Napster: A New Killer Internet App (1999) - <AUTHOR> https://evolt.org/node/564 <comment><USER2> Napster is the future of the internet. It _will_ come back. But the world has to evolve on a social level before this can happen.

We saw the same with the printing press: the Powers That Be first banned it, then tried to control it, and eventually had to relent. It will happen with data sharing too, eventually. It might take a century, but it will happen.

<comment><USER3> > We saw the same with the printing press: the Powers That Be first banned it, > then tried to control it, and eventually had to relent.

All of those phases have already happened - banning (RIAA lawsuits), control (iTunes), relent (Spotify). We've reached the endgame - it's streaming.

If you want to store and maintain a personal 128GB collection of MP3 files with incomplete titles and data, that's your prerogative, but you're going to be in a tiny minority.

<comment><USER4> Must be nice to have a high bandwidth connection with 5 nines uptime, no risk of your account being revoked, or the content licenses abrogated or expired.

It is of the utmost importance to inculcate the newest generation of media consumers that renting is preferred to ownership.

<comment><USER5> I slogged through keeping a local archive of my carefully-ripped audio collection on a hardware RAID-5 storage server for decades. When I finally gave up in favor of Google Play (and subsequently Apple Music), it was liberating.

At the end of the day, the "content" we're talking about here is purely entertainment. You can live without it. And even if the hammer falls, and the copyright holders go backwards, things like Napster and Limewire and eDonkey will rise again.

At 10 years old, I never understood the line in SW EPIV, where Leia says, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." (Seriously, the line haunted me for years.) But it's a perfect allegory for this situation.

Of course, I'm still waiting for the blowback against Facebook, so...

<comment><USER6> I had the exact same experience, but then about 2 weeks ago, one of my favourite albums got deleted of All Music. So I had to search the disc, rip it, and then upload it to my account, which works for now but certainly put a dent in the experience.

Let's see how it plays out on the future.

<comment><USER7> >Let's see how it plays out on the future.

Exactly as you'd expect. Aphex Twin had a CD that included the video on the data portion of the CD (I think it was Windowlicker, circa 1999) - but you had to unlock the video online. After a couple of years, the server shut down, and you no longer had access to the video.

Of course, someone released a crack, and eventually the advent of YouTube negated that particular problem.

I still keep local copies of my music. Part of this is because I have a not insignificant amount of music that I listen to that is not and might never be part of a subscription service. Part of it is because I've experienced early attempts at controlling access to music and video that I purchased, and saw how that failed, and I don't plan on risking that loss again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was the author of MP3 Fiend, which was doing really well back in 1999 (CNET 5-star Editor's Choice). Then Napster came along.

While I appreciate that its 1999 interface was just as ugly as mine, what I didn't have was P2P. And obviously, that was the "killer technology".

<comment><USER9> Interface looks great to me. I know what every single piece of the UI does immediately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Napster. Worked there in 2000 and 2001. It was surreal (at least for me) to work at a place that was always in the news at the time. I can understand how employees at Faang must feel at times. Not a total distraction but it's there. Napster was an interesting place.

<comment><USER11> How good a job did Justin Timberlake do in portraying Sean Parker?

<comment><USER10> Only saw Sean Parker in a meeting once (and I don't believe I was ever introduced) so, difficult to comment on that. My sense is that he was more involved at the beginning of the service. I got involved around the time Bertelsmann made the investment in the company.

<comment><USER10> I guess technically it was a 'convertible loan'. Whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > I've used it mostly for finding obscure or impossible-to-find music. I mean, > where else are you going to get a copy of The Mr. Belvedere Show theme song?

This is a nice reminder of just how much things have advanced in a short 20 years.

In four mouse clicks and under 5 seconds, I was watching _the video_ for it.

Select -> Right click -> Search with Google -> Click.

<comment><USER13> YouTube solved the problem of piracy enablers getting sued out of existence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wish Mesh Networks were a bigger thing. I wish that casual P2P over them was a thing. Music. Books. Pictures. News. All spread by just walking around, gathering content that matches tags you subscribe to.

<comment><USER15> there are a lot of people working on various aspects of this. hopefully something usable will be available in the next couple of years.

[https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/)

[https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki](https://www.open- mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki)

[https://heropunch.io/Tracker](https://heropunch.io/Tracker)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I remember launching Napster for the first time. Millions of popular and obscure songs at your fingertips. It was exhilerating to experience the power of peer-to-peer.

The genie was out of the bottle.

<comment><USER17> Tooth paste out of the tube is what Gene Kan tried to coin for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "if the recording industry knew about this, they'd probably shut it down."

<comment><USER19> Well Lars must had read the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Since my genre of choice is dance music, I use Soulseek, which I think has done a great job of carrying Napster's torch.

The trouble is that many of the tracks I'm into come from the personal collections of assorted DJs or diggers on Youtube, so obscure tracks are often in poor quality: I've had to resort to using Discogs to purchase the original vinyls and recording them through a sound card. I am not yet a pro at digitally cleaning up some of the minute crackling that occurs, and buying a brush to clean the records hasn't helped much...

<comment><USER21> >> I've had to resort to using Discogs to purchase the original vinyls and recording them through a sound card. I am not yet a pro at digitally cleaning up some of the minute crackling that occurs, and buying a brush to clean the records hasn't helped much...

Source: vinyl junkie, vinyl DJ, professional audio engineer and girl who presses her own vinyl here in Toronto - You really have to acetate wash your records and only use the highest quality gear. There's little you can do beyond that. If a record is messed after you acetone it, unfortunately removing the crackle sounds is kinda going in and modifying the original sound itself. You don't _really_ know what else you're getting rid of.

I use a Pioneer PLX-500 which has a built-in USB. I generally get an extremely low level of noise especially off of new LP's.

<comment><USER22> > _There 's little you can do beyond that._

Depending on how much you want to spend, some flavor of iZotope RX will let you de-crackle and perform other types of audio restoration in a very transparent way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The nostalgia for this UI/UX is astounding. These were truly golden days of a sort.

<comment><USER23> This seems like something that would be held up as an example of why programmers shouldn't do the UI but I think I'd hold it up as an example of why they should.

Those buttons along the top look like an early implementation of tabs or a stack switcher that are common today. The search interface doesn't infantalize the user. I bet if you changed the windows theme it would match as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > It's a true community sharing all their music.

That's the point. Sharing is caring. Also this is what culture is about... not about the pop shit we get shoved in our face all the time. If anything, mp3 sharing made me buy more records (12" vinyl), not less.

<comment><USER25> Counterpoint: I hate having to track files on a hard drive, love pop music, and could never be bothered to buy a physical piece of media ever again. Don't yuck my yum, I think that's a better point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can anyone explain the T1, T2, T3 classification of internet speed? Back in the day, I don't remember it being used where I lived.

<comment><USER27> I remember seeing them a bit, but not knowing what they meant. I've found this which explains it a bit.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier)

> The most common legacy of this system is the line rate speeds. "T1" now > means any data circuit that runs at the original 1.544 Mbit/s line rate. > Originally the T1 format carried 24 pulse-code modulated, time-division > multiplexed speech signals each encoded in 64 kbit/s streams, leaving 8 > kbit/s of framing information which facilitates the synchronization and > demultiplexing at the receiver. The T2 and T3 circuit channels carry > multiple T1 channels multiplexed, resulting in transmission rates of 6.312 > and 44.736 Mbit/s, respectively. A T3 line comprises 28 T1 lines, each > operating at total signaling rate of 1.544 Mbit/s. It is possible to get a > fractional T3 line, meaning a T3 line with some of the 28 lines turned off, > resulting in a slower transfer rate but typically at reduced cost.

<comment><USER28> The T1 users were like internet royalty to us dialup users back in the Napster days. I often pondered where they must be to get such an amazing connection (Universities, I assume). Now even in rural England I get a reliable connection that's over 50x faster. Even mobile is faster than that. How times change.

<comment><USER29> I remember being on dial-up as a kid back then and being insanely jealous that kids in college got T1 connections in their dorms. One of the reasons why I wanted to go to college as a kid was the blazing fast internet speed. Downloads that took hours for me, took seconds for them. It sounded like heaven to me back then.

