khedoros

That's similar to the idea used in a lot of emulators, especially some of the Nintendo 64 ones, except that they programmed those to look for specific patterns of opcodes that they could replace with higher-level C/C++ functions. Some of the emulators might only support 1 or 2 games, but get phenomenal speed emulating them.

Somewhat separate, but related, I remember one of the video plugins that would accept external images as replacements for in-game textures.

Anyhow, I agree that for at least some games, replacing parts of the code makes getting the game running with some degree of improvement easier than completely re-implementing it. On the other hand, I like the idea of reverse-engineering the original binary, and along with an engine re-implementation, providing documentation of how the game originally worked. I think of it as a kind of software archaeology.

I can think of three high school classes that were great because of the teachers (an English class, a geometry class, and a shop class), and maybe three that were great because of their self-learning nature (my first programming class, an engineering class, and an after-school electronics+engineering class taught by the shop teacher).

For everything else, I've got to agree. Take my US History class. I think it's important to know the events that shaped our culture, know roughly the order they came in, and about when they happened and why. The name and date of a 19th century law involving share croppers? Sure, I'll be able to write an essay on it for the test, because I know that's the requirement, but ask me 6 months later, and I won't be able to tell you much about it.

Yeah...the "web" link didn't work from work, and I tried Google manually when I got home. I tend to forget the little tricks, because a paywall article is usually an insta-close. I've got a few friends with Note 7's though, talking big about how it's not going to affect them.

The little "cache" arrow doesn't show up, and clicking on the link itself has the same issue.

This is from a few months ago, but it seems to apply here (at least for me): http://digiday.com/publishers/wall-street-journal-paywall-go...

An Anandtech article from last year claims that they were recalled for overheating issues, with the possibility of being a fire hazard: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9480/nvidia-initiates-safety-r...

Don't know about who you responded to, but wsj is paywalled for me. I can read just a little over 4 lines.

I have a similar feeling, when I pronounce a homonym/homophone. The word "mouth feel" resonates for me, although I suspect that sometimes it's just an awareness of the spelling of the word. Other times, I'll consciously choose to pronounce a word differently to try to disambiguate it. I'll say "aunt" as "ant"/"ont" (read those second as phonetically-spelled Californian American pronunciations) depending on the situation and flow of the sentence. "They're" is usually "They-er", "their" is sometimes "thur" (like "fur" with a /ð/), and "there" feels like it's pronounced the expected way. "To" might be "tə", but "two" and "too" never are.

Of course, that's all when I'm paying close attention to what I say. I'm sure there are times that I go against those. Also, sorry for the mix of layman phonetic spelling and IPA.

I use both every day (work+personal phones), and I come down on the opposite side. My Android does everything I want out of a pocket computer, and the iPhone doesn't. If I don't like the UX of one app, the next one I try will almost certainly be better.

I like multiple app stores, and multiple vendors to buy apps from. I like downloading program source and building an apk from it. I like having a terminal app and a file manager. I like running an ssh server to get files on/off the phone. I like using the phone as an oversized USB flash drive, and not having to install a vendor's software to do it (and not caring which OS I'm booted into at the time).

iOS is pretty, well-thought-out, performant, predictable, and the best ecosystem on it isn't produced by a tarted-up advertising firm. It has a lot to recommend it...but I'll still take the tangled nest of features over the carefully pruned garden, because I don't always agree with the decisions of the gardener, and I like to have other options.

People put up with all kinds of crap when it's the best option available. They're OK with it until something better comes along. In this case, a smartphone with a day of battery life trumps a flip phone with a week of battery life just because it can do so much more. You know what trumps a smartphone with X battery life? One with X+1 battery life, as long as it still fits comfortably in a trouser pocket. With the behemoth-screened phablets that are common these days, I think it's reasonable to make them a little thicker and a little more useful.

