thedudemabry

One possible benefit of the hybrid handheld/docked model is that each player maintains their own system and screen, independent of whether or not they have control of the television or are even in the same room as their opponent.

I don't know how much Nintendo is going to implement with regards to their online services, but if they do this right, they would have the killer family gaming machine ecosystem.

They could: * Implement sensible parental controls. Each user potentially having their own handheld system would make this significantly easier and more robust. * Implement a friendly family content sharing model. I'm not necessarily begging for free family sharing a-la-Steam, but a discounted license per additional family user would be a smart move, compared to their current 3DS strategy. * Implement something along the lines of PS4's amazing SharePlay feature, where you can invite a friend to watch you play, voice chat, and even hand the controller virtually over to them so they can help you through tricky sections. Here again, the hybrid model would make it so cool to cheer on my kid from a hotel room across the country on a business trip.

I don't know if the NS will live up to its teaser video, but everything I've seen makes me excited to imagine possibilities, rather than the raw polygon-pushing and logic-crunching. This in stark contrast to the comparatively gimmicky Wii and Wii U.

This is totally not a meaningful use, but one that surprised me when I stumbled across it:

Bravely Default, the Square-Enix RPG, had an intro where a fairy crawled out of my carpet and flitted around. I don't remember any more AR in that game, but it was kind of a neat gimmick that I hadn't seen since unboxing the handheld.

I didn't take "baseline" to be dismissive, but rather a description of GIMP's venn-diagram overlap with Photoshop. They both make different choices for different reasons, but ensuring that proven useful features eventually land in that overlapping region is a valuable contribution to OSS and proprietary software.

I tend to agree with you. GIMP is a very important project in my view because it provides legal, cross-platform access to a baseline of image manipulation tools. The above-and-beyond feature set is fantastic, but not the reason why I love it.

I suppose this isn't directly related, but following the theme of OSS alternatives to commercial software... after being ignorant of the OSS desktop application world for a few years, two cross-platform projects have blown my mind recently with their feature sets and level of polish:

Natron - https://natron.fr/ - Node-based video compositor. I've used it to add some dumb special effects to videos.

Godot - https://godotengine.org/ - Unity-like game engine and IDE with export to all non-console platforms. I've used it to make some dumb games.

We've occasionally brought our little dude into bed with us when he's going nuts, but also know the potential consequences. It's not generally safe to bring a child into an adult bed and I know without my spouse being super-vigilant I might roll over onto him.

This is fantastic. I'm not joking when I say that I have family members who didn't realize that a second pregnancy was possible during the after-birth period. Thumbs-up for a government tackling a really thorny problem.

Haha, I once got into a rather frustrating discussion with my partner when discussing the optimal order and partitioning of laundry loads so that we spent the least amount of time babysitting the washer and dryer. After our third digression into understanding the concept of pipelining I decided that saving 30 minutes per week wasn't worth it :)

Ted Chiang's short story collection is the most concentrated dose of fantastic sci-fi/fantasy I've read. Each story is brief, memorable, and plays with at least one neat "what if?"

I've also given out a couple of copies because it's a great way to demonstrate SF&F genre awesomeness to the sceptical in just a few pages.

I credit Mr. Hartl's tutorial many years ago with my decision to take Rails seriously and find a job where I got to work with it every day. I appreciated the framework, but it often seemed "too cute" or "too magical" for my C++-based tastes. His tutorial provided a sober introduction to pragmatic work with the framework that continues to influence my day job to this day.

(Apologies for never actually buying the book after working through the HTML version and loving it–I'll be sure to purchase a copy this month.)

This was one of the biggest level-ups in my own personal cooking, realizing that salting (and to a much lesser extent peppering) to taste makes or breaks the dish. Most home cooks I know will skip that step out of ignorance or health concerns, not realizing that it will make the dish taste awful.

Why do you enjoy simple restaurant dishes (including salads) much more than your home-cooked equivalents? Salt.

