dave_au

Slightly off-topic, but perhaps not too far: http://www.beaverandsteve.com/index.php?comic=228

I don't think they're moving away from that practice because it makes them feel good.

I can imagine if they continue down their current path they'll take a huge pagerank hit before long - if they aren't on googles radar for SEO dodginess it's only a matter of time.

Some of the (extensive) reddit comments on the story cast a reasonably amount of doubt on his claims. Unfortunately there's just too many of them for me to be able to quickly summarise the various bits and pieces.

On a side note, I only stopped by to see if reddit had reached digg parity - not there yet, but I'm increasingly glad that I left.

(I nearly used "e-migrated" instead of "left" - and that's just from 5-10 minutes of exposure)

I've been using the dbus support with the CVS snapshot for a while now - it's nice.

So far I've only been using it to control workrave and to bring up compilation messages with the system notification handler for long running compiles. Still, I've been liking it a lot.

Then who's mission is it?

I just checked http://www.boardgamegeek.com to see if it was mentioned there. It was, and it was compared to http://www.superiorpod.com/ and http://www.guildofblades.com/, in case anyone was looking to compare alternatives.

Discussion was here http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/424272 and here http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/424309

Also, for those that don't know, boardgamegeek is an awesome resource for board game information.

I'd like to hear more about why the GPL would be a roadblock.

If you're writing code and see the GPL as a roadblock, then you can use a different license.

If you want to use code that is under the license and see the license as a roadblock, no one is forcing you to use that code. It's either compelling enough code that you'll deal with the licensing, or it's not compelling enough and you'll have to roll your own. It's basically just a non-monetary price point then, isn't it?

Am I missing something or is there some kind of assumption that people are entitled to other peoples work if they GPL it?

(Not saying that you make the assumption personally, but that you might be assuming that is what is stopping others)

I'm all thinking aloud / genuinely interested in what the issues are here.

I had an idea for a non-evil gambling site a while back - basically runs at a profit with a small bias against the house. Not a scam, but it has a 'compelling mechanic' component in common with Swoopo (albeit a different mechanic).

On one hand I think it could make some cash while not being as dodgy as a regular gambling site, but on the other hand I don't want to encourage gambling addicts with the positive feedback.

I'm just glad it's not my only money-spinning idea :)

I've been considering having a look at Scala as the next potential language that I'll learn.

It looks pretty nice. I'd add another point to the article - what I've seen of the community from mailing lists and such has been very positive. It seems like they're all (or mostly) very smart and welcoming.

I'd more alarmed by the fact that they've thrown something new into the mix security-wise than the effect on startup time.

If the system pseudo-random number generator has no problem, what's the use case for not using it? And if it does have a problem I'm sure they would have told someone :)

I just don't know why you add another moving part to the security system if you could avoid it, especially since it seems like a reasonably safe bet that people have had more eyes move over / experience with the alternative.

Some of them are just wrong, and a few of the wrong ones seem to be intentionally wrong. C++ has quite a few flaws, but I've always considered the FQA to be a troll.

IIRC, you can do anything in NC1.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NC_(complexity)

It may not be all that likely, but I wonder what would happen if Amazon and Apple collaborate instead of dance-fight?

If Apple is working on an ebook reader it'd be the simplest way for them to take a slice of the pie - just show the reader to Amazon and say "That's a nice ebook business you've got there, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it."

It depends on how much pie they'd like I guess.

Netflix gets a non-exclusive license from the winner, so they can sell it to other parties, and it seems like something that various parties would be willing to pay for.

An open source version would be a significant act of charity. It would be nice to see older versions or versions that were crippled enough to be education without watering down the reward that the winnners receive.

IIRC, Counting Sheep by Paul Martin has some references in this area. I'll try to dig them up later.

Google Reader is Google's feed reader, and its users can choose to share items that they read. The sharing is/was done by clicking "Share" on relevant items in your feeds, and you could give other people a unique URL (containing random looking characters, possibly just an obfuscation of your username, who knows) and they could check your shared items or even subscribe to them.

