vlasta2

I guess it is more accurate to talk about latency, because throughput can always be improved by accessing multiple cells in parallel.

I have a problem with the word reusable. A reusable software should be a component in a larger solution. Not a complete solution itself.

If I accept that Stack Overflow or Discourse are reusable, because you can run them on different urls with different graphics, topic, moderators and users, then every application, for example Photoshop, is reusable in the same way, because multiple people use it to perform multiple tasks with images.

What you do with Discourse is good engineering, but there is nothing special about it. Every serious CMS, like WordPress or Drupal must inevitably be usable more than once.

I may not understand quantum computing properly, but would not this approach require N entangled qubits? If no, can someone explain how it would function on less than N qubits, for example 1? If it does require N qubits...I can imagine a classical solution with O(n) and slightly less ridiculous hardware requirements.

I have been making native Windows applications for years and I am still making them. Around year 2000, Microsoft was a reliable partner. They made the OS, provided the tools and others were free to make any applications they liked. There was little to complain about.

These days, being a Windows desktop software developer is pretty bad. Leaving out all the .net framework craze, Microsoft has made things much worse for many old software developers with their attempts to control everything. I am not OK with Microsoft being the one, who decides, whether users may run my software or not. I simply cannot develop for WinRT no matter how nice the native+HTML5 API may be. Even on desktop, Internet Explorer checks every download and hides the install button if the installer is "untrusted".

In short, Microsoft is not a reliable and respectful partner for independent software developers anymore.

Stopping a presidential plane because there may be someone as dangerous as Snowden onboard? That is completely ridiculous and out of proportion. Not only did no European country officially offer Snowden asylum, we have even made fools of ourselves by this action. I feel personally ashamed by what Europe did. Although my country has no direct involvement in this incident, it happened awfully close and it is depressing. Did Europe lost all sense and morals?

This was true 10 years ago. These days, every additional setting the application has is a liability. There is a growing group of people, who are scared to have conversation with their browser and make any informed decisions. They ignore such messages. Other people will change any setting they can find and then forget about it. Then they will be surprised and angry at the application that it is not working.

My experience shows that the more options an application has, the lazier the author was. What do you do as a software developer when there are two ways how to solve a problem? Ask the user which way to use? That is the wrong approach these days. The computer should not ask the user stupid questions. "Do you want to enable JavaScript?" is a stupid question for more than 98% of browser users. Instead of asking questions, software developers should invest the work to come with answers and "read the user's mind". Successful apps can do just that.

You should throw in a kinect sensor (or any alternative) and have a very comfortable remote control.

If Google really wants to "not do evil", they should actively work on removing themselves from this position of power they have. They should also work on making it impossible for any entity to obtain this kind of power. That is certainly a very difficult task, but there are little things that can be done and would make a difference (real support for freenet, bitcoins, or wikileaks).

Just gathering power is evil, because in a few years the temptation to use the power will be too strong.

I agree that someone should fork bitcoin and fix the mining problem. But screw transaction rates, the mining difficulty shall be determined by the nodes (people) participating in the network. Periodically, every node votes and a (weighted) average determines future mining difficulty. It may be a technical problem, but it may also be the right solution. And it will make the bitcoin more democratic.

Today, the buyer does not experience the fee. Sellers accept it, because the middle man gives them no other choice. With bitcoins, the middle man has no leverage anymore as the buyer and the seller can interact directly. That was my point.

One of the advantages of bitcoin is that you do not need a middle man to do a transaction. Some people may choose one for whatever reason, but would they be OK with paying the transaction fees? Would you use a credit card if you had to pay 4% more than if you paid in cash? I do not think many people would be OK with that.

It may sound as if I am a PayPal lover and bitcoin hater, which is NOT the case. I just do not see them cooperating sensible.

I am sorry I cannot agree with you.

You cannot collect profits from a transaction between 2 Bitcoin users like PayPal does right now with "real" money. If the world adopted Bitcoin, it would be the end of PayPal's business model. If PayPal were ready to replace their business model with something way less profitable, but more future-proof, it would still make no sense for them to adopt bitcoin. It would only make sense if they owned significant amount (50%) of the existing bitcoins and had the code base under at least indirect control. What would happen if this were true and the bitcoiners found out? ...too many ifs.

That said, Bitcoin will never become a commonly used currency in its current form. The built-in deflation is a fatal flaw, which makes it unusable for normal buyers or sellers. It is only appealing for "get-rich-quick" investors, which is a shame, 'cause we really need a good solution (0% fee & safe) for online payments.

Oh, dear. If I were the president of PayPal and wanted to make quick buck, I would buy some bitcoins, released news like this, and sold my bitcoins the next day with a nice profit. And then, I could just deny the news, sending bitcoin value back where it was so that it is ready for the next exploiter... Heh.

But seriously, PayPal and Bitcoin are by nature rivals. If PayPal wanted to have a crypto-currency, it would develop its own, not validate and boost value of another one gaining nothing in the process.

