JohnnyFlash

So the FSF award is a tea towel? Grreeaattt...

It is nice that Matz was acknowledged for his work but I feel that the FSF is increasingly out of touch. Instead of campaigning against closed source applications I think they would be far more effective providing support and direction to open source projects.

The difference between open source and closed source commercial software is often polish and general direction. Helping take open source projects to the next level and showcasing them would be far more effective than bemoaning Windows and DRM.

Take MS Office. Libre Office can do pretty much everything everything MS Office can do and it doesn't cost anything to install. The FSF should be asking questions about why Libre Office hasn't made a bigger dent in the Office suite market and then help solve any issues which are slowing uptake.

It sounds great. My partner's family has a history of cancer so she doesn't want to go on any kind chemical birth control. Nor is she keen on something like the coil.

I have always wondered why there are so few contraceptive options for men. I know a lot of guys who have had the kids they want and contraception is a hassle. Something like this for couples which is inject once and forget for a decade sounds ideal.

This is why I do not particularly like last.fm.

I play a couple of metalcore band's and soon enough the only recommendations I get are 2 a penny metalcore bands. Yes, these bands are similar to what I want to listen to but how about some variance?

What Mayer is talking about sounds dangerous. I have a habit of looking for pizza places so this is what Google would prioritise.. I do not want this. It seems like it will skew search results.

I want Google to answer my questions and help guide me into asking the right questions to get the answers I am looking for. Beyond that.. i'm good.. I don't need anything else.

Sometimes I feel Google forgets its search is just that... search. An application to find things. It doesn't need to be anything more.

So you don't agree with this decision by Sony? Basically you would be happy if Sony were complicit in allowing vulnerabilities to exist and be exploited on their platform.

>> because it opens up closed hardware (which is always a Good Thing)

If you want open hardware buy something that supports it. Don't punish a commercial company that just wants to do their own thing.

Hasn't Apple been doing this for years? If an App is found to have an exploit it is taken down. I would assume that these titles would go back into the Vita store when the issue is patched.

It is in Sony's interest's to keep pirated content off of their devices. If an exploit can let you run doom, I am sure it could let you run applications which circumvent copyright protection. I wish Sony the best of luck.

So the message is. Lets all switch to LibreOffice!

Seems like nonsense to me. If you are running Windows, which most people are, you are almost certainly going to have Word / Wordpad etc.

A far better solution to .doc attachments is to ask if your content really needs to be in an attachment. A lot of the time it simply doesn't.

To be honest though this isn't really a problem is it? When Microsoft first brought out their .docx format it seemed like there was a lag before other free applications could read the files. I found that a problem.

Today, everyone has an application to open a .doc file. A lot of people are using gmail. I just click the preview button. I assume that Windows Live Mail has something like this which makes use of Office365 functionality (might be wrong on this). It really is a non-issue.

Did Google even defend against this in the Japanese court? I don't understand how this could get by if they did.

The fact is that names are not unique. Would he be complaining if his namesake was a renowned scientist / businessman / whatever?

Just because someone with his name is linked to crime does not mean that he is. It simply means that someone with a similar or same name is known for their criminality. I don't have what I would term as a popular name but hundreds of people share it. I would imagine in countries with far denser populations that meeting someone with the same name would be fairly common.

I would also like to see an employer who received a CV. Went to Google and typed in half a name and without even searching discarded the CV because auto-complete had shown the name along with a buzz word like crime.

I don't get Facebook. I have a hundred or so 'friends' on Facebook. I keep in contact with about 10 of them.. of those ten I phone or speak to them in person. I never contact them on Facebook.

The other 90% of friends are people I have lost contact with / old school friends. Neither of which interest me in the slightest.

Facebook status updates from friends and non-friends for the most part are worthless. "Today I am going to London", "I just saw an albino cat [photo of cat]" etc. I needed to know / see that!

The only thing Facebook succeeds at is managing an event. Everyone is on Facebook, invites are easy, its easy to keep track of who is coming. Everything else is fluff.

One of my new years resolution's was to become a finisher. Last year I started a number of projects, I wrote a lot of code. I learned a lot. Nothing saw the light of day.

This year had to be different. I needed something to show for my time. I became a finisher.

To make this change I did 3 things:

1) Reduce the scope on any new product ideas. Simple is best. I will only allow myself a month to work on something. If I am working longer than that and have nothing I can publicly show then the scope has probably buried me and nothing will ever be released.

2) Say Fk it and quietly release the project. Quietly because it isn't 100% finished. There are little problems here and there. I would like to spend weeks tweaking a feature but if I do it without releasing anything I will get bored and start a new idea. Once released I can iterate, improve and add functionality.

3) Tell everyone what I working on as I am doing it. This means I need something to show at the end of it or I will look silly. I then tell people in order of technical expertise about its release. Tech savvy people understand the concept of a beta and even an alpha. Others... not so much.

So far its working. I have already released something this year. Its still a bit iffy but it is improving each week. I am becoming a finisher.

There are two important things raised by this article but completely missed.

Firstly, what dcurtis made is not as ground breaking as the article makes out. It looks very promising but this trend towards simplification is happening everywhere. On the mac you have iA Writer for writing things. If you look at productivity apps (names escape me), the trend is to strip things down only to what is required to be most productive. Same things are happening in bug tracking and message boards.

dcurtis has come up with something that is really neat but saying "it looks like a better Tumblr" after seeing two screenshots seems a bit premature. There was also mention of "competing with Tumblr".. its a closed beta with 6 users.. the hype machine needs to calm down.

The second point is everything dcurtis has been working on being completely ripped off in a couple of hours is almost completely ignored. We not talking about someone being inspired by the idea. Nor are we talking about duplication of functionality. Instead someone cloning the concept, functionality AND design of both the front and back end!

For the developer to then open source it on github should be story. Now anyone else can rip off dcurtis' site. Its not acceptable. There is nothing wrong with being inspired or copying functionality from another website. However, cloning both and front and backend then open sourcing it to encourage others to participate... not cool. This should be the story. Any hype is premature.