pachydermic

While we're playing word games...

"The fact that you got caught spying on everyone is making it harder for us to convince the world to hand over their personal data to us!"

>I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS.

Same here. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem, though. I mean, I'm pretty much a nobody. I haven't contributed to the kernel or created a perl module or created systemd so of course I haven't had any issues.

I'm sure Poettering isn't making this stuff up. People are so pissed at him for systemd and it makes no sense. And he's right to call out Linus for saying those things. Whether you think the people deserve this kind of abuse or not it's just toxic for the community at large and there isn't any reason to say stuff like that (I'm talking death threats or the most hurtful insults you can think of). If someone drops the ball don't take their work and ask them to leave - if they don't, you should be able to ignore them.

>Saying open source is awful because you've encountered assholes is like saying free market economies are awful because some vendor overcharged you one time, or saying cars are awful because some guy cut you off yesterday, or saying free speech is awful because some guy insulted you in public the other day...

What he's actually talking about is a pattern of bad behavior. Of course there are going to be random assholes on the internet - that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about all of the abuse he gets from the actual community on a regular basis. Systemic abuse and vitriol.

I love open source. I owe my career to Linux and my passion about it. But that doesn't mean we can't make it better. And this internet bullying stuff is a real problem - it's very well documented. Ignoring the problem is the worst thing you can do short of contributing to it.

If we're going to have a real community then we have to make sure people feel safe and welcome.

I think the idea of a quick-time event is to make a cinematic experience more visceral/engaging, so it's not necessarily lazy... I mean it is more work than just putting the cutscene in after all. Anyways, maybe it's misguided and definitely overused, but I think it's pretty extreme to call it lazy. At some point pretty much every game devolves into "press button to make thing happen".

Kingscrusher is a user on YouTube who has a ton of great chess videos. He covered the Sinquefield quite a lot - here's the first encounter between Carlsen and Caruana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfgRWM6IfP0&list=UUDUDDmslyp...

And all of his videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/kingscrusher/videos

I know they're pretty long (often 45 mins or more), but if you're a big chess fan they're pretty awesome.

The level that these super GMs play at is astounding.

First of all, successful streamers tend to have entertaining personalities (at least their audience thinks so). Other than that, I think there are a few main reasons why people like it.

1. Sometimes you just want to veg out and watch something, not be an active participant. You can enjoy the game without putting in any effort.

2. There's a community aspect to it. In a single-player game like Fallout you get to see someone else enjoying and talking about what you enjoy, and you can interact with others who share the same interests.

3. Many of the people who stream are really good players. Almost no one reaches that level of play so for most people watching a streamer is the only way to experience it. They can also offer insights and help make you a better player.

It is kind of weird and not traditional... but it does make sense to a young'n like me.

If you can't rely on current working directories then you have to specify any file locations absolutely? That doesn't seem like a good idea because then your code quickly turns into a hot mess if you ever have to change where stuff lives.

This is such a stupid problem I run into a lot. Both alternatives (doing things with absolute paths vs doing things entirely with relative paths) seem to have a lot of downsides. Overall relative paths seems to be way better, but then you leave yourself open to problems which "rhyme" with the one OP was talking about.

I think its more about the magnitude of innovation.

Twitter barely does anything new. It's not really that fundamentally different than a mailing list... The reason it's a big deal comes from the fact that tons of people use it - not from what it actually does.

I think things like the internet are incremental improvements as well. The internet just made communication between computers faster than, say, a person walking between them and re-typing everything. In a bigger sense, it just quickened up and made more reliable the transfer of information - just like radio, the printing press, writing or even spoken language.

The difference (to me at least) is just the size of the innovation. Twitter? Small change. The internet? Pretty huge. As big as writing? Who knows.

Just my two cents. I think how you look at these kinds of things has a lot to do with your world-view. As you can probably guess, I'm a "top-down" kind of thinker.

And I do get quite annoyed by arrogant startups "changing the world" over and over again. At the end of the day most of these things are just businesses who make small, incremental improvements to existing ideas. Very rarely does something truly revolutionary come about. That's fine - it almost has to be that way by definition. On the other hand, please keep trying, people! Just maybe show some restraint when you talk about yourselves?

I love to think about what Twitter and Facebook will be in 50 years. I find it really hard to imagine them being around other than in "internet history 101" textbook-equivalents.

Check for the update?

What isn't a plane ride away from the US? The moon? The Earth's core?