But JPG was like 10x better than the other image formats available at that time for photographs. WebP hardly delivers 1.2x improvement... This is virtually unnoticeable.

I agree, that pushing WebP now is too soon as almost no image editors support it. I have added latest WebP codec (that also supports animations) into my RealWorld Paint ( http://www.rw-designer.com/image-editor ) few weeks ago and I doubt anyone else did it since that time. Chrome is really crazy supporting WebP now while it is still immature. Image editors and web server libraries should be the first ones to support WebP, web browsers should be last.

Downloading TV shows is actually not illegal in many countries. Usually, only uploading is illegal.

Morally, is is questionable. You can program your video-recorder (if you still have device like that) and let it record the TV show when it airs and watch it later. Or you can skip recording it yourself (because constantly recording everything is boring and wasting resources) and download it from piratebay. Is there really a difference? And if the show in question is inaccessible in your country, should you wait years for it? I would not.

You cannot really compare Windows Store with Steam. There is no Steam-only OS with a name that evokes that it is a successor to Windows 7.

How many non-programmers actually recognize the difference between full Windows 8 and Windows RT? They are both Windows, right? They are both new. Who cares about the details... until it is too late.

Windows RT is not really Windows in the sense it was understood in the past decades. It is a real disaster for every conscious Windows developer.

I find it quite funny. The author started by demonstrating that sliders are inappropriate when representing 1-of-N choices. I agree. Then he proposed a visual change that makes things better. This change makes the GUI element look like and work like radio buttons. The only step remaining is to stop calling this GUI element sliders and start calling it (fancy) radio buttons.

With sound waves, your speed is added to the speed of sound and you hear a different note. With light, the speed remains at c, but perceived energy of the photons is still affected (energy must be preserved after all). And energy ~ wavelength ~ color.

You can also think about it being one of these "zero (weight of a photon at rest) multiplied by infinity (energy of objects moving at c) gives a finite number (actual energy of a photon)". The last number still behaves nicely.

Well, it certainly is impressive, but if I understood the video correctly, it actually requires different graphic primitives than SVG offers, so it would require a new format.

that was not the list of applications, but a guide on how to write one with and example at the end

you can drag the splitter between the navbar and searchbar to adjust the sizes as you see fit...

VS2012 is still a problem though

> Because Windows and Windows apps don't support resolution-independent UI scaling.

This is not true. Windows has had very good support for custom resolutions since Vista. Windows 7 actually looks great when set to higher resolution. Windows applications is another story, but the number of DPI aware applications is growing http://www.rw-designer.com/DPI-aware

I believe the example ("abc" + 123) given in the article is not 100% correct. Let's take C++ as a statically typed language and define a custom class MegaType. Then, in the whole program, we may use only variables of this single type. Any program can be trivially transformed to use just this single type. The piece of code would then look like MegaType("abc") + MegaType(123). When executed, it would behave exactly as a language with dynamic types. So, a dynamically typed language really is a specialization of statically typed language - you only need to define and use this one MegaType and implement all needed operators for this type (and they may of course work differently in runtime: "123" + 123 may result in 246 if you decide it should).

I find it ridiculous too and I am over 30. Maybe this is just some kind of joke or social experiment. Demanding things that are on the list from a partner or a friend really sounds absurd. But everyone is free to make their own lists and publish them wherever they see fit. In my previous job, I actually saw people chatting via Perforce change-lists :-).

Disagree, it actually may make sense. The office is overwhelmed with patents and does not have the resources or people that are experts in that particular field. The author of the patent is supposed to be the world's best expert in their field (they are claiming to have crossed the boundary of known things with their patent, aren't they?) and it should be far easier for them actually check if there is prior art or the patented thing is actually not obvious to anyone, who is explained the problem that it is supposed to solve. Many low quality patents are filled and there is no risk in filling them. There should be a risk and a penalty for misusing the system.

Agree, but I think the GPL examples about communication mechanisms are pretty weird and sometimes absurd. Consider this scenario:

Someone takes a GIMP plug-in licensed under GPL and converts it to a Photoshop plug-in (which is a DLL and shares memory space with Photoshop).

According to GPL, Photoshop would now have to be open-sourced, but the person, who converted the plug-in does not have access to Photoshop source code.

What now? Goes GPL actually forbids the existence of this? What if the converted plug-in with the source code is published? Is that actually illegal? What if they only publish the adapted source code and not the binary? What if a third person compiles it and publishes the binary? Who would be the guilty party?

Yes, I too was blocked from further exploring by this bug. Why so much clicking? Wouldn't it be much better if the box with information simply appeared when mouse hovers over the circle?

It seems like I am in a similar situation - having a site with user submitted icons and mouse cursors. And I got an email informing me they will not show ads on that site. The page mentioned in the email contained an icon of the "pedobear"... (see wikipedia) Oh, Google...

Is there a well know central place for this? I once considered starting a web site for this sole purpose - to let people publish their ideas to establish prior art - but I don't have time to manage yet another web.