dustmop

Yes, "inverse" could perhaps be more clearly stated as "inverted". I've heard the term used this way before, but it's not common.

If only there were a single word that could convey "difficult to translate without using more than one word", alas the closest we have is "untranslatable".

Yes, a few folks in the NES homebrew scene have managed it. Here's a cartridge my team released this year: http://starversus.com (currently sold out, hope to have more soon) and there's many more at RetroUSB: http://www.retrousb.com/index.php?cPath=30&osCsid=ff2d40cb26...

A crying face is called "ever"

    #define ever (;;)

    for ever {
        // do something
    }

Wow, Super Mario Bros Special looks terrible. Very strong evidence that the main reason the NES was so successful was its easy to use hardware scrolling. Just one write to a memory mapped register and you were set (sort of).

A couple of years ago jwz did something similar, getting the original Mosaic browser to talk to the modern internet: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-brows...

Here as well, a proxy was used to get around the Host Header problem.

The same thing happened years ago to New Brunswick, New Jersey, a college town that produced some very successful artists in the past 2 decades: Lifetime, The Bouncing Souls, Thursday, Gaslight Anthem. Around 2006, the cops started scouring Myspace for shows and permanently shut down a number of popular house venues. Since then, the punks have responded by moving all info to the sneakernet; you can't find out any show details unless you're actually friends with someone who already knows a band or the house owner. Even physical flyers don't have addresses or exact times. It's effectively killed most of the output that this cultural hotspot used to produce.

I used to years ago, but eventually wrote a browser extension Paragrasp to do it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/paragrasp/lhhabjbh... for Chrome and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/paragrasp/ for Firefox.

As of an hour and a half ago, it's April 1 in Japan.

Another possibility, which I use for testing my Firefox Add-ons, is using Rhino + env.js, which creates a very good simulation of the DOM.

If you like this, I would highly recommend the "Carl Sagan Tribute Series" by callumCGLP: http://www.youtube.com/user/callumCGLP#p/c/0/pxlPVSAnWOo

It similarly uses quotes from Sagan's audiobooks, but combines it with the Lost soundtrack (which fits surprisingly well), and footage from Discovery and the BBC. Really great stuff!

That's funny, I was expecting the opposite behavior:

    fart => [ :fart ]
    fart 1 => [ :fart, 1 ]
    fart 1, 2 => [ :fart, 1, 2 ]

I remember getting a Taco Bell Star Wars toy just like this when the special edition came out.

http://www.listia.com/auction/20297

It does the infinite folding thing but doesn't split into two stars.

Well the term is not very precise if the way that you're using it and the way the article is using it are completely different. The article makes it clear that the term "pass-by-value" refers to the fact that the callers' references cannot be unseated by the function call; but it does not mean deep copies are made, like by copy constructor, hence that's why it applies to Java. Allow me to illustrate:

vector<int> numbers; void f(vector<int> args);

Due to C++'s copying, args[0] has a different address than numbers[0], because a deep copy of the vector was made. As the article states, this is not what pass-by-value is referring to, otherwise it would be false that Java / Python / Ruby et al are pass-by-value. So I disagree that the terms are clear, but rather that there is confusion around these terms. As for wanting immutability, it's almost always better for C++ code to write functions not like f but instead like this:

void g(const vector<int>& args);

And apologies for the editorializing, but I do consider this a language design flaw, one inherited from the backwards compatibility for C, which already allowed struct's to be passed (non-pointer) as args and then copied to keep the caller untouchable. It makes C++ code more verbose and more error prone, and is quite difficult for new programmers to grasp.

Hence the word "traditional" in the article.

I reason I think this discussion is ever a problem is because in C++ "pass-by-value" has an extra meaning: that a deep copy occurs. There's no precise term for this, so people started (incorrectly) using "pass-by-reference" to talk about parameters that don't get deep copied. After all, in languages that do it right (Java, Ruby, Python, CL) there's only one parameter passing technique, and therefore no reason to make the distinction.

What is the user action for opening a program or document on the desktop?

Looks to me like CD sales were a bubble, and there's no reason to expect the music industry's success to continue as it has for the prior decade.

I've heard from a few family members that ever since they've started using their cell phones, they can't remember anyone's numbers, and they felt this was making them stupider. As if memorizing sequences of 7 digits is desirable and conducive to being intelligent. I tried explaining that they shouldn't have to memorize phone numbers - they don't represent anything real, they aren't convenient, and there's no advantage to using them. It's much easier to put a number in your Contacts list and reach someone using their name instead, at which point the technology is strictly empowering, and like TFA says, the number is just for backwards compatibility.

I'm one of those few people who completely hated Primer. I found it to be masquerading poor narrative as intellectual mystery. It's possible to present an intricate, complex logic puzzle as story without being totally incoherent, but Primer doesn't even bother.

For a movie that matches Primer in everything it does right, but none of what it does wrong, check out Timecrimes (Los Cronocrimenes). It is far superior.

Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/246/

The common mistake the opposition makes is that the complement of "determinism" is "randomness". In fact, the complement of "determinism" is "non-determinism", of which "randomness" is only one possibility; ostensibly "free-will" is another.

Also, Password Gorilla, which is java and runs everywhere and is compatiable with passwordsafe's databases. I do what Joel recommended, keeping the db in Dropbox so that newly added passwords are replicated and up to date.

If the grey were made white instead I would have gotten this immediately.

After watching this video: http://xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/14310459/kodu/videos/ces2... it looks to me not like Logo, but like all the existing Windows game creators - Game Maker, Klik & Play, Multimedia Fusion - but with a nicer UI and easy 3d. Seems neat, looking forward to me.

This isn't meant to be my view, this is how the internet is viewed by the average non-techie. Yes, I realize how West-centric the point of view is, and that's unfortunate. But it's exactly why we have "dot-com businesses" and the "dot-com bubble", as opposed to the "dot-com-and-net-and-org-and-co-uk-... bubble".

At least keeping the set of TLDs small and restricted to standardized names, or countries that people using them will recognize, helps to keep the recognition problem manageable. But allowing anything and everything for a domain name removes all hope of recognizing one without context.

I've found I sometimes type domain names into the search box just because my fingers are better trained to use "Ctrl-K" than "Ctrl-L" or "Meta-D". Especially since "Ctrl-K" is pretty cross platform, while shortcuts for the location bar vary by OS and browser.

Having names ending in ".com" is great - it says explicitly that the thing is a web address. Just like how the hyphenation of a phone number 123-456-7890 tells you right away that it's a phone number. This is part of why ".com" is more desirable than ".net", ".org", et al. It also shows how blatantly stupid this idea is, since it removes all framing from a web address, making the web harder overall to use.

Sounds like the conclusion is that Chrome OS is Linux, but only in the strict sense - the kernel and not the distribution.

Given that it's been soaking wet all summer long so far (and looks to remain so), I guess it'll be a safe summer in New York.