kijinbear

I completely agree with the author's argument about smartphones and tablets, but I think @nextparadigms is right about the MacBook Air. It belongs in a completely different market segment, along with $2,000 "ultraportables" from Lenovo and Toshiba. That segment has been there for a long time even before netbooks appeared.

It's definitely possible to pack a real Core 2 or i7 processor, an optical drive, and 10+ hours of battery life in a 11-13 inch form factor with a weight of no more than 3 pounds. It gets pretty damn expensive, though, even without the mandatory Apple mark-up.

Personally, I would urge anyone who has a good enough budget to get a real ultraportable instead of a half-assed Atom netbook. But if somebody is shopping for a $350 netbook, I don't think they'd consider the MacBook Air a serious alternative. If anything, smartphones and tablets are stealing market share from both netbooks and ultraportables.

Full-disk encryption. You enter the key whenever the system needs to be rebooted. I know at least one company that does this with all of their US-hosted servers.

Not nearly as dramatic as Réunion, but I've personally seen 900mm (35.4") of rain in one day. It was August 31, 2002 in the East Coast of South Korea. It felt like a reenactment of the Biblical deluge or something. Really scary stuff.

That will only tell you if somebody has hacked your Gmail account. The OP is for checking if somebody may have hacked one of your other accounts (e.g. Sony) where you used your e-mail address.

There's no way Chrome will do this until Google can find a different way to insert AdSense ads on third-party sites. Currently, third-party scripts are the best way to achieve this. iframes are inelegant, and telling webmasters to update the script every once in a while just isn't going to work.

But I do hope that something like this becomes one of the standard add-ons that we can install. I'll have to go check if NoScript has a similar option...

Reminds me of Microsoft in the pre-Firefox, pre-Chrome days. It is extremely difficult for someone who has a virtual monopoly to innovate and listen to its users all the time. We can't just assume that it won't happen to X because X has something to do with open-source.

I really hope that the rise of GitHub and similar competitors provokes SourceForge to innovate again.

Yes, the SQL example was lame. There are too many PHP "tutorials" which attempt to demonstrate one concept while blatantly ignoring basic security principles. In this case, the example should have used prepared statements with either MySQLi or PDO.

I think it has to do with neither pride nor discipline. It's all about business.

Microsoft won't make much money by breaking backwards compatibility; in fact, they'd lose billions if they did. Think of the hundreds of millions (if not billions) of business licenses they have sold. Business customers want their old apps to keep working. Yes, I'm talking about the same people who still use IE6. Whether you like them or not, these are the customers who purchase thousands of licenses each, and there are lots of them. Losing these customers could hurt Microsoft just as much as, if not much more than, losing tablet-toting consumers.

Of course, Microsoft doesn't want to lose either market, so they'll produce a version of Windows that has both complete backwards compatibility with existing Windows apps, and a fancy shell to appeal to tablet users.

I totally agree with your concerns, and I also love your small touchscreen idea. A full touch interface gets really awkward, not to mention expensive, once your screen gets bigger than 10-15 inches.

All these full-screen apps with touch functions are optimized for laptops and tablets. Apple did it, Ubuntu did it, and now Microsoft is going to do it. Maybe that's where everyone thinks the future is. But as the proud owner of a 24" widescreen monitor who is always looking for an excuse to upgrade to 30", I am very disappointed with this inspired-by-tablets-but-also-fits-the-desktop nonsense.

I don't want full-screen apps, dammit. I bought a big monitor because I want several apps and all of their content to be simultaneously visible at all times. I shudder whenever a member of my family "borrows" my PC for a few minutes and goes on to maximize all the windows without even thinking twice. And I certainly don't want to wave my arms all across the big screen like an idiot. There's a very good reason why we have a small device (mouse) that can be manipulated with the flick of a finger to control an arbitrarily larger interface. I don't know how a small touchscreen might be used in a similar role while retaining the intuitiveness of a touch interface, but we're definitely going to need something like that or our arms will begin to hurt very badly after 10 minutes.

Given how configurable Firefox is, I'm sure they'll add an option to disable automatic updates even if it becomes a default feature.

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a tech-savvy "Internet generation". Most of those kids who know how to use Facebook inside and out would be just as clueless as today's senators are, if they had to deal with anything remotely technical.

I'm in Canada and I pay for music. Now I want my tax back on all the blank CDs I ever bought.

I hated it when Ubuntu switched from Gnome to Unity by default, but I like this move away from GDM. If there's one thing in Ubuntu that's less customizable (in terms of look-and-feel) than Unity, it's GDM.

Yeah, jQuery tends to break backwards compatibility a little too often. But I don't think they can keep doing that forever. Sooner or later they'll have to settle on a stable API. Maybe in jQuery 2.0.

I wonder how long it will take before browsers start shipping with jQuery by default. Chrome might do it first, given its willingness to bundle commonly used plugins such as Flash.

Driving can still be cheaper than flying if you have 2 or more people traveling together. It would be tough to beat trains and buses, though.

Not if you're holding onto it using a magnetic field, or any other method that doesn't involve direct contact.

Yes, it's possible to use up to 32K characters in the path if you use the "\\?\" prefix. Support for this feature may be hit-or-miss, though, so I wouldn't count on it.

TrueCrypt is OK if you only use Dropbox for backup. But as soon as sync comes into the picture, all hell breaks loose. Remember, a TrueCrypt volume contains an entire file system inside. File systems seriously don't like it when you modify bits and pieces of it from under their feet. You can't use any file in the volume until you've finished using the volume in the other computer.

