rchowe

Legally, they're not. Bitcoin just isn't actual money in any country.

Someone should buy sealand and change the national currency to bitcoin...

Ubuntu was supposed to be the linux distribution that was easy for the everyday user. Now they're suffering from GNOME politics and Canonical treating their users as beta testers (but Unity works great for (most) people with Intel laptops).

Don't get me wrong - Ubuntu has made great strides in usability, but it's not that linux is harder, it's that people who are already used to Windows will find it much "easier" because the mental shortcuts are already there, compared to Linux where they need to think about something as simple as launching a program. Combine that with the fact that Linux does break on occasion (mostly with regards to distro upgrades) and probably requires the command line to fix it and you get frustration on the user's part compared to Windows.

Android is a different story. Even though it's based on Linux and is supposedly "open source", Google's still the driving force behind its development. So the problems the article points out with the linux development process won't really apply to Android.

Canonical partnered with Dell for a while to get Ubuntu on a few systems (Dell had been looking for an alternative to windows and had gone to Apple to try to license OS X; Apple refused). Turned out customers didn't really want Ubuntu, and mostly installed (pirate?) Windows and wiped out Ubuntu. You can't just wipe out iOS and install Android on your iPhone (well you can on an original iPhone, but it's not as easy as installing a desktop OS).

System76 is an Ubuntu-only computer vendor, but for most linux geeks they just buy any PC that works with the Linux flavor they want and put linux on it. Most non-geek linux users had linux put there by a geek linux user and don't know any better.

The problem is that java bytecode and the JVM are a good match for java in terms of safety: array bounds checking and such is enforced on the bytecode level. C programs which either are written poorly and take advantage of some of the unsafety or require a highly optimized inner loop that takes advantage of some of C's behavior for optimization will probably function rather slowly.

But the market places a higher value on a single btc once they are "out of circulation" because money is scarcer, right? So the only person losing money is you.

What if I put a link to my github account on my resume. And a potential employer sees me being a member what someone thought of as a joke? Losing potential jobs is a big deal.

The original USB interfaces which apple made mainstream in the iMac? I don't know. But I do know that MacBook Pro prices with Thunderbolt are similar to without, probably because the thunderbolt controller also does DisplayPort (I wouldn't be surprised if Apple built the connector themselves, actually. Maybe ifixit knows.)

The market is different than when they put USB into the iMac now mainly because there are large amounts of cheap USB peripherals which USB 3 is backwards compatible with. I think (but haven't done any research) that the number of companies making USB peripherals now is much (one or two orders of magnitude) greater than the number of companies making PS/2 or parallel SCSI when the iMac was released. The personal computer market has grown a lot, and USB now has much more momentum than anything else had when the iMac was released. People (such as my mother) are going to buy a new computer and are going to want it to work with their existing external hard disk -- they're not going to transplant the disk to a new case. So USB, especially is USB 3 peripherals can run at slower speeds over USB 2, is going to stay for a little while. Thunderbolt is going up against an entrenched competitor, and if you compare to the HD format wars, both players worked with DVDs. If Blu-Ray didn't and people had to have two boxes instead of one, HD-DVD probably would have won. The best Thunderbolt is probably going to do for the near future is be the new FireWire.

The author is saying that they won't be relevant and doesn't give any context. I believe they won't be relevant in the consumer market, because I think most people would rather have a droid or an iPhone. However in the enterprise market they're bought by IT, and RIM knows who's buying the phone, not who's using the phone.

There aren't really any good libraries for it. You can compile straight ObjC on linux fairly easily with gcc or clang (use -lobjc), but the thing is without NSString and all of the foundation you'll end up doing a lot of work.

And yes, you can get into GNUStep, but that's a whole nother ballgame.

> verifying solutions is much easier than finding them

If P = NP Bitcoin breaks down. Interesting.

At this point, I just prefer the way gedit renders text compared to OS X. It seems crisper and easier to read than OS X's anti-aliased with no regards to the pixel grid. That's the main reason I do all of my non-mac development on linux.

