The modern, non "black hat" use of the word originates with the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club (http://www.gricer.com/tmrc/dictionary1959.html) who define "hack" as '1) an article or project without constructive end; 2) work undertaken on bad self-advice; 3) an entropy booster; 4) to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack (3)."
Quite a few words in the "computer geek" lexicon were borrowed from the TMRC.
Objective-C isn't a proprietary language, as this author annoyingly suggests several times. Regardless, the new JavaScriptCore framework is pretty impressive. It would be nice if there were some official Apple docs beyond the one WWDC video, though.
It's worth noting that there are some discrepancies between that codebase and the actual behavior of the public iOS 7 framework, but if you're not doing anything too crazy it probably won't be an issue.
No it couldnt. Air Conditioning is not just about temperature but also humidity, which this doesn't address. I think room fans would still be necessary to keep the air moving as well. Plus, could tricking your body into thinking its cooler than it actually is be dangerous? Make sure people don't wear it while doing vigorous physical activity in the summer heat.
I believe the idea is not that it's a nervous system trick, but by heating or cooling a part of the body with high blood flow which occurs near the surface of the skin, you're actually going to impart a meaningful change on overall body temperature. Hospitals already do this for patients with hypo/hyperthermia. This could be monitored/regulated with a second band worn on the upper arm near the armpit which measures body temperature directly.
The question is more one of how much of an actual change can they impart (and under what circumstances?) given the size limitations of something like a wrist strap. My hunch is that this would need to be a fairly large system (including its power source) to have a meaningful impact outside of sedentary activity in an environment which is mildly under/over temperature. So good news for people who get chilly working long hours in their cold offices (which is a completely viable market), but not for runners looking to shed gear. Maybe there's something there for cyclists though, but only if they're willing to put up with a wheel generator.
Also, humidity impacts comfort largely because of its impact evaporation rates. Reducing body temperature reduces the rate of perspiration, in turn reducing the impact of humidity. You're right that it won't eliminate the effects of very high humidity, but it would reduce them.
>I believe the idea is not that it's a nervous system trick, but by heating or cooling a part of the body with high blood flow which occurs near the surface of the skin, you're actually going to impart a meaningful change on overall body temperature.
From the article i understand that it is a nervous system trick: "The research suggested that anything with a temperature change greater than 0.1 degree Celsius per second would produce the effect".
From my very limited experience SF is not that humid, yet has a lot of AC.
Things like painting roofs silver or insulating buildings are great starts to reducing AC use. (Dark roofs can reach 66C to 88C in hot weather, better roofing helps a lot. (http://www.epa.gov/greenhomes/ReduceEnergy.htm#advhome))
But this? I'd freakin' love to try something like this. I'm almost always too hot, even in England.
You can also just play on one board, swapping your opponents pieces for pieces of your color when you take them (obviously you need two sets of pieces). This is called crazyhouse.
It's unfortunate that the icon designer mentions iterating on handles for the cup and how difficult it was because he still got the perpective (and color) wrong.
Universities will shrink to coffeshops? That's a very CS/math-centric viewpoint. How are you going to do MITx with with Chemsitry? Physics? Biology? Med School? Anything that requires specialized equipment? How will you do team projects that require people to be in physical proximity to one another (building complicated things, for instance).
Universities aren't going away. At most, some programs may become "virtualized" but even then there's a lot of value add with college. They have specialized libraries and librarians to help you find information that may not be on the internet. They can afford expensive equipment and the people to take care of them. It's often useful just to be around people in your same program to talk about projects and learn from each other. It may not be $100k value add, but that just means college will get less expensive and possibly shrink, not that it will go away all together.
Exactly. The labeling of anything with low resolution sprites/graphics as 8-bit drives me up the wall. The atari 2600 was 8-bit. The NES, 8-bit. They have very different aesthetics. "Low resolution" (lo-rez if you're nasty) would be a much better term as it doesn't tie the graphics to any type of hardware.
That visualization is not very readable. It's neat looking, but kind of horrible. A regular2d grid with countries across the top and meanings down the side would be wat easier to read, especially you wouldn't have to look up what the letters/number mean.
Quite a few words in the "computer geek" lexicon were borrowed from the TMRC.