adamsmith

I agree that the camera is rotating. I guess the follow up question would be: why isn't the Earth rotating as well about the same axis?

Can anyone explain why the star trails make concentric circles? What's at the middle of the circles?

I understand why you might see concentric circles in time elapsed photos from the North or South Poles on Earth, but why from space?

One more: the taxi fleet model (fewer cars) makes it easier to replace cars with newer models, which tend to include more environmentally friendly technology.

All good points!

I should have mentioned this more explicitly but you could take the buying-raw-storage model and use it to do anything S3 does, I think. Eg you could have three independent whole copies, or one whole copy and 1.5 copies distributed widely.

The only thing I can think of that Amazon could do that you couldn't do, if the raw storage providers are untrusted, is serve the data with no addition hops, since the data would be encrypted.

RE Least Authority, awesome!, thanks for the link!

This is a really interesting question.

At scale, this could be managed, I think, through a combination of (a) shipping hard drives around, (b) caching, and (c) peering between storage providers. For example, shipping hard drives around would be expedient if you wanted to switch out a raw storage provider. The optimal strategy also depends on the access patterns and latency requirements.

It seems solvable, but not trivial.

That's right. The main point is that these services still benefit from the falling cost of storage.

> This article is basically advocating RAID 5 across many storage providers.

That is correct. And to be more precise, I'm advocating RAID 5 across storage providers as a service, so people who just want to store data don't have to manage anything.

Thanks for the comment. I just edited the post to try to make it clearer.

I'm proposing that anyone could start a company, Foo Inc, who would sell redundant storage and compete with S3. Instead of operating your own hard drives, you rent hard drives connected to the Internet from a variety of providers. Of course your customer would know that you were doing this, and advanced customers could even choose their own blend of raw storage providers to optimize for different things.

Towards the end of the post I mention briefly that instead of a startup (Foo Inc), this ecosystem could be set up in a decentralized way (think Bitcoin v.s. central banking), though that is far less realistic.

The way the system is set up makes it a tax on global efficiency. All of these resources (crazy smart people, money, equipment) are needlessly wasted on getting lower latency when really it adds no systematic value.

Instead, just as the system disallows fractional penny bids, it could discretize order times to the nearest e.g. 5 seconds. Boom. Suddenly you have more MIT/etc grads solving better problems for the world.

Yes. For another account, see David Rusenko's blog post about GoDaddy and Weebly: http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2011/12/godaddy-a-glimpse-of-...

Their .com doesn't seem to have the same ugly ICE/government/FBI logo landing page, so that seems to also implicate GoDaddy.

If that's the case they could get their services up again by just switching registrars and DNS servers. (?)

Yup it was the text adventure game, and yes I read the whole book. I remember finding the last parts to be the most amazing; I think they were about register machines.

The relationship between boredom and grit, or maybe an intermediate variable like finding what you love, is an interesting one to ponder.

Here were the terms of the compromise:

* that you read the textbook, and take the quizzes and final exam in the course;

* that you can skip the online problem sets and projects, except for project 3 (which will deal with Object Oriented programming);

* that you engage in some independent project. One possibility is for you to read "Code" by Lessig and work to design/implement a system informed by that perspective. A good example might be a Scheme implementation of an information/document management system -- perhaps modeled on DSpace -- with (a) encryption/DRM in a strong "IP owner" centric fashion, or (b) with a user-centric/fair-use vision. (N.B. this was 2003.)

(The independent project ended up being a failure.)

You're totally right about the great content in 6.001. SICP was amazingly meaty.

This sounds awesome! It reminds me of Winamp plugins from back in the day -- only hopefully with all of the advantages of modern technologies.

This isn't really the same thing. Those things (at least after my brief googling) are for building apps. This is an attempt at packing everything else -- mostly an installer, build system, and auto updates -- but for .NET apps rather than python apps.

(If there's such a set of things for python desktop apps, including a byte code obfuscator ideally, or someone builds it, that'd be awesome and I'd love to know about it!)

Wow that's really cool! I wasn't sure you could register COM classes from ClickOnce.

So yes it seems like ClickOnce is great as long as you don't need per machine installs or special powers to eg upgrade the user's .NET version, etc etc.

How have you found the .application installer? (vs exe)

Edit to add: I was surprised when MS introduced .msi installers! Someone at MSFT is cranking out the installer systems.)

Shared components -- at Xobni in the early days we used a library called Redemption that other addins often used. My latest project includes VirtualBox, which uses COM components that are going to have ID's in common with any other use of VirtualBox. (In the VirtualBox case we could change all of the ID's are recompile, but I'm still hoping to avoid doing that.)

Yeah -- the particular application that this is derived from needed pretty wide compatibility out of the box, so the projects are targeted to .NET 2.0.

