eupharis

Interesting idea. I've been using Django for 10+ years and like all the choices you've made here. Not 100% what I personally prefer but close. And the decisions I differ on I'm curious about: "Hmm, should I be doing it that way?"

In the past few months I've been working on side projects and have gone through the process of setting up a similar template (just for my own use), which I've used with two different side projects.

I think my interest in buying this is not so much to replace my own template but to borrow parts of it.

From the borrow perspective, I wonder if this could be worth it to some established, non-agency companies that use Django.

Really nice code you can copypasta over? Doesn't take too much of that to get to $1000 of value.

Free Geek is a great organization. Like this guy, I knew very little about Linux or programming before volunteering there. Fast forward five years and I spend all day monkeying with Linux boxes at work. Free Geek was a perfect introduction to this wonderful world.

The cost of developing the Windows 3.1 OS in 1992 was $250 million.*

Clearly, software development was expensive and difficult.

In 1992 could an open-source OS on a shoestring budget contribute something of real value?

*adjusted for inflation: $150 million in 1992 = $250 in 2013.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1

Presumably this trade-in will be done by people who are thinking, "I'm not crazy about my iPad. I want to try something new." If Microsoft convinces these customers to try Surface versus something else (aka Android), it's a win.

The iPads will be resold to someone thinking, "I want to try a tablet, but I've never tried an iPad." Which is a different market segment.

Also, a $200 gift card != $200 cash. Some estimates say 20% of gift cards in the US are not redeemed. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_card#Redemption_rate

And even for the cards that are redeemed, Microsoft is making a profit off every $ that is spent. Plus interest on any gift card balance.

It's not far-fetched to imagine Microsoft making 30%+ profit off this, while increasing the (dismal) market share of Surface devices.

This is a good point, and the most positive interpretation of Zynga's actions.

But I doubt one more competitor in the gaming industry would have a substantial impact on Zynga's long-term health. There are so many competitors already, many of whom create smash-out hits. Zynga does not anymore. OMGPOP's existence or non-existence won't change that.

Or at least something. If I were a shareholder, I'd be irate. Maybe Zynga has some grand master plan for Draw Something and whatnot. But as of now, this looks like executives taking a massive, unnecessary loss in order to cover their own incompetence.

Something I didn't know:

"A very small part of your energy comes from breaking down your muscles — but you can avoid this by doing some resistance training, otherwise known as pumping iron. The majority of your energy comes from breaking down fat."

I thought fasting would always cause your muscles to weaken. But this makes more sense for evolution. If your muscles are being used, the body takes energy from all other sources first. The preserved muscle could make all the difference between eating and not eating.

Looks like Snow isn't being extradited. Xinhua is the official press agency of the state. Editorial or no, this didn't get posted without the state's nod.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency

This is the perfect distillation of everything that is right and hopeful and beautiful about the internet.

Ah yes, I should've included the next sentence:

Wyden repeatedly asked the NSA to estimate the number of Americans whose communications had been incidentally collected, and the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, insisted there was no way to find out. Eventually Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to try to estimate their number.

This is what I was referring to when I said the Senators didn't know how exactly it was being used. It is pretty basic knowledge about the program.

Has the NSA incidentally collected data on 300 Americans? On 3,000? On, say, 300 million?

Washington Post did revise the story. And yes, they should have issued an explicit correction. But this is still a major story:

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who had classified knowledge of the program as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were unable to speak of it when they warned in a Dec. 27, 2012, floor debate that the FISA Amendments Act had what both of them called a “back-door search loophole” for the content of innocent Americans who were swept up in a search for someone else.

“As it is written, there is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of communications, which may have been incidentally or accidentally been collected without a warrant, to deliberately search for the phone calls or e-mails of specific Americans,” Udall said.

US Senators with classified knowledge of the program don't have knowledge of what exactly it entails or how it is being used. I can forgive the Post for getting some of the details wrong.

/agreed

This is one of the most breathtaking biased pieces I've seen in a very long time. This guy really, really doesn't like Google. Or maybe just Larry Page.

