smartkids

Making your Mom deal with permissions? Yikes.

I think reasoning, in addition to basic instructions, is important even though some people might not care about it. By leaving it out you deny those who do care an opportunity to learn.

And to me it just seems more respectable when someone asks you to do something and tells you why you are doing it then if they just give you bare instructions. (That said, the bare instructions should be able tostand on their own. They had better work, every time.)

Moreover, providing reasoning forces you to demonstrate you know the subject matter well enough to be able to explain it.

and you're not answering my questions.

what are we debating? i'm happy to debate.

here's my guess: we're debating whether mdonahue's statement "people like you are not a large market, unfortunately" is true.

however as i pointed out, we haven't agreed on what "people like me" means. we cannot debate this statement until we have agreed on a definition for that. then we have to consider what is meant by a "large market". what is a "large market"? then we have to decide whether this what is assrted in his statement, if true, is "unfortunate" or not. or maybe we can skip that since it seems like just a mdonahue opinion.

is this explanation still too vague for you? i'm not sure how much more specific i can get.

Thank you. I knew there must be a reasonable explanation.

Intelligence insulted. Next.

I have a MicroSDCard inside a SDCard adpater sitting flush in my smaller-than-iPad netbook. I got it for "free" with purchase of a cell phone, before the iPhone existed. I guess I need to get a MacBook to reproduce this unsightly protruding SDCard problem so I can then get a "niftyminidrive" to solve it? According to the title, it's a"hack". Would that make me a "hacker"?

This is almost as good as Microsoft's "ReadyBoost". Otherwise known as a USB slot.

It's a $5 USB stick used as a swap file. No, it's a "Windows Memory Expander". And the price is $49.95. Oh.

This HN title reminds me of the type of headline The Onion used to be famous for.

This is a fascinating story. The most interesting stories never seem to reach the HN frontpage.

Solution: Let these interface gimmicks be the stuff of tech conventions and demos, and never part of any mass-produced product.

But maybe some marketing folks, seeing the success of Apple, have reasoned that these gimmicks can sell products in the short-term, at least until consumers discover the problems with them.

At the end of this era of tapping and rubbing little screens with our fat, dirty fingers, we may be reminded why we had tactile interfaces to begin with. What ever happened to the PDA stylus?

re: his appeal to "interested corporations"

Does he need money? One would think he probably has a pretty good day job already. But if he really needed it in order to continue writing software, I would bet many people would be willing to contribute to a "Bellard Writing Fund". His contributions to open source are really in a class by themselves.

This is nothing compared to the number of py spent writing crapware. Think of how much effort has been spent writing lousy software. It is enormous. (But then most consumers of software don't know any better, so from a sales perspective, maybe writing crapware makes perfect sense.)

IMHO, these guys are heros merely for undertaking the task, let alone completing it.

If Bluetooth isn't working for some reason, then cables would not work either, so it makes sense to remove the option to use them.

Bluetooth always works flawlessly, unlike cables.

It's also proprietary and far more secure than cables.

It's a good thing that Apple iPad can't use cables.

In fact any device that is smaller than iPad and can accept both cables _and_ Bluetooth is less useful and just plain bad.

"this claim"

what claim? can you be specific?

the original comment referred to a market for "people like [me]" being "not large". my response was that i have not seen any evidence to support that sort of claim. but i'm not even sure i know what he meant by "people like [me]". i had to assume i knew. the problem with assumptions is they can be wrong.

and i'm not sure understand the reference to "techy people". i never mentioned such a group. i mentioned "people like the [commenter's] mom". presumably (another assumption), she's not a "techy person", whatever that is. but maybe i'm not a "techy person" either. what is the definition of "techy person" anyway? would the definition differ based on the person defining it? maybe i see no distinction between "techy" and "not techy". maybe i only see differences in how much a given person understands about what computers can do, and how to make computers do those things.

It's possible that innovation, specifically scientific progress that leads to innovation, actually relies on scientists sharing stuff with collaborators that patent lawyers would not want them to share. The patent lawyers might often be "the last to know". It's possible that many scientists often put their own scientific goals, which stand to enrich the scientific community as a whole, before the business goals of the employers they work for. Something tells me that Apple's patent lawyers do not have this problem with Apple engineers.

Not that I consider software developers to be scientists but I wonder if there are any Apple engineers contributing to open source projects or even just publishing the occasional research paper.

Doesn't Apple have rules that keep all their employees from talking to anyone outside of Apple under threat of immediate termination?

No FDA for software. You can say that again. There's also no Medicaid, Medicare or health insurance that pays for it.

no empirical evidence to support the original statement he made: "the market for people like [me] is not very large"

for one, what does "people like me" mean? people who can make use of non-apple hardware? what sort of uses? i don't know what he meant. i could take a guess. but then i would be making an _assumption_. and i might be dead wrong.

and that's what you did in your comment. you made some assumptions. what were they?

i already told you one: you assumed the os a "mom-type" would run would be various linux distros. what if it's not linux?

anecdotal evidence indeed. that's precisely the point. there is no empirical evidence behind the vast majority of comments like these. conclusions without evidence or any indication of the methods used to arrive at them.

linux? are you kidding? this is exactly what i was referring to: assumptions. how did you conclude by booting an os i meant linux?

a true apple fanboy. thanks for sharing.

