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zppx

381 karma · joined July 7, 2008

I am Applied Mathematics student at Universidade de São Paulo, a Ruby (but I'm using more Python) and hobbyist C programmer (learned a couple of SML and Scheme and some functional programming), now working as a sysadmin. A Linux user since 1999, though I'm using a Mac in a laptop lately although I have a personal dekstop with Debian.
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zppx··on All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)
For the 2 people that downvoted I would love to know what you consider a takeover. I'm pretty sure that in financial term takeover means change of ownership.

BTW, I'm quit, HN is just becoming a place where Steve Jobs and Rails must not be criticized, even when they must be. I will put some random string as my password and never return here, it was a good time but I think the community lost something in these years.

zppx··on All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)
Takeover for me means change of hands of ownership and power of decision in the company, and whatever your technical or managerial arguments are I think the resulting company was owned by Apple's stockholders, Steve Jobs probably among then after the acquisition, not by NeXT investors.
zppx··on Why Apple built Final Cut Pro X
Can someone write about what's going on? Is it the same type of stuff that happened to the XServe line?
zppx··on Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships
This however is not applicable to every developing country, here in South America the majority of foreign companies are here because of the local market potential and not generally to produce here and send to another place in the globe, this happens mainly because of the existence of China and India that are more cost effective for this type of market than industries in South America.
zppx··on Google+ Project: It’s Social, It’s Bold, It’s Fun, And It Looks Good
Facebook's interface is much better than Orkut's interface, Orkut is a social network that was acquired by Google some years ago, and it does have the broadcast feature that made twitter popular, so Brazilians, were Orkut was really popular, loves Facebook.

I think that Google can leverage adoption by targeting android users and creating a good application for them.

EDIT: Orkut still is really popular here in Brazil but the majority of my friends migrated to Facebook and do not login in Orkut anymore.

zppx··on I Spent A Coin (And I Liked It) — How I Bought Lunch in Manhattan with Bitcoins
Care to explain the errors?

People tends to vote on divisive issues in whichever post they agree.

Although not perfect and not entering in details, maybe because of generalization, I found his explanation resonating with what I know about monetary history, but I'm not a monetary economist.

zppx··on Consumers Don't Want Tablets, They Want iPads
> Would Android really have had the same success it had if the iPhone was available on Verizon, Sprint & T-Mobile (and assuming Apple could keep up with the volume) from the start?

That's in the US, what about the rest?

Yes, this is an honest question.

zppx··on The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II
Well to be fair I saw a lot of people downvoted on HN because they got valid points criticizing OS X or even Rails, so your first rule applies in some other situations too, at least here, maybe it's a problem about discussions on the internet...

I use a Mac so I understand their criticisms sometimes, sometimes I think they're just whining, as I think of this article.

I think that an article about a switch for Windows would have been much better.

zppx··on College is a waste of time
This was posted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2617379
zppx··on How to beat Apple
From what I read, I think there were not that much IT departments in the 80's outside technical companies, I think Microsoft got its position because of a series of factors, one of them was the presence of Visicalc-like programs (specially Lotus 1+2+3), in the 80s Apple was already offering an absurdly good user experience compared with Microsoft, yet it failed in the first time.

I remember that people got pretty excited with Windows 95, I don't think that this excitement was a enterprise mandate at all.

zppx··on iTunes should be a platform, not a bloated app
Mac App Store is not even related with portable devices synchronization or media playing and purchasing, areas that's traditionally iTunes covers, why would Apple even consider including it as a feature of iTunes?
zppx··on Apple replaces Samba for Windows networking services
> Presumably, Apple will replace Samba with something that works well for the vast majority of cases.

I doubt it although I wish this becomes true, the protocol is a pain in the ass, even Samba has some quirks, Samba is a very large software (probably millions of lines of code) just to compare.

I just cannot see Apple spending so much time developing this solution only because of their dislike of the GPLv3, sounds dumb to me.

zppx··on .tel, .xxx and .mobi are all pointless and idiotic
> If Catalonia has its own TLD, why not California or Maine?

Politics.

zppx··on .tel, .xxx and .mobi are all pointless and idiotic
.cat is for Catalunya, and only open for sites in Catalan.

.co is for Colombia

Google uses both:

http://www.google.cat/ (in Catalan)

http://www.google.com.co/ (in Spanish)

zppx··on Is There Money in Open Source?
> Red Hat provides support for MySQL?

No. But it does have mysql packages in the distribution.

zppx··on Bootstrapping CC (for OSX, using Homebrew)
I think you want something like http://rudix.org
zppx··on OS X Isn't for Developers
It will make me mad IF Apple does not release Xcode outside the fucking App Store. I do not care paying for an IDE, that I do not use, but I still want a compiler, some assemblers (nasm and gas), and a working linker.
zppx··on OS X Isn't for Developers
Just a correction.

