Viewing profile — abthomson

In the upper right there's a "login with password" link. I logged in successfully using my old number there just now.

It's called Fermi estimation for a reason!

For shorter distances, time-of-flight is not typically used. There's surprisingly little documentation about how these things work online though. From http://ptd.leica-geosystems.c…

The Kwikset motorized deadbolts have tapered bolts to help compensate for poor alignment. I'm not sure why it's not more common with other locks.

Both "normal" automatic transmissions and the Prius use epicyclic gears. The main difference between the two would be that an automatic transmission in normal operation has one pow…

Very true, search for "server inlet temperature" if you want to learn more.

It's definitely not accepted that power and cooling are the dominant cost, in most cases it's the servers: From James Hamilton (who just happens to work for Amazon) http://perspect…

It's not clear why the author decided to compare a ZestCash loan with credit cart debt when they're clearly different products. And while ZestCash's rates of 242% to 462% are high,…

http://thestartupdigest.com/ is useful for finding out about events like this in advance.

I don't know much about ISP DNS configurations, but the problem extends to clients as well. For example, until Java 1.6, the default TTL for DNS lookups was forever.

I'm only sure because I saw a bunch of RTMP and Flex messages going to the central servers (they all have similar IP addresses) and a lot of UDP traffic going to a pretty much rand…

Yes, and this is what chatroulette does. I did a TCP dump of the traffic and the data sent to the central servers is very minimal, mostly short plain-text messages containing littl…

Furthermore, the flow in the two pipes is usually in opposite directions because it's more efficient that way.

If a child prodigy becomes famous in later life, it's probably not because they were a child prodigy but for some other reason. One example I can think of would be http://en.wikipe…