anonymous

Or 5. package wayland for ubuntu.

Kubuntu have already said that they will be using wayland and not switching to Mir, so you may want to talk with them, too. It doesn't seem like anything but stock Ubuntu will be using Mir.

Speaking as a user, the problem is one of marketing and first impressions. In the video, the guy shows a laptop that looks a lot like a MacBook and shows an OS that looks a lot like MacOS. This gives me the impression that Elementary is the equivalent of Adibas-branded shoes - some cheap knockoff aping some of the look, a little bit of the feel and not being anywhere near the functionality.

Personally, if I wanted to make an OS look like MacOS, I'd advertise it as "We wanted MacOS on the PC, but Apple don't give it. So we made an OS based on Linux that follows the same attention to design."

Or better yet - change the look. I doubt that stylish grey is the only possible colour. I can see that it's not MacOS, but it feels dirty when it looks a lot like MacOS, down to using a Mac look-alike laptop in the ad, and you claim to have made something original.

It may be. But it doesn't feel like it.

The title is better phrased as "should you worry that lots of people can't use computers?". Because of the obvious "no" response. No, you shouldn't worry.

We've had computers for two generations now and the existence of people who can't use them hasn't made the world stop turning. People who do not understand things in general have always existed. People who make decisions about things they don't understand. Politicians who make decisions about things they don't understand. Always has been, always will be. Trying to educate them is a futile effort, we're better off trying to find ways to get what we want or route around the damage. I would of course prefer it if that wasn't the case, but it's like wanting pi to be exactly 3.

Think of it like driving a car. I cannot drive a car. I have a license, I have taken classes, I have put in effort, but it's just too complicated and unnatural for me; and I deem myself too dangerously inept to drive. To commute, I ride my bike, take public transport or pay other people to drive me. Same with computers - if you can't use them, either do your job without one, or pay someone to do stuff for you.

You'd find it easier to make the earth spin in reverse than to make sure everyone knows how to use a computer.

I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to add a userstyle for having <blink> back. Actually... I think I'll do just that.

I don't use mnemonics in general. For me the effort to remember the mnemonic is actually double that for remembering the thing per se. I need to once remember the symbols->mnemonic connection and then the mnemonic->meaning connection, instead of simply the direct symbols->meaning one. It feels like cluttering my brain with junk that not only doesn't make it easier to remember things, it actively makes it harder.

Ah, yes the "I can't fit it to my mental model, therefore it is impossible" argument.

When little, my brother used to mix up the words "more" and "less" while speaking. I don't doubt someone could mix up > and <.

No, it's not. I only see it on the odd hip-n-cool project by people with less experience than my server's uptime. Everything I install is either from a distro's package, from a tarball or by compiling from source.

I don't mind having a script that sets up the environment, there is a lot of software out there that does have these set up scripts in the tarball, or is distributed as a self-extracting archive, but you can always see it is marked as such. What I really balk at is "run this random script, trust me it installs". Would it kill them to write "download this script which will run apt-get pkg1 ... pkg10, then extract an inline tarball to ~/.local/lib"? I'm not going to run a random script that I have ZERO idea what it will do. It's not about security, it's about knowing that a good-intentioned non-compromised script won't crap all over my environment.

> Quickstart

> Run the bootstrap script:

    bash -c "`curl https://raw.github.com/larsyencken/marelle/master/bootstrap.sh`"

PFHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

no

> bumblebees not being able to fly

I'm pretty sure science still cannot explain how bumblebees would be able to fly a Boeing 747

If it were me, I'd have looked for a way to sneak it into a popup that shows the first time you run the updated client. Something like

    In the interest of your safety and
    the prosperity of the Chinese, all
    your chat messages are henceforth
    constantly monitored by government
    officials. Have a nice day.
    [OK]

It may ultimately turn out to be impossible to do, but I would like to at least try.

For the life of me, I could never understand what compelled americans to switch from monday first to sunday first.

A 10-day week would be really uncomfortable. It would mean 8 days work and 2 days rest, rather than the current 5-2 split, which seems to be the most comfortable.

> I've got the forms and I'm pretty sure you could be Tanaka Taro by the end of today

Now I see where point 39. of your post about names comes from :).

Well, that's one way to deal with having to name 10 kids.

