smithzvk

Indeed, but there are odd economics at work here. How much do you pay for something that you might not use in the next 2 years, or ever? Do you assume it will drop in price? If it isn't already installed, will I ever actually bother when there are so many other distractions competing for my time?

We live in a world crowded with entertainment opportunity and it is only getting more crowded with time.

(by the way, GOG should pay you a commission for talking me into it)

Just goes to show you, if you wait long enough, that game you never had a chance to play but have been eying for a decade will be given out for free... so now it can sit on your hard drive where you still won't have time to play it!!

Now I just need wait for the OddWorld games to start coming out for free... any decade now...

Hmmm... not seeing the same behavior today. There have been upgrades in the meantime, of course, but I doubt that this was addressed. Must have been something off that day. It did run off and start downloading the header of every single message in my GMail account, which I would rather it didn't as I really only care about the mail that I have received recently (I only use Thunderbird for encrypted emails but the web interface otherwise). That is still annoying, but since I don't want to bad mouth people with false information:

Let the record show that Thunderbird no longer becomes unresponsive for me when accessing my GMail account, must have been a glitch on that day when I first set up GMail in Thunderbird.

Yes, to the point that it is very easy to crash Thunderbird if you blindly hook it into your GMail account.

Two things here:

1) The cost of work-arounds is incredibly cheaper than surveying the distro space to find one that works for you.

2) It is likely the case that the benefits of using Ubuntu outweigh the cost of the work-arounds (at least this is true for me and probably many others).

Actually, you can't really trust that behavior if you ever install new software, or even change the way you use the computer by say starting to use some other program that starts with a "t" very often. The Dash optimizes for programs that you run frequently and some other program might win out if you run it more often than "terminal". The Dash is based on giving feedback to the user; that's why it needs to be fast.

Well, sorry, but as I see it, that is kind of the way of things. The things that coexist/compete share ideas so strongly, due to chasing each other's features, that the things they were before cease to be and they usually, eventually, converge, at least in a functional sense which is all that matters to users. That or one is forced into a minority status. Not really dystopia in either scenario.

> Consider filesystems, which are also tools used to manage stored data. If I'm writing some Python thing, I don't proclaim to everyone that I'm storing my work on a ReiserFS volume, and I'm thrilled by the fact that ReiserFS indexes its metadata using a B+ Tree. I just store my data.

No, but you do see thousands upon thousands of pages of text written about how to best use a shell to interface with the file system. This is what I think we are dealing with, we are on the cusp of actually having competent tools for the task of this collaborative, everybody works on their own computer but everything needs to be merged together in the end, and still work, thing that we have been doing for years. Give it a few years to settle down and either csh (Hg) or bash (Git) will win out and there will still be odd birds out there using sh (SVN) or zsh (Darcs) (feel free to permute those assignments to your taste).

I like how a 24 character password is automatically insecure, while a 16 character one is not... dumb password validation...

> The ability to irretrievably lose massive sums of money with no recourse is a challenge for Bitcoin. Banks have insurance for just this sort of eventuality.

I find it funny that you pose the problem and give the solution in such close proximity. (In case you miss my meaning, the solution is to trust large wallets with third party companies that insure their holdings and guarantee your money even if they are successfully attacked)

I use Feedly, but I really dislike it. I, almost overnight, transitioned from reading blogs for most of my content, to using HackerNews and Reddit for most reading. I might check my Feedly account once every week or two as opposed to multiple times a day with Reader. The things I liked about Reader, that it was minimal but what it did (find RSS feeds given a URL, catalogue what I have read, fetch new posts, and be reasonable on a mobile device) it did very well, are just not present in Feedly.

This really puts a damper on my excitement for the Nexus 5 (or whatever it will be called). I hear that it will be running an Adreno GPU. On the other hand, I guess it is going to be rough no matter what option you pick in the mobile world.

Maybe this explains why us people that link our SIP to the PSTN via Googlo Talk haven't been able to do so for the last 18 hours or so? Maybe they are attempting to figure out what they can safely turn off/revert.

Edit: A bit of reading says that this probably is unrelated...

Sorry, busy today and didn't see this. Velocity is a vector, but so is position, and direction, and a whole bunch of things. Anything you can express as a fixed length, ordered, group of numbers is a vector (I guess they don't even have to be numbers). The point is that the distinguishing thing here is not the vectoral nature, but the fact that the mouse directly modifies the absolute 'direction vector' while a joystick directly modifies the rate of change of that 'direction vector'.

Interesting point, but I think you don't mean to say vector, but something more like 'velocity', 'momentum', or better yet, joysticks are meant to control a rate of change.

The FSF is about advocating for Free Software. From their point of view (and I think this is mostly true) the conditions are in place where society doesn't actually need to use proprietary software (outside of device drivers, and they are actively working to improve that situation). Sure, you personally have to use proprietary software because the rest of the world does and proprietary solutions are often superior (either technically or in terms of usability), but we would get by fine, as a society, if we did away with proprietary software. Further, so long as proprietary software is used by most people, and most developers are getting paid to develop proprietary software, technical superiority is almost guaranteed. I think that the FSF long ago realized that the battle field is in public opinion, not in delivering quality software. Sure, the software needs to be "good enough", but once the software is "good enough" then no killer feature is going to shift people away from the proprietary software that they know and that the vast majority of the world is using. Now, there could be meta-killer features in terms of responsive development, transparency, and privacy.