Way to go, Dontnod! This is an amazing indie-movie-flavored game that you should definitely try out if you want some Heathers-meets-Donnie-Darko awesomeness.

I've had this issue (during and after GPU-intensive tasks, which aren't common enough to be a major nuisance), and after blowing compressed air through all exposed vents, didn't notice a change. I should schedule a repair time at a retail store to see if that fixes the issue.

A jury-rigged stopgap that is surprisingly effective for me is setting the metal-bodied laptop on top of an liquid icepack for a few minutes. kernel_task drops to background noise and I can continue working.

We also use Clojure at work alongside Ruby, and I'm continually pleasantly surprised to find the benefits of using an immutable-by-default language. I like the functional programming aspects of programming in the large and small, but those advantages pale in comparison to the idea that data should be immutable except when absolutely necessary.

I dabble in Elixir in my spare time, and that language appears to yield similar benefits. Again, immutability is the key, not necessarily the functional focus. While immutability is more difficult to implement in OO languages, I would be curious to see what that looks like.

It's a _super_ tropish twist, but I think that's a knowing choice. There's a great Extra Credits episode (usually a video game analysis show) exploring that theme at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghrI2Vb8u2U

In my mind (though future episodes could prove me wrong), Mr. Robot is taking its favorite tropes from hacker culture, anarchic culture, and corporate culture, and using them to paint an interesting picture of helplessness and instability.

While I agree with your assertion that a state of anarchy introduced by force (technical or otherwise) in a relatively stable democracy would be nightmarish, I suspect that's going to be the thrust of season 2.

The activists leveraged some technical know-how and swashbuckling intrusions to bring down a big bank's systems, but the opening episodes of season 2 point to a mobilization of the democratic government forces to restore order by force. They didn't create anarchy by destroying the source of financial truth, they handed the keys to democracy to the very conglomerate they attempted to take down.

The series was supposed to have been composed as a three-act movie originally, and it'll be interesting to see how it unfolds moving forward in the second act.

VLC Player! I didn't even think to include it on this list because I rarely think about it, which is a great sign. I always install it on new OSs and make it the default media player. But it plays all the things I've thrown at it well and even changes its icon over the Christmas holiday to have a little santa hat!

Agreed on all three recommendations. My use of Trello grows and shrinks over time as project management influence shrinks and grows, but it's a great product. Instapaper and Inbox are just amazing.

In our R&D Slack instance, it's amazing to see a program with great UX (Slack) enable engineers to post awk, grep, sed, jq, etc. one-liners to solve other engineers' questions. IRC has the same benefits, I'm sure, but Slack is the first command-line-style chat application to gain enough non-engineer mindshare to make it ubiquitous at any company I've worked for.

I had forgotten about this tool, and having worked mostly on Apple hardware for the last 5 years didn't realize they had a macOS version. But when I used it on Windows, it was phenomenal.

Synergy. It's a keyboard and mouse sharing client/server application that runs on every platform I use.

I don't know if better alternatives exist because it has just been rock-solid for the last 12 years that I've been using it. I've used it in multi-monitor and machine desktop setups (e.g. an Apple laptop paired with a Windows desktop and linux desktop for enterprisey cubicle development), as well as to let me drive my gaming and media PC from my couch using an Apple laptop.

I was a bit bummed that the pricing model went from free-as-in-beer to free-as-in-speech, but couldn't be happier to pay $10 for a lifetime license.

I feel it belongs in this thread because even when I've neglected to upgrade various machines, or upgraded OSs on machines with the application installed, it just continues to hum along. I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to deal with any problems in any capacity.

I would imagine that different markets make a huge difference.

My only two points of reference are Denver, CO and Kansas City, MO.

In Kansas City, Whole Foods produce and dairy prices were anywhere from 100-200% more than their Price Chopper / Hen House / Hy-Vee equivalents. Meat was marked up around 150% from their commodity supermarket price with a marked increase in quality and variety.

