tarabukka's comments

tarabukka | 12 years ago | on: Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target

The Amazon advertising fiasco? The commercial "Ubuntu Software Center"? The lack of upstream patches for many years? Debian maintainers and Red Hat wouldn't even thinking of pulling off that kind of junk. It's not about deeply analysing every possible motivation for every single thing involving them -- Canonical simply shows an attitude of taking from the open source community and not giving back.

tarabukka | 12 years ago | on: Bose founder, Amar Bose, has died at 83

> Bose doesn't have nearly as good range of sound as professional equipment

It's not about "range of sound", it's about producing sound accurately. A more accurate frequency response won't sound exciting, but you'll hear slightly more of your music because nothing is hyped. It's a matter of personal taste and suitability to the task. I wouldn't mix a song on any Bose equipment, but I wouldn't be frothing at the mouth if I went to a friend's and they had a Bose system. I'd still prefer a £300 pair of studio monitors over an equivalent Bose setup, but that's my opinion.

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: Hoodie: very fast web app development

Magic of Erlang? I hate to be cynical, but have you got benchmarks to back that up?

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: Hoodie: very fast web app development

> p2p sync enables you...

That isn't what "peer to peer" means, though. Peer to peer means that peers (the aforementioned browser, smartphone and tablet) communicate directly with each other.

Also, how does CouchDB keep things secure if clients can sync apparently any data? I'm assuming there's something there, but nobody else has explained this.

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: Opera moves to WebKit

Not passive aggressive?

>the browser that nobody cares about

>Now they see Chrome is going to win

Implies that Opera never innovates or has anything interesting to offer, and implies that instead they follow the market leader like-for-like. They were one of the first browsers to have tabs and supported many CSS3 properties without prefixes first. Just because they didn't support WebSuperFlySpeedySocketRockets the day the draft standard was out doesn't mean they don't innovate.

>copying Chrome

They're standards compliant, Chrome is standards compliant. Not "copying" Chrome.

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: Win a signed copy of Programming in Lua 3rd Edition

Lua's runtime is small and easy to embed compared to something like V8. It's also written in ANSI C. I don't know about Guile.

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: Booting Linux using UEFI can brick Samsung laptops

I think finding a kernel exploit in the server's OS that let you run the firmware-bricking code would probably be more viable than installing a new operating system.

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: Hackulous shutdown

I've SSHed into my iPad to transfer media files (without using iTunes) that I can then play with another player... I really don't like iTunes.

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: What one book could give me a new, useful superpower?

I think it's more on the part of the reader. A lot of willpower is needed to fundamentally change yourself, especially based on just one person's ideas. It's up to the reader to put the ideas into action, and I think that for a lot of people that's difficult without a motivating environment.

For example, hanging out with people that are into fitness does a lot more for you than going it alone. Working a service job and having to speak to people to make money does more for your confidence than any motivating words. It's different for different people, of course.

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: What one book could give me a new, useful superpower?

This is my problem with self-help books... you must try to replace years of your own learning, rationalizing and understanding with someone else's ideas, absorbed only through a few hours of reading. Naturally, it falls apart quickly.

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: How to set up Remote Desktop with the Raspberry Pi

Nothing, the R Pi just has a different host triple and lands you more pageviews and ad impressions. /cynic

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: It's like JSON. but fast and small.

Although if you're running this over HTTP, you might end up compressing it with DEFLATE (either directly or with gzip), which partly involves adding references to duplicated data... I'm not sure what the use case for this format is meant to be, though, so that might not apply.

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: IF-less programming

Oh, yeah. My mistake. Although what you describe is a lot more functional in style. You could probably emulate it in a language with higher-order functions.

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: CSS3 animation

It's not about monopolistic practices, as another reply to my comment says. It's about developers using new, incompatible technologies and thinking that everyone is using a WebKit-powered browser.

At least I didn't get a "please upgrade to a modern browser" notice in Opera, like an unfortunately high number of Show HN posts have done...

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: CSS3 animation

>You should try it on Chrome

And people ask me why I keep calling Chrome the new Internet Explorer.

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: IF-less programming

If is an expression in a lot of languages. The syntax you describe is identical to the "ternary statement" in C-style languages.

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: Python alternatives for PHP functions

I have never, ever seen nl2br referred to as making anything secure or safe. It just converts new lines to <br />s. That's what the manual says it does. That's what tutorials say it does. That's what the function name very obviously shows.

I think map() from Python should be removed. Its name implies to a new learner that it will draw a map, but it actually does nothing to that effect at all! No, it maps an array to a function. We must rename this dangerous function to call_a_function_on_every_element_of_an_array - or, even better, remove it from the language core ENTIRELY. If it was a private function used inside the runtime, maybe that would be fine, but it's a public part of the API.

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: Samsung Phones: Every app has full memory access

>Please leave your platform cheerleading at the door.

And then you link me to an Apple security document that basically says (but in Apple style) "we encrypt a lot of stuff and use standard kernel-level security".

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: Samsung Phones: Every app has full memory access

The exploit used in comex's jailbreakme was just a PDF vulnerability. Sliding the "slide to jailbreak" simply loaded the correct PDF with some JavaScript; it wasn't actually needed.

Memory protection? That's a basic feature of a kernel? Are we talking about each platform's ability for native code to mmap() executable memory or something?

tarabukka | 13 years ago | on: Samsung Phones: Every app has full memory access

iOS has a jailbreak for every single version. Some have even used a variety of exploits to do this straight from the web. Apple have no magic up their sleeve that makes iOS 'more secure'; they are running on a normal CPU with a normal kernel. Apple users are more proactive in updating because they're nagged by the interface they're forced to use (iTunes) to update.