<comment><USER30> I went to a state school that hadn't completed networking their dorms. Even at school, I had to use dial-up to get my email (using Pine through a VMS). My girlfriend at a different school had high-speed access in the dorms.

I remember making the 2 hour trip to visit her, and half of my excitement was all the music I could download once I got there.

I show up, and find out she hadn't connected her computer yet! First priority of that day was going to the campus bookstore to buy an ISA network card and 10Base2 terminators and connectors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Got to remember mp3. THAT was the killer tech that enabled everything.

<comment><USER9> Before that we used real audio files. I remember downloading so much music via .ra files on IRC via XDCC. Back then it was a great choice because we were still using modems. The quality was basically AM radio level, but the files were tiny so the trade off was worth it.

<comment><USER32> On my 28k modem with my Win 3.1 machine, I relied pretty heavily on MIDI files. I had a good collection Greenday, Nirvana, and movie theme songs (Ghost busters, Jaws, Jurrasic Park, Spaceballs, etc..) Oh, and I recently discovered that browsers no longer even support MIDI files.... yes, I _recently_ tried to create a webpage that would play music on load, don't ask me why...I'm just an awful person sometimes.

<comment><USER9> I'm hugely nostalgic for the early web, I don't blame you at all.

If you've never seen it, this is worth scrolling through: [https://www.cameronsworld.net/](https://www.cameronsworld.net/)

<comment><USER32> Thank you. That was amazing. The dancing girls especially made me reminisce (of my 13 y/o days). My parents never knew that I installed some secret dancing-girl thinger on the home-computer. I constantly wonder, and struggle with, how the internet impacts my 14 y/o stepdaughter in ways of which I'm unaware.... and how to approach it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> written by metafilter founder mathowie

<comment><USER34> About Napster and on evolt, the whole thing was a nostalgia bomb as soon as I clicked the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> What an application. I will download right away and try too.

</comment><comment><USER36> "I could go on and on about how I feel mp3's promote the sales of CDs, but that's an argument for another day."

Yeah. That worked out. ;)

</comment><comment><USER37> I was always amazed by the old jazz recordings that were never released on CD but were on Napster. Somebody cared enough to convert vinyl to mp3.

</comment><comment><USER38> 'killer app.' I heard that was the term 'Bill Gates' was also asked about during his hearing in the Gates vs USA case.</comment>


"Ancient Mayan city" discovered by teen may in fact be cannabis crop - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-36276864 <comment><USER2> You could literally throw a dart at a map of the Yucatan/Northern Central America and it would land on an "Ancient Mayan city". I grew up there, and our house was built on top of Maya ruins, we'd find hundreds of ruins in the surrounding mountains. We used to dig up full ceramic bowls and a ton of obsidian in the garden.

The hype around this kid is amazing.

<comment><USER3> I'm Mexican and i can confirm this. The south is full of "undiscovered" pyramids. There are in certain regions tons of fake mountains. And even in mexico city you just need to digg a little bit in certain places to find artifacts and art. There is just not enough funding in archeology, and once "discovered" its expensive to take care of them. Which is a shame really because there are tons of things we dont know about this civilizations. Precolombian history is full of speculations.

<comment><USER4> I thought the main expense was maintenance after unearthing, as deterioration accelerates?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The claim that it's a cannabis field is at least as unsupportable as any other claims. It's a throwaway comment in the article, and frankly considering the remoteness of the location seems very unlikely.

</comment><comment><USER6> Usually you find the cannabis _before_ you find the lost Mayan city. Kid's got it all wrong.

</comment><comment> St-Clock So we've been in Le Monde[1], now BBC and Hacker News. All of this because a tabloid newspaper from Montreal thought it was better to gain exposure than to protect and correct a young aspiring scientist. A local "mythbuster" [2] already debunked the whole story, but alas, the trashy newspaper is still pushing this fiasco from new angles every day.

I fear this whole story will be extremely bad for the kid and most news outlets should blame the newspaper instead of focusing on the kid or the bad science part.

[1] [http://mobile.lemonde.fr/big- browser/article/2016/05/11/l-hi...](http://mobile.lemonde.fr/big- browser/article/2016/05/11/l-histoire-aberrante-d-un-jeune-quebecois-qui- avait-decouvert-une-cite-maya_4917667_4832693.html) [2] [http://journalmetro.com/opinions/inspecteur- viral/962214/ce-...](http://journalmetro.com/opinions/inspecteur- viral/962214/ce-jeune-quebecois-a-decouvert-une-cite-maya-non-disent-les- experts/)

</comment><comment><USER7> > "The whole thing is a mess - a terrible example of junk science hitting the > internet in free-fall," wrote Dr David Stuart

Wouldn't it actually be an _excellent_ example of 'junk science hitting the internet in free-fall' ?

<comment><USER8> "I'm in terrible pain."

<comment><USER9> "This is an excellent example of excruciating pain". The "terrible" in "terrible example of X" means that it's a bad example of X, not that it's a good example of how X is bad.

<comment><USER10> When we're talking about something a person did (promoting junk science, in this case), it's easy to use the meaning of _setting_ a bad example. It's usually clear from context whether the example is 'terrible to follow' or 'terrible at explicating'.

You might prefer a nonambiguous wording, but the current wording is valid, and not a grammatical error.

For the pain example, think of "a terrible example of how to excruciatingly injure yourself" as a phrase that's easier to use in either context.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for explaining. I hadn't meant to point it out in a sense of grammatical correctness but it makes sense that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe the link should be changed to Gizmodo instead of "BBC Trending" (which seems to be the linkbait division of BBC)...Gizmodo has much more detail and original reporting, e.g. contacting the Canadian Space Agency for comment:

[http://gizmodo.com/experts-doubt-that-a-teen-found-a-lost- ma...](http://gizmodo.com/experts-doubt-that-a-teen-found-a-lost-maya- city-1775985640)

FWIW, the CSA doesn't seem to have much of an explanation...

> _We asked De Lisle to respond to the claims made by experts that this is > "junk science," and that the objects in the satellite photos are probably > abandoned milpas. To which he responded: "The area of interest covers more > than 78 square kilometers, and many linear features that appear manmade are > visible from space." Which is not much of an answer._

If the Maya ruins end up being nothing, I think this story is a great example of how silly it is to think of science as one monolithic entity, where every scientist automatically has a clue about fields far outside of their expertise. The CSA were likely impressed with the kid's tracking of the stars...there's no reason to think the CSA has any expertise in what an actual Maya city looks like.

<comment><USER12> Science is a method, I don't understand why 'science' is all lumped together anymore than mechanics and carpenters being 'hammer users'

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Before they get into a big flame-fest, maybe someone should go and, you know, check it out.

<comment><USER14> One does not simply walk into the Mexican jungle.

<comment><USER15> It looks pretty remote even for sending in a light aircraft with a camera, so I guess it's not too surprising that some possibly interesting feature hasn't been quickly investigated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Clickbait 2, the revenge of the clickbait

</comment><comment><USER17> Whoops, well give the kid high marks for trying

<comment><USER7> __cough __high marks __cough __? :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm actually surprised that I saw the "it was false" news pretty much everywhere, without even seeing the original news anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER19> It may be _anything_ , but I think it's a little strange how they shot this down so fast without any evidence. Makes me wonder if this is a desperate attempt to deter looters.

<comment><USER20> Probably not.

[http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32829/has-a- fift...](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32829/has-a-fifteen-year- old-from-canada-discovered-a-hidden-mayan-city)

> Very few Maya constellations have been identified, and even in these cases > we do not know how many and which stars exactly composed each constellation. > It is thus impossible to check whether there is any correspondence between > the stars and the location of Maya cities. In general, since we know of > several environmental facts that influenced the location of Maya > settlements, the idea correlating them with stars is utterly unlikely.

> In this case, the rectilinear nature of the feature and the secondary > vegetation growing back within it are clear signs of a relic milpa. I'd > guess its been fallow for 10-15 years. This is obvious to anyone that has > spent any time at all in the Maya lowlands.

<comment><USER19> I didn't know about the relic milpa idea. I guess if there were a lot of thick solid fertilizer just in that rectangular area that wouldn't run off easily, it could possibly do that.

