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I doubt it. RMS uses some laptop specifically because the processor is open source. From his wiki page: "Stallman's only computer is a Lemote Yeeloong netbook (using the same company's Loongson processor) which he chose because it can run with 100% free software even at the BIOS level, stating "freedom is my priority. I've campaigned for freedom since 1983, and I am not going to surrender that freedom for the sake of a more convenient computer."[57] Lemote is a joint venture of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an institution of the State Council of China."
The problem is that binary-only drivers are in privileged locations and frequently cause OS kernel problems. As they're binary only, they've basically undebuggable, and frequently nonportable to other systems.

OpenBSD is very strong on this, and often has drivers that are blob-free when other OS's don't: http://onlamp.com/bsd/2006/04/27/openbsd-3_9.html

This isn't restricted only to free OS's either - nearly 30% of Vista crashes were attributed to buggy nVidia drivers:

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/03/vista-capable-l...

In short, if you want a system you can at least have a chance at fixing when it breaks, you need the source code to your drivers.

This case in particular is a firmware load into a 3rd party chip, which isn't usually as bad a a binary driver, but can be a hassle if there are restrictions on distribution of the firmware.
I might be missing something, but how will the stores prevent theft? Will I have to show my receipt to a salesperson after checking myself out?
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Agreed! Was more impressed with the nav, but that's probably because I'm on old hardware/slow connection so the slideshow was very sluggish for me.
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I had an idea the other day when trying to think of a costume idea for my friend. You could do it.

For each costume, break it down into its components.

Clark Kent: black glasses, superman t-shirt, fake press pass, black suit. (Basically just tags)

Then allow someone to input all the random crap they have laying around their house and you can tell them which costumes they can create from that random crap.

It's like an ingredient based recipe search engine, but for costumes. http://allrecipes.com/Search/Ingredients.aspx
They got bought out nineteen years ago; it's not the "once mighty Origin Systems," it's a trademark that EA owns becoming attached to a product.
Does anyone have an idea what the start up scene in Africa looks like?
Brand Necrophilia.
Thanks for the feedback, someone else mentioned this too.. so clearly its something I should address. And here I was thinking it was obvious :) I wonder if G+'s 'hangout' feature being a webcam thing made you think it could be as well?
Agree with this. Was disappointed the guide didn't delve into asynchronous even at a basic level. This is what makes nodejs and mongodb worth using and I don't think the concepts are overly difficult to grasp.
Are you saying that in about 5 years of working at Apple, you've only ever heard words about Steve Jobs that were "suffused with narcissism and loathing"?
So Apple's potential use of self-checkout is being viewed as some amazing move? If this is the case, my local chain drugstore and supermarket are brilliant because they have had this in place for the last two years. I guess if they were employing some sort of NFC/pay-with-your-handset technology that could be considered something, but I don't see any mention of Apple doing that in this piece.
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I've found a solution to the problem of people finding information I want to keep private. It's actually fairly simple.

Stuff I want to make public goes here: https://github.com/stucchio http://crazybear.posterous.com/ http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yummyfajitas

If I had a twitter/facebook/etc, it would fall into this category.

Stuff I want to keep private goes here: file:///home/stucchio/

The general rule of thumb (ignoring exceptions like gmail): "http" = public, [ "file", "ssh"] = private.
More details on that laptop, if it piques your interest:
http://www.amazon.com/Screen-Lemote-Yeeloong-8101_B-Netbook/...
This is a great idea, and fits nicely with the observation that humans seem to perceive many things, including time, logarithmically:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber–Fechner_law
But opening a restaurant is similar to opening a restaurant. Given that there are many people who have opened restaurants before, it is obviously reasonable to get some advice from them before opening your first restaurant (though I'm sure many restaurant owners fail to do that).

Startups are no doubt more varied and unpredictable, but there are still a lot of commonalities. Unlike driving, a startup mentor won't sit in the driving seat and do it for you, but their advice can prove invaluable, because once you're experienced enough, many aspects of business do look the same across all or most businesses.
I guess they start competing with DoubleRecall, the smart YC funded startup[1]. Nice competition!

[1] http://doublerecall.com/
It's an interesting edge case when you have someone actually moving from one model to another. But I think even OpenBSD's famously strong policy on binary blobs would allow this one, at least as they've implemented the policy in the past. They require source for drivers, which means anything you need to load onto the chip or use to communicate with it, but not for every piece of ROM that's internal to a chip. For example, Intel and AMD both microcode some instructions in firmware on their chips, rather than implementing them in silicon, and OpenBSD is ok with that, treating the silicon and microcoded part as all part of the blackbox chip package, rather than as a "driver" that requires source.
I've taught introductory computer programming in Scheme and Pascal. (I think I just dated myself.) And I find myself concurring with this.

