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alec

Re:Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone on Thursday April 30, 2020 @05:18AM (#23028970)
I work for Google, but not on anything related to Meet. I'm most excited about this because the video/audio quality is much higher.

When I use Zoom with friends, everyone is usually 320x240, or maybe 640x480 if there's only one person. Doom was 320x240 in 1993.

In Google Meet, I usually see people at 1280x920. A 4k monitor will fit 6 people at that resolution.

I value this higher resolution because it makes me feel more connected to people.

Re:Pebble 4.0 Apps and Firmware Released on Tuesday August 30, 2016 @11:56PM (#12395926)
I recently got a Pebble Time Round and love it. Never wanted a watch before.

Few watches provide vibrating alarms, but Pebble's helps keep me on track during the day without disturbing everyone around me with beeps. I wrote a tiny app to vibrate at different points of a meeting so I know how much time is left without boorishly checking a clock, and the development experience was smooth.

With the Android Light Flow app, I can control which contacts for which apps can send notifications, which helps keep me aware of things I need to be aware of without being a firehose of alerts.

Re:Introducing Kindle Oasis on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @08:09PM (#11493389)
Saving half a pound (225g) on a backpacking trip is a enough that a frequent hiker would notice.
Re:Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @01:56PM (#8724815)
I don't think this offers an "incompatible experience" - my reading of the post is that the experience is fully compatible and that users of non-Chrome browsers will still be able to use Google Search. Currently, some/all non-Chrome browsers won't do the extra prefetches.
Re:Permissions asked for by Uber Android app on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @10:13PM (#8660965)
> there's nothing in this analysis that suggests they're doing otherwise

The article included a decompiled code snippet showing it running methods like "sendMMSLog" and "sendPhoneCallLog", apparently logging a bunch of private data and sending it back to Uber.

Re:CVE-2014-6277 on Thursday October 09, 2014 @10:16AM (#8432464)
My computer runs Debian, so I read debian-security-announce, which gets one email per updated package. Sample of messages from this year: https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2014/threa...
Google talks a fair bit about their internal systems at this level of "descriptions but not code" - Bigtable, MapReduce, Spanner, Flume, Chubby, and more have been influential.
Works for me - I have a StartSSL personal cert and an Android phone (Nexus 5 / KitKat), and all of Chrome, Chrome Beta, and Firefox load up the site without any sort of warning or other indication. I also dug out a Jelly Bean phone (Galaxy Nexus) to try with the stock Android Browser and didn't have any issues.
Re:No more ads on Thursday May 29, 2014 @08:25PM (#7819462)
re: "One way less for Google to track me."

Google says that they don't use Google DNS for tracking.

From the Google DNS privacy page: "We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information."

They go on in some detail to say how and what they log.

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

Re:Go Read: One Year with Money and App Engine on Thursday May 22, 2014 @12:21AM (#7782088)
Thanks! I don't really know when the website has a problem, when goread has a problem, and when I have a problem, so I end up assuming that it's goread problem. I like how the desktop web version gives a "last refreshed" and "next refreshed" indication.
Re:C-Reduce, a C program reducer on Thursday May 22, 2014 @12:10AM (#7782054)
See also Delta Debugging for a line-based (non-syntax-aware) version of this. Very useful for cutting down test cases to size. I'm enthusiastic that c-reduce is threaded.

https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/dd/

Re:Go Read: One Year with Money and App Engine on Wednesday May 21, 2014 @12:36PM (#7779158)
Interesting writeup, thanks.

I'm a user and have been negatively impacted by the feed fetching optimizations - daily feeds are often a few days behind and come in bunches. Two examples:

- Penny Arcade updates its comics Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, always at 7:01AM UTC, and then news other times during the week. It's Wednesday at 4:25PM UTC - 9 hours after - and goread hasn't picked it up.

- Dinosaur Comics is updated weekdays. I'll eventually get all of them, but usually two or three at a time. For example, yesterday I marked all my feeds as read; today, I have entries from Monday and Tuesday, but not from Wednesday.

I had hoped that the move to the everyone-pays model would give you the resources (either developer or quota) to fix these issues, but they've gotten no better or maybe worse.

I haven't looked at what you're doing, but I believe Google Reader used pubsubhubbub where available to reduce/eliminate polling for many popular feeds.

I honestly didn't have a great experience with my last bug report, so I haven't tried again.

