has anyone ever debunked or repeated the food-coloured white wine test? I've heard this one before and it always seemed very strange to me as white and red wines have such clearly distinguishable characteristics.
fortybillion··on Samsung cites Kubrick's "2001" as Prior Art in Patent Case Against Apple
Yup. http://vimeo.com/26187915
fortybillion··on Google Chrome Beta update: Fullscreen support [OSX Lion] and Native Client
I actually find the omnibar incredibly frustrating, as I know when I want to search and I know when I want to find something from my history. For me, these are separate tasks and combining them makes me slower because I have to mentally filter out the unrelated results.

I'd love to see Google vs. Apple's research for one vs. the other. It seems to be one of the polarizing issues.

fortybillion··on Google Chrome Beta update: Fullscreen support [OSX Lion] and Native Client
My behaviour is pretty much the same — Safari for personal browsing, Chrome for dev. Chrome is very nice, but Safari is a lot more "solid", especially when it comes to 3D Transforms and other advanced features.

Safari 5.1 on Lion isn't a life changer, but the gestures just feel right. Going back to Chrome feels like taking a step backwards, especially on a Magic Mouse where the double-finger-sideways swipe is still somewhat awkward.

fortybillion··on Google Chrome Beta update: Fullscreen support [OSX Lion] and Native Client
Having used this extensively for development and testing over the past several hours, this is definitely "beta", but it's nice to see Google making the effort here.

Unfortunately for Chrome, Safari 5.1 has set a new standard for gesture support that will be hard to replicate (if they even care to, I'm not convinced Google actually cares about feeling 100% "native" on any OS).

fortybillion··on The future of CSS layouts
Nested tables worked, but they were incredibly hard to write/edit by hand. This gives us a way of using those layout concepts while still maintaining some separation of document structure and layout definition.
fortybillion··on The future of CSS layouts
The issue with columns in web browsers is the variance in screen height. Clearly it would be worse to render an entire long-form article in 3 columns, forcing the user to scroll back up to the top of the page to start reading the next column.

This forces the designer to break the content up into multiple column blocks based on a target screen height... so now we have the same problem, only on a different axis.

fortybillion··on The Fridge (YC S10) Is Going Dark
Fans of The Fridge might want to consider Minigroup (https://minigroup.com). It's less about the social and more about communication and collaboration, but we share their idea of private, defined groups.

We'd love to have you :)

fortybillion··on Netflix touches down in Canada this fall
I remember reading somewhere that the reason they called the company Netflix (and not something like, say, Mailflix) was that the distribution model was always intended to be flexible.
fortybillion··on Full Trailer For Facebook Movie ‘The Social Network’ Hits The Web
His scene lip-syncing to the Killers in Southland Tales is one of my favourite cinematic moments from the past few years.

Which is saying a lot because that movie is awful in such a unique and special way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ7aS01JpK0

fortybillion··on The right way to do iPhone 4.0 OS Backgrounding . . .
If the app is using the background GPS process, there's already an indicator in the title bar (the little purple arrow) showing that the GPS is being used.
fortybillion··on Why Tabs are on Top in Firefox 4
Unless you want to move the window, in which case trying to click on those 15 remaining pixels above the tab bar is very difficult (at least on OS X, not sure if it's different on Windows).
fortybillion··on How Not to Fix Soccer
> it's a top 4 sport already (displacing hockey)

Not a chance. The NHL is enjoying some of its highest ratings ever.

fortybillion··on OnLive - Cloud Computing meets video games
> Normally, I'm happy to download at around 150k/sec!

Is he serious? Is this the actual broadband speeds in most of the US?

fortybillion··on Safari 5 Extension Development
Snow Leopard broke a lot of the extensions built using Input Managers, so 1Password 3.0 used the Scripting Additions method.

http://kevin.sb.org/2009/09/02/1password-extension-loading-i...

fortybillion··on Google launches Google TV
Cost. Ease of use. Remotes. Integration with existing AV equipment.

All available in a PC connected to your TV, but requiring of effort and understanding.

fortybillion··on Visa to Launch Contactless Mobile Payments for iPhone
"the new Apple-certifed technology combines a protective iPhone case with a secure memory card that will host Visa's contactless payment application, Visa payWave."

So, it's exactly like the payWave technology already integrated in my Visa card, except I have to put a stupid case around my iPhone.

Sounds like buzzword-itis.

I've had payWave in my card for over a year, and I've never even seen an opportunity to use it. The social interaction with the cashier is just too weird. It's already bad enough with debit cards ("do I swipe? do you swipe? do you take the card from me and swipe it for me, making me feel like an idiot?")

fortybillion··on It is Time to Think About Books as Applications
All I want is a good implementation of footnotes. Then I can read Infinite Jest without three bookmarks and a reclining lounger.

While I'm at it, I also want embeddable fonts.

What I do not want is animation or interactivity, at least not in my novels.

fortybillion··on Single menu bar for Ubuntu
Which is why I don't understand Apple's terrible default mouse acceleration profile. On a 27" iMac, even set to "fast" it's 2 swipes of the mouse across the desk to go corner to corner.

It's one of the few areas of OS X that I consider broken by default and needs a 3rd party tool to fix (made more difficult by the Magic Mouse requiring its own drivers).

fortybillion··on jQuery Masonry
Although uniform spacing tends to look better from the macro view, I actually find this incredibly hard to read. My eye jumps all over the page, ignoring many of the articles because they are hard to skim. I went to a few of the demo sites and ended up leaving without reading anything.
fortybillion··on Asana: The Interface is the Product
Odd that they don't mention where the company is located.
fortybillion··on More Web Inspector Updates
IE7 mode seems to catch 95% of the cases, but I have had issues crop up in "real" IE7 that were not present when tested under IE8.
fortybillion··on More Web Inspector Updates
I haven't, I will test those out for sure.

IE8, of course, is the least troublesome but it's good to have options.

fortybillion··on More Web Inspector Updates
I love where this is going. I now use Chrome's Dev channel or a WebKit nightly for development, and only launch Firefox/Firebug to do compatibility testing.

Although I still have a ton of respect for Firefox's rendering engine, the browser just feels wrong on the Mac -- not to mention it's slow launch times. The Inspector Panel has caught up to Firebug's functionality in many areas and is now starting to surpass it.

What kills me is launching IE in a VM and discovering how archaic its developer tools are.

fortybillion··on Strongly Encouraging XCode Lets Apple Switch Architectures
The article seems to insinuate that everything on the iPad runs under an ARM emulator. It would make more sense that OS version 3.2 running on the iPad is already compiled for the A4 (hence the astonishing speed), and only iPhone-native apps were emulated.

But you're right, it does seem a little crackpot. Couldn't someone decompile an iPad executable and see if it's ARM code or not?

fortybillion··on Joe Hewitt on the iPad
They refer to the 3G model as the "Wi-Fi + 3G Model", so I believe that line item indicates that only the 3G version has GPS.
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