chancho

Stop it. You're going to summon Jon Harrop. HN is so pleasant without him.

If you use Wine with Silverlight 3 there are many Linux boards that would welcome your howto.

right-ctrl-f is easy enough, but it doesn't change the monitor resolution as windows sees it. Unless you were already running vbox at native resolution (meaning much of the virtual screen was cut off) then you also have to increase the resolution in windows. It's like a 3 step processes, which is fine for me buy not for my wife. She'd just always stay in virtual box, so I do her one better and just boot Windows, which I don't like but she couldn't care less.

They both wear pajamas to work.

There is also commercial application compatibility. Windows is king, but OS X is still light years ahead of linux. Netflix and iTunes are two apps that come to mind. I want to use them, but not bad enough to boot Windows. Hacking OS X to work on my PC is probably easier than teaching my family how to make VirtualBox run at full screen.

He was being dramatic when he said "every classroom in America." I never saw any serious deployment of asymmetric desks before college. Rather just a handful of them mixed in with a Frankenstein-like assortment of worn-out furniture spanning the 20th century. They were to be avoided.

Your logic is sound, but reasonable people can disagree. No operating system is designed to crash, certainly not advertised as doing so, yet all operating systems crash and these crashes sometimes result in serious monetary loss. But no one has ever won a verdict against an OS manufacturer for such losses (except for maybe like some defense contractor missile guidance OS or something. I'm clearly talking about Windows and Mac OS here.)

Yeah rsync.net by far looks like the best functionality, but they are almost 10x more expensive than Amazon or Rackspace, $1.20/Gb/Mo vs. $0.15/Gb/Mo. For 20-30 gigs of photos and movies, that starts to add up.

To be fair, no language lets you just "write code" and have it run anywhere near optimally. The programmer always has to be aware of what the compiler is going to do and work with it.

I've written a fair amount of Haskell, and done a lot of this type of optimization, looking at the core (intermediate representation) and fiddling with pragmas, unboxing, strictness, etc. I've put Haskell on the back burner and gone back to C++ because I spent SO MUCH time doing this. Maybe I'm not being fair, and in another 5 years I'd be able to predict what GHC is going to do as well as I can predict what a C++ compiler will do. But for now, I can't justify the expenditure in time it takes to get a large piece of Haskell code (more than a microbenchmark) to perform at the C/C++ level. If you write idiomatic Haskell you're tracking down stack overflows (the Haskell kind, not the C kind) and misfired optimizations, and if you're writing C-in-Haskell you're better off just writing C. In the end, I think Haskell just isn't (yet) the best language for what I was doing (image processing, graphics, 3d modeling, etc.)

(The short reply to your comment is: yes, you the application writer have to be very aware of what GHC is doing if you want C-level performance.)

Hah I actually signed up for jungle disk after this happened.

I like it so far but I don't think it solves the alias/hardlink problem, so you'd just get one or two good snapshots before it got to be really expensive. The great feature of time machine (or rsync --link-dest) is that your snapshots share storage of unchanged files, and I don't know how to make S3 do that.

I just checked Windows and OS X licenses and there is specific language disclaiming liability for damages. Apple's license in particular disclaims liability for loss of data, in explicit terms. So your state or country would need laws specifically dealing with this kind of thing. Anyone know of any such laws?

I'm becoming less and less comfortable with hard drives as long-term backup media. The other day I plugged in my external to back up some family photos, but the drive wasn't coming up and while I was investigating (this was Linux so it could have been any number of reasons) this faint noise was bugging the crap out of me. "What is that, a metronome?" It took a few minutes before the "oh shit" set in.

Time machine is nice because its nearly impossible to remember to do backups regularly (unless it's your job) and the backups are highly available, but really its more like an extended trash bin, not an archive. Storing your backups on-site is one thing, but keeping them plugged in and mounted is just asking for it.

Whatever happened to tapes? They're like comically expensive now. Another option is to copy your Time Machine out to S3 once a month. (Would probably take that long) but I don't know how you'd preserve the aliases / hard links.

(disclaimer: I'm not a .NET programmer so maybe I'm talking out of my ass. Feel free to correct.)

One major difference between .NET thread pools and GCD is that the former are used in a high-level, garbage collected language, while the latter are built on top of C. Call me old fashioned, but if I'm CPU bound then I'm going to explore moving the bottlenecks to C first, and THEN look into parallelism if they still aren't fast enough. GCD follows that order, .NET has it backwards. (Although I hear the JIT is pretty good, and VS supports OpenMP which is nearly as good as GCD.)

There's an argument to do things the other way: stay in the high-level regime, make things parallel and buy more hardware, but this strategy is more prevalent (and useful) on the server, rather than the desktop, and in that case going to threads is just postponing the inevitable, you need to go fully distributed.

There will always be value in good, fast serial code, and nothing is going to beat C at that in the foreseeable future.

Your argument refutes itself handedly because 32bit processes are limited to 4GB of address space. You've maxed out 1Gb now, how long before you max out 4Gb? Memory concerns are clearly the reason to go 64bit, the stuff about registers is icing on the cake.