What I'm saying is that you can't do something like this in C++-derived OO languages

    class Test
    {
        Test( int count ) {
            if ( count > 5000 ) return new Implementation();
            return new OtherImplementation();
        }
    }

you'd have to use a class method, whereas you can do that with the standard alloc/init in Objective-C.

NSArray/NSMutableArray are class clusters - meaning that upon allocation/initialization they choose between many classes (and it might swizzle the class pointer to be of type NSArray/NSMutableArray, I can't remember).

What's interesting to me is that this uses the standard Objective-C [[class alloc] init] mechanism, which is more intuitive than using a nonstandard class method (because in most other languages new will only allocate one class). When you look at Apple's (NeXTStep's) APIs, there's a lot of evidence of thought in the design process there.

I had assumed this was a weekend project that just launched, my bad.

Your copyright notice still says 2010.

My school censors almost everything on the internet. paulgrahm.com is blocked for being a personal site, as are all blogs, wikis, and forums. And the best part? The teachers have different censors so if a teacher gives you an assignment with links on it there's a fairly good chance you won't be able to use most of the links. I use my iPhone at school to do research because it has an uncensored internet connection.

GNUStep also has garbage collection (albeit Boehm, not the same as the collector in OS X). Yes, it is missing from the language, but it doesn't make OS X special. And all that needs to come along is a version of GNUStep that fits in with the desktop environment on a platform before people start developing for it.

I don't think the problem with OOP is that it's antiquated, but rather that it leads to spaghetti/difficult to maintain code because things get so tied up in encapsulation or not properly encapsulated that you end up with a bad java framework in the extreme case. But CMU is replacing it with functional programming, which has been around longer (and has recently gotten more trendy).

This also serves as a differentiator for CMU: they're not just churning out Java developers like some universities.

The coding, compsci, and reverse engineering reddits have a fairly high signal ratio for computer science (higher than the programming reddit). All of the language-specific reddits are also fairly focused.

I had hoped that this would have been an internal install of Diaspora one day...

The whole concept of a "business" social network seems to me like a fit that a startup tries to force every now and then. If it were me I'd look at combining project management, CMS, and CRM, then put some access controls on it and the ability to use the service only over email.

I find github second only to the sonic screwdriver.

There is, but you need to be at a certain karma threshold.

But what about updates? Now handled by the mac app store, for apps bought by the mac app store. And the iPhone SDK may or may not be distributed with the mac, which may be out of date from the current iOS.

The problem is that if there's a high barrier to entry there might be a "Google Wave" effect - people joining, finding out they have no friends on the service, and never using it. What the distributed social network market needs is a network that has an actual launch with a product, and get as much press as Diaspora did when they announced, but have an actual product.

It created "Aspects", or groups of friends, and you post things to specific aspects or to all aspects. Only the people in that aspect will see updates.

Most people won't have to do this. Most people will just join an existing site. Diaspora is much more significant in that it solves the gay bar problem of social networking (http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...) and that it lets you export your data. It remains to be seen if they make the system of "aspects" simple enough.

That said, it's a little annoying that a supposedly open product can't be installed in one command.

I think Scoble's "The bar is low" is better expressed as the fact that it's an undeveloped market. Whether or not there is a gold-rush for this app store remains to be seen, but his other points still remain valid. By using the builtin APIs it's difficult to get a view to scroll smoothly, whereas with the iPhone it's in every scroll view. And yes, statistically I believe that the type of geeks attracted to Android are stingy, but there are other people on the platform as well (I don't have any actual percentages).

It seems like a whole UI refresh. I haven't seen an image yet, but the top bar is different and the there's more padding on the messages. Kinda un-google-like; they're normally minimal padding and 1px rounds.

Some iPhone/Mac devs are obsessive about their UI. This does not look like their kind of app.

UCLA grads on Top Prospect are more likely to be founders than Stanford grads, which may or may not be a representative sample of the population of founders.