dubya

39 ms·

391.
by dubya 15y ago
I will definitely be shopping more carefully the next time I purchase a phone. I have an AT&T iphone 4. It works well, I have good coverage, and it can be used internationally, but AT&T will never unlock a phone, even after your c
392.
by dubya 15y ago
"It's a business" is a weak argument, but potentially a helpful one. Your optimal search experience generally won't line up with theirs. In retail, for example, there are all kinds of tricks used to keep customers in the store as long as
393.
by dubya 15y ago
All of those you listed have have standard shortcuts except menu, help, and maximize. Moving them to special keys would be a backwards step, because my fingers wouldn't know where they were, and they would different from keyboard to keyboa
394.
by dubya 15y ago
My weird biometric tick is that I will hit the shift key twice rapidly sometimes. Usually this is a no-op, but does something funny on the nytimes site. It's also super annoying in Windows since hitting shift 5 times brings up an accessib
395.
by dubya 15y ago
That seems like the appropriate compromise, SVG for various optical sizes. The analog example that comes to mind is Dr. Seuss books. The Cat in the Hat is much less detailed when he is far away, and has very detailed pen work close up.
396.
by dubya 15y ago
It does sound odd, but when Chrome for Android was released there was suddenly a lot of talk about how bad the original browser was. But I assume Chrome would fulfill this one.
397.
by dubya 15y ago
"And I don't care that you've never tested your awesome app with 1.3 — it's better to be possibly unstable than certainly unstable or, far worse, vulnerable." Not all library bugs affect all programs though. If you change a library and bre
398.
by dubya 15y ago
I did GMail-myself backups before Dropbox was around, and now have stuff on a Time Machine backup as well. But the networked backups are dependent on Google and Dropbox actively maintaining their servers for me, which it makes sense for th
399.
by dubya 15y ago
It's even worse, because Congress for years has been happily handing off it's responsibilities to the executive branch. It's to the point that it's barely controversial that the President can order the assassination or indefinite detention
400.
by dubya 15y ago
The scenario where paper seems to have a serious advantage over digital is when people disappear or lose interest in maintaining digital copies for a few decades. Paper just sits, relatively inert, in libraries or boxes in peoples attics.
401.
by dubya 15y ago
"And to the C students, I say, you too can be president of the United States." This was admittedly addressed to a graduating class at Yale, but certainly circumstances matter. Doing poorly in school and experimenting with drugs generally
402.
by dubya 15y ago
I'm not sure it's more asinine, but in my town there are sometimes lights where a major road intersects a single lane road with almost no traffic. But typically these lights do not have a traffic sensor, so they just regularly interrupt th
403.
by dubya 15y ago
This is a lost battle. It's like arguing that decimate means killing only 1 in 10, or that literally refers to a something factual, or that a virus does not need your admin password to install itself and spread.
404.
by dubya 15y ago
To be fair, I haven't seen a good solution to this anywhere. Even on Apple's site, you'll sometimes be scolling down a page, and then the page will stop while an embedded frame scrolls sideways. The pinch to zoom would work fine, but Safar
405.
by dubya 15y ago
The "all other doctors" part really bugs me. It's mostly true for most specialties, but certainly there are examples of plastic surgeons performing questionable procedures, and obstetricians who perform more conveniently scheduled C-sectio
406.
by dubya 15y ago
It's a smooth effect, but it's so much nicer when scrolling scrolls instead of zooming. On this one, scrolling left or right just duplicates scrolling up or down, and for some reason, scrolling right (zooming out) sometimes stutters. I wo
407.
by dubya 15y ago
For the more mathematically inclined, there's a really nice little book, "The Computer as Crucible" by Borwein and Devlin, about experimental math. It makes a really convincing case, that I think couldn't have been made 15 years ago, that
408.
by dubya 15y ago
Really good type inference like Haskell has is my preferred option.
409.
by dubya 15y ago
They could, for future products, but I suspect that all current iDevices have hardware H264 decoding support, and no WebM decoding support. Meaning battery life or performance would suffer on the web, though it would still be fine for thin
410.
by dubya 15y ago
I think it is hilarious that the 3.5" floppy disk is still an icon. What does a pair of them would mean? Copy disk? Commands you use every time you use a program don't really need an icon. Is there any overlap between the set of people
411.
by dubya 15y ago
The University Bookstore in Seattle has one of these. It's kind of neat to watch. There's a lot of momentum for digital books now, but traditional books will be around for a while. That may actually help this machine, as getting a traditi
412.
by dubya 15y ago
I'd like to think the conclusion is that Office-style work actually isn't that necessary most of the time. I'm sure there are jobs where some of the capabilities are required, or where there's a bunch of important VBA code lurking in a spr
413.
by dubya 15y ago
Allowing 3rd party apps to access iBook notes and highlights would be useful, but will probably never happen. It's one of the weak points of the app model that there's not any good way to work with other programs' data. On the desktop, yo
414.
by dubya 15y ago
I'm not a fan of ebooks generally, but would love to have a tablet that could replace a bunch of technical books and papers. Any of the e-ink readers refresh too slowly to really allow skimming, but maybe the iPad or Android tablets would
415.
by dubya 15y ago
re: "Literate Programming" is admission of defeat. This seems like a misunderstanding of Knuth's purpose in developing Literate Programming. Sure, trivial boilerplate code for a dictionary class should be largely self-documenting. But tha
416.
by dubya 15y ago
Maybe not the first, but I remember typing the line ## REM TYPE "IS A FLASHY PERSON" IN INVERSE VIDEO from a listing in the little manual that came with my Atari 800XL, before I new what REM meant.
417.
by dubya 15y ago
To be fair to Knuth, it's not the sort of little utility program that he usually works on. At least from TeX, Metafont, and the TAOCP books, it's usually really big problems, or very low-level things where cycle counts matter. The two sor
418.
by dubya 15y ago
This is at least partly a matter of retention. There was a study on giving algebra tests to adults, and one of the best predictors of performance was how much math the person had taken. So someone who had taken math through calculus did p
419.
by dubya 15y ago
"TAOCP: Decades ago, and not a serious suggestion"? TAOCP is not even finished. My copy of volume 4a is copyright 2011. Although it's definitely not something every programmer should read, it's a fantastic resource when you run into a rea
420.
by dubya 15y ago
Using something other than the officially supported system creates friction for the students, who generally are not as computer savvy as one might expect. We use Blackboard at my school, and it links into the the time schedule and grading.

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