liljimmytables

> At the point one insists on Linux the desktop for an average user, the complexity argument has left the barn. This isn't meant as snark.

Agree, but I'm not sure what you're driving at. I was talking about existing users that want to run Linux as their primary desktop, as they're going to be the market that is affected by this.

It's more of an unnecessarily substandard user experience than anything else. The virtualised system is necessarily more complex than the bare system (it is the bare system + another OS + the virtual machine) so when something goes wrong there is that much more of a problem surface. If you intend to use the linux desktop, you are booting into one operating system purely to get through to the next one. That means additional waiting, keypress captures, device sharing, and things you don't really need to worry about.

These things aren't killer issues, sure, but if there exists a product that doesn't involve doing things the hard way then I'm going to avoid doing things the hard way.

I wonder if this will have an implication for running Linux on Surfaces, I hope it does because they're a very neat (and affordable - inb4 Asus Transformer) piece of hardware but I have little use for another Windows machine.

You're right about CRUD and canned solutions. On the other hand, I think that OP is in fact bemoaning their lack of investment in the product- that "CRUD" is just the most notable feature of it. So I would agree and disagree with you at the same time: "embrace what you have" is true for "embrace this approach to development" because it's good, and you will find joy in the details. However, "embrace what you have" is false for "I'm doing a job where I have no love for the things I'm making." The longer you try to embrace it, the more damage you will do to yourself and to your employer.

> feedback was _not at all achieved_

To be more precise, _market_ feedback was achieved. A small, pizzling drip of market feedback. When you hand out devices, you're looking for _product_ feedback.

That said, if someone offered me a free laptop, I probably would keep it because I don't own nearly enough laptops.

Personally I've been waiting for this device for years. My primary phone usage is reading and composing email, making calls, and listening to music. I also use a Nook Touch to store reading material for reference and entertainment. This new device resolves the two devices into one- what's not to like? If I need internet or video, there are tablets available that provide this functionality in a much more comfortable form factor.

I don't claim to be representative of a large market, but this new device has finally done something that NFC, dual cores, retina, et al have failed to do, which is excite me.

This is broadly my take on things; I love the inspiration that I get from the startup community, but I'm not motivated at all by the rapid growth aspect. I'm sure that if one of my slow-growth projects developed into something bigger I would change my tune, but I don't feel like joining the high-growth scene for the sake of it.

I admire people who can identify a useful, positive seed idea and grow it to something that enriches a wider audience though. That's kind of why I lurk around HN.

I think the interesting thing is that you can now raise large sums while still having an exit condition that isn't "IPO" or "buyout." To me, anything that brings the focus of the CEO back to "create cool thing" is a good move for capitalism and the world in general.

A personal opinion: Lua comes close to having a predictable control flow, as more program structure stuff is built in to the language. One of the headaches I had with Tcl was maintaining heaps of scripts that implemented structural features (OO, object references, list comprehensions, to name a few that come to mind) in different ways _because you can_. Doing things the elegant way can sometimes be the enemy of doing things the predictable way.

This is strictly a limitation of languages like Lua, but in day-to-day use it sometimes becomes an advantage.

Humble Bundles have been my primary source of linux games for a while. They deserve much kudos for upping the game, as it were.

There is also already plenty of DRM-encumbered Linux software (I'm thinking of electronic engineering vendors, but that's only because my field of experience has led me there). If Steam will do anything in this space, it will bring mainstream visibility to the potential of software licensing mechanics in Linux.

Everyone seems to be going on about bad webdesign, but with the exception of the blue-on-red in the search bar at the top I find the choice of colours uplifting. It's a personal taste thing I guess, but DDG isn't going to score points for homogeneity so they might as well stick with it.

Where DDG really scores over Google is that it is cruft-free. It's not inviting me to look at maps, images, my G+ account, it's not got sidebars, and it doesn't break up the search to add in image/shopping results. My brain is working optimally on the task of scanning the results, I am <s>fitter</s>, happier and more productive. That's DDG's killer feature for me. It's not even an original feature, Google used to have it but they got rid. In short, DDG isn't a Google killer, but it's a great companion.

So, assuming one was a lazy slacker and wanted all their email to fall into a black hole for the purpose of work avoidance, have you got any advice other than "always mail people without CC?"

It's not for me you understand, it's for a friend.

I confess, after spending a few years as an inexperienced coder applying for anything I could get, that I take a perverse pleasure in updating my shitty resume only occasionally now, and not giving a wet fish about the formatting. (a) because it's cathartic, (b) because I don't need to suck up to assholes any more, and (c) because one of the smartest, most reliable people I ever hired submitted her CV to me entirely in Comic Sans.

Slightly off-topic, but it bugs me that the article feels obliged to contain a picture of the number. Firstly, why the hell would you want to display plain text as a picture? Secondly, if I click through to the source, I get a slightly better picture. Did IHC take a photo of the original website with their phone camera and upload it? Mind is boggling. Encouraged by the better quality picture on geekosystem I decided to click through to THEIR source. And there's a plaintext version. Kudos to <a href="http://www.futilitycloset.com/2012/01/08/math-notes-76/<...; for having a modicum of common sense.

I did something similar for a while but other concerns pushed my routine out of the window, and for the sake of my sanity I shouldn't have kept on with it as long as I did. If I could recommend one thing to anyone thinking of doing an early-morning stint, it would be to keep an escape route clear. Don't commit to more than a week's work at once (you shouldn't be doing this anyway) and make sure that you can unconditionally drop the project at short notice if something comes up. Otherwise you will find that your work strategy is very fragile and very explosive.