So, I can completely understand that the FSF feels that their time is best served by getting the public to change their views regarding Free Software vs proprietary software. I don't think that it has been very effective, but it is a heck of an uphill battle. But doing this in combination with their other work (lobbying, writing briefs for court cases, acting as a GPL violator watch dog, and publicizing when large organizations have selected Free Software over a proprietary alternative) also help the cause more than funding any particular project I can think of.

Usually when I see smart people talking about security, they think about what attack vector/situation you are trying to protect against. In this case, the situation you are trying to protect against is not keeping your phone locked when you are in custody or at gun point. The situation is someone unlocking your phone if someone swipes it from your pocket, you lose your phone, or simply leave it on your desk for a few moments as you go to the bathroom at the office. So, yes, a biometric scanner, even one that is easily beaten by an attacker, is good for this purpose.

Whatever the case, maybe we should step back and get some more perspective. How many of us don't put locks on our shared computers and phones because we don't want the inconvenience of ensuring everybody that should be allowed to use it can? My phone is a shared device and I removed any and all locks on it as I got very tired of "oh, let me unlock that for you." Basically, I want everybody that can reach it physically (when it isn't lost or stolen) to be able to access it and make calls, surf the web, use the map, search contacts, play games, etc. Is any phone locking mechanism going to work perfectly, probably not. Being able to set up my phone to unlock for anybody in my family and friends circle by something like fingerprints is a pretty good start.

Right, but that is the point. If you think that the NSA has some magic machine that might break one of the common encryption schemes, but you don't know which, then pick five different encryption schemes. A layered encryption scheme is only as weak as its strongest layer.

I truly don't understand why the suggestion isn't encrypt it both ways (or, more generally, many different, layered encryption schemes).

I understand that he said this, and I think that he is being honest, but just to point out: if he was secretly planning on bailing it out at the last minute, saying that you will pick up any slack is probably not a good way to run a crowd funding campaign.

Shouldn't it be charging when you are using it as a desktop?

Crowd funding, at its core, is a pay first system. This means that it is also in some way speculative. You cannot price your device above what people are willing to live without if the project fails spectacularly (or simply fails to deliver on what they really wanted).

To be fair, if Ubuntu Edge is truly the F1 of phones, then it should be marketed to people that don't bat an eye at spending $830 on a device they have never held and have little guarantee that it will actually be suitable for their needs. I just think that the intersection of those people and Ubuntu users is significantly smaller than Canonical thought it was.

You could also encode the information in the size of a transaction sent to yourself. Then any money lost would go back to the miners as transaction fees.

I don't actually think this will change things as much as you might think. New problems would be efficiently computable, sure, new programming paradigms will be needed, yes, but people have been producing abstractions for a very long time. If you want to know what it will be like to program a QC, look at what it is like to program in CUDA, OpenCL, Prolog, SQL, or any high level language with a compiler. All of these things do substantial work that the vast majority of users are not aware of. 99.9% of programmers will go out and buy a book called "OpenQC for Dummies" and they will build up a set of heuristics for proper programming techniques. Meanwhile, 0.01% of programmers will actually understand QC, and make this abstractions simpler for the rest of the world.

It is pretty neat, but I have yet to actually use it to fix a bug. The bugs that I cannot just spot tend to be bugs that occurred long ago in the program execution, something that record doesn't handle well (well, it could but it takes a lot of space to store all that info).

It seems that the only thing that reverse debugging helps me to do, i.e. find errors from not long ago, are something that is actually pretty easy to do. Maybe I am using it wrong.

Why do they still recommend 32 bit for everybody?

I have been using 64 whenever possible. I wonder if any weird behavior can be attributed to it?

Yes. This article gives this other little nugget.

> If you have a $10 bill and I replace it with ten $1 bills, do you feel richer?

If I exchange a $10 bill for ten $1 bill, I don't feel any more wealthy. However, if my $10 buys ten times as much stuff, then I would feel 10 times more wealthy.

So, like a virtual allowance?

Is the "whole early adopters win" thing only sucky because you are not an early adopter? Note that I'm not an early adopter either, but it seems a bit nonsense.

Also, BTC is still pretty young, you could still be a relatively early adopter. You could spend a few months researching, and a few tens of thousands of USD to purchase a competitive mining rig, and you could still make a fortune, or you could lose it all. It isn't the same "anybody can do it" world that it used to be, but it certainly is still low barrier to entry. Is this really a dislike of systems that reward personal risk taking?

This was what I thought was happening as well. Even without active transport (because that turkey is dead) some salt should work its way into the tissue, after all it remains salty after a thorough washing post brine.

There will definitely be a second exodus. People such as myself are waiting to see what "wins out" over the next few months. I'm still adding feeds to my Reader account.