Thinking aloud: could one build a combination fossil fuel and solar steam-powered turbine? When the sun is out, you use (supercritical) steam as they describe being able to generate. If the sun goes away, you feed the same turbine with steam generated with fossil fuels. You could use same turbine, condenser, etc but just switch the heat source (or use both) as the environmental conditions change.
Amazingly, this sort of use-after-free causes compatibility problems for allocator writers even today. Imagine if you change the implementation of malloc() such that smaller allocations get their own mmap() region rather than being stuffed in with other allocations. Now any use-after-free bugs to allocations affected by the change will segfault instead of reading garbage, since the allocator would munmap the region upon free().
That's why programs like valgrind are great, they check all your memory allocations, and ensure these kinds of bugs don't occur (though it can only test codepaths that run, and has an overhead for all the checks).
This is also why I'm so excited about Rust. Suddenly your compiler and language definition ensure these kinds of bugs can't occur.
Keep in mind: This class is part of a conservatory-style BFA program. These students are already, or will soon be, custom to public critiques. And learning how to accept public criticism, positive and negative, is explicitly a goal of many such programs.
My two cents: While I would have hated such a thing in an engineering class, I really appreciated public discussion and criticism of my work in the arts. I found that such transparency, even when painful, was hugely valuable to me as I grew as an artist.
Yes, that's a good point. I've certainly never examined the problem through the lens of a BFA conservatory-style program. If a necessary part of the skill-set a student wishes to learn is the ability to accept and process public criticism, it certainly makes sense to emulate that in the classroom.
Does anyone know if either of these platforms support hardware accelerated H.264 decoding? And, do either HTML5 or Flash in these environments support using it?
If you are going to post online about a problem with an Apple product, I personally believe that it's a good idea to also file a bug (http://bugreporter.apple.com) and include a bug number in your post. Doubly so if you submit it to HN.
It is possible that there are people who work at Apple that read HN and if you post a bug number one of those people might then be able to open the bug.
