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trurl42

605 karma · joined May 10, 2013

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trurl42··on TerraTech – Physics-based vehicle construction and combat
It reminds me of Spore, but it already looks a lot more promising than Spore.
trurl42··on Quantum Randomness
The idea of infinite randomness expansion really fascinates me, it's like watching Münchhausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his own hair.
trurl42··on Improving GitHub for science
The DOI is linked to a zip archive on zendodo / figshare, which will not change, even if you change the tag.
trurl42··on Introducing Moto E and Moto G with 4G LTE: Smart phones priced for all
Turn screen brightness to max and turn all pixels white.

Now you have a flashlight.

trurl42··on Keepod: Can a $7 stick provide billions computer access?
So this time it's based on Android? That seems like a bad choice if you wanted to provide the people with access to true general purpose computing.
trurl42··on Multipartite Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Steering may lead to ultra-secure internet
The content of the article is freely accessible on the arXiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.2270

And no, this will not lead to ultra-secure internet, which also isn't even mentioned in the article.

trurl42··on Mozilla, GitHub and Figshare team up to fix the citation of code in academia
DOI exists since 1997, which is pretty much since forever in internet time.

Figshare on the other hand, not so much.

trurl42··on Git 2.0 release notes
I guess 'simple' means "don't try to be too smart".

Pushing only the current branch by default is a good thing, I think. If you are using a more centralized setup you can change the configuration of push.default to 'matching'.

trurl42··on The New TextSecure: Privacy Beyond SMS
I have been able to compile it myself, so I could install it on my tablet.

You can register an Account using any phone number. Just wait until the SMS verification fails, you then have the option to request an automated call, and get a verification code that way.

So far it seems like it's working.

trurl42··on Keepod Unite: $7 PC to bridge the digital divide
Last year it was a card with nfc, hardware encryption and usb: https://www.google.com/search?q=keepod+card

You could also download the software back then: http://keepod.com/keepod-os-12-4-cave-man-is-released/

trurl42··on Github Reliability
Git is a distributed version control system for a reason.

Even if GitHub is down for a few hours, you can still do most of your work. (Yes, no issue tracking, etc. I know.)

trurl42··on Epistemology of Wave Function Collapse in Quantum Physics [pdf]
Very true, there is a lot of nonsense going on in the fundamentals of quantum theory.

But I find that GRW (or Bohmian mechanics if you're into that) doesn't add much of interest to the debate either.

trurl42··on Epistemology of Wave Function Collapse in Quantum Physics [pdf]
A note: This is not about standard quantum theory, but about GRW theories.

Basically it's an ad-hoc modification of quantum theory, in which you postulate that the wave function collapses at random with some probability.

As long as you say the probability is low enough, the theory is not really experimentally verifiable. (Currently there is no experimental evidence for GRW type theories.)

trurl42··on Buying a laptop, check if it has nVidia Optimus, its purpose is infuriate you
Having bought a laptop with a ATI Intel hybrid graphics solution in 2011:

- I'm still stuck on the driver version from 2011, can't install a newer one.

- Only works for DirectX, with OpenGL you can only use the Intel graphics.

trurl42··on Google Play Store Ratings Drop
It's a suggestion to rate the shown app, to get better app recommendations.

It only shows apps you have downloaded.

trurl42··on Google Removes Vital Privacy Feature From Android, Claims Release Was Accidental
I hope this feature will get added again in a future version.

It was not an official feature in KitKat and somewhat breaks the current API, where developers didn't have to check for permissions at runtime.

Android 5.0 maybe?

trurl42··on Analyzing an Android WebView exploit
That is wrong.

Pre JB you can run any function by using reflection, as is demonstrated in the example.

anyjavaobject.getClass().forName("android.telephony.SmsManager").. etc.

trurl42··on Explain Shell
It fails to parse the command if you start with a redirect.

http://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=%3E+foo

trurl42··on Hgraph – Your health in one picture
I find it a lot harder to interpret.

You can't really make out the rate of change if it's not linear.

trurl42··on Hgraph – Your health in one picture
http://hgraph.org/images/hgraph_manualinput_v02.jpg

This looks awful. Why would want to do a polar plot for a time series?

Just so you can rotate it with your finger to go back in Time?

trurl42··on Wolfram Language
Yep, they are marked as new here: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Association.html
trurl42··on Wolfram Language
Here are your hashmaps:

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/Associations.ht...

trurl42··on Wolfram Language
So far it seems like the "Wolfram System" and the future "Mathematica 10.0" are the same thing (see: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/WolframSystem... )

Licensing doesn't seem to have changed: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/SystemAndLicense...

trurl42··on How to set up a mail server on a GNU / Linux system
Postfix is the mail server used in this very guide.

So I don't consider Postfix to be easy to set up.

OpenSMTPD looks like a step in the right direction.

trurl42··on How to set up a mail server on a GNU / Linux system
Virus scanning is maybe not that important, but pretty much everything else is.

Spam filtering for example. Would you really want to run a mail setup without it?

What would be the "SQLite" in mail servers, including spam filtering, webmail, imap and all the other conveniences?

trurl42··on Bytecode
The newer models had display drivers. You could write write small graphical programs for them, like an animated version of the Towers of Hanoi: http://www.kernelthread.com/projects/hanoi/html/macprom-gfx.... I remember running that that on my iBook.
trurl42··on How to use the Python Imaging Library
When drawing something from scratch, I found Pycairo to be much more useful.

http://cairographics.org/pycairo/

trurl42··on Dropbox disables ASLR on Windows
It seems like git-cheetah and the 7-Zip shell extension exhibit the same problem. MinGW doesn't enable ASLR by default, which might be the reason for that.
trurl42··on On Citizenship in open-source software development
In git every commit contains the authors email.
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