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mcb3k

54 karma · joined February 23, 2012

I'm a Systems Engineer who enjoys linux, python, cooking, and snapping the occasional photo. I have been known to write about things that interest me.

http://www.mcb3k.com

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mcb3k··on Lords Sneak UK Internet Snooping Law into Bill
I think a modified version of a line-item veto, where the president would be able to cross out the offending lines, and then send it back to congress for them to vote on the modified version of the bill could be useful. I think it would be significantly less dangerous than having a normal line-item veto.
mcb3k··on PopSlate, an E ink case for your iPhone
I don't really think it abuses the term, since it doesn't require a backlight to display things, it is technically correct to call it e-paper. I also remember the people at Pebble discussing the differences between e-Ink and e-paper when it first came out. It's not like they hid how the Pebble's display worked.

Besides, an e-Ink screen would be a horrible experience given how the display gets used in the Pebble watch.

mcb3k··on PopSlate, an E ink case for your iPhone
e-paper, or electronic paper, is a generic term for any kind of display that doesn't work by emitting light, which the pebble, the popSLATE, and ereaders like the nook or kindle do. What you are describing is e-Ink, which is a specific implementation of a non-light-emitting screen generally used in ereaders.

That being said, it does seem that popSLATE is using a screen like what is used in an ereader, and not like what is used in the pebble.

mcb3k··on Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'
Well, it's TPB. They might not have had much of a choice about what ad networks they were allowed to participate in. I mean, if you're running an ad network, you need to appear respectable to get respectable clients. In that case, running ads on a torrent site is the exact opposite of what you want to do.

Most companies are not going to want to be associated with TPB, so most ad networks are not going to want to assocaite with TPB. So, the bottom of the barrel, scummiest ad networks are going to be what it would have to use to keep the lights on.

Just my two cents though.

mcb3k··on Handmade Hero: C game from scratch
You can actually use an unactivated copy of Windows 7 for longer by using "slmgr /rearm" in cmd (which needs to be run by right clicking cmd.exe and choosing the "run as administrator" option). You can extend the license 3 times (leading to 120 total days). It should be noted that you can apply it after the temporary licensing has expired.

I'm not sure if this applies to Windows 8 or 8.1, however.

mcb3k··on I'm Leaving Mojang
There might be a different documentary/biopic/film, but there is currently Minecraft: The Story of Mojang[1]. It only really covers the first year, however.

1: http://www.2playerproductions.com/projects/minecraft

mcb3k··on Yes, we’re being bought by Microsoft
I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but Mojang recently (within the last year or so) started a service called Realms[1] which is exactly what you mentioned: hosted, invite only Minecraft servers. The only difference is that it's 13.99 a month, although it's cheaper if you do a longer term (3-month or 6-month). It'll let 10 players on at a time, with a 20 player white list. I'm not sure what their current implementation for Realms' backend is, but if it's not on Azure or another cloud provider, moving to Azure would probably cause a decrease in price.

I do agree about improving performance and presentation within the game though. My understanding is that there is a lot of room for improvement.

1:https://minecraft.net/realms

mcb3k··on Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it
Have you looked to see about renting the equipment or finding a service that will help you do this?
mcb3k··on In 'Sherlock Holmes' Rights Dispute, Conan Doyle Estate Slammed Again
Am I right in thinking we can still do automatic copyright assignment, even with your proposed hybrid system? One could just check the registry, and if the work is not present in the registry then it can be assumed to have the 20 year lifespan.

I still think we need to make sure that we keep very good records with this registry, however. I could foresee more instances like we have with Happy Birthday if we don't do a good job of it.

mcb3k··on In 'Sherlock Holmes' Rights Dispute, Conan Doyle Estate Slammed Again
I had never thought about it like that before, but that is a great point!
mcb3k··on In 'Sherlock Holmes' Rights Dispute, Conan Doyle Estate Slammed Again
I think that having an exponentially increasing renewal fee seems like a good idea on the surface, but makes things more complicated than they should be.

