I'm not lying, that's the actual size, something like 420k. It may have been a bit shorter playtime, perhaps 20 seconds (I didn't time it), but still, it was quite small.

Nobody said videos on Facebook are Blu-Ray quality. But you seem to have weird concepts about how big videos need to be to be good enough quality for a web page. Just as a test, I took an original high quality full-motion video of a concert, reencoded it with ffmpeg, audio codec aac, vbr audio quality 0.5, video codec x264, preset veryslow, cf 33, resolution 512x288 (half original size), 20 seconds. File size? 420k. Of course the video from facebook was darker and quieter, so one would expect it to compress better. If we give my sample concert clip an allowable size of, say, 550k, then I can up audio quality to 0.7 and cf down to 30. Either way, the resultant clip was fine, the sort of thing you'd expect to see on a Facebook wall.

Anyway, the key point is, Facebook feeds aren't loading you down with 50 meg videos, they're little couple-hundred-k clips, the same size as animated gifs. And while I haven't measured it, they don't appear to start streaming until you scroll down to them, and look to stop after you scroll away.

1) I just went and pulled the first anim-gif I saw off 9-gag, a fairly simple thing of Ralph Wiggum with little motion, so it should compress quite well for an animated gif. Size: just over 400k. I then pulled the first video that showed up on my Facebook feed, a 30 second full motion clip, and downloaded the entire thing (including the audio stream, full quality). Size: just over 400k.

So....?

2) Are you actually sure that it is downloading the audio stream when it does muted autoplay? Not saying that it oes or doesn't, but do you actually have evidence either way?

3) See the reply below.

There's really no argument. If you're going to allow animated gifs, you should allow autoplay videos. So that we can finally put the nail in the coffin of the awfulness that is gif by removing the last common use of it.

And FYI, 400k is not that much. Slashdot is a pretty simplistic website compared to most, and I just measured how much data is downloaded just to read the front page: 1.4M.

Why is it any more evil than animated GIFs? Both play automatically, neither happen with sound, and compression on x264 is *way* better than with animated gifs.

I was initially opposed to autoplay on FB, but after thinking about it, I changed my mind. We already see tons of animated stuff on web pages, and the videos from people who show up on my page about are usually things I'd find interesting (if the user posting them didn't usually post interesting things, I'd have stopped following them). There's no unexpected sounds to bug me, and the quality to size ratio versus animated gifs is, what, two orders of magnitude better?

Talking about open-source businesses is missing the point entirely. Most businesses that are successful as a result of open source (or Free Software, for the RMS-style folks) or that contribute significantly to open source are not 'open-source businesses' any more than companies that use Windows and Office are 'closed-source businesses. The difference is that one category of businesses realises that writing software is expensive and copying software is trivial, so spends its investment on the software parts of its infrastructure paying people to write software (typically customising and improving existing projects), whereas the other pays someone for copies of software and hopes that that will give them an incentive to produce software that's more like they want.

Or a live badger. That would just be awesome. Franklinator 2.0.

It both scares me and pisses me of that the government can do whatever it wants with nuclear weapons, while my ability to use them is very, very restricted.

Who do they think they are, claiming the right to use things that the general public can't? Let me use my nuclear weapons!

Until I can be sure things are as safe as they reasonably can get I'd rather not have drones delivering packages yet

But that's exactly what drone proponents are asking for - a permitting standard that gives them the right to fly in these conditions and for these purposes in exchange for meeting a set of safety standards. Passive or automatically-engaged active safety features that ensure that "death by falling drone" is effectively an impossibility, whether that things like be cowled propellors, parachutes, an inherently low terminal velocity, fully independent backup propulsion, or whatever the case may be.

And in case you didn't notice, massive objects weighing hundreds of tons loaded with massive amounts of fuel and capable of taking out whole city blocks and/or skyscapers already fly extensively over your head. But you're worried about little plastic helicopters?

*Happy spices!* We *happy bubbles* second Star Control II; only *silly cows* do not enjoy *smelling* *pretty colors*!

Not really. The kind of situations where Windows 3.x let you try to continue, Windows NT just handles transparently. In Windows 3.x, with cooperative multitasking, a single application can refuse to relinquish the CPU. If this happens, you have three choices (outlined by the dialog box):

• Just wait and see if it eventually recovers.
• Kill that application and hope that it isn't holding any handles that other processes need to be able to do useful work.
• Restart the entire computer.

In a system with protected memory and preemptive multitasking, an application that refuses to relinquish the CPU will just have its priority downgraded and the only thing that you'll notice is the CPU getting warm. Eventually, you may choose to kill the program, but it never affects system stability.

It means that there's a high probability that something has damaged some kernel data structures. If you continue, there's a good chance that this corruption will spread to the buffer cache and you'll end up writing invalid data to disk. If you kill the system, the corruption is limited to the RAM.

Agreed on Chen's blog, but the summary is horrible. This message hasn't been part of Windows since Windows 95 (which introduced preemptive multitasking to the Windows world, so a single application could no longer freeze the system trivially), so the odds are that if you used Windows in the last two decades you've never seen this notice...

The idea is to have a timer that would automatically disable the equipment unless it received an enable signal, either from a satellite or removable medium. It's possible to make such a system that is, at the very least, very difficult to tamper with. Many of the systems on tanks and so on are computer controlled and if the computers stop working then it's a lot less valuable. The goal of such systems is similar to that of crypto: it's not to prevent the enemy from ever using the tanks that they've stolen, it's to prevent them using them quickly. If you have a few weeks to bomb the stolen equipment before it can be used, and the enemy has to invest a lot of high-tech resources into cracking the systems, then that's probably good enough.

MIRVs are a better second-strike weapon. In a first-strike context, your missile bases are all working fine and you can just launch everything that you've got at the enemy. MIRV in a first strike requires fewer missiles to get through, but that just means you need to build fewer missiles, which doesn't reduce the cost by a huge amount compared to the cost of maintaining a first-strike capability at all. In a second-strike situation, however, you're much more likely to have limited launch resources (a few submarines if you're late, the missile silos that you can contact in time if you're not). Being able to have a devastating second-strike capability with just one submarine surviving is a strong deterrent.

You didn't read my post, did you? You can turn it off globally, but it's really hard to then turn it on for a subset of applications. You have to individually disable each one's access (and they all default to 'on', so you have to remember to do it again after installing each new app). If I turn on mobile data somewhere expensive to look something up urgently (or, for example, to get an updated boarding pass for a flight) then suddenly a dozen applications will say 'whee, Internet! Let's download a load of updates!'

If you're doing a million items, then the difference between O(N) and O(N^2) is a factor of a million. If each operation takes one cycle to complete, then on a 2GHz CPU you're going to take 500 microseconds. More plausibly, if each iteration takes 10 cycles, then it will take 5ms. The O(n^2) version, assuming the same ten-cycles per operation (which is pretty small - even a bubblesort on integers in an array will be hard pressed to be that quick), will take one hour and 23 minutes.

If you really think that the difference between 5ms and almost an hour and a half is irrelevant, then I really hope that I never use any code that you write.

De Morgen's laws are widely known and trivial to automate. Any vaguely modern compiler knows about them and will do the transform for you. Not only will it do it for you, it will do it for you everywhere and base on knowledge of the target architecture.

That said, it won't rearrange things that might have side effects. In C, for example, you have short-circuit evaluation, so if you have something cheap on the left of an or and something expensive on the right, then it will be faster unless the compiler can determine that the expensive thing has no side effects. If you have a negation of a long string of ands, the arguments to each of which is expensive to compute, then turning it into a string of negated ors is faster, because the compiler can stop computing once it's found one that's failed.