aryastark

$500M buys a lot of lawyers though.

I'm afraid it's much worse than that, even. You don't even need to use the internet.

You can be walking down the street and an hour later, unbeknownst to you, your picture makes it to the front page of reddit. It could be that you were skipping work that day, and told your boss you were sick. Or perhaps picking up an engagement ring.

This sort of free-for-all will only get worse as technologies like Google Glass and the so-called "Internet of Things" become mainstream. Your life is now a commodity for internet voyeurism and, possibly, witch hunts.

The tech is ripe for turning citizens against citizens. "Turn in your neighbor for un-American activities" sort of stuff.

That's true. It would be nice for a true alternative. I still think about it from time-to-time. My Scheme project was to be a SchemeOS. It wasn't even the sheer amount of work that got to me, and ultimately did it in. It was the realization that I'd have to go it completely alone.

I was a lurker for years when the TUNES project was going on. I won't say a new "from scratch" OS is impossible, but I will say that TUNES ended up with a death by a thousand bike sheds. Linux worked thanks to POSIX and other *ix systems in existence. The groundwork was there. There was a model. Anyone that wanted to contribute knew what a Unix looked like and how a Unix functioned.

Not so with any LispOS. Or TUNES. It's a new thing, wholly different from anything that existed before. The few people that had access to Genera weren't going to want to replicate that for reasons that become apparent when using it (it's quite outmoded in many ways). And since there was no Genera community and nothing to really salvage there, it made more sense to start over anyway.

With all that said, I believe the true appeal of a LispOS is that it's homogeneous. It's Lisp from top-to-bottom. Which means it's great for programming at any level, great for productivity. But not so great for people that love variety in languages.

This is pretty cool. But the problems I see are infrastructural scaling issues. To get a 2min throughput, you'd need at least 15 batteries stored below. That may sound reasonable, but then you realize it's only Tesla. And probably only compatible with one model of Tesla. Not very future-proof. I don't have audio at the moment, so maybe he discussed that.

Charger stations seem the better option. But I still think there could be bottleneck issues if electric cars really took off. You could reach some midpoint somewhere, say, Primm, NV, and be stuck there circling lots for hours waiting for a charger station to free up (assuming one could circle a lot for extend periods of time on a dead battery). The gas station there is pretty much hell on earth already.

Pretty sure he meant debris, not trash. Stuff that falls off trucks because it hasn't been properly secured. I've had a number of close calls due to large items blocking entire lanes on the freeways.

This is incredibly similar to an assembler I wrote in Scheme, almost a decade ago. I was using Bochs and even unit testing with NASM.

I think people are going to be disappointed, if they can even get this to run in Bochs. About the only "Lisp OS" thing here is the REPL, which looks like it's incomplete anyway. Movitz is ahead of it by a bit, since it at least has, IIRC, a working compiler and possibly a driver or two.

But nothing we have today is anywhere close to what people think of, when they think "Lisp OS". However, I've used Genera, and I'd really caution people about getting this romanticized view of it. There are still many good ideas there, but Linux and OS X today are not the Unix of 1980. We've come a long way.

I don't consider a web UI as anything more than a temporary workaround for when I don't have a native mail client around. They all tend to suck. Even gmail's. Try roundcube if you must.

My brain hurts from contemplating what you wrote.

The point of gmail is that they take the configuration and headache of maintaining a mail server away from you. If you're okay with running your own qmail/sendmail, then there are vastly better open source UI options than gmail. Google didn't invent email. They just run some of the world's largest mail servers as a (mostly) free service.

Yeah, I don't see it. This is Dot Com Bubble 2.0. Nothing but hype. I don't care how many teenage eyeballs SnapChat has. You don't suddenly become Tencent or LINE or whatever tomorrow's out-of-the-ass comparison will be. SnapChat is going to have an uphill battle moving their users to anything that is not a simple picture transferring app. And they only have so much time left. If there is one thing teenagers do not do, it is use something past its trend expiration date. The fact that SnapChat hasn't been monetized yet probably means it's already too late and they have no clue where they are going with it, other than hoping to get bought out for an even more outrageous sum of money.

The iPhone 5c surely cannibalized 4s/5 stats, no? I mean, in prior generations people would purchase last year's model. But this time they got the 5c instead.

