castell's comments

castell | 8 years ago | on: MPC-HC v1.7.13 is released and farewell

Very unfortunate, MPC-HC was so simple to use, has a slick UI inspired by MS Media Player and to quickly review/seek videos it was the very best. (much faster than VLC for that task)

castell | 8 years ago | on: Why Threads are a Bad Idea (for most purposes) (1995) [pdf]

> Erlang code is single threaded. Each Erlang "process" is an isolated, share-nothing single sequence of instructions, and you don't use semaphores, locks, or critical sections in writing Erlang code. The BEAM VM is implemented as a multithreaded process, but this is not exposed to the Erlang code

The same is true for PHP.

No wonder Facebook developed HHVM for PHP and also uses Erlang with WhatsApp and other parts.

castell | 8 years ago | on: A Hedge Fund Manager Who’s Shorting America’s Malls

Interesting site!

"Complex problems don't have simple solutions. It could be a series of sticks: a vacancy tax, an increase in tenants' rights through guaranteed leases and binding arbitration over rent increases (as outlined in the Small Business Survival Act). Or it could be carrots: tax breaks to small businesses to help ease the pain of high rents, or streamlined registration and a reduction of regulatory hoops for certain types of retail tenant. [...]"

And some possible solutions to fix this complex problem

castell | 9 years ago | on: Chrome 55 to start highlighting Not Secure websites

I am with you. In many use cases HTTP 1 is fine. And as we have seen with the Hearthbleed bug, if you cannot devote resources to keep your HTTPS up-to-date all the time 24x7, it makes your server and the user sessions more insecure. And often providing HTTP and HTTPS makes sense too. So I am against labeling HTTP as "evil" or legacy. We should look who has an interest in doing just that, and why they are forming initiatives. Beside all that pretty much all ad-networks serve HTTP ads, so if you want to loose much of your ad revenue, please go with the HTTPS-only route and face the real world surprise.

castell | 9 years ago | on: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

Is there a way to op-out of this on iOS and macOS? That's really scary.

ML and AI on OS-level should run decentral on the device itself, and don't leak data at all. The spirit of the 1990s was that way, and we older desktop software works fine that way (even on Pentium 1 hardware), so it would run like a piece of cake on a modern smartphone.

The "differential privacy" technology may sound good, but without an independent audit who knows how good it works.

castell | 9 years ago | on: Bad predictions about the internet

Another interesting prediction was Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead" (1995) book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_boo...

The Microsoft Network (MSN v1, MSN dialup) failed spectacularly and the WWW won, Bill Gates rewrote the whole book in less than a year, the paperback edition already featured the WWW instead of Information Super Highway and MSN/Microsoft Network. Windows 95 shipped with MSN integration, an addon "Plus" CD shipped Internet Explorer 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Dial-up#Early_history

castell | 9 years ago | on: Bad predictions about the internet

I remember there were almost no visitors from France on my websites, back in 2000. Many were still on Minitel. From Wikipedia: "In 2005, there were 351 million calls for 18.5 million hours of connection, generating €206 million of revenue, of which €145 million were redistributed to 2,000 service providers (these numbers were declining at around 30% per year). There were still six million terminals owned by France Télécom,". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

I read that Germany had something similar called BTX from Bundespost, but that died a few years earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext

castell | 9 years ago | on: HoloLens secret sauce: A 28nm customized 24-core DSP engine built by TSMC

An article that mentions the field of view: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Microsoft-HoloLens-im...

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev... (scroll down a bit)

Machine translated:

  Opposite VR solutions HoloLens however significantly 
  limited field of view has: Particularly when you view the 
  video on the large virtual canvas was how far away an 
  ugly proscenium effect.  In addition, the glasses showed 
  in black and white content distinct RGB effects - similar 
  to the rainbow effect, causing the color wheel of DLP 
  projectors.

castell | 9 years ago | on: This JPEG is also a webpage

So you are one from the XHTML2 camp then? Good we got HTML5 and good that the weird years of transition to XHTML 1 and unclear vision with XHTML2 and ECMAScript for XML (E4X) are long gone.
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