DavidNielsen's comments

The husband of noted game developer Brenda Romero is doing fine. By all accounts, he is selling his old treasures mostly for nostalgia reasons. He has fond memories of those times developing Doom and he wants to share those pieces of gaming history. Plus at a certain age you just realize that you have stuff cluttering up your attic which is doing you no good but still has value to others.

His company Romero Games Ltd. has had at least one big hit in recent years, Gunman Taco Truck, which by all accounts made a nice little profit. I believe he also occasionally lectures in Ireland on game design.

From everything I gather, John is happy, healthy and wealthy enough to be able to devote the odd few hours to a passion project which is dear to his heart. He loves Doom something fierce and given both the impact it had on society and the period of his life developing it took place it, it is hard imagine how he wouldn’t have it occupy a special place.

In fairness to Apple they are these days quite the Open Source company. Their main language is fully open source in every sense the word. You can get large parts of their base OS under an acceptable license as well as their stack, much of which is developed in the open or work is open sourced as Apple is able to. Of course they will keep back OSS code if it means making a big splash at a presentation but I don’t think that is a bad thing as such, who would deny them a bit of theatre.

They also do a lot of tech blogging on their Open source code, especially the Safari and WebKit team have some excellent posts regularly.

Sure they have proprietary magic in there but it is not as big a part of the pie as people imagine, and certainly less than in years past.

The same is true for Microsoft, who now famously aims to be the biggest Open Source company in the world (having acquired GitHub, Xamarin and many others, as well as made partners and friends out of enemies of the past, to help them on that journey).

In fact I can’t think of a single major company in the business which hasn’t embraced Open Source to some degree. I don’t think that the Apple strategy of controlling the entire experience means what it used to anymore. It doesn’t mean locking you in to just one way of doing things, we now know that we need the compiler, tools and stack to be available and truly free, as a bare minimum for this to work and experience shows that the more work we share, in general, the better an experience we can present to users and developer.

Open Source has won, all these companies taking on designing their own chips, datacenters, OSes, languages and so on, they would not be possible without that commonly shared mass of work.

Famously FaceTime was supposed to be an open standard, until someone threatened to sue them for damages to the tunes of X times infinity, which is a fairly large dollar amount for any given value of X.

To be honest “eco friend” sounds a lot more like what I’d want my children to be involved with than “shotgun shooting”. According to the website the requirements for “Eco Friend” are essentially doing no harm to the environment, making a safe campfire and attempting to be kind. All worthwhile skills but perhaps it could be rebranded to sound cooler, like “Ecosystem management engineer”.

Also if the Girl Scouts could see their way to making merit badges for “fighting the man”, “radical feminism” and “understanding white privilege”, I think their members would be better armed to understand the world in a useful manner. I’d be happy to sew on those to any piece of clothing.

Maybe some Boy Scout badges for “non fire related cooking”, “hanging pictures straight” and “basic household budgeting” would also improve the world and give their members useful skills.

I’d certainly not mind helping fund development in some form, if there is some discomfort with charging for the app I’d be happy to see an IAP tip jar.

I like the wood, I think it is nice to see someone go a different route than copying Apple’s all metal, clean look. It’s a warm and organic look which feels fresh. I also suspect that the wood might help the machine dampen noise which would be welcome.

They also copied a page from Apple’s eco playbook and will plant a tree for every machine sold which is nice to see. A solid move given the company’s size and reach. I wish more IT companies would use that as a marketing move, it has good signaling value and helps drive change.

I’d like them to do even more with the wooden look and feel, but their cases are still not far removed from a typical desktop. I think it would be great to see them do something really small, in the Mac Mini style, but with that warm wood look. That would look great on any desk.

I’d also like to see someone Hackintosh those machines just for fun.

Except for their desktops models, the base models of even the 5K iMac still ship with a Fusion Drive, and we only just got support for APFS on those configurations with macOS 10.14. As the base models are typically all authorized Apple Resellers and pop up stores get they must sell a bunch of those especially in regions where there aren’t a lot of Apple Stores (and where people don’t want to pay full price for a year old system).

They are going to need to support and perform well on non-SSD systems for quite a while.

I’d posit that such a setup will lead to users with low speed connection or connections which aren’t online constantly to be banned or required to buy a pardon from the site when not fulfilling the seeding requirement (as every site policy I’ve seen required maintaining a ratio over time).

This happens because users with high speed connections are incentivized to seed well beyond 1:1 and thus there is rarely any demand for seeding. Downloading is super fast which just exasperates the problem as your share ratio drops below the acceptable rate quickly.

Thus such sites tend to make their money off the people who can likely afford it the least, while rewarding people with the disposable income required to live in a neighborhood with unlimited high speed internet and pay for said service.