But this is also helpful for DesktopBootstrap. If someone wants to retarget to a higher .NET version it's very easy to do. There's only one winform in there (the tray icon)!

Sure! There's not a lot to look at! Here are two screenshots:

DbgView of an update happening: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3/DesktopBootstrap_Updating.png

Default tray icon menu (with custom cloud icon): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3/DesktopBootstrap_TrayIcon.png

(The idea is that you can blast away the tray icon if you don't want or need it, and either way you add your own UI and application logic on top!)

I've never used ClickOnce, so maybe someone with more direct experience can chime in!

My current project, and my last project (Xobni) both worked with COM components that could not use Reg-free COM for various reasons. Thus, if another app registers the same COM component, and then the user uninstalled that app, we needed to be able to re-register that COM component, which required SYSTEM level privileges in order to avoid a UAC elevation prompt.

Services can also be useful if you want to be able to run code when a user is not logged in, or if you want installs to be system-wide.

For example, in DesktopBootstrap, installs are for "all users," but if one user disables auto updates or starting up with Windows, it actually asks the service to disable those things for all users. You need a service running as SYSTEM to be able to pull that off, again unless you ask the user to elevate you.

Finally, I'm curious about ClickOnce's browser-powered install. I'm not saying it doesn't work -- it might even increase conversion rates -- I'm just curious. I'd love to learn more about what happens with users who are using a non-ClickOnce-compatible browser, and/or who don't have the .NET framework installed yet.

I wonder if they'll use non-TCP connections on 3G. That'd be cool. (http://blog.davidsingleton.org/mobiletcp)

IANAL, but as far as I understand it, any given patent holder has exclusive rights to use its invention however it sees fit, including licensing the patent (e.g. patent trolls) or maintaining a monopoly.

Some patent pools (e.g. MPEG LA) are set up so anyone can license the patents covered under either FRAND or RAND requirements, e.g. fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory, but participation in patent pools is entirely voluntary. In the case of H264 everyone agreed to these terms to boost adoption and the ultimate value of their patents.

* The practicum is launching your first product.

* The Tuesday dinners are the weekly lectures.

* The coursework is Hacker News.

* Your fraternity brothers are the YC alums

* And unlike contributions to your university’s general fund – when you invest in Y Combinator you get a return.

Wow!

Just like starcraft SCVs!

You can also use acoustic ranging, since sound travels at about 1 foot per millisecond. We did this with ultrasound at MIT -- http://nms.csail.mit.edu/papers/index.php?detail=9

You can get about 1cm of ranging error (median), and say 10cm of positioning error.

Not to mention 0% short and long term capital gains. That's another 10% over California, and it's where it counts.

Go talk to Dropbox, and ask them if they give below market salaries, options that will likely never pay off, and an expectation that you work 80 hours a week.

But you're right that that's the danger of joining a startup coming out of college -- you have no idea which ones are great and which ones are not.

If some intermediating third party vetted the startups for the students we wouldn't have that problem.

Such an idea has worked in all kinds of problem domains, but in startups founded by college grads YC is the standard. Having the PG stamp of approval is so valuable.

Wow, what a great find!! Sadly I don't think this will work, though I would love to be proven wrong.

A brand new, two person startup in my (limited) experience isn't able to give an intern the support they need.

At Xobni we had a one-month intern from MIT when it was just Matt and I. I still regret that we weren't able to give him the full startup experience. He wouldn't be around long so he couldn't work on anything core, which meant that his work didn't really get much support from me. And he was burning the midnight oil side by side with us, with no definite long term stake in the company.

But who knows. Anyone been through the HackStars program and able to share their feedback?

I also imagined better pay -- like a $90k equivalent salary.

> Sure there will still be some secrets, but ideally they'll be used for important things rather than political propaganda or manipulating allies.

I agree. That's definitely a plus of these releases. (Though I think on the whole they are still net negative.)

Now to some of the things I personally disagree with..

> The forces that lead to large scale geopolitical action are not impacted by the small gravitational pull of these leaks.

I can disagree with this, in at least one instance, using the data from wikileaks. From the NYT article: "[The cables] reveal that Colonel Qaddafi was so upset by his reception in New York that he balked at carrying out a promise to return dangerous enriched uranium to Russia."

It's kind of a funny example, but I think the implications are more broad than embarrassment or showing government failures.

As daniel_levine said, "The expectation of privacy in diplomacy can be an extremely powerful tool in creating honest and helpful dialogue."

To use a metaphor, imagine trying to run a big company wherein everything the CEO hears (!) or says is published to the world. Sure, it'd be harder to keep secrets, but it would also be harder to get anything done.