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What's wrong with assuming the customer is a criminal if the big majority of your customers are, in fact, criminals? (Presuming that by "customer" you just mean "person playing your game.")

The question should be: how do you account for the fact that your customers are criminals and still make money without crippling your game? Putting useful features online is a good answer to that question.
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I would disagree about not needing >2GB of ram, but other than that - SSDs rock.
That's actually not always true. Check out the reddit thread on this topic, and you'll see plenty of people who pirated first and then actually bought it. I know plenty of pirates use the "I try before I buy" line, but some of them actually do. You're right on your second sentence, but do you have anything whatsoever to back up your first?
It's almost like you need a anti-spam filter program for google to remove all the spam/farm sites from the results.

I wonder why google can't store a list of results I simply never want returned.
The iPod Touch is successful specifically because it is a non-phone device that resembles a really hip phone. It appeals to many people who are not interested in paying for a high-end service plan.

So here's the underlying question: Why is it that no Android handset or Blackberry is made available without the cellular equipment ? What's special about the iPhone/Touch that it can hack it as a lifestyle gadget?

(P.S. Samsung Galaxy Tab doesn't count. It's not even close to the same form factor as the Galaxy S.)
I'd pay GBP 5/month for premium - ie, phone access - but GBP 10 is too much. An ad-hoc survey of my friends show most of them are in the same boat.
These are anecdotes, not real data.
Yes! I've seen a demo of WebGL used in medical imaging:
http://imaging.robarts.ca/~dcantor/?p=133

3D medical data sets, from PET scans and such, are indeed huge in size. Typically GB's of voxel data. The sort of thing that requires an overnight download unfortunately.

One possible optimization is to recreate the 3D vertex set from a series of 2D texture images, by interpolating vertex positions between frames. Surprisingly only a small subset of images is needed to recreate the resulting 3D geometry, but the tessellation calculations are pretty math intensive.
On my Ubuntu machine, I rarely use more than 1GB (apart from the disk cache, of course, which can fill all remaining memory. Note: windows only has an 8MB cache)
At least Google has a policy of you owning your data, and of making it easy to grab all your data so you can move to other services.

So if they ran something like Facebook it would be much easier to compete with them outside of their ecosystem, unlike Facebook which tries to dominate all data submitted into their system.
What if it doesn't really make sense to add online or multiplayer support to the app/game? Then isn't it just the typical DRM anti-feature?

I'd be pretty annoyed if I couldn't play my fun new game on a plane because it needs to constantly connect to the internet to prove I didn't steal it.
I'm very curious to try this out. I didn't use Twitter until I discovered Tweetie, since the website was just too much manual labor. The UI is such a crucial piece of the Twitter experience so I hope this will be a nice, big boost for Twitter.

Another big thing is that the ecosystem is feeding back into twitter.com now. Apps aren't just built on top of what Twitter puts out, but Twitter also pulls that information back in. This has a lot of potential that goes beyond what Facebook can do with it's walled gardens.
Back when my company was using our analytics to track piracy for iPhone applications, we found that 1 out of 243 people who stole an application later installed a legitimate copy.

We stopped tracking piracy when we realized that we were getting into a cat-and-mouse game with application pirates and the feature wasn't worth the resources, but I can't imagine these stats have changed much since.
How does it handle a restaurant with mutliple locations (if I own a chain of 5 restaurants, etc)?

Do I have to create a new menu for each physical restaurant location?

What if I have a smaller selection at one of my 5 locations?
If you're wondering what AR.Drone is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgqmJyFpWDM&feature=fvw
anime characters clearly aren't black though
What pain point does your app address, exactly?

There is a difference between providing something that seems interesting and cool and actually making a point of frustration go away.

In my opinion, it's highly likely that your app doesn't solve any real problem that people have right now. It's executed well, it's clear at what it provides, but it is unclear as to why this is a benefit to me as a user.
Can you qualify the "Windows only has an 8MB cache" bit?

Of course on Microsoft Windows it uses all available memory, quite effectively. If you have copious RAM you get far-better-than-SSD "read speeds" when reopening applications (which is a typical behavior, cycling between a small universe of applications), presuming your computing lifestyle is that your computer is never turned off...e.g. you put it to S3 sleep during off time.
Maybe that's just what is going on? He is rolling his own for what ever reason and decided to release it. Python is used pretty heavily in science, having taken the place of Perl as language of choice. Doing science can produce massive data sets that often need heavy and complex processing.