Not only that, but that bit of Q3 code was at one point in time a mystery to even John Carmack. Which is why it has the "what the fuck?" comment next to the magic number. Eventually they did track down the guy that authored that bit of code. Not only did the guy that wrote that have a good understanding of the math behind it, but he also understood the low-level mechanics of floating point. Which is something your average math major wouldn't know much about. Even most software engineers don't know floating point, sad as that may be.

But Doom and early Quake are bad examples of why math is needed. Those were ground-breaking games. Their math has been encapsulated and turned into libraries and things like DirectX and OpenGL. Today, you generally just take a physics engine and 3d engine off the shelf and tweak it a little here and there.

So many comments from people that have obviously never even downloaded it and tried it out for 5 minutes.

Unity3d comes with Mono Develop (http://monodevelop.com/). That's their default editor. However, you can easily switch to Visual Studio or whatever you want. You can use gvim if you want. If you pair up Unity with cygwin and git you come pretty close to what Linux gives you. I'd still prefer it if they ported the editor to Linux, since it would mean I don't have to boot Windows.

Unity3d is not a text editor. It's similar to Blender... it's a UI for manipulating 3d objects and setting various components of those 3d objects. When you need to edit the scripting of an object, it launches the external text editor.

Huh? It's free for commercial use. You really can't beat that. I doubt you will need the advanced (paid) features of Unity unless you are established and have a team of developers. In which case, you can surely afford $1500.

Who is going to trust Obama? Then, who is going to trust the NSA?

Only fools. James Clapper lied about what the NSA was up to, to Ron Wyden, a member of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Clapper has still not been charged with anything.

There is no way to oversee an organization that only has to tell you whatever it wants to. Do people really not understand such a basic concept as this? Congress does not have special insight into what the NSA is doing. Everything Congress knows is whatever the NSA wants to tell Congress. It's all a sham. Kangaroo courts and pretend justice. As fake as all that crap North Korea shows tourists. As fake as Saddam's elections in Iraq.

This article is literally advocating a cargo cult. I've seen sharks jumped, but never this high and this obvious.

Not sure what you mean. TRESOR prevents cold boot attacks. If your Linux OS is compromised, TRESOR wouldn't help you anyway. But that's not the point of it, either.

If you're storing passwords on disk, you're going to use something like bcrypt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt).

The way it generally works is you keep a user's encrypted pass with a unique per-user salt stored on disk (usually in a database of some sort). When you need to authenticate a user, your script will ask the user for their password. Then, you encrypt this input pass with the stored salt. Finally, you compare the encrypted input pass with the original encrypted pass on disk. If they match, you're good. At no point do you store passwords on disk that have not been encrypted (via bcrypt or similar). Depending on the security needed (i.e. your threat model and risk) this can get tricky if things like hibernation or virtual machines are involved.

If you're confused at all about this, I would browse the security forums (http://security.stackexchange.com/) and ask for expert advice.

For Linux there is TRESOR (http://www1.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/tresor). It uses CPU registers, which can prevent this sort of attack. However, you're limited to one encrypted drive with this method.

> was willing to cut features nobody needed

Ah. And then a week later you hear that Janice in the accounting office in New Zealand depended on one of those features. That's when you learn there is a Janice in accounting. And that your company has an office in New Zealand.

You know why you can do that? Because you have hindsight. You see exactly where the business went.

And this is the same damn trap all neophyte developers fall into. "Let's rewrite!"

Once that first wave of business requests and demands comes along, your precious sandcastle will crumble. Because the business team is fickle. And they stick you with deadlines. And then, mid-deadline, they change their mind. Or are forced to go a different direction because some shit government law is passed that requires you to broadcast your service requests with encrypted messages tied to pigeons (because, realistically, that's how the government does APIs).

Here on the internet where everything is made up and the points don't matter, you can get away with rewrites. Agile not working for you? Let me introduce you to the CADT model (http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html).

All rewrites become tomorrow's bug-infested legacy ghettos.

They riot by calling the White House.

"Too big to fail!" And yet, surprising, not too big to be considered a security threat to the entire United States. My, what lovely clothes you're wearing today, Emperor!

Wow, that site is great. It's like John Nash and a librarian had a secret love child. Organized thoughts are clearly a virtue, but not quite his forte.

Oh god. It's Perl. And no need to drag it through the mud here. It's pretty much the only language that gets Unicode right. It has nothing in common with the abject misery that is PHP. Perl came out in '87. Erlang came out in '86. I don't know what you're high on, other than trends and trendwhores.