People who taught themselves to program often have a hard time understanding what novices find difficult. The one that gobsmacked me -- and I only ever ran into this when teaching Pascal -- was twofold: one, that the computer does things in the order they are in the program, and two, that the definition of a function or procedure does NOT execute the function or procedure. Something about Scheme made the distinction between "we are defining a function" and "we are executing a function" much easier to understand.

And I concur about the terseness of Python. I've been using Perl professionally for, um, 15 years now (and I just dated myself again). I've written a few toy programs in Python, enough to establish that it's a worthy programming language.

But the pedagogical problem is that there's a lot of depth under the surface of Python (Perl, PHP, Visual Basic) - a lot of things going on that the experienced programmer understands and that the novice programmer needs to. It's often easier to learn in languages that have less going on, because the programmer needs to do more explicitly.
So, would it be okay to keep re-posting (high quality) stuff because it is new to me?
btw, the most recent post of the Graphing Calculator Story was 4 weeks ago.

NB: My comment was not about the quality of this particular post. The story is inspiring, of course.
Sounds great! Good luck with your business. Post an update sometime, I'm be curious how it'll turn out.
I think responsive design is different in that the basic idea is just to reduce the number of columns as the screen gets smaller (or increase them as it gets bigger). Likely the sites you are complaining about are serving up something completely different for mobile or perhaps some are going beyond what responsive design is and messing things up.
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I agree with this guy and I think one of the reasons for this is that a lot of the people that buy into this will do so casually: as (a) a one-off at a low price. They also (b) may not be willing to sit for an hour watching.

Agreed with making some teaser videos -- perhaps the first 15-30 minutes of the video they are interested in. Then bring up a call-to-action and measure your conversions.

Due to the possibility of people watching this at lunchtimes at work it might also be a good idea to (1) create some way for people to bookmark where they watched up to, and (2) make the site look as work-like as possible.
Are you talking about iOS updates? If so, I believe this has changed with iOS 5, at least with over the air self-updating.
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No, the technical interviewers want to know your technical skills, because they advise the people who pull the trigger on your hiring whether you will provide value.
Now, it's been a while, but my Google interview involved straight technical interviews and several interviews that were less about technical detail and far more about discerning my longer term value to the company.
Seems to be a trend that most screen casts are paid whereas most text based equivalents aren't. I guess this might be because people have expressed a willingness to pay for this type of content whereas text based blog type articles and tutorials are a lot harder to convince people to pay.
But it goes beyond that. Your local chains make you go through a pre-installed POS for payment. Square disrupted the POS by setting it free inside the store, each store rep armed with their own POS running on a smartphone. Apple, by doing this has eliminated traditionally held notions of a POS altogether.

The POS now runs inside YOUR Smartphone, inside their app. You can browse the aisles, take all the time you need and when ready, check out with out having to wait in line (which you still had to, at your local chain) and with out needing to find a store rep. That is why I called it as re-inventing the checkout experience. It didnt merely parallel the existing POS experience.
China? Could he not side with someone who dislikes USA more? Surely there's a North Korean laptop that fits his requirements. Not that anyone other than Stallman is right, it's just odd.
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It's ironic that his "free" computer was funded by the Chinese government.
Secure boot affects bootloaders, not kernels. And GRUB is under GPLv3.
It's already easy enough for lunatics to blow stuff up. The barrier to entry isn't cost of energy.
The items Apple will start off with, are accessories which are low volume, lower priced. If theft in this scenario would be a problem tomorrow, then it should have been a problem today; as Apple only gives you an email receipt and I have not come across a scenario where I had to show the receipt on my way out. Hope that answers your question.
Don't do that. It can seem like a good idea if you're kind of desperate for a job, but it'll drive you mad.
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I thought this would affect the bootloader. Gnu Grub would need to be signed.
Stupid error (posting at 5am lol) it's 0.7% not 0.007%.
Are you really demanding that the author of an open source javascript project to supply non-javascript code to make your website backwards compatible? You've gotta be kidding me.

