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grapeshot

144 karma · joined August 9, 2013

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grapeshot··on Walmart will begin offering to subsidize college tuition for its U.S. workers
The yearly maximum is something like $1500 (and it's not paid up front) so it's not nearly as generous as it looks.
grapeshot··on Donkey Kong scoreboard strips high score claim
Even byuu doesn't emulate this particular quirk, in general he doesn't seem to be pushing the bounds of accuracy for any system but the SNES.
grapeshot··on Amazon will launch its own delivery service to compete with FedEx, UPS
Amazon operates the delivery center. Most drivers are subcontracted through a couple different messenger companies and use rented Ford Transits, and the randos in their own cars take care of the rest.
grapeshot··on Donkey Kong scoreboard strips high score claim
There are limits to this, as with everything. No one is going to make their emulator 3x slower to properly emulate one glitchy line in Super Mario Bros. that shows up on 1/3 of powerons based on a random clock alignment issue.

Besides that, the real console hardware could vary more between revisions than the difference between a console and an accurate emulator, so you also have to ask whose real thing is being emulated? Even with Nintendo's attention to detail on lot check, some real Game Boys won't play Prehistorik Man. There are some NES accuracy tests out there that require making your emulator behave like one specific console owned by blargg.

grapeshot··on Amazon Go and the Future
Kohl's seems to be doing pretty well with that system. They print a high price on the tags, then discount it by rack, and mail out 30% off coupons with short expiration dates to some of their rewards card holders every month.
grapeshot··on Amazon's Fake Review Problem
With TVs and computer parts it becomes impossible to read the reviews because they are merged with every other variation of that product from the same brand, with wildly different features and quality levels. Look up LG monitors or eVGA power supplies for instance.
grapeshot··on The Amazon Machine
This works for AMZN as long as customers don't get fed up with the results of this lack of attention to category detail:

- reviews for different items aggregated together making them useless

- counterfeits commingled with legitimate items with the same UPC

- questionable packaging decisions

- delivery drivers without consistent routes so they never learn how to find your address / get into your building

grapeshot··on The FCC has repealed a 42-year-old rule blocking broadcast media mergers
The other two can be owned by the Educational Media Foundation, and all the programming can be sent in by satellite now that broadcasters no longer have to have a local presence.
grapeshot··on YouTube-mp3 agrees to shut down
It was the second channel on a multiplex owned by a church, normally it's showing educational programs for kids.
grapeshot··on The Beige Box Fades to Black (2002)
White desktop PC cases seem to be popular again, and with no more 5.25" drive bays you don't have to worry about color matching your optical drive any more.

For other devices, there's still the problem that white or beige plastic gets grimy fast and will turn an ugly yellow after it's been exposed to sunlight for 10 years. If you look at photos of old iBooks or white DS Lites on eBay, some of those are looking pretty horrid.

grapeshot··on YouTube-mp3 agrees to shut down
One of the over-the-air TV channels in Los Angeles seems to be run off a YouTube playlist, which I know because it was stuck displaying the video unavailable message for most of last Saturday.
grapeshot··on Grasping Robots Compete to Rule Amazon’s Warehouses
20 cents per item just to pick it out of a bin and pack it in a box has to be a significant chunk out of the profit Amazon can make from those smaller low value items that people order individually with Prime.
grapeshot··on The Internet of Things – A Disaster
If you're writing an article, is it really that hard to do a little research? Most of this piece is just "I didn't even bother to look up a teardown photo, but here's how I assume they must have designed it".
grapeshot··on Echo devices are Amazon Prime Day’s best sellers
The Echo won't play you "Alexa, Buy This Song" [1] but that's probably for the best.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbigjSBk1qY

grapeshot··on Culture Clash at a Chinese-Owned Plant in Ohio
Reminds me of what happened in the 1980s with Japanese buyouts of American TV manufacturers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c

I don't know if history offers any good solutions here though.

grapeshot··on New paint colors invented by neural network
Aren't most of those names Homestar Runner characters?
grapeshot··on Secret colours of the Commodore 64
If using composite video and a PAL TV, you can also blend colors by using alternating horizontal stripes because PAL TVs use a delay line to cancel the chroma information with the line above it. Exactly what color you got would depend on the specifics of your TV's decoding.
grapeshot··on What the death of the CRT display technology means for classic arcade machines
It's only the best quality arcade CRTs that are going to become unavailable. The US still has warehouses full of worthless CRT televisions that are too expensive to recycle because of the lead content in the glass. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/us/disposal-of-older-monit...
grapeshot··on Nintendo Switch Teardown
They've done at least one revision of most of them, usually with significant cosmetic differences and less features. There was the top loading NES, the SNES Mini, the GameCube was revised and the digital output port was removed, and for the Wii there was the version with the GameCube ports removed and the Wii Mini with all the remaining ports removed.
grapeshot··on Amazon guts affiliate program, cuts fees for electronics in half
In my experience, eBay is usually cheaper than Amazon these days, especially if the buyer doesn't have Prime. Also because many eBay sellers still don't charge sales tax.
grapeshot··on Show HN: Evilpass – A slightly evil password strength checker
The other drawback to emojis was that they used to completely crash Chrome's password manager, but I just checked again and it seems it's been fixed.
grapeshot··on Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K people in a single year
Chemical Engineering. It seems that the only growing industry in the Inland Empire right now is warehouses.
grapeshot··on Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K people in a single year
There are plenty of people with degrees working in those warehouses because it's the only thing they can get due to their circumstances and it pays a little better than retail. (I know this because I was one of them until a few weeks ago.)
grapeshot··on NES Classic Mini boot image dump method via UART and USB
If you plug in a Wii Classic Controller, you can use the home button on it to get back to the menu without having to get up.
grapeshot··on Apple Sucks Now, Here’s a ThinkPad Buyer’s Guide
Well I guess I finally know who this was made for: http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/31/4380132/acer-aspire-r7-rev...
grapeshot··on Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick
Engineer's Disease.
grapeshot··on Ask HN: What is your favorite internet rabbit hole?
The Alternate History wiki and forum. http://www.alternatehistory.com/
grapeshot··on More than 90% of ‘genuine’ Apple chargers and cables sold on Amazon are fake
Apple cables always fall apart because they use the thinnest insulation possible and don't put on proper strain reliefs. Probably just another example of design over common sense.

It gets especially bad when you wrap the cable tightly around the sharp plastic hooks on the MacBook power adapter that are supposed to keep everything organized.

grapeshot··on YouTube Go: YouTube reimagined for the next generation of YouTube viewers
There is a setting in the YouTube app to only play in SD when not on WiFi but that may only be on Android. It's still not nearly as fine grained as it should be.
grapeshot··on Intel's Kaby Lake CPU: The Good, the Bad, and the Meh
It's going to be very difficult to get Windows 7 working if Intel won't release things like USB or video drivers for it.

There are already problems with Skylake where you'll do a fresh install of Windows 7 and none of your USB ports or network devices will work because they require newer drivers. Microsoft is doing their best to drive everyone to Windows 10 by not doing another service pack or releasing updated ISOs.

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