I think someone should check it out to be sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Off topic but what is the purpose of the photo of the young lady at the bottom of the article? At first I thought it was the teen that made the discovery, then I thought it might be the author (on mobile this information is not easily visible), finally I concluded it has something to do with another article and is spliced into the original in a very confusing manner.

<comment><USER11> BBC Trending is a site for clickbait/hot-takes...a common feature of these sites is to include the header of another story to entice you to make another click. It's like the news sites that infinitely scroll from one article to the next, except without the infinite scroll's auto load.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Cripes, people are such killjoys! The counter-claims pooh-poohing the lad's "discovery" smack of schadenfreudensuchen. So what if there's a bit of media hype? It's a nice feelgood story and the kid hasn't done anything wrong. In fact, that's the sort of curiosity and inquisitiveness we should be fostering in schoolkids.

<comment><USER20> The kid should be applauded and encouraged in his interest in science/discovery. The media outlets that apparently didn't do even a tiny bit of checking with experts before running with it, though, have been irresponsible, and that's what the experts are upset about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Lets give this a little twist. Teen arrested for 'accidentally' finding marijuana with google maps. Claims the stars guided him there.

</comment><comment><USER24> Obviously these so-called "scientists" are lizard-spawn who are covering their cloacas that this youth was able to deduce the location of their eldritch portals.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'll just throw this in. John Oliver on science and bullshit. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw)</comment>


Spoof Google search results into spreading misinformation - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/a-simple-bug-makes-it-easy-to-spoof-google-search-results-into-spreading-misinformation/ <comment><USER2> Hindsight, this feels like the most obvious _hack_ ever. I can't see much value in it myself, but could have been an interesting prospect for some social engineering attacks.</comment>


Why Facebook Is the Perfect Representative of Tech's Privacy Problem - <AUTHOR> http://medium.com/hacker-daily/why-facebook-is-the-perfect-representative-of-techs-privacy-problem-5e5c29063d47 <comment><USER2> "Besides the Cambridge Analytica scandal"

That is exactly the reason, and the only reason. Because Facebook let user data from potentially hundreds of millions of people get used by a third party who "said they deleted it" \-- they have to take the blame.

</comment><comment><USER3> The point about Mark Zuckerberg is spot on. People like to love him, but half of the internet has now decided they like to hate him.</comment>


Why Small Companies Will Win in This Economy - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bregman/2009/03/why-small-companies-will-win-i.html <comment><USER2> There are some worthwhile ideas in this article, but I have a slightly different take on them.

The sentence near the end, "Trust is the new competitive advantage." is the main point. And he says small companies tend to have the advantage as far as trust goes. But, while that _is_ generally true, it might be looked at as a challenge for large companies.

As I see it, large companies have two advantages: (1) they can take advantage of economies of scale, and (2) when they figure out how to do something _right_ , they can apply their knowledge very widely.

For an example of #2, consider Joel Spolsky's statement about Big Macs: "The secret of Big Macs is that they're not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way." If someone is in an unfamiliar area, other restaurants may offer the possibility of better food, but McDonald's has them beat on _trust_ : when you go to McDonald's, you know exactly what you are going to get.

So, rather than say that trust being an advantage, means that small companies are going to win, we might say that, in order to be competitive in this economy, large companies need to figure out trust.

And, for better or worse, the ones that do figure it out, might very well beat the small companies hands down.</comment>


Credit card with a built-in display is being tested to help reduce online fraud. - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8046492.stm <comment><USER2> idea: use this technology for atm cards. you authenticate to your card by punching in your pin on its built in pad, then feed the atm your activated card. the card transmits a one time use number to the atm. this way, the atm never gets your pin, and your card data is never good for more than one use.

</comment><comment><USER3> How does the server know the CVV2 code that was generated by the Emue card? Or, given the card number, and other variables like time of day, is the CVV2 code determined by some function?

<comment><USER4> Yes, it's some polynomial function initialized by pin number value. This is plain old technology which is very well used in corporate banking for years: accountants receive their "beepers" to generate authentication code to authorize their transactions (wire transfers for example).</comment></comment>


How to destroy Programmer Productivity - <AUTHOR> http://georgestocker.com/2014/04/15/how-to-destroy-programmer-productivity/ <comment><USER2> Came here to mention Open Floor Plans, found that it was #1 on his list.

<comment><USER3> Agree, I lay most productivity problems on an open floor. It isn't so much that an open floor allows "noise" to go around, but it sets the culture and expectation that interruptions are really "collaborating".

I'm all for collaboration, helping out colleagues, etc, but having no walks anywhere is a big target for "come talk to me". I prefer it all to be organized. Send me a Skype message, or an email along the lines of "I need your help when you have a moment." \- Fine, I can do that. I'll read the email/skype message when I have a moment to take a break.

There is a colleague that I do work with, I sit right next to him, no wall, and he sends me a message on Skype to help him out when it fits my schedule even though he could just turn to me an interrupt me. I truly value this. If every single person did this, I would be much less hostile to open floor plans. It's not really the open floor that bugs me, but the culture and attitude it attracts.</comment></comment>


J3D - javascript webGL engine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/drojdjou/J3D

<comment><USER2> Seems nice. But would love ot know it compares to Three.js[1]

[1] <https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks really good, but I fear the name might be a bit deceiving. I've found most Java libraries start with J, and most JS libraries end with JS(processing.js, popcorn.js, three.js), so I initially disregarded it as a Java library when I was just skimming the page.

</comment><comment><USER4> The Unity 3D export is fantastic.

Here's hoping that webGL gains full traction.

</comment><comment><USER5> You might want to change the name. J3D is already taken by Java 3D.</comment>


A word of caution about iPhone 5S chargers - <AUTHOR>

An original iPhone 5S charger blew up in our co-workers's hand.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/125661418@N06/15242534155/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/125661418@N06/15055971937/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/125661418@N06/15219529876/
Fake chargers have been known to be high risk, and there have been deaths reported recently. But honestly, I expected higher quality from an original Apple product.
Just to add to the cringe factor, this happened on the toilet power outlet. Gladly, no one was harmed, despite the proximity the fingers to the actual short circuit as you can see on one of the photos. Also note that the mains pins are not damaged: the actual burst was on the USB side: who knows what transient went through that USB cable and into the user's hand.
If you've played with electronic circuits, you know carbon is a great conductor of electricity. Once a surface is carbonized, it spreads the short circuit around. The USB jack on this charger is now carbonized and should be considered electrically in contact with the mains pins.
Be very careful with any device charger. Never use your phone while it charges and never use another device while they're both charging as it may form a circuit. Just because it is 5 Volts USB it does not make it safe. There is a power line just 3 milimeters away from the USB jack inside this enclosure.
These switch-mode chargers are getting smaller and smaller and the physical shielding between 220VAC mains and the trusted USB output is literally just millimeters away. Distance means safety in electricity, and as great as these little charges look, I think safety's being compromised for aesthetics here.
Be extra careful with any charger, including original brand name chargers. <comment><USER2> I don't see the usual "Designed by Apple in California" sentence. Are you sure this is an original charger?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. I am holding it in my hand now and it seems like a generic model. Below it says "for use with information technology equipment".

This charger came out of a brand new iPhone 5S box purchased in an Apple store in the USA.

Apple then shipped a lot of generic low quality chargers? Can anyone else please check theirs? This was purchased in late June 2014.

Also found this: [http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/25/apple-warns- chines...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/25/apple-warns-chinese- customers-to-stick-with-official-chargers)

Mine definitely looks like a generic one cautioned by that article.

<comment><USER3> As far as I can see from your photos, it doesn't say "Apple" anywhere on the label, but it has the model number and design of an Apple charger, so it has to be a counterfeit. How the Apple Store was selling this, I don't know.