Clojure isn't new. Not to take a dig at Rich Hickey, but everything he is doing with immutable objects was done more than a decade ago by the likes of Henry Baker (http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/home.html). Of course, everything that has ever been tried at all has been tried in some variant of Lisp/Scheme at one point in time.

I barely trust Guy Steele with macros. You know who I don't trust with macros? Random JS coder dudes that haven't learned what true hardship is, when debugging a macro that is 5 levels deep and subtly changes the language because, hey, I have a macro! And having a macro means using a macro.

Language design is hard. Scheme has gotten it wrong. Over. And over. And over. They didn't get hygiene right for more than a decade. They still don't have it right. But people think they can easily invent new syntax that somehow doesn't do unexpected things. Your clever macro isn't so clever when some poor son of a bitch has been beating his head on a bug all day long just to find out your macro-that-looks-like-a-function isn't evaluating all its arguments because your macro-that-looks-like-a-function is really a function-that-is-a-macro. Don't get me started on missing IF branches and undefined behavior...

> So why would you willfully pick to use C when C++ is around?

There are many reasons to not use C. But C++ existing is not one of them. Over the 15 years or so that I've used C++, there is always the constant nagging feeling that I don't really know what is going on. My programs tend to work. But I often find that there are incredibly subtle nuances buried deep in the C++ run time model that are simply beyond comprehension.

If you can keep all the rules of C++ in your head, then you are a god among gods.

Today there are few reasons to even need C++. I tend to stick with C or go to Perl/Python. I don't really need a language that attempts to straddle the middle. Especially one that more often than not, gets it all wrong anyway.

The games I tend to play the most, are the games I paid full price for. The simple reason is because I anticipated those games and waited until they came out.

I still browse the Steam sales. But I rarely buy. Steam has pulled off an amazing feat. They get people excited to buy games that, a decade ago, would be sitting in the sad dusty $5 bin at Wal-Mart. These games would get overlooked because they were in that same dusty bin yesterday, for the same $5. They weren't $15 and suddenly were priced $5 for Christmas. No. They were just old games being sold for whatever Wal-Mart could get for them.

But, take those same games and put them next to Skyrim like Steam does, and now you change the perception. Shoppers don't see the sad tired box art of a game from 1997. They just see a $15 game on sale for this limited time only for $5.

Of course not. VCs are in the business of inflating bubbles. That's how they make money. Andreessen has every reason to claim that we are not seeing a bubble situation here.

But to pull Tencent out of your ass and compare it to Snapchat? There is no basis on planet Earth for the comparison. None. You're just tossing out random names at that point. Tencent is literally as old as Google is. They had $7B USD in revenue last year. They have 21 thousand employees. They run the China equivalent of PayPal. Their messaging service, QQ, has 798 million accounts and has seen peak usage of 176 million users at a single time. It is here that I remind you that the entire population of the US is only 313 million. Mathematically speaking, Snapchat doesn't stand a chance. No one "plans" to become Tencent. No one. I don't care how good the prospects are for Snapchat. You tell me you want to become Tencent and all you have is a sexting app? That's when I laugh at you. Then I pull up the App Store and flip through all your competitors. Then I remind you that your entire value is derived from fickle teenagers, that won't be there a year from today.

$100B my goddamn ass.

How does one get from Snapchat to Tencent? Just because Bob down in the van by the river is making soda pop in his wheelbarrow doesn't mean he's going to be the next Coca-Cola. Even the mere suggestion takes so much credibility away from Andreessen. How many thousands of messaging programs have come along already? ICQ, MSN, AIM, etc. etc. Why weren't any of them the next Tencent? Perhaps, because China is not the US. Last time I was in Japan, kids were still shelling out $40 for CDs from their favorite pop singers. Different markets are different.

Snapchat is a one-trick pony and about as special as a snowflake in an avalanche.

You would assume CNNMoney would be more concerned with the CEO's lack of a business plan rather than his lack of apology. Let's get our priorities straight here. I mean, if you're not making money, do you really have a business? Does any of this even matter? If a tree falls in the forest...

It takes a certain type of person to use Snapchat. A person that believes in unicorns. That is, someone that believes you can erase things you send over the internet. I suppose if you believe in that absurdity, then you may also believe in whatever nonsense the CEO might tell you about their enhanced security that will prevent this type of breach from ever occurring again.

Or you could just stop using the damn thing. Vote with your wallet, er, eyeballs.

How the hell is James Clapper still in office?? Isn't what he did so obviously perjury?

The America of 2013 is absolute bullshit. I can't even fathom how corrupt this country is.