401–410 of 510 posts
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Half a joke, because the concept is very much the same. You "paint" to an invisible buffer and then you swap.
Yeah, but the concept of double buffering is to swap every frame, for performance gains. Here nothing gets swapped, and just temporary the screen gets hidden. So vaguely similar ... but not very much the same in my opinion.
Back in the '90s I consulted at HBO, and they were migrating from MS Mail on Mac servers to MS Exchange on PCs. Problem was that MS Mail on the Mac had no address book export function, and execs often have thousands or even tens of thousands of contacts. The default solution was for personal assistants to copy out the contacts one by one. So I experimented with screen hotkey tools. I knew about QuicKeys, but its logi…
The voice thing is hilarious. Thanks for sharing.
And when I went into the Windows sound scheme configurator, it had wacky names for some events like "asterisk" and "critical stop", with no explanation of what might trigger them.
So as a first step of narrowing it down, I made self-explanatory sounds for everything: I just recorded my voice saying "open program", "program error", "restore down", "exclamation", and so on, through the whole list, and assigned each sound to its respective event. There were a lot of them!
(Mind you, it was all the rage at the time to have whole collections of funny sounds assigned to all this stuff, movie lines and SFX and what-not, so there were these subtle games of one-upmanship to have a cooler sound scheme than anyone else.)
Not me. I had created the world's most humorless sound scheme. The only possible improvement would've been Ben Stein voicing the whole thing.
But in doing so, after a while, it took on this air of absolute hilarity. Like here's this machine that's capable of anything, it could make a star-trek-transporter sound, but there's just some guy's voice saying "empty recycle bin" with a flat, bored affect.
We have a production service running for years that just mmaps an entire SSD and casts the pointer to the desired C++ data structure. That SSD doesn't even have a file system on it, instead it directly stores one monstrous struct array filled with data. There's also no recovery, if the SSD breaks you need to recover all data from a backup. But it works and it's mind-boggingly fast and cheap.
I've always wanted a Smalltalk VM that did this. Eternally persistent VM, without having to "save". It just "lives". Go ahead, map a 10GB or 100GB file to the VM and go at it. Imagine your entire email history (everyone seems to have large email histories) in the "email array", all as ST objects. Just as an example. Is that "good"? I dunno. But, simply, there is no impedance mismatch. There's no persistence layer, yo…
Old HN discussion with Wikipedia pointers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18907798
Not my idea or implementation. Our startup built a plugin for Microsoft Outlook. It was successful, and customers wanted the same thing but for Outlook Express. Unfortunately, OE had no plugin architecture. But Windows has Windows hooks and DLL injection. So we were able to build a macro-like system that clicked here and dragged there and did what we needed it to. The only problem was that you could see all the actio…
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There’s a theory that cats mostly domesticated themselves; human settlements and their large grain stores proved to be a reliable source of rodents for them to hunt, and the humans tolerated the cats because they kept the rodent problem in check, but these cats would have lived a semi-domesticated lifestyle around human settlements without initially being kept as household pets. Maybe the feral cats of Istanbul are t…
When I was a kid, that still used to be the norm on farms. There were farm cats and house cats. The farm cats were there to kill rodents and otherwise minded their own buisness. You could not just take them up, they would have bitten you. I think this has gotten out of style, as I have not seen the division nowdays and all cats seem to be gotten tame.
I used a WiFi smart switch and a USB thermometer to make a sous vide cooker. I plugged a slow cooker into the smart socket, put the thermometer in it, and wrote a program to turn the switch on/off depending on the temperature the thermometer registered.
It ended up wearing out one relay, but he had a spare and just swapped it in and restarted the script from where it hung up. For the cost of like $30 and a few days, it gave us a new unobtanium unlocked unit.
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Would love to see that implemented here in USA. People in places like NYC love to catch and spay every cat they see, then go on to complain about too many rodents around.
Rodents are an issue of trash and food left around, not a problem of not enough cats. Cats shit in my garden and leave dead songbirds where I grow food. No, we don’t need more cats.
B2B startup in the sales/financial space. We were solely targeting Salesforce customers in the USA at the time, who conduct all transactions in USD ($). So sprinkled throughout our very large app were thousands of dollar signs - some rendered on page load in the HTML, some constructed via JS templates, some built on graphs in d3.js, and some built in tooltips that occassionally popped up on the aforementioned graphs.…
A friend of mine was hit with a "prank" that created a directory hierarchy so deep the OS couldn't get down to the lowest levels of it. Not even `rm -rf` would work, and I couldn't `cd` to the lower levels to start deleting things one at a time.
I realized I could `mv` the top level directory to a sibling of its head, rather than to the child of it, cd into that, delete all the files, then do the same with any subdirs. So I was able to script that and started deleting the files/dirs from the top, rather than the bottom up. Took a while, but worked.