Ray Cromwell

It's definitely fast, although I'm surprised there's a page load from the main page to the stories. - Matt M (inactive)

Not cool Game! I visited this site once and let it access Twitter, now it posts ads through my account. - Ray Cromwell

Because the most important thing is for a scientist to hold a *belief* that America is exceptional and #1 rather than helping us strive to BE exceptional. Neo-cons hold onto a 50-60s image of US vs Soviet polarization, you know, back # of kids entering engineering/science fields was increasing, not decreasing. You can't be exceptional if you already believe you're the best, you get complacent. - Ray Cromwell

Originally demoed in 1987, the amount of functionality they delivered for the price was amazing, I'd say, too low. Did I mention most of their software was written in 68k ASM, 350kloc of it? - Ray Cromwell

Haha. That _was_ a floating keyboard. - Micah

The Amiga was so ridiculously overpowered for its price compared to competitors at the time. In '87, the 500/2000 were going up against The Mac Plus/IIx/IIci/IIse which were incredibly expensive and still inferior from a multimedia perspective. VGA had just only been introduced in 87 and could still only do 256 colors. Commodore was so incredibly corrupt and inept that they, IIRC, lost the original source designs for the chipsets, so when they introduced the Amiga 1200/4000, they had to reverse engineer the old chips. - Ray Cromwell

Commodore was incredibly adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory... - Joel Webber

Had to reverse engineer their own chips?! Wow-just-wow (thanks for the insight, Ray). - Micah

"The 8244 video-game chip had 40,000 transistors. The ‘‘random logic’’ was hand- drawn using color pencils. At the time, there weren’t many CAD tools to assist in get- ting an error-free chip, so Salmon offered cash bonuses to draftsmen for each design rule violation they found—a nickel on the first day to a quarter on the last. Recently, Nvidia announced the GT200 graphics processor unit that has 1.4 billion transistors—a 35,000 times increase. Al- though the Nvidia chip’s power is impressive, the 8244 was also impressive for the day and provides a nostalgic glimpse of the modern chip industry’s history." - Ray Cromwell

For another great read on the state of the art in the '70s, checkout Warren Robinette's (Atari 2600 Adventure) presentation on how it was designed and written. - Joel Webber

Android today is a mobile phone platform, but in the original conception (http://www.stanford.edu/class...) it was a Smart Camera platform! - Ray Cromwell

"In a report on their findings the researchers said: 'We conclude men's cognitive functioning may temporarily decline after an interaction with an attractive woman.'" - Ray Cromwell

lol, I think my coworkers know me better ! - Vivian Li

I love these cheap NASses that are just Linux, since they are the equivalent of a cheap commodity Linux box in a very small form factor and Kudos to DLink for providing an easy way to install anything on it. I'm surprised they included a BitTorrent client right into the NAS. Joel oughta like this. :) - Ray Cromwell

This falls flat for me. She failed to plan ahead. Most people I know who plan non-emergency trips, especially to non-OECD countries, start the Visa process weeks or months early. Relying on an expedited Visa process and then complaining strikes me as whining. - Ray Cromwell

I'd also like to point out that Brazil only wants visas for US citizens because we force Brazilians to get them to come to the US. Otherwise it wouldn't be all that complicated. - Joel Webber

I was so disappointed, I ignored it. Its the typical "I'm American, what's up with these other countries deal" mentality. Just visiting the US for non-citizens can be a daunting process, and even for citizens depending on your demographic. If you don't have enough international wherewithal to understand this, how can you write a book about business in emerging markets? Can you even know the complexities of an emerging market? - Andrew Bowers

A lot of people can't even get tourist Visas. I have relatives in China, my wife's cousins from Shanghai. They are wealthy and want to visit the US, but have been unable to get a US tourist visa for years. So they go to Australia and other countries instead. - Ray Cromwell

I got a little bit distracted watching this ... what happened to this guy? http://friendfeed-media.com/5c63c6d... - Kelly Norton

Put a Gmail front-end and SMTP server in my Access Point at home. Then let Google DNS send connections to my server if Gmail is down. When it goes back up, my personal server will resync. :) - Ray Cromwell

And yes, it would be trivial to write it myself using IMAP to do the mirroring, I'm just saying, a mirrored architecture should be a given, not a 'hack it yourself option'. And for those services like Facebook that imprison your data? Screw em. - Ray Cromwell

Yeah, this makes a lot of sense at any scale (mail, web apps, etc). If you're a web developer, you should be considering how you can store all your user data in a read-only fallback mode that's accessible when your cloud goes down. - Matt M (inactive)

Ack... We've moved over to OOPHM for some stuff, but hosted mode is still part of some of our workflow (testing etc). No Java5 at all? WTF, Apple. - Matt M (inactive)

Here's the 64-bit edition: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse... - Matt M (inactive)

Wow, the speed improvement is very obvious on my Mac Pro. Everything has lower latency, from the URL auto-suggest to page-load speed. I don't know whether this is because of 64-bit recompilation, or leveraging Grandcentral, or both, but Safari 4 + Snow Leopard is a winner! - Ray Cromwell

I wasn't sure if I wanted to jump on Snow Leopard right away, but I'm seriously considering it this weekend based on all the positive reviews I've seen. - Matt M (inactive)

And you can distribute these between CPU cores and GPU cores too. - Ray Cromwell

I'd love to have Java bindings for OpenCL. This is something Sun needs to ship ASAP. - Matt M (inactive)

That's a little creepy... I just tried it myself and the first result that came up was, funny enough, "Searching for the Snow Leopard": http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Matt M (inactive)

I guess it depends how many weird Japanese anime/manga/cosplay/etc sites you've been to? I see that "searching for snow leopard" as third down, after an IGN story on Snow Leopard. Let's just say, it's absolutely the most esoteric, bizarre false search result I've seen in awhile. :) - Ray Cromwell

The black sheets on the wall just scream classy. I guess this is from the Furries section of Youtube? :) - Matt M (inactive)

I dunno, I thought it was associated with Japanese Cosplay/Anime, but the animal stuff doesn't seem to fit, I guess it's a hybrid East/West fetish? :) - Ray Cromwell

Boy he struggles to find issues. What's that about GrandCentral and OpenCL "For example, Snow Leopard picks up multicore functionality that Windows has had for years, making the system more responsive on the Intel Core 2 Duo-based systems Apple is now shipping. " - Ray Cromwell

He complains about the install process while ignoring the absurd upgrade process in Windows 7. Oh, you mean Apple doesn't give you the option to back up and completely wipe everything except as a hidden power feature, just because that's often necessary on Windows? - Ray Cromwell

I like how he implies, over and over, that Snow Leopard rips off Windows 7 features. Windows 7 isn't even out yet! - Mark Trapp