By the way the sentence "CAUTION: For use with information technology equipment." also appears on legitimate chargers, so that isn't a sign of anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fake chargers are often made to resemble the original product including the branding.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but this one came out of the Apple box, purchased in an Apple store in the USA

<comment><USER5> Purchased new? Or refurbished? It'd be interesting to get the history of that device serial# from Apple to see if it was perhaps a return or something, and was returned with a fake charger. Granted the store may be on the hook for not verifying it was a legit accessory before reselling it, but that IS a pretty good looking clone so I'm not sure I'd really fault anyone too much for overlooking it.</comment></comment></comment>


OneDrive Changes - <AUTHOR> https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/ <comment><USER4> This has been a very common 'bait and switch' tactic from Microsoft over the years. In recent years we've watched O365 'benefits' for non-profits / charitable organisations be targeted and reduced several times while competitors offerings have remained the same or increased. I could understand this if quality was improving over time but we haven't found that to be the case either. Microsoft's cloud offerings have been plagued by outages and extended periods of unavailability across the O365, exchange and sharepoint online servers. Last year we measured at O365 availability at an embarrassingly poor 78% while the number of times Microsoft acknowledged problems on their service status page was less than 1/20th of the number of times an outage occurred. What's more - it's not just us, I've heard from many small to medium businesses that experience the same poor performance, it seems for every one person that says 'oh we never have problems...' I find 5 people that are dissatisfied or worse - have already left for an alternative or on- premises product. Related note: It's scary how often we notice problems that occurred internally within Microsoft's hosted environment - just start looking at the full email headers of emails from Microsoft's outlook / O365 domains and you'll notice a disturbingly large number that have spent time bouncing around their internal mail servers due to poorly configured / managed DNS and mail relays.

<comment><USER5> Can you provide some specific examples of reduced benefits for non-profits? I have been an IT admin at a non-profit for three years and found O365's introduction of Enterprise level non-profit plans has been a huge money saver for us.

I do agree that their availability has been less than stellar. We have lots of odd issues with Exchange and SharePoint can be a real damn pain at times.

<comment><USER4> I can't remember the exact number but we used to get something like 300 licenses, then they reduced it to 200, then earlier this year they reduced it to 100. I believe too that a single user can use more than one license depending on their account type. We spend more time dealing with the issues with O365 both on the licensing and stability front than we did with our own hosted exchange which is saying something since that wasn't very well managed TBQH.

<comment><USER5> Ahh, interesting. I'm guessing you are using the Business Essentials or Business Premium licenses? Microsoft's website[1] does still say 300 users. We actually use the E3 package at the discounted rate so we have unlimited (for now anyway!).

[1] [https://products.office.com/en- us/nonprofit/office-365-nonpr...](https://products.office.com/en- us/nonprofit/office-365-nonprofit-plans-and-pricing)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lame. I understand killing unlimited. But 15GB to 5GB? That's less than Google, and quite easy to fill with photos. Doesn't Amazon also offer unlimited photo storage as well?

They even admit that the average is around 5GB. So the 15GB to 5GB seems to be aimed at annoying/hurting average users that are close to or a bit over the limit. And 5GB is trivial to fill with even a moderate amount of photo taking.

And the paid plans are getting nerfed. $1.99 used to be 100GB, now it's 50GB, with no way to increase? How does that make sense? Edit: Ah it's to push people to sign up for Office365 which offers 1TB. I bet someone thought this was an oh-so-clever move.

Well, I guess MS Online/Live/whatever has always been a bit of a mess with zero clear direction.

<comment><USER7> iCloud is 5 GB, despite having to store a lot more data out of the box than a onedrive account, and apple pushes hard for people to buy more storage. Probably someone at microsoft thought they were just falling in line with the competition. Where they miscalculate is that people put up with apple's bad deal around storage because they love the other aspects of their products. I'm not sure there is as much love for the other aspects of microsoft's products.

Still, 1 TB for office 365 is a good deal, and with this change i'm more confident it will remain. I have the 30 gb of free onedrive storage mostly filled, and was doubting whether to get a subscription to expand my storage. Now they're giving me one. I feel like that's a good deal.

<comment><USER8> Just to point out.

> Still, 1 TB for office 365 is a good deal, and with this change i'm more > confident it will remain.

If you are a student (or have been a university student), you can get MS Office at a very good discount for a 4-year subscription with 60 minute/month Skype credit and 1TB.

> apple pushes hard for people to buy more storage.

But the storage is really cheap for 1 year in the US I literally think that was a steal. They made me to believe it of course, like you said they literally market many users to get more storage.

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT201238)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This move shows that users cannot trust microsoft to keep their promise. Atleast when google discontinued free google apps accounts they didn't disable them or remove features.

Another point is that in many cases, a person becomes hooked to a free service for personal use and that affects buying decision for their contacts who are looking for a paid account, or at work for larger accounts where the service provider makes the bulk of the money. I think this move by microsoft will slow down adoption of Office 365.

Many businesses take inputs from employess before adopting new technologies (atleast in tech sector), and imagine a situation where 1 or more employees got cheated by microsoft because of this move and managed to convince their IT dept to go for google apps instead of Office 365.

<comment><USER10> This move shows that you generally should not trust cloud offerings, if they mainly replace what you already had at home before. Onedrive already "took" my files away, as they degraded features on the PC. Where before in Win 8.1 we had a proxy representation of the Onedrive-files so the feeling was we could access them as they were local, we now have to sync every folder there is in order to access them, which I can't do on all my devices as my Onedrive size exceeds most available space. So everything I can't sync feels like "gone", as I can only access it through the browser.

<comment><USER9> The main problem is that cloud storage has become a necessity - you NEED to sync things like music, pictures (important ones atleast) and documents across devices if you want to save time. There is no clear solution to this at this moment - you either trust a cloud provider who can screw you like MS anytime, or you host it yourself paying exorbitant hosting fees. It does not help that hard drive quality has been falling with failures being more common even on "power saving" drives like WD Green.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are a lot of people attributing malice to Microsoft's announcement. I think it is mostly incompetence. I think the underlying Azure storage technology is behind Google's and Amazon's and does not have the same ability to take advantage of decreasing costs due to improved technology. How else do you explain everybody else dropping their prices and/or increasing their quotas while Microsoft reduces their quotas. Google still has unlimited storage for photos up to a certain size and 1080p video. Then again they are not using Azure Storage.

That Microsoft is having problems with scaling Azure also makes sense of the announcement that they are reducing the free tier storage. If you looked at it from just that they are being abuses by people storing 75tb then reducing the free tier storage does not make sense. However, if they are having issues with the underlying Azure Storage and are wanting to relieve pressure on it, then reducing the amount of storage and the number of accounts because of existing users migrating to other cloud storage providers makes sense.

If you are considering Azure for your cloud provider, consider that their halo internal customer OneDrive decided that Azure Storage did not allow them to fulfill what they promised to their customers and they are being forced to cut back at the cost of a huge customer backlash and loss of goodwill. If Azure Storage cannot be relied upon by their internal customer, how can your company rely on it?

<comment><USER12> Is Onedrive hosted on Azure storage though? During the last two Azure outages, O365 services remained unaffected and someone on here mentioned that they're completely separate. You may still be right about the scaling problems though. Why else would they take such a huge PR hit?

<comment><USER11> According to this Quora answer it seems they are now.

[https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between- OneDr...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-OneDrive-and- Azure)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the problem with Microsoft - you cannot trust them with their offers. First they offer 15GB free space, then they limit it to 5GB. Like many of their online services, they make mistakes and offer something that in the end is not profitable (enough). Then they offend their users and prove they are not to be trusted in the long run. Google is jumping up and down with joy.

Time and again, they make this mistake. They change names for their services continuously. They should keep all old users on 15GB or whatever was offered, and new users take the 5GB account. That is the correct way to handle this.

<comment><USER14>
      First they offer 15GB free space, then they limit it to 5GB.

Actually 30GB if you automatically upload your pictures taken on a Lumia.

While I can appreciate that the unlimited service is not provided so that users can store dozens of TB (which may be within the terms and conditions, but is certainly not reasonable) I wonder why it should be users like me, using the service in a responsible manner, that are punished. Reducing the space to 1/6th is certainly not reasonable.

Two issues: My phone photos are not really that important. But it seems time to download them locally and delete them in the cloud. My "real" photos are anyway stored locally on multiple hard disks.

Next: I may regret having said this, but: _FUCK YOU, MICROSOFT!_

<comment><USER13> > While I can appreciate that the unlimited service is not provided so that > users can store dozens of TB (which may be within the terms and conditions, > but is certainly not reasonable)

If it's within the terms and conditions, it's reasonable.

If Microsoft promotes unlimited upload, then it should have no limit. If it is not reasonable, then do not promote it.

