reeses

What are you using beyond Chrome? The Open Sans web fonts render much better on my Mac with Chrome Version 30.0.1588.0 dev.

Not that I'm a big fan of the font (too close to Arial, especially the 'R' for my antiquated tastes), but I would say it's a well-rendered font of a typeface I do not like. :-)

The gradle/groovy integration is of only slightly better harmony. It's very obviously a plugin and the lack of analysis makes for an awkward dynamic programming experience.

For example, I dislike the yellow warning lines that abound when it can't infer a type that has previously been assigned on all call paths.

Feeling a little Rick Perry this morning? :-)

Most lenses such as this are rented for a number of reasons. For example, there's little need for ownership before and after a film is shot, so it's just an expense.

The other is that a lens such as this will be awkward to use on a day-to-day basis. It's specialized and you wouldn't use it for anything except staged and planned photography. You'd have to stop way down (which you would have the flexibility to do) to get a manageable depth of field, but then you'd struggle with artifacts from the iris unless it had a costly number of leaves/blades.

There are 'inexpensive' (~$1k) lenses that come close. I think Voigtländer and Zeiss have a couple options for f/0.95 or /1.0 in 50mm. I don't have personal experience with them (I've only rented the Leica f/0.95 50mm noctilux) but they're amazing when you want to take photos in a dark place.

I'm not sure about SLR and PL-mount lenses, though. The Canon EF mount is very popular in digital filmmaking, so you might find a really wide aperture there. Zeiss Master Series has a T-stop of 1.3, but I don't know the apertures for calculating DOF. (I'm going to guess f/0.95 or f/1.1.)

If you're just after better low light performance, sensors are getting better all the time and are a much less expensive variable to tweak. I'd probably grab a decent f/1.4 or even f/1.8 and then look for the best low-noise sensor I could afford. $2k of sensor would buy you $10k of lens.

I was twitching on behalf of the 1AC in that dolly shot at the dinner table with an oblique angle. In fact, just looking at the credits[1], there was a dedicated focus puller on the film. The 1AC probably just watched the lens at all times to make sure it wasn't bumped or even thought of roughly.

Thinking that other nerds must be talking about it[2], I found a great thread discussing the ~20cm DOF @ 3m and the tradeoffs that would be involved in shooting a similar setup today. http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?65115-Barry-Lyndon-C...

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072684/fullcredits

[2] I've been fixated on the New Wave and crusty mise-en-scène and so discussion of Kubrick only comes up about once a year. It's always Barry Lyndon, this lens, and how much better the film would have been without Ryan O'Neal. :-)

This happens a lot with old lenses meant for film. Amusingly, that was a desired effect at the time. It's even more appropriate for a lens made for NASA as a proper lens will render out of focus elements with sharp-ish edges. Refer to the issues with Hubble.

I have some old summiluxes and one summicron that do the same thing on my current digital cameras and, while it's not the "creamy bokeh" many people pursue today, it's a characteristic of the equipment. This was a time when asph lenses were either insanely expensive (although, I seem to remember these lenses were in the $100k range at the time, which is beyond insane) or unavailable.

As with any aberration or distortion (including creamy bokeh) it can be a benefit or a disadvantage. Sometimes you want to eliminate or obscure the background and sometimes you want to remind people that the background is there.

If you talk to someone in a room lit by candles, you're going to have dozens or hundreds of little light sources beside and around them. They're going to catch your eye and, if you wear glasses, you're going to flare.

The underlying problem is one of reflection and restraint. Many comments and posts are made very quickly to get the "frist post" or count coup in some other way.

There is a lot more to discuss about the Snowden/NSA brouhaha. It's just not regurgitation of existing bits of information that have already been posted hundreds of times. We burn out on the repetition and get annoyed.

What is relevant, and in my eyes disappointing, is that there has been little deep discourse on the topic. Every article starts at the basic "OMFG" and doesn't take a broader view of new developments.

There is some incentive that is driving the decline of quality content and interaction on the site. Whether it is attention, karma, or whatever, site members have responded with a focus on shallow quantity.

For example, there hasn't been a deep discussion on why privacy is a right. There've been a few comments, such as Schneier's "What's your salary?" that evoke the fear of having privacy violated, but people who are afraid of negative stimulus will override their fear for a more meaningful or important goal. Why is what the NSA doing bad, from basic philosophical principles, and what will the impact be on business, technology, and society in the coming years?

Solving the problem is not simple or trivial, but I'm sure Paul has given many approaches significant thought. It's difficult to implement them without changing the essential simplicity of the site.

There is the Reddit path of subreddits and the various "this thread moved to IYFCategory" forums. I'm not sure that helps. However, there is a natural clustering of some of these topics. While a "politics" cluster is too broad, some shorter-lived and more specialized clusters, such as Snowden/Angular/whatever grouping, would afford discussion among those interested, encapsulate the babble storm, yet give an indication of activity so that individuals can determine their own level of involvement. "I see you're posting a link to a story about Edward Snowden. I'm adding it to the Snowdenball."

