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lton Opera 10.5 Alpha Released, New Javascript & Rendering engine, 7x faster

Certainly. Processor, OS, RAM, etc will matter a lot.

FWIW I ran in a Core 2 Duo P9500 with W7 64, 4gb of ram.

lton Opera 10.5 Alpha Released, New Javascript & Rendering engine, 7x faster

Thought I'd give this a try since I never gave Opera much of a chance, and I'm usually very tolerant of alpha/betas as long as they mostly work.

Lasted about half an hour - Google Reader doesn't seem to work right, and GMail also stopped responding after a while.

lton Opera 10.5 Alpha Released, New Javascript & Rendering engine, 7x faster

Is it? I just downloaded this alpha and ran SunSpider. Chrome 4.0.266.0 got 506.8ms +/- 6.6%, Opera got 763.4ms +/- 4.4%.

lton Ask HN: Review my App - Freeciv.net

I hate when pages say my email is invalid because it has a plus sign in it.

lton Ask HN: What/Who is whyslow.net and why are they copying HN?

Aparently their main page loads HN as an iframe and hides all techcrunch stories. Kinda funny.

Probably someone that was sick of techcrunch on HN made it for himself and there's no major conspiracy of password stealing or SEO tricks.

lton The Voynich Manuscript Decoded?

The author does elaborate on that theory in a previous article: http://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_author_da_vinci

lton Google Chrome for Linux

It's not correct to say that Picasa is emulated using wine. Instead, it's a native Linux app that has been ported using WineLib, which reimplements a lot of the Windows API, but compiled to Linux. Instead of replacing API calls with the Linux equivalents, there's just an additional layer that redirect calls or implements them.

Wine and WineLib are different things.

lton Eric Schmidt: "If you have something [to hide], maybe you shouldn't be doing it"

The Register being sensationalist? Impossible!

lton TSA redaction fail: hidden text easily readable via copy & paste

I remember a similar story from a few years ago where redacted names where discovered from the length of the redacted characters. Turned out it wasn't too difficult to brute force names and see which ones matched the exact size of the redaction.

lton No one gets fired for hiring IBM - how our pitch was stolen from us

They didn't approach Fabergé with a sales pitch out of the blue. I wouldn't expect a NDA for that. But Fabergé did ask them to come up with a pitch to relaunch their brand - I wouldn't come up with it and present it without some kind of document saying that they can't take the idea and run with it with someone else.

lton No one gets fired for hiring IBM - how our pitch was stolen from us

Document fully your pitch work and if possible, put in place NDAs

this.

lton Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them

There's something that always amuses me in movies and series: something happened/is about to happen, a taskforce is created and they're running software very specific to that thing right away, with graphics, simulations, etc.

Who writes all that? No one ever mentions the programmers that save the day.

lton Three lessons I learnt from porting Diablo

That's writing a whole routine in asm, though. Embedding a couple lines of asm in a function can have the opposite effect - the optimizer can no longer make assumptions about some things disabling a large number of potential optimizations for that routine.

lton DevShop: The Cool Game that Makes Development Look Fun

This is actually a good point. StackOverflow showed that badges work and not only in games. Probably not for your internal company tracker, but for an open source project, an issue tracker with badges, quests (you've got steps in there already, just follow them!) might be a light-hearted way to get people interested and motivated to contribute to it.

lton Canabalt: iPhone Game

Grats, it's pretty nice. Just spent some minutes playing it up to lvl 10 and now my wife is having fun with it.

I agree with the other poster that the bar on top with the battery/time is distracting. The menu fonts seemed a bit non-standard to me. The blocks seem a bit simple, could use some extra glow or something.

Keeping the high score on the top is a nice touch to encourage self-competition. The big combos are what make you want to come back for more.

It was kinda hard to figure out the "combo" mechanics at first (which blocks shrink when one disappears and a column falls down). There was nothing in the tutorial about this.

Regardless of the nitpicks, it's fun. I'll definitely play it again.

lton Apple's Mistake

The worst? Data Loss, or corruption, which is worse than "not working".

Likewise, more likely it could just not work well, be buggy and require several updates to get it right, burning out your team's (or your company's) image with the customer. Before you deployed your fix, it's whoever changed the protocol at fault. After that, it's you that can't fix it.

Again, not justifing it taking ages, just saying there's never an excuse to skip QA.

lton Apple's Mistake

Not that the indentation complaints are valid, but the fix should definitely go through QA while the users continue to suffer. While I'm sure it works on the developer machine, it is much better to have a program that takes a long time and works right than for it to give incorrect results to users, or make a different part of the application stop working.

If the feature was really critical and important, QA should find a way to expedite the verification, but it should never be skipped in order to ship the fix faster.

lton Apple's Mistake

This is a very developer-centric view, though. For users, the app store is great - tons of applications, and they're easy to find, buy, and to install. The approval process, for the user, makes a better overall experience, increasing the overall quality of available apps. For each bugfix waiting for approval there I'm certain there's lots of buggy apps being rejected, and for each anedocte of rejection due to using the wrong icon or such nonsense, there's lots of appropriate rejections due to unstable apps.

Obviously without good and satisfied developers those benefits are moot. I'm certain the approval process needs to be [improved/changed/redesigned/removed], and maybe some kind of sanctioned jailbreak should exist where more advanced users can manually install third party apps, but I do believe the App Store itself is a good thing when you you look at it from a user perpective.

lton Designing a .NET Computer

I'm guessing it would run cosmos.

http://www.gocosmos.org/

lton The Go I Forgot: Concurrency and Go-Routines

It does make more sense after understanding that.

There's still the ever-increasing number of concurrent goroutines, but what just helped me accept that a bit is the fact is that each goroutine does not necessarily map to one thread (it actually does in one of their compilers - there's two - but that's an implementation detail).

lton The Go I Forgot: Concurrency and Go-Routines

I'm a bit confused: I see several threads running aparent infite loops generating numbers. It doesn't seem to be lazily evaluated (or is it?). Is this going to run until it runs out of memory (or thread handles)?

When it runs, it is going to spawn a thread generating a sequence of numbers, then another one taking that sequence, start generating a new sequence based on that skipping multiples of a particular number, then start another one doing the same. Number of threads seems to always go up. Is that the right analysis of the code? Doesn't seem right to me.

lton New Dropbox Features

I don't know if it's been there before uservoice (I think so), but Dreamhost has this same thing on it's feature request area. You have a number of votes, can see all the requests, vote, and get them back once/when the feature you asked for is implemented.

lton Whitespace

It's also interesting to note that you can select all text to "see" the whitespace code, although that only works for me in Firefox, not in Chrome.

lton Google Chrome OS To Launch Within A Week

It's actually there to test now, if you don't mind using unstable versions. You need to switch the dev channel[1] and start the browser with --enable-extensions switch. There's a number of sample extensions already[2].

I've been running the dev channel builds for a while now and never had any major issues, only the occasional minor issue.

[1] http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel [2] http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensio...

lton Whitespace

Here's a list of languages in the same vein:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Esoteric_programming_l...

lton [dead]

If realism is proven to be invalid, then that could be true.

lton [dead]

Physics has been a recent interest for me, for all its weirdness. I was thinking about this issue in particular yesterday. Made me think of Thirteenth Floor - the simulation doesn't need to happen until someone observes it Maybe we were written in a functional language with Lazy Evaluation.

Maybe the issue isn't if it the tree makes a sound - does it fall at all if there's no one around?