mchahn

> Games console manufacturers and media player vendors often maintained exclusive services software and content distribution right[?]

That must not be true. Atari had to patent a mechanical mechanism that its cartridges used in order to prevent others from developing for their system.

The article did nothing to explain the motivation for making sick videos instead of bland knockoffs. I know my grandchildren will watch anything. Surely a sick video won't gather more views than a bland one.

Maybe the number that are sick is small and not typical.

I was referring to the fact that an "exact value" doesn't even exist. There is noise on every analog signal. If there is no exact value then lossless becomes a meaningless term.

> using lossless analog compression

What does this mean? Analog is inherently lossy to begin with.

> using that symbol in positional number systems

Exactly. There is a book about the number zero which is a good read (as are the ones about pi, e, i, etc.).

Can some tell me what the "{\em ex ante}" I see in several places means?

> Damn, glad to see this

Hmmm. I seem to remember seeing this a year or two ago. Didn't really find any use for it.

Why are the results so dark?

> the thing that blew me away the most with Dell is the support.

I have an XPS 13 and when my keyboard got flakey a repairmen came to my house and replaced the keyboard without even checking it first. Also, after I bought the laptop they randomly put $50 in my credit card account because I was "a good customer". WTF? I guess buying customer's loyalty is a thing now.

And myth explanations spawn more myths. I had read (forgot the source) that it was a myth and that the lemmings were really jumping off cliffs to swim to an island people weren't generally aware of.

Although swimming to an island is closer to the truth of swimming across a river than suicide is.

I you restore a work over and over is it the same work of art? A serious philosophical question goes: if you replace the planks of wood on a boat until eventually all the wood is replaced, is it the same boat?

Did he say his work was real or a copy? If defrauding then I can't be sympathetic.

Ditto. I use Github because of the network effect and I don't have the time or desire to try something else. If I have a problem I will switch. I'm not losing sleep over anything.

> Linux wouldn't have been a solution on those platforms

And why is that? It takes a while for the most popular hardware to change and linux could easily track it.

> I've never had an actual Ph.D. Psychologist [prescribe drugs]

That may be because they aren't allowed to.

> covers how to use threads safely and sanely.

It takes a lot less expertise to make events as fast as threads as it takes to make threads as safe as events. I don't know about the rest of you, but I personally do not have a brain that can become an expert on every topic.

Depends on the temperature.

> i'm not sure how to avoid this feature

Talk about a bug being called a feature. This drives me crazy.

> now I know Apple didn't do it first

It may not be apple's fault, but many apple fans incorrectly think features originated at apple, like mobile fingerprint scanning. My daughter thinks apple invented everything. :-)

I take it that you don't use node? I write all my scripts in node instead of bash.

My eyes! My eyes!

> I use VS Code now exclusively, having moved from Atom months ago.

Ditto. I was a huge atom fan when it came out. Being able to customize it with web tech that I already knew was exhilarating. Between jobs I wrote over 20 packages.

When I went back to work I was still using Atom but I didn't have the time to baby it. All my packages were slowly dying and I didn't have time to support them. The overall stability of Atom was bad if you didn't have time to identify and rotate out dying packages.

Then VSCode got far enough along for me to use it daily. I have found it to be very stable and have almost all features I want without plugins. Rectangular text selection, drag-drop text, etc. Being an IDE for Node sealed the deal. I haven't used Atom since.

That will also work, but the & isn't needed because foo is already a pointer address.

What are these 1000/4000 year starting points? From when mankind evolved?

To me, if it requires an explanation then an explanation would be best. I certainly don't care for explanations of things that don't require explanations.

> in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0. The same cannot be said of Windows updates.

A few years ago I turned on my windows machine to see the dreaded upgrade. Being in a rush I went to another machine and the exact thing happened. I blew my top and replaced all windows with Ubuntu. I would have preferred Macs but I couldn't afford the Apple tax (high prices and not working on my existing HW).

Yes, the first thing VCs ask is whether you have patents.

> Even lawyers are terrible for this.

That would be surprising to me but I'm just quoting the lawyers. They might have just simplified it.

Since there has been interest in my story I'll tell another part of it. When we first discovered the distributor was copying us we sent them a letter telling them we had a patent and to stop. It did no good.

When we met with the lawyers they told us we made a big mistake. We were admitting we knew about the infringement. This sealed the issue of losing the patent. If we had acted ignorant we could have argued later we didn't know about it.

> Do you mean damages could not possibly have been enough to pay back your legal fees

Unfortunately yes. The infringer was not big enough to be worth it. However, that meant the patent was then worthless. If you don't enforce a patent you lose it.

Patents only seem to be worth it for large companies and trolls.

P.S. I have always been fascinated by a contrary story. The guy that invented the intermittent window wiper got a patent and the car companies ignored him for a very long time. He sued over and over with no lawyers and eventually got a huge sum of money. Unfortunately he was quite old by then.