garethrees

11 ms·

61.
by garethrees 11y ago
The article says, "His conclusion: The space elevator could be built with existing technology—minus the super-lightweight tether necessary to make the whole thing work." In other words, it cannot be built with existing technology.
62.
by garethrees 11y ago
There are a couple of cryptocurrencies based on this idea (CureCoin [1] and FoldingCoin [2]). But as far as I can tell these both rely on a trusted third party to distribute the folding work and verify that it was done. That's because
63.
by garethrees 11y ago
If you're using Farbfeld as an internal format for your custom image processing pipeline, which is the use case I was describing, then constant explanation isn't a problem. Not every image format needs to be suitable for use as ge
64.
by garethrees 11y ago
The idea is very sensible. Using an image format that's trivial (and fast) to read and write makes it easy to build custom image-processing pipelines. The video game industry used to (and maybe still does) use Truevision TGA format, in
65.
by garethrees 11y ago
If the message is not found, gettext returns the argument unchanged, which would be a bug (English text incorrectly appearing instead of localized text). So that's not it. The answer to my question is that xgettext and gettext have spe
66.
by garethrees 11y ago
How is this supposed to work? The underscore is a convenience macro for the gettext localization function. But gettext works by looking up its string argument in the localization database, and here the string varies from one platform to ano
67.
by garethrees 11y ago
The Guardian quotes Adam Rivers of KPMG as saying, “You’d need close to all 50 million eligible people in the UK to purchase at least one ticket in order for the expected value to go below the £2 purchase price” The Telegraph reports that 4
68.
by garethrees 11y ago
If you have a long important task, then surely you can break it down into sub-tasks that take less than a day to implement? Not just for the sake of having something to say in the daily status meeting, but to be able to manage your own work
69.
by garethrees 11y ago
The conclusion I draw from this list is that it's almost impossible for an ordinary person to maintain anonymity using the current tools. Who has the discipline to maintain the level of operational security implied by this article? I m
70.
by garethrees 11y ago
I don't think they were state of the art even back then, but they were widely available, well documented, and produced fast, robust lexers and parsers. They are still just the ticket if you need to quickly get a programming language i
71.
by garethrees 11y ago
I do take your point, and so I've rewritten the opening to be even vaguer.
72.
by garethrees 11y ago
Yes, you've spotted the irony in the title :)
73.
by garethrees 11y ago
For "twenty years", read "once upon a time". I feel that a bit of vagueness in dates is appropriate for a story like this. I have no contemporary written documentation, so it's based on my fallible memory, and I don
74.
by garethrees 11y ago
There is a general problem with combining destructors and automatic collection of reference cycles, and its one that several languages have unexpectedly found themselves facing. For example, Java has the function System.runFinalizersOnExit,
75.
by garethrees 11y ago
There was obviously some kind of misunderstanding. Khachian found a polynomial algorithm for linear programming. And the travelling salesman problem has a formulation in terms of an integer linear program. Unfortunately, solutions to a li
76.
by garethrees 12y ago
The Tsar Bomba was an experimental weapon, but the United States had the B41, a three-stage thermonuclear weapon with a yield of 25 megatons. Four of these would have been as powerful as the Tsar Bomba; the U.S. manufactured 500 of them. h