This is pure marketing. Only a tiny percentage of users does this, and the rest uses less than 1TB. Still you can market that unlimited upload. If that would be unreasonable, then do not promote it.

But then maybe too many users start to upload many terabytes, and then it starts to costs money, and then the promotion budget gets cut, and suddenly they realize it's not going to get better. A new manager steps in, cuts out the stupid idea and there you are, another stupid marketing failure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You cannot offer unlimited storage when you offer a cloud storage product. Bitcasa found out the hard way and now OneDrive is taking the same lesson, people will abuse it.

I think any company has the right to change their business model and/or product offerings. The one thing I'm a bit confused about is why are they decreasing their free storage tier and taking away the camera roll bonus? To me that just seems like a really bad PR move. In a similar fashion Box did the same type of thing way back in the day and while that was their right I still won't use them to this day.

<comment><USER16> >You cannot offer unlimited storage when you offer a cloud storage product

[https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html](https://www.backblaze.com/cloud- backup.html)

<comment><USER17> [https://help.backblaze.com/entries/57805800-What-Happens- If-...](https://help.backblaze.com/entries/57805800-What-Happens-If-I-Delete- A-File-From-My-Computer-)

<comment><USER18> Which makes it a mirror rather than a proper backup.

<comment><USER19> CrashPlan has unlimited backup and never deletes files. And keeps all the old versions of the files. I don't know how they stay in business, given that somebody probably uses it to backup petabytes of constantly changing data. They have pretty slow upload/download speeds though so perhaps something like Amazon Glacier is involved.

[https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Restoring/Retaining_A...](https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Restoring/Retaining_And_Downloading_Deleted_Files)

<comment><USER20> I was just about to say that CrashPlan is restricted to the internal drive of a computer & is therefore limited to the maximum size of hard drives (e.g. 1-2 Terabytes for laptops), but apparently CrashPlan lets you backup external drives now too:

[http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Backup/Backing_Up_Exte...](http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Backup/Backing_Up_External_Hard_Drives)

<comment><USER21> Having used CrashPlan's personal offerings for many years, I recall that they have always allowed the backup of attached storage either from hard drives or network mounts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Love this quote: "Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average."

<comment><USER23> Good to know they can see what I'm storing in my OneDrive account, and that they'll do so whenever they want to.

<comment><USER24> This is true for almost[1] all cloud storage providers.

\--- [1] Except maybe SpiderOak, or anything you encrypt yourself before upload.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Classic MS bait and switch move. If you advertise something as unlimited, don't cry if someone uses it as is.

Also they just admitted they know exactly what people store in their cloud (type, content).

<comment><USER26> How would they not know? I mean, OneDrive has a built-in video player, it is integrated with Office Online, etc. Obviously Google or Apple knows this as well.

[ from the sibling post ] > they just said they can and do check exactly what is uploaded to each account in complete detail

They have to check because at least they show the proper file type on the online interface :) How would you implement photo and video sharing without looking at the actual files?

<comment><USER27> You're confusing computer programs with Microsoft employees.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure. You can easily get anonymized statistics about your whole userbase without any employee looking at a particular account directly. Getting max(size) of all the storage accounts does not require employees to look at files directly. Figuring out that someone stores 75 TB of video files does not require at all that an employee looks at a specific account.

Really, I don't want to be too snarky but this has nothing to do with privacy at all. At least try to imagine how could you do this without breaching the privacy of individual users if you were running a service like Google Drive or OneDrive -- I'm sure you will find an easy way. :) Do you really think someone actually looked at the account and added up the sizes of the video files in Excel, then wrote to his manager that 'email@example.com has uploaded the whole Game of Thrones in 4K?'

<comment><USER28> _Figuring out that someone stores 75 TB of video files does not require at all that an employee looks at a specific account._

Figuring out that someone stores 75TB of video files does not. Figuring out that

 _a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings_

does.

<comment><USER29> Not if the users used standard file extensions:

Run a report that selects the top 0.01% of users by total storage used, return % of space per file extension.

<comment><USER6> Not to mention simply searching for common file names would do the trick, too. It is not too hard to come up with an algorithm that can return a boolean (or float) indicating if a file collection looks like TV series. "Game of Thrones - S??E??" is a good start.

<comment><USER30> I consider the file names on my hard drive private.

<comment><USER6> Then you should explicitly use a product that encrypts before upload. Again, it's not clear that a human at MS looked at anything. They could simply have run a query "does any customer have files looking like TV series".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> An Office 365 subscription is still good value I think - $99 a year lets you share your subscription with up to 4 other people, each of whom get 1TB of cloud storage. Each person having a genuine version of Office is just a bonus.

The OneDrive client isn't as good as Dropbox unfortunately - for some reason it eats my entire downstream bandwidth when uploading files.

<comment><USER32> How are you connected to Internet? It was quite common issue with some ASDLs. Whole upload bandwitch is used for, well, file upload and there is nothing left to send ACKs to maintain download speed.

<comment><USER33> That is a problem with all kinds of connections, not only ADSLs, unless you use any QoS solution.

A router of a good quality will prioritise ACKs. Obviously, most routers provided by ISPs are awful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I was about to purchase the 100GB plan, choosing them over Dropbox. But I don't know anymore. If they are concerned about people abusing unlimited backup, why are they reducing paid tier storage? How does that make sense? Were 100GB users storing 200GB somehow?

<comment><USER27> They hoped you'd buy 100 GB plan and use only 50 GB of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I was going to say: "Ahh, they're just copying Apple's bizarre iCloud storage prices" except at $1.99/month for the 50 GB plan they're actually charging _double_ Apple's. Given that Apple is just reselling various cloud storage services, this really is a combination of disabling the unlimited (fine) and a profit grab at the low end (sigh).

<comment><USER36> _Given that Apple is just reselling various cloud storage services_

Do you have a cite for this claim?

Apple has built a number of giant data centers. They shouldn't need to resell cloud storage.

<comment><USER37> Though there are a couple articles on this, Apple's own security whitepaper actually acknowledges the use of Amazon S3 and Azure (page 41 as of 11/2/15):

[http://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf](http://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf)

Also, if you have a Mac (or I believe the PC iCloud app now supports iCloud Photo Library uploads), you can watch your network traffic, and last time I checked it also was connecting to some Amazon/AWS domains[1].

[1]: Others have also found the same-- [http://appinstructor.com/blog/2015/apple-using- amazon-s3-sto...](http://appinstructor.com/blog/2015/apple-using- amazon-s3-storage-for-icloud-photo-library-storage)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Same old Microsoft unfortunately. While I understand that some people storing ridiculous amounts of data could be called out under a fair use / reasonable data policy - it seems a very poor excuse to state that as the reason for penalising everyone. I think this is a simple statement that Microsoft aren't able to economically compete in the consumer cloud storage space. Rather than being honest Microsoft have to spin it. Glad I stayed with Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER39> While I understand the changes to the free tier and the backpedaling on unlimited, I am quite surprised that they decided to reduce the benefits for paying OneDrive customers to a level where they are totally inferior to Google Drive's prices.

</comment><comment><USER40> Fundamental problem with "the Cloud": You're entirely at the mercy and whims of an organization (Microsoft, Google, Apple, whatever) that doesn't give a single solitary fuck about you.

If I don't build it, I don't trust it, period.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm not sure why anyone would have expected a different outcome; of course people are going to try and push that "unlimited" to the limit. Lower the free storage and the photo stuff though? That makes OneDrive a rough deal. I had most of our photos backed up there but now it might be cheaper to move elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER42> With this decision OneDrive might become usable for the rest of us. While flip-flopping is bad, I think they did the right thing here for their target consumers.

OneDrive is no longer a backup and storage cloud service. It's now a document syncing and sharing service. Hopefully it will be more usable soon as such.

On another note, now it makes perfect sense why they removed virtual file system support on Windows 10. The intention isn't to add capacity to your system, but to mirror files to the cloud.

<comment><USER43> One can share documents just fine on Google Drive and Dropbox. Doesn't need Microsoft Office, but works with it as well.

Removing placeholder files on Windows 10 was a kneecap to users with small SSDs. You may think it makes perfect sense, but again, Microsoft took a unique differentiating feature and threw it down the train. Now there's no upside to using OneDrive over Dropbox/Google Drive.

