The script would be for huge amounts of images that may change, if they are provided from a third party. Most thumbnail scripts implement caching, so effectively they are only doing the work once too.
I find it very interesting that apps are downloading images that are an order of magnitude larger (in file size) than they need to be. First we use expensive bandwidth to download the image, battery life to use the radio longer, and then more battery life to resize this image on the device. One easy thing they could do is resize and optimize images server side.
Whether or not his websites are still online doesn't erase the built-up brand. The "Dive Into..." books are still mirrored and generally respected resources.
I think the problem is that Google is increasingly optimized for the vast majority of people who have no idea how search engines work and don't put any thought into their query. They make it so that you can search for "i have this mole and i want to know if it is cancer and also can i get tickets for the knicks game tomorrow" and get something useful, but when you need to search a specific error or programming construct you're out of luck. I wish I could remember specific examples, but I keep having + operators and quotes ignored by Google, or searching for two equally important words and having the second result not feature one of the words. Highly irritating.
Hate it. I was always annoyed when I had to switch from Top News to Most Recent, and now I don't have a choice. The addition of random visual embellishments like blue corners and 3d borders takes away from readability and scan-ability.
Also I can't imagine why I would want a side feed of people commenting on people who I'm not even friend's with photos. This violates peoples expectations of Facebook.
So good job guys, you broke your core product. This is just what you need to defeat Twitter and Google Plus.
Edit: I just noticed they stapled the real time feed to the buddy list, halving it. So now I can see even less of the buddy list (the one they broke last month) at once.
If developers always have the fastest machines available, how will they test or care about speed? I hope they have automated benchmarks of common tasks at least.
(Although it is obviously good to have things compile as fast as possible.)
Your website needs to have a one sentence explanation of what it does, e.g. measure sleep and wake you up when you're in a light sleep. You pretty much have to read the FAQ to figure out that's what it does. Not saying this makes it seem like a quack magnetic bracelet or something. Just a suggestion.
So I've read 1,4, and 5 now, and found them wildly interesting. One begins to get a picture of a protein and fat focused paleo diet, providing great endurance, and our modern and reccommended carb focused diet as a serious kludge.
Very interesting. However, the time frame doesn't work in this example, those studies showed reduced performance for a week, and then back to baseline or slightly above.
This seems reasonable, until you consider that there might be other factors at play. Maybe he eats food that is hard to digest or causes a sugar rush and then sugar crash, and simply not riding the sugar roller coaster felt better, but he'd feel the same or even better by eating meals with less simple carbohydrates.
The point of these studies is to remove these other factors and test one thing at a time.
This ignores all research already done on the brain and nutrition, and also common sense. Its pretty well understood that the brain runs on glucose. Now of course if you eat too much or eat shitty food, you're going to have an insulin spike and sugar crash, and if you're eating too much you probably have other health problems that aren't helping.
Healthy eating, good body weight, and regular exercise sharpens the brain.
Edit: The number of people jumping on board with this "theory" in his blog comments makes me despair for the state of nutrition and health education.
XP simply remembers the last ad-hoc network you connected to, to be used when there are no actual APs around. As a blindingly obvious differentiation, ad-hoc networks have a different icon and say "computer-to-computer network".
Back when Windows XP was introduced, ad-hoc was extremely useful as lots of places didn't have wireless internet access. My friends and I often used it to swap files or play network games.
If anything I would call this an unintended phenomenon of people just clicking something and hoping it worked. The network does not spread because of Windows, it spreads because people select an ad-hoc network without knowing what is.
Why we as a society think its totally great to be completely ignorant and reckless with our computers, I'll never understand.