jpatokal

23 ms·

181.
by jpatokal 8y ago
All these examples of bad badges, but not a single good one? A picture would have been worth the entire blog post here. Update: Huh, apparently that angry fruit salad at the end was supposed to be a good one. Fortunately the one on the ho
182.
by jpatokal 8y ago
Those are desktop numbers. Virtually all ChromeOS devices are laptops!
183.
by jpatokal 8y ago
Not sure what's up with the downvotes here, since this is objectively correct. A Chinese friend of mine loves to regale listeners with tales of eating things consider outre even by famously expansive Cantonese standards (live mice etc)
184.
by jpatokal 8y ago
I'd count Minecraft as a success story. (Not sure if the deal closed under Nadella, but it was certainly started during Ballmer's reign.)
185.
by jpatokal 8y ago
> Windows is a clear winner over ChromeOS Could you expand on this statement?
186.
by jpatokal 8y ago
In a word, no. There are some 30 million people living in the greater Tokyo metro area, depending on where you draw the line, of which 14 thousand have Shinkansen commuter passes: https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/com
187.
by jpatokal 8y ago
Forbes "Sites" pages like this have opinions from "contributors", not Forbes itself.
188.
by jpatokal 8y ago
I was a regular at the JW Marriott in Jakarta after it was bombed in 2003, and so was my boss, who was actually in the hotel at the time of the attack. In addition to being an excellent hotel, they also took security very seriously, unli
189.
by jpatokal 8y ago
It's difficult to appreciate how freakish industrially farmed chicken is until you have a comparison point. I'm typing this in Fiji, and yesterday purchased three local chicken breasts: the total weight including skin and some ca
190.
by jpatokal 8y ago
There are two versions of WeChat, one for China and one for the rest of the world. The latter is trivial to join, but it's completely firewalled off from the Chinese one.
191.
by jpatokal 8y ago
> you will be locked into a holding cell – a very bleak room indeed – but also offered a cup of tea. A useful reminder that this is about prison in the UK. I suspect this little touch of sympathy is absent in the US.
192.
by jpatokal 8y ago
The one entry level IT job that is not going away is tech support. Sure, some parts of it can be outsourced, but beyond a certain point you need a person on-site to figure out why the Internet is broken. The Cloud companies are also hiring
193.
by jpatokal 8y ago
Hoarding digital media has become kind of pointless with the advent of streaming services though. As a former DJ with eccentric tastes, I spent tons of time looking for, buying and cataloguing obscure music, then eventually digitizing it.
194.
by jpatokal 8y ago
Wikipedia goes into this in some detail, but it really is pretty much the canonical example of a protocol designed by committee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service Here's the technical spec
195.
by jpatokal 8y ago
For better or worse, it's convention to use really short (as in, single character when possible) variable names in Go. https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/CodeReviewComments#variabl... Disclaimer: I work a
196.
by jpatokal 8y ago
Great post. I used to work with SMS for a living, and still remember the first time I visited a customer's data center and watched one of their engineers send an SMS... by telnetting directly into the SMSC and punching out a command i
197.
by jpatokal 8y ago
I don't and very rarely do, but there are narrow lanes on many Sydney arterial roads well outside the city, like Parramatta Rd.
198.
by jpatokal 8y ago
> Why would I want to buy a sedan when I could buy a crossover SUV with the same fuel economy for the same price? Because you live in a city designed for horses and carriages? It's tough enough driving a small sedan in Sydney, th
199.
by jpatokal 8y ago
"Reverse engineering" seems a bit pointless when Google has open sourced the code for Google Earth Enterprise: https://github.com/google/earthenterprise (Update: The client was not open sourced, just the se
200.
by jpatokal 8y ago
It's both: it's a bug fix, whose side effect is a hard fork. The whole point of a blockchain is that there is no single authority that can unilaterally impose "law" by fiat. In practical terms, the software used by the
201.
by jpatokal 8y ago
It's going to be increasingly difficult to compete with the big players' economies of scale though. There's a reason we don't buy cars from the neighbor's factory or generate our own electricity these days.
202.
by jpatokal 8y ago
Wikipedia has a nice article with pics on the bamboo trains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norry
203.
by jpatokal 8y ago
Apparently some managers used to hire sacrificial lambs with the express purpose of culling them to spare the rest of the team.
204.
by jpatokal 8y ago
(2017), but still cool! https://www.blog.google/products/maps/welcome-outer-space-vi...
205.
by jpatokal 8y ago
Really? As a passenger, 777s are way noisier than modern jets like 787 or A380.
206.
by jpatokal 8y ago
It's marketing: the average guy won't buy a "make-up printer", but a "skin printer" sounds much more palatable.
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by jpatokal 8y ago
I'm curious: do you genuinely find that beautiful?To me all the enumerable/map/frozen string literal stuff seems pointlessly overcomplicated compared to the simplicity of just writing down what you're supposed to do:
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by jpatokal 8y ago
This. Growing up in the fifties meant your school days were punctuated with drills where you'd cowee under your desk in case nuclear Armageddon had arrived and the world was going to end .
209.
by jpatokal 8y ago
In 2016, Maltans got around 200 (two hundred) euros per person more from the EU than they put in, and in the previous year they got 20 (twenty). For comparison, Greece steadily gets ~400 EUR/person, and they have a lot more people t
210.
by jpatokal 8y ago
Dyson may have missed your memo: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/10/23/dyson-to-begin-construc...

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