skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not a fan of RDS. It has all the same drawbacks of using an EBS partition for storage, but as far as I know you have no visibility (like await, iowat etc) to know when your storage subsystem starts to flake out. EBS removes a lot of Sysadmin & DBA headaches, but when you suddenly get mysterious DB stalls, good luck trying to figure out what's wrong.

I've worked with some systems that used a software RAID10 array of EBS volumes, and when a single EBS volume started to flake out, they'd just kick it out of the array, and performance would improve. They'd then rebuild the failed replica during off hours. If you're going to rely on EBS for DB storage for anything in production, this seems like this is the way to go.
All of the above. Audio, video, 3D. Any pro level design. Even print design.

Having a Mac Pro with lots of storage and big monitors when you're working on a 300 page book with 300GB of photos is much less annoying than poking along with a laptop.

It's not just the speed, it's also the usability. Eg, a comfortable trackball and a nicer keyboard. Sure, you can add those to a laptop, but then you have a kludge.
'superficial' is not the right word for what Apple does.

An Apple machine is really very utilitarian and simple. It's a box with rounded corners and tapered edges. Pop off the screws and the case itself provides the structure for the machine. No extra structural support. The bulk of the material is also recyclable.

If you look at other computers, especially before the brushed aluminium trend, it was everyone else that had fancy sculpting on their enclosures, the keyboards, fancy personalisations. Just look at the machines linked. And they all needed extra stuff on the inside to provide a skeleton.

Apple machines certainly look good (why do we think grey boxes with round corners and tapered edges look good?), but they have also thought about manufacturing, engineering, materials, disposal etc ...
Yet people criticised the VAX. I guess every computer has its flaws (nothing is perfect!), but was the criticism of the VAX justified? (Assuming uptime and reliability means anything, and compared to what followed it. Windows NT? C'mon.)

It is just one more bit of evidence that tells me that many of the supposed "experts" on matters of computing are anything but. There's FUD and then there's just people who just have no idea what they're saying. (Of course the CEO of DEC got caught making the dumbest comment ever. No one is immune.) Maybe we should just focus on results and not what people say?
Doesn't amazon promise delivery to anywhere in the world? These high prices might be subsidising places with crazy high data rates.
It's 25% thinner - now 1.8cm. And the MacBook Air is 1.7cm at its thickest point.

So I really have no idea what you are talking about about you being able to fit 2 or 3 Airs. You would think if you are about to spend $2000 that you would do some basic research.
The same way the answer to a headline with a question mark is no, every time I read "even more" in a new product description I understand "nothing new", and there are a lot of "even more" on this one.
A quad core Dell is half the price of a 12-core Mac. Once you put the same CPU, RAM, and hard drive in the Dell, the difference is about $200. It's cheaper, but not that much cheaper. The bulk of a Mac Pro's cost is really just passing along Intel's price for Xeon processors.
Well ... I guess you could buy the windowspasswordreset software OR you could just download Ubuntu desktop, launch the liveCD and use the chntpw utility.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/14369/change-or-reset-windows...
You and OP have made clear, concrete, differing predictions about the future, predictions which can be checked within the next 6-12 months. This is epistemically virtuous -- congratulations! If you want to be even more epistemically virtuous, you could arrange a bet. How much would you be willing to bet that there will be a new Mac Pro within the next year?
That was exactly my response, as well, as I have something like 7 85W magsafe adapters scattered throughout my house and bags.

Then I saw the backward-compatibility adapter[1]. It's not so bad. You can probably just leave it on the computer (or cable) 24/7 and never notice it. It's _tiny_, and only $10. Whenever I end up with a device that uses it, I will probably just buy 10 of them and leave 2 or 3 in every bag I own.

Still debating if I want to drop $4k just for retina, as my current machine is the quad-3.4 iMac with 32GB. I will probably wait for a retina Air or retina TB Display.