There’s also the matter of keeping content alive to consider. I’d consider it much more valuable to keep content with no or relatively few seeders alive than incentivizing seeders to add additional bandwidth to already popular torrents. I has not seen an site policy which encourages this, rather it likely punishes such activities as it bans users who are trying to reach a required share ratio without constant demand thus taking the content offline rather than keeping it available.

Whether or not Project Atlas will enable incentives for all users and multiple scenarios or if it will simply perpetuate a similar system to what is seen in the private torrenting communities remains to be seen.

And yet we also gained a lot of value we did not expect, such as the World Wide Web.

You cannot predict the true value of basic research in a straight forward manner so let’s just stop. This is about extending our understanding of the universe. We will find ways to use that knowledge and ways to enrich our lives because of it in due course of time.

People cite Law of Jante to be anti exceptionalism when in reality it is meant and generally used as a means of reminding high and low alike that we are in this together.

We are different, but do not think that your view point on our difference makes you inherently better than me.

We are both human, we both share this place called Earth, could we be productive and not turn life into a weirdly specific genitalia measurement contest.. por favor?

You are allowed and encouraged to be exceptional, just like everybody else. You should just recognize how you got there and how other people got where they are. In essence, Jante, is a teaching tool regarding inequality.

Denmark is a lovely place, in part, because of a general adherence to following those guidelines. Therefore as a Dane it pains me to see it cited as a bad thing and as justification for actions and behaviors Law of Jante which are in direct opposition to how it is de facto taught and applied in Danish society.

Rob Reid did a funny 5min TED Talk on this called the 8 Billion dollar iPod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0

He used the same premise when he wrote the comedy sci-fi book Year Zero, the story of naive aliens accidentally pirating all of Earths music and the legal consequences thereof, i.e. owning the citizens of Earth literally all the money in the universe leading to the ruination of their delightfully hedonistic utopia. A quick and hilarious read.

And a citation.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/01/private-i...

No timeline yet though but given the early state of WireGuard and the platform support that is understandable.

Seconded, e.g. going to the signup page on my iPhone 5 just leads to a blank page. I suspect the same might be true for my iPad Air despite being on a current iOS release.

A slightly better onboarding experience would be worth a lot, even if the answer is "thine device is unsupported and no plan to support it exists."

They would likely argue that HEVC and H.264 are hardware accelerated on nearly all of their devices whereas VP8 likely isn’t. This would mean compromising on battery life as they’d have to provide a software fallback where needed. I don’t see Apple being very willing to provide a bad user experience and given how hard they were pushing HEVC during their 2017 WWDC keynote the best bet is that they think that’s the better option.

Alternatively they’d have to add VP8 support in their chips and one suspects they would be unwilling to spend silicon on that which could otherwise be used for whatever witchcraft their silicon designers are whipping up.

I’d grant that as a valid technical reason for limited video codec support. Silicon and battery are at a premium.

There's also a somewhat incomplete reimplementation in C#

https://github.com/toshok/scsharp

In that case it would lessen the chance of a competitor gaining access to your eyeballs, not a bad bargain in some cases.

Signal is great in principle but:

1. Their desktop support isn't provided by a native app but rather ducktaped onto Chrome, which in turn forces me to have that pole of junk installed.

2. There's no iPad app, granted you can run the iPhone app in compatibility mode but that's just feels wrong in 2016.

3. Their support for multiple devices using one account can at best considered an afterthought attached to their mobile apps with gum. When I checked last it only worked with their Android and their Chrome clients so no love for iOS users.

Wire provides all of this, wrapped in beautifully designed apps (if currently a touch unstable)

Considering my wife just bought a 8620 this bodes well for my future.. oh joy.

Signal has limited platform support, e.g. I can't use it on my OS X desktop nor is there a version for the iPad (I could us e the iPhone app but I'm not a savage and the user experience actually matters to me).

Worse though is the complete lack of support for using the same user profile on multiple devices, I want all messages to follow me where ever I go on whatever device.

Signal is nice and all, and I want it to succeed. I try to help in that regard by providing and maintaining their Danish translation (as well as for similar apps and services, except Telegram who despite repeated requests have not opened a Danish translation on Transifex).

They have very well defined documentation for all the stable parts of the API, their code is modern and quite readable. In addition to this Lennart is good at publishing lengthy explanatory blogposts aimed at system administrators. Finally they have done a truly admirable job building a community and explaining the why's and how's of their project. This is evident in the fact that there is now a systemd conference coming up.

If this fails the test, I suggest that it is a marvelous failure which every project should strive to emulate. To suggest that systemd is poorly documented indicates an insufficient exposure to the sad reality of most Open Source projects where "our unmaintained, outdated, bug riddled code base is the documentation" is the best case answer to the question of documentation.

He created Instapaper, not Instagram. He sold it to Betaworks.

They've been doing great work with it lately and have a solid subscription business model now.