Comment Re:So , , , (Score 1) 392
That got modded 'Informative'?
Comment Nifty (Score 1) 179
Well, it is!
Comment Re:What I'm not clear about (Score 1) 113
Just real-time systems - ones where you have set deadlines :)
Comment Re:Anybody notice the clock on the stove (Score 1) 830
3 hours for a 6 minute bit of video is not at all unusual.
The Nickel & Dime Generation 358
Phaethon360 sends in a piece that looks at how quickly game costs can add up these days, now that DLC, microtransactions and standalone expansions are commonplace, writing, "If you were trying to the think of the most expensive games to play, Rock Band or a monthly-fee MMORPG would come to mind. But Halo 3 is right up there, too." It's reminiscent of a recent post at IncGamers where the author tallied up how much he'd spent on World of Warcraft over the past several years, and was astonished to realize it numbered in the thousands of dollars.
Comment Re:Great... (Score 1) 173
My mind, it is blown.
Comment Great... (Score 0, Troll) 173
I want a British pirate party now. We need one :/
Comment Re:Seems odd... (Score 1) 306
Not in Russia, you insensitive clod.
Comment Seems odd... (Score 2, Interesting) 306
As much as programmers do often work hard and produce nifty things, why this rather than, say, surgeons' day, or police officers' day?
Comment Internals (Score 1) 342
Basically, libdispatch just creates a thread pool for each separate task, then uses some clever magic involving an inter-process semaphore to keep them blocking so that no more than enough threads (ie: the number of CPUs) are running at any given time. Nifty, because it means little change needed to be made to xnu.
libdispatch is also, theoretically, portable to other platforms, as long as one can provide a blocks runtime and a compiler capable of handling blocks. I noticed a patch on LLVM's mailing list today providing a Linux port of the blocks runtime, and llvm-gcc and clang both are capable of handling blocks and running on Linux.
Scientists Wonder What Fingerprints Are For 347
Hugh Pickens writes "The BBC reports that scientists say they have disproved the theory that fingerprints improve grip by increasing friction between people's fingers and the surface they are holding. Dr Roland Ennos designed a machine which enabled him to measure the amount of friction generated by a fingerprint when it was in contact with an acrylic glass at varying levels of pressure. The results showed that friction levels increased by a much smaller amount than had been anticipated, debunking the hypothesis that fingerprints provide an improved grip. Ennos believes that fingerprints may have evolved to grip onto rough surfaces, like tree bark; the ridges may allow our skin to stretch and deform more easily, protecting it from damage; or they may allow water trapped between our finger pads and the surface to drain away and improve surface contact in wet conditions. Other researchers have suggested that the ridges could increase our fingerpads' touch sensitivity."
Sniffing Browser History Without Javascript 216
Ergasiophobia alerts us to a somewhat alarming technology demonstration, in which a Web site you visit generates a pretty good list of sites you have visited — without requiring JavaScript. NoScript will not protect you here. The only obvious drawbacks to this method are that it puts a load on your browser, and that it requires a list of Web sites to check against. "It actually works pretty simply — it is simpler than the JavaScript implementation. All it does is load a page (in a hidden iframe) which contains lots of links. If a link is visited, a background (which isn't really a background) is loaded as defined in the CSS. The 'background' image will log the information, and then store it (and, in this case, it is displayed to you)."
Comment Dead People (Score 1) 165
I asked Google Squared for a list of dead people. One of the first to appear was 'God,' whose date of death was apparently September 2006.
Comment The dangers of strlen (Score 1) 486
I note they've also banned such wildly dangerous functions as strlen.
What's even more interesting to me is that _INLINE ASM_ is perfectly acceptable under their guidelines, but not memcpy.
Looking Back At the Other Kind of Virus 147
Slatterz writes "All this panic over a strain of flu got these people thinking about some of the more virulent computer pandemics that have hit in recent years. While a computer virus pales in seriousness to a human outbreak, malware attacks can still take a huge toll on businesses throughout the world. This list of the top ten worst viruses includes some interesting trivia, including ARPANET's Creeper virus in 1971, how early attempts at copy protection resulted in Brain, and MyDoom's denial of service attack on SCO."
