celerity

I came away from today's presentation thinking that he was an unusually bad presenter. IMHO he failed to explain why the Surface Pro 2 was better at the things he was claiming it was better at, didn't give concrete details on basic specifications (saying "25% better battery life" is useless unless you know what his supposed base is), and made too many lame jokes.

Your problem is that you have an iPad 2. If you use a retina iPad, you will be able to read a PDF in landscape if you can read a book. The screen simply becomes almost as good as print.

I've read many math papers and books this way.

People don't run desktop environments to squeeze performance (although it's a plus!), but to gain productivity in a convenient and easy way.

If you don't control it, treat it as virtually public. I do that with Skype, Gmail, Google Docs, iCloud stuff, Evernote, Dropbox etc.

Don't trust it if you can't encrypt it with a private key.

I wonder how useful these are. It seems like a lot of the functionality of Light Table is accessed through mouse interactions.

With that said, I could still use some emacs bindings :)

Why do people use these horrible services? Is having an online social presence so important? I understand if you do it for business, but if bad news like this keeps coming out of a company, I simply stop using their products.

I am a math Ph.D. student, and one of my professors went straight to Princeton after 3 years of college without his degree. He impressed a Princeton professor enough to have him offer a position there, which he could apparently do. My professor took the offer, not only because it was fantastic in its own right, but also because he only took math courses as an undergrad, and getting his bachelor's degree would have meant taking a year of humanities -- a nightmare!

This isn't that strange. A lot of universities are private institutions, so they can accept whom they please.

The only reason this story is remarkable is because Steve Jobs was a jerk all of the time, so exceptions and exhibitions of humanity seem special. Really, I'd see him as a cool guy if he were always like this. Not that him being an ass in any way devalues his abilities. It is what it is.

Please, please stop voting pseudo-science up so much. Look at the comments in the post. The second one pretty much explains why this "paper" has no credibility what-so-ever.

This is great news, actually. It's a free "get out of jail" card. Now you know you shouldn't trust Apple with your email.

Using other people's software or services which you don't control should be based on trust, in my opinion. What I mean is that you should build up evidence about different service providers, and choose whether or not they are trustworthy.

This is essentially why I am OK with closed source software. In many aspects of life (from the obvious, like banking, to more abstract, like personal relationships) we have to act based on our degree of confidence in something. The downside is that this thing is obscured (hence the need for trust), the upside is that through obscurity it was made possible (in this case, email providers make money by having a unique, high-quality offering).

I moved my music from iTunes to Linux and back many times. It's really just a matter of finding the files (trivial) and copy-pasting (trivial).

I also don't understand the author's preferences. Macs weren't good enough for programming, so (s?)he switched to Linux. This was the whole cause of the iTunes trouble. Why does it, then, matter whether Macs are going downhill or not?

Am I the only one that loves Unity?

I took some care when getting hardware to have it work with my Ubuntu computer, and I don't have any major problems with it.

Now, 12.04 used to be buggy at first, but now I can even play intense 3D games without problems on it!

In any case, it's so much easier to code on than on a mac, I really hope that good laptops that work well with it start costing less than $1500.

Arch Wiki is the best! I use it to set up stuff on my Ubuntu computer, sometimes. The thing is, Ubuntu already does most of the stuff from the Arch Wiki automatically.

Eh, it is so easy to forget to set something up on Arch and scratch your head all the time to figure out what it was. Things that start working on Ubuntu fail rarely.

This screen and 4:3 would make this an almost perfect Ubuntu Linux laptop for me. Too bad it probably won't be installable for a long time!

Two issues: One, in a matter of dispute, he is claiming his own logs as proof -- which is nonsense. Two, even if the logs are legitimate, the error could have been somewhere between the computer and the user (e.g., the user might have been getting wrong information).

In either case, Tesla is being very unprofessional. Very petty, too. Think about Musk: he created PayPal, where he was a total scumbag. Why would it be different here?