Edit:

By the same writer:

In the same vein as this "story", a bizarre caption in a "story" covering Eric Schmidt's Guardian op-ed suggesting civilian drones are a bad idea:

"Google CEO Eric Schmidt knows what's best for us."

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/04/15/ban_civil...

I glanced through the first 10 pages of his other stories on Slate. They aren't all rabidly anti-Google. Though he does seem to hold the founders of Google in special disdain for some reason.

Now I'm more inclined to think this is simple link-baiting, not bias. He'll say anything for the clicks. Which seems like a common trend on Slate these days. I remember the days when Slate had some really excellent original journalism.

/nod

Using something said in the past to embarrass in the present is one thing. It is often justified, like with "mission accomplished" or the "the fundamentals of the economy are strong."

Prosecuting for something that was legally done in the past is a whole different issue.

Well, in the specific case of using native selectors (document.querySelector), I'm sold. It's supported very widely:

http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/selectors-api-testsuite/level1...

Wish I'd known about this before. I've been using $('#main').get(0) when I didn't want a jQuery object. Which is all kinds of silly.

Nice! Just installed. I love the feature list. The fact that is was easier to install and has a nicer UI than Dropbox was a nice surprise :)

Since AeroFS never stores the files, the upload speed must be determined by the upload speed of every team member who is sharing the file, yes?

At the moment, how good is AeroFS at chopping up the bandwidth to get good speeds among, say, four users with upload caps of 1 mbps? How close will it get to 4 mbps?

Do external collaborators help upload on folders they are sharing?

.

P.S. for Ubuntu Unity users: after setup, as with Dropbox, there is one tweak. You need to run the old:

  gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']"

This is different than the NEO X5 or its peers because it's bigger, slower [1], costs the same amount, and you won't actually receive it for six months or a year.

It also has a custom piece of software. Which is really what is being sold here.

[1]The NEO X5 is somewhat coy about it's clock speed. But the CPU is a Rockchip 3066. Which is "up to 1.6 GHz." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockchip#RK30xx_series

The state of Oregon at least has programs specifically targeted at you. Basically, you get unemployment money while devoting yourself full-time to building your business. You don't have to apply for outside jobs. It's the "Self Employment Assistance Program."

http://www.oregon.gov/EMPLOY/ES/SEEKER/pages/self_employment...

I've heard the guys at Urban Airship in Portland made use of the program. They just raised $25 million in funding this past February.

From a tax perspective, it's a pretty enlightened policy.

Sargun, your point was, I think, why is it that we treat software modding differently than we treat hardware modding?

The chorus of "The hardware is hardware, and we can do whatever we want!" misses the point.

It is a good point sargun. One I wish I had an answer for.

Perhaps one explanation lies in the fact that some level of risk and skill and ingenuity and research is required to actually mod hardware. So we feel like the hardware modders deserve the fruits. But at we feel like the software "modders" don't, because most of them are thoughtlessly running some riskless script devised by someone else.

I am not saying this should be our attitude. I am just saying I too have the knee-jerk reaction "the hardware is the hardware" but am far less certain when it comes to software. And I don't really understand why.

Learning how to predict what stuff will and will not reduce risk is a learned skill. One should not be too hard on oneself while learning it. (The laptop hinges sitting in a box under my bed right now--perfectly good laptop hinges!--are probably going to be one of those learning experiences.)

The point of both pg's and NYT's stuff article is that this prediction is a learned skill. Our instincts suck.

Whereas this article's point is that the opportunity cost of hanging on to stuff is different for rich and poor.

True. But the rich and poor are united in one thing: their stuff instincts suck.

Especially since things like Amazon and Ebay have changed the relationship to stuff. With no real effort, I have sold 57 things on Amazon since 1/1/2012. The fact that I can readily convert almost anything I own to cash, usually with only 15 minutes of actual work (listing and shipping), changes the game.

The cost of each market transaction used to be the big drag. 50% commission plus the work of finding an agent, transporting the stuff to your agent, and receiving payment from the agent when it finally sold. And then if you needed to repurchase that same item down the road, the work of finding and transporting the repurchased stuff.

