aeberbach

Linus has earned the right to that tone, care about Linux or not. Now when some unknown emulates it, that's the time to take note (and ignore that person ever after).

I don't call myself an audiophile but I have owned a lot of different headphones up to the $1500 mark.

There's no need (and no way) for double-blind studies here. We're not talking magic cables. Objectively you can plot frequency results with actual science and measure a difference. Subjectively you can experience it, and of course there is the look, smell, weight, clamping pressure, earpiece comfort and texture of the things as they sit on your head (hence no blind testing possible).

I have disdain for Bose because of their breathless hype, misleading sales practises, high cost and (subjectively speaking) mediocre performance. Lots of people disagree with me and like Bose a lot. And that's just fine.

You definitely had a bug. I shipped a single-threaded A* for 3GS and up with maps created from maps of approximately 500x500 locations.

It started out completely broken, storing waypoints in Core Data and was taking upwards of four minutes to calculate a path. Switching to prefetching Core Data paths brought it down to about 90 seconds, but that's as far as it could go with so many Core Data faults firing.

What made it really fly was the change the underlying data to direct bitmap access on maps prepared from the source maps (shopping centre levels actually) and applying simple filters to generate monochrome maps where one color was walkable and another not. Then source and destination locations were obtained through the original Core Data coordinates and a quick search algorithm found the closest walkable point to both. The A* calculation took perhaps a second or two.

Not content with that we went further and drew more complicated maps with what amounted to train tracks, a network of walkable paths one pixel wide connecting every store to every store to narrow down the solution space. The result was instant A* pathfinding and it was a very neat feature in the app.

You can definitely do A* in Objective C - just get to know Instruments inside out and keep tuning. On a 5S I expect you could get away with a lot of inefficiency.

L - a swirly potion

If you spelled it "grey", you didn't get your wish!

Did you look at Nethack? Certain monsters have set loot. Dwarves have a high chance of carrying a pickaxe, noble variants have a high chance of having dwarven mithril, shield, iron shoes. Same with Elves. Soldiers carry K- and C-rations. Paper golems leave piles of blank scrolls!

Monsters will pick up items. If you are in the dwarves mines and there's a mining dwarf about, gnomes and other creatures will pick up the piles of rocks they leave behind.

Additionally monsters with the right flag set will often use items. This can reveal their blessed/uncursed/cursed status ("The dagger welds itself to the goblin's hand!") or identify the item - which is sometimes a real pain, when a consumable you needed is used. ("The gnome zaps a wand of lightning! You die...")

As in "the mousetrap". As in "the disingenuous reply". A class rather than an instance, but you knew that.

Oh, you weren't talking about Nathan Mhyrvold and the oven? OK then.

FYI, patent trolls usually haven't invented the thing they hold a patent for.

No it isn't, but I would expect him to have patented anything he could get away with and have his shell companies lying in wait for anyone who builds an infringing oven.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml - and plenty more if you look further.

The only renaming to avoid detection I knew of was when fast modems were becoming a commoditized but FTP had started taking over as a transfer mechanism. Did you ever trawl through anonymous ftp servers looking for directories named ". ", ". .", "...", " ." etc.?

And if you didn't have 16550AFN serial and a USR Courier HST your 0-day was likely to turn into a 3-day...

I remember taking advantage of call waiting tones to dump friends offline and steal their places on local multi-user BBS. Good days!

Did you read the article? Z-machine wasn't the cause of the graphical games failure. By the time Infocom ventured into graphics the games division was hamstrung by a focus on the business division (and their database product Cornerstone). They just didn't have the resources to compete. The graphical game Fooblitzky had its own issues, including that graphics quality was tailored to the lowest common denominator allowing the game to ship on multiple platforms as all of the text adventures had. This kind of thinking may have come from the write-once-ship-everywhere approach of Z-machine but it was a failure of strategy rather than technology.