Re:Practical Tmux on Friday May 16, 2014 @07:45PM (#7758581)
I'm with you. I tried tmux but didn't find any benefit and several serious drawbacks.

Many of the purported benefits - better configuration language, more maintainable code - don't matter to me:

- Screen is done and isn't going to change. Debian has had the vertical splits patch for so long I was surprised it was a patch.

- My configuration of screen is not going to change. It's five lines that I copied and pasted 10 years ago. There's just not that much that needs to be configured.

The "Multiple Clients Sharing One Session" thing is important to me and screen gets it right by default. It's useful to have a few fixed xterms on my screen and a bunch of multiplexed terminals in screen. I use one screen session per task.

I think "screen contents persisted through full-screen programs" is screen's "altscreen on" setting. Or at least that's my note from the person whose screenrc I stole.

Re:Practical Tmux on Friday May 16, 2014 @07:15PM (#7758451)
I think he's asking what happens if you have two panes side-by-side and try to select text in one to copy. Does it also select text from the other one?
Re:Oracle continue to circumvent EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() on Sunday May 11, 2014 @05:22PM (#7730047)
The person who wrote the CDDL says it was deliberately written to be incompatible with the GPL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distribu...

Re:A collection of Unix terminal/console/curses tools on Friday February 28, 2014 @08:01PM (#7322595)
I'm a big fan of Joey Hess' moreutils - https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

Examples:

- sponge: read in all of stdin, then write to the given file. Great for pipelines: sed "s/root/toor/" /etc/passwd | grep -v joey | sponge /etc/passwd

- vipe: easily drop a $EDITOR instance in the middle of a pipe chain

- ts: timestamp all standard input; great for long-running output

Re:The average top 1,000 web page has grown 150% in three years on Thursday November 28, 2013 @11:52AM (#6815284)
A 2007 Yahoo investigation found 40-60% of Yahoo's users came to the site with an empty cache, accounting for 20% of page views. Empty cache experience is important.

http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-...

Re:Two years of production Go at CloudFlare on Monday November 11, 2013 @06:13PM (#6714757)
"The guarantees needed to avoid leaving the server in a bad state when handling panics would be impossible without the defer mechanism Go provides."

I'm only passingly familiar with defer, but I understand it to be equivalent to RAII in C++, Python's with statement, Common Lisp's unwind-protect, and others - does is actually provide something more, and if so, what?

Since the Bitcoin blockchain is public, couldn't you follow the money? Make a list of all wallets that accepted these funds initially, and then do graph analysis, either to see where the money went or provide others with a tool to avoid transactions with those wallets?
Uninteresting: "Use my blog platform! It has the power of node!"

Interesting: "I wrote something new in a way or with tools that I had not used before. Here's what worked, here's what didn't, and here's what I learned."

Unfortunately, this is the former. I'd be interested in reading the latter if you wrote something up about your experience with this.

Re:Twelve Go Best Practices on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @12:05PM (#6134732)
"Deploy one-off utility types for simpler code" can be called a monad or Optional. I wonder if the language developers will add more formal support for that; it looks impossible to add Optional as a library due to lack of user-configurable generics.
The AnandTech link in the article says they found the string "BenchmarkBooster" in the apk alongside the class names of several well-known benchmarks.

http://anandtech.com/show/7187/looking-at-cpugpu-benchmark-o...

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/06/go...

"Google Lawsuit Challenges N.S.A. Domestic-Spying Apparatus"

the first hit on google for "google nsa lawsuit"

Re:Google flights on Tuesday July 02, 2013 @04:08PM (#5980414)
I'm surprised at your result - Google Flights was effectively instant on the routes I tried, while on those same routes dohop.com had a progress bar that took over ten seconds to complete.
Re:Google+ Games is shutting down on Thursday May 16, 2013 @07:20PM (#5721845)
You probably didn't. They had desktop ebook software (can't find a link describing it at the moment) pre-Kindle that was phased out due to low usage.
Re:Google+ Games is shutting down on Thursday May 16, 2013 @04:10PM (#5720853)
The "shut it down, you lose all your stuff, and we're starting over" strategy worked for Amazon and ereaders (result: Kindle), but hasn't so much for Microsoft and music (result: Zune marketplace).
Re:What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support? on Thursday May 16, 2013 @12:19PM (#5719423)
Google does not sell your data. http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/

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