qntm

24 ms·

181.
by qntm 16y ago
The real article is linked at the bottom: http://dailyartifacts.com/walmarts-185-billon-dollar-mistake Interesting one-two quote: "What was the result of Project Impact? - $1.85 billion in potential revenue lost; [...] Customer satisfacti
182.
by qntm 16y ago
I wish this person had been more specific with respect to the specific problems with calendaring. The ones raised in this article look reasonably straightforward to me. "Thousands of machines, each one run by a human, most of whom are proba
183.
by qntm 16y ago
Bugs in time-based code are great. The most amusing example I've seen was an intermittently-failing automated test case which, I discovered after careful scrutiny of the results database, failed only on Sundays. There's also the classic tim
184.
by qntm 16y ago
Also, the "-" in "C-x" means "Hold down Ctrl and press x". It doesn't mean to press Ctrl and then press x, or to press the "-" key. You are probably used to that being expressed with a "+", as in "Ctrl+x".
185.
by qntm 16y ago
Hey, sometimes I compile with the expectation of error, just to make sure that the right error comes out.
186.
by qntm 16y ago
TAI, then? TAI is UTC but without any leap seconds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
187.
by qntm 16y ago
The interesting thing there is that these problems of wall-clock time have largely been solved at every level other than seconds. Years vary in length - 365 or 366 days. It's 29th February. Add one year. Is it 28th February or 1st March? Wh
188.
by qntm 16y ago
Personally, I favour manually adjusting the Earth's orbital and rotational characteristics to match atomic time.
189.
by qntm 16y ago
Geez, you're right. I went all the way through the Wikipedia article on cryptographic hash functions looking for something similar to what I'd just described, but there was no link to THIS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_chain The rese
190.
by qntm 16y ago
That only protects you at account creation time. How about this: Password hash function is h. Client creates password p, hashes it 1000 times. Account creation: Client sends h^1000(p) to server in the clear. Server stores h^1000(p) in plain
191.
by qntm 16y ago
I think this actually does protect you from exposing your password to an attacker, but only at account creation time. If the attacker waits around for you to log in conventionally at some later time, then it's over.
192.
by qntm 16y ago
Privacy. Friend of mine travels all over the world. He wants to keep track of where he's been, which photographs he took in which locations, what he did there. He doesn't want to have to share all of that with everybody. It's just for him
193.
by qntm 16y ago
It's the same in every discipline. You have to know the rules before you can break them.
194.
by qntm 16y ago
Which is why you should also care about post-quantum cryptography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
195.
by qntm 16y ago
I don't understand people who say this about the ribbon UI. "Messy and complex"? Do you remember what Office XP looked like on startup? Literally forty different, tiny anonymous icons?
196.
by qntm 16y ago
Also, I'm not impressed by the quality of the vector graphics.
197.
by qntm 16y ago
From context, I assumed we were talking about users following deep links. This can be prevented technologically by the target website, and the burden of circumvention is obviously on the user. Obviously there is no technological way to pr
198.
by qntm 16y ago
Because circumventing that filter is even easier than installing the filter in the first place?
199.
by qntm 16y ago
I like how the bees are said to figure out the answer faster than a supercomputer, when the problem involves "several" flowers. Unless "several" is 15+ flowers, a supercomputer is going to have an optimal solution within milliseconds, befor
200.
by qntm 16y ago
I feel necessary to point out that the sites you regularly visit seem to fall in two broad categories. Wikipedia, Slashdot and so on are enormous sites with vast user bases and advanced JS, where any JavaScript functionality has to be backe
201.
by qntm 16y ago
Talk about a hostile working environment, though.
202.
by qntm 16y ago
The EU? The UN? Wales is a constituent country of the United Kingdom and has some devolved power. However, it is the United Kingdom which is internationally recognised.
203.
by qntm 16y ago
That's probably because it's IBM's 100th anniversary this year so it's running through the old logos as a retrospective.
204.
by qntm 16y ago
Yes, I live for the day when people start being greedy on a super-long-term, multi-generational basis, and finally investment banks will work for the general good of humanity.
205.
by qntm 16y ago
I could argue that if you are, for any reason, creating a formal computer language which requires more than just a CFG to parse, something has gone wrong somewhere. CFGs are narrow in comparison with general grammars but that doesn't stop t
206.
by qntm 16y ago
Sometimes it feels good to work for IBM.
207.
by qntm 16y ago
Obviously this is not what was done here, but how difficult is it to take a satellite photo from the side, instead of from directly above?
208.
by qntm 16y ago
> Nobody expects a "back" or "undo" button in everyday activities like driving a car or cooking or making social conversation. How did this expectation become so irreversibly fundamental in computers? People make mistakes. All people, i
209.
by qntm 16y ago
I'm reasonably sure that Google doesn't index punctuation marks.
210.
by qntm 16y ago
It's a fairly cool recursive problem. Let N be the number of floors. OneBulb(N) = N. With one bulb and 100 floors, you have no choice but to drop the bulb 100 times, once for each floor. With two bulbs, a single drop at floor K has two outc

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