_stephan

951 karma · joined October 18, 2010

_stephan··on When, not if: how do San Franciscans live with the threat of the next quake?

If you don't buy earthquake insurance, can you count on state or federal disaster relief programs to pay for reconstruction?

[Edit] Or to rephrase the question, do disaster relief programs create a moral hazard that should be countered by making earthquake insurance in high-risk areas mandatory (with possible subsidies by the state)?

_stephan··on Consumer Reports Calls Tesla Model S The Best Car Of 2014

Can't you now replace the tires with cheaper ones?

_stephan··on Announcing the new Roslyn-powered .NET Framework Reference Source

Looks like Microsoft has some deep structural problems with its developer support.

Let's hope the right persons at Microsoft see this thread.

_stephan··on Announcing the new Roslyn-powered .NET Framework Reference Source

Your support experience sounds really bad.

I'd file the bug here: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio (which despite the name is also the right place to report library issues)

_stephan··on US Media Blacks Out Snowden Interview

In addition, the video has been taken down almost immediately every time it’s posted on YouTube.

AFAIK, the German company that produced the interview didn't sell the international rights to the German broadcaster, which is also why the original video is geolocked to Germany. So I'd guess it's this company that's behind the YouTube takedowns.

_stephan··on Light Table is now open source

I expected a permissive license or an open-core strategy to monetize proprietary components and not be friendly with the free software community, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

So you don't consider a permissive license to be friendly with the free software community, or is that a typo?

_stephan··on The New York Times Redesign is Live

How do you like the typography? I find e.g. the italic font for the headlines in the left column or the small all caps serif format of the bylines to be somewhat detrimental to readability.

_stephan··on Canada's top court has overturned all restrictions on prostitution

Are you trolling?

_stephan··on Canada's top court has overturned all restrictions on prostitution

AFAIK, most sex workers in Germany are self-employed, so they neither get unemployment benefits nor a national pension (since they also don't contribute to these insurance systems).

Do you have any source for your statement on many people loosing unemployment benefits for refusing to work in brothels ? That sounds quite fishy.

_stephan··on Mercurial developer responds to "Switch to git?"

Have you tried it in the last few days? After SourceTree got relatively slow for me with the past few updates, the last update actually completely fixed that!

_stephan··on Mercurial developer responds to "Switch to git?"

You should try SourceTree, it's a great Windows and Mac Git GUI client! It's free (as in beer) and also supports Mercurial.

_stephan··on An Empirical Evaluation of TCP Performance in Online Games

There's also Google's QUIC:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RNHkx_VvKWyWg6Lr8SZ-saqs...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC

_stephan··on The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone

Why would the baseband processor need access to anything but the RF and maybe the GPS hardware?

_stephan··on The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone

"Lastly, the baseband processor is usually the master processor, whereas the application processor (which runs the mobile operating system) is the slave."

Can maybe somebody explain what this means exactly? Could the baseband processor/OS be used as an attack vector to exploit the main mobile OS? Could the OS protect itself from this?

_stephan··on Google F1 vs. FoundationDB's SQL Layer

An ordered key-value store with consistent secondary indices and simple transactions covers the needs of lots of applications (as e.g. the Google App Engine data store proves). If FoundationDB can indeed deliver consistency without compromising performance and scalability, they will probably have a bright future.

_stephan··on Jenkin developers accidentally do "git push --force" to over 150 repos on github

You're right, I should have been more precise: They seem to be switching to Mercurial because they think it's easier to customize Mercurial in order to address scaling issues they're having. (And I'd guess that some of those customization are going to end up in a future Mercurial release.)

Btw, I'm pretty impressed by Facebook's open source efforts.

_stephan··on Jenkin developers accidentally do "git push --force" to over 150 repos on github

Facebook seems to be switching from Git to HG for performance/scaling reasons:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1nl9at/i_am_a_member_o...

_stephan··on NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

This is being disputed by the government, AFAIK.

_stephan··on JetBrains releases open-source Python IDE

I suppose Meai is referring to AppCode, which is a different product.

_stephan··on JetBrains releases open-source Python IDE

JetBrains has actually open sourced the complete IntelliJ Community Edition IDE/platform:

see http://www.jetbrains.org/display/IJOS/Home and https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

Incredible!

_stephan··on Reason #73 why C++ is a terrible intro language

The non-value preserving implicit conversions -- both the signed-unsigned conversions and the narrowing conversions -- are one of the biggest language warts in C++ (which it inherited from C). However, you can basically avoid these issues completely by enabling the compiler warning for these conversions and treating the warnings as error.

_stephan··on Amazon Drops Price Of EC2 Dedicated Instances By Up To 80%

incero and securedservers don't seem to offer hourly billed dedicated servers. Monthly billed dedicated servers are a different market.

_stephan··on Amazon Drops Price Of EC2 Dedicated Instances By Up To 80%

Hourly billed "bare-metal" cloud servers from Softlayer seem to be cheaper still: http://www.softlayer.com/cloudlayer/computing

_stephan··on Merging lock elision into glibc

Has anyone seen performance measurements for hardware lock elision? What's the performance gain/loss in the uncontended case? How costly is an aborted transaction?

_stephan··on Secret Documents: NSA monitored 500 million connections in Germany

What "internet war" are you talking about? And although the NSA is an agency of the US DoD, I don't think they would consider all targets of their eavesdropping measures as "military" targets.

_stephan··on Secret Documents: NSA monitored 500 million connections in Germany

Eavesdropping or even "hacking" attacks don't have to be military in nature.

_stephan··on Secret Documents: NSA monitored 500 million connections in Germany

"Angriffsziel" in general is not synonymous with "military target". I'd translate it simply as "target".

_stephan··on German Parliament says: Stop Granting Software Patents

See the correction in the text:

[Correction 2013-04-24: Parliament did not yet adopt the motion, but rather decided to pass it to the parliament committees for further consideration.]

_stephan··on ECHELON was used for industrial espionage (European Commission report)

It seems the report was written by a German. When the report was written (apparently around 2000-2001) "computer freak" was commonly used in Germany to describe what today would be called "nerd" or "geek". There's even a Wikipedia page: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computerfreak It's not really meant in a derogatory way, it's just one of many annoying pseudo-anglicisms.

_stephan··on Larry Page addresses PRISM

They don't need to access to all network traffic, just the interesting bits, like e.g. the internal traffic for the storage/backup systems used for GMail or Google Accounts .

← PreviousPage 3 of 6Next →