peterwiese

Pay cash, moron. That's how we roll in Europe.

where?

I think that whatever comes out of this campaign (i.e. certain failure), the team of app.net should continue developing this service bc the need for it will emerge one day in the future. It's just that right now, this point hasn't been reached yet. But being able to move first when the time has come is a good thing. Right now they should, instead of associating this project with failure, provide the service for free but be clear about the fact that they will start charging for it at some point in the future. Or maybe offer a free and a paid plan with the former being limited in possible API calls.

first of all, what is this extremetech site exactly? it suddenly appears everywhere and the articles i find there are usually of low journalistic quality.

this article is the best example. the author delivers no argument whatsoever to support his/her claim.

" If you imagine a smartphone-sized computer that automatically loads Firefox after boot-up, and the only apps you can run are web apps, then that’s a fairly good analogy of Firefox OS."

- no, this is not a good analogy. although the apps are indeed written in html/css/js they have access to low level apis, thus delivering the same capabilities as native apps currently do on ios/android.

"We weren’t at the meeting when Mozilla decided to make Boot 2 Gecko an actual smartphone OS, but I have a pretty good idea of how it probably went down"

- what follows is pure speculation and adds no value whatsoever to the whole undertaking of proving the article's claim.

"Today, if iOS falters, there are 10 other mobile operating systems that can step into breach"

- No, there wouldn't. Of all mobile operating systems today, there are only two that have a viable developer base, namely ios and android. No other platform has yet succeeded in attracting 3rd party developers to create useful and beautiful apps for its platform (maybe windows phone will step up it's game). So, obviously, the huge advantage of firefoxOS would be the simplicity to create apps for the thousands of talented and motivated web developers out there. How often to you encounter a headline on hacker news that reads "check out me weekend project x which i made because i was bored/wanted to learn some new technology/whatever"? This happens every day basically. Now imagine these people had the possibility to do "weekend projects" with the tools they already master but this time not for the web per sé but for a mobile platform? That is pretty damn exciting if you ask me.

"Firefox OS is a nice idea, but it’s predicated on open standards"

- but? BUT??? If anything, open standards is a good thing.

"Anyone can take Firefox OS’s additions to HTML5 and produce their own implementation [...] Google can simply implement the same specification in Chrome, Microsoft can implement it in IE10, and Apple can implement it in Safari"

- Yes, i can totally see it, Apple et all will give up their control over the app store and let people install apps from anywhere on the web with access to low level apis.

"Mozilla shouldn’t be disheartened, though"

- Certainly not. Especially after this kind of click bait crap.

i think you should add a moral support button. because right now i wouldn't pledge you $50 but i generally like the idea and i might join if this really takes off (and seems to offer me some unique value that i won't get elsewhere for free). i think showing the number of people that think like me somewhere on your page might encourage more developers to pledge something.

if it is my final paragraph that is correct, then i don't understand why you are referring to twitter et al when announcing your service. you are obviously not in competition with them at all (with the exception of bot nets as a customer base maybe).

the problem i see with this whole thing is that twitter (which is the company you are disappointed of) is a pain only to developers because they want to use their (more and more restrictive) api but not to the users. obviously they suffer too in the long run by not getting any innovative third party twitter clients or other useful stuff that's based on the twitter api. but this is (a) too far away in the future and (b) most of them won't know why that is or worse not even care.

the thing is: the reason why developers want access to the twitter api in the first place is because the users are there. you cannot just make a paradise for developers when there are no actual users feeding data into the system. one of the main reasons twitter got to where it is today is because celebrities started using it and their fans followed... you cannot reconstruct this phenomenon in the way you're trying to pull it off.

maybe, what you're trying to do is something completey else. maybe you want a service rather for machines to talk to, as a service purely for developers. than that's something completely else.

This is pathetic

Why not win7?

Don't take the t series. Lenovo basically transformed this to pure trash. The only thinkpad series that lives up to ibms quality is the x series. Truthfully I wouldn't by thinkpads anymore. The only notebook you can by nowadays is the MBA.

It's good to know that there are teachers like you!

The Strangest Man - Graham Farmelo

A biography of Paul Dirac. Very good.

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The Fabric of the Universe - David Deutsch

What picture can we paint of the universe if we take together the best theories we have about fundamental things like time, life, virtual reality, cosmology etc. Easily the best book i've read in recent years. Consider that Deutsch is a very distinguished scientist in the field of quantum cryptography/computing. He is really good at explaining things in terms that non-physicists and experts alike can learn a lot!

