Sheepshow

I think the difference is between:

"OK, but what do you mean by quickly?"

and

"Oh that's great to hear. What is impressing you most?"

The newer JPEG algorithm JPEG2000 uses Wavelet Transforms which is kind of similar to the Fourier. The Fourier applies a finite window then decomposes into a sum of infinite waveforms. The Wavelet on the other hand applies no windowing function, and directly decomposes the signal into a sum of _finite_ waveforms.

The Fourier has the disadvantage that you can't arrange the components into a time hierarchy; that is, no component occurs "before" any other.

The Wavelet transform _does_ have a natural time hierarchy. This makes it much better for streaming compression like voice calls.

The Fourier perfectly describes signals of infinite duration (think tone or color) while the Wavelet perfectly describes the position of things within a signal (think rhythm or space).

With the Fourier filtering is really easy. You can do hard, hard cutoffs -- literally no contributions within a certain frequency band -- just by removing components of the decomposition. Similarly, you can accurately apply any arbitrary mathematical filtering function.

The disadvantage of the Wavelet is that, well, the only meaningful transformation you can apply to it is compression -- dropping the shorter timescale components. If you want to filter, it's not enough to trim off timescale components because the wavelet itself can contain any frequency components. There's also nothing like a simple mathematical function you can apply to the coefficients to get a smooth filter.

Neat!

Sounds completely unobtainable. Lifestyle at least sounds like a choice that a person could make, and have control over.

Stephenson wrote this about text editors:

> emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish [1]

I think if you replace "emacs" with "TeX" and "editing software" with "document formatting system", the quote holds just as well.

[1] http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

A wise man once said "More money than brains"

I know this isn't the point of the article, but:

> developers focus on useless UX features

This is the number one reason I have personally delivered poor quality software.

Funny, the Linux kernel performs excellently on my $35, 800MHz, 400mA ARM RaspberryPi embedded machine, my x86 desktop, and some of the world's largest supercomputers with who knows what architecture.

For a company with hundreds of millions to spend on R&D, you'd think Microsoft could match a bunch of hobbyists.

This is the most soul-crushing category of bug, the kind which keeps me up all night, drinking.

Build a skyscraper, and lock the keys inside for the ribbon cutting. Sorry pal you lost your funding

Land on Mars, see an alien, but your camera is out of batteries and everybody back on Earth thinks you're a quack.

Successfully perform open-heart surgery on a desert island, but muck up the stitches and cause a scar. Your patient will hold it against you the rest of his life (which you saved).

Any time you hear "profits are X" remember that is the vocabulary used by our aristocrats as shorthand for "standards of living for the proletariat are X."

In other words, we should be grateful for the gifts blessed upon us, rather than greedy children asking for a seventh or eighth serving of ice cream.

Is it really fair to lump Jared Diamond in with Malcom Gladwell? Diamond writes about a career of firsthand research, and has won a Pulitzer prize. His field of study (traditional societies) is by its very nature shrinking daily, and requires serious dedication to observe firsthand. In contrast, every single human on earth has experienced a difficult assignment. So yes, while both Diamond and Gladwell overgeneralize based on a small sample size, Diamond's pool of potential samples is orders of magnitude smaller.

Cool, I look forward to the next version (17) and the one after that too (28). This is the first Fibonacci version number scheme I've seen, maybe in the spirit of how TeX keeps adding digits of pi.

I both play video games and experiment with new technologies at home. I don't think it's strange to use the same card for play and research.

Tried to drive up a set of stairs; was promptly placed inside the geometry.

Did I miss something in the article? Where did you get that information? Here's the complete text of the linked article:

  Oct 2 (Reuters) - U.S. law enforcement authorities raided
  an Internet site that served as a marketplace for illegal
  drugs, including heroin and cocaine, and arrested its
  owner, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Wednesday.

  The FBI arrested Ross William Ulbricht, known as "Dread
  Pirate Roberts," in San Francisco on Tuesday, according to 
  court filings. Federal prosecutors charged Ulbricht with 
  one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, 
  computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering 
  conspiracy, according to a court filing.

More idiomatic Python, and quite clear IMHO

    print sum(x if x % 3 == 0 or x % 5 == 0 else 0 for x in range(1, 1000))

I don't like it any more than you, but to Samsung and its investors, the undeletable Pizza Hut bookmark is a feature. Not only does it generate additional revenue with little additional design time, but it also indicates that Samsung has a healthy and attractive business in which other businesses would like to participate.

It's truly the gold standard, if alchemy worked.

What's the target market, aside from hackers trying to get familiar with the board, or maybe some really basic debugging?

Is exposing pin-level hardware details over an HTTP API really helpful for building larger applications? And why not run that larger application directly on the ARM?

> You can't design a driver for a card without knowing everything about the card

Strongly disagree with that statement, though I sincerely wish it were true. My company manufactures hardware and does not provide a reference driver for any OS. We provide binary blobs and textual "guidelines".

For our hardware, driver authors operate without knowing any details beyond the interface.

To confirm or disprove your idea, you could look at the output of the battery charger rather than the input to it.

In general, AC-DC converters are pretty insensitive to the harmonic content of the AC input because their role is to remove any harmonic content they do find. They do this with huge low-pass filters with corner frequencies well under 1Hz, whether the charger is either linear (unlikely) or switching (much more likely).

When AC becomes distorted, you start seeing harmonics (i.e. contributions at higher frequencies). Low pass filters are progressively more effective at higher frequencies. This is to say, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the efficiency of the charger itself suffered, but the output voltage was unaffected, meaning the laptop was unaffected.

SV tech giants creates artificial demand in SF by providing premium buses, without motivating any sort of supply. Developers can't choose to say, build more housing near the place of employment in SF because there isn't one. The closest would be to build near a bus stop -- which is completely ephemeral real estate.

And that's the point of the article. How can developers possibly respond to this demand?

Reminds me of "here's one weird tip to prevent unlawful search and seizure"

I guess Google really started taking advantage of "today's digital internet"

> Adding "no follow" tags to your Robots.txt file is a smart step but it's simply not enough on today's digital internet.