qntm

> the 4 bytes sequences (Supplementary Planes) are very rarely used (most used languages and useful symbols are already in the Basic Multilingual Plane) and also more complicated so I did not vectorize that case for the scope of this blog post. This is left as an exercise for the reader ;-)

And you still call them UTF-8 and UTF-16?

> Valuable as surprise launches may be, are they that valuable? Or is there more to this, in which case what is it?

It's about staying so far ahead of the competition that nobody can ever hope to catch up.

There's no largest integer, but the integers still form a set with an (infinite) cardinality, namely aleph-zero.

Likewise, there's no largest cardinal, but you'd think that the cardinals also formed a set with an (infinite) cardinality of its own.

Fun fact: they don't. There are too many of them.

Those sets have the same cardinality...

A much harder question is "How many infinities are there?"

http://everything2.com/user/sam512/writeups/How+many+infinit...

They should just give them year numbers. This is the 2012 iPad. Older models are the 2011 iPad and the 2010 iPad. The system is perfectly simple to understand and has planned obsolescence.

The axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory don't admit the construction of a "set of all sets that don't contain themelves".

Subtract the nice wallpaper and the problems here become much more obvious. It's wrong in exactly the same way that the new Gmail UI is wrong. Too much white space, too little colour, tiny grey abstract buttons without obvious hit boxes. Screen elements are too similar in colour to tell where one ends and another begins, white spacing is inconsistent, the scrollbars are too small to grab and lack up/down buttons, the mouse pointer is almost invisible even when placed over one of the darkest areas of the screen. It looks like there's an assumption that third-party programs (Skype) will create icons and front-ends which use the exact same widgets and icons as the new UI, which most of them obviously will not. There's a similar assumption about third-party web sites: what does it look like when you load up Facebook?

How do I launch Office from this interface? What do the tick marks next to "Homegroup" and "SkyDrive" indicate? What about the 3x3 grid of tiny squares next to "Max" in the Skype window, which is almost impossible to see? Why is the "minimise" icon in the top right of all windows still a thin horizontal bar? Why say "thumbs only" when that's self-evident? What do the red and green squares in the IE tab bar indicate? How do I see which taskbar icon is highlighted if my wallpaper is white? How do I see them at all if my wallpaper is bright orange?

That's a fair point. Strawberry Perl, I'm looking at you.

I stand by the rest of what I said, though. If a piece of software can't handle spaces in paths, the software is broken. I'm not adding a top-level directory to my C: drive just to appease it. I'll use something else.

Program Files

My Documents

Also, why wouldn't I? Why shouldn't I? There isn't a single file system that prevents me from doing so and there isn't a single other computer program in the world which has a problem with it.

Fair warning: GNU make cannot handle directory names or file names which contain spaces. This is a show-stopper defect which has been present since the day it was written and shows no signs of ever being fixed.

The only explanation for 110,000 transactions taking a whole weekend is if bank employees are handling them manually. That amount of work should take 60 seconds.

6th April, actually.

Same reason two plus two equals four.

"Ton" would be ambiguous, but "tonne" is unambiguously the metric tonne (1000 kilograms).

> Vehicles using this interface may include light vehicles in the range of 5-8K kg, and medium vehicles in the range of 8-25K kg. These vehicles will dock to each other, to large space complexes in the range of 100-375K kg, and to large earth departure stages in the range of 33-170K kg.

I've never seen "K kg" stand for metric tonnes before. Two Ks of different cases both standing for "kilo-" therefore meaning "kilokilogram"? At first I thought "five kilograms is quite small for a spaceship" and then I had to re-read it. To say nothing of the fact that "K" means Kelvin, not kilo-.

On the other hand, what are the other options? "Mg" for "megagram"?

Not that the floppy disk being used as a Save icon was actually floppy, of course.

Well, for one thing, the total number of digital computers in the whole world increased by a factor of about a hundred million.

Mathematicians are able to quickly pick up new technical concepts and systems. Also, studying mathematics trains you to recognise and focus on important edge cases. That's good for designing software to be robust, finding problems in specifications, and testing.

All of Inception is a dream except the final scene. It's a movie about a father (Michael Caine) trying to rescue his son.

The terminology isn't fixed, but in my book, a traffic circle is where traffic on the rotary has to yield to traffic entering, whereas traffic on a roundabout has priority over traffic entering.

Roundabouts are typically smaller (down to a mini-roundabout with an island just a metre or two across, compared with traffic circles which can be hundreds of metres in diameter). As a result, roundabout traffic typically moves slower, and they're MUCH safer.

Getting up to go to the bathroom between typing in the password and hitting Enter?

Point being, no amount of money can replace time spent off work with your family. What are you going to do, pay your spouse and children as an alternative to actually eating dinner with them? Only replacement time can make up for that sacrifice.

> In practice what this often means for the developer is unpaid overtime (also known as "crunch time"), something very familiar to game developers, and also common in traditional software development, as the project nears its deadline. But those unpaid hours are actually costing you, the developer, because you can't get them back.

Sure you can. A good employer will give you time off in lieu later.

Of course, an even better employer would never let it come to that.

I guess nobody in your entire organisation knows to mute their microphone until they're talking?

Unless pirate players have a significant negative effect on the gameplay experience, which doesn't seem to be the case from what I can see for this game in particular, World Of Goo's makers do not care how many people pirate their game, either in absolute terms or as a percentage. All that really matters is the absolute number of legitimate sales.

Is it acceptable to not know sed, grep or awk but to know Perl?

You're correct, the major disadvantage here is the ambiguity not just in this JSON/S-expression translation but in any possible JSON/S-expression translation. Linear arrays and key-value dictionaries in most programming languages are intuitive and meaningful and usually even have a native data type. The conversion is usually very obvious. Not so much with S-expressions.

An even simpler problem is how do you express an empty array and an empty object in S-expressions? Is it () for both?

EDIT: and what about nulls? What about strings that resemble numbers?

It seems[1] that GPS at least already broadcasts "GPS time", which is fixed at TAI plus 19 seconds, and hence doesn't include leap seconds.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Timek...

This article doesn't give clear enough reasons for abolishing leap seconds. One passage says:

> But those seeking to abolish the leap second say these one-second jumps are becoming increasingly problematic for navigation and telecommunication systems that require a continuous time reference. These include satellite navigation, financial services, the internet, flight control and power systems, among others.

But elsewhere,

> Ron Beard, chairman of the ITU's working party on the leap second, said: "This is not a technical issue, it is more a diplomatic one."