That said, the particular issues I faced were external to my early-morning work strategy, and on a level playing field it is a wonderful way to do some of your best work.

What do you think an economic incentive would add to the organisation? They have been working on this product for a while now, they're bringing it into production, they seem well-motivated and adequately resourced. Is this something that's likely to go into decline when the "new charity smell" wears off?

(I'm aware that capitalism's a sensitive subject, so to be clear: this is an honest question)

I expect it depends on the particular company, but I have noticed that there is a direct correlation between having a fully-staffed accounts department and paying your contractors on the last possible day you can get away with. (I'm sure someone will tell me that "it's just good business," but it shows a lack of empathy with small contractors who may be operating on a tight margin).

I work in a very ad-hoc sort of way, but I find the idea of an n-hour work week very useful. If I work _n+d_ hours and feel exhausted, or I work _n-d_ hours and miss a deadline, I have an immediate and intuitive insight into what the problem is (the sign) and how big it is (the delta). Essentially it's a metric that I don't have to think too hard about.

I don't work rigid hours. My n-hours approach is a patch for the otherwise vague system in which I do stuff. And I (at least theoretically) don't beat myself up if d gets too large in either direction; if I'm overworking it's a sign that my planning process is out of whack, and if I'm underworking it's a sign that I need to find a way to get motivated or get out.

I view these "do x" blog posts as interesting things to try based on other people's life experience. It might not work for everyone, but I wouldn't pull the "x sucks" card because it's a pretty subjective problem.

I think it's because people were trying to find their new social network and were getting errors instead. </conspiracytheory>

It really depends what it gives us. For synthesis what you want is to be able to stream bytes to audio out. You can currently do this with AudioTrack but it goes through IPC and is generally slow. Personally I'd call that a use case for "streaming multimedia" but who knows what it will actually cover.

"Android 4.0 provides a direct, efficient path for low-level streaming multimedia" http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-4.0-highlights.html

I've been on the Android audio latency trail since 2009, and recently spoke to some platform developers who've hinted that something is finally on the horizon. I'm too tired of the situation to be blindly optimistic about it, but maybe just maybe...

This is a good point. Here's something I've found when arguing about similar things:

Some people define "work" as "unpleasant tasks I do to get money," and by this definition I support the OP. Minimise that crap, get it off your plate entirely if possible. These people would never consider a book that they wrote or an app that they made as being real income, even if it eclipsed their other income, because it was fundamentally done out of a sense of fun rather than work.

If you don't think of work in those terms, your argument is true. For instance, I would much rather do an extra hour's work than to save twenty bucks by shopping at an out-of-town supermarket. An hour's work is fun, wading around a big soulless store for an hour is not fun (this is a personal comparison, you may disagree).

This is where I think frugality is overplayed as a tool for personal liberation; instead of finding yourself liberated from money by abandoning the rat race, you tie yourself to it in the piles of bookkeeping and pleasures denied that are the province of the penny pincher. But this wasn't the point that the article was making anyway, rather it seems to be advising to think clearly about what you want, and choose things that will last more than six months.

So yeah, what was the point I was making? Oh yes, moderation is good. I'm not qualified to make any of these statements, I'm hardly an example of good financial management myself. But I've been typing for too long not to hit the reply button now.

It looks great! One word of warning is that quite a lot of bugs in each Ubuntu release get fixed in the first month. If you're patient, you can sidestep a lot of stabilisation issues that might not have been found in the RCs.

But in a month's time, this is definitely going on my lappy.

If this happens, you should take them up on the offer and see whether they notice when they try to initiate an introduction.

Hand-coding and maintaining bog-standard glue logic at the start of a project isn't good either. Auto-generation of database and glue logic for your app is possible, and the task usually falls to an ORM. The problem as described is that the glue logic is trying to hide the implementation, making it hard to remake the code when it becomes clear that the out-of-the-box implementation is not appropriate.

This doesn't seem like an insoluble problem; rather than use an ORM to generate an impenetrable glue layer, it would be better to use code generation tools to create a clean database model and a glue layer that can be easily overloaded as required.

What tools exist that give you ORM-esque generation at the start of your project, but allow you to do maintenance on the glue layer later in the project?

Or even due to awesome coding. I would hate to miss out on my occasional bouts of can't-drag-me-away-from-the-keyboard inspiration simply because someone "fixed" my work ethic and shut the office at 5pm.

But yeah, I appreciate the sentiment that no-one should be allowed to pillage their workers' evenings and weekends simply because they don't want to tell their boss "I promised something I couldn't deliver."

It's an interesting point. Mentally, I think of vi as meaning "a member of the set of vien" (from "emacsen").

Also, I never type that extra "m" so why should I say it?

"out of the people I know who use tablets"

I didn't mean to make that comparison, I guess. I specifically don't own a tablet because it doesn't offer any really appealing use cases to me. I can't speak for the market in general, the iPad is a big-selling device, but e-readers are quite popular too[1].

I guess I want to wind this up; I never intended to lay in to your criticism of the eInk screen, simply to offer that my experience of people's use cases differs to yours. It's kind of redundant right now anyway, the number of hoops you have to jump through to turn a nook touch into a general-purpose Android box means that it's still not a consideration for most users.

[1] a quick google for "more tablets than ereaders" yields the converse http://www.google.com/search?q=more+tablets+than+ereaders

"Most" is a bit presumptuous; email, social networks, and Hacker News are all good examples of things that are all reading-oriented. I'd say "most" of my casual computer interactions are eInk-friendly.

I've ordered a Nook Touch for rooting and development work, and to find out how well this theory works in practice. Maybe in a couple of weeks I will eat my words ;)