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Bill Hill wrote: The human visual system has a vernier acuity of about 1/600th of an inch. We can't see anything smaller than that.
I take exception to this statement and all statements regarding the limits of our perception. Anything that is wave-base, frequency-based, has harmonics. The higher frequency waves mix with the lower frequency waves and alters them. Some people are very sensitive to these changes and some are not.
Tom Scholtz, of the band Boston, said in an interview that he had a hard time listening to music from CDs so he hooked up a spectrum analyzer and compared a song from a CD and the same song from vinyl and found that the music on the CD, digitzed, had introduced harmonics and phase shifts that the record did not have. If you have an understanding of Fourier series, you can see why this would be the case (you should also take a look at the article below on signal processing[^]).
Now, you might not be able to distinguish elements below 1/600th of an inch, but that does not mean you cannot see them. I have a form of blue/yellow color blindness where I can see blue and I can see yellow, but I have a hard time distinguishing the two of them side by side. I can do it, but it is harder than red/green.
What I am saying is that people will blythely throw away data that they believe isn't useful data because it cannot be immediately appreciated when, in fact, that data colors other data, makes it richer and more vibrant and should not be tossed out so quickly.
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
In most cases the only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment. -- Marc Maron
I am not a chatbot
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Well, I absolutely cannot stand colour fringing, or grayscale antialiasing blur. But I don't mind the slightly pixellated look of monochrome font rendering. Why is that a problem again?
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The most important operating system developers write software for is not Windows or OSX or Linux or Android. It's Homo sapiens 1.0. We make software for people first. Very wise words from a very wise soul, Bill Hill. Rest in peace Bill Hill, father of True Type and Clear Type.
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Personal computers have been around long enough to become a part of our history and shared social consciousness. As time marches on and older hardware dies, emulation is often the only way to experience these orphaned systems again. Amiga has been mourned more than most. Emulators are tricky business, however. Mastering and maintaining them can sap enough enthusiasm that you're left wondering why you bothered. Cloanto carefully sized up this common problem when putting together its Amiga Forever package, and the results are impressive. Too fancy and new? There's C64 Forever, too.
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Microsoft has exhausted its initial supply of the lowest-priced Surface RT tablet, which now is backordered by three weeks. You can still order the keyboard, though. Or buy an actual laptop...
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A few years ago I blogged about FizzBuzz. At the time I thought I would give the problem a go in F# and sure enough the solution was fairly simple – I then also did a basic solution in C# but never posted it. Since then I have learned that being able to solve a problem and how you solve the problem are two totally different things. Today I decided to give the problem a retry and see if I had learnt anything new in the last year or so. An elegant attempt at defeating the goal of a simple solution.
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Useless wanker who has too much time on his hands (when it is not his you-know-what).
This is what happens when you start putting in functionalities such as dictionaries, templates, delegates, etc., into a programming language.
An idiot would want to use all of them in the simplest programs.
Hasn't anyone heard of KISS? Or Occam's Razor?
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As readers of this blog know, I am a proud user of the third most baffling editor in existence. (Why third? well, I feel confident placing Vim as the 2nd, because while inscrutable, hand-twisting keybindings are difficult, in my observation modal editing is a slightly bigger mental leap for the programming newbie. The most serenely baffling editor of all is, of course, ed.) I also spend quite a lot of time tutoring newbie programmers. One thing I do not advise them to do is to learn Emacs. Not right away, anyway. I have been guilty doing of that in the past; consider this my statement of repentance. Gnu's Not for Newbie Users.
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An inherent problem with Javascript is that it has no macro support, unlike other Lisp like languages. That's because macros manipulate the syntax tree while compiling. And this is next to impossible in a language like Javascript. In LispyScript we write Javascript in a tree structure. If you know Javascript and a Lisp like language, then using LispyScript will be a breeze. Even if you don't know a Lispy Language, all you need to learn is to write code in a tree structure. Just what we always wanted: JavaScript with more parentheses.
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Recently, we have created a console application that parses an entire solution and shows summary information about declared types and the number of members in each type. Let’s tweak it a bit, so it provides more meaningful and useful information, such as a report of Maintenance Complexity (MC) code metric for a solution source code. How does your code measure up?
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This page is in response to Robert Scoble's declaration that the death spiral of MySpace can be attributed to their bet on the Microsoft technology stack, specifically .NET. As a developer with an interest in developing high-performance scalable systems using C# I've learned a few things in my research on what makes systems perform and scale well which is what I'd like to share to the wider .NET world. In order to keep this document palatable and provide the most value I will try to stick to point form and link to various topics and articles with the intention for this to serve as a jump page into your own research. How do you make .NET scale? Contributions welcome!
