Tloewald

52 ms·

481.
by Tloewald 11y ago
Apple's statement is not quite airtight. E.g. they could have implemented a backdoor without government agency involvement; but it's by far the best statement. Condi Rice's presence on Dropbox's concern was why I went to
482.
by Tloewald 11y ago
My takeaway is that the galaxy is a much flatter disk than we think based on classic pictures of the milky way. The clouds that make it seem fat are just nearby rubbish, and the other wavelengths reveal there's nothing really there. Ca
483.
by Tloewald 11y ago
Check out Dropbox's statement: " Governments should never install backdoors into online services or compromise infrastructure to obtain user data." In essence we want companies to state the following: 1) They won't coop
484.
by Tloewald 11y ago
He's right of course. It's essentially the "billionaires in gated communities guarded by robot drones" argument. http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-robot-lords-a... It's amazin
485.
by Tloewald 11y ago
I'm proposing something slightly more complex under the hood to be sure. But the API is simpler. And the point of APIs is to eliminate implementation details from the interface.
486.
by Tloewald 11y ago
I think it violates my ideas about good APIs which should transfer only the smallest amount of information necessary to do the job. When I subscribe to something all I am asking is that I be notified when a thing changes and to be told what
487.
by Tloewald 11y ago
I'm curious as to why the observable needs a reference to the subscribing object at all. The subscriber knows who it is. (Similarly, why does the update callback need to pass the old value?)l If the subscriber didn't keep a copy o
488.
by Tloewald 11y ago
SAP ain't Xerox though. The idea of SAP hiring a bunch of maverick UI geniuses is pretty mind-boggling. This is a company whose products are almost the complete antithesis of good UI design (they're also the antithesis of software
489.
by Tloewald 11y ago
Nah, it's the camera makers that are holding things back by sticking to proprietary formats and in some cases obfuscating them. There's OpenEXR, HDR, and DNG (the last of which is a true RAW format). The big issue with creating a
490.
by Tloewald 11y ago
The real question is how it converts to mpg. A whole bunch of manufacturers have gotten in trouble for exaggerating fuel economy, and I for one certainly consider it when comparing cars (to an irrational degree, in fact). If it's the d
491.
by Tloewald 11y ago
Setting aside the fact that US intelligence agencies can and will subvert foreign servers with impunity, foreign intelligence agencies operate with less oversight within their own borders than the US agencies do within its borders AND they
492.
by Tloewald 11y ago
To be fair, as a human I don't feel particularly adept at driving in bad weather, so an autonomous vehicle that simply slows down to where it "feels confident" and uses some kind of radar to avoid collisions won't be doi
493.
by Tloewald 11y ago
Perhaps by comparison with desktop CPUs, but since the A8 had 4MB of L3, presumably there are good reasons for Apple to include more L3 in the A9. It may well be that Apple has found that a larger L3 cache contributes more to overall perfor
494.
by Tloewald 11y ago
Ok I'll bite. This is a good reason to use PHP. In fact, I first learned PHP because I had a specific web application I wanted to write that needed to be dead simple for relatively tech phobic users to deploy, and PHP won. For small th
495.
by Tloewald 11y ago
You're confusing a breach of contract and the settlement of a suit. You sue for divorce and eventually reach a settlement. A settlement is enforced by the courts. (Having decided a breach exists and decided damages, the court can force
496.
by Tloewald 11y ago
The experiment has already taken place and its findings are either correct or incorrect. It's not a Schrodinger's Cat, the Cat is alive or dead. Imagine two studies have been completed and they have non-overlapping confidence inte
497.
by Tloewald 11y ago
I am not a lawyer, but this seems wrong to me. Could you elaborate? (My whole point is that NDAs are contracts and not special. Breach of contract is not a crime; it's a "civil wrong" according to Wikipedia, as distinct from
498.
by Tloewald 11y ago
Well, assuming I got it right :-)
499.
by Tloewald 11y ago
The beginning of the article discusses common fallacious interpretations of confidence intervals (i.e. what most of us probably naively think a confidence interval means, e.g. 10 ±2 95% means there is a 95% probability that the true value i
500.
by Tloewald 11y ago
Then it's those laws that can be enforced. NDAs themselves are not laws, they're contracts. You can sue, but you can't arrest.
501.
by Tloewald 11y ago
Violating an NDA is civil, not legal FFS. The US government has no business enforcing NDAs. (It can and should enforce court orders resulting from lawsuits over NDAs.)
502.
by Tloewald 11y ago
Refactoring is abused as a handy word to use to describe random shit that would confuse management if you went into detail. If you're genuinely refactoring then, depending on the scope of the refactoring and the nature of the code bein
503.
by Tloewald 11y ago
I didn't realize Turbo Pascal was ever released for the Mac. Apparently (according to Wikipedia) it was, but it was soon discontinued. Lightspeed/THINK Pascal/C ruled the roost on the Mac for a long time (thanks in large part
504.
by Tloewald 11y ago
It all went downhill after they got bought by Symantec.
505.
by Tloewald 11y ago
And your singleton user class worked better because?
506.
by Tloewald 11y ago
You realize that there's a war between people who write static code analysis software and "software architects", the former trying to detect global state buried in object hierarchies and the latter disguising global state as
507.
by Tloewald 11y ago
Module names are, effectively, global variables. The reason global namespace shouldn't be polluted is that it's so damn useful. Not using it for anything is like never driving your car to avoid wearing out your tires.
508.
by Tloewald 11y ago
Unlearning Object Programming might include discussion of the legitimate uses of global variables, and how Singletons are just obfuscated and inconvenient globals.
509.
by Tloewald 11y ago
I wish it were organized in terms of utility relative to difficulty. Walking everywhere with a hat and buzz cut to avoid shedding hair is kind of insane and is more likely to attract attention than prevent you from being tracked by your DNA
510.
by Tloewald 11y ago
Somewhat in this vein: Years ago I worked at a large advertising network that was concerned about fraudulent impressions. E.g. Ads placed "under the fold" or hidden or behind stuff or otherwise generating impressions that weren&#x

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