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Comment Re:Oe noes! A compiler bug! (Score 1) 739

If it's unreachable code then it is indicative of a bug - someone has written code which they *think* does something but doesn't do anything. Now perhaps the programmer deliberately commented something out or surrounded with an "if (false)" block but even so at the very least the compiler should generate a warning and in some cases an error.

Comment Re:various places (Score 1) 85

Formatting ate my brackets. Chances are, if you're interested in a language, there's a /r for it. In that /r there's usually talk of projects built with that language, or articles comparing that to other frameworks. It's kinda like a wikipedia style hole you fall into. For example, on a whim I was looking at /r/smalltalk and found pharo. Once I was digging around pharo, found newspeak. Or in /r/lisp, found dr. racket while reading through. I haven't read through /r/linux though, mainly because I'm rather content with my Mint installation, although I have been eyeing trying a slack release again on another box.

Comment Re: Like China och USSR (Score 2) 512

We have ISIS running amok engaging in mass murder, mass mutiliations, and the destruction of religious sites. The problems in the middle east have sqaut to do with oil. This kind of ethnic strife would be going on regardless.

It's like the Balkans or any other place on the planet where people can't get along with each other to the point of engaging in genuine ethnic cleansing.

Comment Re:Human recall slows down too. (Score 3, Interesting) 281

perhaps Apple and google will ration their back end service such that a user of an old phone only gets the equivalent compute power that was available at the time the phone was first sold. Newer phones thus pay for upgrades in the computing infrastructure, and thus are entitled to superior backend services.

Comment Human recall slows down too. (Score 3, Informative) 281

Studies have also shown that as humans age their rate of recall also slows down, not because their brains are slower but because they have to navigate a database filled with entangled excess information. I've noticed that google searches by voice are vastly more word-accurate than siri searches by voice. But that's because google is doing something in the context of something else-- it has clues to context. Siri is trying to do free-form semantics over a much greater realm of possibilities. When you narrow Siri to a phone specific function, it does better than google. As the AI realm grows, perhaps to include sarcasm and slang, these services will require even more compute power to keep going.

However, these days, phone services are done on back end servers, so there is no great reason they should slow down in "modern" times.

Comment Re:Hipsterism at its finest (worst?) (Score 1) 288

> And I have ones that have failed.

My last Archos 5 with spinny rust inside of it refuses to die. It's fortunate too since no other device I've seen can match it for local storage and disconnected (from the cloud) operation.

I've yet to have an SD card fail. If anything they will become obsoletely-tiny before actually breaking.

It's funny that someone thinks that multiple redundant server farms and the entire network infastructure of the internet and all the phone providers is less of a resource hog than a few tiny bits of electronics.

Comment Re:Alternative explanation (Score 2) 398

That is true perhaps.

However, this is all entirely Verizon's fault. They are the entity in this arrangement that has actively encouraged assymetric use of the net by offering assymeteric service. It's really rich to see ISPs complain that they are getting too much traffic all in one direction then that's how they f*cking design their service.

Verizon is selling massive downloads. So is every other consumer ISP.

Comment Re:Even my DVDs are streamed (Score 3, Interesting) 152

> Why bother compressing?

Uses much less space and yields you something small enough to fit on a phone while still being useful for a 60 inch TV or 120 inch projector. Besides, most playback devices don't handle MPEG2 very well. They're all expecting h264.

DVD is a really outdated format and benefits greatly from transcoding.

Comment Re:But what IS the point they're making? (Score 1, Interesting) 342

I'm not convinced people in mud huts were numerous enough or destructive enough to manage the megafauna extinctions. A lot of this hysterical screaming about how we're destroying the planet seems a lot like hubris.

On certain level, the idea that we have that much power pleases the egos of some people.

Comment Re:Keyboards (Score 1) 225

...except consumer tablets aren't proper digitizers. This is especially true for platforms where a stylus is a banned option because it doesn't seem fashionable enough.

Proper tablet inputs typically are PC peripherals, not the limited functionality that comes with consumer tablets.

Even a mundane mouse is better at the "direct manipulation" stuff than what's provided on your average consumer tablet. The "direct manipulation" on a consumer tablet is crude and clumsy.

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