Now, if they'd made it a clunky dongle, or charged more than $15, I would be sharpening my pitchfork. Connector conspiracy or no, I get the impression that this was a situation where this was the only possible way to get the new case just right.

It's not like they'd do this just to fuck with us - the thing has asymmetric _fan blades_, for fuck's sake.

[1] http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD504
I'm surprised that people haven't started contacting funnyjunk and telling them how much of a tool they are.

Here are some good links, if you are want to do more.

http://www.funnyjunk.com/contact/

http://www.funnyjunk.com/abuse/

http://www.funnyjunk.com/copyright/
iOS was a revelation in 2007 but it seems to have stalled since then. The static grid of information-free tiles and clunky task management are starting to feel downright archaic even compared to Android and their decent into cheap skeuomorphism continues unabated.

Apple is lucky Google is having so much trouble getting ICS out there.
The article then states that "This study concludes we better not exceed the 50 per cent mark of wholesale transformation of Earth’s surface or we won’t be able to delay, never mind avert, a planetary collapse", as if that is a fact, and then claims that "We’ve already reached the 43 per cent mark through our conversion of landscapes into agricultural and urban areas" (maybe that is so for their definition).

And then therefore concludes that "governments undertake five actions immediately", the first example being "Society globally has to collectively decide that we need to drastically lower our population very quickly" - so mankind must enter into a global depopulation program. We all know exactly what that is. It doesn't look like scientific claims at all, it looks like irrational hysteria with an agenda.
Perhaps you should actually bet with OP then!
Apple announces 2012 Design Award winners
It really bothered me that Google Maps on Android got vector maps and the iOS Google Maps didn't. I guess that won't be a problem for me later this year.
The crowning irony is that it looks like the digital creative set is going to be pushed into the arms of Microsoft, for so long the subject of their scorn. If you want a fast digital workstation now Windows is your only reasonable option.
With honesty, what good will that do?
Who are these customers you're talking to? Seems like everyone and their mom is a 'customer'.
And those cell users can download the book multiple times at no additional cost, in perpetuity. So sometimes they may be taking a loss. It's really not all that simple, and I think calling it a 120,000% markup is dubious at best.
ICache Geode: The Catalyst To A New Era Of Mobile Payments?
Every time I touch Qt, it feels more like Java than C++

I just wish they something as powerful as the GridBagLayout. No, QGridLayout is not it.
My current rig is a last gen Mac Pro 12 core with 128GB of memory from OWC and 4x2TB in raid.

I was hoping to upgrade to a box that could support more memory (the 128GB is already over the official spec, but well tested) ... but just meh. I am disappointed.

But, it gets me off my butt to research how to build out a decent hackintosh.
The legal herd definitely is in need of thinning. (I mean, career changes, of course -- to flipping Kodiak burgers.)

I'm glad parody and appropriately sharp (in more than one way) commentary have not been wiped off the Internet, yet. Hopefully, not ever.
> I’ve said it before and will say it again: Google made a mistake by deciding to oppose rather than ally with Apple on mobile.

I get that DFB is an hardcore apple fanboy (Some would say macfag). But how is Google making a bad decision here?

They have a huge market now with Android.

They can show ads in apps on Android.

They conquered the tablet market easily since they already had android when the market started.
Check how much Amazon pays to its employees

http://www.visasquare.com/visa-greencard/salary/amazon-corpo...
The Garden Gates
How about re-downloading books several times over over roaming 3G for the lifetime of the user? I don't think it's a one time delivery charge fee.
If they are "best" is immaterial. Linux is a poor laptop experience.

And you don't have a dual mode graphics card and probably only have VGA out, so you really don't have dual monitor support except in entirely unsatisfactory or projector contexts.

You also almost assuredly get battery life that is worse to a comparable windows 7 installation with Lenovo customizations.
comedy protip: strong/hard consonants are funny. 'kodiak' is an awesome comedic word. Any punchline involving a bear could almost certainly be improved by inserting 'kodiak'. Just like you should use 'buick' when you need an arbitrary car, and 'tuesday' when you need an arbitrary day. This also explains why a well-placed 'fuck' is funny.
I think you mean 12-core. Who's selling 16-core CPUs? Also worth pointing out that the Mac Pro is one such system as you just described.
Just the first few pages seems to contradict you pretty strongly.