Another approach is to limit karma. The people who post karma-bait will top out very quickly and either lose interest, or focus less on the score they have accumulated. It could just be another exponential function of up votes. 1:1 when getting started, then decrease the karma adjustment of each vote over time. Then one has positive and negative feedback, especially among "newer" accounts, and less of a desire even to look at the number past 2,000 or some arbitrary figure.

It's a tough problem. We can self-regulate by avoiding the xkcd 386 impulse. Stop giving votes to shallow thought. Stop posting one-line replies that are obvious and superficial.

You need to cruise through the skin care center of your local cosmetics/beauty/whatever store. If you put in only enough water to keep things moving, rather than creating an unsaturated solution, sugar and salt work very nicely.

Couple that with the added benefit of being water soluble, cleanup after using the product is especially easy. Scrub and rinse (and gently scrub) until you can't feel the product. It's self-documenting. :-)

It's funny to read about the Microsoft developer culture now vs. when I left fifteen years ago.

MSFT was the PayPal, Google, etc. of our generation in Seattle. It spewed out startups of FYIV people in a short period of time.

At the time, it was very disruptive to hear that "ex-Microsoft engineers" were entering a market. There were a few things that seemed pretty common in the groups with which I had contact. (SQL, LAN, VC++, etc.)

1) QA as a first class function. SDETs were awesome, and they tried to staff projects with about two for each SDE. Testing tools were automated and accounted for huge amounts of code. Compatibility labs were huge. Breaking the build would be just short of a flogging offense.

2) A focus on maximizing productivity. Spend the money on the desk that can be raised or lowered. Spend the money on the newest, latest computers, and give them to anyone who asks, as many as they think they need. Locate beverages very close to everyone and subsidize outside businesses to provide food services. Give everyone a window office. It made it a lot easier to stay there from 8am to whenever. This also led to the diaspora of startups.

3) Scary-ass yelling matches in the hallways. People who had always felt they were smarter than the jocks and popular people in their youth were suddenly capable of establishing dominance by insulting other people, their intellects, and especially their work.

4) Readable code over clever code. This led to a lot of typedefs like LPCSTWCSRARSARTARSTA[1] and Hungarian notation[2]. So if you see MyMethod(lpszName); somewhere, you'll know where that came from.

People would leave after vesting (sometimes before and sometimes long after) with the idea of creating a product of their own with the good things that Microsoft taught them and without the bad things that they hated.

Very much like when we start thinking about having kids with the intention of not making the mistakes our parents did.

[1] Yes, Colemak.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation

When you read about 'DIGIC', 'BIONZ', or 'EXPEED' in dedicated digital cameras, you're on the spot with custom processors. (In some cases, more than one) They're often multi-chip modules that can be scaled depending on the level of camera and can be based on standard SoC or embedded macros.

On top of that, you'll have the 'firmware', which is where projects such as Magic Lantern/CHDK make things fun.

Some reading on the Canon gear:

http://cpn.canon-europe.com/content/education/infobank/captu...

http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/Datasheets

Definitely make the most of getting onto different boats. I am not a stinkpotter fan, so I am unlikely ever to own one, but it was a good way to experience all kinds of different craft.

The 3d rendering in the original PC product was kind of a "why not" with OpenGL acceleration just becoming somewhat common. It was very cool looking and was a good combination of bathymetric data with the charts of the time.

Mind you, we still had to deal with different geodetic data depending on the chart supplier. Seamlessly navigating from a NAD27 chart to a WGS84 chart was probably the most important feature at the time. Interfacing with as many random pseudo-compliant NMEA 0183 devices was the other. Autopilots that don't respect zero padding is a fun one when it comes to headings. :-)

Wow, congrats. My first "real" job was working on NavTrek when Nobeltec was a startup.

Make sure you work out relationships with beta testers so that you can do a lot of onboard "tests". :-) That was probably the most fun part of the job (other than reverse-engineering the GPS models on the market at the time).

Hah, the first thing I did was build a going train. I had to use belts for the second, third, and fourth wheels because the planarity was difficult or impossible to manage.

It was of course more like an electronmechanical clock since there isn't a way to build a balancewheel and escapement, but since I had to eyeball the gear sizes and draw them with my mouse anyway, it now appears to be approximately 0:65:101am.

Tough to do an inter-agency transfer (L1) if it's because you closed your international location, but they do have a distribution facility in Eindhoven and an IT center in Pune. (And probably more elsewhere, but I just looked at the 'careers' page.)

It's amusing/ironic to look through their press kit. Especially "Happy 1 Year Birthday Fab Europe -3.5M Members And 30% of Fab’s Global Sales-February 21, 2013.pdf", which is all about the growth of the Berlin office.

That said, you don't need a lot of people after the Brennschluss. Amazon laid off 300+ people in IT after the big initial push. Builders are less important than processors after a company has established a new capability. You'll often create a redundant hierarchy to Get S* Done that will become an obstacle to later growth.

There may also be a bit of German labor law involved as well. Closing the location entirely may let them dodge termination considerations.

TeX is evolving with LuaTeX appearing to get some momentum. Given that almost no one uses TeX directly, I'd expect the biggest change would involve a gradual "improvement" in the macro library. It may even result in an embedded TeX à la sweave.

