dave_au

9 ms·

31.
by dave_au 17y ago
I had to write a freeciv patch for my girlfriend which adds a daily move and/or time limit to the game. It was much appreciated, still have a couple of odd behaviours that I'd have to iron out before letting it out into the wild.
32.
by dave_au 17y ago
There's always a small chance that they're not billion dollar genius' but are instead people who have had a pretty good idea at exactly the right time. If the right time is just after a step forward step in some seemingly tangentially relat
33.
by dave_au 17y ago
Slightly off-topic, but perhaps not too far: http://www.beaverandsteve.com/index.php?comic=228
34.
by dave_au 17y ago
I don't think they're moving away from that practice because it makes them feel good. I can imagine if they continue down their current path they'll take a huge pagerank hit before long - if they aren't on googles radar for SEO dodginess it
35.
by dave_au 17y ago
Some of the (extensive) reddit comments on the story cast a reasonably amount of doubt on his claims. Unfortunately there's just too many of them for me to be able to quickly summarise the various bits and pieces. On a side note, I only st
36.
by dave_au 17y ago
I've been using the dbus support with the CVS snapshot for a while now - it's nice. So far I've only been using it to control workrave and to bring up compilation messages with the system notification handler for long running compiles. Sti
37.
by dave_au 17y ago
Then who's mission is it?
38.
by dave_au 17y ago
I just checked http://www.boardgamegeek.com to see if it was mentioned there. It was, and it was compared to http://www.superiorpod.com/ and http://www.guildofblades.com/ , in case anyone was looking to compare alternative
39.
by dave_au 17y ago
I'd like to hear more about why the GPL would be a roadblock. If you're writing code and see the GPL as a roadblock, then you can use a different license. If you want to use code that is under the license and see the license as a roadblock,
40.
by dave_au 17y ago
I had an idea for a non-evil gambling site a while back - basically runs at a profit with a small bias against the house. Not a scam, but it has a 'compelling mechanic' component in common with Swoopo (albeit a different mechanic). On one
41.
by dave_au 17y ago
I've been considering having a look at Scala as the next potential language that I'll learn. It looks pretty nice. I'd add another point to the article - what I've seen of the community from mailing lists and such has been very positive.
42.
by dave_au 17y ago
I'd more alarmed by the fact that they've thrown something new into the mix security-wise than the effect on startup time. If the system pseudo-random number generator has no problem, what's the use case for not using it? And if it does ha
43.
by dave_au 17y ago
Some of them are just wrong, and a few of the wrong ones seem to be intentionally wrong. C++ has quite a few flaws, but I've always considered the FQA to be a troll.
44.
by dave_au 17y ago
IIRC, you can do anything in NC1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NC_(complexity)
45.
by dave_au 17y ago
It may not be all that likely, but I wonder what would happen if Amazon and Apple collaborate instead of dance-fight? If Apple is working on an ebook reader it'd be the simplest way for them to take a slice of the pie - just show the reader
46.
by dave_au 17y ago
Netflix gets a non-exclusive license from the winner, so they can sell it to other parties, and it seems like something that various parties would be willing to pay for. An open source version would be a significant act of charity. It woul
47.
by dave_au 17y ago
IIRC, Counting Sheep by Paul Martin has some references in this area. I'll try to dig them up later.
48.
by dave_au 17y ago
Google Reader is Google's feed reader, and its users can choose to share items that they read. The sharing is/was done by clicking "Share" on relevant items in your feeds, and you could give other people a unique URL (containing random loo
49.
by dave_au 17y ago
I felt comfortable with Google up until the Reader fiasco and how they dealt with it. That said, I'm significantly less comfortable with Facebook.
50.
by dave_au 17y ago
Nice article, although this bit seemed a bit of a stretch: > This highlights how the direct manipulation and natural gestures of Microsoft Surface can blur the real and virtual world. I can imagine that results may vary for people older
51.
by dave_au 17y ago
The unladden-swallow page says they're using the LLVM JIT compiler in order to be able to compile Python / bits of Python to machine code. So it's less about choosing a VM from LLVM / Parrot / JVM / etc and more about using a feature of LLV
52.
by dave_au 17y ago
I'm not so sure that parsing / syntax is the bottleneck - didn't that regex engine get most of its improvements from JIT compiling the regexs?
53.
by dave_au 17y ago
I assumed it was an identify-the-cute-pig-picture captcha service.
54.
by dave_au 17y ago
Kind of related - I tried the 28 hour day / 6 day week when I started my PhD. I could still code but I couldn't do theory - turned that part of my brain off like a switch. And even though I only did it for 1 or 2 weeks it took more than mon
55.
by dave_au 17y ago
Or they could just lie about it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuffer2005/3216972462/
56.
by dave_au 17y ago
I have a problem with the idea that all the C++ veterans with 10+ years of experience are priced out of the market. If they're "too expensive" to hire doesn't that imply that their services are in demand?
57.
by dave_au 17y ago
Thanks for that - I was pretty unsure about what was going on.
58.
by dave_au 17y ago
Slightly offtopci - wasn't the guy behind that also behind the acacia berry site? I can remember hearing about how they were optimizing to adwords / adsense - just filling a need, basically being nice about it all. Then every now and then I
59.
by dave_au 17y ago
A little off-topic, but it's made my day seeing one of Lipton's posts on the front page. It only started relatively recently and it's been a really good computational complexity blog so far.
60.
by dave_au 17y ago
Perhaps the money would be to keep them away so he can get some work done...

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