DrSprout

Not for me. For new users. Have I misread something?

I find it hard to fault them for changing defaults, the big thing is my settings haven't changed. (But again, some peoples' settings are bound to have been corrupted or mis-imported during Facebook's quarterly overhauls.)

Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but if their intent was to show what a load of nonsense Apple's insistence that native apps are better is, it sounds like they couldn't have done a better job.

I believe that they haven't intentionally changed privacy settings, but in the frequent privacy overhauls it's inevitable that they break stuff and throw people's data out to the world. They need to stop thinking about innovating and thinking about how to stabilize. Facebook was perfect from a user perspective... 3 years ago. Innovation is at this point antithetical to the social web. It's why Craigslist, despite a no-frills interface, remains dominant.

Stability and user control are primary. Facebook is unstable (in the sense that its interface changes every other month) to the point of being completely uncontrollable by the user.

>In a 2001 study, two scholars in Canada asked 70 people to read “The Demon Lover,” a short story by Elizabeth Bowen. One group read it in a traditional linear-text format; they’d read a passage and click the word next to move ahead. A second group read a version in which they had to click on highlighted words in the text to move ahead. It took the hypertext readers longer to read the document, and they were seven times more likely to say they found it confusing.

In other words, if you mangle a short-story and push it into a different format from the one it was written in, it's harder to read. That has nothing to do with hypertext.

>She found that comprehension declined as the number of links increased—whether or not people clicked on them. After all, whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which is itself distracting.

That's more a question of wordiness than of hypertext. Whether and where to link is a very important decision in modern composition, probably more important than word choice.

Basically, these studies are assuming that all content is created equal, and that's far from the case. I would say it's more a question of poor web design shattering focus - that said, much of the web is designed with the intent of shattering focus.

Why is human supremacy a necessity? Why must a child be flesh and blood? If we want our children to be smarter, more powerful, and happier than us, why should we create children as feeble as us?

>Jesus, if you account for the fact that they promised 1 year hosted service, and 1 year phone support for anyone who donated more than $350, these guys are already underwater.

By "hosting" they mean 1 year of a Diaspora account on their server. So essentially that's 30/month for unlimited photo and text uploads to a walled garden site. I'm pretty sure they're fine.

>If people actually used such a website in good faith

But they don't, which is the point of his comment.

Farmer : producer. Walmart : distributor.

Car manufacturer : producer. Car dealership : distributor.

Software developer : producer. Apple App Store : distributor.

Did you read the root post in this thread? Apple is distributing GPL code, and therefore Apple is responsible for providing source. Cut and dry, cannot get any simpler. If you distribute binaries compiled from GPL source, you are required to distribute source. Apple is not distributing source, case closed.

Furthermore, the App store license forbids end-users from redistributing binaries, which again, is a cut and dry violation of the GPL, since it not only says the opposite, but that you must allow them to distribute binaries and source. This isn't an "if you touch GPL in any way" problem. It's a "if you give someone something under the GPL, you must follow the GPL."

Apple is not a dumb pipe. They are hosting the software.

When my university put RFID tags on all of our ID cards, I fantasized about setting up enough scanners to create a marauder's map.

All you would really need is a simple web server and a shit ton of RFID readers set up all over the place. Completely impractical, but plausible. Now that we've got e-paper, we've got the final piece.

I knew a physicist who only programmed C++ in notepad. He was having some problem with some multiple-body simulation he was working on, and I took one look at his code and told him to paste it into Gedit or Notepad++ or something (since he was a die-hard anti-Emacs/Vim zealot.) He refused, couldn't figure it out, did an "exact transliteration" of his code into Python and suddenly it worked.

Calling that real-world corruption seems fairly self-important. Real-world corruption is when you have to bribe the DMV to get a driver's license on top of the normal fee. Or when you can bribe your way out of most criminal offenses.

Getting taken in by a flashy corporation's sales division is just bad management.

Back when that deal was being floated, it was pretty obvious that most of the potential buyers would probably cause users to leave in droves. Especially since the most likely buyer was looking like Microsoft.

Facebook is very dependent on being a single entity. If it sells, it has to sell to a company larger than itself, and that's about the only thing scarier from a user standpoint than what Facebook has already done.