I'm a short walk from an university with a Linux cluster for crunching astronomical data for example. Lots of signal analysis goes on there.
Will this work in current browsers?
We don't, actually. We have http://google.com/path/ . The URI scheme, the 'http:// part, that is, is actually meaningless and could be replaced with shorter and meaningful 'web:', which was, I believe, the main point of a poster you were replying to.
"If the Japanese really perceive white people to have large eyes, then you would expect to see white people in anime to have larger eyes than Asian characters. That's not the case."

chinese people often have slits for eyes
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And how many of those people would have bought the application if it wasn't available to pirate? I'm guessing it would still be a much smaller number. There's a massive gap between being able to get something for completely free and having to pay for it.
Maybe it can play the similar role in the MapReduce field like Sqlite in the Database world?
Be that as it may, can you see that it's legitimate for a musician to want to make, record, and sell music - not an associated industry of products? And there are fans who don't go to concerts or buy t-shirts, but really like listening to music? If you're a fan like that, and you don't give back to the artist at some point, you're making it less likely that the recordings you want will be made in the future.

Notice that I'm not throwing around moral claims. I'm just making an observation. If you want something to be made, and it costs time and money to make, you can encourage its creation or not. But don't complain that the music selection sucks if you don't financially support the music you like.
Where do you find good developers in Philippines? They are 10x cheaper but they are 10x worse and take 10x more time. I'd like to know your opinion on that.
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It still amazes me that Amazon bought Stanza (which powers O'Reilly books on iOS). Stanza's still going strong though.

http://ireaderreview.com/2009/04/27/kindle-vs-stanza-amazon-...
Not yet. They did mention in the comments that they would try and integrate it back into webkit.

There is also a link in the comments to a new issue for the chromium project of them adding in "device" support: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=55377
We're trying to address two pain points:

1) For consumers outside of NY and SF (which seem to be covered by menupages.com), there is no searchable menu database. Since their acquisition by NY Magazine, menupages appears to have little/no growth plans.

2) For restaurateurs, we aim to solve the difficulty of getting menu content online in a conventional way by providing simple, free menu content management.

Point number 1 can be difficult to see for folks outside of the top few major metro areas, but there is honestly no other solution currently in place if you want to search for "salmon in downtown Denver".
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Was surprised to hear OSX doesn't support TRIM. Does anyone know why? I was gettin all excited about getting a new SSD for my MBP, but now I'm not so sure...
I've bought games/cds/movies after pirating them and enjoying them. I in no way represent everyone, but in my mind I see pirating as a trial period or satisfaction guarantee in a way. If I enjoy it, they deserve compensation so they can go on making others things I enjoy.
There's not really very much revisiting, as opposed to repetition. What's new: (1) Atwood recommends the Crucial RealSSD C300 (citing a couple of reviews). (2) Seagate have a reasonably priced hybrid SSD/spinning-rust drive, the Momentus XT, which according to AnandTech has good performance. (It uses 4GB of flash as a read cache; performance is intermediate between typical HD and typical SSD.)
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Well, if I'm the (non-criminal) customer and you're the game producer, what's wrong with it is that you're making your problem my problem. It isn't, it shouldn't be and I'm not going to let it be (and no, I don't pirate, I just don't buy stuff I dislike).
"Googlers seem to love to tackle hard problems (e.g. Wave and Instant search) but social networks are not a hard problem from an engineer point of view."

So the mentality goes: there's no motivation to come up with the next best social network, unless it can also simultaneously calculate the interconnectedness of every human being on this planet...
No. But they say they'll submit their code back into webkit as fast as they can. So hopefully soon!
Having Omar die also allowed them to emphasise the whole thing starting over again and nothing really changing - Michael taking Omar's place, Dukie taking Bubble's and so on.
Thats a very valid point. Hadoop does a lot more than handle the basic logic of MapReduce (which btw, is not terribly complicated). Fault tolerance, preemptive duplication of tasks in case of unexpected slowness, etc. are all part of the ugliness that Hadoop takes care of on large clusters.

That said, I can see this being useful for prototyping MapReduce code quickly in Python without going through the hassle of setting up Hadoop and coding in Java.
This is a potential weakness of our current implementation.

Because we are aiming at independently-owned restaurants, we have kept each entry separate. This means you do have to create a new menu for each location. We have plans to allow for menu-sharing for multiple locations, but I do want to keep the focus away from "chains". Defining exactly what constitutes a chain can be a gray area, though.
I only somewhat agree with the blog post you linked to.

