noahl

21 ms·

151.
by noahl 14y ago
This is very interesting. I always thought that making an ASIC was prohibitively expensive except for the largest companies. How much does it really cost? I would really enjoy playing with a Lisp chip. It might not be good for performance c
152.
by noahl 14y ago
I think I understand what you're saying. Yes, I agree that research funded by the public should be freely available (definitely unpatentable, and maybe uncopyrightable too). I think this is a separate issue, though. If Northwestern did the
153.
by noahl 14y ago
Actually, this is about how music works nowadays. You can download DRM-free files for a small fee. It would be technically easy to redistribute them, but people still buy lots of music. Why is that? I think it's because people are making a
154.
by noahl 14y ago
I might be behind the times, but the thing that was by far the most interesting to me was Servo [0]. He's absolutely right - all of the current rendering/JavaScript engines are going to need significant work to take advantage of massively-p
155.
by noahl 14y ago
As for what goal you're trying to accomplish - I think it would be worthwhile just to see what sort of software people start writing when the expected level of programming knowledge starts increasing. With text editors, for instance, we alr
156.
by noahl 14y ago
I've had some problems with the drivers, which is what I was referring to. Sometimes the computer will get into an unusable state and I don't know why. There are also some odd issues with the tools. Did you know that CUDA-GDB will give an i
157.
by noahl 14y ago
Interesting. Do you know why CAD programs are slower on gaming chips? I know the gaming cards sometimes have much worse double-precision performance than the GPGPU cards, but I must admit that I don't know what the difference is on any part
158.
by noahl 14y ago
I think most people are excited about Steam on Linux because of gaming, but I've actually been excited because of better driver support. If this makes Nvidia put more effort into their Linux drivers and tools, it will make life a lot better
159.
by noahl 14y ago
Is it true that they wanted to give weight to geographic regions? I'm curious because the way I heard the story it went something like, "they needed the House to get the big states to agree to the Constitution, and they needed the Senate to
160.
by noahl 14y ago
I'm curious about your thoughts on mailing lists vs. private newsgroups. I think of email and news as just two different ways of sharing MIME messages, with the difference that email is sent to specific people and newsgroups are stored on a
161.
by noahl 14y ago
I may not agree with all of the decisions Shuttleworth makes, but this is unfair. The "secret development process" is completely normal - people work on features for a while, but don't make them public until they're really good so that othe
162.
by noahl 14y ago
I've been thinking for a while, actually, that terminal emulation isn't something I want today. It might still be appropriate to have some terminal/shell distinction, but emulating an old text-only terminal imposes UI issues. For instance,
163.
by noahl 14y ago
I think a phone has a higher risk of being lost than a laptop because it's smaller. People (at least the ones I know) carry their phones more places than their laptops. And it's much more likely that a phone will drop out of a pocket than t
164.
by noahl 14y ago
When I first heard about this I was really excited, but then I realized that if I dropped or lost my phone, my entire environment would be gone. What do you think about that issue? I think I'd still do it, but I'd really like to have some s
165.
by noahl 14y ago
I like this way of thinking about it, but I think it is not quite accurate for discrete Fourier Transforms. In this case, we're not projecting onto the space of all sinusoids, only the space of sinusoids whose period is a multiple of (1/N).
166.
by noahl 14y ago
Hi, I contribute to Guile (in a very small way); I'm happy to answer whatever questions I can about it. You're right, I don't know of any newbie guides. If you already know Scheme, you'll find Guile easy, but if you don't, you'll need to le
167.
by noahl 14y ago
Ars Technica has a source who is supposedly close to the RSC who also says that lobbyist pressure helped to kill the report: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/influential-gop-g... . They also make some good points about different
168.
by noahl 14y ago
You appear to be right, but I don't know anything about it. That's exciting, though - it would be really cool if Makefiles could do more computation. Maybe then we'd get an easier-to-use autoconfiguration system!
169.
by noahl 14y ago
A few of us do, but not many. I work on Guile because I enjoy messing with compilers. I absolutely agree that very few projects use it (exceptions include Lilypond and GNUCash). However, that might change - Guile 2.0 switched from a simple
170.
by noahl 14y ago
You're right; departments might do it for the prestige. And of course it might make their teaching easier to have a textbook customized to exactly how they teach the course (after the initial work of writing it).
171.
by noahl 14y ago
The distinction you make between "professors" and "textbook creators" seems strange to me here. At least two of the best textbooks I've seen were written by a professor who was teaching the class and wanted something different than the othe
172.
by noahl 14y ago
Yes, but what other plausible way do we have for getting rid of bad patents? The problem is that those "defensive" patents are all bogus too. If the bad patents are ever going to stop, there has to be a transition period where some of the o
173.
by noahl 14y ago
Just out of curiosity, couldn't the FSF release GCC under the AGPL or something like that and then modularize it all they want? That was my first thought when reading that message. That way they can promote freedom and still have modular so
174.
by noahl 15y ago
The fee does seem high for individual academics, but I bet the costs of running a journal are low compared to what libraries currently pay for getting them. Moreover, storing information and making it available is a library's mission. There
175.
by noahl 15y ago
This rewrite has already been done. See http://www.texmacs.org/
176.
by noahl 15y ago
What happens if a domain name changes hands legitimately? Maybe the old owner of the domain would have to sign off on the turnover? But what if the turnover was because of domain-squatting, and the old owner doesn't want to hand over their
177.
by noahl 15y ago
Ah, but the queue doesn't exist on Google's servers. It's purely on your computer. So the idea is that instead of time-consuming, blocking operations, you have fast blocking operations that put things in queues, and the queues then handle t
178.
by noahl 15y ago
But there's a third choice, which I hope is the sort of thing he meant: as soon as you send a message, it goes into a little list on the side of your screen of things that are transferring to Google's servers. You can see it there, and you
179.
by noahl 15y ago
I'd recommend Racket with SICP, actually ( http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html ). While Racket is probably the best Scheme implementation around right now, the authors have a somewhat misguided (in my opinion) idea of what
180.
by noahl 15y ago
GTK itself will probably never do that, because it doesn't include any sort of language-processing code (as I understand it). Adding code to GTK that could translate programs between languages would be a huge increase in complexity and scop

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