AncientPC

> Nearly 9 out of 10 downloads of the new version of OpenOffice have been for Windows machines, rather than Linux, according to recently released statistics from Apache.

I'm fairly certain that Linux users install the majority of their software from package repositories rather than downloading and installing from websites.

I'd say a lot more goes into a company's revenue than two single product landing pages. Don't use Apple's earnings as justification for all it's actions.

McDonald's sells the most burgers in the world, that definitely means it's the best in everything burger-related right?

When Go came out in 2009, Android was only 2 years old. Go was easily not mature enough.

Another consideration is Android was fighting for market share from Apple. Forcing Go on developers would just create another barrier to switching.

Go's ARM compiler (5g) still needs quite a bit of work before it can be used on Android. Right now, even the canonical "Hello World" program fails to work on a lot of Android phones.

There is too much momentum behind Dalvik that it would be near suicide to discontinue support. However that doesn't mean Android can't support both Java and Go in the future, but there must be a compelling reason to switch.

Managers pay quite a bit to get "unknown artists" airtime on radio stations.

Smaller bands advertising via internet route still have YouTube, Soundcloud, etc. I've bought a few albums as a result.

Also, with the proliferation of smartphones, a significant group choose to listen off their own devices rather than slog through yet another pop song + advertising.

If you're using Gnome 3 fallback you can add / remove applets like Gnome 2. The only difference is you have to alt + right-click on a panel / applet instead of just a regular right-click.

I hated that concept too when I first switched to Xmonad, but after a few months I've come to appreciate that behavior. It allows me to keep one screen static while working on another.

This allows me to dedicate a workspace to communication (email, IM, etc), server, development, documentation, etc and move among them easily.

Could you point out some of the useful features removed in GNOME 3 not available in fallback mode?

I switched from GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3 -> GNOME 3 fallback + Xmonad. I tried to find a suitable alternative to GNOME 3 (Cinnamon, Unity, KDE, XFCE) but was excited to find out about fallback mode.

It essentially behaves like GNOME 2 for me, except now I use Xmonad for WM instead of Mutter / Metacity.

I've lived in Waikiki for the past 2 years. I'm a 15 minute walk away from the beach. Do you know how often I visit? Once a week.

Moving here will not magically make you more outgoing or productive. While I love it here, I lived in Austin and miss the tech culture from the area.

Granted I probably should network more but it's mostly IT, real estate, and tourism industry. There is no comparison to SF / Austin for startup culture.

If you're browsing HN and in Honolulu, let's grab a beer.

HD means high definition. The TV people have adopted that term for HDTV, so be it.

I threw a number out there, but should have known better since someone was to nitpick it.

The correct term is PPI (screens) over DPI (printers). Also, PPI is pixels per inch. PPI is not relative to viewing distance. DPI is not relative to viewing distance.[1]

An iPhone 4S has 326 PPI. We already have a technically accurate method to measure pixel density, so let's use it. Use bytes to describe data, not Libraries of Congress.

Retina is a marketing term. Does phone A had better PPI than phone B? I don't know, is Retina better than Super AMOLED++? Why not just compare technical details instead of resulting in fuzzy marketing word arguments?

[1]: DPI does not change with viewing distance, but the closer the viewing distance the higher the DPI needs to be to achieve the same visual effect. A billboard can look the same as a postcard at a much lower DPI because at that distance the human eye can't discern the individual dots.

I agree. Why use the term Retina? That term means nothing to many consumers.

Why not use the company agnostic term HD? You can be even more technical and say displays with 100+ DPI.

I don't see much value for most of these Unicode domain names except for novelty.

However, CJK domains are a potential goldmine if you factor in:

1. Most internet ready devices in Asia have Unicode input (language-wise). For example, they can easily type 日本.com (Japan).

2. China's internet users count has surpassed 500M.

A brief lookup revealed that the most common 1-2 character domain names have already been picked up.

I don't use SQL very often, but I've found Jeff Atwood's explanation using Venn diagrams sticks in my memory pretty well:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/10/a-visual-explanatio...

Having a car provides function, but the difference between a mediocre car and a great car is $10k+.

Spending the extra $10k for a better car leads to less happiness than using that same money for a 2-week vacation in Europe / Asia.

I don't know, we were a really small shop?

It was the first app launch, and we prominently showed an iPhone and a Nexus side by side with our app. Whoever reviewed our app didn't like that, so we took the Nexus image down.

We probably could have just posted the old design back up after the app got approved, but the company didn't last very long past that.

I'm not sure. I haven't closely followed sex.com except when the domain gets sold and resold for millions of dollars, but outside of domain name novelty other porn sites have already dominated the market.

This seems as a pretty low cost method to increase revenue while not being yet another sex site link farm.

Clamshell packaging was made for retail shelves. To prevent shrinkage and increase product visibility, it was designed to be transparent while simultaneously difficult to open.

The explosion of Amazon and other online retailers made the advantages of clamshell packaging moot. However if you are a manufacturer, it may not be economically feasible to produce two different types of packaging for different retailers so lowest common denominator wins out.

