JL2010

Of the variants of the attack that can leak privileged memory, AMD is only impacted if a non-default kernel configuration is enabled: "BPF JIT"

I can't seem to find any information on how or if this was disclosed to AT&T. Does anyone know how the blogger proceeded here?

"cops are disproportionately killing black kids", then that was disproven

Was that disproven? The studies that I've read have shown disproportionate police shooting fatality rates among African American men, especially in the unarmed case when adjusted for population. [1]

The unarmed case is the one I pay attention to the most as I think that it (mostly?) filters out cases where shootings were justified.

I'd like to keep an open mind so I welcome any reading that has disproven the disproportionate argument.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...

Yes, they have pre-built images for RPi: http://www.minocacorp.com/download/

I'm on the slow ring and recently received it. They have a blog here which details each of their releases on each of the release "rings": https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/tag/windows-insi...

For me, the full-measure solution would be to provide a native port of Visual Studio for Linux. I understand that this is not practical on many, many levels, but if Microsoft were to ever take on that herculean effort they would win me over in terms of my choice for dev tools under Linux.

For now I'll have my Windows stuff in Windows and my Linux stuff in my Linux partition. I do look forward to checking out the linux-in-windows (dynamic syscall translation) feature soon though.

I have a new XPS 15 and you can completely disable the touchscreen in the BIOS. I did this pretty much the first week I got the machine.

Has anyone spent a lot of time with VS Code? I tried it a while back when it was first announced and have not found a reason to re-visit it yet. At the time it felt like a sublime-text alternative instead of an IDE (was it always positioned to be just an editor?) Always great to see more options though.

I've been having some good discussions about this exact topic lately. I'm glad you brought it up.

After mulling it over with some friends, I think it would be awesome to have a community gathering where the principles of its "teachings" are based on respect for the earth, each other, and critical thinking.

Instead of typical weekly worship, it could be replaced by something like "Science Sundays" - where folks can bring their kids for a lecture and experiment that the family can do. If one can find enough local individuals who could serve as advocates then I think something like this is possible. Although, I don't what spark it would need for it to reach critical mass.

The closest thing that we've identified as such a group is the Maker community. One problem that we've had in these discussions is that any time we try to add structure to the idea (ie, a common reference book, hierarchy) we immediately realize that it sounds like it would be mistaken for a cult. :( http://abstrusegoose.com/31

What they're saying is that their underlying hardware has been selected such that it can be used with the Arduino programming environment to target it as if it were a regular Arduino. So it is compatible with Arduino software and tools.

Rdio is probably one of the bigger success stories for Xamarin/Mono You can see a list here: https://xamarin.com/apps

I wish that first chart extended back to say... 1996.

I think it would have given a better scale to indicate how much the rise of the internet has effected traditional mail delivery.

Disclosure: I'm an XBox hardware engineer and encourage you to try the new kinect before writing it off. It is completely re-engineered with new time-of-flight technology that achieves orders of magnitude more precision than the last gen. This is not some BS hardware hype either, it translates into better real world use cases. I've never had to wear any special clothes or paint my walls... it just works for me. It will also work in nearly pitch black environments.

I think the hardware/software co-design for this particular peripheral was done phenomenally well, and MS has had some time to refine its use cases and integration into the system. I'm really excited to see where this goes.

Those are typical names for academic papers, check out pretty much any conference's list of accepted papers for similar verbosity.

"You don't have to have a certain surname to get into Waterloo. You'd be much better off just scoring well on the Fermat Contest. When nobody gives a shit what you have, and it's what you do that gets you places, you tend to be more modest."

Well put. UBC grad here, living and working in the valley now but if I ever wanted to raise a family I would think strongly about moving back to Canada purely for the great accessibility to quality public education.

Besides the cost advantage due to the economies of scale, specialized gaming consoles offer something that both developers and gamers want: a consistent experience due to a common hardware platform.

