acon

Saying that fork forces overcommit is strange. Fork is just one of the things that allocates memory. If you don't want overcommit fork should simply fail with ENOMEM if there isn't enough memory to back a copy of all the writable memory in the process.

I've heard that you're supposed to put your feet against the ceiling of the car before unbuckling if you end up in a rolled over car. Has anyone tried that?

I also have a one-year-old Samsung and I managed to get it to not overscan for at least one input. Put your Mac Minis HDMI into the HDMI 1 / DVI input and then select the input in the Source menu on the TV, press Tools on the remote, and chose PC as the name of the input. This magically turns off overscan. Hope it works!

It is quite obvious that the article compares Chrome against Safari. This makes you objection to point 5 invalid, since Safari uses a search bar, not a search dialog and the thing you think is missing in the list of good points is something Safari has had forever.

The fact that a tree builds itself out of thin air is one of my favorite tidbits of knowledge. However, this kind of metabolism is only used by plants. Humans, as all animals, gets their building blocks from what they eat and drink. All the oxygen we use from the air we breathe is exhaled as carbon dioxide.

There is nothing wrong with indenting lists negatively. In fact some say it is more correct: http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-st...

You can always combine a fluid layout with a max-width for your text. Besides its not the width of the monitor that matters, its the width of the windows and I like my windows narrow, thank you very much. I used to be able to do this, but then they went and broke Readability :-(.

I think it's Lua, not json. Lightroom being written in Lua an all.

Sorry. I missed that.

AMD is also fabless.

I really like the idea of strace for dependency detection. Unfortunately some people still use Windows which means I have to build on Windows. Does anyone know of an equivalent to strace one could use for dependency detection?

I believe this prediction code wasn't included in the original Quake. It was added later in QuakeWorld which was some sort of multiplayer enhancement for Quake. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Since Google Earth was inspired by Snow Crash I'm not sure you can classify it as prescient in the same way.

An alternative to government regulations is to organize in unions. Then you can have somewhat equal partners negotiating.

Of course there are disadvantages to unions, as there are to all large organizations. They tend to take on a life of their own, with its own agenda which may not represent the will of its members.

To me the only thing killer about the iTunes integration for the iPhone is that it almost kills the experience for me. I would really like to get rid of iTunes, but I can't since I need to use it to sync my iPhone.

For music I use Spotify, and Spotify has applications for both iPhone and Android.

I also listen to podcasts, but I would like to manage that entirely from my phone instead of having to use iTunes to download the episodes. I know you can get new episodes with the phone, but that is far too manual and requires WiFi which I keep turned off to save on battery.

They claim the slowness is due to Mutter. They say the are moving (back?) to Compiz, and that it improves performance a lot. http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/10/25/ubuntu-11-04-to-ship-uni...

Chrome is taking some steps to improve this with its sand boxing and principle of least authority for its many processes. It will be interesting to see how this translates to a full operating system when Chrome OS is released. I hope it will push other operating system developers to improve along this axis.

No need to use apt. Apt is great for handling dependencies, but when it comes to mac apps there are just two parts: OS X and the app. No dependencies between apps and no dependencies on libraries not part of the OS. Nice and simple.

Well, gmail was announced on April, 1, with an unheard of 1 Gig of storage, so I think Google likes to do this sort of thing on purpose.

Is that really true? I would guess most people live in the country they were born in.

Really interesting, but isn't this more about what white people want other people to think that they like, rather than what they actually like.

It would be interesting to compare this to what they actually like, but I have no idea how to get that data.

I'd say it depends on what your goals are. If you want to build a following for your blog then it is definitely doing, but if your goal is to lose weight or renovate your home, then it is talking.

3D TV could work if producers showed restraint and only used it to add depth behind the frame, instead of throwing stuff at the audience for effect. Clipping of objects thrown towards you really kills the experience for me.

I think it will work for sports and nature shows. In the same way BBC's Planet Earth is great in HD I think some future production of the same kind will work great in 3D. Let's face it, that is basically what Avatar is – a gorgeous nature show set on an alien planet. At least that was the best part of it for me.

If forces a move to fluid layouts for the web I'm all for it. I like my browser windows tall and narrow, which breaks a lot of sites unless I use Readability.

On small devices, however, there is definitely a place for pixel perfect designs. The designer have to be real conscious about what fits on the screen and how to lay it out in a way which is understandable and good looking.

If something is very beneficial, but in great supply the price tends to be low, like clean water in Sweden, it will be very cheap, so I don't think somethings price on the market is enough to decide how much benefit it has. Somethings which are of great benefit to us, like air we can breath, are even free.

Do you think bribing government officials to get preferential treatment is also OK? If not, what is the difference?

Yes, but how do we decide how much society benefits from what you do? The military and police, keeping the mob rule at bay may be a great benefit, since it protects the rest of society and gives it the opportunity to invent and build things. Teaching people, healing people, motivating people. How should we value and reward all these things?

I think this will be the most monetarily successful social network yet. While Facebook has a huge mindshare I don't think they are very good at turning that mindshare into money in their own coffers.

Apple is really good at daring to ask for money for their services. While other companies often rely on ads or even more nebulous ways of making money, Apple just asks their users to pay money.

I really like this model of paying for what I get. I means that I am the customer, and not the product.

I'd say all the things you mention – nice effects, clean windows and nice themes – are examples of where Ubuntu is beautiful. I agree that Ubuntu is quite beautiful, and it is getting better and better.

I'd say what is lacking most in Ubuntu is elegance, which I define as it having strong vision about how things should look and behave. On a Mac you can quite clearly see when an application does not fit, for example Google Earth and Firefox. I think this is in large part due to the elegance of the platform.

Ubuntu is also somewhat lacking in simplicity. I think in large due to their attempts to hide accidental complexity instead of working to fix it. This has gotten a lot better, but as an example, Ubuntu still spews files for applications all over the place instead of having them as an application bundle as on a Mac. Then you get desktop files to give you a single icon to click, but they hide the complexity instead of removing it.

Reading what I wrote I realize that there is quite a bit of overlap between simplicity and elegance. App bundles are both simpler and more elegant than spewing files for an application all over the place.

Looks really nice. Let's hope they get some hardware out the door. I have lusted after a webOS device since they first revealed it, but I still haven't seen one in real life. Looks like they haven't made their way over here to Sweden.

I actually think webOS's card metaphor is the nicest and most understandable of all the current mobile OSes. The update to the platform looks nice, especially the PDK for games and other computationally intensive applications.

Now just get me some hardware. A tablet would be nice and a phone even nicer.