mitosis

Exactly. You're not supposed to pacman -Syu without looking. Part of your duty when you choose to install Arch is to take a few minutes every week to keep on top of what's new. Call it basic hygiene.

When I was an undergrad, I found very early issues of Dr. Dobb's in the medical library of my university, the name of the magazine having fooled the librarians. I remember spending many happy afternoons there reading about 6502 single-board computers and porting Tiny C to various machines.

I think control-L should be "^L", not "^+L", and so on.

Canceling a pledge is possible as long as the project is live (click on "manage my pledges", the cancel button is at the bottom).

Interesting. I don't get this at all from his message (that he is depressed and frustrated). I understand that this is painful for an entrepreneur to read, but Notch doesn't seem interested in using his fame to project his vision, or change the world, or any of this big Jobs-y stuff. He doesn't owe it to anyone, and people have no business telling him to do it or else he's a traitor, or grumpy, or a fake.

University administrators, mostly. They outnumber faculty at many universities, and their salaries are rising fast.

Heh: "Achievement unlocked: Refresh Prince of Bel Air".

So they spent a lot of time and money learning to crack buggy whips very well. Too bad there are automobiles now.

For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. -- Kipling

That keyboard is wrong on so many levels.

Those of us old enough to remember the early days of the Macintosh know that this is nothing new. Apple programs used undocumented calls to QuickDraw and did all kinds of yucky stuff with the upper 8 bits of the address (in the early days, the Mac processor used 24-bit addresses but the registers were 32-bit), which lead to the "32-bit clean" problems that plagued the first Macs to use 32-bit addressing.

Apple also did this in the Apple II days, calling undocumented ROM monitor routines from their own programs and operating systems. In fact, several companies made a list of those entry points and considered them "semi-official", the reasoning being that Apple wouldn't change entry points used by their own programs.

This feels exactly like the kind of thing we will look at in a few years and say "How 2014."

That could well be it. My bank enforces similar short passwords, but they're not such a big security risk since they lock the account after three mistakes, and require you to visit a branch in person to reactivate it.

I guess that means they're wide open to denial of service attacks, but that's another story.

To continue the author's music analogy, what do you think music class would be like if it were taught by teachers who have never listened to an orchestra in their life, are barely aware of the existence of different music styles, and cannot play any instrument? That's right, it would consist of drawing treble clefs, memorizing note positions, and transposing music.

Many high school math teachers actually have no idea what math is about. It is illogical to expect them to teach what they don't know.

There is no incentive for people who would make great math teachers to go into teaching in America. No social recognition. Ridiculously low salaries. Internal pressure to conform and avoid making bad teachers look bad. Who in their right mind would willingly do that, when they could be doing mathematics?

Seconding this: the killer app of Arch Linux is its community support.

Is there a country where it is usual to put the percent sign before the number? I sometimes see things like "%100 performance increase" on English web sites, and I wonder where that comes from.

Chinese writing does not encode sounds. It encodes meaning. If you write Chinese in pinyin, all you do is write down the sounds, not the meaning.

Said differently: why do we keep writing English like this, instead of using a phonetic alphabet? Same reason.

Eye no.

Your wife seems to be affected by the recently discovered vulnerability. It would be advisable to upgrade her firmware to the latest version.

As any French person will tell you, it should be "Ze fish in la river".

Is there more to the site than the five small PostIt-like paragraphs on a green background? Perhaps I'm missing something.

I'm not so sure the majority of developers / hackers (the target market for this device) are used to Ctrl on the bottom left. I know several (myself included) who remap their keyboard so it sits left of "A".

Love at first sight. The only thing left is deciding whether to buy the desktop or the laptop version.

He did not throw away $50k/day. He walked away from it because he had enough money already and did not need any more of it (especially since he did not particularly enjoy all the attention that came with the money, but even if he did not mind it, that would not change my point).

Only France, hm? Let me google that for you:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=language+academies&l=1

Just because English borrows words more easily than most other languages ("We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Nicoll) and has no central language regulating authority, doesn't mean all languages ought to work the same way.

Complaining that the French say "disque dur" instead of "hard disk" is just silly, because "disque dur" means "hard disk" in French. It's a literal translation. There's no reason to use an English term when there's a perfectly good French one available! Why don't you use a German loanword and call it a Festplattenlaufwerk in English?

News flash: different languages use different words!

Do consumers really control their devices anymore? Maybe they still can, but in the industry, there's no doubt that this is viewed as a problem that needs solving.

After trying Ubuntu Touch on my 2012 Nexus 7, and finding it WAY too unstable for my needs (I averaged maybe 10 minutes of use between hard crashes), I installed Arch on a chroot, accessed via VNC. The specific applications I used are Linux Deploy and bVNC Free. Added an external bluetooth mouse and keyboard (the keyboard being a cheap cover-with-gutter thingie), and presto, a usable desktop Linux in my coat pocket.

It works better than expected (no crashes, slight lag but nothing serious), and I can do 50 wpm on the cheap keyboard (after some extensive remapping), which surprised me (my average speed on a full keyboard is around 100 wpm). I've typed and LaTeXed a few papers on the thing, and just yesterday I built R from source for a biostats class.