In order to do that, you have to have a central authority that actually keeps track of copyrighted works, who owns the rights to it, if they've been extended, if the fees have been paid, etc. On top of that, you need to think about the broke independent author who can't afford to extend the copyright on that 5th year because they got a divorce, got in a car accident, and landed in the hospital. Or the high schooler who wrote a book for NANOWRIMO, self-publishes it, but doesn't know the first thing about copyright law or needing to continually do extensions. The copyright inevitably lapses, and some publisher finds it, likes it, and starts printing copies and selling them because it's in the public domain.

I really, honestly believe that we need to reform copyright, but I also think we need make sure that it doesn't favour people with money and people with access to intimate knowledge of copyright law. I think everyone probably has at least one copyrighted work to their name, so we should make it a goal that just about everyone should be able to understand copyright.

mcb3k··on In 'Sherlock Holmes' Rights Dispute, Conan Doyle Estate Slammed Again
Another good point is that for every book, movie, song, game, etc. that is very popular and keeps getting re-printed, re-published, re-released, or ported to new platforms, there are tens to hundreds of books that do not. Having long copyright terms makes the chances of vast swathes of works stop existing entirely, simply because of the decay of the medium that they are produced and stored on.
mcb3k··on In 'Sherlock Holmes' Rights Dispute, Conan Doyle Estate Slammed Again
I think that using just the fixed term would be better, just for simplicity's sake. How would it work if you have a collaborative novel? One author dies, the other continues living. What if the author goes missing? Changes their name, moves and leaves no forwarding address? How much effort do you need to put in to track down an author in order to re-print their works, or to tell if they're in the public domain?

It's much easier to just do a standard, fixed term for all copyrights.

mcb3k··on A Conversation with Edward Snowden at HOPE X [video]
Are you giving him flak for misspelling Ellsberg? Because otherwise Daniel Ellsberg was the keynote speaker at HOPE X (which the keynote was right before Snowden's talk), and was the one asking the questions to Snowden.
mcb3k··on Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
When a document stops being a document and becomes a record, it should be saved in a format such as PDF/A for longevity, and not a binary format. That would be regardless of if it was created in libreOffice or Microsoft Office.
mcb3k··on All Our Patent Are Belong To You
Note that Tesla owns the super charging stations, and is also aiming to stand up a large scale battery production facility. Assuming that the patents would lead to other auto-manufacturers to use the same standards that Tesla uses, this would mean that the would need to either build their own batteries, or buy them from Tesla. Since Tesla is making the Gigafactory so that the price of batteries will drop, it's likely to be cheaper to buy them from Tesla than standing up their own infrastructure to handle it. So, even if they aren't selling as many cars as the big automakers, they can still sell batteries and access to the super charging stations to the big players.

In any case, I think a sufficient amount of people would probably still buy a Tesla because of the brand recognition, even if the big auto-makers were making solid electric cars.

mcb3k··on An Accountant Explains Why 45% Of Her Income Goes To Student Loans
I will not comment about finances, but the idea behind starting at a community college isn't that an associates degree will prepare you for something like the CPA exam, but that it will help you satisfy degree requirements for a bachelors degree without spending as much money as doing all four years at a public four-year institution.

The tuition for a community college, per year, is about 1/3rd [1] the cost of a year at a public in-state 4-year college. If you live at home, you possibly save another couple grand a year. Factor in that some states have Guaranteed Admission Agreements [2], it can make community college an attractive option.

[1]: http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-table... [2]: http://www.nvcc.edu/current-students/transfer/Search/GAAAdmi...

mcb3k··on Steam In-Home Streaming
Many of the lower-end Steam Machines should be capable of doing this, as well as some HTPC implementations (assuming they can run Steam, so not a Roku or AppleTV or such). I'm betting the SteamOS system requirements[1] would be a decent proxy until more information is released, although I doubt that you would require a hard drive that big and a graphics card that powerful.

[1]: http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown

mcb3k··on How Munich switched 15,000 PCs from Windows to Linux
Have you taken a look at LibreOffice[1]? It forked from OpenOffice a few years, and my understanding is that it is much more actively developed than OpenOffice.

