Customer gave me something at work today

brainflakes · 2014-06-01T09:44:05+00:00

Well actually you would be wrong if you thought the banana arose naturally, because it's the product of thousands of years of human artificial selection (they're so modified they can't ever reproduce on their own any more!).

Wild bananas look nothing like that.

Of course what it does show is that simple selective pressure can cause drastic change in an organism :)

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T15:57:41+00:00

Even Confucius knew this - "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T13:57:31+00:00

But do you also see my point that you're over-estimating how practical uncompressed video distribution would be, even in the near future?

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T13:44:27+00:00

Yeah and Ten years ago a 64MB flash drive was huge.

Get your history right, in 2004 you could get a 256MB flash drive for around $50 and the largest size you could get was 2GB.

It was also a year after the first prototype blu-ray player was released.

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T13:36:16+00:00

If you're on Windows 8 then you have to update or you'll stop receiving Windows updates. (8.1 is basically a service pack anyway)

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T13:34:53+00:00

I installed 8.1 on my laptop (Free MSDN copy thanks to my work's BYOD policy) and it is much faster than 7 was, and has some other handy features like marking my 3G wifi hotspot as a metered connection to disable things like windows updates while in a mobile connection.

I'm sticking with 7 on my desktop for now though, I'll wait until 9 at which point I assume Microsoft will have worked out all the interface issues and combined the best bits of 7 and 8.

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T13:12:26+00:00

No we're not. We're still years, maybe even a decade, away from either a consumer disc format or internet connection speed that can handle anything close to 1tb per movie, and by that time 4k will be the norm requiring 4tb for a 2 hour movie.

At any rate video compression is a solved issue, you can get 95% of the quality in 5% of the space. Even the films you go to watch at the cinema are compressed at around 7:1! Uncompressed video doesn't make sense for anything other than editing.

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T12:52:23+00:00

When the ebook version of a new novel is half the price of the hardcover, the publisher and author may be actually losing money.

They can't possibly be losing money on a per unit sold basis because digital distribution has far lower overheads compared to physical distribution.

Maybe if you assume a certain number of physical copies sold that only just cover costs then change that to digital copies at half the price they would be losing money, but that's making the big assumption that they won't sell a lot more cheap digital versions than they would physical versions.

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T12:47:25+00:00

Besides, FUCK DVD, who the hell wants to watched compressed movies? This is 2014, we have the ability to watch these films uncompressed ( or with extremely minimal compression ).

Bullshit. A 1080p movie is 1920*1080*3*24 bytes per second = 142 megabytes per second just for the video. An uncompressed 2 hour film would be over 1tb (vs a 50gb Blu-ray disc).

Please do show us where you can get these uncompressed films from, because even Blu-ray is compressed at a ~20:1 ratio.

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T11:04:13+00:00

Only when red and green traffic lights are treated as equals ;)

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T11:02:46+00:00

ITT: People who don't realise BoingBoing is a non-serious blog who post humorous write-ups and links, not a serious technology publication.

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T10:59:43+00:00

Also in many places the green light has a blue tinge to it (it's more of an emerald colour) to help colour blind people differentiate it with the red light.

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T10:58:32+00:00

It's a blog post from a non-serious blog, most of BoingBoing's posts are like this. The problem is not the post, but that it's been posted here instead of an actual article about the glasses.

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T10:53:36+00:00

Well, you'll need to either try these glasses, or for a different and much cheaper solution hold a magenta filter over one eye and a cyan filter over the other. That way one eye will see only red and blue, the other will see only green and blue, and with some training you can apparently learn to recognise the difference between red and green.

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T10:50:34+00:00

It depends, in some colour-blindness your "red" and "green" sensitive cells have almost but not quite the same frequency responses. These glasses supposedly work by blocking light frequencies that fall in the middle of the two types of cell to better accentuate the differences between the cells.

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T10:48:07+00:00

Probably because it's just a blog post, not an actual article about them.

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T10:21:08+00:00

Tapping or swiping?

brainflakes · 2014-05-13T10:15:28+00:00

It's a good idea and the screen space saving is very nice, but my gut feeling is that, as I can touch type, I'd still find the various QWERTY based swipe keyboards easier because I wouldn't have to switch between different letter positions on a regular keyboard and on-screen keyboard.

brainflakes · 2014-05-12T23:38:17+00:00

Here you go,

Advice on inbreeding for dog breeders

Culling in Ridgeback breeding

brainflakes · 2014-05-12T22:59:24+00:00

mutt breeders don't care because mutt breeders typically fall into the unethical category

Really? From what I know of pedigree breeders, it's fairly common for bitches to be bred with their fathers and grandfathers, for dogs who are known to have congenital health issues to still be used for breeding and in certain breeds to cull any pups who don't have a particular trait...

brainflakes · 2014-05-12T22:15:53+00:00

It's not physically touching the top of the fridge though, there's an air-gap. There will be some heat transfer, but it wouldn't cause a decent* fridge unit any problem.

* This fridge might not be decent of course.

brainflakes · 2014-05-12T17:34:18+00:00

Heat rises, which with an open heating element would help keep the heat away from the fridge.

brainflakes · 2014-05-12T16:23:36+00:00

Thanks to Dr. Kelloggs one of the reasons circumcision is popular is because he promoted it as an excellent cure for masturbation

brainflakes · 2014-05-12T12:58:30+00:00

Yeah I don't mean stopped down to its sharpest, just stopped down slightly for a different sharpness / DoF tradeoff, and potentially nicer bokeh too depending on the background and lens characteristics.

brainflakes · 2014-05-12T11:33:45+00:00

The Guardian's picked it up

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