That's not his responsibilty at all. Try contributing to an open source project instead of complaining.
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"Broadcasting LIVE on Justin.tv" is the default title. The broadcaster can change it. I think they can even go back and snip out, say, 40:00 - 1:15:00 in a video and make that available as a separate 35 minute "highlight" with its own title.

Example of what you get when a broadcaster uses these features: http://www.justin.tv/naslseasontwo/videos
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Knowing tools takes time. And it seems like every week I'm hearing about some great new dev tool. Do folks actually try all of these? It seems you'd be perpetually at the base of the learning curve if you did.
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"Because if you can’t make that first wildly successful product, nobody will care about your platform."

Pretty much the money quote.
Already posted, but relevant (and fairly technical) details about Turbo Pascal 3: http://pcengines.ch/tp3.htm
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Our clients are typically churches and small business who like to have banners on their home pages. There's always something "featured" that they want to show off.
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High school counts as childhood, and more to the point, childhood friends are an indication that a person is not a disloyal back stabber and is someone others value. It's social proof.

it's just a saying though and is useless past its intended meaning. It does't seem to apply to you.
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Jason interviews NeuAer CEO Dave Mathews and attorney Reid Dammann about everything startups need to know about patents, from why to file to avoiding being poached by "Patent Trolls."
If you go to the entertainment section, there are lots of copyrighted movies and shows being streamed and I doubt they have permission from the content creators.

This brings in lots of traffic to Justin.tv (there are ads on each video). Because you can't really search for these, it becomes very difficult to get caught (unlike youtube).
"This case in particular is a firmware load into a 3rd party chip, which isn't usually as bad a a binary driver"

In most scenarios where I think a '3rd party chip with its own firmware' makes sense, that chip can generate interrupts and/or do DMA. Both cases will (typically) allow that firmware to crash the OS on the other CPU (or bring it to its knees by DDOS-ing it with interrupts)

Because of that, I do not see why a blob running on that 3rd party chip would be less of an issue than a blob running on the main CPU.
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His concern in this case is to get something that runs with free software, rather than buy something from a particular country. I'm sure he'd agree that China does a lot of things he disagrees with at a political and philosophical level.
Mongo is excellent but I'd argue that Node and CouchDB is even a better fit because there's not even a driver involved, it's one HTTP request which just calls another.
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This is just great, huge potential, looking forward to giving it a try. Congrats to author!
I agree with the implication that talking about bettering yourself isn't usually the best way to better yourself.
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R's integration with free data sets is crazy. For quick analysis it is great. For development Numpy/SciPy/Matplotlib/PyCUDA is more suitable.
What does the USA have to do with this? It's not exactly the paragon of freedom.
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To be honest, a good attempt by the author but I wouldn't recommend this to a beginner. Why? I don't recommend the use of the native driver - you end up with needlessly complex code.

I don't want to criticize the authors work. He's done a pretty good and thorough job. Hopefully I'll pen down an easier guide later tonight.
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Amazon Prime movies and Tv shows - 13000 or 3000?
While Amazon claims that is has over 13000 Movies and TV shows eligible for Prime, in reality the list shows only 3092 results when I click on Prime eligible!

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=s9_hps_bw_clnk?node=2858778011&field-is_prime_benefit=2470955011&page=1&sort=reviewrank_authority&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-9&pf_rd_r=1G698KPPSGTPSAXD8T3T&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1314170002&pf_rd_i=2676882011

What am in missing?

Is this a gimmick?
It sounds more like legal:

Suit: "We're collecting this data? Why?"

Cubicle-dweller: "Dunno, seemed useful."

Suit: "Well, we better put something in the ToS about it so our customers know that we're storing it."
In theory, yes. But there would be a load of incompatible installation CD/DVDs in the wild, and there is the problem of patching an unbootable system.
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Now that HN doesn't show upvotes, I'm largely compelled to add a comment endorsing this reply.

Yes, some people have written brilliant MSc theses. Yes, you might be one of them. But don't make that your aim.

By all means try to write a really good thesis, but your deadline is much, much more important. Work hard, produce something solid, contribute to other people's work, and that will give you a much better launching pad. It may be that your thesis ends up being brilliant, but if you make that your target, the overwhelming odds are that you will crash and burn.

ObHN: Most of the people who started huge companies did not have that as their target, it happened as a consquence of hard work, a good idea, a bit of luck, and some undefinable magic fairy dust.
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See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1248496 and especially http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1248922 for another discussion of the same idea.
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Do CS programs not teach this? Pretty early in getting my degree I was taught about gates, timing signals, flip-flops, deMorgan's Law, etc. By the time of the Sys Architecture class it was assumed this had been covered.

