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Comment: Re:Wow, some discovery (Score 1) 179

stdio functions often lead to stack overflows. News at ten...

Well, it's interesting insofar that this is a rookie mistake you usually fall into in your first year of programming in C, and never again afterwards. It's amazing that such programmers are working in a very high profile gaming company.

Comment: Re:Now how to fool you inner accelerometer? (Score 2) 292

by am 2k (#43514415) Attached to: Omnidirectional Treadmill: The Ultimate FPS Input Device?

Very cool, but your inner ear is going to break the illusion

Palmer (the guy behind Oculus Rift) hinted at working on a solution to this problem on the MTBS forums just before the Oculus Rift Kickstarter. Apparently you can fool these sensors with some magnetic fields. The concept is nowhere near commercialization yet, of course.

Comment: Re:Not native (Score 1) 81

by am 2k (#43396803) Attached to: Qt 5.1 Adds Android and iOS Support

For example you can notice that Qt draws the focus border around buttons differently than Cocoa does. The biggest difference being that Qt buttons are focusable but Cocoa buttons are not.

Actually, that's a user preferences setting (I keep it turned on all of the time, since I want to use the keyboard as much as possible). Unfortunately, this setting is ignored by Qt.

Comment: Re:He's got a point (Score 1) 208

by am 2k (#43383493) Attached to: EA Responds To Its Appearance In the 'Worst Company In America' Poll

That's why you have been winning this poll, EA. You're the supplier, and we're the junkies, and since there is a cohort of "addict" customers that will continue to purchase your product regardless of how you treat them, you maintain the status quo.

Yes, the problem with this line of thinking is that as soon as there's a cheaper supplier or one with better material, your customers are gone (also see: Blackberry).

Comment: Re:User configurable (Score 2, Interesting) 135

by am 2k (#43356319) Attached to: Opera Confirms It Will Follow Google and Ditch WebKit For Blink

Google says they're forking for technical reasons -- Google uses a different thread model and security model than Apple and making a hard break makes for easier maintenance.

That's only half of the story - they're using a different thread model because they wrote it themselves and didn't allow Apple to merge it into the original code base. So the fork is not really based on a technical reason.

Comment: Re:They should call their bluff already (Score 1) 628

by am 2k (#43319233) Attached to: North Korea Declares a State of War

Healing the scars that the Bush administration left will take a lot longer than a few years. Meanwhile, enjoy your invasive security screening on airports and attempts like the constitution-free zone on "borders" that include half of the population.

(Note that I'm not saying that only Bush did all of that, but the people in charge apparently noticed with how much they can get away with, with only insignificant uprisings like OWS that can easily be removed by the military.)

Comment: Re:I am not at all sure this makes sense. (Score 2) 384

by am 2k (#43039389) Attached to: Is Code.org Too Soulless To Make an Impact?

The problem is, everybody has to start at some point. Right now I'm earning all of my money from programming or teaching programming. I got lucky, because my parents happened to show me a BASIC programmable computer at the age of eight, and helped me write the first programs when I wasn't even able to read English (I soon surpassed them, though). I didn't know that I'd like it before that. Others aren't so lucky, and have their first exposure to computers in school, and then it's on programming-hostile environments like smartphones and Windows (which doesn't ship with any programming language environment, unlike DOS did).

Comment: Re:Call Bruce Lee (Score 1) 225

by am 2k (#42751869) Attached to: NASA Says Asteroid Will Buzz Earth Closer Than Many Satellites

What I was taught was extremely rigid, canned moves that might work if you were extremely lucky enough for an attacker to come at you in precisely the manner they trained you for, but if they deviated at all, if all you had to rely on were the moves you were taught (and you couldn't improvise on your own), you'd be toast.

I'm training in a school with a similar upbringing. It has deviated a lot from that in the last years, and so there was a lot of discussion about that issue.

The philosophy behind what you're criticizing is that you're learning thousands of techniques, every one for a different situation (opponent properties such as stance, weight distribution, movement, inertia, total weight, height, agitation, etc.). Then you repeat them so often that you just know which one to use when, without thinking (aka moving the information to the cerebellum).

The problem with it is that it takes a looong time to get that far, maybe 20-40 years, depending on the person's talent. This clashes with western philosophy, where something that takes longer than a week isn't considered to be viable. Thus, many western schools move more towards teaching principles instead of techniques, which allows you to react to a random situation much earlier in training, but your responses aren't as elaborate (which isn't that important in self defense, since the first attack usually strikes down an untrained/inattentive opponent anyways).

Mother is the invention of necessity.

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