Alex was an early Twitter employee, Twitter API lead at a time that many HN readers were writing Twitter apps, and wrote Programming Scala. There're a number of folks here that follow his writings with interest.
At home, I have a rack of shelves with box and manilla folders. Each one contains different things like house bills, banking statements, insurance docs etc. I find it completely natural and a very easy way to file stuff. When I go to the bank, I take my banking folder with me. When I go to the insurance company, I take my insurance folder with me. My Mum and Dad (and likely most other people in the world) also have a similar system in their house.
I store my digital files in a similarly compartamentalized, hierarchical manner. It may come as a surprise to you but my Mum and Dad (who are approaching 60 and are not exactly clued up computer users) also do the same thing on their PCs (dad with his various excel sheets and word docs, mum with her photos). Of all the brain dead questions they ask me to do with their computers and the various tech problems they have, understanding folders and using them is literally something that has never come up. The paradigm is immediately obvious to them and they find it a natural way to catalogue and store their files. This notion that a user is too lazy to organise their files is simply something I have NEVER seen (and I've seen quite a lot when it comes to bad computer users).
If my parents were to be given a computer that had no concept of directories it would be a disaster. They would be just as lost as when I try to explain to them that the email they see in Thunderbird is the same as the one they see via webmail because Thunderbird is accessing their mail account through IMAP. To them that just sounds like magic. They much preferred it when they used to get their email via POP. Oh, and guess how they organise their email? Yep, lots of folders. I don't think they've ever used the tagging and advanced search features offered by Thunderbird.
I'm the same and it would fill me with rage having to exclusively interact with all my files through a GUI front end to an sqlite database. Which effectively is what we're talking about here. I can't think of anything more non-intuitive or pointless.
Any competent machinist can make functional semiautomatic weapons. This is just the next step in making it even easier.
If the United States ever got serious about banning firearms, a massive homebrew industry would grow up overnight. Gunpowder is not fundamentally harder to make than methamphetamine.
People who quite rightly see our drug laws as pointless and ineffective somehow often miss that a gun ban would be no more effective in the United States. If you want there to be less drugs or guns, you have to attack the demand side, not the supply side. Suppressing supply while keeping demand steady just ensures higher margins for the suppliers.
The original article wasn't very good, but this response is even worse. It appears the author is lacking any form of creativity to think beyond the idea that folders are the only paradigm for ordering files that could possibly work.
In practice, if you forget about system files and such, I'd estimate 9 out of 10 people have all their documents in a single flat folder, which they only access through their word processor or whatever they use to open them. They have all their pictures and video in a tool that organizes them into albums and such without them having to deal with folders. They have all their music in a program that keeps them in a library somewhere, which they never manipulate on the file system level. And so on. Or (also very common) they just dump everything they touch on their computer on the desktop. This is not because making folders is 'too complex', but because users can't be bothered to come up with hierarchies to order where there files are 'stored on the file system' or whatever, they just want to make their changes persistent and be able to quickly find their files later.
For the vast majority of people, folders are an anochronism. It's not that they are 'hard' or 'complex', but they are simply not essential, and actually quite limiting for file management. The whole idea that the artefacts you create or consume are best structured as a tree really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Especially not if you want to have all your data available on multiple machines which may have wildly different file systems such as desktops and mobile devices.
This doesn't mean we should all have big piles of files with no ways of structuring them, but it doesn't mean folders are the epitome of file management either. A database-like file system with powerful search options could definitely be much better. From an end-user perspective, organizing files by the applications they can open them also seems to be a pretty good idea to me. Attaching metadata and tags to files so you don't have to superimpose them using a tree-like structure would be a huge improvement.
I'm not saying that what Apple is trying with iOS and now OS X is so great we should all hail it as the future of file management, but personally I think they are moving in the right direction. Ideally, end-users should be able to operate their devices and get to their files without even knowing it has something as abstract as a 'file system'. Just sit down, get the file you want using whatever criterium makes the most sense for finding it, manipulate it, and have the same file available on every other machine. I think this is the vision Apple has, but it will take lots of time to get there.
Also, people mailing files to themselves to get them on their iOS devices literally has nothing to do with how the iOS file system works. Folders or no folders would not make any difference.
I'm not sure the comment you're replying to views all startups as a con like PG was talking about. A lot of people just dislike Zynga because of their early shady business practices, and the fact that their games are seen as a dumbing down of the industry.
Zynga is sort of the Nickelback of the startup world.
When I was at Georgia Tech, I got 650 Mbps. You realize the bottleneck isn't your connection at that point -- it's everyone else's. Which means a lot of sites still download just as slow. Although the big sites have optimized data centers, so it was pretty cool downloading an entire OS in a few seconds (although I think my hard drive write speed limited that a bit too).
