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hackermom

1,708 karma · joined January 14, 2010

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hackermom··on Zerg Rush Google Easter Egg
I think it's also referring to the phenomenon as it exists today in every single online multi-player game that features open PVP as well as closed battleground type PVP, not just StarCraft.

The "zerg", as it was commonly known to all players, presented itself to me in the beginning of 2002 in a well-known and still active MMORPG called Dark Age of Camelot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_age_of_camelot). DAoC-players refer to a mass of ungrouped, uncoordinated players joining in on the large battles between the realms of the game as a "zerg", and to individual players making up the "zerg" as "randoms" (random players; ungrouped) and sometimes as "zergers". The term certainly sprung from the first StarCraft game, but the phenomenon is today embodied not just by NPC units in this or that game, but by actual groups of players, and is seen in practically every MMORPG with PVP.

hackermom··on Descriptive Camera: A camera that prints a description, not an image
Yes I did, Mr. serious face.
hackermom··on Descriptive Camera: A camera that prints a description, not an image
I wonder how it holds up against a human being. They sould run a test on that.
hackermom··on The Underpants Project
"Your word has been saved! Now point your browser to any of the following addresses (copy-n-paste) and watch the magic."

Followed by, "It seems you didn't save the word." on the two connecting websites.

Safari 5.1.5, OS X 10.6.8, no add-ons installed. I do, however, have Flash configured to not allow any websites access to local storage unless I specifically say so.

hackermom··on The Average Font
Beautifully soft and living! Like reading old typesetting! Thank you!
hackermom··on The Top Of My Todo List
So, can you offer me and everyone else a nice job that makes all of this possible? That makes it possible to NOT be a cog? Or is this just another set of advice that only the privileged ones can afford to heed...
hackermom··on '9223372036854775807' == '9223372036854775808'
"Intolerable for real-world use. A toy language. Alas, PHP, we hardly knew you..."

Have you been out on the internet the past decade? Do you have a tendency to make extremities of things and trying to stand the needle on its tip?

hackermom··on "Tap the spacebar with your phone." - Bump unveils new photo uploader
I like the idea a lot. It's brilliant. Regarding the removal of the app- and music sharing feature, I noticed that it was the number one complaint and reason for a 1-star review in the app store, and then I saw this on their website:

Q. What happened to the music bumping feature?

Listening to you and reviewing our usage data, it became clear that sharing music links wasn’t a great experience for you, our users. We have removed it for now to make the app simpler and easier to use.

Q. Why can’t I bump apps anymore?

Similar to music bumping, you made it clear that this was not a great feature and therefore, we have removed it to make the app simpler and easier to use.

Marketing tip: don't lie to your users in order to smoothen out the folds and creases, because that always rubs people the wrong way and always makes a company and its product look suspicious. Just say it like it is, "Sorry, guys. Copyright and anti piracy laws forced us to remove these features."

hackermom··on Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
Standard response from fundamentalists - they can only see their own reasoning, but fail to get a perspective of everything else around them. (re: gpl license advocates, political extremists, muslims etc.)
hackermom··on PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter
Too much comp-sci attitude, too little coder attitude.
hackermom··on Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore, dies at age 83
Thank you for all the fun Commodore computers gave to my childhood, Jack.
hackermom··on Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
Is Skype forced on me? Is Amazon forced on me? Is Facebook forced on me?
hackermom··on Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
Please explain to everyone how this, http://stallman.org/amazon.html, is just instructive (useful/informational). There's plenty more.
hackermom··on Rick Falkvinge and his "a bit slow full-duplex 100Mbit" Internet Connection
When 100 mbit/s isn't fast enough you know it's time to get checked out for Download's Syndrome.
hackermom··on Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
"Why the nerve, living a life different than I would choose!? IT MUST BE STOPPED."

Hm, is it just me or doesn't that sound like the agenda RMS is trying to push down everyone else's throat regarding their choices in personal computing?

hackermom··on Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
It's like it was still 1980 around him. To me, freedom also includes choosing what I feel like and what I desire, and allowing myself to move with the times rather than against, instead of fooling myself that I strike a blow for freedom by tethering myself to the floor in every single question. All he does is putting restrictions on himself (and in the process also on other people who blindly follow his fundamentalism) rather than removing restrictions and bonds. But that's just me and where I draw my line.
hackermom··on Stallman: "Facebook is an international parasitism project."
I can't quite see what's funny about the response.
hackermom··on Notch's next game is an MMO
"...if the last instruction..."