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Roadside Picnic - Strugatzky

Soviet Science Fiction book about the first and only visit of earth by aliens. The approach is very unusual since there is never any direct contact between humans and the extra terrestrial intelligence. The book is more like a study of human society and how it could develop if suddenly there was some extremely advanced technology available to us which we are too primitive to understand/control.

in my opinion soundcloud is one of the hottest most amazing startups out there. they reached a critical mass of important artists already a while ago. the fact that they're located in the epicenter of electronic music is just the icing on the cake. recently i had a complete harddrive failure and lost 500gig of music. since i couldn't access my backup for 2 months i was limited to streaming music. after a short while i realized that i needed nothing else than soundcloud to completely satisfy my daily need for good music.

the update seems to bring soundcloud closer to twitter's model of 'social'. i think this is a perfect fit for the site. i sorely miss an equivalent to twitter's lists feature, however. further more i'd like to create playlists in the browser and not just in the macstore app.

/edit: about the 'list' feature i mentioned: it'd be awesome to create lists of artists within which i'd be able to switch between recently liked tracks of these artists (with full waveform-player display) and recently self-released tracks.

this article is embarrassing in every way shape and form.

no one has no wide screen

the tech-blogs' perception of google is so far off reality. google isn't loosing. google just entered a new market (social) which has a huge barrier of entry, thus they're fighting to get a foot in this door. within their traditional domain (search/advertising) they're unrivaled. all the "google is doomed" talk is based on the potential entry of facebook into the search market. however, this hasn't happened yet and if or whenever it should we'll see how that goes. until then, i'd like to not read the same shit over and over every day on hackernews.

i don't really get this.

we're not only in an age of consumer-orientated devices, which is great, but also in an age of such wealth and technological progress, that we have specialized machines serving different, specialized purposes.

in which way could the ipad be a tinkerer device more than it is now? well, it could have an accessible *nix core with the ability run a package manager like apt and in general the ability to modify the core experience of the device. although it'd be great to have that, there wouldn't be that much use to it. everything in and on this device is highly optimized for the one experience every buyer comes to appreciate. any core modifications would probably deteriorate this experience rather than improve on it. but whatever i'm saying here doesn't actually matter, since every enthusiast has been able to do exactly that, get root access to any iOS device, since the first iphone. of course, in order to properly modify the devices behaviour, a lot of back-engineering is needed. but hey, that's what tinkering is all about, isn't it?

i'm digressing... my actual point here is: specialized devices for specialized purposes. a fully capable linux machine with the most open os available today and the benefit of a prospering eco-system costs you a mere 35 bucks or even less. this is any tinkerer's dream and it's real and accessable to anyone. what again are we whining about here?

the ipad/iphone are produced within a highly competitive market. that they're locked up is, objectively, a matter of protection of investments. also, because they can.

to sum it up, the ipad isn't a tinkerer device because

1) it doesn't even have a keyboard. how would you tinker with it?

2) actually you can root the device and modify the underlying core processes

3) going beyond this would need official documentation by apple of it's secret apis etc., which isn't economically feasable in this highly competitive market. i mean samsung copies whatever the fuck is coming out of cupertino, atm at least.

4) it doesn't need to be more than a consumption device, because for the tinkerers there exists the most vivid environment imaginable: cheap hardware, a free, open, up-to-date os and a brimming eco-system of developers and software.

the main problem i have with your concept is that it's not a solution but merely a workaround. what you're doing is basically hijacking different communication service providers like facebook and twitter to exchange encrypted content. this means that your service depends on the mercy of these providers, since they could easily ban the urls/ips your service posts instead of the original text. so, if this should ever become large scale, facebook & co would just break your service because they have no interest in this kind of usage of their platform.

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you didn't keep this apolitical at all. i only talked about an arab spring because you did so in your video. and i agree that your platform doesn't add any value for this kind use case, except the ease of use maybe, which i think isn't really a concern if you're operating in the political underground.

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if you don't want facebook to own your content and personal information, don't give it to them in the first place. this is obviously easer said than done. but your service creates just another dependency while solving nothing.

the video lacks the serious implications this will have for any kind of service relying on open access to content in the wild. whereas privacy issues are a problem for some services, for others they're not. if privly were to be used world wide, there would be no google. they could talk about how they want to add api access for search engines for content that is supposed to be public (but still under the users' control). this is either an idea that wasn't thought through properly (in case this is supposed to be used as a standard way to publish any kind of content) or this is merely a tool for the relatively rare use case of arab springs, where information needs to be spread on a global platform (twitter) but not be legible by people who aren't whitelisted.

anyway, in it's current form it breaks the web as we depend on it. iranian protesters can already exchange pre-encrypted messages, so it seems unlikely that this is their intended use case. also, they don't sell it in this way.