I'm actually wondering about that now...

You're not alone. Things are getting better, though. Drivers are definitely still an issue, but I think because of Steam's movement in the Linux market a lot of progress is going to be made... of course, maybe all this SteamOS stuff is just a hedge against Windows (to dissuade a move to a 100% app-store model on desktop).

Laptops and wireless are still definitely a big issue. I think desktops have a much better chance of working. Whether they work as well as Windows or not is a different question.

$20,000 in 1964 equates to $153,483.87, according to [1].

The population of china is currently 1.365B, according to [2].

A dollar today is equivalent to $0.04 in 1914 according to [1]. I should add at this point that there are a lot of different ways to measure inflation.

The number of passanger vehicles is around 250 million in the US today - how many of those are "cars" is up to interpretation. [3]

1: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unite...

Did anyone look at the site for that other company he was talking about?

On its about page, it says:

"""

Tibanne Co. Ltd. is a Tokyo, Japan-based corporation founded in 2009 by Mark Karpeles, a young technopreneur with more than 15 years experience in software development, network administration and business development. Mark is well-versed in multiple programming languages, has a strong background in network security, and is well-known in the tech community.

Tibanne specializes in web hosting, application development and system management. We are currently engaged in the research and development of new and existing services to produce innovative solutions for our clients.

Our team is comprised of talented Japanese and international staff hailing from many countries, disciplines and specializations.

"""

What the fuck? What is wrong with this guy... I gotta admire his shameless self-promotion. I'd be hiding under a rock if I were him, not banking on my ruined reputation for my other company.

I wonder what else there is to this story

Police departments profit as well. They are able to confiscate all kinds of "evidence" like the car a dealer uses when they're selling drugs and then auction those items off. It's an extremely perverse incentive which must be eliminated.

More info: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599349-america...

Well, here's the most relevant quote, anyways:

"""

Because of a legal quirk, SWAT raids can be profitable. Rules on civil asset-forfeiture allow the police to seize anything which they can plausibly claim was the proceeds of a crime. Crucially, the property-owner need not be convicted of that crime. If the police find drugs in his house, they can take his cash and possibly the house, too. He must sue to get them back.

Many police departments now depend on forfeiture for a fat chunk of their budgets. In 1986, its first year of operation, the federal Asset Forfeiture Fund held $93.7m. By 2012, that and the related Seized Asset Deposit Fund held nearly $6 billion.

Mr Balko contends that these forfeiture laws are “unfair on a very basic level”. They “disproportionately affect low-income people” and provide a perverse incentive for police to focus on drug-related crimes, which “come with a potential kickback to the police department”, rather than rape and murder investigations, which do not. They also provide an incentive to arrest suspected drug-dealers inside their houses, which can be seized, and to bust stash houses after most of their drugs have been sold, when police can seize the cash.

"""

I don't quite understand how Mesa and device drivers play together... can someone explain this for me? I read the wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(computer_graphics)) and this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_kernel_and_OpenGL_vi...) graphic makes it clear that Mesa is the implementation of the OpenGL specification... what I don't get is the relationship between drivers and Mesa. Why aren't the drivers the implementation of the OpenGL specification? Is pushing bits from the GPU to the screen the only thing that the drivers do?

This is certainly interesting, but it duplicated my own nav on my webpage. Don't know how it could be smart enough to detect that even though I have a very standard setup. In any case, I suppose it would be good for a quick and dirty start to your app and you could flesh the rest out later? I wonder who will actually end up using this for real.

And we all know how bad the tooth paste bubble was!

So only the best games will rise to the top now... I fail to see how that is a burst bubble.

tl;dr the indie space is more competitive than it was a few years ago and it's hard to get noticed

Well maybe that's not fair, but that's the impression I got from this.

That is very different from a "bubble" popping. The problem of discoverability will be solved by someone - there's just too much money on the table for that to not happen. Whether it's Valve or not no-one knows (obviously they're the front runners now), but someone will get it done.

Sure. It's probably a lot harder for the indie devs out there in a lot of ways (in terms of trying to stand out - or only getting a smaller and smaller slice of the market). On the other hand, there are tools like Kickstarter, Unity and now Unreal which make it much, much easier to make games - often for a wider array of platforms.

Harder to stand out, but lower barrier to entry - that makes sense and does not mean that any bubble is about to burst. In fact, it probably means that games will just continue to get better!

Holy shit this is awesome

I wonder what the license is?

