niftich

66 ms·

481.
by niftich 9y ago
XP shipped with WMP 8, but WMP 9 was the landmark release that brought more ripping options, star ratings, a quick navigation screen, and essentially made WMP into the product that is familiar to many from the XP era.
482.
by niftich 9y ago
Winamp 2 was the music player of choice of discretionary users who knew to seek out software on their own. Winamp 3 came out and it was so colossally awful that most people stayed on 2. If you bought your computer in a store -- like most pe
483.
by niftich 9y ago
A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs. The Windows world at the time was a b
484.
by niftich 9y ago
I use an old convention for approximating em dashes in ASCII by using two hyphens, set apart from surrounding words by spaces. Typographers might shudder, but I find the meaning clear -- its presence signifies the same sort of rhetorical de
485.
by niftich 9y ago
It was introduced because " web developers are building more sophisticated applications where application performance is increasingly important. Developers need the ability to assess and understand the performance characteristics of th
486.
by niftich 9y ago
There is some good substance buried here, but it's phrased in a voice thick with hype and slathered with emergent jargon/slang pidgin of folks mentally and emotionally invested in the loftier suppositions of the cryptocurrency mov
487.
by niftich 9y ago
It's not just groceries. All big multinationals do the same. Electronics and appliance makers typically only sell mid- to low-end devices, and the low end is lower than what you find elsewhere. Samsung is particularly egregious, shippi
488.
by niftich 9y ago
Sure. These days the point isn't to eavesdrop, but to insinuate that you could credibly disrupt communications.
489.
by niftich 9y ago
Satellites are a poor choice for this particular problem (i.e. when you think an adversary may cripple your communication capabilities), because they can be disrupted, especially if your adversary is one of the premier states in spaceflight
490.
by niftich 9y ago
Yes, the TFA is about a laptop from a maker who popularized autocorrect on smartphones. In the early days, spellcheck was an application-level concern, but its presence in smartphone platforms as an OS-level service made them part of user a
491.
by niftich 9y ago
Java is worth learning because: - It's a popular programming language with a large and diverse install base; - It's commonly used in server-side backends, and in a modified but recognizable form, for Android app development; - It&
492.
by niftich 9y ago
I've seen people argue that autocorrect is part of the input mechanism of on-screen smartphone keyboards. The rationale goes, with a physical keyboard of respectable size, you make much fewer typing mistakes than with a virtual keyboar
493.
by niftich 9y ago
"Lite" versions of news sites are a smart compromise between two competing forces: the desire to appeal to audiences that are put off by garish, heavyweight sites, and to do so in a way that doesn't endanger the revenue they
494.
by niftich 9y ago
Antirez blogged about this in detail [1] when HyperLogLog was added to Redis. [1] http://antirez.com/news/75
495.
by niftich 9y ago
The 'random' button would interfere with their aggregate viewership tracking and recommendation algorithms. When the viewer appears to select a particular show to watch, you can have reasonable faith in the viewership numbers. If
496.
by niftich 9y ago
The Walking Dead had a longtime product placement deal with Hyundai. Although it was much ridiculed, much of the point of product placement is to cause positive associations to be made between the product and the setting. Many people may no
497.
by niftich 9y ago
I'm actually happy they listed something as "trivial" as station configuration first. The list is full of things that are either politically fraught, or are already in progress and just take of a lot of time. Reconfiguring in
498.
by niftich 9y ago
Generally, all 'train control' systems take a long time to roll out. Despite often seeming like one product you 'install' from one vendor, it's really more of a 'solution' that requires a bunch of things y
499.
by niftich 9y ago
They go multi-media for preroll ads. These are contextually more resistant against adblockers, and bring in more revenue.
500.
by niftich 9y ago
I can't speak to ss and ip, but apparently netstat actually operates by opening these exact files [1]. [1] https://github.com/ecki/net-tools/blob/master/lib/pathnames....
501.
by niftich 9y ago
Amtrak actually makes a profit [1][2] on both Acela and the slower services in the Northeast Corridor, but not anywhere else. If we suppose that a privatized passenger carrier would want to make a profit, shedding long-distance trains would
502.
by niftich 9y ago
If I accurately recall, PATH is rolling out Siemens Trainguard MT; a Communication-Based Train Control (CBTC) system which uses trackside (between-the-tracks) beacons and in-car equipment. Radar is used to figure out the vehicle's dist
503.
by niftich 9y ago
Reading transportation fatality statistics requires some nuance. In the realm of railways, most fatalities tend to be suicides causing no additional deaths, which are often analyzed separately. The EU does this [1], while the Guardian artic
504.
by niftich 9y ago
I think the author's quote is a bit of an overstatement. Reading the docs on tokio_core seems that knowledge could be readily transferred if you've worked with Node, or browser JS, Java Futures, or a game engine -- this, of course
505.
by niftich 9y ago
It was never private. In BitTorrent, IP addresses are public. Trackers help peers match with each other, but trackerless mechanisms have been introduced not long after, and this keeps a distributed datastore "in the cloud", distri
506.
by niftich 9y ago
I usually hear "your destination is on the right", and become aware to having zoomed by the place. 5 minutes of U-turning ensues.
507.
by niftich 9y ago
OpenStreetMap, the (only?) backing dataset for OpenRailwayMap, is a little picky about purely historical features, as they generally seek to document current facts on the ground. Check OSM policies before you contribute. That being said, th
508.
by niftich 9y ago
Equal parts learning about the world [1][2][3] and armchair engineering [4][5]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989538#14991800 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14277421#14278793 [3] htt
509.
by niftich 9y ago
The OpenRailwayMap project is great; I just wish their default map viewer had the Query/Inspect feature. When I'm browsing railways (don't ask...), I find myself using OpenStreetMap side-by-side to Query for more details abou
510.
by niftich 9y ago
> PEP 528 Wow, working IO in Windows cmd.exe, finally? The changes [1] seem to implement most of the functionality of the module 'win_unicode_console' [2], which was made to work around bugs that have been open in Python sinc

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