PotatoEngineer

10 ms·

61.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
I ran out of gas three times when I was first driving; the gas gauge was bad, and would show "half full" when it was dead empty. The odometer was reasonably reliable at telling me when I was about to run out of gas, but I was cheap and did
62.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
For what it's worth, I'm a US citizen and I got a credit card a few months before I turned 18; I was just starting college, and they must have used that bit of data to offer me a card.
63.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
I've always found == to be very useful when comparing undefined, because undefined == null. It's very rare that I want to treat undefined and null separately (unless one or the other means there was an error earlier).
64.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
Not all of us wake up easily. My body loves to get 9+ hours of sleep, and I need something to kick it out of bed in the morning. At the moment, that's whacking the snoozer a lot, but I need a better solution.
65.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
Some people honestly do love nigh-impossible platformers. I am not among them, but the Linux games are going to be made by people who 1) are making it for themselves (and possibly a few others; that community's relatively small) and 2) are
66.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
My favorite thing about used bookstores is that the books are cheap: I can try out new authors (based on nothing more than the cover and the blurb on the back) and not feel I'm wasting money. This goes double since I'll be trading in my pr
67.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
It's a mutual fund that's designed to follow a particular stock index. For instance, there are funds that will exactly mimic the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or Standard & Poor, or other such indexes. And there's a pretty large numbe
68.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
If it were only that, it would be simple. The problem is that most of the laws and methods used by the music industry are... overkill. DRM has, in its many forms, been inconvenient and/or invasive, and chock-full of false positives. SOPA
69.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
The trouble with a major disruption is that crime rates go through the roof. (In the worst-case scenario, you get roving bands of raiders.) How does preparing with a well-stocked kitchen help if a bunch of armed hooligans show up? I don't
70.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
Giant images have more power to do striking layouts than CSS does. The advantage of CSS is that it will probably look good in every browser, while a giant image is a particular size and doesn't scale. Images can have greater.... imagery? C
71.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
Isn't that the most likely result? There are a lot of possible things we could call intelligent, and only a few of them could be "like us". (Granted, anyone trying to make an AI will aim towards something like us, but considering how w
72.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
Most men are ignorant of computer science, too. You're right in one aspect: of the very, very few people in the world who know about computer science, most (more than half, anyway) of them are men.
73.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
The same total energy would be transferred, but it would be spread out over a larger area. If the area is sufficiently large, then all you've done is raise the temperature of Germany by one degree for a while. (Still, there are plenty of c
74.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
I agree; I use Linux infrequently, and I've always found the man pages to be chock-full of details on how to use particular switches, but lacking in examples. I usually have to read them very closely just to get to the point of "look, I ju
75.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
Possibly a holdover from the old, bad days of storing passwords in plaintext in the database, somebody said "nobody's going to need more than X characters," and it became a hard limit. And then, later, when we all switched over to storing h
76.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
Or, you're converting the nebulous "value of the site to a user" into cold, hard cash. The game isn't zero-sum, it's closer to an IPO (or some other stock-issuing event) in that sense: theoretical value becomes real value, but now you don'
77.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
Unless that's an "aggregate data only" service (you have 3 people trying to get poached), it undermines the entire premise of the site. Even then, for small companies, it can be easy to spot the guy who doesn't want to be there anymore, if
78.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
That would encourage piracy. If you pirate a movie right when it comes out, that's $20 or so, but after a year, it gets closer to $10. So: pirate it now, pay next year's price in the worst case!
79.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
The current laws allow huge fines per song . Download about $100 worth of music (~6 CDs), get hit with over $500,000 in fines. That's simply overkill. A fine of less than $100 (even on a per-song basis) would make the punishment fit the
80.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
You're also seeing a difference between undergraduate education and graduate education. The class sizes and professor interest are night and day.
81.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
That wouldn't have helped me when I was in college; my college stopped supporting my email address after I left. (They also had this weird email client called Simian that you had to use, and it wouldn't let you read your email until it had
82.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
Until I saw this article, I never realized that CR reviewed computers. It makes sense (they review everything else), but I turn to CR for appliances and cars, not computers and smartphones. There are plenty of other sites that are better
83.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
My main worry about battery-swapping is that batteries die after a while. At some point, you're going to show up to the battery-swap station expecting a battery that goes 100 miles, and get a battery that only goes 50 miles. That won't be
84.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
The trick is usually to look at the references section of a paper. If there's an old paper in there (say, >10 years old), then it's probably seminal. If you see the same paper in a lot of reference sections, then it's probably seminal
85.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
Lovely; they'll just start anew with a different company.
86.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
I'm unclear on just how bad meritocracy is; the author blames meritocracy for the recent economic mess, sure. And our meritocracy isn't "perfect"; it doesn't guarantee that "good" workers end up well-off, and that "bad" workers end up dest
87.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
Synchronizing schedules across many time zones is a problem for a pretty small proportion of the populace. Who needs to regularly worry about people 8 time zones away? Maybe 25% of all people in IT (I'll estimate high because outsourcin
88.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
Right: if you can't say something useful and accurate, please don't post. (There's still a LOT to say, so don't let that stop you from posting at all!) If you post in good faith and are inaccurate, then it's good form to either edit your
89.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
That's easy enough to do with a Greasemonkey script or other extension. Are you interested enough to write it?
90.
by PotatoEngineer 15y ago
That, and reliability. You're assured that some kind of peer-review happened, at some point, and that some standards were met. What standards, and what kind of peer review, will differ per journal.

More ›