demetris

Symlinks are specific to individual devices; also, symlink implementations are different from operating system to operating system.

So, if Google Drive or Dropbox were to support that, they would have to implement some very complex solutions (along with some probably very confusing interaction with the user) in order to be able to sync reliably across devices, even devices running the same operating system.

You can always[1] move your Documents inside the Google Drive folder, and then put a symlink at the place Documents were.

[1] I haven’t tried this with Google Drive yet but I suppose it should work. It is what I do with Dropbox, in Linux and in Windows. It works fine.

It baffles me that people who seem to pay careful attention to the appearance of their websites are so careless with their fonts:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3mi5ecf8xguccl4/20120424-025233-ni...

The allure of web fonts becomes stronger and stronger as availability and implementations improve, but people need to be careful: there are very few choises that work well everywhere.

“Changing from your browser -> Firefox = most websites will still work, no additional effort on anyone.”

Now.

When Firefox v1.0 was released in 2004, 8 years ago, that was not so, and early adopters who were thinking about recommending Firefox had to consider two important issues:

First, compatibility.

Second, the fact that the idea that you would install a third-party program to browse the web seemed strange, even pointless, to people.

Yet, Firefox was so good already by that time, and it held so much promise, that those who already knew about it did recommend it. As a result, within one year it had 15% market share—an impressive achievement—, and webmasters had to start doing something about browsers that were not Internet Explorer. Today the compatibility problems are largely confined within intranets, and the idea that you would need one particular browser to browse the web seems strange.

Let’s compare that with where desktop Linux is today. What is the promise it helds? Which are its redeeming virtues that would make me and you recommend it to other people?

I have Linux installed on my auxiliary desktop system since 2004 — either Ubuntu or Debian Sid. The main issue that prevented me from switching when I was more enthusiastic was this:

I like to have two sound cards on my desktop systems: The on-board one, which I don’t care about, and a good one with a good DAC. The music I listen to is fed to the good card, which then feeds the amplifier. All other sound generated by the system goes to the on-board card. In 2004, and also in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, there was only one—I repeat, one—audio player that allowed you to select a non-default sound card for its output and at the same time met some basic requirements like proper gapless playback and good UTF-8 support. That was Quod Libet. The option was not exposed in Quod Libet’s GUI; you had to search for it, and then pass it to the program as a command-line argument. But at least there was one program that supported this simple thing. However there was another issue: Because of a bug in ALSA or the kernel (don’t remember which any more) the sound devices of the system were enumerated at random upon booting, with the result that 50% of the times the audo player had the wrong card selected upon starting! :-) So, after some time I got tired of struggling with the system in order to listen to music and abandoned the idea that I would use Linux as my main desktop system. I don’t know how much better things are today, but I would not be surprised if such problems remain.

I still use Linux today but only on my auxiliary desktop system (Debian Sid). I also use Debian on my laptop for a simple reason: I use the laptop for about 5 to 10 hours a week for a narrower set of tasks, and the high maintenance requirements of Windows seem to me too much for that. Debian, even Debian Sid with its occasional hiccups, is MUCH easier to maintain.

Now, one could say that the one issue I say prevented me from switching to desktop Linux is an edge case. It may be. But I am afraid it is only one of the many edge cases that are frought with problems on desktop Linux. Desktop Linux in my eyes is a heap of edge case problems. Not everyone is affected by every problem, by everyone is bound to hit upon a serious one at some time or other. The two exceptions I know are folks who use their machines mainly for developing for the vibrant Linux web ecosystem, and folks who need their desktop/laptop systems for a narrow set of basic tasks.

It says more about the quality of the review than about the relative merits of the 3 systems.

These things are simple: If Ubuntu were so much better, or just plain better, than other operating systems, more people would use it.

Firefox is, and has been for a long time, much better than IE, and so people use it.

OpenOffice/LibreOffice is not better than Microsoft Office, and so people don’t prefer it over Microsoft Office.

Ubuntu is not better than Windows or OS X, and so very few people prefer it.

“Why is he so threatening?”

In my view, because he has influence based on credibility that he does not deserve any more, and because he exerts that influence in ways that do not benefit free software.

Aha! Thank you.

Interesting that the name of Linus Torvalds is not in the list of previous winners.

If it were possible to take Bing’s search results, throw a handful of people at them and match the quality of Google’s results, Google would not be where it is today.

That is the main problem I see with Duck Duck Go. The quality of its search results depends on Bing. Duck Duck Go can do things to offer something better than Bing, but not that much better that matches Google’s quality.

If by smart wrapping you mean indented wrapping, yes, it does. Set you preferred wrap mode to Indent in Settins, Preferences, Editing, and then toggle Word Wrap from the View menu.

SciTE, with which Notepad++ shares the scintilla editing component, has quite a few settings for wrapping:

http://www.scintilla.org/SciTEDoc.html

(Search for “wrap” in the page.)

I haven’t looked into how many of those are supported in Notepad++, as I don’t use word wrap myself.

For folks who want Ubuntu’s font rendering on Debian, there is a simple hack you can try:

Get Ubuntu’s /etc/fonts directory, remove or rename your own /etc/fonts, and put Ubuntu’s in its place.

I’ve been using this hack in Debian Sid, I have applied it to several machines, and it always gets the job done.

Apologies for veering off topic.