Amazon has tried to combat clamshell packaging[1] with a few manufacturers (Fisher-Price, Mattel, Microsoft), but it has yet to be adopted by the rest of the manufacturing industry.

[1]: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/amazoncom-cuts-pack...

I don't understand why people think this is new.

I created a website that announced the launch of a small mobile app for both iOS and Android platforms. I was told by Apple that my app would not be approved as long as I had links to competitors (i.e. Android) on the web site.

While we're on the topic of poor programmer assumptions, here's a problem a developer ran into with his family tree software when it turned out there was a cycle in a user's tree (father had children with his daughters):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6163683/cycles-in-family-...

Hooray X220 owners! I ditched 11.04 for Arch, running Gnome 3 in fallback mode with Xmonad.

Gnome 3 fallback is essentially Gnome 2.x all over again, so I'm pretty happy with the results.

Otherwise I haven't run into any problems so far...

For example, trying to solve this problem (CodeJam 2008 minimum scalar product):

You are given two vectors v1=(x1,x2,...,xn) and v2=(y1,y2,...,yn). The scalar product of these vectors is a single number, calculated as x1y1+x2y2+...+xnyn.

Haskell:

  sum(zipWith (*) [1,2,3][3,2,1])

Python is not inherently functional, just supports a few convenience idioms. It has zip, but no zipWith. As a result you have to use list comprehension to perform the same:

  sum([x*y for (x,y) in zip([1,2,3][3,2,1])])

Changelog: http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES-1.2

Differences between v1.1.19 and v1.2:

  Changes with nginx 1.2.0                                         23 Apr 2012

    *) Bugfix: a segmentation fault might occur in a worker process if the
       "try_files" directive was used; the bug had appeared in 1.1.19.

    *) Bugfix: response might be truncated if there were more than IOV_MAX
       buffers used.

    *) Bugfix: in the "crop" parameter of the "image_filter" directive.
       Thanks to Maxim Bublis.

  Current HBO subscribers = 28M
  Revenue per subscriber  = $5

  Households that can support HBO Go = 5M
  Revenue per subscriber = $15
  Assume 100% of eligible households subscribe.

  (28M * -5 * x%) + (3M * 15 * 100%) = y
  x = 32.14%

For y to be positive (net gain for HBO), the chance that cable companies drop HBO needs to be less than 32%.

If we assume HBO Go adoption rates are the same as cable subscribers (26.6%), that means 800k subscribers.

  (28M * -5 * x%) + (800k * 15 * 100%) = y
  x = 8.57%

For HBO to have a net gain, the chance that cable companies drop HBO needs to be less than 8.5%.

Another way to put it, in order to risk $140M to gain $12M you need to be more than 91% sure.

One of the nice things about using map() is multiprocessing.Pool.map() can be a drop-in replacement.

OTOH, map() does otherwise have a little overhead compared to list comprehension.

I've posted my full test scripts and results here: http://williamting.com/2012/04/19/performance-decrease-using...

I've been using this handle since '93 out of inertia. My tests were done on an idle i7-620M, sequentially.

If your invocation takes about 0.015s, that means you're not looping enough for differences to appear. A 2% increase from 0.015s is 0.0153s, invisible due to significant digits cut off.

> Jekyll is an awesome framework, But, we think it's not right for blogs for a number of reasons. Also, we think that the git push → deploy dance, is a bit too much when you want to make minor edits.

You realize this "dance" is solved by a simple post-receive hook right? For example:

  git clone ${GIT_REPO} ${TMP}                                                                                               
  ${HOME}/gems/bin/jekyll --safe --no-auto ${TMP} ${PUBLIC_WWW}                                 
  rm -rf ${TMP}

Any time you push to that repo, it builds and deploys the new site automatically.

Professionalism. The blog lacks all pretense of any.

- The blog's tagline talks about "bullshit and ... how much I suck".

- It leads off with a close crop of cleavage. This negatively attracts males' attention while being untactful to others.

- He then demonstrates Gimp's new features by making people uglier. Have you watched any of Adobe's demo videos for comparison?

I don't know who this Nicu guy is and what his relationship with the Gimp project, but a look at his LinkedIn profile reveals that he was a developer 8 years before changing careers to photography for the last 3.

However his blog post is #11 under the Google search for "gimp 2.8", so the level of professionalism can leave a bad impression for new users.

People hate change.

Relevant Oatmeal comic: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout

I wrote a few small scripts to test this out. Each contained a simple print statement, then looped it 5000 times and timed it.

There is ~2.1% overhead when using env.

This doesn't matter in most cases, but in a Google-sized company with standardized environments it's worth it.

I don't mean to start yet another tabs vs spaces debate, but I've always felt spaces dictate how others see the code while tabs allowed others to see code however they like (2/4/8 spaces).

One exception is some projects are strict about lining up code properly in multi-line statements, and spaces are more consistent in that respect.

I prefer tabs, but most Python code I've seen has been 4 space indents.

If you're working with a Git repository, there's always `git blame` (http://schacon.github.com/git/git-blame.html).