zgramana
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
187
Submissions
46
Member since
Jul 11
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 years ago
The real takeaway is that researchers may have found a potential test for string theory.
Its presumed lack of falsifiability has been one of its drawbacks and has been the source of some of the controversy around it.
Finding a potential test that could be conducted with telescopes instead of high energy particle accelerators would be a big moment in modern physics.
Comment · 6 years ago
You may be surprised to learn that your face is your least identifying trait online. You network of friends/followers/likes identifies you far more readily—even if you use a random username.[1]
Managing your privacy is a lot like CPU side channel attacks. It forces you to re-evaluate your fundamental assumptions about what information can be exploited.
Comment · 6 years ago
Surprised to see the author suggest that the C64 keyboard did not include the graphics glyphs on the keys.
Both the VIC-20 and the C64 both had them, albeit printed on the front vertical face instead of the horizontal face like the PET.
Moreover, the VIC-20 and the C64 keys include the box glyphs as well so you could see what character you’d get via CTRL and the ‘C=‘ (“Commodore”) key.
The Wikipedia page* states PETSCII includes 192 characters, but the author seems to suggest it’s at most a 7-bit charset. I was a little surprised to find that out after reading the article.
Fun walk down memory lane.
Comment · 6 years ago
Given than Mono-the first open source C# implementation-was used to build banshee going back 15+ years, C# on *nix deserves more credit than is given here.
Comment · 6 years ago
There’s been a lot of promising work done on IEC by a startup called EMC2. Their reactor/fusor design is called Polywell.
Comment · 6 years ago
For a mature, non-Google open source _and_ open hardware option: https://solokeys.com/
Software: https://github.com/solokeys/solo
Hardware: https://github.com/solokeys/solo-hw
Comment · 6 years ago
The Community Edition is open source, though the Enterprise Edition has some proprietary extensions.
It’s admittedly not at all obvious from the repo name, but the following is the top level repo for Couchbase Server (which uses Google’s `repo` tool): https://github.com/couchbase/manifest
Comment · 7 years ago
My first touchscreen Garmin unit, circa 2007, definitely suffered from reliability issues in FL summer heat. Just keeping it on the dash in direct sunlight while driving was enough to affect its operation.
I’m guessing it didn’t effect their brand much because other companies like Tom Tom were aggressively targeting the entry-level market segment, and then the iPhone came out the same year.
The number people who had these higher-end units in hot southern states was likely just too small to significantly tarnish Garmin’s brand goodwill.
Soon enough most people switched to using their phone once the software was good enough (circa 2009 IIRC).
Comment · 7 years ago
Xamarin and Microsoft alum Bryan Costanich got some friends together to rescue Netduino and “reboot” it.
They wanted to maintain that same sense of delight for .NET devs, but also modernize the aging hardware platform and replace the restricted .NET Micro Framework with full .NET Standard support on the software side.
Several friends from the old Xamarin docs team worked their magic on the Wilderness docs site—which is why it’s so good.
Comment · 7 years ago
Love this! I just wish the Bill of Rights had been a pull request that was merged once the 11 ratifying states approved it.
Comment · 7 years ago
JyNI* was created to bridge Jython to Numpy. I don’t have any personal experience with it, but one need not wait for a GraalVM solution.
Comment · 7 years ago
If you haven’t checked it out already, you should take a look at Jython. As the name suggests, it’s a Java implementation of Python.
Comment · 7 years ago
This sort of self-dealing has been going on since the 1940’s, and was just the kind of problem that President Eisenhower alerted us to in his prophetic speech* warning the country about the military-industrial complex:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Comment · 7 years ago
I think the essay would have been better served getting to what appears to be the point much more directly:
- The VW scandal was so shocking because executives and engineers exploited a societal taboo against lying
- Was sustained for so long by exploiting another taboo against placing personal advantage over honesty
- Signs of fraud were dismissed because people assumed successful executives would never violate these taboos, leading them to accept misleading explanations and discounting the possibility of a cover-up.
Comment · 7 years ago
I’m more than a little surprised nobody has chimed in advocating Openfire, which is Apache 2.0, standards based (XMPP et. al.), extensible, and also has some pretty nice browser clients out there (e.g. conversejs).
https://gographene.io/
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