icarus_drowning

Regardless, it isn't some sort of oppressive scheme designed to further the marginalization of certain groups.

Not allowing pseudonyms on G+ is obviously a tremendous and awful mistake, and I think most (not all, obviously), of the people here on HN agree with that statement because of the obvious cases that boyd mentions. However, I think that huge mistake is different than "an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people". The latter requires intent, and neither I nor danah boyd can know if this is Google's intent. Indeed, I suspect that Google's intent isn't even known to most of the people working on G+, or even the "upper ups". The marketing people probably want better data for AdSense, and the Engineers are probably viewing the problem from the perspective of simplifying the site's infrastructure, etc. etc... I sincerely doubt that anyone is attempting for some sort of authoritarian power grab.

What they are doing, however, is making a really big mistake.

My wife had the first Galaxy S (the Verizon version). We had to replace it after six months because it routinely would not accept incoming phone calls despite showing full reception, was extremely crash prone, and had awful call quality. We worked with Verizon to address the call quality/missed call issue, but it never helped.

A few weeks ago, my wife dropped it, and shattered the screen. The phone is still usable, but we took this as an excuse to get her an iPhone 4.

It is amazing how little anything matters when a phone doesn't function as a phone.

Try doing this with 3rd party sound libraries (e.g. East|West) and you can quickly get into loading times that are hugely longer. I love opening my projects that only use Logic's built in synths, because they load quickly compared the marathons that can ensue when I am working on a large, fully-orchestral, 70/80-track piece.

And that's before I've added other media, such as video, to the project.

Look who has the biggest armies in Europe. (Hint: it isn't the countries who look likely to default).

I have to admit, I don't find it very "interesting" at all. I find it irritating and sophomoric.

I'm very sympathetic to Google, but I do believe that they are entering dangerous territory as they become more and more dominant. So I would like to see a serious critique of their policies and practices.

This is not it.

There is not a single example of "deceptive practices" in the article, merely supposed "evidence" that those practices are likely. Whether or not that is true, without any example to point to, the article is entirely evidence-free.

We have a word for that: it is screed. That's all this article really is. One of the worst OP's I've ever read on HN.

I used to backup to a 1TB drive connected and shared by a TonidoPlug using Time Machine. It was a bit of a pain to set up under Leopard, but it worked well enough over the network. A big advantage here is that Time Machine creates a Sparseimage file to back up to, which means it is trivial to "backup your backup"-- all you have to do is mirror that file somewhere else.

I stopped doing this because it was easier and faster in the long run just to plug in a FireWire800 drive and stop messing around with a somewhat hacky solution that occasionally failed and was pretty slow.

I find it interesting that the article begins by talking about how great it is that Google+ puts pressure on facebook and then immediately tries to paint the service as a bad thing. Intrinsic to the claim that G+ is a long-awaited challenge to the "monopolistic" facebook is the obvious fact that Google is one of the few entities with the power to challenge the facebook behemoth. So why then does the author then complain that Google is too big?

Pretty shallow analysis, and dependent on the assumption that there is no legitimate reason to "keep people out", when there plainly is, as is obvious to anyone who has read stories of employers stumbling across embarrassing photos on facebook.

My wife and her friends (who amazingly all accepted her G+ invites and immediately started the service) like it much more than Facebook. My wife's an RN, and reasonably technically savvy, but not someone I'd call a "geek". I asked her why she liked it more and she said two things that I thought were interesting:

1) "Well, I like Google better anyway. So I'd rather use their service."

2) "It just feels better than facebook to me."

Really surprised me, considering that we're going to replace her Android phone that she's only been using for 6 months or so because she hates it so much and because she really likes to use facebook.

I'm not sure if her experience is going to be the norm, but it seems to bode well for Google.

It is quite obvious that Google+ is far, far from perfect, and I don't think that it is going to make even the smallest dent in facebook's market-share. But that doesn't mean that many of the features that make it distinctive-- including Circles-- aren't a positive step forward. (If anything, if the "defining features" of + serve no other purpose than forcing facebook to integrate similar features, I'd call it a success).

