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skwiddor

128 karma · joined April 5, 2009

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skwiddor··on [dead]
modding me down doesn't make it false

If you remember SCO made exactly the same threat, and though it didn't work out that way, it is still a legal recourse where the infringer is outside of jurisdiction but the customers aren't

skwiddor··on [dead]
Use the one that Apple sent to Microsoft when they were suing for the look and feel of Windows being a rip of MacOS.

oh

skwiddor··on [dead]
you can also sue their customers
skwiddor··on Yahoo is Number One in So Much More Than Search
NYT need a login for many pages, open them and you'll see the numbers go up
skwiddor··on Tell HN: The Grocery Store is Watching You (and it's brilliant)
My evil grocery store (Tesco) already sells packets of 5 and 3 so you have to buy too many or not enough.

They offer price comparisons (a legal requirement) in 100g or 1kg (to make the expensive stuff look cheaper).

I don't think for 1 second they would use it to the direct benefit of a customer.

So, er, fuck them and btw., you :>

skwiddor··on Programming Jacquard's loom (1801)
> Statistician Herman Hollerith used punch cards to tabulate data from the 1890 U.S. census. The cards evolved into the mid-20th century’s ubiquitous IBM cards that were used in early computing to store data as well as program the way the data would be processed.

Cunningly stepping over that whole WWII business.

skwiddor··on The Capitalist Manifesto: Greed Is Good (to a point)
communism is good, communism is good, communism is good, communism is good, communism is good, communism is good, communism is good, communism is good, communism is good, communism is good

oh sorry, I turned on the propaganda machine

skwiddor··on Calling out Hacker News
This seems like a list of stuff I tell clients when they sit down with only the ideas of how the visitor will access the site.

But 18 man months seems like an awfully long time, but I bet their framework has 10x more features than they use!

If the guy thinks it is just a feature of OSS he clearly hasn't bought much shrink wrapped software. Procomm anyone? try these proprietry programs http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/shame.htm

skwiddor··on Calling out Hacker News
probably 96.5ksloc
skwiddor··on 35 Years of the UNIX Time-Sharing System
your point being?
skwiddor··on The little start-up that could
Ah, NatWest Streamline how I miss thee. Where one learns that all those security questions you've been asked by retailers before turn to dust by the time it gets on the wire!

We had a POTS Modem doing ours one dial-up per transaction. You being re-directed to our payment taking portal from your website because it was one SSL per IP. Fun Fun

skwiddor··on Python's Iterators are a Bad Implementation of Laziness
The use of strongly typed languages would resolve all those problems.
skwiddor··on Senators Want To Punish Nokia, Siemens Over Iran
Get your own house in order

http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying

skwiddor··on The TTY demystified
And it's another example of a win not being necessarily what yo hoped for. Ok, Sony didn't get a Beta machine into every home as they had hoped, but they got at least one into every TV station.
skwiddor··on What Facebook and Google Can Learn From Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell
And what exactly is it, that technology changes social interaction?
skwiddor··on The TTY demystified
We're always saying to each other, HTML + CSS is wrong. We like PDF & PS & troff and plumbing on http://example.com/cod.pdf will open it in the pdf viewer.

fmthtml turns web pages into plain text.

But ignoring the majority of web content is really not an option. HTML can be pretty lightweight, we do have some renderers that do HTML3 and a subset of CSS really well and there's also Abaco that does a good job with HTML4, we've even got a canvas widget!

We could probably port WebKit if only we had a native C++ compiler but the incentive to do that is pretty low, we've got other cool beans to play with and you can pick up a dedicated Web browsing machine is less than the price of a round of drinks.

skwiddor··on Ask HN: Does cryptic string in URL affects SEO?
We always worked on the idea that parent directories carry more weight, it takes longer for the crawler to go down than across and the PR was always higher for those first level directories. (I'm talking in the past tense because I don't do SEO any more, though we used to get $1000 a month from AdWords).

