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Comment Why can't it auto-update? (Score 1) 71

Drives me nuts ever week or so asking me to install updates. It's a stupid pop-up updated app that gets triggered when a page with flash is loaded.

Yes I understand that running a browser non-stop for weeks goes against their updating philosophy. Too bad. The constant "Update now!" alerts just make their users more likely to fall for phishing scams.

Instead, if you can't update your plugin on already loaded pages... Refactor your app.

Make the bit loaded by the browser a wrapper that can allow its back end to update when convenient. Otherwise everyone who uses tabs is going to hate you. (Those who don't already)

Comment Divide by zero != zero (Score 1) 1067

Easiest way to see this is by graphing 1/x
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Notice from the negative side y is approaching - infinity as x nears 0, but from the positive side, when x approaches 0 y is becoming + infinity.

So it's not the same as multiplying by 0 where everything results in 0. It's really and truly undefined. You can't average +/- infinity and get 0, it's the gap between them. It doesn't exist.

If you ignore a divide by zero, your results will be unpredictable and often nonsensical. For example:
The classic algebra trick to "prove" 1 = 2

Comment Re:Please explain a passage from the article (Score 1) 143

I don't see how there couldn't. Sure OUR perception of time is connected to gravity and matter, but something outside that would be unaffected. Unless you want the nothing became something and instantly blew up idea. To me that argument always felt like something intended to shut up the religious. "No there was NO TIME and NOTHING was before the universe, not even your God". To me time having no beginning makes more sense than it simply starting up one day. Would it be more correct to say "Spacetime began with the Big Bang"?

Comment Closer than I expected (Score 3) 204

It's been interesting how ARM has been gradually getting closer to desktop performance, while Intel has been getting their TPD down. The real metric however is cost. For Apple or even MS, being able to shave another $200 off their price by ditching Intel for ARM is tempting. Now MS, having its bad experience with ARM is less likely to for it, whereas Apple is definitely at least internally testing desktop ARM chips. With their LLVM work and now Metal on Mac the change is a lot easier than their PPC--> Intel was. Now a quad core A8X or whatever their A9 is going to be should nudge it up past that last 25% or so and it would cost them way less.

It looks like MS dropped ARM too soon. That and they totally botched their transition. Looks like Apple is gonna pull it off and regular users may not even notice the switch. Just gradually converge from both ends til one day your laptop also runs iPad apps.

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