The problem with webapps is it makes it extra easy for closed source vendors to just lock all your data way just to be dicks.

For example, look what happens when your Google account is locked... there goes all your mail, all your stuff in Reader, all your stuff in Docs, no more posting on Groups, etc etc etc. Now, imagine if Google was evil.

The only way for webapps to flourish on the web in the way mobile users would need, licenses like AGPL would have to become the norm, and downloading your data to use offline would also have to become the norm.

Plus, some things simply don't make sense as a webapp, such as applications that have large data sets (such as games). Until HTML5 offline storage starts actually working, theres no fix here.
That's why I said "without crippling the game." You're right, though; most developers will make their problem your problem, either to a small degree (by making sure that some useful things are only accessible for authenticated online clients) or a large degree (requiring always-on connectivity, nutty DRM schemes.)

I don't think there's really anything "wrong" with that, though. It's not very fair, but that's how the world works. Given that people are going to continue to try making money from games, it seems like an optimal outcome.
I haven't smoked in years because it doesn't agree with me anymore, but when I did, the stuff from Mexico tended to be lower quality. The good stuff was usually local and grown with care. Think industrial versus local produce.
The illiquidity premium?
My problem with this article is that he basically asks us to assume what he wants to demonstrate:

"Anyone who believes that repealing the corporate income tax, the capital gains tax, and the death/gift tax would not increase economic growth by at least 0.12 percentage points needs to consult a psychiatrist, not an economist."

Edit: The more I think about it, this analysis is silly. Sure, a sustained increase in GDP growth rate will dominate a decreased tax rate in the long term. Unfortunately, what happens during the "me and/or my kids are still alive" term matters. For example in his "you're insane if you don't believe it" scenario where a 3% decrease in tax rate leads to a .12% sustained increase in economic growth, the government would take in less revenue for the first 150 years. In his "what I'd like to believe" scenario with the 3% cut and a .26% sustained growth increase, it would only take like 70 years to break even.

Nice try.
That's why the Minecraft creator's solution is sane. He does not block any features without network access. But some features only make sense with network access.
My daughter started playing around with Paint when she was 8. When she mastered that, she turned to more sophisticated programs (PaintShop Pro, etc.) and eventually to photo editing.

I wouldn't get my hopes up about "changing someone's life", though-- kids that age go through interests pretty quickly, in my experience. Some stick, some don't. Don't push the river. Just give them room to explore, and try to answer questions as they come up.
So, it's not fair but there's nothing wrong with it? I don't think we have the same definition of the word "wrong".
Where do the Woodhill Curve figures come from? The article just asserts them as facts, without indicating how they were derived.
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Life is shaped by our mind. We become what we think. (c) some smart guy around 2500 years ago.

The longer explanation - everything is connected not because it is predestined, but because by a cause and effect. So processes in the mind are affecting bodily processes, and opposite, of course, is true at the exactly same time.

The same guy, btw, taught that the cause of suffering is ignorance - not knowing your own nature.
I guess we don't.
Actually, the search for "the most efficient coin system" is kinda pointless -- if you are as advanced to discover and implement such a system, you are certainly advanced enough to implement and use a cashless system based on digital payment transactions...
That is indeed ironic. I've never heard of Filipinos complementing on how tan someone is, though there is a certain shade of tan called "kayumangi" that sort of exemplifies "Filipino Beauty." Filipino views on the various shades of skin color can get kind of confusing.
Nice but not having loops in the templates makes for too poor a language. Still seeing it in action it looks quite fast.
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> And there are fans who don't go to concerts or buy t-shirts, but really like listening to music?

While buying music is one solution, another approach is donating to the artist. (And with easy piracy, both amount to the same thing modulo middle-man.)
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Yes, the point opposed to statement-less templates is the speed, but I'm quite happy for the result :-)
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I understand the perceptual difference (it's annoying when features that are already there are "taken away," and less annoying when new features just don't appear.) But is there an actual difference? The time he's spent on network-dependent features may have been spent on other, more interesting features for everyone if the networked features didn't also serve as piracy prophylaxis.
Or both ways. Somebody with a strong spirit of independence will insist on walking on their own, thus keeping them fit and independent.
Does anyone know how to get Linux to support TRIM? I just reformatted my SSD and would hate for it to become slower just because of deallocated blocks.
To answer the question of why is the service slow to gain traction: While it is a useful service, and I have this pain point, it doesn't come very often. Perhaps this is because I don't eat out much, but I would say I only could use a service like this maybe once per month. It's not quite like email or messaging, that people need to access several times per day.
Agreed. That (youtube) method may be better for non-musical people who haven't actually learned but... if they spent the time learning to read music they'd find it far better.
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Ah, my point was just that if the users don't like the photos they take, they're not going to upload them.
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But it seems he was corrupt even before he attained much power...
It's a revisited taxation on a gullible readership, many affiliate links there covering all budget points.