I know this sounds like nitpicking, but that mistake right there has caused many a 6502 emulators to produce erroneous results. The 6502 core's status register is resident and the flags in it are changed only when an op-code directly does so; it never "resets" arbitrarily, so proper conditionals that act on a specific status flag can actually occur far and wide between the op-code that actually affected that one specific flag.

hackermom··on Mozilla: Are We Slim Yet?
By now I think it's well-known to every Firefox user that in the case of Firefox, the memory used is mostly leakage.
hackermom··on Mozilla: Are We Slim Yet?
"Writing efficient programs requires complex tricks."

Says who?

hackermom··on Novocaine: painless high-performance audio on iOS and OS X
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Novocaine still an abstraction layer that interfaces with Core Audio (I haven't had a moment to look at the sources yet)? I understand that it's simpler to deal with, but how is it more "high-performant" than working with Core Audio directly?
hackermom··on Poll: What is your primary operating system
What is this "crappy" memory management of OS X that you speak of? When it comes to memory management, OS X is definitely among the best from my 14 years of experience with modern operating systems. For what it's worth, I regularly run two VMs in VirtualBox totalling just over 2gb of guest RAM allowance, on a 4gb machine running 10.6.8, and I don't suffer problems with this. Users of 10.7 claim that it's a wee bit hungrier than 10.6, though I still can't recall the last time I saw anything else than "Swap used: 0 byte" in the Activity Monitor.
hackermom··on Poll: What is your primary operating system
Couldn't agree more. The whole mentality in the OS X developer world glows of such a strong focus on usability and UI design, while, for some reason I cannot understand, the Windows and Linux world is mostly the diametrical opposite. This was the first thing that I noticed when I moved over to OS X; the difference was incredibly clear, and it struck with great impact. I think people in general gravely underestimate how much in good software lies in a good interface connecting the user with said software.
hackermom··on Poll: What is your primary operating system
I took a leap of faith from Windows to OS X as my main desktop OS back in late 2004, before it was "trendy" to use products by Apple - and long before users of Apple products began being referred to as "Applefags". I haven't looked back once. Besides OS X and Windows, I've been using the *BSDs (mainly OpenBSD) since around 1999.
hackermom··on Poll: How long have you been programming?
I started at age 8 or 9 on my VIC-20. This was in 1988-89. Later I got a C-64 followed by the Amiga models, and found my way to assembler and along with that a fundamental understanding of how computers work, what's possible and what's not, and how to (in terms of performance) properly and efficiently make computers do what you want them to do.

Commodore computers played a huge part in raising me.

hackermom··on Apple gives in, two year warranty for Europe
No, 1 year is the EU minimum of product warranty.
hackermom··on Apple gives in, two year warranty for Europe
This isn't an extension of the one-year warranty. It's a clarification of the consumer complaint period and an acknowledgement of it. While EU mandates a minimum of 2 years, in some countries, this time period can be longer, like in Sweden where it's 3 years. However, there is a big difference between warranty and a consumer complaint case: Apple's warranty covers things that break after the customer has received the product - essentially a guarantee that the customer will be able to enjoy 12 months of fault-free goods - while a consumer complaint case covers defects and flaws (including false or erroneous marketing) that were present in the product before the customer received it. Examples of this can be a manufacturer claiming that an LCD screen is a 24-bit truecolor display while it is in fact an 18-bit dithering display, or claiming a certain resolution for a digital camera higher than the camera's sensor can actually provide.

If something in the product that was working ok and as advertised for 1 year suddenly breaks, you're not covered by Apple's warranty, and you're not covered by the consumer protection laws of the EU. If you within the established consumer complaint time period find that something about the product isn't as it should or isn't as advertised, you have a legal right to a full refund providing that you can prove that the problem in question accompanied the product when you received it.

The bottom line: you still just have 1 year of warranty, but now Apple also lets you know that you have another type of consumer right that extends beyond the warranty period.

hackermom··on We're a 2.5 man team vs millions in VC. Please review our skunk-works project
The first thing that put me off was "Begin here <Facebook login button>". I don't use Facebook, I don't even have a Facebook account, and I am not sure how I feel about having something as personal as a Facebook account instantly connected and associated with another service, even just to try it out.

To state the obvious I have nothing further to say about your service, as the mere login procedure scared me away.

hackermom··on Please do not take down the Sality botnet
So, is it down yet?
hackermom··on Self-contained, Internet-less Wikipedia machine.
I'm still eagerly waiting for an e-ink version to show up.
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