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User: digitaltraveller

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  1. MediaWiki: Install the Youtube Extension on Ask Slashdot: Multimedia-Based Wiki For Learning and Business Procedures? · · Score: 1

    There's plenty around. Here's one: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/...

    Ignore that advice about Confluence. That product is HARD to use imo. Mediawiki is way better.

    BTW - New version of Mediawiki have a rich text editor built in. You probably want to turn that on.

  2. While they are getting rid of bad legacy things... on The XBMC Project Will Now Be Called Kodi · · Score: 1, Troll

    Drop the requirement for the 3D graphics card, since it's NEVER EVER used for anything remotely 3D graphics related.
    Don't get me wrong, it's a great way for someone who doesn't know any better to run their CPU at 110% using software emulation, but otherwise a bad decision for their target market.

  3. Advert disguised as story on NVIDIA Unveils Lineup of GeForce 800M Series Mobile GPUs, Many With Maxwell · · Score: 0, Troll

    This takes the cake. I've never complained once about an obvious advert disguised as a story.

    But to pimp this, this CRAP company that has been so incredibly hostile to the free and open source community is such bad judgement.
    The new slashdot management seems determined to undermine the loyalty of their userbase. What a disgrace.

  4. Official Stats are Suspect on Quebec Language Police Target Store Owner's Facebook Page · · Score: 1

    Most young Quebecers speak English. The official stat is 43% of Quebecers are bilingual English and French, but I have a feeling it's actually way over 50% if we are talking passable English. Certainly it will be by the time the baby boomer generation dies out. I hope this law is challenged before that tho.

  5. I find this strange on Electrical Engineering Lost 35,000 Jobs Last Year In the US · · Score: 1

    Does anyone have any speculation about why this is happening?

  6. Try UPLINK on Google Removes "Search Nearby" Function From Updated Google Maps · · Score: 1

    UPLINK
    Swipe left in the main app to get the search by map feature.

    Also please give any feedback about the app. We expect the experience to be progressively enhanced.

  7. Re:The Wave Story on Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Implement Wave Protocol Self Hosted? · · Score: 1

    Just heard about this: https://github.com/WeTheInternet/collide - thought you might be interested.

  8. Wouldn't someone think of the children? on Parents' Campaign Leads To Wi-Fi Ban In New Zealand School · · Score: 1

    Oh gosh. This is not a very good precedent. I hope the children are taught that:
    -The radiation from WIFI is the same type as what comes from the Sun, which is essential for all life on earth.
    -We all emit radiation.

    A New Privacy Enhancing HTML5 Mobile Browser - It's your remote control for the world.

  9. Re:The Wave Story on Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Implement Wave Protocol Self Hosted? · · Score: 1

    Part of 3 startups. So you've worked in Silicon Valley. Good for you. If you are some amazing founder/investor, instead of a know-it-all software engineer, please do post your personal links so I can learn more.

    BTW The Wave stuff was only a small component of our value offering. So your supposition that we "built a startup around a protocol that wasn't yet released, that wasn't well documented, that wasn't in your control" is just wrong. That's why I said "partially". There were other contributing factors.

  10. Re:The Wave Story on Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Implement Wave Protocol Self Hosted? · · Score: 1

    Shrug. So I have a higher risk tolerance than you. Everyone is different. If you don't understand or believe that startups/companies are a bundle of bets on many different factors that you can't control then you don't understand startups. I think you need to have more exits than me if you are going to criticize my business sense, Mr. Armchair Quarterback. Also the company ultimately died because on of the investors was bright enough to knock back an offer of investment. That person wasn't me.
    Also we trusted Google's word. Some of the API's (eg. the Robots API) got plenty of traction early on. We built a replacement. Like I said it wasn't the only contributing factor, but it didn't help. When a big company makes a promise like that - you expect them to follow through.

  11. The Wave Story on Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Implement Wave Protocol Self Hosted? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here's what happened in excruciating detail:

    1) Google Releases Wave, claims it will be open source. Promises/Tells a Fibonacci.
    2) Google doesn't release Wave as open source for various reasons eg: protocol buffers toolchain underneath deemed too valuable. (Please don't argue this, the protocol buffers stuff that's been released is only a tiny part of the story.)
    3) Google builds a terrible open source replacement pretty much from scratch. It BARELY works for one commit nearly 3 years after they claim Wave will be open sourced. It never has been. Entire affair is swept under carpet.

