nathanb

10 ms·

31.
by nathanb 11y ago
Great article. When an indie developer does an HD remake, it's a labor of love. Each sprite is scaled up meticulously and a lot of thought is put into how to make the game look the best. When a big company like Squeenix does an HD rema
32.
by nathanb 11y ago
This may be dissonance between audiophiles and regular people. When I see that it works with my best, old-school speakers, I wonder if it has red and black posts for me to crimp my speaker wire to. But of course I know better and know that
33.
by nathanb 11y ago
I would love to see a characterization of this bug's impact. Reading the description, it doesn't seem to be nearly as serious as the author of this post is making it out to be. But there's no information about how fast the cl
34.
by nathanb 11y ago
Given your definition, and viewed from a high enough level, every feature or enhancement is a bug fix. I think nitpicking the wording (while an interesting philosophical discussion) detracts from the point of the article: an unnamed Google
35.
by nathanb 11y ago
To me, this story has analogues to the analysis of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. The engineering report indicated the O-rings were a risk, but the report was not clear enough or strongly-worded enough to effect change. The mission
36.
by nathanb 11y ago
Unintended consequences are still consequences. Most extensions are developed by volunteers; many of the rest are, at best, subsidized as a second job through donations or ad affiliates. These volunteers don't always have the time to f
37.
by nathanb 11y ago
I think some of this might be Firefox OS mentality creeping into the browser. I have used Firefox since right after it stopped being called Firebird (0.8 - 0.9 days). I loved it because it seemed to be built around an aesthetic of tinkering
38.
by nathanb 11y ago
I rated 43 films, then selected "Top Picks for You" and got 0 results. So I decided to not watch a movie and instead go for a walk. Which turned out to be exactly what I needed. Five stars.
39.
by nathanb 11y ago
Indeed. I wonder if Ohm works the same way, in that if you have an optimal driving pattern it will last you for 20 years. I suspect based on the Li-ion batteries in laptops and how poorly they last that the Ohm will have a much more predict
40.
by nathanb 11y ago
Sometimes. With the new ultra-frequent release cycle, as a volunteer maintainer I don't always have the time. And sometimes it breaks in ways that are not visible to me (I run Linux, for example, so bugs that show up on OSX or Windows
41.
by nathanb 11y ago
That's a fair point. Thanks for the explanation. I think it's cool that Firefox has become mainstream enough to have so many non-tech-savvy users that Mozilla has to save them from themselves. I wish there was another approach, bu
42.
by nathanb 11y ago
It's the "no override" part that concerns me. I created and maintain an extension that is used by visually-impaired people around the world (it has been translated by volunteers into Dutch and Chinese, for example). Occasiona
43.
by nathanb 11y ago
I think you're discounting the fact that the software with the bugs was written in C precisely because C was a better fit than the other languages which offered greater protection. I'm not saying (and have never said) that C is be
44.
by nathanb 11y ago
I have difficulty accepting "let's replace C with X", where X is a memory-managed language. As a systems programmer (I write SCSI driver code in C), I can't overemphasize how important it is to be able to address memory
45.
by nathanb 11y ago
That is a really well-written article. It explains the problem, explains what the remediation plans are, and puts a human face on it...while remaining positive and optimistic. Looking forward to seeing what the problem turned out to be and
46.
by nathanb 11y ago
Wow, cool. I love Cape Town, and think it's awesome that there are tech companies trying to make it work there! One question: when I was staying in Cape Town, there wasn't a lot of broadband infrastructure to speak of. I and my ho
47.
TSA's failures start long before screeners fail to detect bombs(theguardian.com)
3 points by nathanb 11y ago|0 comments
48.
by nathanb 11y ago
I think that's the point of this site.
49.
by nathanb 11y ago
Wait, I think you and I are having very different conversations. If the topic you're discussing is that the clients of an OS API should not encounter a bug...uh, I mean, I don't think you'll find anyone to disagree with you.
50.
by nathanb 11y ago
This may come as a shock to you, but operating systems have bugs. And nobody is trying to defend NTFS populating your file with random OS pages. So yes, an OS should allow you to call its API without triggering internal bugs. But that'
51.
by nathanb 11y ago
I don't know anything about Windows driver programming so I don't know what the contract of the buffer flush operation is. Obviously, "sometimes fills your buffer with random data from memory pages owned by the operating syst
52.
by nathanb 11y ago
My reading of the bug is that it would write random data from memory owned by the OS, not necessarily other files on disk. Certainly no better (and could very well be worse ), but just a clarification. (Going back and reading the post agai
53.
by nathanb 11y ago
It's not that simple (speaking as someone who works on OS SCSI driver code for a living...). I will amend your statement to say that the OS itself should never corrupt your data, which I agree with entirely. The post was not super clea
54.
by nathanb 11y ago
My complaint is that it will often give you words that are nearly English words (but not actually). If you really want to type quickly, you will sort of type one word at a time rather than one letter at a time (time yourself typing an Eng
55.
by nathanb 11y ago
In my day job, I have to write reams of complicated code that can slow down the system or make maintenance more annoying...just because a user can do something (even though doing that is unsupported). That's what it means to write bu
56.
by nathanb 11y ago
How can you be confident that "we will come back"? (Not trying to criticize your decision; just trying to understand it).
57.
by nathanb 11y ago
I'd like to hear from the folks downvoting this comment. Is it parents who think I'm talking rubbish (I may very well be; I was just describing how I felt, not what I thought was objectively true)? People who thought I was critici
58.
by nathanb 11y ago
I feel like this is the sort of thing that would be amazing and fulfilling unless something ends up going wrong and you spend the rest of your life dealing with crushing guilt. The idea of having kids is terrifying, because there would be p
59.
by nathanb 11y ago
Currently it doesn't seem to exist even if someone IS looking at it :)
60.
by nathanb 11y ago
I think there are some interesting dynamics at play here.... The post (even with the edits to remove unfortunate phrasing) seems really aggrieved at the community's expectation that open source projects are by definition free as in bee

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