Look at the big picture, whether it be pointers or integers into an array: the size of the index grows with the log of the number of things being indexed. You can't avoid this growth, but it matters less and less as you grow.

This tired, false Microsoft / Linux dichotomy completely misses the point. Microsoft's customers are computer users. Linux doesn't really have "customers" in any normal sense of the word, but if it did, they would be developers, and the product that Linux provides is a platform that can be molded. Whether or not the unruly horde of Linux developers will ever produce something as polished as Microsoft remains to be seen, but your argument against Linux is a bit like saying Wikipedia will never overtake Britannica because people want to _read_ an encyclopedia, they don't want to _write_ one (duh!)

I think the important part is that it's half-toned (little dots of varying radii according to color and intensity) rather than just making each pixel into one big square. So really its a misnomer. Should be halftonabator or ditherbator, if only those rhymed with masturbate. (TEE HEE!)

No, it's not needed here. Metafilter predates the digg/reddit style of user moderation. Anyone there can post directly to the front page, and only mods can remove posts. And I think there's only like 3 mods.

Orbit your own satellite? Isn't that a bit like eating your own mouth?

I think you're absolutely right about fortran's legacy advantage (that, and it's really not a terrible language for numerical work) but the distinction between 'supercomputer' and cluster of commodity PC's is all but history. Virtually all current supercomputers are clusters made up of the exact same chips you can get in desktop machines. The vector processing optimizations you mention are merely SSE or AltiVec or a GPU, technologies we all have access to. The only thing that makes a supercomputer super is the number of processors and the interconnect.

Does anyone know if these kind of libraries (pygame, pyglet, gosu, etc) are good for networked multiplayer games? I can't find a whole lot on the subject, nor any examples, but I haven't looked too hard.

English: Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

> 200lbs to be vacuum sealed & delivered at your doorstep!

You're making me hungry.

Oh I'm all about eating meat, just not exclusively. Both of those links advocate grazing livestock, which I 100% support and think it also tastes better. Better than the grain-fed meat that is so cheap and plentiful in the US (I think that's where thras is.) But meat raised that way is more expensive, which makes it difficult to eat only meat and greens (the latter of which are likely to be trucked halfway across the country.) This is how he's "hacking" the food economy: taking advantage of agriculture subsidies that distort the price of meat.

Exclusively eating local produce, grass-fed beef, free-range chickens and their eggs is not only seriously expensive, but in many parts of the US (like where I am) nearly impossible.

Whole grains and legumes, however, are pretty healthful and easy to grow, AFAIK.

Putting \c and \C in the search pattern can also be used to turn case sensitivity off or on, respectively, for just that pattern.

Ditto for "hacking." I mean, good on you thras for losing the weight but it seems to me that what you're really hacking here is the global food economy. An all meat-and-horticulture diet is completely economically infeasible for a great number of people, to say nothing of environmental impact or sustainability.

Is not most energy consumed in places that are not dry and sunny? On account of the correlation between clouds, rain, irrigation and people.

This was T. Boone's mistake: overestimating the portability of electricity.

See DarkShikari's comment for details on what goes wrong when a compiler tries to be all things to all architectures.

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I should clarify. I agree with what you said below, these days GCC is an excellent compiler for x86. It's just that it's near to impossible to be so excellent for all archs.

Commercially, C++ is already on life support: it's no longer a general applications language but rather a niche language. Microsoft supports it in Visual Studio for the game industry and Intel supports it for the same as well as the HPC market. For all the rhetoric over C++ (it will either save or destroy C++ depending on who you talk to) its unlikely to make a big difference either way.

I think D is pretty cool, but it has a lot farther to go with regards to standardization as well as implementation. There is a current reddit thread going over its shortcomings:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/93jh5/ask_progg...

Whether it wants to be or not, D is now in the same niche as C++, but without either the maturity or commercial support that a niche language needs to thrive. And that probably won't change now that the larger software world has moved on.

It's not supposed to be night vision. All I want out of a digital camera is the ability to take hi-res indoor photographs without flash. Consumer-level cameras have modestly-sized CCDs that can't gather enough light fast enough indoors, so the picture is either noisy (not enough light gathered) or blurry (exposure is too long). This aims to remedy the former by using the UV/IR photo to smooth out the noise.

Some VMs (LLVM and Parrot, that I know of) give you an arbitrary number of virtual registers, which are then mapped to physical registers by the compiler, so allocation is a not an issue.

When complaining about "the effect" on a news aggregation site it's customary to refer to it by the name of said site. So here it is called "The HN effect." Nevermind the absurdity of this name, on account of HN's (thankfully) small community size. It's just polite. If you MUST refer to "the effect" by any other name, give credit to the historical originator: It's called "The Slashdot Effect." Not Digg, and certainly not reddit.

(Actually I'm not sure Slashdot was the first, though I was aware of "slashdotting" as a verb more than 10 years ago. Anyone know of predating claim to "the effect" by another site?")