criley

Am I missing something? Other people have my files? Peer-to-peer sounds horrifying for my personal files.

I'll take SSL between me and one server, thankyouverymuch, and I'd prefer if 100 different seeders didn't have my personal files!

Or am I only seeding between my own personal machines? I sync to my four devices and I can leech off of any of my own devices connected? But that doesn't seem very "cloud".

Does anyone honestly feel comfortable syncing their files to peers?

Why not just hop on and peer everyone for the sole purpose of harvesting people's files?

I think the author is explicitly NOT stating that battery technology has reached it's peak, but rather the safe bet isn't on huge changes in a decade time frame.

He's not commenting on the tech so much as the wisdom of ASSUMING it will be better in a certain time frame.

He's saying, it's not wise to build a business on top of the idea that battery tech will progress predictably or at all.

I disagree, because any business built on that will be the first to exploit it properly when it comes out, as a competitive advantage. But if they're wrong, they'll deal with the downside risk of, you know, being wrong.

>there is no such thing is good/bad (morally) casks of whiskey.

I disagree -- just as someone writing C can do it well or poorly, someone drinking whiskey can behave well or poorly.

The spectrum of drunken behavior is a big one, and does include moral and immoral activity...

I had never heard of "Hopper" until this censorship! Thanks CBS, now I know that Hopper is brilliant and enough of a threat to have media companies sweating!

Go Dish! The censorship validates the legitimacy of the idea!

New Windows install: use www.ninite.com to get a 1-click installer for most popular programs and codecs.

I agree with your analysis though: there is a difference between parody and stupid, and this hits the latter. I've been building Win7 PC's for years and I haven't loaded to messed up graphics and no networking since before the friends and family beta. That was always a hallmark of WinXP, not 7.

The only thing I can think of is that he installed Win7 on 10 year old hardware and the drivers for such an antiquated setup weren't even included in the default set.

It's also possible that he grabbed a really old copy of Win7 with no service packs or updates baked in, which includes tons of driver updates.

However, and I run Ubuntu, Mint and Win7 on my machine, I can say that both found all of my drivers immediately and worked, although the Windows drivers are newer, more stable and more fully featured (I'm looking at you ATI).

I mean, they're allowed to respond by saying "No comment" or, more likely, a totally white-washed PR report extolling the virtues of a marginally related task force or agency that seems to completely miss the point.

But who knows, maybe we'll get a decent response.

I prefaced my post with "as long as color isn't important to you".

Since it clearly isn't to you, there's no reason not to mess with it!

As long as seeing correct color is not important to you. I'm the kind of person who can immediately tell when an LCD is not at native resolution and what temperature the color is set at, so the strong yellow tint of f.lux was unbearable.

If your eyes hurt at night, just alter your brightness contrast, or write a script to do that instead of messing with color!

Pretty sure "moat" is a term popularized by Warren Buffet himself to describe a company with some kind of inherent advantage over it's competitors. As in, when a company with a moat succeeds, his competitors have a hard time entering that market and replicating that success because of the moat.

A moat protects your marketshare. A very large moat then would be, I guess (I'm not an investor or anything), a company with a large competitive advantage and a market share that would be very difficult to steal.

Sources? I'm curious, and I hadn't heard that they were losing money. Seems silly that they'd be added people on a regular basis if they were doing so poorly.

So you really believe that the government is setting up concentration camps around the country, is going to use the military domestically to round up guns and all dissenters, and Obama is going to seize dictatorial control of the USA then hand sovereignty over to the New World Order?

Maybe we just hear different conspiracies but I'm pretty positive that the conspiracy nonsense regarding the government shouldn't be taken as "true by default".

It's an adult version of Apples to Apples. Think MadLibs, except one player readers the "madlib" and the other players draw from their hand to answer.

Example:

"Alternative medicine is now embracing the curative powers of ______ " was read aloud in my group.

I played the card that reads "Literally eating shit" and won the round, because the question reader liked my answer the most.

No, there's not as big a difference as you're implying -- because ALL mapping data is imperfect, therefore ALL smartphones are capable of actively misleading you. And paper maps can mislead, as well! (I'm trying to think how many "this place is closed/moved/never here" notices I sent Google Maps myself, because of the number of times I've been misled by Google Maps!)

A smartphone is not a replacement for common sense. In Apple Maps, you can clearly look at your destination and say "Hmm, wow, that doesn't look like sprawling medical complex, perhaps this tiny out of the way building isn't a hospital".

People have been misled by Google Maps and MapQuest and Tom Tom for years and years. How common are stories of people driving off of cliffs or other such nonsense because a GPS said so?

Yes, Apple Maps isn't perfect, but it's a long shot better than Google Maps and MapQuest were six months into the product, and is actively providing superior maps to the baseline of a decade ago, or even five years ago.

How is going from having your app presinstalled on every device and being maintained, for free, by Apple developers to having to write and maintain your own app and put it in the app store a "win"??

