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just_the_tip

114 karma · joined May 2, 2009

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just_the_tip··on Why Arabic is Terrific
"A language is a dialect with an army and navy"
just_the_tip··on O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today
It's an issue of using a subpar client, not a subpar format. I have yet to find a decent epub reader for a computer. Stanza for iPhone, iBooks, and dedicated hardware render epubs beautifully.
just_the_tip··on O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today
You can get $5 O'Reilly EPUBs from the App Store everyday.

Extracting an epub from an iPhone app is easy. First you unzip the .ipa file. Then you cd to Payload/*/book. Finally, you zip up the files to an .epub file: zip -X ~/book.epub mimetype && zip -r9DX ~/book.epub META-INF OEBPS.

mimetype must be first in the archive for validity, which you can test with EpubCheck.

just_the_tip··on The New Browser Wars: Will Ubuntu drop Firefox for Google Chrome?
I suppose everybody here knows the ins and outs of the browser landscape and has their own favorite. Most everybody else doesn't care about browsers and would find a selection screen annoying. Ubuntu has worked hard at reducing the effort to install an operating system, and such a screen goes against their philosophy. It's important to have sensible defaults.
just_the_tip··on Relocating from San Francisco to Seattle: cost comparison
King County also levies a sales tax.
just_the_tip··on Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable
>The browser should have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with video and audio decoding.

I know! While we're at it, who had the brilliant idea to put image decoders in browsers? I say let QuickTime decode GIFs and PNGs.

just_the_tip··on Nook, Barnes & Noble eBook Reader Announced
Most of those titles are public domain books scanned as part of Google Books and complete with OCR typos. Right now, Amazon's selection is better.
just_the_tip··on Apple behind Intel's new 10Gbps Optical Connector Standard
Hopefully this means we can standardize data exchange on something like Ethernet so that if some faster technology is invented on the physical layer, it would be easy to upgrade. This scenario is what Bonjour is made for. Imagine plugging in any peripheral into any port. The peripheral would automatically assign itself an IP address with zeroconf, assign itself a name with mDNS, and advertise its capabilities through services discovery, all without requiring a DHCP server or DNS server. The backside of your computer would be one power port and a whole bunch of Light Peak ports. No more fudging around with USB, FireWire, BlueTooth, DisplayPort, DVI, VGA, all of which are incompatible with each other but do the same task of moving data around.

Here's an excellent (but long) video on this topic: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7398680103951126462

just_the_tip··on Firefox 3.5 is "location-aware"
https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Using_geolocation
just_the_tip··on Inside a Netflix Warehouse
Video of a Netflix hub:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWA0LKfEv3c

just_the_tip··on Acer’s Everywhere. How Did That Happen?
LG was never an ODM (sic). And they don't manufacture hard drives. Sure, they manufacture displays but so do Sharp and Philips. Also, I was under the impression that Lenovo merely acquired IBM's PC business. All the other companies are ODMs though.
just_the_tip··on Acer’s Everywhere. How Did That Happen?
You sure about LG and Lenovo?
just_the_tip··on Japan Going to 10 Gigabit/s symmetrical internet access starting 2010
I think it has to do more with policy than it does with the telcos. Japan, Korea, and Sweden are outliers which have had massive funding (direct and indirect) from the governments to build up their broadband infrastructures. The hands-off, let the market decide, strategy of the previous Republican administration has led to the largest commercial fiber deployment in the world (FiOS), but it isn't as far-reaching or speedy as the government-assisted rollouts. When you look at penetration rates and bandwidth capacities of different nations, the US is in the middle of the pack.
just_the_tip··on Ronco Spray-On Usability
In regard to the printer sharing problem, it's pretty much solved today thanks to zeroconf (marketed as Bonjour by Apple). It makes addressing computers and advertising services in the local area network much easier. I wish more developers would take advantage of zeroconf.
just_the_tip··on Hack: Site steals your browsing history based on URL link color
Here something similar based on social sites: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/
just_the_tip··on Ask HN: Explain AWS
Or you can just use Amazon's console.

https://console.aws.amazon.com/

just_the_tip··on NoScript author apologizes, releases 1.9.2.6 to undo the changes
He did this by including obfuscated code that modified the internal state of Adblock Plus without notifying the user.
just_the_tip··on Attention NoScript users
The plugin is updated frequently also because doing so lands itself in the Most Popular Add-ons chart. Giorgio has a history of pushing the limit to see what he can get away before backtracking when someone calls him out on it.