The gist as far as I can tell is that complex systems behave in specific ways when changing from one state to another (eg. "an increase in variance in ... fluctuations"), and that the climate currently seems to be undergoing similar fluctuations. It doesn't seem to be particularly vague; I noticed references to things like the inverse power law of species body mass, so they're not just pulling numbers out of their ass.

In real world terms? Mass extinctions most likely, just like the last major state shift.
With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there.

Not true. Try running a really complicated Logic set with a lot of virtual instruments on a low-end machine and watch it grind to a halt. In the last year we've seen new virtual instruments that bring analog emulation to a new level but they can eat as much as half of my Macbook Air's CPU playing a single note. Extrapolate this to a professional mix with as many as a hundred tracks and you can see why some people still need a real computer.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Android has a lot of features. Turn by turn directions? Android has had it for years. Notifications? Android first. Video calls over cellular? Android apps did that.

But Passport, that's a fantastic feature. Adding in the geofencing (so my airline ticket shows up when I get to the airport) is genius.

But more than anything else, you know that everyone is going to integrate into this. Every brand already has their own app (some with this sort of functionality). That's going to be a HUGE block of users.

Android apps can't easily fill that space, because they'll all have different standards. The fact that there is only one standard on iOS now is very convenient. Google could add one, but that would take dev time, not to mention how long it would take to get 5.0 on a reasonable number of devices.

It wasn't a headline, but it could easily be one of those features that everyone ends up loving and using all the time.
You'll have to move the cursor left a bit, to get the same image, but with visible finger. The images are indeed offset so that in the upper right corner the finger actually doesn't fit in the frame.
I don't like the AWS pricing either (or at least how it's communicated). I have considered AWS but no matter how much time I spend looking at their pricing, I can't figure out how much I should expect to be charged each month.

I agree the tone of the article is a little over-victimized though.
I have turned my scrollbars back on, not because I want to use them, but because I want to look and see how much of a page is left without moving my mouse over there. I never actually click on it.
Even with powertop and and eye for cutting things, odds are you are ending up with worse battery performance than a Lenovo-supported drop of Windows 7. Which is sad because it's not great battery life for not great performance, the T420 is also a pretty underpowered machine for developer use.

I'm not going to fisk your post otherwise. I have better things to do. I will point out that due to the way Lenovo updates models over time, it's entirely possible for mutiple people to buy "T420s" and end up with different-enough components that you'd need to tweak drivers to get things to work right. So "Your T420" may not be someone else's "T420."

This is provably the case for my T520, and supposedly the case for the T61.
If you are using a Blackberry, my Blackberry App (Callernizer) does exactly that.
No MBP 13" refresh, too bad, I was hoping for that. That size is just the noteook sweet spot for me. More specifically, I'd love to the see the discrete Nvidia 650M GPU in the 13", want to play with CUDA on it.

Back to waiting...
Incentives for Drivers Who Avoid Traffic Jams
Really? iPhones alone brought in $22 billion in revenue last quarter.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1166533/apple_nearly_doubles...

The entirety of worldwide PC shipments for a quarter is less than 100 million units. So, no, cutting prices is not going to help catch up to iOS revenues.

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1981717
I am. Chrome on OSX.
I'm not sure if that's intentional so you can see what exactly was being clicked on, or a bug.
http://www.bestwatchsale.net
Watches Inc is known as the professional replica watches supplier, offer the high quality imitation watches from Rolex, Omega, Breitling,
Huge (unofficial) rise in AP CS Test Takers
Great this link works on Ubuntu using VLC.
Looks like FJ's been excluded from the Internet Archive. Is there a trustworthy caching authority, you know, for this kind of situation?
The alleged libel is based, in part, upon Funnyjunk's claim that they are acting legally within the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA by only hosting UGC and taking it down upon notice of infringement.