You have to know that -Wextra exists, which I for one didn't until just now when I ran a sample program. All my projects just compiled with -Wall, which doesn't catch that error.

Also, unless every programmer on the project is being scrupulous about finding and correcting such errors, it quickly becomes line noise, and a lot of it completely unimportant stuff.

The point of Flashblock and NoScript is security without sacrificing usability on trusted sites. Yes, it lets you ignore the Flash, but it doesn't actually protect you because the Flash is still loaded.

I use NoScript. HN and GA are both whitelisted.

>Basically use V phones for V, or throw them out.

Sans contract my Droid is still a nice mp3 player / WiFi device. I'm hoping they back up their bluster about switching us all over to per-GB plans before my contract runs out so I can either renegotiate down to $15/month data or just walk with a nice little subsidized touchscreen device.

But yeah, this is bullshit and needs regulation. The entire market is so far beyond price fixing it's not even funny.

Thanks. Point stands on Perl. Also... BASIC, among others.

It's rather semantic, but I would differentiate typed from untyped by type checking vs. type being an inherent property of a variable.

So you have something in Scheme like:

     (define foo 1)
     (define bar "1")

And that is typed, the former being a number, the latter a string. If you try to subsequently do:

     (+ foo bar)

the program will error out.

Contrast this with what I would consider an untyped language like Python or Perl, where the translation from string to number is done without any warnings showing up.

>[Scheme is] untyped, which makes it ideal for web-based programming and rapid prototyping.

Erm... While Scheme can be useful for web and prototyping, it is typed. That's why R5RS requires functions like number->string and so on.

>A sincere question, why is the onus on microsoft to make sure its .net stuff runs on "one of Google's new fangled hand-held devices"?

Adobe is doing it with Flash. Sun/Oracle does it with Java. FOSS projects do it even with C/C++ code. Javascript, HTML, AJAX, PDF, .doc.

Microsoft claims that they have developed a "standard" called .net, so it's their responsibility to maintain the ecosystem in a manner that makes .net code portable.

>If I was to take their distro and start selling it as Red-Hat Enhanced Pro Super Cool version what you think their response would be.

Now you're just trolling. Trademarks are entirely separate from copyright and patents. Both Red Hat and Google in fact encourage companies to take their code and build on top of it. Of course, Google keeps some things, like Gmail and Maps closed source, but they don't pretend that they are standards or available for anyone to use as they please.

The phone numbers thing is really their own fault. Evil is streaming from open "everyone post your numbers" groups.

I know it's kind of a spiritual successor, but Dwarf Fortress might just take the cake...

The first-gen iPhone had a really good web-browser. Even if Microsoft miraculously finishes IE9 and ports it to WinMo 7 in time for the launch, it's still going to be a substandard mobile browser, and thanks to the all-Silverlight development platform, there will be no other browsers available.

He would also have to include a Webkit browser by default.

Basically yeah, I'm saying that this is a mutually assured destruction situation. Google having MPEG pay them license fees would validate an MPEG lawsuit against VP8 users.

On the other hand, if MPEG decides to sue, Google will do a counter-claim, refuse to settle, and the thing could easily be tied up in courts until all the relevant patents have expired.

Maintaining two per year for 500 years is more than sufficient.

Personally, I expect false starts in the next couple centuries. The beta testers will be healthy and fit into their hundreds, but those that follow may get to 200-400, then possibly further. There are just too many engineering issues to work out in a single iteration.

Someone really needs to start a nonprofit Facebook with the same basic design goals, a steering board, and probably some nominal monthly costs for accumulating more than 2GB of photos. Facebook solves the Internet anonymity problem, but it does so in a business-oriented way, which is gradually eroding the benefits of verified identity.

Only a non-profit with the stated mission of facilitating private and consensual friendship between existing, identified private individuals can really solve the problem.

They don't have to indemnify VP8 adopters. VP8 is only patent-free if you agree not to do what MPEG is doing. And while it may be true that MPEG holds some patents that apply to VP8, Google clearly holds some patents that apply to H.264 (because this is a huge mess.)

So they can sue, but it will be an ugly battle, and unlikely to finish before the H.264 patents expire. It's really not a good idea.

Any word on when VP8 will be added to the Android core media formats?

http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.ht...