The virtual machine approach did have grave consequences for Cornerstone - performance just wasn't as good as the competition. While it allowed a full-featured database product to ship on just one floppy it made performance so sluggish that one test abandoned testing their larger datasets after horrible performance with the smaller data.

Why stop at having an office merely "open"? Hot desking is the new thing - it's nothing to do with cost saving, it's all about "flexibility". Except that your organisation might also have a policy against working from home. There's no implicit message that you are simply a replaceable functional unit, not at all. You might even find there's no desk left when you arrive at work - who doesn't love the suspense of arriving for an oversold airplane? Now you can have that at work every single day!

Truly modern offices have hot desks AND are wired for teleconferencing - right in the open areas! That's right, if "open" is good for communication then a 60" screen on the wall with video cameras pointing at you is even better! You can share in the dull roar of collaboration with people on other continents ALL DAY! In the average open space you can fit at least two, maybe three such screens. When you have them installed, get the tradesmen to come during office hours. It costs way more if they come after hours and your employees should get the chance to see drills, saws and nailguns operated by professionals, they may learn something.

We all know there's nothing that stimulates productivity like the sound of productivity, right? So when you plan your next office, leave the kitchen open too - the scrape of chairs on the tiles, the sound of the dishwasher being unloaded, the happy PING of the microwave - not to mention the aromas of hot food - all these things will make employees feel right at home. Using only the most modern materials in the office - lots of glass and steel - will ensure the entire workforce shares the joy. You don't want to be damping the precious sound waves with carpet or plasterboard.

I wish I was joking.

What's your job? Do you have a greater need to concentrate or to socialize? Not criticising, just asking. I need to be able to go talk to people only sometimes but I need to go to a quiet place and think without interruption more often.

The best office I ever worked in was a series of long corridors with many closed offices and two developers to each. It had large meeting rooms at regular intervals, a lunchroom with table football and that was about it.

"Gleevec became a breakthrough, helping almost every patient with a particular rare blood cancer, chronic myelogenous leukemia. Patients stay on it for years, and it is so valuable that Novartis has quadrupled its annual price from $24,000 per year in 2001 to more than $90,000 today. Even the stingiest insurers pay, though some patients get it free."

I am also in a country where you don't have to choose between pay or die, and I'm thankful for that. Seeing this kind of thing in print certainly makes you look twice and appreciate what you have.

But was the iOS version ever fixed? I got it, played up to the point where the giant suit of armor is sending electricity down the tiled floor at Dirk who has to jump several times to avoid it ("Electric Knight Battle" according to some walkthroughs). There was just no way to get through that scene on iPad. Many people reported the same issue.

They are no longer legal currency but are issued on the The Bank of San Serriffe (address:Thirty Point, Caissa Inferiore, San Serriffe, Pincus).

The reason for the change: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html

In the Q&A Knuth mentions TAOCP conversion to ebook several times - I did a quick search and found only millions of pirate sites. Does anyone know the legitimate source where the ebook can be bought? Informit seemed likely but there are only two digital volumes available there.

(edit: there is a note saying "as they become available". I guess TAOCP is only partially portable so far, more to come.)

(brag: I got a decimal dollar by check from Professor Knuth for finding a typo in 2010. Nothing clever, just a cheap typo, but I was happy.)

I could see it working with the best recruiters, like the few I mentioned. They call every six months or so, ask how things are going and chat about technology, that's fine with me. Sometimes they have something really good to discuss, and if I'm happy where I am then I am always willing to recommend someone I know. Those recruiters are acting like an agent already. They rarely collect a fee but when they do I feel they deserve it, unlike the chancers who harvest phone numbers from web sites and work the percentages.

There doesn't have to be an agent relationship. I guess what I am really saying is that the only recruiters worth talking to are the ones that do the work to find the best fit for both parties. The rest add nothing.

I am not 100% sure why recruiters are still tolerated in technology positions. It's time for the model to change - maybe engineers should have agents? If an engineer chooses to use an agent they could build a personal relationship with that person, who knows their skills and what they like to do, and avoid wasting time with positions they don't want to know about and are not suited for. Or not - handle job search in the normal way without recruiters.