    I know because I had an ehealth startup that died partially as a result of this. In the end, after we realized we had been hoodwinked (this post excludes private conversations we had with Google) we wrote a Wave-like thing around part of our technology in record time and it surprisingly turned out really well, but unfortunately it was too late, and company died. That was sad. Startups are fragile things.

    Anyhow, try sharejs it's written by a former Wave team member and it's better. You can easily wrap gwt around that if you need to. Or, I'm highly skeptical but you can try JBoss Errai, they have written an OT framework into their weird everything framework. OT is a pretty complicated bit of code, and they just stuck it in a directory errai-otec like it was any other feature (eg. a Base64 encoder). I would rate the chance their OT impl has major issues as very high. I don't really understand corporate open source like this, so I'd love to see an Errai person explain the project. I'm guessing the thesis is somehow based around upselling a service of some sort.

    tl;dr You want this.

    Support A Free Internet

  12. New Mobile Android Browser on Ask Slashdot: Why Do Mobile Versions of Websites Suck? · · Score: 1

    We've just released a new mobile browser for android. We have a number of innovative feature in the works to improve the mobile browsing experience. Fairly soon, we will release the desktop to mobile form factor converter feature, which will also retain the option to see the page in it's original format. Here are a list of other features that will happen soon (at least for Android > v4). Over time the list will also evolve to give higher priority for mobile and tablet optimized sites. Did I mention it gives you free WIFI too through our advanced connection manager? Good connectivity is a major barrier to a great mobile web experience.

  13. Re:I wouldn't on Ask Slashdot: Can Commercial Hardware Routers Be Trusted? · · Score: 1

    I really like the BSDs, especially Tinfoil. There will always be standalone servers. But we think that the future is partially about router/server hybrids with eg. big LRU caches. A great example of this. A busy router can easily download the same image file, 100K times a day. That's waste. In a perfect world we'd have a completely finished software system, that works everywhere, without hacks, and doesn't have to leverage the convenience of an OS that seems to have most of the market share out there. If it's any consolation anything we do should be trivially portable to the BSDs. But at the moment it doesn't seem like there is a big market for what we are doing.

    tl;dr Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

  14. Re:I wouldn't on Ask Slashdot: Can Commercial Hardware Routers Be Trusted? · · Score: 1

    Thanks for your feedback. Something I've learned is that marketing and complexity don't mix, so I agree our communication strategy is not optimal. We are trying to talk to too many audiences and doing a bad job with all of them. We'll try harder.

    Half a million is an awful lot of money. $430 is a lot for a router.

    It's a server/router hybrid. We need to be clearer about that. The specs are competitive with what you'd find in the market for regular computers, but we thought it would be distracting to break them down because some of them are subject to change.

    It's not clear at all what it does. IPv6 internet? What is that?

    Sharing the connection with nearby people? Why would I want to?

    Because at scale, the idea turns your internet acquisition cost into a one time cost. It's true that it's better for municipalities to adopt this kind of technology than individuals. Sharing your connection: For better performance and your privacy. We probably could probably selll the privacy aspect more, as I think our architecture is the best I know out there for turning the internet back into the bastion of liberty it once was, rather than the surveillance state it has become. Our solution to this by the way was to create a commodity market for anonymous distributed computation, but more work needs to be done.

    Mesh networking. How is this going to scale? What performance and latency do you expect? How likely is it that two users will find one another? You need a huge amount of deployed devices for this to work, especially for ones in fixed locations.

    I admit there are critical mass issues, and this is a very legitimate criticism of the project. Our strategy to bootstrap this network is to run our network over the regular internet until such time that it spreads to someone near you in physical proximity.

    There's some nonsense in the video about the number of people in the world without internet access. A $430 device sold in first world countries won't do anything to address that.

    I don't think it's nonsense. We are trying to turn internet acquisition into a one time cost. It's a high price, why we were asking people to get in touch with internet.org for us and ask them to talk to us. We've now made contact with them, and hope something comes of it.

    It's an enormous mish-mash of things. Android, mesh networking, some nebulous IPv6 internet, a web browser, an API for I don't know what... seriously, I'm well versed in tech, but I have no clue what is all this about. And that is a bad sign.

    TL;DR: it's unclear what it does, why would I want to participate, and it's very expensive. Why aren't you developing alternative firmware for cheap wifi routers, for instance?

    Mish-mash: That's true, but I think the strength of our approach will come out as we roll out more of our stuff. If you are serious about solving this problem you have to look at it from a lot of different angles. Also most WIFI hardware sold out there has closed source drivers, even on Linux. That's a nonstarter for a project like ours. Controlling the hardware makes things much easier.

