Waywocket

>If you wish to go to a system whereby there is no patent system, then recognize that people wouldn't be revealing their inventions, and thus things like android couldn't exist, because they wouldn't have a source of technology to copy.

Congratulations. You win the 'most mind-bogglingly retarded statement of the millennium' award.

In reality, I'm aware that nobody is actually stupid enough to hold such an indefensibly ludicrous position, so you're clearly trolling. Good job though, it's the first troll so successful that I'm not going to read HN again. A community that could give this trash even a single upvote is not a community I want to go anywhere near.

>I usually multiple bytes * 10 to account for overhead

I don't disagree with your point, but this bit is faulty. If you want to account for some overhead you should multiply by a number lower than 8, not higher.

So does almost everyone, when asked. The depressing thing is, when it comes to actual results, the x.99 pricing still works (well, I read this on the BBC a couple of months ago - don't have the link but the study they were quoting sounded pretty convincing).

>You can also set up IPv6 for yourself or your home network via a tunnel (which is a pretty fun exercise), and get access to the IPv6-enabled Internet. All recent operating systems have very good support for it -- even Windows 7 will hear RA and autoconfigure itself.

In fact, even Windows XP will automagically set up a 6to4 tunnel with no configuration needed if you have a public IPv4 address. Just enable IPv6 support for your connection and it does it all for you.

>Finally, that's the first comment I get, instead of someone extolling the virtues of swap and babbling warmed-over 1990s rules of thumb about "twice the RAM is the recommended size of your swap file" as if I'm going to wait for even 200MB of swap to fill up before flipping out and killing the offending process, let alone 8GB.

Those people have doubtless misunderstood the point of swap. You should have a swapfile/partition because it allows allocated but currently unused memory (from an application which keeps data hanging around which is not needed for most of it's working life, or an application which simply leaks) to be dumped to long term storage, thus freeing memory for its real use: page cache. Sweet, sweet page cache.

I'm always happy to see a few tens, even a couple of hundred MB of swap in use, because it means that some application had some unused data hanging around for so long that to leave it there would mean my machine having to read from disk more frequently, which would be Bad.

>emacs and vi are console based editors.

Don't know about emacs, but vim has an (optional) gui.

>In Sublime you can select text with your mouse

And in vim - even in the console version in fact. It's useful being able to select text, scroll with the mouse wheel, etc in a terminal window, particularly if you're editing a file on a remote machine.

>and on the right there is a graphical overview of the entire document.

Depending on what 'graphical overview' means, it's almost a certainty that vim can do something similar. The only thing I can think of where that would not be the case is if you mean something like a thumbnail view of the whole document (can't see much use for that offhand, but maybe) [edit: I had a second look to see what you meant by that, and yeah it looks like that's one thing vim can't do].

Not sure if you're aware but it also has features like tabs, arbitrarily split screen, colouring (console version is limited to 256 colours unfortunately, not sure about gui [edit: gVim supports proper 24bit colours]) and numerous other features that you might only expect in a dedicated graphical application.

Where did you get that idea?

>For one thing, eFreedom.com actually answers your question. This is different from ExpertsExchange (which promises you might get an answer if you fork over $, yeah right)

Not sure if I'm taking you too literally, but Experts Exchange does answer your question without having to pay (scroll down).

Indeed. My work's web server logs show that the number one referrer is a Google search for the full URL of the site.

That's even worse. Users habituate themselves to the two-step process in exactly the same way, only now they're annoyed because you're forcing them to do extra unnecessary work.

>Firefox doesn't hide that much of the details. You can still see the gory details of URLs and HTTP requests surfaced quite clearly, and the experience of using the web is that much richer if you know what they are and how to manipulate them. Firefox doesn't actively prevent you from doing so if you want to, which it would if it was trying to present a sealed abstraction.

Contrast with IEs 'friendly' error messages by default. Instead of an easily diagnosed 'page not found', or 'address not found', or 'server error' you get 'something went wrong' and then a list of always incorrect guesses as to what the problem might be and a confusing list of irrelevant things you can try to 'fix' the problem. I bet somebody got a bonus for that feature.

>USB drives are the most common form of data transfer because of the assurance that they will be compatible with most machines.

At $orkplace I have the 'opportunity' to see how non-technical folks work - In the last three years floppies seem to have finally died out, though there are still a few holdouts who will burn to CD-R rather than using one of those newfangled USBthingamies.

