nullflux

Upvoted for a very intelligent reply and extremely insightful comment. The "Linux desktop -> Android" bit oddly resonates with the way things feel today.

Is this really worse though? Distros themselves technically work as the vendors in this case with "crap pre-installed" (Unity, anyone?) , depending on how cynical you want to be and your choice of distro. Install Fedora Core 9 and Ubuntu 11.10 side-by-side to see that difference in play.

The problem isn't that nice drawing software like this doesn't exist, it's that styli on iPad still suck. The capacitive screen (even on "new" iPad) only has about a 6mm capacitive resolution, so you're stuck fudging the fck along with a sausage for a stylus. Ars had a good review[1] on the current state of styli, and they said much the same. I've personally owned about four iPad styli and none come close to what I am capable of with an old Graphire.

We need pressure sensitivity, finer resolution, and proper calibration for this to work well. Everyone wants to replace drawing stuff with iPad (including myself) but until iPad supports Wacom-esque pressure sensitivity, feel and resolution on iPad everything you do there will likely be too rough compared to what you could get with a Bamboo on Painter/Illustrator or what could be drawn directly on paper, scanned in and retraced with said Wacom. Even the Galaxy Note / Lenovo Tablet / etc. are better for this.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2012/03/does-the-stylus...

Edit: Looks like some guy already did this: http://blog.makezine.com/2011/09/26/toilet-paper-printer/

I certainly don't. Are you sure this isn't just rosy retrospection?[1]

There's a reason why apt and yum exist today, and it's because most people want their primary OS to "just work". You only have to play this game once to get it. The second time the configure && make && make install doesn't change much, except for needing a flag here or a utility there.

I wonder if a lot more people would be using nixes on PCs today if something like a current Linux distro existed ten years ago and worked as well with the varying hardware in common PC laptops/desktops.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

When I see Microsoft's new ads, I still cringe. It's just a veiled "developers, developers, developers" thing. It still feels like the rich nerd trying to act like the cool kid. It just doesn't work, and Microsoft should realize that.

Why are the marketing-heads so interested in "rebranding" anyway? I personally don't understand image campaigns.

Actions, not words, Microsoft. Give us more things like Xbox 360 and Kinect (or half of the stuff Research comes up with), less lame attempts to make me "aware" of your cool work on Internet Explorer. If you want me to use your product, make it kick the ass of its competitors in my head. You won't convince me based upon your silly marketing anymore. I've been hurt by that a couple of times before.

I am glad IE has finally started to come around to be a browser worth using, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that I think these "hip" commercials are targeted toward people that are mostly off of the whole Windows game by now anyway. The problem here is that Microsoft is too late. The Lumia looks beautiful, IE doesn't look bad, but Apple already ate their mobile market and IE had its chance in 2005 when Microsoft didn't seem to take Mozilla seriously.

(I am not affiliated with Pinterest. Just curious from a product perspective.)

The utilitarian argument here invalidates this premise of the pins needing to be human, which is what is interesting. If you are getting utility out of it and you didn't know it was a bot, you are actually still better off.

This. I hate waking up early, work very long hours, and find the majority of the time I have for running errands falls outside of traditional "business hours". That means these errands either stack up until I have to take an entire day or two away from the office every few months, or I have to leave my desk and do them midday.

The user experience for this could get bad fast when a new user signs on to trade their month-old H&M+<insert expensive designer> collaboration and finds nothing but a bunch last summer's Forever 21 shirts with cheeky slogans. That doesn't look so good. It's like going to the video rental store ten years ago and having them say "Whoops, we're all out of that new release, but we've got a few copies of Groundhog Day!"

Do you guys on either side of it want to get into the terms of acquisition a bit more, just for curiosity's sake?