Interesting, thanks for the heads up. Last I heard it was OSX only. I may try this when I get home.

I wonder why it wasn't this way from the get-go... Oh well, at least I'm actually interested in it now. Can't wait for the Linux version to try it out. Pumped that they did the right thing and open-sourced it so that it actually has a chance of becoming widespread, and more importantly, of sticking around for longer than a couple years.

Good on you, Atom.io devs

Ugh, Zenimax legal is the worst. I mean, maybe they have a claim - Carmack was probably working on Oculus stuff while employed there - but I find the idea that businessmen own everything a programmer works on just because he's an employee abhorrent.

Remember the whole Scrolls debacle? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrolls_%28video_game%29#Bethes... Apparently that was Bethesda Softworks, not Zenimax... but I wonder who was really behind it.

I really liked LyX when I used it back in school for my proof-based class's homework. I even used it for my resume - which I have to say came out looking very neat and professional for not a ton of work!

I don't have much of a reason to use it anymore, but I really appreciated this software. Even though it would occasionally crash on my admittedly unstable laptop Linux install (never tried it on windows)... I guess you could use Emacs or hobble through using a gui in MS word or something (actually there probably are some alternatives, I just never looked into them), but if you do a lot of LaTeX/text work you might want to look into LyX.

This looks awesome - I have been wishing for a resource exactly like this for a while now. With my first game under my belt I learned the hard way how difficult game programming can be. I need some high level advice and this looks perfect.

Thanks!

Oculus does have a real, physical, available product - I've used one personally that my friend bought (albeit through the kickstarter page). There are definitely people who are interested and it actually worked relatively well. Maybe it won't catch on, but I don't think it's absurd like many other tech start ups.

Plus, they weren't bought for $2 billion. They were bought for $400 million in cash and the $1.6 billion in FB stock which is quite a different thing. If you believe that FB is overpriced, then they were really bought for a lot less than $2 billion.

Does Silicon Valley have a laugh track? I don't remember one from the first episode, but I watched that a couple of weeks ago.

Often (not always, though) shows with laugh tracks are an entirely different level of "not funny". It's bad when the show creators have to rely on cheap psychological gags to trick you into enjoying yourself. Silicon Valley operated at a higher level than that, although I still found a lot of its humor just referential and not too humorous or too easy. Honestly, just reading hacker news every day provides you with way more satire than the show does... I didn't watch anything past the first episode, so I can't speak to the story which you seem to like - I was just looking for a comedy show.

But tastes do differ. Especially when it comes to comedy. I'm glad you liked the show. I wouldn't compare it to Big Bang Theory, but I wasn't a fan.

That video is painful to watch... I know there's clearly a bit of a language barrier, but this guy sounds like a complete dingus. Then again, he's the guy making a cool ~$60 mil a year so what does that suggest?

I wonder what a guy like that actually does on a day-to-day basis. I could see there being a huge amount of pressure and work to do, but maybe they just hand it off to their underlings secure in the thought that they have a fat severance package waiting for them if anything goes wrong.

How can you expect someone to give a damn when they have no skin in the game? So this guy did an apparently horrible job and made millions. How does that make sense? Wouldn't you only want him to make an obscene amount of money if he did a good job? It really is fascinating how massive companies like that work - I guess you can draw some similar conclusions as in politics.

Specific comment:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/224ntd/unreal_engin...

Unless they only write good custom drivers for hardware they know will be used in Steam machines. Don't know of any reason why they'd do that, though... I'm hopeful :)

Finally. The year of the Linux desktop is upon us!

It's almost as if that sentence itself were pieced together by some kind of blagosphere-mining machine learning algorithm. I guess that's kind of what writers do?

Except for the fact that sudo is already built into your system. What?

Rooting most likely voids your warranty and is definitely nontrivial to non-technical people. I have rooted my phone and installed cyanogenmod before and I wouldn't call it easy. I can't imagine average people going through that process voluntarily or without screwing it up. Yeah, to people like us it might not be that bad, but to your every day user it just doesn't make any sense to do.

That's a horrible analogy, sorry.

I have to agree with some other commenters here that Google using Linux as a base for android and chromeOS doesn't do much for the Linux community (not nothing, though). It really doesn't matter what kernel they are using. It's all the stuff that's build on top which matters... maybe there's something to calling it "GNU/Linux" after all - just so we could avoid misleading and misinformed commentary like this blog post.