rcamera
Re:Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002
on Thursday October 29, 2015 @09:19AM (#10470729)
I have used pretty much all MS operating systems as well, except windows 10, and I remember how windows XP felt "too colourful and distracting" when it first came out (with those very bright green grassy hills wallpaper, along with green and blue taskbar), how Vista's start menu was so slow when compared to XP, how windows 7 grouping of programs in the task bar, showing only the program's icon, was painful, or how terrible windows 8 entire user experience was.
While many engineers have a lot of nostalgia for old stuff, much of it is not displaced. Interfaces got a lot better, for those people who are not completely acquainted with computers. But power users, such as many engineers, still use terminals and other tools that while less intuitive, are much more powerful.
Re:A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers
on Monday April 06, 2015 @11:12AM (#9328453)
This isn't theory, it is a concrete example of content creators who make content and make a living with absolutely zero advertisement. If you need yet another example, LWN ( http://lwn.net ) runs mostly on subscriptions, instead of ads (90% of their revenue is subscriptions).
People won't pay for bad/terrible content, that is the hard truth.
Re:Ask HN: Is the Blackphone worth the price for its security features?
on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @11:55PM (#9182510)
I actually bought one two weeks ago after my 6 years old smartphone died. I still haven't picked it up (shipped it to the US, getting there next week only), but it arrived at my friend's house with no problem. From all I read before making the purchase, it is a good phone, not hacker-proof though, as there is no such thing as a secure computer. But on the other hand, their development team has been extremely fast in patching bugs and pushing fixes.
Also, for those claiming that it is still uses insecure baseband chips and firmwares, the phone comes with Silent Circle suite apps which allows you to make end-to-end encrypted calls and messages, so even if you have a flawed baseband chip, it was built so you could have secure calls and messages through wifi, 3g or 4g, without worrying about the security vulnerabilities of those chips.
Re:Hackers Who Shut Down PSN and Xbox Live Now Attacking Tor
on Friday December 26, 2014 @04:54PM (#8800563)
There is a clear explanation in the same thread as to why LizardNSA's actions of adding bandwidth to the network isn't good, and in fact, potentially dangerous (not very dangerous at this moment of writing):
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-Decembe...
Re:Hackers Who Shut Down PSN and Xbox Live Now Attacking Tor
on Friday December 26, 2014 @04:07PM (#8800381)
Tor Devs haven't made any announcement yet, there is, however, a discussion about it on the mailing list:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-Decembe...
If you use Tor, I would follow the suggestion by another member of the mailing list [1], simply add to your torrc file:
ExcludeNodes US
StrictNodes 1
[1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-Decembe...
Re:Show HN: An MMO twist on Battleship where you bet Bitcoins
on Thursday October 30, 2014 @01:31PM (#8534418)
It crashed my Firefox a few times, randomly, apparently. I managed to play a few rounds, but for no apparent reason it just crashed without any error being displayed. On FF 33 on Linux.
EDIT: it stopped crashing when I disabled sounds and other people's ships.
Re:Tor Browser 4.0 is released
on Thursday October 16, 2014 @07:00PM (#8468388)
I didn't have the guts to deal with all the possible legal problems that an exit relay could spawn, and no lawyers I could find could help me with that question.
I suggest you run a non-exit relay instead, like I did for almost a year (at home). About to put it up again, after 3 months offline, now that I got better hardware to do it. Didn't have any trouble from my ISP, which was Tim, but I think that the biggest reason for that is that they are new in the business and they are trying to make things as painless as possible. It was a heavy traffic relay, I was limiting it to 4gb per day up/down bandwidth, which is quite alot, and never heard any complaints from Tim.
Re:Chapter Two of Peter Thiel's New Book
on Monday September 15, 2014 @03:17PM (#8320838)
Thank you for talking to Peter and sharing this.
For those interested in more, Blake (the co-author from the book) took Peter Thiel's CS183 class in Stanford, and has class notes freely available on his blog (the notes generated the idea for the book, from my understanding):
http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup
I highly recommend the book.
Re:Yes, we’re being bought by Microsoft
on Monday September 15, 2014 @02:53PM (#8320663)
My mistake to point out, it is the best selling PC game of all time.
Re:What the Brazilian Startup Ecosystem Needs to Succeed
on Monday September 15, 2014 @01:28PM (#8320104)
I agree with you that startups in Brazil should focus on the internal market first. But Rudi also has a point that for many of the startups here, very few look past Brazil's borders, loosing relevance and being exposed to external competitors once they consolidated their markets outside.
Brazil is rather expensive and an extremely bureaucratic place to start a company in, so there is less competition when starting up. That is the only advantage of starting a business here, so doing one but focusing on the outside market before you validate a business model isn't optimal, you would be better off starting in the US instead.
Re:Yes, we’re being bought by Microsoft
on Monday September 15, 2014 @12:48PM (#8319881)
The thing is that what makes Minecraft strong is its community, unlike Halo. You won't see Minecraft succeeding at being Windows exclusive, or by making Minecraft 2, 3 or 4. There is a plethora of community mods made and being made for MC, you won't see that happening for any sequel, not at the same level.