“If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last few months, you probably know all of the following:”

Whenever I see articles starting in this manner, I suppose that:

1. The writer does not know how to write; or

2. The writer is so far immersed in their topic that they have lost sight of what is important and relevant to the rest of the population.

In either case, I stop reading.

Am I wrong? (Genuine question, not rhetorical!)

A similar story on HN from a couple of weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3392851 – Why (and how) we've switched away from Google Maps (nestoria.co.uk)

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est

For those who don’t know, “popcon” is short for Debian Popularity Contest, a project that collects stats about the usage of Debian packages from users who have installed the optional popcon package.

http://popcon.debian.org/

No. It is not an addon or toolbar; it is what happens when you select Amazon.com in the search box and then search for something.

The query string includes this: tag=mozilla-20

(To be sure, I just checked this in three different instances of Firefox: Iceweasel 9 on Debian, Firefox Nightly on Debian, Firefox 9 on Windows.)

I would be surprised if that were the case.

I made a clean Firefox profile and installed and enabled everything in the selection except the Firebug addons and the HTML validator, which does not support Linux. That is, 47 extensions in total. The machine is an old box from 2004 with an AMD64 3000+ processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM, running Debian Sid 64bit. In this old box, with all 47 extensions enabled, Firefox starts in less than 5 seconds and takes about 175 MB of memory.

But even if installing 47 extensions brought Firefox to a halt, why would you need to install all of them? This is simply a collection of recommended extensions, not a set that no developer can do without.

I’m using Gnome 3.2 on Debian Sid and vertical/horizontal maximization is still there.

To define shorcuts: Go to Settings, Keyboard, Shortcuts, Windows, and set your shortcuts.

To change the behaviour of middle-clicking or right-clicking on the title bar, install gnome-tweak-took, run gnome-tweak-tool, and go to the Windows section.

Not just you. :)

Some rearranging/rewriting would make it easier to parse. E.g.:

“In this article I will use the term ORM to refer to any library or framework for interacting with a database; that is, to refer to anything other than writing straight SQL.”

“Are these the folks you want having access to all the personal data on your Facebook account?”

If I had to choose, I would say these folks do indeed sound scarier than Zuckerberg.

The piece needed a better closing sentence.

Previous discussion:

Introducing /run (lwn.net) — http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387495

Ubuntu One cannot be compared to Dropbox, at least not yet: It does not support OSX and it does not support other Linux operating systems either, not even its daddy Debian.

I run Windows and Debian on my desktops and laptop and I recently decided to try Ubuntu One. I could find no mention of other Linux OSes on the Ubuntu One page, and a quick web search returned nothing encouraging.

I was surprised by this. The impression I got is that Ubuntu One is just for people whose main OS is Ubuntu and who may have to also use Windows from time to time.

A screenshot, for when it’s gone:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/390716/google.com-20111006-redacted....

The anchor text (Steve Jobs) links to http://www.apple.com/

The first three Twitter messages by the vulnerability reporter are:

“@AmericanExpress Who can I contact regarding security vulnerabilities in your system? I'm not available through phone, physical mail or fax”

“@AmericanExpress Just to clarify: I have vulnerabilities. This should be "urgent", so no technical support jungle please :-)”

“@AmericanExpress I've been trying to get in touch with AMEX regarding security vulnerabilities in your system for a while. Who do I speak to?”

I think this is not ideally expressive language when you talk to a lay-person representative on Twitter. I believe a better result could be achieved with simpler and clearer language:

“@AmericanExpress I have discovered a serious security issue in your web system (money can be stolen). Please help me report it to someone responsible.”

I’ve been always uneasy with the “crazy things” Chrome does on Windows, mainly because of my general dislike for apps that disregard important vendor recommendations like where programs should be installed.

I understand that the main upside for Chrome is the unobtrusive automatic updates. What I would like to know is what are the possible downsides. Do you or anyone else know about any discussion about that or research into that?

(By the way, another modern app that uses appdata instead of programfiles on Windows is Dropbox.)

Thanks for the information! I first noticed the improvement in Aurora and Nightly builds, and was wondering what they did to fix the problem.

Here is some more information I just found for anyone interested:

Main bug report:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=661471

The two new preferences:

gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families

gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_max_size

And a post talking in detail about the issue:

http://blog.mozilla.com/nattokirai/2011/08/11/directwrite-te...

Of these five I only have the firewall enabled on my Windows 7 desktop. And that only because I can’t be bothered to look into some issues with interdependencies when you disable the Windows firewall. (Can’t recall what exactly now.)

I don’t think the firewall adds anything significant to the startup time; it is just one of the dozens of services that start automatically.

Then, for many people an antivirus program may also be useful. Would that add 5 to 10 seconds to the startup time of a modern machine?

For the other 3—anti-rootkit, anti-spyware, keyboard scrambler— why do you think they are necessary for every user of Windows?

Not all combinations of hardware and drivers work yet. See:

http://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/BlacklistsAndWhitelists

Google do share the percentage of advertising revenue that they give to publishers: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.ht...

(It’s 68% for AdSense for content, and 51% for Adsense for search.)

Quick meta-comment:

It is such a joy reading good, clear, expressive English in a public discussion thread on the internet! Thank you, George Grellas!

Usually you get fixes for a WordPress release up until the first beta of the +2 release is out. That is, for 3.1, up until 3.3 Beta 1 is out.

I don’t know if 3.1, the last release that works with PHP4, will receive special treatment.