Seems like your reason for this is to allow the same slug for multiple entries in the category. I'd more more inclined to just add one of . _ - on the end in the event of an unlikely clash!

skwiddor··on Adobe on "HTML5"
> Every modern PC or Mac has Flash

Mine don't, and not through (my) choice. And neither do either of my phone handsets (Freerunner, HTC Dream). Flash is a pain in my arse.

skwiddor··on The TTY demystified
Plan 9 does have a userbase, albeit small it is >50 We have a GSoC entry http://gsoc.cat-v.org/ this year. Plan 9 is also used in some Lucent / Alcatel cell phone masts in RT mode. I know of three commercial companies with Plan 9 / Inferno based products.

Plan 9 was a for sale product when free Unices became the rage. When it became a free download, Plan 9 landed without a modern web browser in the days of the Web and we still don't have one. Until recently, with the addition of an AC97 driver, the only way to get sound was an 8 bit Soundblaster or difficult to find specific models of USB audio device. There's no video playback (unless you don't care if the sound syncs). So you end up needing two machines and only one of them expects to be just another node in the network and the other thinks it's the sentinel.

skwiddor··on The TTY demystified
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/

They got rid of the TTY, huzzah!

skwiddor··on Ask HN: What Web apps increase your productivity?
Delicious
skwiddor··on Open-source software has won the argument. Now a new threat to openness looms
Come on, it's just another vendor. Being tied to a vendor is a choice we've always made, the beauty of Unix is the abstraction. Present an attractive abstraction and developers will come, not only because of the strength of your provision but because we also have to recognize how hard it would be to change environment providers.

The Unix model presents files and folders, it is a fantastic model with a few operations. You present me with a file system and I'll manipulate it. We've spent 30-40 years building tools to manipulate files grep, sed, awk, join, sort etc.

skwiddor··on The Wizardry of Id: a profile of John Carmack's programming (David Kushner)
The beams have crossed since

http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html

http://ninetimes.cat-v.org/news/2009/03/04/0-9doom/

skwiddor··on The Wizardry of Id: a profile of John Carmack's programming (David Kushner)
Bell Labs, that darn name gets everywhere, I wonder what happened to that place?
skwiddor··on Ask HN: In which modern language/environment/framework is programming a joy?
Shell script keeps me happy, you've not lived until you've used join(1) in production. http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/join

Assembler is good especially on something clean like a microcontroller. I like the AVR instruction set. http://www.maht0x0r.net/library/computing/avr/docs/8bit_avr_...

Hook up an AVR to a GSM module and a SIM and you've got you're own programmable cell phone, like this one http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...

skwiddor··on Ask HN: Do you use PHPMyAdmin as an alternative to your app admin?
No

also consider http://www.google.com/search?q=phpmyadmin+exploit

skwiddor··on MySQL-PostgreSQL comparison
> PostgreSQL has implemented for years transactions, foreign keys, subselects, unions, views, stored procedures, triggers, Unicode support, full joins and constraints on data.

> MySQL does not yet implement full joins and constraints on data.

It's all you need to know,

skwiddor··on Ask HN: Do you write comments, and then not submit them?
I've often wondered which websites might track all your keypresses and send them with the submission so they keep a record of your typing, and display only the final edit. Wouldn't be too hard to turn keypresses into ed commands.
skwiddor··on OpenBSD Develops Its Own SMTP Server
http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/awk/smtpd.awk is one I did in a couple of hours, and although it dealt with 1,000s of emails in its time, I wouldn't put a price ticket on it!
skwiddor··on Ask HN: If you have access to an IDE, why would anyone use a text editor?
I use Acme and Plan 9 from Bell Labs, a text editing tool, I edit text. I don't need something to do the programming for me. Acme's ability to run commands by clicking on text is more productive than you're giving it credit for right now. Want another menu item? Just type it into the menu bar! Use a bunch of commands on one file regularly? keep them in the comments. Want to pattern match text snippets and execute commands, no problem it's built in to userland.

I won't call it an IDE because it knows nothing about the types of text you're editing, doesn't do syntax highlighting but it can run a shell in a window, and an HTML renderer and has an email client and a wiki editor and and and

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