My phone's about 3 years old now. Even when it was new, I couldn't use it indiscriminately and expect a full day of charge. If I want to have it available for critical purposes like emergency calls, it's literally not usable in the way that I'd like to use it. I don't think that it's even remotely unreasonable to advocate for better battery life, and I think it's only a slight exaggeration to call current phone battery life "unusable".

The image itself is customized; it's not a vanilla copy of Raspbian. So, no matter what, you'll end up downloading ~1GB of data (less, when he's got the Lite version built).

One benefit of this, over doing it online: you can download the file+program, disconnect from the net, and customize as many versions of the image as you'd like without extra bandwidth use. There are a lot of Pi users with limited internet access.

Another benefit: Doing it online implies at least a two step process. Go to the site and build a setup (with either an account system or an import/export feature to save progress and make it available for re-use), tell it to build the image, download it, and use a separate program to flash. Doing it through a native app eliminates the separate program and the question of whether or not you need to create an account on their service. Plus, when their site goes down eventually, I've still got a working, independent program. When they introduce a new version, I've got the option to stick with what I've got or upgrade (if I judge it to actually be an upgrade).

Web apps have their place. This thing is one that makes more sense as a local app to me.

Powering the bluetooth radio takes some power (more than driving the DAC and amplifier for headphones).

> By the way each time you're typing netstat you're suppposed to get a message telling it's obsolete

Starting about when? Most of the distros I use are a couple years old, and I don't see "ss" under the package managers.

Arduboy: 16MHz AVR microcontroller, 32KB flash, 1KB EEPROM, 2.5KB SRAM, 6 buttons, 128x64 display.

CHIP: 1GHz ARM Cortex-R8 CPU, 512MB RAM, 4GB onboard flash, 802.11bgn+bluetooth 4.0, composite video output.

They're very different computers.

I see statements equivalent to these in the article:

- Cities are inefficient Rube-Goldberg contraptions

- Portions of city systems are too complex for one person to understand

- We see evidence of complex, unpredictable systems when things go wrong

- Cities have multiple complex systems that can and do produce unpredictable failures

- Methods inspired by scientific study may help us improve city life

I'd summarize it as: Here are some problems caused by complexity, and here are some (vague) ideas for how to fix them. From the article's content, I think there's an implied "yes" answer to the title.

If someone buys a big EMC system, they aren't just paying for hardware and software. They're paying for EMC to also integrate it into their other systems, set it up, train them to manage it, provide custom coding if their environment requires some unusual change, give early access to fixes for problems they experience, etc. There's a support contract with SLA. There's free overnight shipping of components, and field techs that'll fix the hardware for the customer.

Can someone else do it for cheaper? Maybe. Probably. But to a large degree, it's a "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" situation that you'd be fighting against.

Use an OS that behaves in a way I like more.

Save when convenient.

Repeat as necessary.

I prefer to use software that behaves the way I want it to, rather than modifying my own behavior to work around its shortcomings.

I'd buy a thicker phone, but not one with a screen larger than 5 inches. 5" without a case is already uncomfortable to hold, and if the battery were directly integrated into the phone, I could get a little more battery in the added thickness. One option I wouldn't mind seeing more of is phones with removable back covers, to let you replace the battery with a larger one, while giving people who want a thin device the option to stick with the stock cover.

I think the point is that it wasn't ever a complete loss of signal. Signal strength drops a little, maybe the baseband turns up its gain and burns a little more power, and the call stays connected.

I've used it, but not recently. It was always a novelty to connect an actual Wii controller with bluetooth, set up some LEDs for motion tracking, and play Wii on my laptop.

As for performance: Using software to implement behavior equivalent to specific hardware is almost inherently inefficient. JIT-style processing of the opcodes helps, but you're still going to use multiple operations on the host CPU for each one that you execute from the guest code. Plus emulation of device synchronization that would've originally been done in hardware and that don't have direct equivalents on the host hardware.

> Hotspots

On my wife's, I remember something about the top-right corner, or along the edge there, and I think it had to do with wifi settings. Those are what I was thinking of. Oh, and swiping away from the lock screen.