My PC has both a standard, non-hybrid magnetic disk for volume, and a very, very fast SSD for speed. I use the SSD for development and, humorously, Steam games. It's nice, but given that I have 8GB of RAM and most everything I touch regularly is cached...and I virtually never turn my PC entirely off (S3 sleep is your friend)...outside of database tests it just doesn't make that much of a difference.
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As somebody who makes a living selling software, I do not consider the author getting paid a minor feature. Apologies for the inconvenience, take it up with 80% of your generation.
i've been using this for large ajax driven web apps and websites. saved tons of time.
Agreed. But does it matter? Live a more challenging life and shape the world around you is the takeaway.
I hear you. Even when I do want to go out and eat, I find that it's much more likely that I am wondering "where should I go?" rather than "what's on xyz's menu?"

Because of this, we recently added a new feature where "foodies" can recommend restaurants and dishes to make it much more effective to browse area restaurants.

Would a feature like this make you any more likely to use the service?
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Counterpoint: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2007/11/07/2003999607...
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This is an extension of Mayank Lahiri's "9 line perl script" that allowed you to checkin on FourSquare at any location regardless of where you are:
http://compbio.cs.uic.edu/~mayank/4sq.html

I reimplemented it in Java and threw an OK-looking GUI on top of it for anyone that wanted to mess around with the hack but didn't know Perl or how to get the original Perl script running (a few folks mentioned that to me).

The source code and original project are all available under the GPL. If anyone comes up with anything cooler or becomes the mayor of some place hilarious, let me know :)
Both, for purely pragmatic reasons. I don't really care about the history of the pronunciation, I just want to be understood. So to reduce confusion, in conversations with other developers I generally just use whatever everyone else seems to be using.

If it's just me speaking, I get to choose -- in that case I start off with "Sequel", for the tiny reason that it rolls off the tongue a bit more easily (hey, it's one less syllable!).
Thank you for bringing data into the discussion.
I'm maybe 15 years behind the current trends but all games I've ever bought (when I was still buying games...) were carefully screened and test played using pirated sources. Piracy has always been the de facto news channel for new games: not magazines or demo disks. You had the game coming from your friends first and you saw it weeks or months later in a magazine.

Investing actually money into something as brittle and vague as a video game simply requires that I certainly know what I'm buying. Thus, the title must either be a few-in-a-decade known hit or tested with a pirated version.

If the situation is even remotely like that these days, game publishers are making their money because of piracy, not despite of it.
Yeah, I get it.

But it stinks that developers now have a bias towards online features (because they combat piracy) instead of potential offline features that are more useful or better serve customers.
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Ask HN: Automation to monitor and control AWS usage?
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They should have also made a higher tier price. Some people would have paid that because they love the game, and what is the big difference between $5.99 and $9.99 if you are in a wealthy country and have a full-time job?
Mincemeat.py actually does do fault tolerance and preemptive duplication. I'm trying to get it to handle all of the MapReduce logic (and reliability, security, etc.) without the extra burdens of setting up a distributed file system (the machines I've been running it on have a hefty NFS share, which is good enough for most purposes), preallocation of the machines that will be part of the cluster (my university uses Condor, which spawns processes randomly across a large cluster), etc.
Interesting. I didn't notice the affiliate links the first time and then when I did look, I saw domain names like kqzyfj.com. What purpose does it serve to hide the fact that it's an affiliate link behind a disposable domain name? Are there things like Firefox extensions that would search for "commissionjunction.com" and replace it with non-affiliate links?
Interesting.

This kind of "differential pricing by gentle emotional blackmail" approach seems to work for those who can establish more of a convincingly personal relationship with the customer. Or which at least on a broad economic scale feels like a relationship of equals.

As he points out, bigger orgs tend to fall back on the more traditional and distanced means of differential pricing (sales, selectively-targetted vouchers, student discounts etc)