wladimir

26 ms·

211.
by wladimir 14y ago
Sure. Of course. But my point is, how is that different for touch screen-based input or a real keyboard? The grandparent poster seems to think that in the post-pc era, security problems disappear in puffs of colored icons and magical gestur
212.
by wladimir 14y ago
So please explain to me: what the hell does the input method (keyboard, mouse, touchscreen) have to do with the low-level security properties of a system? If anything, the switch to tablets and thus more ubiquitous computing makes security
213.
by wladimir 14y ago
I wonder if Glacier support in Duplicity will be possible without large changes. AFAIK, duplicity also reads some state from the remote end to determine what to backup (Although it also keeps a local cache of this?). To use glacier, the pro
214.
by wladimir 14y ago
So Kubuntu = KDE and Ubuntu = Gnome and never the two shall switch, ever That's not true. It's pretty easy to switch them around or install both (or neither, in the case of Ubuntu Server): 'apt-get install ubuntu-desktop' versus 'apt-get
215.
by wladimir 14y ago
strings is a very neat utility. I only recently discovered it can even extract 16-bit little endian (Windows unicode) strings by passing `-el`.
216.
by wladimir 14y ago
For a serious long term project I'd certainly use 3.x, to be future proof. It'll probably take some sorting out compatible packages, but it prevents a technical debt. Also the added performance, features and cleanups are worth it. For a qui
217.
by wladimir 14y ago
Very intersting find. Though every time I see 'simple 3D grid' in combination with the brain, I think 'scanner or reconstruction artifact'. For my PhD research I've worked with DTI (Diffusion Tensor Imaging) data which was very hard to sens
218.
by wladimir 14y ago
Exceptions are indeed not the silver bullet to error handling. Handling errors upstream can be useful as catch-all, but when the entire stack has been unwound, it can be hard to recover the error usefully. Also it is hard to make a sensible
219.
by wladimir 14y ago
Still, it is useful if at least one country legislates it. It means that organizations that rely on net neutrality, or strive to achieve net neutrality through technological means, could move to that country and do their work unhindered. No
220.
by wladimir 14y ago
Right, it's a matter of perception and quickly changing "fashion". Many people regard devices of a year old already as very old. So they choose in favor of replacing it, even if it is a minimal problem that is easy (and cheap) to fix. I do
221.
by wladimir 14y ago
Python 3 removes old-style classes and thus removes the need to explicitly inherit from object. (Also it appears it's just an example to illustrate the use of context managers, not of the perfect Python program. You'd never want to use the
222.
by wladimir 14y ago
Quassel solves (1) in a user friendly way. It does not address your other points, though (there's a Linux, Windows, Mac desktop version and an Android app, but not a web interface AFAIK).
223.
by wladimir 14y ago
Agreed. It would already make a lot of difference if the compiler could make decisions between (for example) structure of arrays or array of structures representations. The programmer could always organize the data in a human-sensible way,
224.
by wladimir 14y ago
Isn't that what we're all waiting for, the mythical "smart enough" compiler. Imagine constructing programs from abstract and composable high-level concepts, and the compiler does all the dirty hacks behind the screen. Producing fully parall
225.
by wladimir 14y ago
From an evolutionary standpoint, they might as well never have lived There is the distinct possibility that they affected the chance for others to reproduce or survive. So you are right about their individual evolution, but they were like
226.
by wladimir 14y ago
Just imagine the media circus that would happen if they did that. And occupy would just move to another TLD. It is not as if the movement is primarily known by their domain name...
227.
by wladimir 14y ago
But such thinking can block innovation. It's a form of path lock-in. Both UNIX and Windows "gurus" are guilty of this, of seeing their way as the "one true way". Just because it's always been that way. New ideas are not always better, but s
228.
by wladimir 14y ago
Especially if you use something like a tab delimiter, then you typically don't need to specify the delimiter. What if the fields contain tabs? For every human-readable format that can contain arbitrary user input (nearly all of them) you
229.
by wladimir 14y ago
Unix is not all-terrible though. It also has quite a few very sane ideas such as combining simple commands into pipelines and "everything is a file descriptor". I do agree that zero-terminated strings are the worst idea ever. It's almost im
230.
by wladimir 14y ago
The latency can be significant for TOR, as your connection is bounced through various hosts all over the world. This prevents a single country from putting all the pieces together. This is what you notice while browsing. The raw bandwidth o
231.
by wladimir 14y ago
It's an awful API for the programmer Same could be said for Direct3D. It has its own share of pitfalls. Apart from that MS completely changes the API between versions, making porting difficult, and making it hard to gracefully fall back o
232.
by wladimir 14y ago
For people that use them a lot, smart text-based UIs can be much faster than GUIs (yes, even in 2012). Having the drag around the mouse and click eventually becomes cumbersome as well. But in the end it comes down to preference, I guess.
233.
by wladimir 14y ago
The representation in unicode is also interesting. I never knew there was a range of 11140 characters for encoding the different Korean (Hangul) characters. See: http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/korean_hangul_unicode.html It also has a cute
234.
by wladimir 15y ago
You're confused with Java. In PHP it is simple, just counter-intuitive and set up to mislead you. It would look like a rock but turn into a viscous liquid as soon as you try to hit the nail and the nails get stuck in it.
235.
by wladimir 15y ago
I vaguely remember that parts of the GSM protocol were also described using ASN.1 (BER). I'm not sure how relevant this is for newer cellular network protocols, though. But if so, that makes it unlikely it will go away soon.
236.
by wladimir 15y ago
I don't think I'd necessarily want to trap on all (signed) integer overflows. As you say, it might break working code. There's just too much C/C++ code around to change that retroactively. And for modular arithmetic and such it is desirable
237.
by wladimir 15y ago
Even for fixnums, integer overflows and underflows of any kind should ideally result in an exception by default. I think it's a pity that C(++) doesn't have support for this. A lot of bugs and weaknesses could have been prevented (for examp
238.
by wladimir 15y ago
Well, the advantage that screen scraping has over paper OCR is that the font is completely deterministic and there's (usually) no degrading effects. Even if '5' and '6' are pretty similar, there must be some pixel that can be used to distin
239.
by wladimir 15y ago
The drawback of making it a single dialog box in the user experience is that the "current name" changes when you use "Save as...". So if you do a "Save" next time, you save it as the exported name and format instead of the original one. If,
240.
by wladimir 15y ago
Once you have all this data, simulate mouse clicks on the next and previous buttons to paginate and get more data. It’s all a tricky process, very hacky, but you’re getting really valuable data. If you go all the way to simulate mouse cli

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