protospork's comments

protospork | 13 years ago | on: Sears is Turning Shuttered Stores into Data Centers

> retail POS generates a large amount of transactional data, and you need low latency for database syncing and credit card/loyalty card transactions.

I've always been curious about what sort of infrastructure the average big-box retail store actually needs. My local Walmart can't have anything but a wireless uplink, unless they actually installed 5+ miles of fiber or something when they built the store.

protospork | 13 years ago | on: How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996)

Thank you, that's a better-written answer than anything I could get down. I'd just like to add that (as the article does a pretty good job of saying) perl is /unparalleled/ as a text-processing language. There is no other language that even comes close to perl's ease and utility for string manipulation.

protospork | 13 years ago | on: Adobe wants Ninite to stop rolling out crapware-free Flash

> First off, the Flash updater on Windows works quite well on modern Windows systems.

Speak for yourself; I only ever see it on system startup. I only reboot once every few months (and it doesn't respond to waking up from standby), but there's a new Adobe security panic every two weeks or so, so that's not really acceptable. Plus it opens as a pop-under window for some reason, so I'm generally unaware of it until I've opened a browser, which I'll then have to close and reopen.

The 'stealing revenue' argument is definitely valid, but in Adobe's case it's such a hateful method that I can't sympathize at all.

protospork | 13 years ago | on: Twitter is the new RSS

None of the clients I've used have passable lists support. Bitlbee (my current client of choice) doesn't have /any/ lists support.

protospork | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: how did you learn the command line?

>I use keyboard shortcuts in Firefox, and occasionally dream of an Awesome Bar that works like bash.

This reminded me to check up on Ubiquity[1]. Mozilla doesn't even host a page for it anymore, but apparently someone adopted it[2]. I'm going to have to play around with this tomorrow; I'll be happy if it's half as useful as I remember.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_%28Firefox%29 [2]: https://bitbucket.org/satyr/ubiquity/overview

protospork | 13 years ago | on: Why Linux is better

I do similar things with tab groups/stacks in Firefox and Opera (mainly to keep fewer than 20 tabs visible at once). Guess it just doesn't feel "right" to me to run my whole system that way.

protospork | 13 years ago | on: Why Linux is better

I'm primarily a Windows user, though I dip into Linux pretty often. The first thing I do in any new install is to disable all but one or maybe two workspaces. Multiple workspaces just strikes me as a hack to get around poor panel design, or to facilitate running a modern PC on an ancient monitor.

If I leave >1 active I'm prone to losing windows on alternate workspaces; if I'd upped the number to 12 like the person who wrote that page, I couldn't even fill them all. You can see even he had trouble making them look "used" so he could take a screenshot. I've been using this PC daily for the 24 or so weeks it's been up, and I've only got 13 windows open.

protospork | 13 years ago | on: Cubieboard: A small, high-performance ARM box

>Has either of them actually good (foss) drivers?

I have to ask, what is the preoccupation with FOSS GPU drivers? Not just with boards like this, but even standard desktop hardware. Does anyone seriously think a firm like NVidia is going to illicitly slip spyware or something into their binaries?

protospork | 13 years ago | on: Dropbox' Public/ folders will be phased out soon

From what's been said in the forums and implied in that email they sent to API users, they're leaving the functionality in and just no longer creating the folder on install.

My question is: How long is that functionality going to stick around for legacy users after it's been hidden by default?

EDIT: Indefinitely. I wonder if that's according to the modern usage or the dictionary one... http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=62424&replies=8#p...

And to answer your original question, I was wrong and new users won't get access at all: http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?page=2&id=62381&...

protospork | 14 years ago | on: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs

YES! For anyone with a high latency (huge swathes of the US are still stuck with satellite or mobile and the tech industry seems to have ignored this), twitter is a nightmare. The first pageload only pulls the empty 'framework' page, then a series of js requests pull the information. You can't walk away while it loads, either, because it will register the latency and display errors instead of content.
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