gddr

Someone needs to make a distributed one that can't be regulated.

If they're going to use cryptocurrency to fund drugs and crime we might as well use it for the good stuff too.

You basically just explained good software engineering. Code that does one, well-defined, necessary thing and does it well.

If you want to "do a thing", a DoThing() function is the optimal way to represent it. You can't get any more abstract than that, and you don't need to.

Somehow a lot of (badly explained) ideas of "design patterns" and "abstraction" have rotted people's brains into thinking you're supposed to add a whole bunch of extra layers everywhere.

Which sounds like the only logical solution.

Isn't that something you could investigate and prove? Look up 1000 randomly-generated domains from different IPs, check later if any of them are registered, done.

Indeed, blocking Facebook Connect or disabling Javascript makes the page show empty (on all browsers).

Luckily I'm on a 30Mbps connection now ;-)

I hate Steam's DRM. People keep trying to convince people that it does not actually require an Internet connection and all that. Try using it for 6 months with a 0.2 Mbps connection that gets randomly cut every 5-10 seconds. It can literally take 10 minutes "Preparing to launch" a game. I really hope it doesn't expand to other software.

The funniest part is: "Could not connect to Steam network. Start in Offline Mode?". You answer yes. "Error: could not connect to Steam network. This operation cannot be completed in Offline Mode". Maximum trollgaben.

Just accept the future man.

"Pyramid

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A pyramid (from Greek: πυραμίς pyramis[1]) is a structure whose shape is roughly that of a pyramid in the geometric sense; that is, its outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single point at the top.

Share "Pyramid" with your friends: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Google+ - Email - Pinterest - Tumblr - Reddit - Delicious - Digg - WordPress

Follow Wikipedia on: Twitter - Facebook - Google+ - Pinterest"

(Or you could get Ghostery)

I read somewhere about how Windows introduced in early versions the ability to make buttons look "3D" (update: here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/07/28/19958...), and for the next few years every program made its buttons look more 3D than the previous version, until someone decided they had gone too far and started going in the opposite direction. And now looking at Metro I'd say we are at the other extreme (completely flat and minimalist). I hope it stabilizes somewhere in the middle in 5 years. Just look how fast they ditched the "vista" look.

It's funny if you look at http://stocklogos.com/topic/past-and-future-famous-logos. That page is satire from 2011... well check out the last "Microsoft" logo ;-)

RGBA can be unintuitive. Opera implemented transitions by interpolating them (I think it's solved now), which turns out not to work very well: http://bugs.hawn.be/opera/transitions/color/

As a long-time Yahoo mail user, I'd say basically any email service is better than Yahoo Mail, at least if we're talking about their webmail interfaces.

(Protip: http://us.mc598.mail.yahoo.com/mc/launch)

You know you can buy tablets with Windows 7 today right? It does not have a touch-optimized interface but you can run any program on it, and you might even be able to dual-boot Android.

I just wondered if it would be possible for a company to sign something saying that they will not accept any settlement (larger than $0) with the other company (and that if they do they'll have to give an obscenely large amount of money to someone else). Since patent trolls don't usually want to go to court, precommitment should be enough for them to drop the case most of the time.

Opera seems to have it too, but I don't use it much. It also has had "labels" (as opposed to folders) and message indexing for quite some time, I believe this was one of its main selling points.

Theres's A LOT of emotional weight attached to these kind of issues. People tend to pick one side and feel identified with them (ingroups) and get angry at people at the other side. Politics basically.

It's funny/depressing to go at certain forums/imageboards and see people CONSTANTLY attacking the same thing, every day again and again. If someone defends them (or attacks their own side) they are obviously gonna get angry.

For example, if you want to play a game with someone who's on the other side of the world (or the galaxy) without that annoying lag imposed by relativity, you can simply have them send you a full scan of their brain, and then you can simulate it locally (not necessarily in your computer, it can run in the nearest Google MindSharing Center™).

Heck, you don't even need to play the game yourself. Send Google a copy of your brain too, and they will simulate the encounter in their servers and insert the memory in your brain when they're done. EVERYTHING can run in the cloud!

I think computing power would be a much bigger issue than bandwidth. You'd need to run many instances of the game for each user, and continuously kill and fork them.

And frankly, a $500 computer today can already display quite good graphics. Maybe by the time gigabit bandwidth is ubiquitous, computers will be usable enough that installing and running a game locally will be as seamless as clicking a link on a web page, so we won't need cloud gaming amymore.

It's funny, because in my (shitty) country, we have a "communications industry regulator" that basically does only this: sue people who give free internet.

Well I get 30Mbps for less than 40€/month, so I can't complain I guess...

You said it. I have this feeling people tend to forget developers are users too. The "don't make me think" rule still applies even if their job is thinking.

So if you really want people to use your system (API, library, IDE, programming language, compiler...) you should run usability tests, write easy-to follow documentation with examples and answers to common problems, make it super easy to download (if it's software), maybe make a web page where you can try it online (that helps a lot), have a nice, smooth user interface, make it behave similar to something users have probably already used, have a good name, a nice logo, a nice-looking webpage, take care of its search-engine positioning, offer services such as forums, maybe advertise a bit, sell shirts, give a free night at a spa to one of the users every month (hey why not)... wow that list came longer than expected. Well you get the point.

In 15 years we are all gonna surf the web in a "virtual browser" that will be coded in HTML + Javascript running inside another browser.

Ha ha, that's silly, I'm just joking. Or am I?

That was interesting. I've often wondered if it would be possible to ditch the current keyboard layouts and start from zero.

If I had to do that, my initial approach would probably be letters + a certain number of modifier keys. Each one would roughly correspond to a "level": System/OS, application, content, text... So hitting "System+x" would make your OS do something (like killing the application), "App+x" would make your application do something (like opening a new tab), "Content+x" would make your content do something (web apps would probably use those). Of course, in real life, after two years it would basically be "all combinations that make sense are taken, so grab whichever is still available", but oh well, in the end you have to memorize them anyways so it's no use trying to enforce specific rules.

Fun fact: Opera has had "widgets", which are basically the same thing as this, since version 9 (2006). They could run without having the main browser open, and when I looked inside their folders, I was surprised to see that, indeed, each one had an actual ".exe" file. I doubt you'd be able to distribute them though. They are deprecated now for some reason.

I used mailcatch.com, but I always ran into problems like sites that block temporary accounts. So I decided to make a Google account for all my, ahem, "NSFW needs". Which would also give me the ability to like/dislike videos on YouTube, and see the comments on the ones that have been "flagged as NSFW".

So what is my surprise when I see "You have to enter your phone number to continue". After trying to bypass it a few times I just gave up and got a Lavabit account. I don't want to give you my phone number and I most certainly don't want to give you my real name, Google. What the hell.