raylu

My real beef is how readily Ubuntu installs proprietary software (like binary drivers) while having this "bug" in its tracker.

Yes, yes, if you want to get anything done now, you need those drivers. And a lot of users wouldn't use Linux at all if they couldn't get what they wanted now.

But the long-term implications of giving into hardware manufacturers is you will never get an open driver. Ubuntu does not care about free software at all (whether or not for good reason) and it annoys me that they pretend to.

> there are web browsers written in javascript

Really? Where?

> That if something is not 100%, exactly, totally, purely aligned to your personal vision it's fucking garbage, or worse, evil and bad.

> I'm not arguing any further, you're clearly a zealot

> Whether or not you change the world is up to the gods.

No. Take some responsibility (and therefore, credit) for your actions.

What are the benefits of Secure Boot?

And what is it doing with that calculation?

On average, chances are pretty low that a particular startup will ever make even a hundred thousand dollars, so stop starting new companies!

It's not for either your investors or your customers to tell you what to build anyway.

And just never talk about morals, which I deem "fluff".

Searching for "sign cla", it appears to be a Contributor's License Agreement.

A lot of these aren't Linux/POSIX projects so mingw/cygwin don't solve the problem. It could be as simple as a python project that needs to be bundled in exe form or a .NET project.

Binary downloads are often important for Windows projects, though.

I suspect that a lot of that context (or "buy-in") was missing, as it was when you explained it the first time here, which is why you got the response you did.

A lot of people show up in programming communities asking for help with their intro programming homework. Once you see a few dozen of those, it's understandable if your knee-jerk reaction is at least somewhat insulting.

Puppet/Chef is overkill for a site running a config this simple.

On the off-chance this is not a troll,

> but most could if they were pointed in the right direction

Also, I could make a killing investing in this here penny stock...

First of all, you have a cool service and I don't really think any less of you guys for one line on a blog post.

That said, in my view, that's the entire point of your service. Every language has an SMTP library; the hard part - the thing I'm paying you for - is the constant cat and mouse.

And when you want something that isn't being built for you? You _can't_ build it yourself at that point because there's no text interface to consume.

My complaint isn't so much against SaaS as a whole as it is against things that violate the Unix philosophy. I'm against things that try to do many complex tasks and don't provide a simple text interface (or RESTful API or whatever).

The tradeoff is you get basic features all at once with little overhead. What you lose is any ability whatsoever to make other things work on top of the service/program/application/whatever you're using.

The reason this is always bad is because you're only a first time user once; you pay the startup/integration/setup/whatever cost once. After that, you're a user and you get to suffer under the poor or non-existent integrations forever. See also: http://xkcd.com/1205/

I think that's true for most things that don't follow the Unix philosophy and try to do too much. "Everything just works all the time, unless this and except for that sometimes depending on this but you can that."

"It’s a game of cat-and-mouse that we didn’t ask to play, but we can hunt when we need to."

As an ESP, isn't that pretty much the game you chose to play, both as the cat and the mouse?

How 'bout we just go with the unix philosophy and let you build these things yourself so that they have a chance of actually working?

Yes, I'm saying you should use IRC.

I think you misunderstand sunk cost. Sunk cost basically just says to always employ a purely-forward-looking strategy when evaluating costs and benefits.

> vs how much some other endeavour will take to become profitable AND how much it will cost to switch.

Wait, what are these two costs? Aren't they the same? Where did the cost of switching come from?

It's impossible to prevent all cases of social engineering with a purely technical solution, this is true. But that doesn't mean that we should disregard how much easier phishing attacks are with the advent of HTML mail. The goal here is not so much to stop social engineering dead in its tracks as to prevent some of the low-effort attacks that do happen.

I think he's saying we should instead have text-only e-mail, because that's both standard and has a tiny attack surface.

But for their sources? Am I missing something or is that obviously not OK?

Since when was it OK to even subpoena reporters?

> Logically, it follows that there would be measurable degredation in society over time, as long as workers keep procreating.

What? New workers enter the workforce.

Well, it wasn't last settlement price, it was average. It's just that nobody traded in these items so completing even a single transaction practically sets the price.

I don't think he thinks of cynicism as a bad thing (and I don't either).

It's hard to prove causation in any of these.

I agree with everything you've said here, but I'd like to add something about startup time.

If it takes you 5s to start up your server, that's a lot of time you've added to each development iteration. Make a change, restart the server, wait 5s, see if it works/check debug output.

But you still get to do step 3!

It makes figuring out what happened much harder. When 3 people in a row make some small change to a comment or log output, I'd like to just see those 3 rather than follow both sides of a merge and walk the tree endlessly only to realize I've wasted my time on a bunch of commits that couldn't possibly be causing the production bug.

It generally only applies to people sharing branches with others, whether they be master, feature, or other types of branches.