Thank you! I always mix them up.

You know what else is an obstacle to relativistic spaceflight? Being able to do relativistic space flight.

Fun fact: people realized this a long time ago, and proposed different "shields" in front of the ship (it turns out that the most effective shape is a smoothed-out cone [of ice, say] -- see Asimov's Song of a Distant Earth).

Exactly, it's a faulty analogy. A person with a camera is an immediate threat to react to. People are well aware of cameras in supermarkets, yet they still go inside.

Another, indirect, effect that I hope to see from this is cheaper MacBook Airs in the future. Competition! (I need a bit more than the terminal/SSH/text-editor to do my development.)

Oof, here's a list of things I can buy with $2200: A $600 1080p tablet, a $1200 slightly-heavier-but-beefier laptop that runs Linux, a small telescope with the rest.

Give me a break.

God help you if you want to use it in two different applications. Plus, "you can use a third-party service" is not exactly an elegant solution.

How does clumsily being able to replicate a very basic task that laptops have been doing for many years extremely well for $100 imply that tablets are going to kill computers? This might well be the case (I hope so!), but being able to attach a keyboard is not the indicator of change this guy wants it to be.

I 100% agree with this. I was able to easily sync my settings between Linux, Windows and OS X for ST2, and easily find options because they are all in ONE file (Ctrl+F -what I need-), esp. considering they are very well documented. Still not as good as Netbeans for PHP/HTML (especially since it's not free), but a good settings system.

This is just a good reminder to treat all cloud services out of your control as semi-public.

I broke my $650 laptop by accidentally pulling the power cord. It happens.

Selling an OS-free website is actually doing the Linux community a disservice. The reason is that it takes time and fidgeting in order to make everything work on Linux (and you can, in fact, screw up your computer if you don't set up fans correctly, for example), and the average developer (and, of course, any other user) doesn't want to waste time making suspend function when they can be working. For this reason, desktop Linux will not gain any significant market share if it is not pre-installed. This project will raise the Linux desktop market share, and thus encourage others to do something similar.

There seems to be a lot of confusion in the comments about what Dell is doing with this Laptop. Here are some observations that I've made:

* The image is custom, but it is maintained by Canonical, and one can download Ubuntu independently and then enable a bunch of Dell PPAs for hardware support (see http://hwe.ubuntu.com/uds-q/dellxps/).

* Dell is contributing to OSS with this project. They have, with Canonical and the manifacturer, already built open source touch-pad drivers that seem to be working very well (a rarity on Linux).

* Selling an OS-free website is actually doing the Linux community a disservice. The reason is that it takes time and fidgeting in order to make everything work on Linux (and you can, in fact, screw up your computer if you don't set up fans correctly, for example), and the average developer (and, of course, any other user) doesn't want to waste time making suspend function when they can be working. For this reason, desktop Linux will not gain any significant market share if it is not pre-installed. This project will raise the Linux desktop market share, and thus encourage others to do something similar.

* This project started as a pilot in order for Dell to gauge interest, and they deemed it having enough potential to actually launch. The buzz from Dell (really, the "Project Sputnik" blog) is that if it is successful, there might be a follow-up.

With all that said, I will still not be buying this computer. The high-end version that they're selling is too expensive because of a large SSD (still too expensive), while only having 4GB of RAM. In the age of streaming and Dropboxes, I'd rather keep $200 and have 128GB SSD with 8GB RAM. Plus the screen is mediocre (although the keyboard feels amazing, I tried it at Best Buy).

Edit: Added newlines.

For me, for "serious" programming, I use a full-fledged IDE which has stuff like code linking, quick project search (with ST2 I have to switch to the terminal), built-in documentation, refactoring support... So paying $60 for a text editor, when there are many good free options out there (even outside of Linux) is too much.

Not going to work IMHO. HBO is partly so successful because of its exclusivity. It is THE premiere channel to get, and will give that away only when the fall of traditional TV is apparent.