mark-r

31 ms·

391.
by mark-r 5y ago
And even better on vinyl!
392.
by mark-r 5y ago
Even just the fact that the artist gets to specify the play order. Today it's rare that a playlist will even have two songs from the same artist in sequence, but in olden days you could have a sequence that was greater than the sum of
393.
by mark-r 5y ago
When my kids were very young, I discovered that they had a talent for destroying DVDs. So I put together a media PC and started ripping. I've had to upgrade the HD a couple of times, but every kid's DVD I ever bought is now avai
394.
by mark-r 5y ago
Ah, the A of A&M.
395.
by mark-r 5y ago
I remember going to hear the first CD player imported to our city, it was a big event. I wondered why they had picked speakers to go with it that sounded so horrible. It wasn't until later that I found out it wasn't the speakers
396.
by mark-r 5y ago
Pressed CDs decay because the reflective aluminum layer oxidizes. The bottom of a CD is a pretty impenetrable plastic, but the top is just painted on.
397.
by mark-r 5y ago
Have you watched a VHS lately? The quality is horrible! These days you can go to your nearest Goodwill and load up on as many as you want for $1 apiece.
398.
by mark-r 5y ago
That's funny, we had a very diverse user base but never saw the problem with any printer but HP. And 20 years ago sounds about right for my time frame too. I think that was about the point where Windows started providing more isolati
399.
by mark-r 5y ago
I once fixed a bug caused by a faulty printer driver from HP. The driver changed the floating point control word and didn't change it back. Our program crashed while doing a completely innocuous operation, but only if you had printed
400.
by mark-r 5y ago
I don't believe it is the decrease in IQ that causes the crime, rather that both effects are correlated because they have the same root cause.
401.
by mark-r 5y ago
They made the gas tank filler hole a smaller diameter for unleaded gas cars, so that the leaded nozzles wouldn't fit. https://uiobservatory.com/2010/how-intelligent-design-saved-... .
402.
by mark-r 5y ago
I believe it's 1/96, while a point is 1/72.
403.
by mark-r 5y ago
It's not that nobody cares, it's just that this stuff is genuinely hard. We're too spoiled.
404.
by mark-r 5y ago
px units are not actual pixels, they're a synthetic approximation. I don't remember the exact formula but I'm sure it's affected by font scaling the same as everything else.
405.
by mark-r 5y ago
Second-hand smoke?
406.
by mark-r 5y ago
The title would be better if it didn't include an acronym I've never seen before.
407.
by mark-r 5y ago
Yes, I've known that trick for a long time. There's hardly ever a reason to use it though, unless you're swapping registers in assembly and don't have a spare register.
408.
by mark-r 5y ago
You'd be surprised how often standard libraries can be broken. The integer overflow bug for binary search has been found in many of them.
409.
by mark-r 5y ago
Microsoft are the kings of backward compatibility. Since long has been 32 bits for the last 20 years, it shall remain so until the end of time. Linux compilers are free to be a little more pragmatic. The standards are flexible enough to
410.
by mark-r 5y ago
Using half-open intervals for std::lower_bound and std::upper_bound has an unexpected benefit. It allows the functions to return an insertion point that keeps the sequence sorted, even if that insertion point is at the end of the sequence.
411.
by mark-r 5y ago
In Microsoft C++ long and int are both the same size, 32 bits. Even when size_t is 64 bits.
412.
by mark-r 5y ago
The processors I've used all have an overflow flag that will tell you if an addition result exceeded the size of the register. But I'm not aware of any compilers that will use the flag, because it adds overhead that isn't wa
413.
by mark-r 5y ago
Yes, it's always the midpoint calculation. Everybody forgets that (low+high) could overflow. It's trivial to work around once you know - just replace mid=(low+high)/2 with mid=low+(high-low)/2.
414.
by mark-r 5y ago
That passage was the inspiration for someone's blog to present a challenge and see how many people could pass the test. https://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/are-you-one-of-the-1... Covered by HN at th
415.
by mark-r 5y ago
Obviously that paid support is not paying enough for a beefy server.
416.
by mark-r 5y ago
> Again, this is just like saying that a camera existing enables the government to hack it, so rear view cameras are part of forming a surveillance state. That might be the best example of a straw-man that I've ever seen.
417.
by mark-r 5y ago
Why do you assume these systems are static? It's not a given that the systems available in 2025 will have any resemblance to the ones available today. And in fact they may have mandatory upgrade abilities, so the car you buy may not
418.
by mark-r 5y ago
20 years ago our builder let us have any appliances from any source we wanted. My wife's company was doing a cross-promotion with GE at the time, and we got a decent discount on GE appliances so we loaded up. That turned out to be a
419.
by mark-r 5y ago
And this is exactly why I think Jeff has the winning bet.
420.
by mark-r 5y ago
OK, I see your point. But try to see mine - rain may make it hard to see the lines, but snow may make it impossible.

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