motters

44 ms·

421.
by motters 16y ago
Open source is a kind of post-scarcity economy. It's an economy of attention and status, and although money can be made in the process monetarism is relatively unimportant in comparison to the other factors.
422.
by motters 16y ago
Right. The bigger trend is downward mobility in automation, to the point where advanced automation is much more commonly available.
423.
by motters 16y ago
The problem is that most software development is novel, so there are zero previous data points from which estimates can be derived.
424.
by motters 16y ago
This seems like bogus reasoning. When a minimum wage was introduced in the UK unemployment went down, at least for a while. The article contains assertions, but no experimental results. An experimental economist would experiment with dif
425.
by motters 16y ago
This looks impressive. I've written tracking systems previously, so can appreciate that it's not an easy problem to solve.
426.
by motters 16y ago
Agree. I've always tried to keep social network friends to below 100, and periodically conduct a review to ditch anyone who is no longer of interest. It seems that many people routinely have thousands of "friends", but I can't possibly ha
427.
by motters 16y ago
If they had done this five or more years ago, when there weren't many ways to obtain legal and DRM free music it might have been a story worth reporting, but otherwise this seems like a non-story in the making.
428.
by motters 16y ago
Certainly the amount of over-confidence, downplaying and sheer denial over the Fukushima incident has been quite astonishing to witness. Repeatedly, pundits of all kinds lined up to insist that the plant was in a safe condition and that ev
429.
by motters 16y ago
I expect that the new interface will divide opinion. If you remember what a kerfuffle there was over moving the close button from right to left then this is a much bigger change.
430.
by motters 16y ago
I've been using the 11.04 beta for a day or so, and it seems ok to me. Sure, it's not exactly the same as Gnome 2.x, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's worse. I never used panel applets much anyway, and like the keyboard shortcut
431.
by motters 16y ago
My question is: how did this get to the top position on HN? I could hardly care less about Jeremy Clarkson's opinions, or TV shows such as Top Gear.
432.
by motters 16y ago
All joking aside, for some users with disabilities this sort of gesture based interface could be really useful. My prediction is that gesture interfaces are going to be used for some basic things, but that most interactions with computers w
433.
by motters 16y ago
This is one thing which can happen when you put all your data into "the cloud" and hope for the best. One risk which any business has to take into account is the possibility of a rogue employee or ex-employee running amok. Putting all you
434.
by motters 16y ago
Without transparency cronyism and bad governance can flourish.
435.
by motters 16y ago
This merely ensures that I will never use GoDaddy's services, and I'll also advise others not to use them.
436.
by motters 16y ago
The moral of the tale here is that if you're going to be making allegations of this kind you really need to be quite confident about your research, and be able to back it up with detailed information such as the contents of the relevant dir
437.
by motters 16y ago
The second part is more interesting, but it doesn't give any indication as to whether the keylogger was installed on a small number of internal test machines which then accidentally escaped into consumerland, or whether this is a more wides
438.
by motters 16y ago
Second part http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/sec/2011/040411sec1....
439.
by motters 16y ago
It's a disappointing cliff-hanger ending. Without more information it's impossible to say whether this is just some malware accident or a deliberate policy by Samsung. I'm inclined to think that the former situation is more likely.
440.
by motters 16y ago
That's the same argument that the tabloid newspapers use, and it doesn't work for them either. What readers end up with is low quality information, popular conspiracy theories, sensationalism, voyeurism, etc. What's really needed is some
441.
by motters 16y ago
I think the problem here is that the introduction of payment changes the psychology from one of sharing information to one of maximizing income (gift Vs capital). In the latter mode of operation the quality of the information is a secondar
442.
by motters 16y ago
In the last year I've been on interviews like this, where I've been presented with sorting problems or quirky pointer arithmetic conundrums. However, these bear no relation at all to the kinds of practical software problems which I've had
443.
by motters 16y ago
Unfortunately this model doesn't seem to work. If you look at what's getting votes it's things like pictures of girls and kittens.
444.
by motters 16y ago
http://www.google.com/trends?q=digg.com I used Digg for a while, and it became apparent over time that the quality both of the news and also the comments was tanking. Once I discovered HN I stopped using Digg altogether.
445.
by motters 16y ago
I think one of the main reasons may be that a lot of what appears to be journalism actually isn't - it's press releases from various companies and organisations, known as "churnalism". It's surprisingly easy to find churnalism, even in wha
446.
by motters 16y ago
The aristocracy represents the worst aspects of Britain - the cronyism, unthinking deference, inflexible adherence to tradition and gigantic social class divisions. As far as is possible I intend to avoid watching or reading anything about
447.
by motters 16y ago
I came across a similar thing in the mid 1990s. The program had been written in the late 1980s, and the original author had since died, so he couldn't be consulted. In those days memory was scarce, so the program had been "compacted" by r
448.
The secret life of chaos(youtube.com)
1 points by motters 16y ago|0 comments
449.
by motters 16y ago
It is a curious social phenomena that people often want to believe the best possible interpretation even when the evidence shows that things are not going well at all. In this case denialism is probably a strategy to avoid panic, which cou
450.
by motters 16y ago
Pretty jaw-dropping journalism, even by Register standards. Anyone trying to suggest that the situation at Fukushima is "under control" and is somehow a nuclear industry safety success story hasn't been paying close enough attention.

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