I find sorting garbage to be better and cleaner for me, personally, actually. You don't have one large festering heap in your home, you have three heaps and only one of them actually smells. The rest are used up plastic containers, bottles, paper, etc. - materials that don't decompose on their own. You get to throw all the biological waste in one place, which can be smaller than the rest and you can clean it up every other day. You can of course throw all your trash away every other day, but it's easier when you only have to throw away only a small portion of it.

I currently live in a city that doesn't collect trash separately and I still separate my trash - it's just nicer and cleaner.

The marketing budget needed to convince people to transition to the new model will pay itself off shortly. Consider also that you'll get unpaid "split-trash evangelists" in most neighbourhoods doing your work for you.

I can't picture how you could teach ethics, actually. Meaning, if someone is already unethical, I can't see a way to make them ethical and in reverse - if you have an ethical person, they don't need to be told to be ethical. Is it then mostly a class on reassuring already ethical people that they're behaving well?

HN ate your \* symbols. Try prefixing the line with 4 spaces to trigger code formatting.

Was there a followup to that article? I'm pretty sure the NDA period should be up by now and I'm wondering if the author posted a more in-depth explanation and overview.

> Once you make fat cells, they never ever go away.

Well, that's pretty depressing. Maybe the next big thing in combating obesity would be finding some mechanism to get rid of extra fat cells?

If you want to learn more, I'd suggest at first reading (or at least skimming) Bjarne Stroustrup's "The C++ programming language".

Also, the C++ FAQ http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq/ is useful for getting an overview on the corner cases of C++.

After which you should visit its inverse, the C++ FQA (frequently questioned answers, i.e. an anti-C++ answer to the FAQ) http://www.yosefk.com/c++fqa/ to learn why no-one in their right mind would ever use C++.

That won't teach you C++ per se, but would give you a useful look at the breadth of the language and how and why things happen the way they do.

You can persuade the C++ constructor to run on an arbitrary address trivially with "placement-new". See here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placement_syntax . In short, you can do:

    void* mem;
    ... snip ...
    MyClass* thing = new (mem) MyClass;

And that doesn't allocate memory, but calls the constructor on the mem pointer. You are responsible for having allocated enough memory. You cannot call delete normally on this object though. You'll need to call the destructor manually as such:

    thing->~MyClass();

before the memory is deallocated. If the destructor doesn't actually do anything, you can safely skip this.

The apache http server uses that allocation strategy, actually. For each request you have a separate memory pool and you allocate out of that. There's no function to free memory you've got from a pool and the entire pool is destroyed/released after the request has been served.

Look at the FileInputStream and FileOutputStream classes in Java. The finalize method in them makes sure the file is closed when the object is reclaimed, to prevent file handle leaking.

It's not particularly effective a strategy for managing file handles unfortunately and if you forget to close your output streams, your program will crash with "too many open files".

Maybe have a list of charities and send the funds to a random one?

Strange that they skip safety lines. It might be faster going up, but having a line down which you can just zip surely makes up for the lost time?

Edit: I see there's this response video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b9LahaBJIk about how you're actually supposed to climb these. With safety.

I hope you mean open proxies, because even ssh allows you to establish a (for you only) socks 5 proxy.

CAUTION THIS IS PROBABLY A SPOILER:

Well, the simplest explanation is that the proof involves thinking about hypothetical worlds and each agent modelling everybody's behaviour in each hypothetical world, including what hypothetical-hypothetical worlds can arise, and hypothetical³ and so on. The Guru's statement exist in every world, no matter how hypothetical it is, while the subjective observation that there are blue-eyed people disappears in some of them.

Do you have any source for this? Google shows nothing and Duck Duck Go only points me to a reddit thread with that exact same comment and no source.

I mean just about the specific case, I know that the Tiananmen square incident is unknown to almost all Chinese.

Hmm, that's all nice, but what about securing my data against snooping? I'm wondering specifically how I would prevent people from snooping data while in transit (MITM) and prevent someone with physical access to the hard drive from reading my bits? To simplify the question, assume I just want to store and retrieve plain files. Bonus points if I can also safely share them in some way (i.e. share one file without also giving up security on the rest).

I doubt there's a directed conspiracy on this. But I don't doubt this is how the technology will end up being used.