We seem to always hear about the terrible shortage of engineers and related fields, so how is it that recruiters add any value?

I have never taken a position where a recruiter contacted me first. I've never even done an interview in that situation because they always see to be shotgunning jobs at everyone they possibly can - email costs nothing so why wouldn't they? I have always found a job rather than been found by the recruiter.

Monster.com and LinkedIn seem to be wretched hives of scum and villainy. The best advice I can give is to never use any "service" that makes it possible for everyone, without qualification or your explicit permission, to contact you. Build your personal networks. Apply for the jobs you want. You won't be losing anything. I never had a Monster.com presence but I did have LinkedIn - since removing it I have lost nothing but unsolicited contacts from recruiters who want me to look at jobs I don't want, and then for me to give up the contact details of anyone else I might know...

There are a few recruiters I like and trust, but the ones spamming like this need to be spoken to very sternly indeed.

Yes, it is that much more difficult for people whose primary goal is doing stuff other than tweaking their computer. And as others have mentioned, nothing gets you more battery life than OS X on Apple hardware.

Not sure how any of the various Linux package managers are more "standard" than brew on OS X...

I'm surprised, thought Linux of some kind would have been most popular.

Yeah, bought my first car from a town about an hour from my home, a manual car. On the drive home I learned to drive a manual. That weekend I learned to change a clutch :-)

This hand-wave over designer's inability to build enough slack to deal with Adobe's failure into every project is a combination of unsubtle trolling and egregious sociopathy.

If you're one of those, I highly recommend Pixelmator - download at pixelmator.com. My choice for a really simple, easy image editor is Acorn from Flying Meat Software - http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/.

It's like Apple's Numbers compared to Microsoft's Excel - there are things that the most sophisticated couple of percent of users will miss, but for most people it's a great alternative.

Adobe can't die quick enough to make me happy.

And this is why proprietary lock-in is wrong.

Adobe seem to do all they can to screw up the computer their software is installed on. On a Mac you are supposed to drag an app into the Applications folder; to delete it, drag it to trash. Adobe software doesn't work like this. To install a trial of their software you have to install multiple apps, that can't be easily removed, and put up with their stupid Adobe logo in the title bar even when you're not using their software. You can't even use a trial without signing up for a "Creative Cloud" account.

Adobe's "Creative Cloud" is a great example of how to alienate and annoy your customers.

(Don't get me started on Flash)

You could search the web as a whole and find many examples of fast follower used as I used it. You don't have to look very hard at all to find it applied to Google. Your definition is excessively narrow.

Even Don Dodge calls Google a fast follower: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/10/first...

Guess where he works?

That's simple equivocation - you think you can redefine "fast follower" so narrowly? It would certainly be convenient to ignore the similarities of Android and Google+ to their predecessors, but it wouldn't be particularly honest.

Absolutely - Grado is fine if you really like supra-aural open headphones, but you can pretty much rule them out if you sit anywhere near another person who doesn't care to hear your music. Another problem with Grado is they "protect" international distributors who are free to add any ridiculous markup they like to arrive at a local price. There can be no competition because headphone vendors like Headroom and Amazon just aren't allowed to ship Grado products internationally under threat of no supply.

I have the M4U1 model after owning Sennheiser Momentum for six months - they are obviously better in side-by-side tests and they have larger ear cups that I can wear all day with comfort in a noisy office. Definitely my closed-headphone favourite. Too bad they aren't pretty stitched leather like the Sennehisers!

I don't believe ANC is worth the $100 - as you say, same headphones minus ANC.

Canalphones beat active noise cancellation (ANC) every time. ANC doesn't attenuate all frequencies as evenly as passive protection does and it sounds very strange to me. To rub salt into the wound, passives don't need batteries and they pack into a tiny pouch that takes almost no space in carry-on bags.