fab13n

44 ms·

331.
by fab13n 15y ago
I'm not in the USA, so I don't know B&N (although my company provides some of the hardware in the Nook). However, B&N's main advantage compared to Amazon is its network of B&M stores, right? Now, the bet here is "let's lose mone
332.
by fab13n 15y ago
The business model to compete with Apple has been known for extremely long: offer lesser products at lesser prices. Everyone else failed at the "lesser price" part. Amazon can pull it off, because they don't need to make money with the tabl
333.
by fab13n 15y ago
Indeed, the presentation felt like the demo of a poverty-management tool. Then again, I don't expect much from a banking website, although I don't get it today: seamless authentication, easy transfers, easy listing and canceling of pending
334.
by fab13n 15y ago
One of the main security risks is social engineering. The only reason why my mum won't be tricked into adding a rogue CA root is because it's too complicated to do for her, even if she wanted to. * If it was as easy as installing a fake Fla
335.
by fab13n 15y ago
Having used state machines a lot for embedded development, I find that they have one huge drawback: the resulting C code is unreadable, which turns maintenance into a nightmare. SM have a key quality: they are a compact and unambiguous way
336.
by fab13n 15y ago
Operational depts have a natural tendency to answer "that's not possible" when challenged very hard, and to try and negotiate compromises. You don't need the top guy to be the tastemaster, but you need his arbitrages to be heavily biased in
337.
by fab13n 15y ago
The question is: how grade adjustments can be gamed by students? If well done, it can turn into a competitive exam, so that students will fight each other rather that syndicate to game the system. But then, you'll have a very nasty class dy
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by fab13n 15y ago
A very convenient place to store and retrieve them is under a "passwords" folder in your private mail account or your Dropbox, both of which get synchronized with your unprotected smartphone...
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by fab13n 15y ago
I never discussed the appropriateness of AirBnB's response, neither to defend nor to accuse them. I only said that if one wants to destroy them in possibly illegal ways, making such an event occur looks like an excellent move. Bonus point,
340.
by fab13n 15y ago
(Disclaimer: I'm not saying that she's lying, and I see no element that makes me believe that she lies. I don't even see any concrete element pointing to a conspiracy, I'm merely pondering how credible it might be). > what would EJ gain
341.
by fab13n 15y ago
There are many places where prices are higher than that, I would have liked them to explain why those places don't have electric cars. As a concrete example, nowadays a liter of gaz is at about EUR1.50 in France. That's 1.50 EUR/L * 3.8 L/g
342.
by fab13n 15y ago
There's a key element you seem to have overlooked: he's teaching in a business school . What are his students supposed to be able to do, eventually? Navigating around the limits of legality to maximize profit; understand, exploit and tweak
343.
by fab13n 15y ago
[french citizen here] Hadopi had a couple of effects: * You know you've got 2 free warnings before you have to become careful, e.g. by subscribing to a VPN for a couple euros a day. * Hadopi only monitors P2P; French movies and music massiv
344.
by fab13n 15y ago
I'm sure 90% of G+ers will do it and enjoy it. My point was only that figuring out how to organize your graph into circles shouldn't have to be the first thing you've to do before discovering G+. This question (how to organize one's social
345.
by fab13n 15y ago
Google's after people who click on ads.
346.
by fab13n 15y ago
I believe you base your estimation on the kind of people you typically frequent; they are representative of neither the average population, nor the population targeted by social network sites, nor the kind of people advertisers (those putti
347.
by fab13n 15y ago
The problem with buzz was that it put people in your list without asking you first. Here I'm just talking about putting everyone you add in the same bucket, until you (maybe) realize that you want several distinct buckets. That would be Fac
348.
by fab13n 15y ago
Being able to control your connections is a good thing, and eventually becomes very important. But enabling a "don't make me think" approach by default would lower the barrier to entry. 99% of non-geeks hate to consciously categorize stuff
349.
by fab13n 15y ago
This article takes an engineer's point of view, and is relevant to maybe 5% of the population. Facebook is about reinventing the web for dummies: micro-blogging, RSS-like stream aggregation, photo/video/text publishing, web application publ
350.
by fab13n 15y ago
In France, operators are required to unlock your phone on demand and for free, 6 month after you bought it.
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by fab13n 15y ago
I am sure Amazon are pretty good at mining _their own_ data. When it comes to mining the open, unstructured and uncontrolled mess that is the Internet, I believe they're no match to Google. Which is OK: it isn't part of their core business.
352.
by fab13n 15y ago
They don't mention the possibility that Google and Amazon strike an agreement. One knows how to do online data mining, the other knows how to do retail online; it might be worth for each of them to join force by givin up the domain in which
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by fab13n 16y ago
I use Lua on similarly-sized embedded systems. As a result I get readable code, easily ported (and debugged!) under Linux. It really changed the scope of what we could embed.
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by fab13n 16y ago
- the stack-based API makes it reasonably easy not to goof with references and introduce hard-to-find GC bugs. - reference-counting simplifies some stuff, but introduce other bug classes (e.g. circular references). Moreover, ref-counting GC
355.
by fab13n 16y ago
At this time, to create an incentive against the culture of secrecy that prevented the sharing of technical progress, a system of temporary monopolies called _patentes_ has been invented. Its descendant--now spellt _patent_--is today used p
356.
by fab13n 16y ago
I agree that the site won't solve the problem it pretends to address if it's just going to ask you what you usually like and feed you similar stuff. However, this can and should be bundled with a more assertive counseling activity: "we're n
357.
by fab13n 16y ago
If I understand correctly, all this fuss is about a 1.5% tax on wages. If so, it seems nonsensical: settling in the Silicon Valley costs much more than that, yet companies still prefer to settle there than in the rust belt or in Europe. The
358.
by fab13n 16y ago
My guess is that it would lose and scare all of the many people for whom mathematics aren't a native language. Do it for mathematically minded people, I'd say with at least a A level in sciences, but avoid it for "normal" people. There migh
359.
by fab13n 16y ago
A pen-tablet is suited for applications which are too complex for an iPad and too simple for a netbook. That's a ridiculously thin niche. Tablet + pen = 2 hands busy, you've lost most of your comfort and mobility advantage compared to a net
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by fab13n 16y ago
We developed a coroutine-based event-driven networking lib in Lua (not open sourced yet, but it looks like it might change someday). One of the neat thing is that we're able to run that on tiny ARM-based embedded hardware. I think there are

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