Re:Yes, we’re being bought by Microsoft
on Monday September 15, 2014 @09:19AM (#8318600)
I have been trying to understand why Microsoft would buy Minecraft. Even though Minecraft is really important, and wildly successful, but the price tag for a game studio with one successful game is rather odd, considering it is unlikely Minecraft will sell millions of copies more (it is already the most sold game ever made). This is a long shot, but it may explain it:
If Microsoft is trying to build its own Steam competitor (which given Valve's current strategy to make Linux an alternative gaming platform to Windows, makes sense), then Minecraft is the perfect acquisition to start it up, for a number of reasons. It is the best selling video game of all time, with over 15 million copies sold for the PC (54 million copies across all platforms), and it has over 100 million accounts registered. It is possibly the only successful indie game that has never integrated with Steam, and that has a very young userbase (based on my experience) which, given their ages, probably isn't part of Steam's userbase. All of these aspects make it a great strategic acquisition if Microsoft wants to make a new and successful game marketplace and platform for Windows.
Anyone else has any other idea why the 2.5 billion price tag?
Re:Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang
on Wednesday September 10, 2014 @09:00AM (#8296324)
If Microsoft is trying to build its own Steam competitor (which given Valve's current strategy to make Linux an alternative gaming platform to Windows, makes sense), then Minecraft is the perfect acquisition to start it up, for a number of reasons.
Minecraft is the best selling video game of all time, with over 15 million copies sold for the PC (54 million copies across all platforms), and it has over 100 million accounts registered. It is possibly the only successful indie game that has never integrated with Steam, and that has a very young userbase (based on my experience) which, given their ages, probably isn't part of Steam's userbase. All of these aspects make it a great strategic acquisition if Microsoft wants to make a new and successful game marketplace and platform for Windows.
Re:Developers: stop re-AOLizing the web!
on Thursday July 03, 2014 @09:25AM (#7982897)
K-9 mail on Android uses IMAP and it creates new folders, as well as archive my email to my "Archive" folder without a problem. There should be absolutely no reason a mail application couldn't use IMAP to communicate with mail servers.
Re:The next version of DuckDuckGo
on Monday May 05, 2014 @05:29PM (#7701408)
Having been using DDG as my primary search engine for pretty much 6 years now, I really disliked the new redesign.
As mentioned in another comment, the contrast is really bad, I find it hard to read and focus on a given result. This is much worse when using f.lux.
I also disliked the left-align on everything, I rather have it centered as it currently is. When using big widescreen monitors there is a lot of whitespace in the middle of the screen and the results show up all the way to the lower left corner... It is pretty uncomfortable to look all the way there and this makes it harder on the contrast part too because there is so much bright light already coming from the background and the font color is a light greyish. This is specially worse in multi-monitor setups.
The image and video search tabs are great, and I really like the fact they replace zero-click results when you click on them, but I wouldn't leave them in the fixed header, there is just no need for them to be there. This would reduce the size of the fixed header and make it even better.
When scrolling results using j and k, the greyish background it adds to each result makes the contrast even worse. I remember when they were yellowish, they were better back then, imo. But current design works too. I also miss the current border around it, it makes it much easier for you to find yourself if you are switching tabs and going back to the results page. I haven't measured, but the font also seems a couple pixels smaller, is it?
It is also harder to distinguish between results. It all seems like a blob of text, hard to skim through results looking just at the title. In the current design this is fantastically easy, given titles are blue. I only read stuff below the title if the title is of interest. In the new design this is much harder to do, there is not enough contrast between the title and the text under it. Keep it blue, there is absolutely no reason to change this.
Re:Eve-Online player loses a $9000 digital spaceship
on Wednesday July 10, 2013 @08:10AM (#6018931)
Some background facts, there is only 3 of those ships in-game so far (iirc). That one belonged to the best mercenary alliance in-game, Pandemic Legion (PL for short), which are very notorious for having the best and largest spying network in-game (EVE metagaming is pretty unique), some of the best players and are not only one of the richest alliances, but one that has many of the largest ships in-game.
That guy, with a few other corporation mates, were trying to hunt some enemies who were in expensive ships (not a 9k dollars ship though), while there was an entire fleet from Black Legion, another alliance, trying to hunt that guy.
There are two fun facts to all of this... Pandemic Legion has 12 spies in Black Legion, and many of the people online during that time in PL knew that Black Legion were trying to hunt something (they just didn't know what). That guy lost his very expensive ship because he didn't make use of the spy network PL has, by not asking people if there was anyone trying to hunt him. The second fun fact is that the commander of the fleet that guy in the expensive ship was in, was actually a spy for Black Legion! He commanded the fleet right into a death trap. EVE metagaming is pretty unique.
