mgillett

I used to have this problem with my Plugable dock and managed to permanently fix it by changing the orientation of the USB-C cable. The pins are not perfectly symmetric, and some devices don't handle one orientation correctly. You might have luck experimenting with the rotation.

One that I heard last week: There is an 8x8 checkerboard in a room with a coin placed on each square. Each coin is either facing heads or tails up, and the face is determined randomly. Before you can inspect the board, a "master" comes in, picks a square of interest, and must make a manipulation to the board by flipping one of the 64 coins. He then exits the room. You are now allowed to enter, and must read out which square of interest the master chose by inspecting the state of the board. There is a strategy that is guaranteed to work for all possible configurations of the board.

I have the same gripe. Think about giving Switch (https://github.com/numist/Switch) a try. Cmd+Tab still functions as normal, but Opt+Tab (you can change the default keybinding) will allow you to cycle through all available windows on a single desktop.

Not a perfect solution, but it's a big improvement imo over Cmd+`.

Only tangentially related to the article, but I have to commend this guy on his design chops. The new Quizlet site is fantastic. Great job Anand!

I'm pretty sure it has to do with local laws covering disclosure of viewing records. The reason this is now possible in the US is that Netflix just managed to get Congress pass an amendment to the VPPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act). This feature disappeared three years ago because someone sued them over an alleged violation of this law.

Really glad you find it useful, and you're completely right that I need a section on compatibility. The nice thing is that for browsers that don't support Blobs, Amazon allows you to just upload the file as one giant chunk with the same multipart API. I'm not absolutely sure yet (I still need to do some testing), but this should mean that browsers versions as far back as IE 5 will work - only basic XHR compatibility will be required to function. I'm planning on covering as many browsers as possible, I just haven't found a great way to go about this yet. Is there a better option than http://spoon.net/browsers/?

I just think that very much depends on the field and the problem domain. Taverna seems like it's more targeted towards academics that don't know how to code, and that most people that use it are comfortable staying within its limits. I mean, you definitely are going to have a level of project specificity that is much higher than say, that found in the web development world. In science, many people are searching for the existence of new problems, not just the answers. Why build a gem for email integration if the next best method of communication will likely come out next week? The problem with this thinking is that it perpetuates itself. I don't write the library that only you would find useful because I don't think it's worth my time. In return, I never receive anything useful because everyone else has adopted that same mindset. As some others pointed out, I think the problem rests in the lack of best practices and poor comp sci education among researchers. Teach proper library construction and test-driven philosophy, and I think you'll see a lot more people become comfortable writing and publishing libraries. Cobble together some basic documentation, keep an eye on its use, and contribute more accordingly. You're never going to escape writing custom scripts, but there are more well-defined problems out there that could use standard solutions.

This is what turns me off so much from academia. Is this really that typical at most universities? I know that there's always been a large emphasis placed on publishing in high-impact journals (and often), but isn't the open publishing movement beginning to have an effect, albiet rather small?

I think this is more a comment on how the system is broken. Researchers should be notified of new libraries in their area. At the very least, they should be able to consult a single site that everyone uploads their code to (think Github for science with more emphasis on exploration). Academic journals are not the only channels carrying useful information.

Really like the concept and the product feels great. I'm curious as to why voice chat was not included though. Is that planned in an upcoming release, because it seems like a pretty big setback. You may not be fighting over a single cursor anymore, but you're still fighting for control, and it's hard to coordinate that without talking to one another. I don't want to have to use up additional resources by entering a Skype chat either.

I think what's so great about Dropbox is that they don't really have a focus. They do synchronization, and they're superb at it.

It seems to me that Dropbox is trying to change how customers perceive them and that managing photos is just the first step. Until recently, I think they've largely been viewed as a handy service to share files quickly between friends and across devices. There are a certainly a lot of exotic use cases for their product, and some other commenters have touched on specific ones, but the average person doesn't take advantage of them (or have them). If Dropbox can position itself as a base to store and share photos, videos, music, etc (notice the range of sharing options in the top right of the iPad in the blog post) they can give users peace of mind and easy access to content that is now strewn across several services and not carefully curated in other storage solutions.

I think he's talking about a data breach or an untrustworthy middleman.