The Oatmeal's response to the claim included a list of content infringing his copyright. Funnyjunk is going to want to remove that content to retain its safe harbor from liability for the infringement. It may or may not be a properly worded notice under the DMCA, but a lot of notices UGC hosts get aren't, and they still take down the content -- because the intent of the parties and whether they acted in good faith matters when it's time to face a judge.

That the pages are no longer accessible does not mean the evidence has been destroyed, either. The DMCA requires only that you "block access to" the content, not physically remove it from a server.
I didn't see anything on my MacBook. A quick google search and it looks like there isn't. I do know that some/most apps allow you to resize type on a per app basis though.
Hosting a static file in S3 you have to point people to manually find and download themselves is much cheaper because you don't have the built in captive audience, WhisperNet and everything else which comes with the Kindle ecosystem, so comparing the two only via a flat dollar cost is naive.
It looks like the 17" model has been discontinued however. This makes me feel better about replacing my 2007 17" model in April with the late 2011 variant.
The new ASUS Zenbook Prime runs 1920x1080 in 13": http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptops/asus_zenbook_prime_u...

I prefer Windows--I'm going to try this out vs. the new Macbook Pro, but I may indeed pick up the ASUS.
I'm glad you're happy with your box and have found a cost-effective way to use the OS you want to use.

I had different expectations shaped by my use of macbooks and trying to recreate feature parity with any Linux laptop as a basis was difficult enough to render it impossible.

P.S., I think it's pretty ugly that we only get 5-6 hours from the extended-cell batteries. With the extended batteries they're comparable to macbook pros not running extended batteries.
I suspect that Apple has delayed significant changes to the Mac Pro until desktop Retina displays are ready. Likely there was some snag, and the whole kit (including a Retina capable video subsystem) wasn't ready when originally planned. In that case, a small incremental update is the only option.
notatoad: I didn't write or even imply that well-known authors self-publish.

FWIW, I have heard from a second-hand source that one well-known author is receiving net royalties from Kindle sales that are greater than the Kindle price of his books. I don't know if this is really true, but it rings true; hence my question to the HN community.
But isn't that factored into the 30% cut they take before the delivery charges?

I love my Kindle and I really like Amazon, but this is the first I've heard of the delivery charge part. Considering that it's around 25% of the price of the book... it really does seem like a rip off on their part.
A 12-core Mac Pro still offers significantly more processing power than a quad-core Ivy Bridge i7. So the Mac Pro still serves its purpose.
<a href="http://www.bestwatchsale.net>replica watches</a>
Watches Inc is known as the professional replica watches supplier, offer the high quality imitation watches from Rolex, Omega, Breitling,
Although the lawsuit is bullshit, I would probably be really happy if the oatmeal were to get sued out of existence.

I try to stay away from it as much as possible, but of the handful of things I've seen there, they were all trollish and entirely incorrect.

The site is just more Internet scum and it going away would probably be for the best.
The link is to a (supposedly) 15" model, even if the page title says 14". Specs do say 15".

Biggest tradeoff being the Samsung has a low voltage (slow) dual core vs a full speed quad core plus a massive GPU. I don't think we'll see anything much lighter than the Macbook just due to the need to vent the heat. It's considerably lighter than any other quad I know of.
I notice this all the time with your 'normal' user. The scroll bar is quite possibly the most horrific unfriendly control. It's just too narrow. Those users that don't have that much control of a pointer, struggle with scroll bars and small buttons / drop downs etc.

I like the Apple way of placing controls on the left, but having a scroll bar on the right negates a lot of the benefit of doing so.

Having said that they are quite handy as page length / where you are indicators.
I can't stand this crap. Do you own a Thinkpad? I'm typing this on a T61 and items 2-6 on your list are complete garbage. I have never experienced any of those things. It's not that I just don't care, I do care. If that much was wrong, I wouldn't own the thing any more (as an aside, what the hell does "hand patching" even mean?)