As far as I observed in my coworker Macbook gcc still is the default compiler in Xcode 4. Just compiled some software with it today, and it pops a lot of gcc's in ps aux.

zppx··on OS X Isn't for Developers
Extra languages are still there though. But I think this is good, mom uses her Mac Mini in Hebrew, my account uses English, dad uses our native Portuguese (I live in Brazil).
zppx··on Xcode 4 released
Will there be a way for me to install the developer tools for the command line (a C compiler, the C library headers, linker, assembler, and debugger) without using the App Store?
zppx··on Thunderbolt
Two questions:

Is it royalty-free?

If the answer is negative, what are the licensing terms?

zppx··on Why are you people defending Apple?
That is a false dichotomy, Apple vs. Google. I think it's a poor way of trying to make sense of the situation. Keep in mind that the word "Google" is not even cited in the link.

There's no need to defend every one of Apple's decisions, sometimes people do stuff that sucks, or even brings Google to the discussion just to defend Apple.

EDIT: That said, your points were good, I liked the articulation of your comment, I upvoted you.

zppx··on The Great Gatsby - For NES
Oh man, I just began reading this book four days ago, it's my current book to read while commuting, and it's pretty weird to think that tomorrow this will probably be in my head when I read a chapter... maybe this will be too much and I'll put the book on hold for a month or so.

The game itself is a nice classic platform.

zppx··on Tired of Apple's rules? Build your own touchscreen handheld
I guess you never dealt with microcontrollers, right?

The company is about popular DIY electronics kits, I think it's a marvelous project if you consider that, but nothing close of an iPhone, if that's what people want they should play with an ARM board.

zppx··on Miro Video Converter (GPL license) now in the App Store
BeTrains is a GPL software, and the iOS version is in the App Store.

In my opinion GPL software is incompatible with the App Store in general, for paid applications it's even more explicit, the GPL gives you the right to distribute the compiled software as you wish, a paid app cannot be distributed for more than 5 devices as far as I understand.

Of course there's exceptions, if every copyright holders do agree, they can give GPL exceptions for distributors, such as Apple, another situation like that exists if the software contain copyrighted artwork that's not under the GPL, then you can distribute the code freely but not the artwork (and as such any binary that contains this artwork), there's various complications, I think a lawyer can give more explanation about this situation.

EDIT: I'm not sure but I think the GPL contain terms that regulates non-source forms, there are also terms that complicates distributors from limiting user's freedoms, as the GPL define freedoms, although I believe the last case is void if the copyright holders give exceptions to the distributor.

EDIT2: Correction for BeTrains.

zppx··on Engaging Recruiters with Hacker Trading Cards
Cool, but the author switched the pictures of Thompson and Ritchie.
zppx··on Egypt has shut off the Internet (update: not everywhere)
Apparently a large number of autonomous systems are not announcing their prefixes[1], so there's no route for some Egyptian networks.

There's also a small thread on NANOG mailing list in which a user acknowledges the fact that he cannot access a server in Cairo[2].

[1]: http://bgpmon.net/blog/?p=450 (by @atoonk on twitter)

[2]: http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-January/031315...

EDIT: formating

EDIT2: grammar, I think everything is passable now

zppx··on System Admins R.I.P.?
Maybe it will be end of the BOFH or the eternal deployer (the guy that does not everyday, just deploy software, I saw some of them in my life). Small web companies maybe does not need a sysadmin, since they are focused on one application generally this will not be a major problem for them if they know some best practices.

The majority of sysadmins that I know works in the financial market, telecommunications industry and ISPs, mainly in data centers, helping developers who does not know about the infrastructure or as network operators.

zppx··on The GPL is a License, Not a Contract
I doubt you can do this with whatever license you're using unless you put that explicitly on the terms.

But I'm no lawyer and neither a GPL advocate, I'm only interested understanding licenses.

EDIT: I understand that the previous distribution license is revoked only if you fail to comply with the original term under which you agreed to use the software/code.

zppx··on Techies don't understand what business Apple is in
> "Sure, but the user experience on Linux is nowhere near that what Apple's Mac OS X or iOS provides."

You mean about installing applications right? Copy to /Applications or click "Buy" in App Store.

But if I give Systems Preferences to a "common" user instead of /etc, for the majority of users, in my experience, they feel the same bad user experience of a configuration utility, with a great number of concepts that they do not understand, at least it's prettier.

My mother still does not understands why she needs iTunes at all to upgrade her iPhone, and that after upgrading iTunes simply deletes the two applications that she does use, Apple insists she needs it.

This last case is anecdotal, but it shows that Apple also does have it's poor user experience with some of its decisions, the common user, contrary to the average Joe iPod user, does not understand why the hell iTunes is necessary if he doesn't listen to music.

> " Apple gets an A in that category (App Store on Mac OS X and iOS is a success), Linux a D (Package managers are a success, but the user experience isn't)."

I would completely agree with the idea if Apple pricing was not so elitist and if the majority of users that I know that have a Apple product was not a techie nerd at least (ie, he knows how to deal with the basics of a computer, whatever system he's using, can install a program if you provide instructions, he follows technology section of his favorite newspaper, etc.).

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