Amazon and Ebay have reduced that whole process (cost of sale transaction + (cost of repurchase transaction * probability of repurchase)) to what, 25% of the price of any individual item? Depending on how much it costs to ship.

Sold a 2GB stick of DDR2 RAM today.

  Received:    $16.49
  Amazon fee:    2.31
  Shipping:      1.76
  Cost of transaction: 4.07
  Cost of transaction as percentage of market value of stuff: 24.7%

As one American once put it, "The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave."

In the United States, over 200 years in, it is still very much so the American experiment. Its success dependent on all sorts of radical notions about human nature.

Turbulence in brand new democracies is not evidence of failure. It is to be expected. Democracy is hard.

The term has been appropriated.

John Gruber: http://daringfireball.net/2010/06/iphone_os_too_closed

Neven Mrgan: http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/653708588/the-walled-garden

Why do we continue to accept the Apple euphemism that their ecosystem is a "walled garden"?

There are much more accurate terms to describe the Apple ecosystem.

When governments do this, prevent their users from looking at fine art that happens to involve nudity, we don't call the society a "walled garden."

Now I am as critical as anyone of frivolous public spending, but how in god's name did you get to $50,000 for this? At worst, this took one Friday afternoon of this government employee's time. Just how well do you think this guy is paid?

One afternoon of this guy's time at $50,000 would mean an annual salary of $26,100,000.

(261 workdays per year * 2 * $50,000)

In all likelihood, this was either done on this guy's own time or took like an hour....

Time well spent if you ask me :)

Or hell: pay a team of 6,170 developers $100,000 for a year to make all their apps run beautifully under WINE and/or port the source to Linux outright.

This does not sound like Buffett's style at all, from what I have read in his collective essays:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Essays-Warren-Buffett-Corporate/dp...

He is incredibly passionate about capitalism. Especially smart capitalists responding to pricing signals intelligently. And the symbiosis of good management and good investors to keep companies efficient, take smart risks, and earn consistent, healthy returns.

Making huge, counter-intuitive investments is nothing new for Buffett. (Railroads anyone?) I imagine he is doing this for the reason he usually does: he thinks he is getting a huge amount of value for a low price.

Shareholders will be very happy if Intel remains dominant at the high-margin, high-performance end. And competitive everywhere else.

AMD has been competing with Intel on price for the past two decades.

I know which of these two stocks I'd have rather owned over the past ten years:

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

The data from this article is the first I've seen that indicates Intel could dominate the high-end mobile chip market in the near future.

Yes this is trading an anecdote. It is also sharing his own experience and perspective. And his hopes and dreams.

Which differ from the journalist's take. The American Dream not so much fading as changing.

Reciting the same grim statistics about unemployment and falling wages yet again is what "isn't going to get anyone anywhere." But this sort of conversation? Quite the opposite.

Good. Now we are getting somewhere. I too would love it if OP (or I guess in this case OC) elaborated on these points.

EDIT: Ok I see we are both editing the temper down some ;) I will refrain from my other comments, which were rather unhelpful.

It makes a great deal of statements, and does take positions. Factual positions no less. For example:

"At the onset of the 2008 crisis, some people very accurately predicted the type of crisis it was (a financial panic) and recommended policies that were tested and proven to work."

Position taken. Factual assertion made. Is this true or false?

"The mainstream camp however, thought otherwise and most of the world followed their advice."

Position taken. Factual assertion made. Is this true or false?

"With 4 years of data we now know who was right and who was wrong"

Position taken. Factual assertion made. Is this true or false?

"Few high profile economists have reversed their deeply flawed views and the views of those baked by data and correct predictions are still not taken seriously. "

Position taken. Factual assertion made. Is this true or false?

"Economics is deeply corrupted by politics and the financial interests of its practitioners."

Position taken. Factual assertion made. Is this true or false?

Everything I have seen over the past few years indicates to me his assertions are true. In particular the case of Iceland and Ireland.