Re:Why should we believe that Snowden is in the Moscow airport?
on Monday July 01, 2013 @09:59AM (#5970647)
There is no point in discussing this, as this entire thread will be based on assumptions and not facts. The only 'fact' one could get would be a picture of Snowden in Russia or someplace else dated very recently, but if there was such picture, it would be in the news already.
Re:Why should we believe that Snowden is in the Moscow airport?
on Monday July 01, 2013 @09:52AM (#5970586)
You start talking about Snowden, but then switched the topic to information freedom and privacy.
Anything about Snowden appears to be on-topic to me. No, his sex life, what he eats, how he sleeps, all those personal aspects don't matter, what matters is the leaks, and discussing where the person who disclosed them is at the moment is pretty useless because this will be an entire discussion based on assumptions and I think this or I think that...
Now, if you want to discuss about information freedom or privacy issues or the leaks, this thread has nothing to do about it.
Re:Why should we believe that Snowden is in the Moscow airport?
on Monday July 01, 2013 @09:24AM (#5970418)
This is quite irrelevant to Hacker News. Please read the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Re:"Programmer. Come Work For Us"
on Tuesday May 14, 2013 @10:41AM (#5705135)
"Programmer: I'll be forced to learn things outside of programming. Things like how to design, how to market and how to do customer service.
MBA: But you, are a programmer.
Programmer: I'm also a person. Programming is just one thing I do."
I graduated in business administration, and when I tell people I can actually code and have been learning how to do it for the past few years, I mostly get blank stares, which is sometimes followed by the question: "why do you learn it if you ain't a programmer? You should hire a programmer instead."
They don't get it when I explain that the programmer I would need to do the work I want done wouldn't need me as much as I would need him. They also question me why didn't I graduate in something related to programming instead of BA, as if studying something outside of your area of expertise is waste.
Re:This page is anonymous
on Thursday May 02, 2013 @08:14AM (#5643917)
If keeping your identity anonymous is your goal, there is no better example than Satoshi Nakamoto, that managed to create Bitcoin, run and manage the project for almost couple years, mine a bunch of coins and still remain completely anonymous.
You need a great deal of fore-planning, but it's certainly doable and there is probably no bigger unspoken bounty on an anonymous user's head than Satoshi's, to prove the point.
Also, for those thinking of finding out his identity through text analysis of his writings (you can view about 500 posts of his in the forums archive, iirc), from my experience reading them (though not actually analyzing through proper tools), he seems to deliberately always use the simplest words and short sentences.
Re:A scientific accident that could change the world
on Sunday March 24, 2013 @07:10PM (#5434260)
You have no control of the layer thickness through this process, and their supercapacitor design actually uses the graphite oxide that isn't turned into graphite as an insulator between the graphene sheets (their supercapacitor is planar, it does not use multiple layers). So no, while you can get graphene from a pencil and sticky tape, that's useless for this application.
Re:A scientific accident that could change the world
on Sunday March 24, 2013 @07:05PM (#5434233)
The supercapacitor they created is planar, you don't need to layer multiple sheets, you just need to print it then deposit the gel-like electrolyte and put it together with some copper tape and klapton tape. It's written/explained in their paper:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6074/1326.abstract
Re:A scientific accident that could change the world
on Sunday March 24, 2013 @07:02PM (#5434214)
Their paper [1] show that it is actually quite simple, glue a PET layer to the CD, then deposit graphite oxide solution and let it dry overnight, to then put it in the lightscribe drive. They also explain how the supercapacitor is built with the electrolyte and how to make the electrolyte yourself, the hardest part from what I've read is actually getting graphite oxide.
[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6074/1326.abstract
Re:A scientific accident that could change the world
on Sunday March 24, 2013 @06:59PM (#5434205)
The professors who found this actually wrote a paper [1] explaining every step that they did to create their supercapacitor, including the formula for the gel-like electrolyte they used. The biggest problem I've found to making this at home is getting graphite oxide. They are expensive on the net (google it, not linking any store because I don't know any trustworthy), or hard to make (the usual method requires strong oxiders like sulfuric acid) [2]. There is a bottom-up approach to making them, that uses glucose [3], but I have no idea how hard it is, I need help from someone more knowledgeable in Chemistry before I try it. So if you want to really try this out, read those papers.
[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6074/1326.abstract [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene_oxide [3] http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2012/JM/c2jm15...
Evgeny Morozov: 'We are abandoning all the checks and balances'
Re:What Coke Contains
on Saturday March 02, 2013 @04:29PM (#5311155)
Pressure is the same on both ends, and the bottom of the can is already thicker than the sides of it. The top of the can is thicker than the sides, but thinner than the bottom, because you need to be able to open the can easily. So in order to make it thinner than the bottom but at least as strong, you use a different alloy.
Re:Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33
on Thursday February 28, 2013 @06:36AM (#5298186)
I had this sort of issue. Back in 2010 I had mined a hundred coins (CPU mined, back in those days, lol). A month ago I decided to find the wallet file, took me 2 hours to search 5 HDDs with multiple partitions each from my old computers...
I fixed this problem now by printing the keys out, storing them securely in a safe and deleting the wallet files.