3chelon

I used to always put the full-stop (period) inside the quotes because I was brought up using that rule, but in modern writing it's considered more a matter of stylistic choice, because yes, sometimes it just looks, well, "wrong."

When I was a graduate dev I worked for a company whose primary product was a APL interpreter. So it was an interpreted language, but it may well be possible that it can be compiled or JIT these days. The interpreter was written in 68K assembler and was pretty fast I suppose, but then I'm not aware any benchmarks to compare it with, since APL is not like anything else (except, as someone pointed out, maybe MatLab).

Fair enough. It's a common mistake for people from an English background, too, but these days we have tools to eliminate typos like that.

Spelling.

Buy one now. After the Solar Flare Apocalypse, those of us rocking mechanical computers will be control the world!

I'd have thought a mask ROM would be incredibly easy to build. And the whole system would be nonvolatile anyway, so storage of mutable data would be straightforward.

Ultimately the code would compile down to binary; getting it into the machine is just like any other interface.

Yes, he's often described as an early Pop artist, but unlike the more famous Warhol & co., who used and embraced industrial processes, there's a definite "craftsy", home-made quality to Johns' work.

He used encaustic, which is a mixture of hot wax and oil paint, which lends the paintings a really unique texture. There's also often newsprint embedded in the paint, which adds another layer of texture.

Reproducing the American flag in this medium, and at scale, offers all sorts of questions. The red drips are maybe too symbolic, but the embedded newsprint gives a sense of history, and the whole handmade effect just adds to the ambiguity.

I once read some of his sketchbook notes, in which he'd written something along the lines of "try to hide what's going on from the viewer." So, he was being deliberately vague. And somehow it works, at least in his early works.

Thanks everyone for the corrections, obviously my understanding was flawed there!

I read some linked articles on this. It seems she did it simply to hide the evidence. Unbelievable, it's estimated she destroyed $1bn worth.

it's more of a tiny ray tracer

It's a ray caster, where the rays are sent out from the camera to intersect the map. With ray tracers, the rays are sent out from the light source, IIRC.

Your point on OpenGL is valid, but that just removes all the learning from it. OpenGL does so much of the grunt work for you. This kind of old-school game engine is a great learning experience.

Wow, this reminds me of writing a very similar engine in the mid 90s after learning about ray-casting (and playing Doom of course). There was a very good book which covered the whole process called "Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus", which I would have killed for at the time!

+1 for nostalgia!

This is news to me. I didn't realise Dawkins' theory had been so thoroughly refuted. What's the evidence for this?

Seconded. I actually read "The Blind Watchmaker" first and that had just as big an impact on me. As someone else said, no going back after reading it. It also gave me the confidence to realise I was actually an atheist, not an apologetic agnostic!

It's such a weird twist of irony that someone like Dawkins invented a term that has been so abused and deformed beyond all recognition. As expected, he hates what it's become; but it has truly evolved, beyond his control, so there's a wonderful truth there!

My current address has no street name, just a house name and village name. Technically, there is a street name, but no-one uses it because it's the main street through the village.

I really don't see it as a problem: the local postman knows every house, and these days with GPS the postal code gets delivery drivers within a few yards without a problem. In fact, a post code and flat/house number or name is technically enough to identify any property.

I always hesitate before posting travel updates on social media, and make sure it's only visible to friends. Probably paranoid, but it makes me feel better to not live with the added risk of entire the world being able to know my house is empty.

That is a very good point.

The timing of this is superb - I literally just ordered an IceStick FPGA with the intention of recreating an 8-bit gaming platform, and I was wondering if I could somehow start playing in a virtual environment first! Can't wait to try this out...

It seems Apple have been trying to occupy the moral high ground on privacy for quite a long time now. It's relatively easy for them to differentiate themselves from the other big tech companies, because Apple's products cost so much that, for once, you are not the product.

Unless FB and Big G start charging for their services, I don't see how they can change their behaviour.

Indeed, since the days of the Gutenberg press. All new tech heralds the end of times.

The article specifically points out that Intel/AMD took on board all the lessons from RISC as they evolved the x86 series and now it's pretty much a RISC architecture too.

Yes, but they sit right on transatlantic fibre-optic trunk cables. Presumably leased lines? It's a totally different proposition to a public mobile internet.

Yes I find this shocking too. My kids are teenagers and their high school makes them check their phones into a special locker room during school hours.

I hadn't imagined it any other way until other relatives said their kids were actually using their phones in class. It seems utterly insane to me - how is it even possible to teach a class like that?

Schools have always had rules, so it seems like a no-brainer to enforce this one, and if parents complain, ask them to take their kids elsewhere.

I do wonder how easy it would be to complete automate eye tests. It seems to me a robot could do the job very easily.

Me too. Even though my eyesight continues to deteriorate, a pair of old prescription glasses is many times better than no glasses at all in an emergency!

Of course not, it's an insane argument. To end up with a decent retirement fund, say $1.5m, you'd need to buy 50k units and store them for years. Whether you could even get hold of such a large quantity would be questionable, but when it came to shifting them you'd encounter a huge liquidity problem as you single-handedly flooded the market and watched the asking price plummet.

I think the only feasible way would be to use them as retirement income rather than a lump sum, by trickling them onto the market at the rate you needed for your weekly income.

Interesting, but so much left out. This quote:-

Through some digital gymnastics that would take entirely too long to explain, suddenly my wife’s phone shoots a 279-byte information packet containing “I love you” at the speed of light in every direction, eventually fizzling into nothing after about 30 miles.

is the biggest understatement in the whole article. It omits the entire baseband!

Within the baseband, even the channel coding process itself is insanely complex, involving convolutional codes, CRCs, weird interleaving schemes... and then there's the modulation, and all the L1 signalling to support it all... I could go on.

Sudden disconcerting sound warning!

My exact thought.