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Comment Re:Not Living Computers (Score 1) 23

The living computer museum was to contrast from all the museums that have computers powered off and maybe not even in working order. Computers DO things and not seeing what they do defeats a large part of the point.

I've only been once, but I hope someone steps up and volunteers funding to prevent this.

Your idea is awesome too. I would love to see a museum with a working difference engine, and all the other things we've designed to help us compute things. The analog firing systems from WWII for example.

Comment Re:Android updates suck (Score 1) 136

Maybe. I believe the media exploit from a year or two ago on Android was patched on phones assumed abandoned by OEMs.

Sadly, for many customers they rely on the goodwill of their OEM and telco to provide serious patches. I expect shops like Samsung, Lenovo/Moto, LG, Sony, and HTC to patch pretty much any phone sold in the past 3 years or so.

Budget buyers, no-name brands, etc are most likely going to be hacked constantly until they replace the phone. KRACK is bad but WPA-AES means they can't inject data and that's on top of TLS blocking that as well. Blueborn, on the other hand, is much more serious and could provide root remotely.

Comment Re:Not sure how I feel about this one (Score 1) 342

But probably at the block level. It would be hard for the networks to argue that they own each 16k block encoded in a different way they encode it compressed in a different way than they compress it.

Each user has a file. They may start and end at different times and they can choose to "delete" their file to get back "free space". The same commercial in different shows may share the same blocks even more than the shows.

This make perfect technological sense, but may still be illegal.

Comment Fork it. (Score 5, Insightful) 1098

If GPL is superior, do a GPLed fork of LLVM/clang and beat the BSD licensed version with their own code.

You should be able to grow faster.
You have access to their improvements, while they don't have access to yours.
But then you'd be doing what you criticize corporations for, what you fear being done to LLVM by corporations.

You obviously could, but it feels wrong to me. But if it's freedom you are protecting why does it feel wrong?

Comment Advertising (Score 4, Interesting) 231

Get a display space near the cafeteria or some other place where students go frequently. Put books there that are interesting to the students. Thor comics, Ender's game whatever the media is already advertising for you.

Talk to teachers and hold classes in the library occasionally so the kids feel comfortable there.
See if the school will add DVDs to the library's collection.

Get them there and they'll figure out how to use it, but you have to get them there.

If they can put meeting rooms in, so clubs can meet there that would be great as well.

Comment Evilhat (Score 2) 64

Look at Evil Hat. Fred Hicks is the most open I've seen of the RPG publishers. You see hard sales numbers quarter to quarter. Discussions on what makes a kickstarter work. Shipping costs. All sorts of useful stuff. Steve Jackson Games yearly reports are good too, but they are more summarized. SJG at this point is basically the Munchkin company with everything else as a sideline, so their information will be less relevant.

But this is a good time to be an RPG publisher, print runs and poor management crippled a lot of companies. One of those problems has been eliminated, and the other is easier due to the way the market has shifted.

Good luck.

Comment No copycatting (Score 2) 308

My home projects tend to be on the peripheral edge of my work. I proof of concept stuff. I try a new library that might turn out to be useful. That's the best balance for me. If I pitch it at work, I have to promise return on the time. This makes my creative projects stressful. If I play with it, it fails or it doesn't. Either way I've learned something, and haven't had to worry about deadlines.

Comment Re:yes, there are a reasonable number of positions (Score 1) 237

That really depends on the job and the institution. I am a research programmer and am being encouraged to be more independent. Write papers and come up with grant ideas in particular. I will most likely never be faculty with a B.S., but grad school is almost free while I'm in my current position and there are past and present faculty who only had/have a Masters.

Get in the door any way you can. If you find a project and supervisor you can work with, doors will open. Most of the paths will be through grad school, but finding the research you like first is a good option.

Comment Re:Seems logical.. (Score 2) 114

I like it. I'm often annoyed at the split between the GUI and command line. What if I want to run a find and view the images or videos that result? Or I write a program that produces images, and I want to test many parameters without having to write a GUI to view the results. This allows shell script style programming to interact with graphical data, and that is something I've wanted for a while.

Comment Following the Google/Motorola vs. Microsoft (Score 1) 582

I think Apple knows this offer will not be taken, but they decided to make one to make their position in the eventual lawsuit stronger. One of Google/Motorola's arguments against Microsoft is that Microsoft will not negotiate, so Google/Motorola could not have violated their FRAND obligations.

Comment Re:No *official* port. (Score 2) 333

But the suite of google apps aren't (maps, gmail, access to the market, etc). Google has tons of leverage.

I think the obvious solution here is to put in a simple skinning API and let the devs go nuts with it. Sense, TW, etc would just be apk's that skin the GUI elements. End users should be able to disable this if they wish.

Google could use its muscle to make this happen. Shame they won't. In the meantime, the released stats show a big move from android to iphone because people seem to prefer Apple's way of doing things. Heck, I had a phone with a published security vulnerability and it took almost 12 months to patch it. That's 100% unacceptable.

Comment Re:Best use of money? (Score 4, Insightful) 205

Don't bother with this crowd. These guys clearly have no practical experience with Exchange and are the same people who have been yelling "ZOMG POSTFIX AND EVOLUTION/CHANDLER/THUNDERBIRD WILL KILL OUTLOOK" 10+ years ago.

As much as I dislike defending my vendors, I have to say the Exchange is surprisingly nimble and the number of devices I can support with a very modest server is pretty surprising. The idea that you're getting 10x the number of users on similiar hardware with a similiar featureset is the same bullshit these FOSS guys have been peddling for years. I just with the FOSS crew could write a usable, supported, efficient Exchange/Activesync replacement. That product doesn't exist and the current crop are all nightmares. Heh, there's a reason why they won't let you test this junk.

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