My father works in the fiber optics industry and has told me that if fiber was brought directly to each home, every person would have more bandwidth than they knew what to do with. One thin, tiny fiber can carry an INSANE amount of information. The problem is the processing circuitry that converts these light signals into digital signals. These NICs have a much lower throughput than the fiber itself, but if the fiber infrastructure was already in place everywhere, upgrades would be much cheaper and quicker. (In other words, Google Fiber has easy upgrade potential to 10, 100, ... Gbps).
> every person would have more bandwidth than they knew what to do with.
I think that is exactly the point. That's why they are doing this; Google doesn't know what exactly will happen when everyone in the USA/world has fiber connections, but they do know that incredible innovation will come. What kind of applications will be built? What kind of applications can be built?
Couple this with the increasing computing power inside each home over the next many years, and Google will have control over an unbelievably fast and large network of computers.
I'd be certain most applications are in the weak-to-strong AI arena.
All internal computer now run as virtual machines (not desktops) running on two mondo-powerful Linux servers. The virtualization platform is Citrix. Nobody has a functional box under their desk any more....The company has got rid of the desktop computers entirely (sorry Dell and HP)
What? How are they accessing these virtual machines? Mind meld? In most cases where companies use VDIs the desktop machines are the standard old Dells and HPs because they actually cost less than "dumb terminals" (aka thin-clients). And that's accepting the questionable notion that VDIs are the future.
Nowadays nobody under thirty writes anything on Microsoft developer tools unless they are demented or brain-dead
We have been on a hiring binge lately and it is very difficult to find candidates who know anything but Microsoft tools. Sure they might know github, but there is a very substantial part of the workforce that stills crawls into Microsoft's bosom.
In general this blog post is completely detached from reality. There is the "startup" culture, of course, where everyone runs an iMac and develops iOS and Ruby/MongoDB apps for their EC2 cluster, and then there's the many magnitudes bigger general computing world that holds zero similarities.
Why would anyone try to revise history, casting doubt on the verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Why would the Wall Street Journal publish this garbage?
Short, simplistic answer: because the mere existence of this article, published in a newspaper widely perceived as reputable, is "evidence" of debate about the government's role for all those politicians, ideologues, and other interests who want to cut government spending.
Steam's cut is 30%. However, for that 30% you get to update your game whenever you want, and virtually as often as you want. By that I mean they don't impose any direct limits on how often you update, but the general rule is no more than once a week aside from hotfixes and the like. I'm not aware of any digital marketplace that gives you this much control, especially as video game updates will often be hundreds of megabytes in size. Contrast this with Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, which charges you $40k for each additional update after the first free update. [1]
Edit: It is worth nothing that if a user's game was activated with a retail key, Steam takes no cut. This means that you are effectively getting service for that user for free.
You also get Steam Cloud, which allows you to store your users' configuration and saved game files to be accessed anywhere, their peer-to-peer networking API which provides NAT punching. Then there's matchmaking, stats/achievements, Steam Community (their social network), and several other "Steamworks" features. [2]
Edit: Microtransactions is another big one, also known as in-app purchases. The online brochure for Steamworks is worth a read if you're interested in any of this: http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/index.php
I haven't read a lot about Windows 8's app store, especially concerning Xbox Live, but Steam still has a lot to offer to developers.
I talked to the rep (after waiting about 30 minutes). They were helpful, direct, competent, and provided a way for me to contact the person I talked to via e-mail after the call was ended.
They organized a replacement device and even worked through the fact that I'd purchased the tablet from my brother-in-law.
If their future customer service offerings are the same as what I experienced last night, I have no concerns.
> The current, publicly acknowledged level of intercourse between Google and the U.S. Federal Government is already worrisome. Perhaps your data has been a part of those exchanges, perhaps it hasn't. You and I don't know.
We've known for a fact that companies like AT&T have been working closely with the NSA for years. So it seems like Google is the better choice here.
Maybe once you have tried Gigabit (GIGABIT!) internet, on a daily basis you won't feel the same. Cloud storage and a bunch of other things will now feel very different.
- Why own a computer when you can just vpn into a cluster through a thin client?
- Why own a game system...
- Stream 4k HD movies
- A whole bunch of ideas not thought of yet.
0r maybe your right and it wont be that different, I would like the chance to see if it does make a big difference. The current telcos were not in that game, google is.
-R is the POSIX-standard flag for recursive grep, so that would be worse to change imo. It's also the flag used for recursive grep by the BSDs (some of which do support '-r', but only as a deprecated historical option... OpenBSD calls it "strongly discouraged").
...until Google algos shut down your account; now you loose gmail, docs, drive, etc., etc., etc., and fiber.
OK, I am kidding to some extent. Maybe not. I'd sure like to see them move in a direction that assures users that all services will not be cutoff without recourse for unknown algo violations.
But $0 internet is very amazing.
On top of that, $120/mo for cutting edge consumer entertainment is just a slap in the face to other service providers.