Dave Ray

If you’ve got a separate graphics card or have two graphics cards listed for your laptop (with a switching solution like Optimus), the graphics memory will be entirely distinct from system memory (and likely a lot faster GDDR tech).

Handy summary:

- I attended that ultra-orthodox Jew rally about the internet. I thought I’d have some insight because I don’t use the internet any more.
- I couldn’t understand most of what was said, but I think I got the gist of it. Those ultra-orthodox Jews are worried that the Internet is full of filth and can’t be controlled effectively.
- I spoke to some people who were shy, but told me that they use the internet for work sometimes, but hardly ever at home.
- The lead rabbi was old and had never used the internet. Some would say, Why the hell is he in charge then?
- I went home early because it ran late.

I thought the latter stages of the article were fine, but the extensive rally travelogue was pointless and could have been condensed to a couple of paragraphs.

They’re changing the new Visual Studio after developers complained about the UI changes in the latest preview. The Windows 8 screenshot is from an internal build and they’re still working on changes for the Release Candidate.

I hear they’re interested in shooting a documentary about that.

You probably have something against Nokia, so I’ll leave it there. If you can’t look past a company’s current troubles when judging an completely unrelated open SIM standard, then it’s pointless having a discussion.

There are plenty of people who have shoved an SD card into an iMac’s DVD slot by mistake, too ;)

A lot of multi-card readers also read SIM cards, so making sure it doesn’t get jammed if it’s slid into a micro-SD slot is a pretty good idea imo.

So the BBC must have been in on it then. That’s even more fantastical – not to mention cynical and somewhat paranoid – than the alternative to my mind. I wouldn’t have believed in the invention had I not seen it, but I was convinced by the tests in the video. That’s far from being in the same league as believing in psychic phenomena, perpetual motion machines or levitation.

We’re probably going to have to agree to disagree. Cheerio.

Let’s hope the studio doesn’t mess up the sequel with a noir-esque voiceover and a pointless happy ending ;)

Blade Runner is a flawless, perfect, impossibly brilliant film. It should be left unblemished forever.

Which of the seven different versions is perfect? ;)

I don’t really see your point there. Could you explain how searching and sorting prove that programming has to be ‘very in depth and right down to the precision point on how computers work’?

Searching and sorting are a damn good reason why frameworks have extensive libraries of pre-built algorithms – exactly so people don’t reinvent the wheel. For example, do you know how Collections.sort(x) works in Java or do you just use it? You don’t have to read volume 3 of The Art of Computer Programming to sort a collection.

But there’s a video.

With an egg.

And a blowtorch.

It’s up there ^ ^ ^

Did you watch it?

Please explain how they could do that. Is it a magic egg? Mass hallucination? Computer graphics?

Nokia sell a million phones per day. Just because they’re not all smartphones doesn’t mean they’re bankrupt.

Even if this weren’t the case, that’s unrelated to the SIM standard they proposed. Such a standard should win on its technical merits, not partisan voting patterns. From the slides it appears that the Nokia/RIM/Motorola design would have been superior, cheaper to produce and take up less space on the board. I think it’s a shame they had to compromise because of the 800lb gorilla in the room throwing its weight around.

Here’s the research paper which describes the GPU-based N-body solver (for the galaxy simulation):

Did you miss the bit when they put a blowtorch on an egg for three minutes?

This. All we seem to get on TV now is patronising guff like Bang Goes the Theory. Even Horizon seems to have dumbed down in recent years.

Newly launched consoles are sold at a loss to get the boxes in the hands of buyers. Money is made back through games sales (each disc means a platform licence fee paid to the console maker) and future price drops for internal components. That graphics card in the Xbox 360 used to cost a hell of a lot more to produce than it does six years on.

It’s just dushare.com – no ‘www’.

Yep, it would have been nice if the author had done some basic research on alternatives.

You’d need to download and install the Pipe app, which runs on Adobe AIR, as would all your friends with whom you want to share files.

You just have to wait for the other person to be on Facebook the same time as you are instead ;)

Being Devil’s Advocate here, wouldn’t it be better to upload the file to MediaFire and send Auntie the link instead? That way, she doesn’t have to be online and on Facebook at the same time as you are to get the file.

I think you’re confusing the programming endeavour with programming languages. Yes, there are new programming languages being released every year, but I’m willing to bet that programming as a discipline has not changed significantly since you were at University. You can use any language to produce any program (as long as the language is Turing complete). Your relational database skills are still useful, as are the programming skills you learnt about looping, conditionals, abstraction, polymorphism, collections, pointers and everything else. Just because a new language gives you different keywords and libraries doesn’t mean that you have to start from scratch – you already have a massive head start because of your general programming skills. A good programmer can pick up a new language in a few days and be proficient in a few weeks. In marked contrast to what you said, I think the situation is very similar to being a lawyer or doctor – after a break, you’d still need to read up on the changes in the law or recent advances in medical practice.

Programming is very in depth and right down to the precision point on how computers work

Um, no – at least, not universally. There are many different programming languages and environments, each with a different level of abstraction from the underlying hardware. As a coder, you should know this already, but I note that you only have experience with Java, C++ and C. Try Scratch, BASIC, Python, JavaScript, LISP, Prolog and FORTRAN and you’ll see how different the approaches are. I’d definitely recommend some experience in functional programming, as this will be an eye-opener after just using imperative C-style languages.

General maintenance skills are applicable to more than one task. That’s the whole point. Teach someone programming and you engender logical thinking, lateral problem solving, organisation skills, math and much more. Look at the success of the RaspberryPi – there are under 10s programming games in Scratch and having a great time. Why is this wrong? Why shouldn’t programming be more mainstream? I’m a coder and I’d love to see more people interested in the activity and sharing the fruits of their labours.

Learning UML separate from programming itself would be fruitless. The two are complementary.

No one is suggesting that the richest individuals are forced to give money to charity, merely that they pay the same proportion of their income and capital gains as everyone else. This isn’t punishment, it’s fairness.

Warren Buffett wrote an excellent treatise on this called ‘Stop Coddling the Super-rich’