I'm curious, when is the definition of a content-free if-then-else statement more than a couple of lines? A random line from a .ddd template (end of file) in their source code seems to indicate they're using an if( <condition> ) then block with no attached end statement, with whitespace presumably being meaningful (though in the sample I linked the indenting doesn't seem to be very consistent at the end). This seems like an odd thing to boast.

I think you're incorrectly assuming they're supposed to be primarily a watch. These devices track your approximated movement, location, and, most importantly, heart rate (resting HR is one of the best measures of your fitness). That allows you to get a pretty decent overview of your health and which direction it's trending in over time. Alone, not necessarily very useful after the honeymoon period is over. But when folk figure out ways to use that to effectively motivate people to get better it'll be pretty revolutionary.

They have displays so they can show more detailed information about what they're tracking, but I suspect it'd be a mistake to assume people would be buying them primarily for the watch functionality. They're all a crap watches, but they're awesome fitness trackers.

This may be a stupid question, but why not? I've found pressing win+q and typing "proxy" then enter opening the proxy settings to be significantly faster than attempting to navigate to them manually. Win+Q and "event" is a fairly speedy way to get to the event viewer, though Win+X then V is probably faster. Searching for settings seems significantly easier than attempting to determine which sub-menu item/icon they placed a command under.

I'd argue that searching for everything is a good thing, but not all implementations are up to scratch. They can improve that, though, and have over a year before release, so there's still time to report the search terms that don't do what you expect (if you're ever bored enough to bother doing free testing for them – which is the problem).

If the reverse is true, which seems fairly likely, there'll be an equilibrium at some point. If that point is overweight for both persons, it'd be interesting to which trend continued (assuming fat people eat less around slimmer people). I guess they'll publish more papers exploring the other combinations of people in the future.

User experience is probably pretty key; people will buy the cheapest SD cards they can find (despite some people buying their iPhones up-front, most get them 'free' with plans and like the 'cheap' route). Without some sort of quality control on the cards you could get some pretty dodgy performance. It seems Tom's Hardware did some performance testing of them a while ago, with the slowest random write being 25x slower than the fastest and the slowest random read being 4x slower than the fastest. Those are some pretty large differences.

Windows 8 had a bunch of back-end upgrades that would be incorporated into Windows 9 and that you would be missing by running Windows 7. They probably won't be night and day, but native USB 3.0 support, DirectX12+ (I think Win7 doesn't get it?), file history, and powershell 4, amongst other things, might be useful.

The shell changes are interesting. The only Metro apps I use are Reader, because it scrolls much more smoothly than Adobe/foxit ever did for me, and Weather, because it's less typing than looking up a website. Having them not take the whole screen will be nice.

Most of the complaints about pricing in Australia are around digital products, where there are apparently no protections outside the ability to return it if it doesn't work. That can't justify the 50-100% price increase on digital goods. You're correct that the increased price of things like e.g. Apple products is most likely due to them having to provide actual service without you paying extra, but that isn't what a lot of us are complaining about. A few years ago it was cheaper to take a flight to America and buy Adobe software then fly back than it was to buy it in Australia, despite gaining zero additional protections for it outside of a return if it doesn't work (which is fairly unlikely, depending on your definition of "doesn't work").

It's pretty straight forward, if it breaks within the expected tolerances and lifetime that the average consumer would expect, and is critical to the operation of the device, they must repair, replace, or refund it. If it's a major fault that would've prevented its purchase in the first place, they must refund. If it costs over either $10,000 or $40,000 (I don't recall which off-hand, as it's rarely relevant) then it falls under different warranties, but anything under those is protected.

It basically says "buyer beware" is bullshit and sellers are responsible for providing quality products, not misleading people into buying crappy ones. Though you can still provide crappy products that work just well enough to not be considered broken - they're usable, at least.

The foods our ancestors consumed don't really exist anymore. No, really, that broccoli you're eating didn't exist back in their times, and the ancestor of the broccoli plant that they ate bears little resemblance to the vegetable today. They didn't eat fatty cuts of meat, they ate super-lean meat when they could catch it. They didn't eat onion and garlic fried in olive (or coconut) oil. If they found carrots, they weren't anywhere near as large, sweet, or nutrient-rich as the ones you buy in a supermarket. Here's an archaeologist talking about it.

So given that we can't eat the diet our ancestors consumed, why discount an enormous range of foods that we have created because some others we have created (through very selective breeding) evoke some "natural" ideal? It's not difficult to argue that eating excessive quantities of deep-fried starchy food is bad for you, but that's not cause to throw out grainy breads as well. You can try arguing that coconut oil is good for you, but there isn't enough research on the subject available to conclusively decide one way or the other yet - or we would've decided already.

The argument that you can eat "what we evolved to eat" is an appeal to nature, essentially. It's not possible to eat what we ate 150,000 years ago without putting a lot of effort into finding some really crappy meals. Paleo is a fad diet which may not be harmful, but its rules are as arbitrary as any others.

I hadn't realised it was an update which caused the error, so when I finally resorted to system restore it just auto-updated immediately and broke again. At which point a second System Restore decided it would fail to modify a file and thus refused to work. Four hours later, I had to format to get Windows back.

One thing I learned: Disable fast boot, if it's enabled, on your Windows machine (powercfg -h off will disable hibernation entirely). Apparently a Ubuntu boot dvd cannot mount an NTFS partition with write enabled if a hiberfile.sys is present (apparently windows leaves its mounts active and stored in said file, so modifying the file system would cause problems). You can mount it as read-only and get your data, but if you run into a problem that could be fixed by modifying or deleting files then you're out of luck if fast boot is enabled and the action required cannot be performed from the windows boot environment (you can't disable fast boot from it, the required services aren't loaded).

Your startup time will be a little slower, but you might just save that time if something ever goes wrong with your Windows install and system restore fails.

Branching on the scenario of an object having zero mass in a physics simulation would be a waste, surely? The probability of someone wanting to create something in a physics simulation for a game with a mass of zero is pretty low. Workaround with similar impact is to give it a mass of 1 and call it a day. That's not a problem a player would ever encounter nor most developers, seems like a pretty weak example.

Mods have came out and hit it big, like Gary's Mod, and others have failed. That's not an indictment of the engine, but of the teams doing the modding that couldn't meet their ambitions. Sure, the engine definitely doesn't make it easy for them compared to e.g. Unity3D, but it's a decade old now; I don't think judging the engine based on what random people are doing with it today, whilst using the past tense, is fair. Valve have made some awesome games with it, so it can be done.