Indeed, suggesting that Google+ is simply some sort of "copy" of facebook plus a few new features is a pretty short-sighted view of the service, as the entire model of Google+ is hugely different: instead of viewing one's social graph as one monolithic entity, Google+ views it as a series of graphs that are often intersecting and often entirely different. And that is very useful, especially for people who might want to be able to share things with their coworkers that are entirely different than what they share with their friends.

I'm not going to argue with the assertion that a great deal of Google+'s early "success" is simply due to "non stop hyping", rather than the service's actual strengths. But that doesn't mean that the strengths it does possess are somehow frivolous or meaningless. They simply aren't.

Simply put: sure, you might be happy sharing with email/dropbox, but a great deal of people would rather that our current social networks had a more granular view of sharing/following/etc. (this includes me). And I hardly think its fair to criticize them the way you have-- it is more than just "the early adopter crowd trying to make the masses using Facebook feel inferior for still using it" (indeed, many of the early adopters have been very critical of the service, even noting when facebook or twitter is superior-- see Jeff Jarvis' comments about how difficult it is to follow live events on G+[1]).

It is still far too early to tell whether G+ is a 'facebook killer'-- I strongly suspect that it isn't. But that doesn't mean that unfair poo-pooing of it simply because it is over-hyped is the right response. Both Twitter and facebook could learn a great deal from what Google has done, and I genuinely hope they do.

As I said above, if that happens, I for one will consider G+ a rather startling success.

[1]:https://plus.google.com/105076678694475690385/posts/JSWreaGr...

Google+ solves a lot of issues. It is easy, rather than confusing, to set up lists of friends, and using them is likewise easy, rather than frustrating. Video chat that's free and easy to use (as opposed to easy to use but not worth the expense in the case of Skype or incredibly expensive and inordinately difficult to use in the case of many corporate IT solutions).

It doesn't solve every need that Facebook doesn't, but it does address quite a few of them.

Because the micro-pulse of 6/8 is different than 3/4. 3/4 is naturally emphasized as "1 2 3 1 2 3. In contrast, 6/8 is naturally emphasized with a micro pulse of 1 2 3 4 5 6, which produces a strong pulse on 1, a slightly weaker pulse on 4, and a macro pulse of "1 2. (Think 4/4 with triplets). You thus get a much different feeling from 6/8 than 3/4.

Very practical, which is great. It is very easy to stay motivated when the tutorial is so focused on producing something that you like.

The only thing that I thought was missing was a discussion about micro and macro pulses in 4/4 versus 3/4 versus 6/8, because it is a simple concept that is easy to teach but offers the student much more variety of options in choosing a time signature. As a music teacher, I usually approach the issue by having students count 4/4 aloud ("1 2 3 4, noting that 1 and 3 are accented slightly) and 3/4 aloud (1 2 3, noting that beat 1 is accented). This teaches not just the structure of the time signatures but helps the student internalize them, which I've found speeds up learning and understanding without sacrificing the student's ability to understand what principles make rhythms work the way they do. (This would have made syncopation a lot easier to teach later in the article-- it can be defined as simply rhythms that don't conform to the usual micro/macro pulse of a time signature, i.e. 1 2 3 4, etc)

Also, one of the easiest ways to grok the time signature concept is to say the signature aloud like it's a fraction. i.e., 4/4 is "four fourths", 6/8 is "sixth eighths" etc. It really is that easy, and this approach combined with the understanding that the lower value gets one beat and there are x of them per measure usually makes time signatures one of the easiest sections of my theory courses.

Still, it's hard to criticize a tutorial that has you producing music so quickly.

Mostly it has to do with where things are in reality on the surface rather than taking wrong routes. You can look at a map of London and try to correlate the stations on that map with the "official" non-geographical version, or you can have a map of London and a map of the tube system that's fairly close to it. Just going off the Thames alone makes it easier to figure out where the best place to get off is.

Just visited London for vacation a few weeks ago. As a non-Londoner, I have to say that I like the new version much better. I can already see several mistakes that I made when choosing which routes to take-- mistakes that I doubt I would have made had I had access to this map. Bravo.

I think one of the salient features of Exchange 2010 is a Microsoft Sync technology that mimics some of the features of BES. Last I'd heard (I'm not in IT anymore, having instead chosen a career that actually matches my education), it was woefully worse than BES. Which is saying something.

