spacelizard

8 ms·

1.
by spacelizard 9y ago
Because it's free as in freedom, not free as in price. Most popular free software is written by employed developers working for companies.
2.
by spacelizard 9y ago
This is exactly what I mean though. The term "open source" has become so incredibly politicized that it doesn't mean anything any more. I used to use the term in business contexts but I don't anymore because of this. The
3.
by spacelizard 9y ago
You can tell a lot about a company by their attitude on this. The fact that "you should let your users have freedom" is still a controversial statement in those type of companies should tip you off as to how they treat their custo
4.
by spacelizard 9y ago
If we believe prisons are to act as a sort of operant conditioning for the inmates, then the punishment IS supposed the rehabilitation. However, as you probably know, many folks do not respond to this type of conditioning.
5.
by spacelizard 9y ago
There is no malice, this is just what happens at big companies. When you have 10 layers of management, everyone is expected to fall in line because this is the only way it can work.
6.
by spacelizard 9y ago
On the contrary, this was an obvious power play by the recruiter to get the candidate to agree and submit to whatever arbitrary KPI has been passed down by the HR manager, regardless of whether or not it's meaningful. I would not take
7.
by spacelizard 9y ago
I disagree, a good office culture extends beyond meatspace. I've worked at plenty of companies where the general atmosphere was... not good. These are places where the "hallway conversation" was either nonexistent or didn&#x2
8.
by spacelizard 9y ago
Why is Electron still such a memory hog? Wasn't the Chromium Content module supposed to dramatically reduce footprint by only providing the bare minimum to render a web page?
9.
by spacelizard 9y ago
The real privilege that derives from this is being able to live without being bombarded with advertising. To be able to have a meaningful conversation with a business that isn't predicated on them trying to analyze your behavior as par
10.
by spacelizard 9y ago
Scratch is intended for older children who already have a certain level of literacy. There is another product, ScratchJr, for younger children that uses an icon-based UI: http://scratchjr.org/ The transition path between t
11.
by spacelizard 9y ago
It does, but it has a lot of the same problems as MS Office, some worse. The scripting/macro system is arcane, proprietary, and only works in the cloud. The files aren't in an easily parseable format. You can export them to OOXML&
12.
by spacelizard 9y ago
The problem with Soundcloud is that grew too big and as a result aren't building a site for their core customer: indie artists. Take a look at the front page, all it shows is tracks and artists that are already hugely popular. The feat
13.
by spacelizard 9y ago
Look at the incentives of the people who made Bonzi Buddy and Comet Cursor. That kind of crud and malware will continue to exist as long as spying and advertising are the prevalent business model, which they still are. This isn't going
14.
by spacelizard 9y ago
They also face considerable risk for sticking around when an employer has expressed interest in underpaying and overworking them or just outright firing them. If you're hiring people at 50% of their desired pay, then you're genera
15.
by spacelizard 9y ago
It's difficult when you don't have a lot of free time to spend doing random mundane interview questions. It's doubly frustrating when this is because you're spending a lot of time doing work on free (libre) software and
16.
Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat(wired.com)
117 points by spacelizard 9y ago|154 comments
17.
by spacelizard 9y ago
The goal of a capitalistic government is still unfortunately to have a wholly predictable economy. There is competition, but only until a winner is declared, i.e. a monopoly is granted. After this the rents that the winner charges can be ra
18.
by spacelizard 9y ago
I do. There are all kinds of things wrong with requiring 20 years of study just to be able to have a chance to do a job properly. If done properly, we can reduce that time significantly.
19.
by spacelizard 9y ago
I've noticed Facebook seems to be really good at spamming me with useless notifications, it even somehow manages to do it after I've unfriended 90% of the people that I am not close friends with and blocked most notification types
20.
by spacelizard 9y ago
I agree, and it would be nice to have those things done. Free software has a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem now where there is a lot of demand for certain things like you mention, but it's difficult to find funding to actually do the
21.
by spacelizard 9y ago
>The GPL licence just causes more pain and frustration to developers. I don't think this is true. It's not particularly hard for developers to comply with it, especially those who are used to operating in an environment where m
22.
by spacelizard 9y ago
Don't be fooled by the showboating, behind every attempt at executing these aggressive strategies is a crumbling organization rife with disharmony and malcontent. They would not be focusing on what other companies were doing nearly thi
23.
by spacelizard 9y ago
This will continue to be the norm in industries where the marketing cycles are so short and high-stakes. Firms get burned by picking the wrong contractors. Contractors get burned by spending a lot of time bidding on the wrong projects. Thes
24.
by spacelizard 9y ago
https://m.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https://www.wsj.com/artic...
25.
by spacelizard 9y ago
This article also leaves out: - waiting for compiles - waiting for the CI server to finish running tests - waiting for network transfers - waiting for VMs to spin up - waiting for slow algorithms to process data - et cetera Even if it were
26.
by spacelizard 9y ago
See Replicant: http://www.replicant.us/ Unfortunately it is not well supported yet, as porting it to any given device seems to require rewriting several proprietary Android drivers.
27.
by spacelizard 9y ago
>don't burn bridges Once you get ejected from the cool kids' table enough times for random reasons, you see how not worth it is to put up with their bad behaviour. In the case of TFA, sometimes it's someone else that burns
28.
by spacelizard 9y ago
>Otherwise I just have to wonder what the real motive is behind making a public statement like this. What is the motivation for blogging about anything? I am extremely disappointed that we are still stuck culturally in this situation whe
29.
by spacelizard 9y ago
What happened is that the marketing departments from a bunch of proprietary companies realized what was going on and amped up the bullshit. This is a good thing, it means they feel threatened by the concept of free software, which they shou
30.
by spacelizard 9y ago
Someone was working on one for a little bit, but seems to have stopped: https://github.com/minexew/Shrine May be a good starting point for anyone else interested.

More ›