They owned the network. And they wanted to control devices that could be used on it. (There may have once been legitimate reasons for this.)

Apple wants to control your devices. How you use them after your purchase. The network you use to obtain content. And even the content you download: you don't own it, they license it to you. There have never been any legtimate reasons for all this and there never will be.

I understand the comment. Of course the thought has crossed my mind. But I'm not so sure there's any evidence to support it.

I actually test some of my ideas with people like your mother, and surprisingly (why should I be surprised?) they have little trouble catching on.

What's really amusing is that these things that I have them doing are things that many nerds cannot themsleves do. I've got them using systems and techniques that many nerds won't touch because they think it's too "hard core". It's hilarious.

There are lots and lots of unfounded assumptions about what users can and cannot do.

There are facts, supported by evidence. And then there are assumptions. One requires a bit of work. The other is effortless: you just hit "Submit".

The iPaq was/is a fantastic device. You could attach peripherals. Try doing that with an iPad. I could put an entire OS on a CF Card and assuming I could boot from the card, the expanded functionality is limited only by the hardware specs. They are durable. I've seen consumer electronics businesses still using them to track inventory.

I wish HP would revive the iPaq.

My only imagined use for an iPad is as a portable display. I want the Retina quality, but I have a more powerful hardware to attach and I need a real keyboard. There's nothing the iPad can do that my open, unlocked hardware cannot do.

I believe it was even possible to attach a real keyboard to an iPaq. That's the kind of flexibility I want. I can get data into and out of the device in any number of ways, without hassle.

Yes, but perhaps _making things easy to use_ and _sexy hardware design_ might have something to do with their success?

The problem with the research labs at those example companies you cited is that those businesses have little incentive to introduce innovation that would compete with "yesterday's ideas" that are driving their profits.

This is why Bell Labs was so unique. They could basically do whatever they wanted (you might try to make the same claim with your example companies, perhaps) _but_ ... they also managed to release these ideas into the market. And not always to the satisfaction of AT&T. People once had to pay for UNIX. Not anymore.

Xerox PARC is another well-known case where people were "set free" to work on whatever they wanted. But their ideas did not manage to trickle out to the market very well. Instead, Microsoft got one of their key people, Excel was born and the rest is history.

Apple is _not_ an idea factory. If someone called them two-timing thieves and told us to watch our backs, I would be inclined to take it seriously. (The fact that Apple is not the idea factory is why the lawsuits are so offensive to anyone who knows anything about the history of computers. If these sort of broad patents should go to anyone, it should be people like the ones who worked at Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. But maybe patents were not their priority. Maybe they were more interested in research, or playing computer games, than money. [How many UNIX patents? 1?] Go figure.)

But, Apple is a design house. An within IT, they do not have lots of competition in that area: e.g. design of hardware casings. In addition they go to great lengths to make the great ideas (namely the flexibility and stability of UNIX-like systems) easy to use. Another area that is lacking in IT: making the good stuff (like UNIX) easy to use.

Unfortunately Apple feels the need to abuse the patent system to stay on top. It makes me think if they didn't they might be in for a big fall. Maybe they are surprised at their own success? And nervous about losing the top spot?

Incidentally you could argue IBM started all this software patent nonsense. Not sure many programmers would agree with you, but the number of filings and issued patents by IBM, most of them before Microsoft even had a patent department, tells the story quite clearly.

You are not going to see much innovation released from "research labs" at the likes of Microsoft or those other companies. They will not keep their patent department in the dark. Those guys want to keep their jobs, not take risks. "Microsoft Research" or "Google Labs" are not Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. It's a wonder that something like Kinect was even made into a product. And you could see how nervous they were about it.

Today, the "labs" and the idea factory is the world wild web.

That's where the risks are taken.

"Wow, this just what we've been looking for! Where have you guys been all these years?"

The sad thing is it's not what we think that matters. If clients fall for the buzzspeak, it's irrelevant if that what they're paying for, believing it's "new" and "different", already exists.

Just based on the Linus quotes, I think he's right.

The kernel did what it was supposed to do back in 1991.

What is the "desktop" supposed to do?

There will never be unanimous agreement on that - every user will have different needs and preferences - and so desktop developers live in constant denial, believing they are the only ones whose preferences are relevant - i.e. they know what's best for users - and blaming others for their own failings.

I'm not a Linux fan, but I give Torvalds' +1 for his response (and knowing the value of "not breaking stuff").

Toughbook is hardware not software. Get an old Thinkpad. It's durable.

I take the opposite view. I like durable software. And that's how I build my systems. If they get trashed, they can be restored in minutes. I'd rather spend my effort preparing simple durable systems that can be restored easily than building complex, fragile systems that would be difficult to reconstruct if something goes wrong. I've heard that sometimes things can go wrong.

Yes. This is why I defined "incompetence" quite carefully.