The QA effort that goes into PC games vs a Console games is a considerable difference. The myriad of hardware configurations (amount of RAM, GPU types and its capabilities, processor speed, etc) make for complicated debugging and graphics quality compromises to capture the mean population of computer performance capability. Contrast this to console development, developers can guarantee the performance of their game and optimize accordingly because they only have to account for one hardware and OS configuration (or 2, if they are going for multi-console release). Likewise, gamers can be confident that they won't run into performance or compatibility issues.

Due to the specialization and simplification of these computer systems, gamers also get to enjoy the sheer convenience of gaming consoles. They boot quickly, jump strait into your game and are fairly no-nonsense.

At a low enough price point relative to general purpose PC's or smart phones, they are still the best experience for enthusiast-level gamers.

Very interesting hardware specs:

Embedded Linux (OpenWRT based)

x86 compatible processor

I'm curious as to why they didn't go with an arm-linux combination. In any case, it sounds pretty well powered and I'm wondering if they'd ever allow 3rd party app development for it as it would be cool to have a tiny embedded box that takes care of the VPN aspect of connecting securely back to home. I'm thinking home automation type stuff.

One thing that has gotten lost in the noise of Xbox One's marketing mishap and the targeting of Mattrick is perhaps his history as a true entrepreneur.

While it hasn't shown so lately, Don does come from a grassroots background in gaming as a former 17 year old co-founder and programmer of Distinctive Software in 1982. His company was acquired by EA which likely put him on the path to executive level success. A kind of exit that some founders dream about.

It's easy to make a judgement and discredit or target him but I do believe he has genuine passion for gaming and hopefully he can infuse some of that in a place like Zynga.

Yes, I also would love to see some of their original IP in modern full glory. Full Throttle and Grim Fandango both have a special place in my heart...

There are tons of trades that do not require you to ever leave a machine shop or electronics lab. If said person is very capable of coding then I would also strongly encourage them to pursue it, but to convince them that it's their only chance? That statement seemed to be a bit of a stretch. Whatever endeavor though, I wish them luck.

I'm curious about this bit: Apple is within its right to send cease and desist with formal demand when it feels its patents are being violated. Naturally, part of a demand is agreement to not pursue the lawsuit if the demand is met.

Typically, for patent disputes, the demand is to stop using the particular technology in question or to enter a licensing agreement, is that correct? So would it be legally OK to tack on another demand that is clearly not related to the patent infringement? Such as, mutual agreement not to poach employees. Or do the demands not have to be relevant to the patent at all?

Tangentially related: http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

An account of Richard Feynman's time at the company.

I had asked a question on stack-overflow a while ago asking for some guidance on parsing this exact kind of stuff. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8198923/natural-language-...

While I wouldn't exactly phrase it like that, it is an important question to ask: Where did he do most of his charging and how does the electric utility in that area produce their electricity?

>doing projects by myself.

Probably not given that limitation. I didn't go to UofW but I spent about a year in Waterloo on an internship. In terms of the experience that you'll get out of it, one of their biggest assets is probably the type of students that they draw - if you won't be working and learning with/from them, then it probably won't be worth it.

Maybe this is a better take-away when comparing the two:

This is a showcase of the progress of such inexpensive, accessible, and miniaturized (embedded) hardware over the course of a little more than a decade - back when we needed much more bulkier and expensive PC's. Yes there are better examples of things that can fit in your pocket and do the things of yester-years N times better, but I still like seeing such raw and transparent examples. Extrapolate this by another decade, it's nice to imagine about what's coming next.

I'd have to agree with this assessment. I'm not sure where they got the idea from that people actually want to do work on these machines. I actually like the surface with metro UI purely as a tablet - the snap in keyboard is super convenient but I struggle to think of enough use cases where I would have it snapped in for more than 5 minutes - let alone fire up word or excel.

>some serious standard-breaking things (bad)

Could you expand on this perhaps? The book sounded pretty compelling up until I read that.

The implication is about the type of humans at Bing, y'know, the Microsoft type?

Agreed, Valve has been known to go for the things that add the most value to the experience, whatever that may happen to be. Before it was lip syncing and facial expressions, now it may be game economics or building the best PC gaming distribution service. So long as they have stellar artists, having a slightly inferior engine means very little to me as the end consumer.