Post-hoc justify it all you like, OneDrive's management has been a mess this past year. They've seen high-level execs leave, and the confused thinking shows up in their product and service plans.

<comment><USER42> I wouldn't argue with anything you said there. I'm in favor of them improving the service and if that means not being all things to all people, I'm okay with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Sounds like a death knell to me... Certainly not interested now. I can see cracking down on abuse, but changing the deal for everyone involved is probably the wrong move.

</comment><comment><USER45> _" Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings."_

Wow. This actually is a direct quote from Microsoft. Unbelievable! I'm not sure what's more incredible: the tone of this message, or the fact that noone at MS has thought about this before...

<comment><USER6> Yeah, and how, instead of cutting off a small number of users, they are gonna cut the limit to right around the average use, guaranteeing customer pain. Bizarre, terrible management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I wish they would fix their support for special characters (e.g., |) in file names. I routinely save bookmarks to a directory stored on a OneDrive volume and I have to go and clean up the names in order for them to sync. I'm not motivated to pay for it until they bother to add proper support.

<comment><USER6> How do you save files with a | in Windows?

<comment><USER46> I'm using OneDrive on a Mac.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> So is now a good time to point out that LibreOffice 5.1 has integrated an "Open remote files" menu for opening files on Google Drive, OneDrive and SharePoint, and a "Save to remote server" menu to save directly to Google Drive, OneDrive and Sharepoint?

[https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.1#Remote_...](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.1#Remote_Files_Dialog)

Maybe time to switch to Google Drive?

<comment><USER48> Also, Fedora 23 was just released today with native Google Drive support in Files (from Gnome 3.18.)

<comment><USER47> All this talk of Office 365... But entirely sure what the real benefit us apart from hosted Exchange.

Yammer? Meh. Besides, they constantly change their UI and confuse their users.

Office itself? LibreOffice is almost able to do everything it can do, and more.

Lync (sorry, "Skype for Business"): There are thousands of chat clients out there.

<comment><USER48> For business, it's a pretty nice package. Hosted Exchange is the big one but, having full Office compatibility in the browser with integrated cloud storage for when LibreOffice doesn't work is really convenient and a step beyond what you can do with Gmail/Google Docs. We used to have a mix of different incompatible Office versions that were a headache to manage, and things are much simpler now. It would be great if everyone just used LO, but we all know that's not going to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This will start a deserved exodus to other cloud storage providers. In regards to space for photos and videos, Google Drive is anyway a better option. In regards to reliable synchronization, Dropbox rules.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is an interesting about-face because just about a year ago Microsoft was boasting about eventual 'unlimited for everyone'. I guess that's why people can't have nice things [eg [http://forums.windowscentral.com/onedrive/335647-anybody- suc...](http://forums.windowscentral.com/onedrive/335647-anybody-successfully- get-unlimited-onedrive-storage-yet.html)]

Having been a (paying, ~250gb) user of sky drive for as long as service has existed, I am upset - I'll still use it, but my recommendation for it as defacto cloud storage for someone needing to send a file is gone.

Most crucial is recent screw ups with office having its own sync engine with one drive-stored files (even if opened locally from onedrive folder) that often creates conflicting upload with default win10 onedrive app.

</comment><comment><USER51> Right now the server is down, so here's a mirror: [https://archive.is/ekGpj](https://archive.is/ekGpj)

</comment><comment><USER52> I totally support this - they admit that they made a mistake offering an unlimited plan, announce the changes, give a one year warning, and offer a pro-rated refund if you don't want to use the service anymore.

My family belongs to the Office 365 family plan and I think that we get a good deal for $100/year: 1 terrabyte OndeDrive per user, web versions of office apps, and installable apps if anyone wants those.

Except for content on the web that people and organizations want to share for free (fortunately most of the web!), I believe in a pay for what you use plan. Pay Microsoft and Google for cloud services, pay Netflix/Hulu/HBO-Go for entertainment content, etc.

<comment><USER53> Totally agreed (we also have a family O365 plan). I'm willing to pay for quality services without all the BS inevitably attached to free models. Because I want the model to succeed, I hate seeing Microsoft take this kind of heat. It's sad that they made the mistake as I fear reversing course will cost them a great deal of good will. I would have preferred they left the free and mid-level tiers alone, or at least grandfathered them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I know of at least one organisation who has made it their business model to sign up free OneDrive accounts and redirect all user profiles into the accounts after linking Win8 to the MS Account.

This is going to be a whole lot of hurt.

</comment><comment><USER55> I used onedrive, I have 30 gigs and I was just saying last week to friends that I will probably buy the 5.99 1t fromonedrive. now that they are steeling 25g of the 30g and leaving me a terrible 5gig they can f off. Its that simple. I bought and payed for my Lumia 930 and part of that deal was the extra 15gig storage. I accepted windows 10 90 pounds because I got a free 15gig for desktop. As onderive is built into windows I find it important to offer a medium amount of free storage and for my 2 devices I found 30gig acceptable, though I really need 45-55 gig but I wanted to test one drive first. I'm glad microsoft came out and screwed over every windows user using onedrive cause now I know I cant trust them even with the basic requiorement of space. Also the fact they find 5g space acceptable fopr most people is completely worlds away from what myself and friends think. With microsoft being thiefs and with them being so backwards in their thoughs of what space is accepotable I don't think its gona be long till we see the reall effects of what they have done here. I cant wait to see the negative impact this will have on OneDrive, windows 10 desktop and mobile, on tablet sales on book sales and well the terrible sales they are about to endure, or at least deserve to endure on their 950 and 950xl and yes I'm a huge windows 10 desktop and mobile phone fan, I justy think microsoft suck. Thks for all the fish SN.

</comment><comment><USER56> People in this thread focus on Microsoft and their history of "bait and switch", however the writing has been on the wall ever since the beginning with OneDrive. OneDrive is a complementary service to Office, much like everything else that Microsoft does, which is why it will never be their focus. OneDrive is not the product being sold, but rather the candy that users receive to entice them into an Office365 subscription. This simple fact of microeconomics has also been visible in the feature set provided. For example out of the solutions I tried, OneDrive is the only one that does not offer features for auditing what happened with your files, as in a log of what happened lately, or versioning of changes - those being features probably reserved for OneDrive for Business, because you know, only businesses care about their data.

And OneDrive is not alone in this. Google Drive and iCloud are also complementary services. I mean, for now you can clearly see who is treating cloud storage seriously by the support they give to their Linux customers. And if you want to vote with your wallets for complementaries, that's fine, but it reduces choice in the marketplace and I think that personal data (think photos, videos, personal projects) is too important to treat with a shitty, complementary free tier whose purpose is to lock you into something.

</comment><comment><USER57> This is a shame. I have my phone backup to OneDrive and just through normal usage I'm using 20GB of photos and videos. Thankfully I have that offer for a 100GB free bonus as a part of installing the app a long while back so I'm good through 2/2017, but it's nice having all of my photos magically on all of my computers. The 50GB upgrade won't be enough for me and I need literally none of the other stuff that's a part of the Office 365 subscription.

</comment><comment><USER58> Every "unlimited" service goes through that phase. See OVH, for instance: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269990)

Google and Amazon had the intelligence of limiting their "unlimited" offers to unencrypted non-raw photos. Google is even using the data to feed their machine learning skynet, so it brings them (and you) value.

<comment><USER20> Bitcasa did this too almost exactly a year ago, and it killed their product. OneDrive announced their unlimited plans 3 days afterwards on Oct 27, so OneDrive's unlimited plans have barely lasted a year:

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/24/bitcasa-no- unlimited/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/24/bitcasa-no-unlimited/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I'm really curious how they are going to reduce accounts with 15GB of data down to 5GB. We get to keep our data for "1 year" apparently - so what after that? Are they going to physically delete half of my files? Or will they be held ransom like a crypto-locker scam? I don't quite understand how they plan to pull this off without hugely pissing of a very, very large number of people.

</comment><comment><USER60> Summary: price going up.

Could be worse. They could offer "unlimited" storage, but as the usage increases, the upload rate decreases.