As for item 1, this was dealt with in another thread a few days ago. Optimus can be made to work, but it isn't convenient (run a script then reboot to switch). But if you're planning to "build a Linux laptop", why would you buy one with Optimus? It actually causes problems on Windows too, speaking from personal experience.

Linux is not for everyone. Let me repeat that. Linux is not for everyone. But if you want to use Linux, which I do, there are excellent options for doing so at very reasonable prices and Thinkpads are an example of that.
I don't know. I've never had an issue with running three fingers up one side of my keyboard!
They seem to be talking specifically about biospheric interactions, so it'll likely be some sort of domino effect, something like:

Frog A goes extinct, frog A just happens to eat beetle B.

Without (as much) predation pressure, beetle B goes completely fucking nuts and eats everything in sight, including most of the forests in the area, crops, etc.

Everything in the area starves, the ecosystem collapses, and you're left with scrub, beetles and widespread erosion until something else can colonise the area and start a new ecosystem.
A critical transition is a mathematical definition related to a fundamental change in the structure of a system. Here's something pretty relevant if you want to know what they mean by this phrase - http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.2908
If you think of the Overton Window as a multidimensional space with multiple axes, RMS does occupy a location close to (although perhaps not exactly at) one or another edge of it. Regardless of whether he is wrong or right, he has done a great deal of work stretching the edges of, and drawing attention to, the part of the Overton Window that he occupies. In fact, it's the whole point of the Overton Window argument that even wrong views can often be useful in the grand scheme of things. So I don't think your exceptions to GP's argument are valid.

Also, lots of people have hopelessly romantic views about the group to which they belong (or used to belong). At least in that respect, RMS is not unique at all. But the fact that he falls prey to this common error is not very relevant when we ask whether it is indeed "evil" to make proprietary software, or any other current issue that RMS rants about. (We don't evaluate Peter Thiel's startup advice on the basis of his odd philosophical commitments, do we?)
A.I. Web Critic: "Wikipedia is Cynical and Accepting" - Let's make it better!
but stressed that “fundamentally, there are no differences <a href="http://www.bestwatchsale.net>replica watches</a>,” and ... Rich, profiled in a cover article for Harvard Magazine Replica Watches,
That almost gave me an aneurysm at the time - I had a first generation iPod touch, and it quickly became less useful app-wise. But long term it was still probably the right move, iOS 3 ran slowly on the first gen touch.
I agree. "Amazon's takes 55% of my ebook sales" or "Amazon's hidden 25% ebook fee" would have meant quite a bit more.
The real problem is that the most popular Linux distribution (Ubuntu) and one of the two most popular window managers (Gnome) are going in exactly the same direction as Apple and Windows. These two projects are so busy emulating what Apple and Windows do, they can't see that they're going to go right off the usability cliff for desktop users.

That, more than anything either Apple or Microsoft does is what worries me about desktop Linux. We have met the enemy and he is us.
From time to time I go slumming and read the kind of thing Mr. Raymond has written, things like:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4278

He quotes something which appears to be backed up by statistics, then carries off into some social speculation. He rails against “political correctness” muzzling the truth. I have read similar things from people who feel a need to “have an honest conversation about the actions of Israel in the Middle East.” And like wise from people who can cite in detail the various horrors inflicted by the legal system against men who are tricked or trapped into biological paternity. All quite possibly true facts to share, of course.

It’s a massive Ad Hominem on my part, but I can’t help but wonder when I read such passionate words, “Why is this person fixated on this particular topic?” We all have our passions, some of us have crusades. What compels a programmer to take it upon himself to fight the injustice of a society that walks on eggshells about the various differences between the “races?”

I’m not going to say he’s a racist. I’ll say instead he’s a man fixated on race. And I’ll wield the Ad Hominem hammer again and suggest, although he may be a pragmatic voice for the open source movement, where society is concerned he comes across as every bit as fanatic as his accusations.