Viewing profile — alan

Static a/b testing?

7 years ago I tried to start a project to allow customers to pay through the ad networks. IE rather than seeing ads, you'd see something saying how much you were providing to the w…

Yes, and when I bought CDs back in the 90s I didn't really expect to be listening to them 25 years later. My tastes change over time. On the other hand I'm a little confused what y…

I buy .m4a files from Apple and download them, then copy them from my laptop to my Android Phone. At this point they're so disconnected from the Apple infrastructure, I don't see a…

Based on the title I thought this was about people who created and killed programming languages. I was sorely disappointed.

I think the server would be able to encrypt with the user's public key, that way they wouldn't be able to read it. They'd have to send the encrypted data to the client to be decryp…

Duff's device does not do memcpy. It's writing all the elements of a string to the same location in memory, where there's a port.

I never figured out why the cobalt has to come from the Congo. There are cobalt mines in North America that are sitting idle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt,_Ontario

I'm suddenly imagining a hydrogen balloon-plane at take off that uses up the hydrogen in the balloon as it flies, until the balloon has been fully reeled back into the plane and it…

Hmm, could we use interactions with the Earth's magnetic field for thrust when in LEO? With the Sun's magnetic field? It would be slow going.

We might be able to start using this as a way to specify planets, rather than the arbitrary number-by-discovery. Try StarName(with catalog info)#log(approximate radius of orbit) Ea…

The World is Not Enough is the movie you're thinking of. From 1999, if you want to call that recent; going back 18 of the 55 years of Bond movies.

For that matter, the app could just record every time it "sees" an object and when you mark it lost, it tells you where it was the last time (GPS coordinates and all) it "saw" it.

Could the fact that the other kilogram weights are being moved around maybe affect their weight? Like they're more exposed to chemical disturbance? Some form of tiny relativistic e…

Sounds like an industry ripe for disruption then....

> I'm not sure the author realizes TCP is a virtual circuit protocol (then again I'm sure OSI had one or more much heavier weight ones). You've missed that they're referring to lev…

My take away is that it's a child dies of poor nutritional education of the parents

Some websites now will include a hidden input field in all forms to convince IE that it's supposed to be sending UTF-8, not latin1 (And so the site can recognize if the input was l…

I'm more interested in this "one-way valve" they're talking about. While they seem to talk mostly about blowing, the valve seems to be the actual invention.

> This is the case in every country. Those at the top will take an inordinate amount of time to make rules that benefit themselves and their friends. It's actually a bit simpler th…

Looking at those pictures, I wonder "Where are the roots?" It's like the artists think the tree stops where the trunk meets the surface. I see rooms where peoples would be walking …