</comment><comment><USER61> While Google lives off of your personal data and what it can gather from it, Apple and Microsoft seem to not use/sell your data to a 3rd party. This means Google will "always" offer the cheaper option, but it has a hidden cost - <USER3> sells your personal data to a 3rd party; so its a question about what you are comfortable with.

I was a huge fan of Google's products while in College, but once entering the professional life, Microsofts offerings spoke to me in a whole new way.

But this is an incredibly silly move by Microsoft!

But to say Microsoft hasn't had a direction, that might be true. But there was also a me.com and Google Docs / Drive / Google Photos; so they are more interesting in being in the space that the consumer are looking for, rather than making their own way in to the woods by themselves.

<comment><USER28> _While Google lives off of your personal data and what it can gather from it, Apple and Microsoft seem to not use /sell your data to a 3rd party. This means Google will "always" offer the cheaper option, but it has a hidden cost - <USER3> sells your personal data to a 3rd party; so its a question about what you are comfortable with._

No, they don't sell your personal data to a 3rd party, that would be as terrible for them as it is for you. They sell ad placements.

If scanning your data for ad placement is not acceptable, you use can use Google Apps, which is covered by a different agreement. The base price is 4 Euro per month, from there you can get 1TB per month for 8 Euro per month or 100GB for 1.99.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I've been using OneDrive to backup my notes (OneNote) and documents. Recently I started to use OneDrive as my primary storage for photo + music + video by purchasing the 100GB plan. This was because of the convenience of auto-upload from my Lumia to OneDrive, and also because I'm using Lumia 1020, with the very high resolution camera, a single photo takes around 10MB space. I'm disappointed with this move by Microsoft, without those little extras, I'll be exceeding the quota very soon (since my storage consumption will always be increasing). I'm thinking to cancel my 100GB subscription (when this rolls out) and turn away to other services, hmm maybe hosting my own cloud storage (OwnCloud)?

</comment><comment><USER63> My only concern here is that 5 GB of storage will not be enough even though I've only been using it for school related documents in the last 4 months. I'm already using ~ 3 GB. I used to hate OneDrive because I couldn't remove from my system completely. I lost the urge to control my Windows environment when I started dual booting Linux, and relegated Windows to making documents for school work. I found that OneDrive actually boosted productivity within Windows. As a poor student who can't add any extra expenses to my budget I will have to transfer back to Google Drive when my 5 GB is up. Is 15 GB really too much for to give for free these days?

<comment><USER64> www.copy.com offers 15GB also. And with referrals you can boost it close to 50GB. Love the app and it's supported very well in my opinion (Win, OSX, Linux, iOS, Android, Windows Phone). I really don't have idea why people don't mention Copy when talking about cloud storages.

<comment><USER65> Seconded. It's pretty good. It has a good Linux client to boot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> OneDrive for Business permits 20 000 items, which can be files or folders.

There's a maximum file size. (What is it now? 10 GB?)

20 000 * 10 GB = Microsoft ∞

Maybe there are limits to how many items you can store in a folder as well.

</comment><comment><USER67> _" Free OneDrive storage will decrease from 15 GB to 5 GB for all users, current and new. The 15 GB camera roll storage bonus will also be discontinued. These changes will start rolling out in early 2016."_

They should secure these pages better, crackers get in and write absurdly suicidal stuff.

(The 'unlimited storage' did not exist either, AFAIK.)

</comment><comment><USER68> And I am storing all my family photos there. My mistake was thinking that space on cloud services can only increase.

</comment><comment><USER69> Microsoft being Microsoft.

I have 20GB worth files in there, all I have to start moving because Microsoft loves their customers.

</comment><comment><USER70> This remembers me the SugarSync case. At the beginning, hey offered a very good storage amount for free, which was replaced for a paid - expensive - plan. Now their plans are fair enough, but the damage was made.

</comment><comment><USER71> So, where's the best cloud comparison website? What does HN suggest for "just store these bits and don't do anything funny"? It's going to be AWS isn't it.

<comment><USER72> Hubic and git-annex do the trick for me. 10TB for 5EUR/mo, from which I currently use just one. And unlike some providers, they have OpenStack API, albeit with a weird auth scheme.

Shameless referral link: [https://hubic.com/en/offers?referral=WVOVSY](https://hubic.com/en/offers?referral=WVOVSY) (referral adds +5/10/500GB for you, depending on a plan selected)

<comment><USER71> Hubic seems too good to be true at that price. Is there a catch to it? Other than the T&Cs being in French.

<comment><USER72> None I know about, or I'd warn or not advertise them in the first place. So, far I've read of them here on HN, about an year ago or so, signed up and everything is good so far.

I don't know how they manage to offer storage at this price point, but I was quite surprised they had even lowered prices some months ago (10TB offer used to be ~10EUR and now the price's half of that).

Either way, git-annex has redundancy. The stuff that's important to me is replicated across multiple storages, so even if one goes down it won't hurt much. And, sure, I advise everyone, whatever technology and storage provider(s) they use to have backup strategy and consider for failures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> It's not 1995 when your windows was shinning everywhere. psst!!! they don't get cloud and and trends, too bad they didn't learn it from Gmail either.

</comment><comment><USER74> If you like something and want it to stay around. The best thing you can do is pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER75> yes this is lame (but I understand 75TB is not ok). go tell @onedrive on twitter

</comment><comment><USER76> very bad move that can affect all products and services ...

</comment><comment><USER77> Typical Microsoft</comment>


Native Mobile Apps Styled With CSS - Pixate (YC S12) Launches - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/15/pixate-debuts-a-framework-for-designing-mobile-apps-with-css/

<comment><USER2> As someone who builds app for big brands (Conde Nast, Nike, Porsche, etc.) I will not use this, despite any desire to actually do so.

Why?

You're shipping me a binary only. I want the source. I don't want to wait for you to fix some shit that you may or may not get around to doing. I have a really strict rule about this when it comes to client work, even stricter for personal work.

Your idea that I should base an entire application on a closed source binary that may or may not work is customer hostile, imho. You are inadvertently leaving customers out to dry when something breaks or doesn't work correctly. Unless your company has a team of devs ready to handle these cases ...

Would have been a good idea when the component market was roaring in the Borland Delphi days, but we're in the future now were open source is the way to go.

Pass.

<comment><USER3> This is crazy, you're already using closed source when you link with the SDK, which links with numerous other closed source components.

<comment><USER4> UIKit is designed to be built upon. A lot of Apple stuff may be a black box but it is designed to be subclassed. This is really an all or nothing affair. Either this works perfectly for you or you are shit out of luck and you have to compromise to fit inside their box.

<comment><USER5> _A lot of Apple stuff may be a black box but it is designed to be subclassed._

Aside from a small number of top-level classes[1] UIKit isn't designed to be subclassed. When you subclass things like UIAlertView, UIButton, UISwitch, UITextField, UIWebView… etc, you're in for a world undocumented gotchas and spending hours to do small simple things.

1\. UIView, UIControl, UITableViewCell, UIScrollView, UIGestureRecognizer, UIViewController, UIApplication and _maybe_ one or two other classes.

<comment><USER4> And you've listed about 90% of the things I usual end up subclassing because I've hit some limitation.

Also I wasn't talking specifically about UIKit. Foundation is another great framework that I've subclassed many times.

It's not perfect but Apple puts a lot of work into documenting how to subclass their frameworks. Third-party UI frameworks like this are much less forgiving.

<comment><USER5> Can you give an example of some things that you subclass?

<comment><USER4> From Foundation? NSDictionary, NSArray and NSOperation instantly jump to mind.

<comment><USER5> What do you get out of subclassing NSDictionary or NSArray that you don't get out of a category?

<comment><USER4> Well in this case I subclassed them so I could have the backing data source only weakly reference the items in the dictionary/array and because I subclassed them I can use them wherever NSDictionary or NSArray is an accepted parameter.

Apple's documentation also gives some examples:

[https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Cocoa...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSArray_Class/NSArray.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000137-740795)

[https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Cocoa...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSDictionary_Class/Reference/Reference.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000140-DontLinkElementID_1)

<comment><USER5> Why not use CFDictionaryRef and pass it along via toll-free bridging?

<comment><USER4> I'm confused. How is that any easier? It's six of one, half dozen of the other.

