acabal

54 ms·

451.
by acabal 13y ago
That's a pretty negative perspective. Not everything has to be about money and getting ahead. I think there's a lot to be said for contributing back to the community for the greater good, without a profit motive. That doesn&#x2
452.
by acabal 13y ago
> Your complaints, however, are centered around not normal consumers but power linux users. I don't think they are; unpredictable back button behavior and inconsistent/plain UI aren't Linuxy complaints. > Also FYI it&#x
453.
by acabal 13y ago
I just bought a Nexus 4 as my second smartphone (the first being a Palm Pre 2). Android is nice in the sense that it's more open and you (I assume, at least, having never owned an iPhone) have more choices to use open-source software.
454.
by acabal 13y ago
I don't think so. Laws change all the time, and a society's fears and priorities change over time too. Technology both gives us the ability to archive and analyze communications forever, and to provably protect (encrypt) them fo
455.
by acabal 13y ago
Having our communication intercepted, stored, and analyzed en masse is not bad because of whoever is in office today. It's bad because someone different, someone with less scruples, could be in office tomorrow. I'm not a conspira
456.
by acabal 13y ago
The surprising takeaway for me is that PGP is so astoundingly crappy to use that even Phil Zimmerman asks people to send him plain text mail. We've got to do something to improve the state of things here.
457.
by acabal 13y ago
As developers perhaps the most effective thing we can do from a long-term perspective is baking strong cryptography in to all of the products we create, and opting for open source whenever possible. (After all, open source is the only way
458.
by acabal 13y ago
Not quite the same comparison. BN's (and Best Buy's, and other retailers') problem is Amazon; Amazon is a problem because those types of physical goods don't have an expiration date and they're the same regardless
459.
by acabal 13y ago
I agree with the sentiment, but since BN has crushed independent booksellers the problem now is that if BN closes, lots of more isolated places like suburbs and exurbs will have no good place to browse and buy books. I'm currently sta
460.
by acabal 13y ago
From talking to some non-tech people about this, I have a dim view of the possibility that Snowden's revelations will change anything on a political level. People seem to either not care about the power the NSA has over them, or think
461.
by acabal 13y ago
That's the one I used, and if I recall correctly they sent me an email with a link for me to download the cert. This suggests to me that it was generated server-side and that therefore they could have kept a copy for themselves. But
462.
by acabal 13y ago
I looked into S/MIME when researching email crypto options. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but with S/MIME, you have to get a cert issued from a "trusted" provider--i.e. your employer, or Verisign, or Como
463.
by acabal 13y ago
So posts about what you can screw up are nice, but what would be nicer is posts about how to set up an ideal SSL configuration for various web servers. (Perhaps there's no "perfect" configuration possible, but "stronges
464.
by acabal 13y ago
That, and the fact that public/private key encryption is difficult to understand on a conceptual level, uses poor, inconsistent, or misleading terminology, and has a user-hostile interface with GPG or a buggy and error-prone interface
465.
by acabal 13y ago
The way art has been financed for the centuries before copyright existed: patronage. It seems like the modern equivalent is going to be Kickstarter et al.
466.
by acabal 13y ago
I looked at BTSync the other day when researching self-hosted Dropbox alternatives. It looks like a great product and so far beats the pants off the closest competitor, Seafile, for ease of install and use. I was really impressed. But unf
467.
by acabal 13y ago
> The iDVD team spend weeks working on a user interface that they think works. Jobs comes into the meeting, stops them halfway through, ignores their complicated workflows, and draws a simple rectangle which has a single "BURN" button o
468.
by acabal 13y ago
I don't disagree that dictators can make great software. My point, perhaps poorly communicated, was that using these exceptional success edge-cases as an excuse to uncompromisingly drive your own design vision will probably do more harm th
469.
by acabal 13y ago
OP here, I agree totally. Steve Jobs was by all accounts a jerk and I think it's unfortunate so many people idolize him instead of people doing more human good like Bill Gates. But it's undeniable that he had a once-in-a-century eye for p
470.
by acabal 13y ago
These drive me absolutely crazy . I hate them, and they're literally everywhere now. Every website I go has some shitty fixed bar at the top that obscures text and is constantly nagging me to like their page or whatever. Developers, p
471.
by acabal 13y ago
I've been working on removing myself from the Google silo for the past few months. It's tough, and the alternatives just aren't as good or convenient as what Google offers, but I think it's an important thing to do at least on principle. I
472.
The results from our pay-what-you-want ebook pricing experiment(alexcabal.com)
2 points by acabal 13y ago|0 comments
473.
by acabal 13y ago
On a tangentially related note, developers, please remember that not everybody in the universe has a Twitter account, or wants one. If you have some cool product and I must sign in with FB/Twitter, straight to the close tab button I go a
474.
by acabal 13y ago
Not just that, but in lesser-developed countries biometric identification can be dangerous. If you get mugged for your ATM card, you can tell them your PIN and they'll let you go, free to repeatedly use your card until you freeze it. But
475.
by acabal 13y ago
What does this mean for software companies in New Zealand? If they sell software in the US (and who doesn't, with the internet and all), I assume they're still on the hook for US patent law?
476.
by acabal 13y ago
Perhaps, but there certainly was (and still is) a not-insignificant amount of people interested in hacking both Nooks and Kindles. Sell a hackable version at a big markup to please the nerds and make some money; regular folks will find the
477.
by acabal 13y ago
It's too bad this basically means the death of the e-ink Nook. It was really a much better reader than Kindle for a long time, but BN couldn't stay a step ahead and Kindle ended up running circles around them. If Nook had just cleaned up i
478.
by acabal 13y ago
I see them as exactly that, dedicated reading devices. Tablets are great for some folks, but others like ereaders because: -E-ink can be stared at for long periods and in bright light; staring at a tablet screen for long periods gives many
479.
by acabal 13y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: anonymity online and encrypted communications are one of the most important problems we're going to going to face in the coming decades. Hackers should be working on those, not clever ways to serv
480.
by acabal 13y ago
> I'll be chilling here in America, where the bottom 10% live as well as the top 10% do in developing countries. Very true. But it's a perspective many people born and raised in the US lack. (Witness the HN thread a few days ago about

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