    Anyhow, thanks for this feedback. Overall, it's some of the best we've got. We'll review it and act accordingly to improve our message.

  15. I wouldn't on Ask Slashdot: Can Commercial Hardware Routers Be Trusted? · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't.

    Our team of scientists and Linux netwokring experts has an open, next generation router project up on IndieGogo right now, but we aren't getting much traction. I guess we missed product-market fit. To the point that we are have modified the campaign to ask people not to buy the router or if they do - risk us not shipping some of the more advanced features that we are working on in this product. We had hoped to release it all as open source but I just don't think that' going to be possible now, unless we somehow magically start getting a ton of orders.

  16. Re:Don't Go On Vacation Then on Online Retailers Cruising Tor To Hunt For Fraudsters · · Score: 1

    Did you know your name is an Aptronym? Especially for this post.

  17. Wine or ReactOS Opportunity on Google To Support Windows XP Longer Than Microsoft · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It would be hugely amusing if one of these projects announced (even in jest) that they were would continue to issue patches for XP after EOL.

  18. pom.xml on MAVEN Mission To Mars Will Proceed, Despite Shutdown · · Score: 1

    We are sending maven to mars? Thank goodness for small mercies.

    An engineer at NASA told me it's not really that great at producing something called binaries for CI, assembly:single notwithstanding. No idea what he meant, but he seemed to know what he's talking about.

    I imagine the mission will come off without a hitch as long as our network connection to it remains up at all times to receive all the useful verbose reporting it gives us.

     

  19. Built with Netbeans on Java Developer Says He Built, Launched Basic Open Source Office Suite In 30 Days · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's proof he is lying. Even the developer's of netbeans don't use netbeans.

  20. Download the source on $200 Intel Android Laptops Are Coming · · Score: 1

    Hey all,

    You can all download the latest builds here: https://01.org/android-ia/downloads.
    Hope everyone likes it!

  21. Going Down in Quality on Fedora 18 Installer: Counterintuitive and Confusing? · · Score: 1

    Fedora seems to have lost it's way with this release.

    The installer wasn't great but alot of other changes changes are in the release that are really poorly thought out.
    There is stuff changed that I just can't work out why on earth they would change it.

    I would really like to see someone smush android-x86.org on top of a fedora like distribution and go from there.
    For intel not to do this is imho basically insane. They are in big big trouble, I guess they haven't realised how big yet.

  22. They/we need the reverse. Anyone remember WORA? on Oracle Proposes New Native JavaScript Engine for OpenJDK · · Score: 1

    A fully compliant JVM written in Js. Doppio is the most advanced one that I know of. http://int3.github.com/doppio/

    Once complete, it will become instantly redundant, because the non ms browser vendors will put jvms back in the browser to speed things up.
    And that's a good thing! This whole js only thing for the web is dumb. At some point in the future, it could be 0 years, 20 years, this will come about and we (you) will all slap our foreheads and go...OMG, we could have been writing our web apps in language (insert favourite here) X this whole time? What were we thinking.

    JS is being compiled and minified and closured away. JVM is open, it's bytecode. It can run anywhere. Let's let go of this fiction that its somehow good or more open to have a single client side web language.

  23. Good memories on Einstein Letter Critical of Religion To Be Auctioned On EBay · · Score: 1

    This reminds me of catholic high school when I quoted Einstein for an assignment in my religion (indoctrination) class as a way of proving that god DID exist. To make my (nonunderstanding) teacher look foolish in front of the rest of the class. Good times.

  24. Re:The stupid! It hurts! on Fedora Introduces Offline Updates · · Score: 1

    As parent said, this is a terrible outcome.

    Moving on constructively, I would suggest fedora should just be a minimal package set and a system for managing VMs. A good way to partition each VM would be for example, each system that manages it's own packages (eg. ruby, perl, firefox). Because of the rise of multi core computing this would have no performance impact at all. The advantages of a system like this include easier system management, better security, and convenience. There will be better upgrade-ability because although fedora has no rolling releases (a shame), users will be able to create specialized appliances that they can copy over to the new version of fedora without hassle and upgrade them at their leisure. It is way easier to deal with variable-sized VM images then partitions.

    Support the android mainlining project
    http://elinux.org/Android_Mainlining_Project

  25. Im sold on Why Open Compute Is a Win For Rackspace · · Score: 2

    Obvious benefit. Where do I buy opencompute servers from? Does anyone sell them yet? I'm outfitting a dc server cabinet in the near future.