Denver has a roughly 30% higher cost of living than KC, and here the Whole Foods / Sprouts produce and dairy goods prices are competitive to slightly-higher than the King Soopers (local Kroger subsidiary) / Safeway prices. Meat is marked up around 100% from the commodity supermarket price, but with the same distinction in quality and variety.

This is all anecdotal and subject to my terrible aggregated memories of shopping trips, but this subject is fascinating to ponder.

"More serious and expensive offerings apply machine learning to internal human resources (HR) records, and work to discover and infiltrate online crime rings."

Their first offering sounds pretty unlikely to yield results and the second seems ethically dubious to undertake for a single client.

I half-remember an article I read a long time ago about chip and pin cards that mentioned asynchronous communication with the mothership as a big win for the chip.

The example it brought up was that because the chip's identity could be verified through local communication with the chip, purchases could be logged at the terminal and synchronized at any point with the payment processor.

Is there something about the US payment processing market that makes that feature unattractive? Are businesses subsidizing more fraud protection than in other countries by making transactions synchronous and hiring more staff?

Thank goodness storage is cheap. I've had a revolving door of credit/debit card numbers over the last few years thanks to identity theft, and the SaaS providers I use for personal stuff are really good about keeping my data around even after invalid credit-card auto-pay cycles fail.

For more serious data, I have to imagine that SLAs generally define data retention periods even after exiting the agreement, right? (I legitimately don't know)

Yep! GiantBomb is a video game website with some interesting personality. Something like 80% of their content is freely available with banner ads on the site and typical interstitials on their podcasts. For $50 a year, all ads disappear, the extra 20% content is available, and you get authenticated RSS feeds for the same podcasts minus ads that go into Overcast nicely. I love subscribing.

While that's an extremely niche website, I would happily subscribe to NPR, for example, in return for ad-free podcast feeds.

I mourn the death of the RSS reader and really really want RSS to continue to be an open model for distributing podcasts. But that being said, a business that handled premium subscription sales and also ad-sales for a publisher could do the unenviable work of inserting ads and distributing multiple feeds for free or premium users.

I thought I was the only one! My gaming PC hooked up to our living room TV has nagged about the upgrade for months, and I dutifully closed the popup window each time I saw it. About two weeks ago, I turned on the TV to find a new login screen and noticed that my remote keyboard and mouse daemon had stopped. All in all, Win10 has been just fine, but I had no idea how it managed to install itself without my direct approval.

Yeah, I've personally overlooked Uber's most unfortunate PR crises because darn, it's convenient to not pay a tip. But if that slim advantage goes away, I'm back to the same decision matrix that made me dislike taxis.

As a self-admitted, lazy millenial, I have to call bullshit. Commuting 4 hours a day for a job, assuming that the job is 2 hours away, means devoting half of your ordinary-full-time hours to driving to a place to work.

Outliers are absolutely an option when attempting to gain an advantage, but the ability to work remotely is an outsized economic and work/life benefit for almost any company.

I've kinda thought about this in the context of relatively complex technical jobs. One side of my family tree worked a bunch in the consumer banking (non-investment) industry, and I remember hearing story after story of someone being caught after their mandatory leave.

But at a job where the ideal is automation, rather than manual verification and analysis, I wonder what additional obstacles must be placed in a potential attacker's way? Rotating keys based on employee schedules? I'm sure there are many well-studied ways to do this, but it's interesting to armchair analyze.

Something that to some small degree worries me is that video game preservation is all but impossible for online-only services. WoW and its ilk have played a large role in the evolution of video games, but in ten years we're unlikely to be able to recreate anything like the experience of playing the game at any stage.

I don't think there's a good solution, especially without market leaders such as Blizzard, Sony, or NCSoft taking a pro-preservation stance. Legislation to protect the rights of reverse-engineers seems troublesome, and existing copyright law makes any kind of expiration period ineffective.