acabal

68 ms·

601.
by acabal 14y ago
Email is great because, at its heart, it's a super-simple Unix-ish concept: send text-based messages to another address. (Granted the history and implementation has grown quite gnarled, but that's not important for day-to-day UX.) That sim
602.
by acabal 14y ago
I like private keys instead of passwords in theory, but in practice, I'm scared that I'll misplace the private key file, rendering all of my data lost forever. Private keys can also be lost (stolen laptop?) or misplaced. Or what if you're
603.
by acabal 14y ago
I agree with you completely, and perhaps to clarify my comment (the one you've replied to): As you say, developers shouldn't have to worry about the fine details of crypto. What I mean by that is: Common tasks like hashing a password, crea
604.
by acabal 14y ago
That's precisely what I'm trying to say, but worded much more elegantly. Thanks!
605.
by acabal 14y ago
Yeah but how do I use systems with crypto? What if I want to encrypt some text? Do I worry about a MAC? Does GPG do MACs? How do I know? Do I worry about EAX? GCM? CCM? AES-CTR? CMAC? OMAC1? AEAD? NIST? CBC? CFB? CTR? ECB? Programmer
606.
by acabal 14y ago
OK, I get it. Encryption is hard. But just look at that post--there's so many acronyms and tech-talk that my head is spinning and I'm not halfway through. How can you expect anyone to do encryption properly when it's presented like tha
607.
by acabal 14y ago
They are, in server-side stuff--but not in desktop stuff, which is what Gnome 3 is specifically targeting. Ubuntu is far and away the largest desktop distro, so losing their support would be a pretty big blow to the adoption of the Gnome p
608.
by acabal 14y ago
Well, you can tell if your users start complaining--Gnome 3--or your products aren't successful. Users of Gnome 3 are being very vocal with genuine (and some not-so-genuine) complaints about how the design process is going and what the fina
609.
by acabal 14y ago
On one hand, I agree that these projects (Gnome, Unity) are going in bad directions, for much of the reasons the post outlines. On the other hand, I understand the practical necessity of limiting the number of moving parts in a project. If
610.
by acabal 14y ago
Good for him. I'm picturing him realizing that he's getting older, and that he can either keep spending money on kid's movies, or he can try to make a real difference in the world. Education is a great thing to focus on too. My personal b
611.
by acabal 14y ago
On a meta-note, I hate, hate HATE how this blog and G+ blog posts hijack the space bar. I use spacebar as page down and it never works in G+, and it doesn't on this blog either.
612.
by acabal 14y ago
Wow, Gruber is kind of a jerk. Or maybe that's a symptom of having conversations in 140 character bursts.
613.
by acabal 14y ago
I assumed the CCI itself was some sort of RIAA/MPAA arm. I guess not?
614.
by acabal 14y ago
I often make this point and people often tell me "just use an LTS". But that's not my point; my point is, if I use an LTS, I can't (easily) get new versions of software I need. Upgrading one piece of software necessitates upgrading the en
615.
by acabal 14y ago
Yeah but Windows releases are years apart, not 6 months apart. With Windows a big help towards easing the backwards-compatibility burden is having DLLs shipped with the program. That way a program knows it can depend on whatever specific
616.
by acabal 14y ago
I don't think people are mad because Ubuntu wants to make money. (Witness the relatively well-received "donate" link on the Ubuntu download page.) They're mad at the Amazon search results because 1) Ads are now intruding in what's been an
617.
by acabal 14y ago
Oh, please. That comment is in reply to one at the very, very bottom . (As I'm viewing it.) Cherry-picking a single--frankly, not really that rude or terrible--comment isn't proving anything. In either case, the "good old days" never ex
618.
by acabal 14y ago
I'd be happy with no truly meta-posts at all. I've been running my own social network for the past five years, and in my experience it's been the meta-posts that are the ones that actually cause the drama. Person A and person B have a littl
619.
by acabal 14y ago
"Uncivil"? "Inappropriate"? "Bile"? "Divisive incivility"? Those are pretty strong words. All I've seen is a few geeks trading opinions about--ultimately petty--consumer electronics issues. It's all just opinion. Nobody's said "Person X i
620.
by acabal 14y ago
For a second I thought this was an Onion article: > 'I was shocked by the numbers,' Kevin Packingham, chief product officer of Samsung's U.S. mobile arm, said. 'What the heck is going on here?' > the company on Wednesday threw a spl
621.
by acabal 14y ago
Well, that's why I trust two other companies, plus myself. I don't know, doing basic backups aren't super-hard for someone who's reading HN. My setup is really just a regular Linux box with a 1TB HDD sitting in a closet of mine, with dynam
622.
by acabal 14y ago
You can say that about any service--what if Crashplan's data center caught fire tomorrow? Tarsnap might be run by a single guy (I think?) but saying S3 is "more" or "less" reliable than any other private company isn't a great comparison.
623.
by acabal 14y ago
Never trust anyone but yourself with valuable files like family photos. I don't care if they promise 110% uptime and reliability. The files you really care about, in the very practical end, are your own responsibility regardless of how mu
624.
by acabal 14y ago
Firefox uses 150% CPU and freezes in Ubuntu 12.04, had to kill the process :(
625.
by acabal 14y ago
My website, Scribophile, has been doing this successfully for about 5 years now. It looks like it's solving a different problem than pen.fm though. While Scribophile concentrates entirely on craft and workshopping, it looks like pen.fm is
626.
by acabal 14y ago
It's endemic in the industry. With a few exceptions, try downloading any book printed before, say, the year 2000. A good example is the Kindle copy of Dune that Amazon sells. Spend $15 ( $3 more than having the print version delivered to
627.
by acabal 14y ago
Baen also has a problem with OCR'd text. I downloaded a Greg Bear book from them a few weeks ago and it was clearly OCR'd without a second look towards quality. It had so many typos and spelling errors that it was practically unreadable.
628.
by acabal 14y ago
I like my Nook Touch, mainly because the built-in software is pretty good (much better than Kindle 3, though I haven't tried a Kindle Touch) and because it can read epubs. I never buy from any online store that sells DRM out of principle.
629.
by acabal 14y ago
I find this quite scary. As with all things like this it starts in degrees. Today it's an annoying warning and "educational materials". A few years from now, when warning aren't enough and people are used to them, it'll be disconnection,
630.
by acabal 14y ago
I don't think they should develop in secret, but they most definitely shouldn't release until things are polished. Much of the criticism Unity and various other features received was well-deserved, because Canonical released essentially

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