Those of us who breathe the internet tend to forget that we live in a world vastly different to that of a large proportion of the population.

On average, I use a USB connector about 3 times a day. I have yet to see a Bluetooth device that isn't a phone (I literally don't know a single person who has a Bluetooth controller that isn't one of those never-used phone features, nor anyone who actually owns a Bluetooth gadget, and the only ones I've even seen for sale are headsets for - you guessed it - phones).

>The alternative, and very likely real reason for the suit, is that Oracle actually cares about its intellectual property and would prefer that Google not do what they will with it.

I think it's far more likely that Oracle has seen a way to get a slice of the Android pie, and the rapidly growing long-term revenue stream that it likely represents.

It's not as sudden as that.

For reference, I admin a mail server for a small charitable organisation, and our mail graph for the last year looks like this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4957647/mailstats/mail.png

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4957647/mailstats/rejected.png

Where the grey is spam filtered by spamassassin and the red is obviously spam rejected outright due to an invalid recipient or an impossible sender or whatever.

The previous year's trend looked sort of similar - I think 2007 or 2008 was the peak in terms of spam we receive and it's been declining on average since then.

I wish I could find a link to an article I was reading a while back, which pointed out that most users who actually use search engines beyond typing 'facebook login' every morning work out how to search within a couple of weeks at most. Given that, it seems like a bad idea to optimise for the first week at the expense of every day for the next few years.

Sadly, I have no idea where I found that and don't recall if they had any factual data to back it up :(.

I wasn't aware that the FSF agreement needed to be physically posted, so thank you for pointing that out.

I will point out in return that their requirements have indeed caused a number of forks (some of which ended up being merged back in without copyright assignment TTBOMK) and acrimonious arguments despite giving strong legal assurances to the contributor that the FSF will only use the assignment for a few limited purposes.

The fact that it requires physical transfer of document stands though, so I'm satisfied that you have actually read what I wrote rather than dismissing it out of hand, and will hence shut up on the topic :P.

If you honestly think there's a way they could plausibly have made it harder, start by naming a project which has a higher barrier to entry.

I'm starting to wonder if anyone's even bothering to read what I'm writing. You've pointed out yet another example of a project which does not require a postal form, supporting my position. Requiring a disclaimer for works for hire isn't even comparable.

Edit: now that I've had my morning cup of tea, I've properly read that link - SQLite doesn't even require any form of contributor agreement, so all you're pointing out is that they require a company to agree that work done on their time is free to be contributed by the employee. That isn't the same thing at all.

>The OpenJDK CA process was put in place a long time ago by Sun, generally well-liked in open source circles last I knew.

Sun was never well liked outside of the Jave gated community. They - and their CA process - were used several times as examples in articles and presentations on 'how not to do open source' (eg. http://lwn.net/Articles/370157/ - 'How to destroy your community').

>And I guess you've got the same problems with all of Apache, for example (which, BTW, requires a signed copy of their CA to be faxed, at a minimum -- and I suppose some would complain about the faxing).

No, they accept e-mailing. See http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt. I am indeed opposed to their CA requirement, but in this case it appears to be simply misguided rather than an attempt at creating a barrier.

>IANAL, neither are you, and we weren't in the room when Rich talked to his. Even if those things weren't true, I'm pretty sure Rich (nor anyone else) would accede to derision by instead of nonspecific, unconstructive griping.

I object very strongly to your dismissal of my position as 'nonspecific, unconstructive griping'. I'll try to restate it as plainly as possible:

No other example has been found of a project with this requirement. Given that there are a large number of both companies and non-profit organisations requiring CAs, none of which require a postal copy, it cannot be rationally argued that this is a legal requirement unless you are also willing to argue that all of those other companies are failing to show due diligence; I don't believe that argument would have any merit. Since Clojure has that requirement, the most plausible reason is that it is an attempt to erect as large a barrier as possible to participation (and the only other reason I can think up is that Rich Hickey is a paranoid of the tinfoil hat variety, but I've seen no other evidence of that). I cannot overstate enough how large a barrier this is; even those corporate OSS projects widely condemned for their failure at understanding the open source ideal (I've already mentioned Android; another example might be OpenOffice, most of whose developers recently decided enough was enough and jumped ship) don't make it this hard. The deliberate attempt to discourage community involvement is what I believe runs counter to the spirit of open source.