As a frontline helpdesk worker at a corporation that deployed hundreds of Blackberrys, I can assure you that the users frequently cared a great deal about the crappy UI of the Blackberry OS. When I left, the MIS (yes, we were that old-school) department were beginning to research moving away from RIM because their end-user devices were consuming too much of our helpdesk resources. And because the executives, who all had iPhones, came to us and asked the question why we couldn't provide them a solution that worked as well as an iPhone's email.

I am continually confused when people write things like "Blackberry...has the shittiest web browser, terrible apps, but an absolutely fantastic email experience (still)." I used to work on corporate IT managing and using RIM products from end to end, and I never found the email experience all that compelling. Sure the devices have fairly good keyboards, and, as a proponent of hardware keyboards in an era when they are all being relegated to software, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the RIM cause.

But the "email experience" on the Blackberry's I've used-- from older, clunkier models with the torturous side-scrollwheel to the Storm2-- was only ever as good as the Blackberry OS itself, which has consistently been pretty terrible. Who cares if it's easy to select an email if you have to endure an excruciating boot process before you can get to it? Who cares if the device has a fantastic keyboard if you have to wade through awful UI in order to launch the email app? (This is not to mention the horrible experience of managing the server portions of BES, which I always found confusing and often deliberately crippled).

I think this "myth" stems from the legacy of the Blackberry, which was one of the first devices to really have any kind of data/email capability. (Or, at the very least, was one of the first to be easy to adopt and fairly inexpensive to run with those kinds of capabilities). Of course the Blackberry was considered amazing when it was the only way to connect a corporate email system to a cell phone or other mobile device. But it isn't anymore, and frankly, I've found the "experience" of using and managing Google Apps and an Android phone light years better. (Hell, I think the crappy IMAP client that comes with Android is better than having to use a RIM OS, although I confess, I got out of the game before the Playbook, and thus, QNX).

UPDATE: Grammer, and ending comment.

I've watched all of the videos-- this is a very good summary of them. Plus, it isn't like the editor/uploader doesn't make it easy to find the original videos anyway.

Well, I'm glad there are some significant new features that Google is trying to use as leverage. Group video chat comes to mind as something that most people don't like to deal with, but as an integral part of a social network, I can see it making more sense.

Its clear they've tried not just to 'clone' Facebook, which I appreciate.

I'm an American who has contacts with a group of people who are illegal aliens. We have been trying to go the correct route for years. Trust me when I say it is a clusterfuck of epic proportions.

The entire reason we have a problem is because there isn't a good way to "do things legally".

Interesting link. Certainly related to the rise of alternative copyright models, which are certainly related to technology and startups. Obviously relevant and valid HN link.

I guess I'm the only one who hasn't had any problems with a Mag Safe adapter in the 3 years I've owned a MacBook Pro?

Ballistic missiles v. Aircraft Carriers seems like overkill, especially when it is fairly trivial to outfit submarines with nuclear torpedos (I can't find any that are listed as active in the U.S. arsenal, but we've had them before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_45_torpedo ).

EDIT: What was I thinking? A nuclear-tipped cruise missile is even better.

Currency is a placeholder for value. So long as I can exchange bitcoins for value, they will function as a currency. The design of bitcoin makes it very difficult for governments to make such a scenario impossible (or even difficult). For that reason alone, bitcoins will remain valuable, if for nothing other than goods or services that governments don't like.

*there has to be someone willing to say "I'll give you X USD for Y bitcoins"

Not really. They have to be willing to say "I'll give you X thing that you value in exchange for Y bitcoins." The entire point is that the design of bitcoin makes that scenario likely to always be true precisely because it is nearly impossible to stop. As I said above, the very fact that it represents a system that is very difficult for state actors to attack ensures that it will almost certainly be used for exchanging goods and services that governments would rather not exist. Not a terribly noble future, perhaps, but certainly one that ensures bitcoins have value.

Thread you are more interested in pushed off the front page by a majority that is interested in something else. Issue here: nonexistent.

As I mentioned above, Bitcoins value relative to the dollar is irrelevant, because its value is found in its utility. So long as there are goods and services to purchase with Bitcoin (and it seems very difficult for a government to stop such services from existing), the utility of the currency remains valuable, regardless of its exchange rate to the dollar.

EDIT: The fact that government would have a very difficult time shutting down the Bitcoin economy is yet another example of its utility and value.