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Almost half of IT managers in a survey last month said that they plan to standardize their company's mobile platform on devices running Microsoft operating systems, including smartphone OSes Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 8 and tablet OS Windows RT. We've secretly replaced their iPhones with Windows Phone 8...
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Eugene Kaspersky had something of a Larry Ellison moment this week, making the bold claim that he and his company are doing what no one else has ever even attempted: Developing a secure operating system. Not only is the assertion wholly inaccurate (of course companies have attempted to develop secure OSes in the past), but the pledge of delivering a completely secure OS -- even for something as specifically niche-y as SCADA systems and ICSes -- borders on irresponsible in that it's all but impossible to keep. Login denied: letting you in would make it less secure.
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Facebook knows who your friends are. Google knows what you’re interested in finding on the internet. Amazon knows what you’ve bought, and has a pretty good idea of what you might want to buy next. If you were an advertiser, which company’s data sounds most valuable to you? If you had a product you wanted to sell, which of those things would you most want to know? I purchase, therefore I am.
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Surface has a lot riding on its magnesium chassis. This tablet is clearly Microsoft’s flagship, a hero device designed to showcase the best of Microsoft’s Windows 8-based Windows RT operating system. It also represents a gamble for Microsoft as a company: This is the first time Microsoft has made a foray into manufacturing Windows hardware. So how does Surface compare? Let’s see where it stands. If you want it to succeed, start writing those apps!
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Even if you’re not part of the Windows Phone 8 SDK Preview program, you can still start validating your site for Internet Explorer 10 on Windows Phone 8. Windows Phone 8 shares the same Internet Explorer 10 engine with Windows 8, so a PC running Windows 8 is great for initial testing. ...and the rumor mill says IE10 is coming to Windows 7 soon, too.
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In this paper, we describe a method for automatically identifying zero-day attacks from field-gathered data that records when benign and malicious binaries are downloaded on 11 million real hosts around the world. Searching this data set for malicious files that exploit known vulnerabilities indicates which files appeared on the Internet before the corresponding vulnerabilities were disclosed. We identify 18 vulnerabilities exploited before disclosure, of which 11 were not previously known to have been employed in zero-day attacks. We also find that a typical zero-day attack lasts 312 days on average and that, after vulnerabilities are disclosed publicly, the volume of attacks exploiting them increases by up to 5 orders of magnitude. I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
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Testing an RNG is serious business. In total, we’ve considered using four different test suites: Diehard, Dieharder, STS and TestU01. All of these suites can be easily used to test uniform random numbers over unsigned integers. Some are also appropriate for testing uniform random numbers over floatint-point values. But we wanted to test a Gaussian RNG. Here's how we did it. Step .99999990909000:
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You don’t need a fancy distributed framework. You can just load the data into memory and explore it interactively in your favorite scripting language. Or, maybe, a different scripting language: data analysis is one of the few domains where special-purpose languages are very commonly used. Although in many respects these are similar to other dynamic languages like Ruby or Javascript, these languages have syntax and built-in data structures that make common data analysis tasks both faster and more concise. This article will briefly cover some of these core features for two languages that have been popular for decades — MATLAB and R — and another, Julia, that was just announced this year. Big data. No whammies.
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Don't forget Octave[^].
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
In most cases the only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment. -- Marc Maron
I am not a chatbot
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Assisted GPS is used by millions of smartphone users every day to get driving directions, find places, and find themselves. As it turns out, the good old GPS satellite system, by itself, works very slowly and often not at all when you're indoors or walking beneath tall buildings. That's why the GPS software in your phone relies heavily on cellular and Wi-Fi networks to help it figure out where it is. You can't get there from here.
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The Dropbox mobile client caches frequently-accessed files, so that viewing them doesn’t require a network call. Both our Android and iOS clients use the LRU caching algorithm, which often selects good files to cache. But while this is the usual algorithm for caching, I wondered: are there better algorithms, and if not, why is LRU the best option? How Dropbox drops your stuff in your box.
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The heart beating beneath the surface of the re-imagined SimCity is the new GlassBox engine. “It’s a new simulation engine that was developed here at Maxis to support agent-based simulation,” Lead Producer Kip Katsarelis told Wired.co.uk. “It’s not necessarily related to cities, it’s a general engine; we’ve kept the code separate from SimCity. It lets you simulate very simple objects that, when composed together, can do very complex things.” “The genesis of GlassBox goes all the way back to SimCity 4,” added Creative Director Ocean Quigley, “when [engineer] Andrew Willmott and I imagined what the ultimate simulator might look like. At the time, computers weren’t powerful enough for us to implement that at any reasonable scale, so our ideas had to lie fallow until we finished Spore.” Please include Godzilla. Please include Godzilla...
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