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jsonscripteron How to Compete Against Open Source Competition

I’ve used mainstream image editors like Photoshop, Paint.NET and Gimp; some of my best friends are mainstream image editors. And when I saw Gimp I almost went blind. Children were weeping; fruit was bruising. The UI could kill small animals.

Really? Did you really have to say it that way? I use the Gimp every day, and it's quite good in my opinion. It does what I tell it to, and not what I "mean". Photoshop does what you "mean", as defined by Adobe. As an example why that's wrong, something like "I'll interpolate this scaled bitmap linearly, thanks" is frequently the wrong solution, but happens anyway when you scale a section of an image.

Now I know this article isn't about the Gimp, but when someone wants to spark a flamewar by claiming the user interface to the Gimp causes him "to go blind", it really discredits his other claims nearly instantly.

jsonscripteron Ask HN: Why don't operating systems gzip their startup files?

Why not all of the start-up files though? There are loads of other things (such as scripts) that are not compressed...

jsonscripteron Ask HN: Do you actively contribute to open source projects?

I work on GPLd code at work, but it is not distributed, so that doesn't really count.

jsonscripteron Propose HN: Give me an Idea for a Startup

How about this? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602606

Create an online AJAX IDE for developing flash using the haXe language. It would be compiled and put together on the server, but the client would be open source and free as a desktop app too, by the magic of haXe. Services could include webhosting and automatic upload of your app, as well as stock flash animation media and sounds.

jsonscripteron Book'em, Github.

I think some employees either can't be bothered or don't understand it.

jsonscripteron How to Back Up Gmail In Linux

What are the specific advantages?

jsonscripteron Canonical Will Own Your Search: New mandatory Ubuntu plugin takes over Firefox

You can't submit a bug without a specific problem. A title like "Multisearch breaks user trust" wouldn't fly.

jsonscripteron New open office UI prototype

What I love about your comment is that your idea is already possible with today's Open Office. Just no one takes advantage of it.

jsonscripteron Don't Stop Supporting IE6

In fact, I believe we should support telnetters too. Hell, we should all have a help desk set up so that people that don't have a computer can call us up and interact with our web apps. Any good designer should be able to work within those constraints and still kick ass.

jsonscripteron The Tyranny of Process Worship Within IT

I think we need to create an approval process for processes so that we can slow down the creation of processes.

jsonscripteron The Ultimate Movie Paradox ? RedBox vs Downloads

Sounds to me like the movie distributors should cut the middle man the way Fox cut out the middle man with Hulu.

jsonscripteron How I (almost) use my computer without a mouse

In bash, just press ctrl+c to get back to the bottom. Also, 'cd -' to get back and forth between your current directory and last directory is great for the edit/execute cycle.

jsonscripteron IP geolocation is a bad way to select a UI language

Or assume a default language and then have a clear option to change to something else. That's the same number of clicks in the worst case, but less in the average case.

If you use the user agent string in combination with geo-location (and maybe a few other factors such as Facebook API or twitter API heuristics), you could lower the number of wrong languages using a sort of learning algorithm too.

jsonscripteron On PHP 5.3's Namespace Backslash Backlash: The PHP Internals Team was Right?

After using namespaces in 5.3 I'm more than sold, I'm in lust

Woah now, it's just a little syntax... relax a little. There's a whole world of programming languages out there with more variations on syntax than you can dream of. Then again, maybe I don't see what the big deal is?

jsonscripteron GNU Emacs 23.1 has been released

It is for me. I think it has something to do with the baud rate of the virtual terminal...?

jsonscripteron SSH login without password (authorized_keys)

ssh-copy-id is great, but the connection argument must be quoted, so if you need to use a different port you must use the form:

  ssh-copy-id 'user@host -p1337'

Took me far too long to figure this out :\

jsonscripteron Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months

I love plastic :(

I'd vastly prefer to recycle or decompose it than to never use it again.

jsonscripteron How To Hijack 'Every iPhone In The World'

I'll be smug for a moment and declare that this is one excellent reason for not choosing closed software systems.

jsonscripteron Steve Jobs on why Apple doesn’t do market research

That totally depends, though. If you're designing general computing or consumer goods, fine. If you're designing a custom point of sale program for a particular industry, that statement clearly doesn't apply.

jsonscripteron Artificial brain could be reality in just 10 years

It's perpetually 10 years away. They've been saying this since the first computers started calculating.

jsonscripteron Emacs 23 is very near

There's no way it actually does that. What does it actually do?

jsonscripteron Emacs 23 is very near

I personally don't like terminus, so this anti-aliasing is great for Deja Sans Mono :)

jsonscripteron Moneyball Update

I was confused for about 3 minutes because I kept reading "Monkeyball".

jsonscripteron Bizarre theory suggests time may be running out (2007)

Nice thought, except that temperature is simply a measure of speed. When something is said to be a certain temperature, it is said to be moving at such a speed with a certain amount of kinetic energy. That is why when liquids get "hot" enough, they start emitting gas... which is really just particles that have essentially reached the escape speed of their respective surface tension (roughly speaking).

Which is sort of a backwards way of saying that General Relativity actually talks about the relationship between speed and time, saying the faster an object is going, the slower (in a sense...) it is travelling through time.

jsonscripteron Pro Git - CC licensed book on Git by Scott Chacon

I just wanted to say I love how this post hardly has any comments because we're all busy reading the book.

jsonscripteron Ask HN : What would you do if you had to switch to a "manual" job?

Why U.S. specifically?

jsonscripteron Humans Glow

Back in high school we calculated the energy in a single photon by turning down the power on an LED until it almost went out. We recorded the amount of power, and figured out the energy in a photon within 15% accuracy.

I had a crazy Physics teacher :)

jsonscripteron Ion engine could one day power 39-day trips to Mars

Both Voyagers have nuclear reactors (of sorts) in them.

jsonscripteron The Advantages of Base 3

Haha, I just got your joke.

Using the word "frippery" is frippery.

jsonscripteron iPhone development emergency guide

You still have to have C in the end. The license agreement forces it upon you. That's disgusting.