v21

The line that made this seem more than a PR move to me was this line:

"...without disrupting the space combat simulator that many of you are, or at least were, very much in love with—and without delaying..."

It's one thing for a CEO to say they were wrong. But for them to say that customers might have been right to fall out of love with their only product - that takes balls.

> No other industry deals with people being able to copy their product flawlessly and eliminate any scarcity of the final package like music does

That's just plain not true. Film, TV, videogames, books, comics and news all fall under this. And I'm sure there's more industries I haven't thought of.

I don't see a way of distinguishing between bad behaviour and discussing taboo topics. They're so often the same thing - consider flat out racism or misogyny for example. An things get even more complicated when you consider /b/-like levels of irony and inversion of meaning, where it;s difficult to tell what is a incredibly subtle troll of racists, and what is actual racism.

But I'm glad that the whole internet isn't /b/. I'm glad that terrible perspectives are often shunned from conversations. It's good to remember they're there, but if someone comes along and expresses terrible things then they should feel shame. And that only happens if those perspectives are not welcome, and are made to feel not welcome.

I want to make games. I want to get really good at making games. It's not even specifically games - I find the intersection of technology and human behaviour fascinating, and games are merely the most fertile patch. I love working on problems that involve such an amazingly wide variety of aspects. Maybe that's because I love novelty, and learning.

Some day, I would quite like to strike out on my own and sustain myself off the games I make. Live the "indie dream". But right now I have a job with a large degree of creative freedom, where I get to practice my craft. I don't have to stress about the financial aspects, I don't have the immediate pressure of "ship-or-starve" and I don't have to worry about the things I make when I'm not working making any money. If they do, fantastic! But if they are only interesting, then I have still won.

But the ability to own my own music isn't going away because I'm paying for Spotify. If I stop, then I'm in the same position that I was before. I've not got music any more, but I'm not paying any more. If I decide to start paying for Grooveshark instead, then I've not lost anything.

Storage isn't expensive, but managing files is a pain. Especially if you have to manage it across multiple devices. I just want to listen to some Nujabes, do I really have to care where it's saved, or whether I'm on my work PC, my laptop, or the media center downstairs? And that's before you get into the pain of syncing stuff onto your phone...

I pay for the convenience of not having to pirate.

(I picked this example because it is both what I am listening to now, and for the irony of it being unavailable on Spotify.)

And at the bottom of the article is the call to "Like" it. And a button that has already told Facebook that I've read the article.

(Don't get me wrong, the web page has also told Google (via Plus and Google Analytics), Twitter, Chartbeat, and a bunch of ad platforms I was there. And a couple of CDN platforms, too, I guess. It's not just Facebook here.)

There's at least three points to be made here: There's a irritating design choice that doesn't let you easily specify a granular enough privacy setting (although this is weighed against the general pain of making choices). There's the fact that having a private or counterfeit or incomplete public online identity is getting ever harder these days. And there's the fact that large corporations are collecting ever more data on us, and this data is increasingly hard to evade.

Still possible, still possible. Of course, it all depends on how much they want to track you.

Or, indeed, using your combination of locale, useragent, etc. These are often unique. You can test yours here: http://panopticlick.eff.org/

Yeah, I too felt a bit swizzed at the end. But if it wasn't for that last paragraph teasing more, it would have felt fairly substantial. Although I don't think you get to say things like "[The Milo Criterion] is the dominant dynamic for successful products." without a hell of a lot more evidence.

This used to be Google's approach. Make a shit-ton of things, see which ones caught on, then expand them. 20% time, Google Labs etc were all expressions of this. Which they've been moving away from now - as Larry Page says, they're "putting more wood behind fewer arrows".

I don't know. Tasting failure, working to avoid is different from lacking food, shelter, or clothing. As an adult, I know I'm more likely to take risks if I know that, for instance, gambling on this job won't kill me. And taste too much failure, and you hit learned helplessness. Like the girl who was chewing gum was experiencing:

> “She said: ‘I’m trying so hard to just grow up. But nothing ever changes!’ And I said: ‘Do you know what does change? You didn’t have a baby attack in front of the other kids, and two weeks ago, you would have.’ ”

That's the teacher being encouraging, lessening the failure the kid is experiencing. Because people's pride in themselves is a sufficient motivator to change their lives positively, without risking starvation.