EncFS is somewhat better in terms of sync, because it encrypts each file separately.

Here's a nice tutorial: http://pragmattica.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/encrypting-your-...

I have ~2.5GB of encrypted files in my Dropbox, and as long as I don't try to edit the same file in two places at the same time, it works like a charm. (Conflicts can be nasty, as another comment says. But it's not as bad as TrueCrypt, because EncFS works per-file.) Editing different files at the same time, on the other hand, is kosher.

There are, however, a few other problems with EncFS.

First of all, you can't mount an EncFS directory tree from Windows. There's an actively developed Windows port of EncFS out there (which uses Dokan), but I've never been able to get it to work properly.

Also, Windows has a maximum path length limit of 260 chars. Since EncFS pads file names with unique IVs and base64 encodes them after encrypting them, you can reach this limit after only 3-4 levels of subdirectories. Paths which are too long for Windows will simply be omitted from the Windows copy of your Dropbox folder. So if you ever treat the Windows copy as an authoritative backup, you're in for a nasty surprise. Linux is OK up to 4096 chars. I'm not sure how OSX does it.

Lastly, Dropbox in Linux tends to choke when you add a large number of files with encrypted filenames. It's not uncommon for Dropbox to declare a "case conflict" in that situation when there actually isn't any case conflict. This can seriously damage your EncFS directory tree, because Dropbox adds the phrase "(Case Conflict 1)" to random files and folders. An easily solution is to stop Dropbox, add the files, and restart Dropbox again. But this can get annoying after a while.

> all around us right now (if you live near leaf-dropping trees in a temporal zone), leaves are turning yellow and looking a little dry and crusty.

At first, I was like "Huh? Do they have NPR in Australia too?" and then I remembered to check the publication date.

Very clearly written, and easy to understand. I love articles like this.

You actually gain weight immediately, due to the conservation of mass. Eat an ounce of sugar (or anything else) and you gain an ounce, until you poop it out. You just don't feel it because the amounts involved at any given meal is small. But if you ate 10 lb of sugar at one meal... you'd definitely feel the consequences.

Warrants are issued by judges. There are few things that a politician hates more than having to answer to a judge.

All of the Internet surveillance and censorship policies proposed and implemented around the world attempt to bypass judges. USA (Patriot Act), Australia (mandatory filtering), and now Canada. The usual excuse, of course, is that things on the the Internet move too quickly to wait for due process to take its course.

Proposals like this can win votes from law-enforcement circles. After all, warrantless disclosures and always-ready surveillance equipment would allow cops to gain information about a person with just one phone call. They hate having to follow procedure, especially if that procedure involves waiting for a judge to issue an order.

There's also the more dramatic explanation about how this all boils down to a power struggle between the haves and the have-nots, but I prefer the making-cops-happier explanation. There are plenty of good cops in every country, but law enforcement has a lot of solidarity built into its ranks, so police-related groups can sway many votes. Harper would do anything for a few thousand extra votes.

It's usually not the base system that causes issues. Most instabilities I've come across have to do with distro-specific UI customizations and proprietary add-ons such as Flash.

For example, Ubuntu Natty Desktop Edition will come with Unity as the default UI, which is a relatively immature platform that Canonical is trying to push hard. Linux Mint will probably stick with GNOME and KDE though.

Of course it's always possible to switch to something that is more stable, but that's not exactly "It works out of the box."

This guy has a point. Ubuntu's constant meddling with the Desktop and adoption of immature software as default is why I left it for Linux Mint. LM 10 has "just worked" for me so far, and LM Debian Edition also look spromising. By contrast, Ubuntu breaks a few important things every time they release a new version.

I don't plan to consider returning until Ubuntu Desktop Edition "stabilizes" a bit. But that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon, what with the impending switch to Unity, and the rumored switch to Wayland, and ever tighter integration with Canonical's proprietary offerings...

GNU/Linux is already rock solid at the base system level, but some distros just ruin the Desktop experience.

They don't all work on the same part of the kernel.

Extroverts can be bad team members when they're assholes. Assholes come in many flavors, but an extroverted asshole often makes a worse team member than an introverted asshole.

Introverts can be effective communicators when they've thought through the problem at hand and therefore know exactly how to make sense of it. Extroverts are sometimes too distracted to think deeply about something.

I think the article is talking about a specific way of talking about "team skills" and "communication skills". Some people tend to equate those terms with the ability to make small talk with everybody, be popular at parties, etc. Those kinds of "skills" are definitely lacking in introverts, yet expected of everybody where extroverted assholes are in positions of power.

I like this idea. Software changes over time, so I always have to double-check the date when reading other people's reviews. Especially if the software is developed at a very fast rate, such as Redis.

Another option would be to provide a history of average star ratings, similar to the 52-week activity graph. Then people would be able to see, for example, that most reviews have turned positive since the v2.5 release, etc. Tie reviews to versions and/or commits, and allow people to post another review after X weeks, so that the same person can post different reviews of different versions of the same program.

"A few hours" could be anything between 2 and 8-10 hours. When I was a teenager I'd get in front of the computer as soon as I got back from school and keep the computer on until I went to bed. That added up to ~6 hours a day on average. Anything more would be unrealistic for someone who needs to go to school every day.

Some of the other discrepancies, though, look more suspicious. The very notion that a security-conscious person who has just committed a federal crime would spill so much about his/her life in a random newspaper article reeks of BS.

Haha, didn't think of that. What if the retired billionaire just ran for President himself?