There is no win here for Google! Less users (not everyone is going to install it), less data coming in, more money spent, having to hire more dedicated iOS coders inhouse at Google...

People have a weird definition of "win".

Wow, what did people do BEFORE a smartphone!

It's a wonder a human being ever found a hospital before Google saved the human race from it's own helplessness!

A thread about this recently popped up on /r/gamedev over on Reddit. Some recommendations were:

Puush, Greenshot, ShareX, HyperDesktop, Snag.gy, as well as some smaller apps written by users.

Maybe one will be useful for people sad about Skitch!

The password isn't just about accessing your account information (making a purchase), it's about authorization to use your hardware.

OSX does the same thing: want to install something? Enter a password.

I agree that there should be a better form of authorization than password, though.

Agreed. I have a gmail account and I use them for search -- that's ENOUGH of my data for any one company to have (and it's probably too much, at that).

Everytime I visit another Google property I'm presented with yet-another "turn your account into a G+ account" popup.

It's very annoying, to say the least. I wish they'd just let me pay for the damn service, I'm getting very tired of being the product they sell (and not behaving exactly as they think a good little product should).

I think about the thousands of "books" and scrolls and story to experience, hours of voiced dialogue and just reams of unvoiced dialogue...

And I compare it to the "Hello Traveler! (Push X to Continue)" diaglouge that 98% of NPC's in SNES games provide, and I'm just shocked that people think those old games had depth.

They spent years writing the surrounding material for Oblivion.

Just because you steam rolled the main story and chose not to explore, to read and experience that world doesn't mean there wasn't depth.

The difference is, in those old SNES games -- there is no depth to experience outside of the linear story. It's the story...and that's it.

When I think about depth, I think about things like: finding people to talk to. Side quests. Fleshing out cities and industries. I think about a deep world -- something SNES games almost never gave.

I think about exploration and emergant gameplay, something SNES games almost never gave.

I suppose if your definition of depth is purely story based and can be fulfilled through a linear, one-story-fits-all game, then those SNES games can be deep.

That's fair. I'd still bet that if you counted up the amount of writing and world building that went into Fallout 3 and compared it to any SNES RPG, you'd find dramatically more "worldbuilding" and "depth" in Fallout 3, but I don't have data to back that idea up, so it is what it is.

Amusing that you didn't post this exact phrase to whomever posted this article on Hacker News.

This article was nothing more than stereotypical Euro-bullying. I mean, "like soccer and the metric system" -- do Europeans really have to list every way they're superior every time the subject comes up? Come on.

It's so rare Europeans get to be superior -- let them have it. They do in fact have superior motorsports. It's okay, whenever an American feels bad, they can just look at the moon or Mars and smile.

This is ridiculous. Final Fantasy 4 did not have "more depth" than Fallout 3. Go play it again. Go roam a town. What's that, an entire kingdom capital has 6 single story buildings and a castle with 10 rooms?

Most of the NPC's have 1-2 lines of dialogue with NO interaction with the PC?

You are viewing those old RPG's with MASSIVELY ROSE TINTED GLASSES.

Seriously, just go play one of the old games. Look at how little character customization you have. How little story option you have. There is no variable dialogue, no choices to make, it's simply a story on rails.

What a ridiculous claim to make.

You can disable it pretty simply: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-7/disable-aero-shake-...

To be fair, they should have made a version from the Palestinian perspective, as well.

Something tells me the Palestinians don't have 15 seconds of air raid warnings. The missiles and strike craft probably don't give much lead time at all. Maybe a few moments of odd whirring before something randomly explodes near them, and people die.

So the Palestinian version should start on 00:02 instead of 00:15...

The joys of American-made, American-taxpayer funded advanced strike weapons.

I love the underlying engineering cause -- let's get everyone to keep a GPS/data link open while they walk around popular city attractions and roadways so we can build an amazing pedestrian pathfinding system.

Similar behavior is witnessed in animals often. An animal will learn a novel behavior -- generally some basic tool use, and then its relatives or packmates will quickly adopt the technique. It spreads like wildfire.

They clearly already contained the capacity to perform that behavior, they just needed to be shown that they could do it in the right context. Once they were shown once, they adopted the behavior quickly -- and even pass it on to their young.

I believe early humans developing new skills and learning was similar.

It was not that humans began speaking or writing as soon as it was biologically feasible -- rather some (long) time after feasibility was evolved, the skill was developed and then had to "go viral" and infect other humans.

How many times did it start and stop before it hit critical mass? How many tribes of humans were available for this kind of development to even take place?

Fascinating stuff, there's an enormous amount out there on this subject, and I only have a BS in Biology, so I'm no expert!

EDIT: "Why the sudden jump in progress" You may mean, "Why did human brains rapidly get larger over an evolutionarily short amount of time" -- and the answer is that there was no sudden jump, only slow increase over time (as measured in fossils).