This only works if design is whole-lifecycle design - if the cheap disposable crap we produce (and rely on, and luxuriate in) can be taken apart and reused after. If cheap fashion predominates, with clothes that fall apart after a season, you need a plan for disposing of those clothes more urgently than you need a plan for disposing of clothes that last a decade.

Here's a even more beautiful variation I've seen : http://interconnected.org/home/more/lightcone/

It takes a birth date and tells you when your personal light cone passes nearby stars.

> But there are some things which make poverty more tolerable. Wal-Mart for one. I’d moved to Louisville with not even a fork or a spoon. Wal-Mart sells all that — hamper, dishes, utensils, dish rack, sheets, telephones, you name it — for prices so incredibly low that I was genuinely grateful. I thought about Wal-Mart’s union busting, its abused work staff of geriatrics and economically desperate wage slaves, its stocks of Third World products which in turn further destroyed America’s manufacturing, its aesthetic Sovietization of America… and then I thought about my own shitty fiscal situation. Conclusion: “Fuck ‘em.”

http://exiledonline.com/elite-versus-elitny/

But the implication in the article is that the negative review is a fake review put up by a competing dog trainer...

Google knows about my Twitter account because I gave them my homepage, which has semantic markup that exposes my FOAF data, linking to that account (and others). I was actually quite impressed by it...

Even the East India Company fell eventually.

Ah yeah, that perspective makes sense. But on the other hand - what business model doesn't degrade over time? What magic that would be!

But who says the system self-destructs? The market has worked in this case - computers are yet cheaper, without a loss in quality. What outcome would be preferable?

The other important measures are also more falsifiable, and more changeable between companies and industries. Every company has margins and revenues. You could argue that investors ought to understand the businesses they own, but that doesn't mean they will.

it's worth noticing that ASUS didn't have to be scheming for the end result for that to happen - each stage involved them acquiring a bit more business, and making a bit more money. Their actions needn't have been the result of long-term thinking.

It does not! But the usual way people get around this is connecting to IRC using an IRC bouncer or irssi on a server somewhere and then connecting to that. This way you are "online" the whole time. But it's a thing everyone has to set up individually.

The other way it's handled is by having a bot sitting in channels (doing things like pushing warnings and error notices from your server, too) that records logs. Then you can visit a webpage that the bot hosts with the transcripts on. I'm sure there are packages that perform the logging directly on the server and host them, but it's useful to have some unlogged rooms, too.

This looks like an excellent place to link someone who knows a bit of HTML, maybe some Javascript, but is curious about "real CS stuff".

The authors picture looks like a woman to me.

(worth noting that two dudes had their stuff deleted - on paid on time, and the other hand paid for most of his services, but due to a PayPal error was unable to pay for all of them.)

Yeah, that's a pretty stupid mistake. My bad!

I still stand by my other, less retarded point, though.

If 1% of sign ups complete the course .. that's still 5800 people. Which is pretty good reach. And then add in all the people who didn't complete, or look at the materials afterwards, or who are otherwise affected by the project... These people don't have enough drive to get the full benefit, but they do get some benefit for sure.

But the displayed URL is truncated with an ellipsis at the end. The OPs URL is likely long enough to trigger that. Sometimes a long URL is all you want to share, but that is now impossible to do. A tweet saying "http://hotchickswithstubbedtoesmakingsexfaces.com/ exists" is a decent tweet, but a tweet saying "http://hotchickswit... exists" isn't as good. And sure, you can mouseover to see the full link, but that's balls.

Lua wins for in-game scripting and embedded devices. In these places, it's Lua, or hacking onto the C/C++ engine/framework code. Or, now, MoonScript with some extra fuss. Mind, Lua isn't terrible, so I think I'd stick to Lua and avoid the fuss. But others will disagree.

> If google simply wanted to be immune to claims from the Novell patents, they could have joined the group and saved money (vs. bidding by themselves against the group.)

But what if they wished to grant immunity to Android manufacturers, but the group did not want them to?