Wolfram is hammering against the interactive element with CDF and I could see TeX being extended to support a more dynamic electronic document format if HTML rendering engines continue to be typographic messes. Perhaps an LLVM-type backend to generate executable ebooks would be an interesting project, but I'm not sure I'd start with TeX except for math markup.

I would hope my prediction of the death of TikZ and PGF would come true soon enough, though.

Am I reading this as a distributed, immutable, weak hash table rather than what one would consider a 'cache'?

Mind you, doing so avoids the hardest parts of caching (and especially distributed caching, which otherwise begins to underperform around ≥ 5-7 nodes), so I can see significant upside. No surprise stales, distribution update clogging, etc.

You're underestimating the level of effort here. It's not about lacking the $100 (they've received more than that in donations), it's that Apple makes significant changes to the way their applications are built and run and they don't communicate the changes very well, if at all.

In addition, as the apps are linked and compiled with different settings (clang, no ppc, no 32-bit, etc.) then plugins that are dependent on these APIs have to find their own way.

ML was a huge change from Lion in many ways. Mavericks has some issues that an individual can resolve on their own (mostly) but it's a moving target as it is not released yet.

But I do encourage you to donate. Integration with your native mail app should be worth $50-100+.

I love FedEx/Kinko's printer drivers for color work. Laminate, bind, etc., and have it delivered or pick it up a few blocks away. It's a good half step between "low-fi" and "trade show presentation".

Brother seems to have picked up where HP left off about a decade ago. I bought my wife one of the low-end lasers when she started law & grad school. She ran through about 10k pages/year (she'd even print front/back/upside down to "save" on paper) which was about 1.5 cartridges. It doesn't jam, it doesn't make noise except when printing, although it does take a few seconds to warm up from sleep.

I think we've been on the same cartridge since she graduated several years ago. I usually two-bag consumables, so there may be a really sludgy unopened cartridge in a closet.

Had it been expensive, I'd say you get what you pay for, but I don't think it was over $300 or $400 at the time.

The thing with west coast states (and others, but shut up!) is that, as they were "settled" later than other states, they tend to have very dense urban areas and very sparsely populated rural areas.

This is OK in the House, where people have reasonably proportional representation (although districting is notoriously prone to corruption), but the senate seats and electoral votes tend to belong to the urban areas.

I'd be more than happy to cede everything east of about 121ºW to Nevada. It wouldn't necessarily resolve the problem, but it just feels right.

True, while warrants are not necessary for the NSA to snoop, they don't like sharing with local LE.

Depending on the quality of your local police, they have nothing to gain and a lot to lose.

Think of it as four powerpoint slides with one "source" each.

You're highlighting the immaturity of software construction.

Anecdote-Driven-Development will justify almost any approach, especially to vague problems.

Not being able to save $700/month or to come up with $2,000 in an emergency situation in the USA is poor, no matter how much useless crap you bought with the rest of your money.

No, mallards have colored heads. Brown for the female, glossy green for the males.

(Apologies for even more off-topic, but xkcd #386.)

Nooooo...Speak of the spring and foison of the year!

I curse you seven times for reminding me of those foul exercises.

To cast it to 'hacker' terms, it's much like design patterns. Prior to GoF and subsequent pattern library books (meta-patterns), engineers followed certain patterns when building systems.

Once it was written down and the patterns were explicitly named, developers, especially less experienced developers, coded to the patterns as if they were software construction blueprints.

I'd say from 2000(ish) to 2005(ish), many conversations with developers approaching a new project would inevitably involve "we need an abstract factory here and a chain of responsibility there..." type discussions.

At the time, it drove me mad because I saw it as a failure in factorization of the development environment or the language. If a million people are writing "façades" and "singletons", then it's a bloody waste of humanity.

Now, of course, there are frameworks to make building-to-patterns easier. Instead of being a vocabulary for describing conventions, it has become difficult to leverage these frameworks without coding to whichever pattern libraries it has adopted.

Back to film, blockbusters have to follow the 'safe' path. Teal/orange, the hero of 1,000,000,000 faces, etc. have been shown to appeal to the human senses of visual attraction and folklore. There's still a lot of innovation if you hit the indie circuit, but if a director/producer/etc. want a $200m check from a studio, they have to come close to guaranteeing a "hit".

If I cared about CMM and that sort of thing, I'd swing back into systems engineering and certification, but you've read enough of my drivel for now.

And if that didn't tip you off, "Top Gear" should have driven it home.

Back in the old days, I used to prepare for interviews by writing the implementation for the (at the time) c and then c++ standard libraries. Interviewers would often draw from the spec for whiteboard coding. Even if it differed from the spec, it really reduced my stress level.

The obvious win was that I knew the standards backward and forward, especially which ones were thread safe when that became important. It also helped with the same sort of interviews where I'd write the function prototype and then work through the implementation with the candidate.

The other huge win for me was that I ended up developing an appreciation for automated test harnesses so I could implement without bias from the control.

I'm not sure I could recommend implementing your own c++11 library (other than as an embedded subset for resource-constrained systems) but it can be fun to go through and do K&R as a bit of kata.

No, that's DuckDuckGo.