Finding bugs in Knuth's or NASA's code might be beyond "a reasonably skilled hacker". To find bugs in that code you would likely have to be "highly skilled", above average.

Everyone makes mistakes. Even professionals who are licensed. The idea is to minimise them to achieve a reasonable, expected level of "correctness". Competent does not mean "perfect". It means no stupid mistakes.

In my biased opinion, there's a high tolerance for stupid mistakes in software.

I hate writing what I just wrote because I know it might offend some people. I'm OK with the "incompetence" (I'm sure I qualify myself), but it's the fact that many of these programmers think they know what they're doing that bugs me. And they are writing software that will be used by other people.

They don't want to admit their mistakes or that someone else might understand things they don't. They actually think they are being smart when they are really being stupid.

Certainly not looking for "votes" with this one. Although I did get an upvote immediately, then a downvote from, who would have guessed, a closed source developer.

I'm not a fan of StackOverflow. There is a lot of stupidity and herd mentality there. It's not where I would look for "competent programmers". Like finding a needle in a haystack.

It's interesting if you think about how easy is is to get food. The drives that cause us to eat probably evolved in the long period of human evolution where we had to work really hard, like every other animal, to find food. Hunger might cause stress, and rightly so. The search for food, for any animal, is always a top priority. But it's so ridiculously easy for people to feed themselves now. The search for food, driven by hunger, is "trivial". You could even eat just for the fun of eating. It's fun. It's also not very healthy. But how many fun things are also healthy? I digress.

Maybe someone in the UK can comment on what it was like during WWII when there was a severe shortage of food. I have heard some say people were actually quite healthy because they were not eating "too much" as it is so easy to do under normal conditions. I don't know. Maybe some from the UK can comment.

In sum, given that we are still animals with animal drives like hunger, finding food and eating is way too easy. Maybe our evolution has not caught up.

13. Most programmers think they know what they're doing but actually are "incompetent". (There are Usenet posts going back to 80's documenting this fact.) How am I defining "incompetent"? In my definition it means writing software that any reasonably skilled hacker can cause to "malfunction", i.e. not perform as expected by the programmer, which depending on the program may or may not present a security risk. The number of "competent" programmers i.e. those whose programs are immune to the acts of reasonably skilled hackers, is very small. They are a rare commodity. In sum, there's lots of reasonably skilled hackers and very few competent pogrammers. There is no licensing body for programmers. Anyone can call themselves a "professional programmer".

Note: If a programmer only writes programs for her own use, "competency", as defined above, is all but irrelevent. Whatever works.

Controversial, but true.

Sounds more like energy depletion that "ego depletion".

The more stress the person is undergoing the more energy is drained. Isn't this obvious? I thought Ariely was known for brilliant insights on human behaviour. Maybe he's become a dieting guru? That's where the money is?

People overeat when they're stressed. Everyone knows that. But why? I've sometimes thought it's because overeating is like an opiate. Think about how you feel after a big meal. The blood rushes to your stomach, you might even feel sleepy and it's much more difficult to "get stressed" than it is on an empty stomach.

Are domain names overrated?

If I understand the reasoning correctly, someone who really wanted to access whatever is at "dajaz1.com" would not be willing to type 108.162.192.76. It is a non-starter.

For example, if an announcement was posted on the web that some great music was at 108.162.192.76, giving users a link that is an IP address would not be sufficient to allow people to access the site? While, on the contrary, if it was posted on the web that some great music was at "dajaz1.com" then that would be different. How? Why? Facts, not speculation.

I know there are theories about how people evaluate domain names in search results. But how about IP addresses? And what if the context is not a SERP?

"dajaz1" as a string really tells me nothing. I could make some assumptions based on the string if it was somehow descriptive, but then anyone could be controlling that domain name. It might be a copyright infringer, it might be DHS, it could be anyone. Even if the string was "music.com". Again, facts not just assumptions.

And if I'm diligent and look up the whois record and it's privacy protected, then what?

The truth is, I could probably get a better idea of who is running the site just by the IP address and using rDNS and IP registry lookups.

The point I want to make is that "domain names", for sites that have decent content, might be overrated. The key word is "content".

If the content is good enough for people to _keep coming back_ to the site (i.e. the site is not just looking to fool people once with the lure of false content based on a descriptive domain name), then users will do what they have to do to access the content. Whether it's clicking on a link that is an IP address, bookmarking it, or even writing it down. Writing down a 4-12 digit number!? Who would do such a crazy labour-intensive thing? A user who wants decent content, that's who.

If this use of IP's becomes infeasible because the site wants to play constant musical chairs with IP addresses without giving its users advance notice (this is relatively rare in my experiments but not unheard of), then it's probably a good thing. Because users will be alerted that the site is jumping from IP to IP. There may be legitmate reasons for it but it's also what copyright infringers and other criminals typically do.

Teach her to turn off Javascript. Voila. No more ads. (Or at least a drastically reduced number of them.)

Just as Google is entitled to show ads, the user is entitled to disable Javascript.

It's a fair trade.

And as for inserting the ads into the video, as Zach says, she'll just figure out how to skip them.