Well let's see, the choice of license is a starting point. The EPL is, per se, a bad license (intentionally incompatible with the GPL and with the showstopping choice-of-venue clause), but it's ubiquitous in Java land so we'll let them off.

In case you hadn't noticed, Oracle is widely considered to be an enemy of open source, so pointing out similarities with their processes isn't hugely helpful. In fact, contributor agreements are reviled by a large segment of the open source community (see the fights that go on whenever this subject comes up on LWN, one of the less flame-infested pro-OSS sites). This example is a particularly bad CA because it is effectively a full grant. The only way it could be worse would be a total transfer of copyright.

Finally, unlike any other projects I'm aware of, Clojure requires the agreement to be printed out, signed, then snail mailed to a foreign country. There is no reason for this other than to deter potential contributors. I've accepted one CA in the past - after fixing a crash in a little-exercised part of Ogre3D I figured the change was so minor that they could own the copyright on it as far as I was concerned. Would I have submitted the fix if I had to post a letter to New York? Not bloody likely.

Other projects (Android is a notable example) are widely derided for this sort of approach to open source - why does Clojure get a free pass?

>Patches, bug reports are welcome :)

Well, not really. My biggest beef with clojure is that it masquerades as an open source project by strictly following the letter (it is released under an open source license), but not actually following the spirit in any meaningful way.

How many other OSS projects have an exhaustive list on their website of everyone who is allowed to make contributions?

Dude, don't feed the trolls.

Well, you live and learn - looking those up I think I've always called them 'those beans, you know, the black and white ones we used to have to rehydrate and which would sit in the cupboard for years before anyone bothered to eat them'.

There are also yellow split peas which I really should have thought of.

>Green peas, alas, escape even the most practised forking, regardless of which method - balancing on the back or stab-them-to-death - one chooses.

Personally I choose not to eat peas at all unless furnished with a spoon :P.

(And what other colours of peas do you get where you come from?)

I've always felt lucky for being left handed when it comes to utensil etiquette. I'd be almost incapable of using a fork in my right hand so I've always felt some sympathy for all those right handers who have to use their cutlery the wrong way round for etiquette reasons :).

Could be - it would make sense for them as it's a good way to increase their exposure. I wonder if there might also be some correlation with whether or not Spotify is available in the artist's country.

>It has a radio mode, which while not praticularly smart, does let you do some discovery.

Oh right. That's not available in the free version or listed in the quick version comparison (though it is listed in the full comparison) which is why I'd not heard of it.

>Smart recommendations, however, are not the experience they're looking for. Spotify seem to be aiming for actual human recommendations. They're focusing much more on the social stuff, both in marketing and engineering hours, than they are on trying to tell you what music to listen to.

If I want that stuff, I don't get it using a computer; I talk to people.

I'm coming to the conclusion that here - as with damn near everything - I'm "Not The Target Market(TM)" :'(. However it does seem that their target market is vast, so good luck to them.

No it doesn't.

(Or if it does, then the UI needs fixing to make it discoverable)

>These days it is starting to become more likely for obscure, independently-distributed music to be there than not to be there.

YMMV. I use Spotify a fair bit, despite having a fairly crappy UI (not that it's too bad, just annoying in places), but there's no way in hell I'd pay for it unless at least one of the following things were true:

1) The premium version cost just £5 a month - The £10 it actually costs would cover a new album each month, which is a permanent asset worth more to me than being able to listen to their selection for a limited period. There is a £5 a month subscription, but it doesn't have mobile or offline mode, so it's near useless. Ironically, I might not feel that way if the premium option simply didn't exist, but putting them side-by-side looks like naked profiteering.

2) I could search for something and expect at least an 85% chance of finding it. The current 50%-ish is nowhere near good enough to pay that much for. I listen to a fair bit of European techno/rock/metal/industrial and those seem to be particularly weak areas. If you can have a conversation with a random person in a pub about a band, there's a good chance they have it I guess, but even then there are a lot of surprising gaps. For a random example, my last search was for something (anything) by Arcade Fire, but no joy.

As you say, it is technically very well designed - very responsive, and even without offline mode it buffers well enough that the frequent dropouts in my crappy ADSL connection haven't caused any problems I can recall. I just feel that it's overpriced for such a limited selection.