rogerbraun

Being a useful tool for businesses is not the main goal of free (FSF-style) software. The freedom of the user to read the source and modify the software is. That's why they care about the distinction between open source and free software.

You can disagree with this, but I think just dismissing it as ideological does not do it justice.

Lots of comments are talking about how Apple "doesn't owe [the FSF] anything" and that it's a "business decisison". This is all true, but it misses the point.

The point is that the current trend of companies releasing stuff under non-copyleft licenses and keeping the 'good stuff' in proprietary forks is bad for free (FSF-style) software. That's why the article argues that you should take a good look at what these companies are actually doing beyond press releases and act accordingly.

You might still think that free software is unimportant or that having pseudo-freemium open source release is still better than nothing. But that's your own decision, based on your own values, which might not be the values the FSF thinks of as important.

It's about educating developers to make an informed decision. I don't know why that's supposed to be religious.

At least you can be sure that it does what you expect. You can have bad architecture with and without tests, but testing will help you to avoid surprising behaviour, regressions, that kind of stuff.

I think having the possibility to not be anonymous would ruin it for the team. Some people might want to show how much they love the company (honest or not) by switching of anonimity. The anonymous group would thus become suspicious.

I don't know why you think that it's impossible to regulate these technologies. There could be laws against biometric identification without consent of the identified.

One nice thing about an ID is that I can leave it in my pocket if I don't want to identify myself. That's much harder to do with biometric identity.

But how do you disrupt the industry, then?

It's not in a releasable state yet.

You can do it yourself after reading the papers, though. I used node with the bittorrent-swarm, dht, ut_metadata and parse-torrent to build it.

Really cool idea.

Using this paper and the referenced one at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1009.3681.pdf%3Forigin%3Dpublication_de... I was able to make a proof-of-concept passive DHT crawler in a few hours.

Yeah, I can, of course, see how the modern alternatives are easier to use. I'm just sad that, instead of making simple IRC clients, nicer frontends for newsgroups, easier mailing lists, we now have ad-hoc solutions that are mainly meant to keep you locked into their system.

I wrote a Zork bot[0] for IRC a few days ago, and really started wondering why the tech community more or less gave up on IRC, especially businesses. Instead of a free, open source, reliable, distributed multiuser chat we now have the walled gardens of Facebook, Hipchat and similar services.

It's sad that we can now, essentially, not do much more on the net than we did 20 years ago, but now it has ads and spies on you.

[0]: https://github.com/rogerbraun/frotzbot

Maybe just reimplement some piece of existing software you wrote with a C version? I want to port a small node-based API to C in the future, just to see what it takes.

Isn't this just rewriting tail calls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call)? Am I missing something?

It's made to confuse and mystify. The Borges quote from ' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' gives it away.

Really well done, though!

When I read dystopic cyberpunk novels as a child, I did not expect them to become reality so soon. Also, why do all AI have to tell you about mount everest all the time?

You are looking for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right

That's not completely true. If it were true, nobody would use facebook because everybody already has email.

Yes, the feature situation sucks. If you look at the pull requests on Github you see that the transition from pseudo-startup to community project kept a lot of things in the pipeline. For example, someone implemented a working xmpp chat 2 years ago, and it did not get merged, for pretty much no reason at all.

I hope that diaspora will develop faster, now that it is a completely community run project and has some momentum again.

About your specific problem: You can host your own diaspora pod if you are really paranoid, for free, on Heroku for example. But I agree that this is one of the basic features that should be implemented as soon as possible.

I invited all my friends, nearly all joined. It's not impossible.

I think that in the case of Diaspora, you really have to be the change you want to see. I canceled my Facebook account, joined a Diaspora pod and invited all my friends with a long explanatory email for why I did this. None of them canceled their FB-Account, but they all joined Diaspora.

Change is possible, but it will not happen if we all do nothing and wish someone else would have done something.

I contributed this release cycle. My incentive is that Diaspora is already a working replacement for FB or G+, but still lacks some features or has a few warts. I tried to fix one of these and it's now in the new release and Diaspora is a little better. That's how open source is supposed to work, isn't it?

We should stop being paranoid because we are already being tracked?

But by that logic, police should just pull a gun on everyone they ever see, because the person could have gun themselves.

I agree with you that this is a big waste of resources, though.

Is it really likely that a 20 year old girl with one box of beer will try to shoot 6 police officers?

I started to switch everything (cloud stuff, Android) to open source that I can host myself in case I need to in the future.

I've switched to Owncloud, hosted at Hetzner. It was really easy to install and does pretty much everything I want (RSS reader, Dropbox clone, contacts, calender, Google Music clone).

I tried Newsblur, but the interface was too complicated for my taste and the Android app was not very stable.

This seems like a compromise. Someone knew that the standard text was somewhat hard to read, so he tried to change the standard setting, but someone with more power wanted to keep it. So they implemented the larger size as an option.

I like this, but the easiest way to do this without pretty much any configuration is to log in to Google Talk with a Jabber client that has OTR support, such as Adium or Pidgin.

I love these hidden stories. Reminds me of the comp.basilisk faq at http://ansible.co.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html

I find it hard to believe that anybody actually thought that Microsoft was going to build a console with a built-in PR disaster. There never was a statement from Microsoft about this, only 'consistent rumors'. I have a feeling that this is just news because news sites need controversy to drive page views.