AncientPC

Let's be honest here. Kindle family of devices is aimed at average consumers. It's sold at retail stores, and everything is setup for you out of box. In fact, it's a bit of a pain to break out of Kindle Fire portal and revert back to native Android.

OTOH, Google Nexus family of devices is targeted towards a different crowd. Nexus devices are comparatively sparse, receive latest updates, and not marketed at all.

With a Nexus 7, there's nothing stopping me from downloading the Kindle app and buying / reading my Amazon content. Try using a Kindle Fire to read Google Market content. If you've never used a Kindle Fire, you have to "jailbreak" out of the Kindle portal where they keep closing the holes.

The PC hardware industry profits are already razor thin, while the laptop industry is marginally better. This doesn't mean an ecosystem can't exist.

Amazon retail / grocery stores are another example of an industry that survives off volume to make up for razor thin profit margins.

  - Kindle Fire: Android Tablet
  - Kindle Everything Else: E-reader

> But while Kindle sales may be falling, demand for the Kindle Fire is climbing, with requests for components up nearly 60%.

The article is about how Kindle Fire may be cannibalizing sales from the e-readers.

There are a few relevant blog posts:

1. Race and gender data:

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-...

2. Attractiveness data:

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati...

I love the low tech video and hope this project takes off. However the biggest issue I see is that git is terrible at handling binary data.

When checking out a repo, git pulls down the entire history. That means binary files added and then later removed sit around forever bloating the repository.

Correct, I skimmed the Wikipedia article too quickly. It is a neutral outcome.

Actually, the Martingale system does pay off if you have unlimited resources. However casinos artificially create limited resources by setting table limits.

It's a bit of a hack, you only see photos if you enable text to email and read it as such.

Here's my data point to counter your data point.

I've been running Tomato and Tomato USB with QoS enabled for 4+ years. Routers were usually WRT54G or compatible Asus models installed into multiple homes or SOHO businesses. Tomato has been rock solid for me over that time period. Uptime was months or years depending on how often the router was moved or power went out.

However I have had a few issues with Tomato USB, which is a 3rd party fork. Switching back to original Tomato fixed my problems.

  git diff --color

Or modify ~.gitconfig:

  [color]
  diff = auto

  [color "diff"]
    meta = yellow bold
    frag = magenta bold
    old = red bold
    new = green bold

I worked in the laptop battery pack industry for a few years, your description is fairly accurate.

6 cell packs cost ~$22 to manufacturer. 9 cell packs cost ~$30 to manufacturer (outdated numbers). Yet, 9 cell packs MSRP for easily 50+% more.

Tor has its own issues (difficult set up, high latency), as well as VPNs (single point failure / tracking, US-based companies must obey warrants).

Perhaps there's an opportunity for a company based in Switzerland to run a private TOR network for obfuscation with guaranteed bandwidth. Private TOR network has its own problems though. You need a large number of users to anonymize each other's data, and the block of assigned IPs can be treated as a single entity and blocked / rerouted as a result.

What happens when you use an off-shore VPN that doesn't keep logs? TorrentFreak listed a bunch of them with their respective privacy policies: https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-ano...

Not just a carrot, but a carrot and a stick. If you don't comply, your family and friends can and will be harmed.

It's a large reason why Mexico military forces stays anonymous by wearing balaclavas on duty and getting rid of the short hair requirement.

The author's style is not idiomatic for C or Go. He uses shortcuts for compactness at the cost of readability.

Normally this alone is not an issue, but using non-idiomatic code is a weak argument when trying to describe language readability differences.

I've gone ahead and reformatted his code using `indent -kr` and `gofmt`: https://gist.github.com/2932444

This link gets posted on HN a lot but I've found it useful:

http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/

Pics: http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/15/3021177/lenovo-thinkpad-x1...

There's a few things of interest:

  - chiclet, backlit, 6-row keyboard (same as X1)
  - new, thinner connector breaking backwards compatibility
  - 1600x900 IPS
  - no ethernet, requires dock or USB dongle
  - no HDMI
  - 2x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, 1x Mini DisplayPort, SD reader
  - embedded 3G

Like Apple, they ditched ethernet and old power cords for slimmer designs.

I personally do not like the chiclet keyboards, but Lenovo has switched to them across the entire Thinkpad line.

OEMs get paid for pre-installing bloatware onto machines which can add up to $40+ per machine. Offering Linux costs them money (in addition to R&D, support, training, marketing, etc).

> Tiled windows are a waste of screen space; I have far more open windows than can ever fit tiled.

That's what multiple workspaces are for. Tiling WMs are especially great when working with large and/or multiple monitors. You're not forced to always use tile mode, you can easily switch between layouts via hotkey: http://xmonad.org/tour.html

Also, a lot of smart people disagree with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3964530

> <Package management>

You don't want to update for fear of breaking something, yet you admit your problems stem from never updating.

