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Comment: Re:Sounds creepy .... (Score 1) 188

by Bitsy Boffin (#46041377) Attached to: Python Scripting and Analyzing Your Way To Love

So the real thing here is that someone needs to be building a dating website for nerds (assuming it's not already happened).

It did, it used to be called OK Cupid. Really interesting statistical mining blogs, actual matching algorithms instead of "look at purdy picture book", interesting somewhat more nerdly people, interesting experiments ("best face"...), developed by nerds, developers openly highly critical of the way that etc operated ( specifically).

Then bought them. I'm pretty sure it's seeded with fake profiles now (sorry, but the chances of a page full of people living in the next suburb to me, here in a small city in New Zealand, with high match percentages... about zero in the real world). There's a focus on images. The blogs have gone. The experiments have gone. The insight and analysis is gone. It's probably only a matter of time before personality profiling is reduced to about 1% of match score (if it hasn't already).

Comment: Re:Ironing (Score 1) 37

by Bitsy Boffin (#45379757) Attached to: Ink-Jet Printing Custom-Designed Micro Circuits

Sounds a lot better than the home-brew technique I've use a bunch of times in the past:

Dry film negative photo resist is available on ebay (or in New Zealand from me), briefly it's used thus: cut to size, adhere to cleaned board, expose to UV (sunlight fine) with negative artwork (tracks transparent), develop in weak washing soda solution, etch, strip in stronger washing soda solution. No need to work in a dark room just don't do it in front of a window, normal household lighting is fine.

For more details, see my tips for using Dry Film Negative Photoresist

Comment: Re:THE virus is a bit of an overstatement (Score 1) 202

by Bitsy Boffin (#45197525) Attached to: Finnish Team Makes Diabetes Vaccine Breakthrough

. He is saying consuming large amounts of sugar is tied to the onset of diabetes. Which is what the American Diabetes Association also says.

Of type TWO diabetes. This discovery is about type ONE diabetes, the cause of which has nothing to do with the consumption of large amounts of sugar or otherwise. They are two quite different diseases, with different causes, different treatments, and different complications. Unfortunately they didn't get different names, they really should have.

+ - Pitch Drop caught on camera.->

Submitted by Bitsy Boffin
Bitsy Boffin (110334) writes "As reported by the Huffington Post, a Pitch Drop has finally been caught on Camera...



Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Try Darcs, you'll like it! (Score 1) 165

by Bitsy Boffin (#44013959) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosting Git Repositories?
Darcs is lovely. But completely impractical.

It's a real shame because it *almost* does version control right. But not quite.

My main gripes:

  • Slow. Very very painful sometimes, minutes of processing for an operation on local disk slow...
  • Implicit dependencies make it virtually impossible to "cherry pick" - a feature which which is supposed to be one of the single biggest reasons for using Darcs, but which implicit dependencies make almost useless, "you can't have that patch without that other massive patch which you don't want but happened to touch the same file in an inconsequential way".

Comment: Re:So many have tried. And failed.. (Score 2) 91

by Bitsy Boffin (#43705461) Attached to: Flying Car Crashes In British Columbia

Helicopters are

1. Hard to fly

2. Have a problematic requirement for a long tailboom with a torque countering thrust at the end of it

3. Or counter-rotating rotors with complex drive requirements

4. Have rotors that are long and ungainly and need to be stowed

5. Need large amounts of power to generate all required lift

Making one into a car means solving all those problems, AND adding all the safety equipment etc that is required for a modern car, AND still having it light enough to get off the ground safely.

Fixed wing, Gyrocopter, or Paraglider based machines are a much easier task than a helicopter based flying car, as evidenced by there being actual existing modern examples of all three (Terrafugia, PAL-V, Maverick), and no existing examples of a helicopter based one.

Comment: Re:CSS is great, unfortunately designers can't use (Score 1) 190

by Bitsy Boffin (#43616469) Attached to: CSS Selectors as Superpowers

To an extent, but as another poster replied, it's more down to simply how the designer's brain works, can't blame them for that, but it doesn't make life easy.

I think at the bottom of it is the common problem that CSS was developed by programmers, not designers, and the programmers didn't understand that the designers don't think like they do, and that they can't think like they do.

As a result, it's just not a good fit for designers, so they use it badly.

Comment: CSS is great, unfortunately designers can't use it (Score 3, Insightful) 190

by Bitsy Boffin (#43608275) Attached to: CSS Selectors as Superpowers

CSS is great when used properly (although, somewhat hereticly, I would kill for definable constants a-la 'color: PRIMARY_WEBSITE_COLOR;' without resorting to dynamically writing the CSS ).

Unfortunately graphic (website) designers are completely shit at using it. Even simply understanding when they should use an ID and when they should use a class seems to a'splode their brain, "huh, what is wrong with using this same id a bajillion times in the page". Don't even try telling them that "redtext" is not a good classname. Heck half of the time it's ".span1"!

They don't even know (even after telling them half the time) that you can use multiple classes on a single element, let alone combine selectors, everything is a single ID or classname to them. The amount of copy-paste in most web designer's stylesheets is simply offensive, all because their brains don't allow them to modularise their desires into useful reusable CSS classes. Cascade? Inheritance? These are foreign words to the average website designer.

There is no point telling a designer how they should can make their CSS better, they just won't understand. Worse, if the programmer, who does know how to use CSS as it was intended, attempts to fix their stylesheets (or worse, cut up their photoshops into proper HTML and CSS), the original designer just won't understand how to do anything in the stylesheet anymore.