I suspect that it is not a spectacular return for the seed investors. Forrst guys get jobs and some nominal signing bonuses as they're likely running low on funds, having closed a $204K seed a year ago. See compete:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/forrst.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/dribbble.com/

It makes a lot more sense for COLOURlovers to acquire the team and the community to strengthen themselves, being an ultra-huge design community. I'm happy that they are keeping Forrst around. CL is also hiring recently, so this gives them a staff boost of good designers/developers with startup mentalities.

That's not my point. My point is that if legit gets people into using Git as their VCS, it seems silly to attack the idea because it isn't the current norm of engineering. Lessening barrier of entry to using a powerful VCS is not bad in and of itself. Not everyone jumps into assembly language. Plenty jump into higher-level languages and find themselves deeper in the rabbit hole as time progresses.

To a newbie, this legit script appears far more accessible than git's stock interface. Is it bad that GUIs exist because the command-line is often more powerful to an experienced user? Why is it so bad that this tool exists and can be used to increase overall engagement and entry into the world of Git?

I see much ado about nothing in these comments. Is it really that awful to alias away an odd set of tools that sometimes contradict one another? That's what every high-level language does. That's what every decent UI does across any paradigm.

Abstractions make things easier for the human in many cases. If Legit increases the productivity of a team of developers and gets newbies using the Git VCS, more power to them and its use. They can learn the internals later.

It is a travesty that American teachers and administrators are put in situations where they feel that they have to falsify results because their students are not reaching them. The learning capabilities and specialties of students are as diverse as the rest of human nature, and the best way to create proper incentives for students and teachers is to build a pervasive culture that rewards learning and meaningful contribution to society. Perhaps American education needs to edit its message: aligning extracurricular American cultural values to highlight the positive effects of learning on success will likely increase test scores more than the next set of standardized whatevers that get thrown at them by an overwhelmed, out-of-touch committee.

Apple could prevent a lot of these issues by using an application-specific UDID generated by the device. Hash the UDID with a random salt generated from entropy on the device, and use it only for that app install. Developers then couldn't track you from install to install, or across their application ecosystems. Privacy issue averted.

Any existing calls that hundreds of thousands of applications make to currently get the UDID just return this application-specific one instead.

The point of this is: who cares if the data center is warm/hot? It's as hot as that inside a mascot suit at a theme park, so they build cooling mechanisms into them. Tools exist for a reason, and it is somewhat ironic that we prematurely assume that our creations require the same environment for "comfortable" survival that we do. The animistic tendencies we have may not just be cultural.

That is not a universal truth.

Is your mother computer literate? How does she use web applications and her computer? How does she connect to the product? What niche does the application fill in her life, and is it truly a superior alternative to another product in her life?

What the article is getting at is that friends and family often show extreme positive bias. If you really have to use your friends or family as a feedback group, you'd be best off not telling them you built the application at all. If you're like "hey, check out this thing I found, it might be useful for you," you can get rid of some of the "My child/sibling/cousin/friend built this!" bias and instead only have to deal with the lesser bias of "My child/sibling/cousin/friend referred me to this product."

Pinterest is getting lots of criticism from press on specific issues and they are editing them.

* "pro-ana" (anorexia) pinboards containing "thinspo" (pictures and sayings to reinforce anorexia) were featured in a Jezebel post. Pinterest clamped down and said they won't tolerate self-harm. See:

http://jezebel.com/5893382/the-scary-weird-world-of-pinteres...

* You need copyright permission to post something to Pinterest but virtually nobody has permission, so they added better takedown methods. See:

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/22/149169388/pinterest-wades-in-m...

* Pinterest is adding private pinboards and an API.

Numbers games (lotteries) are run by governments now because organized crime was running them in inner cities. People still played then. See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game At least the "tax" from lottery proceeds often goes to benefit social goods like public school systems.

IIRC, a martingale strategy will eventually destroy you because it requires an exponentially sustainable bankroll to maintain the same risk of ruin.

Also, 3,650 hands is far too small of a sample size for a game with such a small edge and you are probably just witnessing positive variance. See where the law of large numbers leads you and run your simulation for 500,000 hands.