> Settings

All the settings that I actually use are in the control panel. I end up in the registry less than annually, and I've never touched the policy editor, most of the things in the mmc, etc. Things like folder settings aren't what I'd consider OS-wide; it makes sense to have them in Explorer, because that's where they take effect.

>dual interfaces

Everyone's got their own opinion. It seems like change for the sake of change, to me, and better suited to a tablet UI than a PC one.

Invisible hotspots to bring up necessary dialogs, settings split into multiple different places that used to be collected in one place, flat UI elements, two conflicting interfaces (tablet UI on a mouse-based device? bleh). Windows 7 fits in with my experience on Windows going back over 20 years. Windows 8 throws that away for something I think is a contradictory mish-mash. Windows 10 doesn't completely clean up the mess, and it adds other things that I don't like.

If Microsoft removed the metro UI style, the tile interface, the Windows Store, Cortana, and forced updates (or allowed the user to disable those things), I'd be running Windows 10 now.

Release engineering. More on the operations side than the development side.

> But people spend millions on this product every year? Surely they get some benefit

A psychological one, sure. They perceive that they're getting a health benefit (whether or not they actually are), so the money seems worth it. But the evidence is that it doesn't actually get your hands cleaner than non-antibacterial soap and that it may contribute to creating stronger bacteria.

The FDA's judgement is that the downsides outweigh the upsides. I tend to agree.

Big company, about 2-3 hours per week. I'm in a mostly-releng role. Two team status meetings per week, one status meeting for another project, where I'm the liaison for build+release.

In a previous role at the same company, my meeting load varied between maybe 1 and 8 hours, depending on how many things involving other teams I was working on and how controversial the design decisions for that project were.

They're also much more expensive, have fewer input options than my current (dumb) tv, and have some remote configuration options that would more conveniently be put into menus, in a consumer device. So...what's the point, besides pigheadedness over not buying a "smart" TV? It's not like there's a way to even go see what I'm buying before I do it.

I'm not a big fan of smart devices, but I'm not going to pay more for a display with "meh" connectivity that doesn't really seem to be optimized as a home entertainment device. Although annoying, it makes more sense to buy the smart TV and ignore the extra features.

> Those corporations that are violating the license aren't contributing back to Linux anyway; so losing them won't kill Linux.

I don't think that's what the grandparent was worried about. If the kernel developers defend the GPL too ardently, some companies that currently contribute, or that are considering contribution, may be worried about violating the license and decide that it's in their best interests to avoid Linux altogether. I agree that it wouldn't actually kill Linux, but it could potentially do more harm than good by scaring away potential contributors that are a little more on the fence.

My favorite professor (in terms of homework submission) gave us a path to store out files on our school-provided share. We'd add his name with read permissions to the ACL of the file. Things that were better in text were submitted as e-mail messages. His courses either didn't use texts, or used materials that he wrote, had printed and bound at the campus print shop (average price: about $10).

I had a few textbooks with e-book versions on a CD in the back. I usually liked the book better.

It's on GOG, too (for the same price, when I checked just now). Also, there's a reimplementation of the game engine, which uses the original data/bytecode files: https://github.com/joskid/Another-World-Bytecode-Interpreter

Isn't that the point? If phone's are significantly less useful without the internet, then doesn't that mean that the internet is the more transformational technology?

I drink 8 ounces almost every morning at work. Some weekends, I have coffee. Some weekends, I have none. No headaches, nausea, etc. I enjoy the taste, and I do get the stimulant-like benefits, so my best guess is that I'm walking the razor's edge, or that I'm blessed with a relatively low sensitivity to the drug, or something.

At night, I can have a espresso, coffee, or caffeinated soda at 9pm and be ready to sleep at 11. I've stopped drinking it for weeks at a time before, with no difficulty doing so. All of the stories about caffeine's extreme effects are completely alien to me; I've always considered it a fairly gentle substance.