akdubya

My 'buntu desktop environment is the most solid I've ever used, with the caveat that once a year I can expect to spend a few hours in driver hell. I think this balances out with the once-a-year BSOD hell I encounter on Windows.

I agree with you that WINE is terrible, but I have Win7 running brilliantly right now on VirtualBox. Other than that, linux has all the specialized tools I need for coding and web development, I switched over to console gaming a few years back because I was tired of the hardware upgrade treadmill, and the Microsoft productivity stack, while better than Libre Office, isn't compelling enough to tie me to that platform. Also, I'm not sure what problems you had with video players. VLC has served me well on Windows and linux.

I guess the real killer app for me is sudo apt-get install [some incredibly useful open source library I really need right now, dammit]. The open source infrastructure on Windows is so anemic it drives me nuts.

The patent by itself does not describe a skip list, but the most common skip list implementations use a multilevel list data structure similar to what's described in the patent.

The underscore.js source (http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/) also serves as a great primer on the effective use of 'this'. My rule of thumb is to never rely on 'this' unless 1) the function is already bound to an object or 2) I have explicitly set the binding via bind, call or apply. When in doubt favor explicit argument passing.

I'm working on a distributed app that shares code between the client and server, and there are already a multitude of open-source libraries that are designed to run in any JS environment.

"On my minimal Debian box, you point your web browser at http://localhost:631 and click shit and then the printer works."

I just learned something.

I had this problem until I disabled vertical refresh. Based on posts in the ubuntu forums this appears to solve most people's problems with the AMD drivers.

I was thinking less about the conflict in Iraq than the conflict in and around Israel, where small groups of insurgents have over the past decade mounted increasingly sophisticated attacks on Israeli armor in the open. The deterrent factor here is just as important as the ability to blow stuff up.

Any battle tech that's an order-of-magnitude cheaper to kill than to produce is destined for obsolescence. You can see this happening now with main battle tanks, which are easily knocked out by IEDs and increasingly sophisticated man-portable missiles. It will be interesting to see what happens to the manned air superiority fighter over the next couple of decades now that unmanned drones are being deployed on a wide scale.

Am I the only one who thinks it looks like a high-tech baby stroller?

Bitwise operations pop up fairly often in advanced data structures (Hash Array Mapped Tries, Bloom Filters, etc). The big advantage in my view is being able to perform complex, data-intensive tasks in otherwise limited environments (e.g., mobile devices).

Yep. To upgrade the memory on the compact macs one needed a hex driver, a soldering iron and a spare resistor. I'm still shocked my Dad let me tinker with expensive university property like that.

Good background from the bitcoin people:

"A number of Byzantine Generals each have a computer and want to attack the King's wi-fi by brute forcing the password, which they've learned is a certain number of characters in length. Once they stimulate the network to generate a packet, they must crack the password within a limited time to break in and erase the logs, lest they be discovered. They only have enough CPU power to crack it fast enough if a majority of them attack at the same time.

They don't particularly care when the attack will be, just that they agree. It has been decided that anyone who feels like it will announce an attack time, which we'll call the "plan", and whatever plan is heard first will be the official plan. The problem is that the network is not instantaneous, and if two generals announce different plans at close to the same time, some may hear one first and others hear the other first.

They use a proof-of-work chain to solve the problem. Once each general receives whatever plan he hears first, he sets his computer to solve a difficult hash-based proof-of-work problem that includes the plan in its hash. The proof-of-work is difficult enough that with all of them working at once, it's expected to take 10 minutes before one of them finds a solution and broadcasts it to the network. Once received, everyone adjusts the hash in their proof-of-work computation to include the first solution, so that when they find the next proof-of-work, it chains after the first one. If anyone was working on a different plan, they switch to this one, because its proof-of-work chain is now longer.

After about two hours, the plan should be hashed by a chain of 12 proofs-of-work. Every general, just by verifying the difficulty of the proof-of-work chain, can estimate how much parallel CPU power per hour was expended on it and see that it must have required the majority of the computers to produce in the allotted time. At the least, most of them had to have seen the plan, since the proof-of-work is proof that they worked on it. If the CPU power exhibited by the proof-of-work is sufficient to crack the password, they can safely attack at the agreed time."

http://www.bitcoin.org/byzantine.html

Sounds like the Feynman algorithm:

1. Write down the problem.

2. Think real hard.

3. Write down the solution.

"The only thing even remotely close to the bubble of old would be Twitter, and they have 200 million users. Name one service during the dot-com era with anything approaching that number."

The raw numbers may have changed (there are more people on the internet now) but the strategy is the same. In the late 90's it was all about eyeballs, actual profit be damned. Nowadays it's all about "social". Twitter, Facebook et al are going down the same road: many ephemeral eyeballs with no discernible path to the kind of profitability tech sector investors expect. They are at best media plays, and over the past 10 years we've seen how unkind the market has been to the likes of AOL and Yahoo.

Groupon may be the standout company of this era (who knows?) but people who boast of Groupon's numbers don't seem to understand that most of the revenue goes into the retailer's pocket. It's an as yet unproven proposition that there's substantial money to be made in dipping into the razor-thin profit margins of struggling local businesses.

We won't know who wasted $100 million+ until it's all over -- that's the thing about bubbles. The oversized VC funds and oversized valuations are relatively recent phenomena and it will likely be at least 18-24 months until the well goes dry. But when you see billion-plus dollar VC funds and a dozen me-too venture backed companies in the mobile photo-sharing space alone, well, it doesn't take an expert to see the froth in the water. Personally, I wasn't alarmed until about six months ago.

Why should any of us care? Because after the party's over the tech sector is in for a rather bad hangover. The jobs and the capital will disappear seemingly overnight. As entertaining as it can be to watch things go boom, I'd much prefer sustainable growth.