Have you thought about Debian Stable/Ubuntu LTS releases?

Are you really complaining that Debian/Ubuntu package availability? Even if the main servers disappeared, you're ignoring the fact that there's plenty of mirrors. What happens if microsoft.com disappeared?

> <file browser density>

Hit Ctrl -: http://i.imgur.com/0xWSw.png

Explorer looks less dense, doesn't have tabs, split panes, copy queuing, real file modification tracking (Explorer requires F5 to see changes). It doesn't auto-adjust column widths, look at file size as an example. Not to mention the explorer.exe process doubles as the WM, so when it crashes all windows get reset.

Nautilus has a better hotkeys. Alt + Home to jump back to home directory, F9 to see symlinks to common directories, Ctrl + H to toggle hidden files, Ctrl + 1/2/3 to change views.

You could have not chosen a worse program to compare between the two OSes.

> <driver issues>

That's a result of market dominance, not anything intrinsically different between Windows and Linux. Congrats!

Have you tried installing a clean version Windows 7 on a laptop? Have you noticed how many proprietary drivers you have to download and install? I did this a few months ago with a new X220 and spent 4 hours finding, downloading, and installing drivers. If Lenovo.com disappeared, I'd be SOL.

Take any laptop and clean install Ubuntu and Windows without internet access. You will have a better working system with Ubuntu.

Due to lack of proprietary drivers, Linux actually has much better support for older hardware. Not to mention a large source of Windows BSODs are due to low quality, 3rd party drivers running in the kernel.

No. There are monetary and performance gains for using Linux on servers and embedded products. As a result, OEMs have a financial incentive for making sure those products run Linux well. No such incentive exists for desktops.

Apple incorporates the cost of OS X into selling hardware. Windows' licenses are effectively free for OEM manufacturers.

Dell is the only major OEM I know of that offers a Linux laptop and I'd guess that division is in the red. The original Asus EEE PC was Linux only and spawned the netbook revolution, but Linux only did not last very long once the market took off and Microsoft intervened.

It's improving the base model look and size for the majority at the cost of adapters for the outliers. Apple has always been consistently designing for mass market appeal for the past decade. If you are an outlier, Macs are not for you.

I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 from 2005. It has a WUXGA display (1920x1200) on a 15" screen.

Sadly, screen resolutions have been decreasing and moving towards 16:9 ratio. It's nice to see Apple emphasize the screen again and push competition.

What about package managers? Windows management (e.g. Xmonad)?

You don't like the KDE/Gnome defaults and don't want to spend time customizing. Fonts? Install from package manager. Themes? Install from package manager. Or download from gnome-look.org and install using gnome-tweak-tool. Yet you go out of your way to tweak Windows to your liking.

I don't have driver issues, but that's from researching purchases before buying.

What advantages are there of using Google-specific authentication over using OpenID with Google?

Self-salting with the domain name serves another purpose: prevents you from using the same password across multiple sites.

If your password is "password_linkedin", it's fairly obvious what the salt is. However, most released passwords are not heavily scrutinized. It's most likely that those using exposed passwords will instead try user@email.com / password_linkedin elsewhere.

You can also easily change self-salt so it doesn't fit any obvious pattern. What I do is a strong base password, then self-salt with the domain name. For example:

Mk3+e1_T2iei

I'm using "Mk3+e1_T" as the base password, "2" as a divider, and "iei" are the first 3 vowels of a domain name (LinkedIn in this example).

> Does this really matter?

Sometimes. If your app is network/memory/disk bound, no. If it is CPU bound, yes. That's why web apps are in Python/Ruby, and games are in C++/C#.

Also, Ruby/Python/interpreted language performances are within a magnitude of each other so they're effectively equivalent.

There's no "better / worse" framework. Django and Flask are two tools that try to accomplish the same thing in different ways.

Django:Ubuntu::Flask:ArchLinux

Django gets you 90% of the way from the start, it's in the tagline: for perfectionists with deadlines. However it's difficult to change certain parts of Django.

Flask gives more control but comes at a cost. Each framework has their uses.

That's what Linux package maintainers do, no one seems to have a problem with it.

Public code is public. As long as the licenses are followed and/or credit is given who cares?

No one has found a good solution to this problem. As an open community grows it will inevitably experience Eternal September and content quality will decrease. It happened with Usenet, Slashdot, Reddit, and Hacker News is following their footsteps. The upper echelon will migrate, others will follow.

Perhaps closed communities with a curated member list is the answer[1][2]. Closed communities are not without its own drawbacks, but the trade off may be acceptable to some.

Open communities allows for anyone's input, but you also get drama like arguing about Javascript semicolons or GitHub's commit messages. However, closed communities are susceptible to group think. How do you judge a minority opinion's validity?

[1]: http://svbtle.com/ [2]: http://www.behance.net/