People used it for all kinds of things - political news pieces for likeminded friends, some spouses shared raunchy things, some dude even made it part of his business.

One day Google decided that all of your friends should be able to see your shared items. And that your friends are everyone you've ever sent email to from your gmail account. This caused a bit of anguish for a fair few people - family rifts, job issues, etc...

The official workaround was to either unshare the items or delete people from your contacts list. Sometime after that they added the ability to not have everyone you've every contacted be your friend, and now I believe there's an option to opt-in to the feature and then select who gets to see it.

No trace of an apology to anyone, and the thread of angry people in the reader google group basically got admonished for believing that the pseudorandom looking URL that only the user had access to in anyway implied that the data was private. If the shared page was www.google.com/readers/[username] that'd be fair enough I guess.

For some people it was as big a deal as making everyones email readable by any and all, and there wasn't any kind of official response that acknowledged it was a misstep, let alone apologizing.

I figured since it was around a month after the Beacon fiasco at Facebook that they'd decided that an apology would get them bad PR and so they just ignored the upset people. I switched to Bloglines, and I imagine quite a few of the people who were effected by or noticed what happened did as well.

I felt comfortable with Google up until the Reader fiasco and how they dealt with it.

That said, I'm significantly less comfortable with Facebook.

Nice article, although this bit seemed a bit of a stretch:

> This highlights how the direct manipulation and natural gestures of Microsoft Surface can blur the real and virtual world.

I can imagine that results may vary for people older than 4 years old.

The unladden-swallow page says they're using the LLVM JIT compiler in order to be able to compile Python / bits of Python to machine code.

So it's less about choosing a VM from LLVM / Parrot / JVM / etc and more about using a feature of LLVM to get a speedup.

I'm not so sure that parsing / syntax is the bottleneck - didn't that regex engine get most of its improvements from JIT compiling the regexs?

I assumed it was an identify-the-cute-pig-picture captcha service.

Kind of related - I tried the 28 hour day / 6 day week when I started my PhD.

I could still code but I couldn't do theory - turned that part of my brain off like a switch.

And even though I only did it for 1 or 2 weeks it took more than month for me to get back to feeling normal.

It turns out a lot of systems in the body like that 24 hour thing. I'm glad I stopped before my digestive system got angry :)

Still kind of glad that I tried it because a) I know I won't try anything like it when stakes are higher and b) the amount of discipline it took was roughly equivalent to the amount of discipline it takes to time manage myself to peak productivity on a regular sleep cycle.

Or they could just lie about it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuffer2005/3216972462/

I have a problem with the idea that all the C++ veterans with 10+ years of experience are priced out of the market.

If they're "too expensive" to hire doesn't that imply that their services are in demand?

Thanks for that - I was pretty unsure about what was going on.

Slightly offtopci - wasn't the guy behind that also behind the acacia berry site?

I can remember hearing about how they were optimizing to adwords / adsense - just filling a need, basically being nice about it all.

Then every now and then I'd google something obscure and come across pagerank shennanigans related to similar keywords. That's when I started to think that the people who got excited over the parrot book might have been scammed.

A little off-topic, but it's made my day seeing one of Lipton's posts on the front page.

It only started relatively recently and it's been a really good computational complexity blog so far.

Perhaps the money would be to keep them away so he can get some work done...

I have a sister and a step-sister who are both chiropractors. Apparently there are two disjoint schools of thought within chiropractry, at least in Australia.

My sister does the science based stuff that's mostly about the back and very closely related things, while the camp my step-sister belongs to believes that all ills come from and can be cured through the spine - including cancer, etc ...

They went to different universities, one university having the what I call the "science" focus and the other one having what I call the "crazy" focus. My sister chose the science focused university because the crazy focused university scared the hell out of her.

A bit strange that their qualifications are the same on paper.

I've worked at a place with CD-R versioning scheme but without the Tim equivalent.

Although the backups were pretty important because the founder was paranoid and insisted that we put the hard drives and swap space of every machine through 25 runs of shred at the end of each day.