While I agree that programmers should understand the fundementals of how a cpu et al works, is this book the best one?
There's some rough edges since we weren't given enough time to fully flesh out the entirety of site skinning, but we pulled off changing the entire color scheme, logo, and some icons and in a timely fashion. It's nice being a part of a company that gets our humor and gives us the freedom to pull stunts like this... Happy Halloween!
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Congratulations on launching something, it's great to get that initial step out the way.

I guess the key thing to ask about this is what is the unique value proposition over other services? Mainly Facebook where the vast majority of potential users probably already have their social graphs.

A couple of years back I thought about doing an events site thinking that there was space for someone to be basically social network agnostic and as well as leaveraging those services focus on email as everyone has email. Facebook has grown a lot since then though.

I think you have to use the tighter niche focus as an advantage and really zero in on what you can add to the events experience over the more broad events on things like Facebook. A good example is the photo sharing app called Batch the came out this week, really feels like a better user experience in creating albums of photos because they have focused in on just that aspect.
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It'd be much more compelling if I knew how much RAM I could jam in the thing. Comes with 1GB, but if I could get 4 in there, it'd be a rocking little machine.
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I would not propose this book as one that every programmer should read. But others have posted about books that started with fundamentals and illustrated how computing systems evolved, which brings this book to mind... Henry D'Angelo "Microcomputer Structures".

"Microcomputer Structures" is out-of-print, but I recall the small text starting with atomic physics and building up to an introduction of the Von Neumann architecture.

As a freshman at Boston University in the 1980's, I took this mind-expanding course (probably because it was way above my level) with Professor D'Angelo. The final project was building an interface to a single-board computer.
It sounds like there was some filtering to try to prevent that, for example, filtering out people who follow both Harvard and Stanford. Interesting anyways, even just to see what people interested in attending certain schools are interested in.
The issue is that there is no guarantee that users will be able to disable Secure Boot. If such guarantees would have been given then there would be no controversy.
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A high school teacher in the U.S., with 10+ years of experience, makes about $65,000 per year -- on average.

There are generally 180 days of school per year.

Let's say she teaches 5 classes per day, 20 students per class.

That works out to ~$3.60 per student per class. Classes run
about 40 minutes each or ~$0.09 per minute.

I know there are many variables affecting this calculation
but if screencasting is about delivering consise, high quality instruction, consistently, then $0.10 - $0.15 per minute does not seem unreasonable.

Nor should $0.20 per minute ($12.00 per hour). But it's
interesting that it does.

Compare that to what an undergraduate student pays per minute for a lecture given by a TA to he and 200 of his closest friends.
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I think this is the way to go. Offer folks one or two shorter examples of your work for free, and they will be more comfortable with purchasing your longer works.

If the free examples are solid, then they will be linked to and shared. This will help establish your name and expertise in the subject matter, and will bring many more eyeballs to your site, which will hopefully convert into sales.
Ah, sorry - I misread this as an anonymous thread.
Yes, me too! Oh, how many hours I spent typing in those programs in the hope they'd look like the book's illustrations...
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In addition to small surface area, the distance between the electrodes is very large, which would make it even worse capacitor.
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As background, I (the author of the post) was a founding engineer on the Reader team and the frontend tech lead from 2006 to 2010.
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A few meta-comments if the author comes here:

- Chrome complains about resources served as non-ssl

- I could not find your name on the site (I just wondered who was being the service)

Hope this helps!
I have an MBA, I rarely wear a suit, and I have not sold out customers. Also, the majority of EA's management team (including CEO) does not have MBA's. So, at least in this specific example, the dreaded "MBA" label does not seem to be the culprit.
Frankly,, I'm surprised that news.me still exists, never mind that they were hiring. Good news on both fronts. I'm someone who has no problem paying for content, but I think news.me made a huge mistake by launching with a pay wall before proving to users that it was any different from other Twitter aggregators. It definitely did not win in the polish department.
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Didn't they do that with Vista: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/technology/04vista.html
I posted a submission to the JavaScript 10K apart competition last year which was an HTML5 calendar utilizing localStorage. It essentially gave you a view of all twelve upcoming months in a snapshot. Perhaps even something as simple as this would help with the visual aspect. As far as the "bindings" are concerned, I think you could use tabs along the top and do some redesigning for the different timeframes.

http://10k.aneventapart.com/1/Entry/233