[1]: http://www.libreoffice.org/

mcb3k··on Longaccess Wants To Cold-Store Your Digital Life For 30 Years
This service isn't really meant for storing things like your music and video collection, or even your day-to-day chats. I think the analogy of a safe-deposit box at the bank really describes it well. You wouldn't keep your DVD or CD collection at the bank, because storing it would be expensive and your collections are most likely easily replaced. But you might want to keep your wedding pictures, the video of your kid's first step, birth and death certificates, love letters, and important legal documents in a safe deposit box at the bank. You might even store something like your great-grandmother's wedding ring and other historic documents. Essentially all the stuff that would be difficult to replace, and would be worth keeping for the sake of posterity.

Given this, I think 100 GB is probably an acceptable amount of storage for this day and age. That may change in 5 or 10 years time as technologies change and the size of images and videos expand. But in 5 to 10 years time, services like this will probably have changed to keep up with the times.

mcb3k··on Internal Apple document: FY'14 Planning Offsite
The Droid Razr M is about the same size, at 4.82 x 2.40 x .33 inches[1]. It's only .09 inches wider, and .03 inches deeper than The 5s, and it is actually .05 inches shorter[2]. I'm not sure if you'd still find that too big though.

1: http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_droid_razr_m-4973.php 2: https://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/specs/

mcb3k··on Why You’re Not Hiring the Best and the Brightest
You could also, as an employer, supply a pre-built development environment appliance for VirtualBox that already has your source and everything set up. Then a person just has to install VirtualBox, add the appliance, and boot it. I think there is even a way to get it where the person doesn't even have to install VirtualBox.

As an employer you could also allow access to a remote instance of a machine that is already set up and configured and the person can SSH/RDP into the box and do development there.

I'm thinking that there probably isn't going to be a clear cut, one size fits all answer to this, but I do think there are some good options in any case.

mcb3k··on Humble Weekly Bundle Supports Open Source GameDev Tools
There is a way to connect your steam account to your Humble Bundle account. Instead of getting keys, you can just click a button and your game appears in your steam account. It'd be nicer if they just kinda showed up without me having to click a button, but it's a start.

What other kind of integration are you thinking of?

mcb3k··on Google Glass Still Needs a Killer App
Google currently has policies against doing any kind of cross-referencing with audio or visual data, which means that face recognition is a no go currently [1], even though they're in a good place to provide it because of a) the large repositories of photos on Google+ and b) their acquisition of PittPatt (a facial recognition company) in 2011. They're holding off because of the privacy concerns.

Honestly, I'm glad they're concerned about privacy, and hope that it stays that way. I'm not sure that the privacy concerns will ever go away, and worry that there may be a time when leaving you house could lead to being harassed by random strangers because of something written on an online profile.

[1]https://plus.google.com/111626127367496192147/posts/fAe5vo4Z...

mcb3k··on John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar
Yeah, one of the things that people don't realize is that sugar's hygroscopic nature is a great way to make things shelf stable. This is one of the reasons why so many processed foods end up having a lot more sugar than would typically be in the home-made variant.
mcb3k··on How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username
My friends run sliqua.com, so I go through them. I haven't had any issues with them, their support is pretty good, and the price is good. I would definitely recommend them to other people.
mcb3k··on Open for everyone
That is one thing I've been impressed with about Google Takeout, is that I can download all my blogger data into a big ol' XML file. It makes me feel a little better about using a hosted platform.

I'm hoping that this trend will be catch on and will get more hosted services supporting export functionality in the future.

mcb3k··on Building an Open Source Laptop
>"The positive response has encouraged us to plan a crowd funding campaign around a substantially simplified (think “all in one PC” with a battery) case design"

It sounds like the design of the case will be changed if these are going to hit larger scale production, so I don't think that's going to be an issue. It will still likely be expensive though, unless you do a very large run of them.

mcb3k··on The Day We Fight Back
The banners appear to be able to let you put in your zip code and then help you contact your relevant representatives in congress. If enough high-traffic sites participate, like what happened with the SOPA blackout, I could see this actually having an affect on policy.

However, there probably needs to some kind of bill to support or other action to be urging representatives to do, other than contacting them saying that "spying is bad". The Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow [1] mentions some of these, but the campaign site here doesn't seem to contain any mention of them.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7037532

mcb3k··on Gmail Now Lets You Email Your Google+ Connections
No worries, we're all mistaken about something on the internet at some point in our lives. Have a great day!
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