I'd much prefer to write Objective-C code than pure C.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are there any examples of really successful big name projects using third- party UI frameworks that cost money?

Anything I use in my apps has to be open source in case either I come across limitations or support is dropped. I can't create a dependency in my app that could severely cripple me in the future.

It seems like using Pixate would introduce a huge dependency on your application and everything that Pixate does is mapping down to something already done in UIKit or perhaps CoreGraphics. I can understand the allure of this framework because it would save you writing a lot of code yourself but when you come across a limitation (which you undoubtably will because not even the mighty UIKit does everything we need) and you implemented it yourself you can then easily make improvements rather than waiting for a third-party. Sure you could make requests but if Apple honoured every single improvement request on UIKit they would never ship.

As an iOS developer I'm already in bed with Apple but their track record with AppKit and UIKit speaks for itself. Their frameworks are black boxes but I can build upon the shoulders of giants. Third-party UI frameworks like this feel like I am constraining myself to very explicitly defined limitations and the second I cannot adhere to those limitations I must be the one to compromise instead of striking out on my own.

Is there something that I am missing with these third-party UI frameworks because the opportunity cost has always seem to be too high for me.

</comment><comment><USER6> If the pricing becomes more affordable, I think Pixate has a chance to totally change the way native mobile front-end development is done.

Just look at the simplicity and familiarity with traditional front-end development. <http://www.pixate.com/blog/2012/12/15/table-disclosure/>

View Controller:

       button.styleId = @"disclosure";

default.css:

        table-view #disclosure {
            background-color: linear-gradient(#75a4e6, #2670d8);
            border-radius: 15pt;
            border-width: 2pt;
            border-color: white;
            size: 27pt 27pt;
            font-size: 16pt;
            box-shadow: 1pt 1pt 1pt #333;
        }

If only they had a demo we could test how well Pixate lives up to its claims.

Example of use in XCode: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=h...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=h4JVj0Fqheo#t=88s)

<comment><AUTHOR> You can install our free Pixate Playground app on your iPad and play with the CSS in real-time:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pixate- playground/id57867638...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pixate- playground/id578676382?ls=1&mt=8)

It's also open sourced: <https://github.com/Pixate/Playground>

<comment><USER7> I download it and get:

.../Playground-master/Playground/PXViewController.m:9:9: 'PXEngine/PXEngine.h' file not found

The framework file is not included...

<comment><USER6> <https://github.com/Pixate/Playground/issues/1>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Getting Chrome malware warning for this article:

Danger: Malware Ahead! Google Chrome has blocked access to this page on techcrunch.com. Content from d.adsbyisocket.com, a known malware distributor, has been inserted into this web page. Visiting this page now is very likely to infect your Mac with malware.

<comment><USER9> I'm also getting this.

<comment><USER6> I didn't get it for TechCrunch, but did for this: [http://www.cultofmac.com/192350/how-apples-obsession-with- go...](http://www.cultofmac.com/192350/how-apples-obsession-with-google-is- hurting-apple/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For me, not being able to try the library in my app is a deal-breaker. I'm not willing to shell out $199 on faith alone.

</comment><comment><USER11> It would have been nice to have it link to the framework instead of a techcrunch article. First hand sources are always preferred if they're available.

EDIT: forgot to include the link instead of just commenting: <http://www.pixate.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> relevant: <https://github.com/tombenner/nui>

<comment><USER4> I'm very curious how much Pixate differs from NUI.

I looked into doing something like this and it seems like a pretty straight forward idea. Map CSS properties to UIView properties. It felt like it was lot of brute force work. Creating a parser and some sort of renderer for every supported UIView seems like the majority of the work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great idea. I think that anything that aids cross-platform development is going to be very valuable over the next few years.

Building a platform agnostic front end without having to resort to javascript/HTML could be a really useful step forward.

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks cool, but why can't this be achieved by simply using the native iOS implementation?

<comment><USER15> Assuming you're interested in custom UI elements, visual styling in native iOS code is significantly more time-consuming than something like CSS (assuming an equal level of familiarity with both). A lot of apps just end up using static image assets for everything because it's that much easier and quicker. If the performance is decent and the pricing fair, this could be a big time-saver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This would seem to answer the "is no-idea a good idea for YC" question -- it looks like a great product, and they applied as no-idea (according to the TC article).

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the subtle Arrested Development joke on the front page. "Loose seal!!"

</comment><comment><USER18> Geeez whats up with the music, I couldn't watch the whole video.

</comment><comment><USER19> So let me get this straight - Pixate wants people to build native iOS apps with CSS.... um, ARENT WE JUST RE-IMPLMENTING THE WEB PEOPLE?!

Jesus! The one valid use case for native apps is games, everything else can be solved with web apps. Why we are going out of our way to re-implement the ease of web development on native apps should fucking tell you something. On top of all this, they want to charge you $199 for it?

Disregarding the topic of whether or not Pixate itself is commercially viable, but it makes me feel like XML-RPC all over again. Wasn't that what HTTP was for in the first place?

We go through all this crap to make making "apps" convenient. Ultimately the answer was in front of us the whole time we were just too stupid to see it. The web will win. SECREST OUT!

<comment><USER20>
      > everything else can be solved with web apps.

Key word there is _can_. You sure cab try and sometimes succeed in replicating native specialized components with html, js and css cobled together, and maybe even to get it to work more or less OK. But why?

      > the ease of web development

You gotta be kidding. Developing web apps is not easy. Developing cross- platform mobile web apps is even harder. Developing mobile web apps of comparable to native performance is extremely difficult. I wonder is there anyone who after spending some time to properly learn either native SDK still prefers builng mobile apps with the web stack.

      > The web will win.

The web will win what? Is there a war? A race? What I think will eventually win is understanding what the web is for, what the apps are for and what is the best tool for the job. Trying to fit a square peg into a round hole cannot win.</comment></comment>


Lockdown LUNACY: the thinking person's guide - <AUTHOR> https://jbhandleyblog.com/home/lockdownlunacy <comment><USER2> Comprehensively debunked here: [https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1272007583222513664](https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1272007583222513664)

<comment><USER3> With it being that extensively documented as fraudulent in almost every possible regard, I think there is call to ban the user who posted it.

HN should not be a source of blatantly false information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It must be Thursday.</comment>


John Dee and the occult in California - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/05/29/wizards-of-the-coast/ <comment><USER2> So that's the Dee from cstross's quote:

" _for iterator count from zero to number of entropy sinks within ground state, hear ye, hear ye, I open the gates of starry time for ye that you may feel the ground beneath your feet and the air upon your skin; I invoke the method of Dee and the constructor of Pthagn, forever exit and collect all the garbage, amen._ "

(from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fuller_Memorandum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fuller_Memorandum))

<comment><USER3> Like Bob Howard, Dee knew a bit about math & hiding secrets a.k.a. crypto.

[http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/john_dee...](http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/john_dee.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Dimethyltryptamine [is] the reason people lick the backs of Mexican toads to > get high.

Not correct, Colorado river toads have 5-MeO-DMT, not DMT. Confusing the two could easily be deadly.

<comment><USER5> Very true, and licking the toads can also deliver cardiotoxins (people who really, really want to harvest the 5-MeO-DMT from them apparently "milk" their glands and then smoke it, which sounds like more trouble than it's worth). Sorry for the mistake on my part - I should have looked into that one more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't particularly like the OTO because of the distortion of Enlightenment Era groups and Freemasonry. Crowley and some of the esoteric philosophies are interesting but there's not many concrete ideas there.

John Fleming wrote a great book related to this called _The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason_.

There's a distinction between Freemasonry, philosophy, and DMT; and the speculative ideas of John Dee, the OTO and mystical reasoning. A lot of the most fascinating things are polluted with ridiculous claims and beliefs.

<comment><USER5> Fleming on the Dark Side of the Enlightenment is great, I agree. But I wouldn't say his book is trying to separate the dross of ridiculous belief from the gold of "true" science or philosophy. What I take away from that book is a to me more interesting claim that Enlightenment ideals and methods have always been entangled with varieties of magical beliefs, be they utopian idealism or alchemy or (in a contemporary context) transhumanism. I wrote about this at more length in an article about the history of drugs that appeared in Aeon magazine a few months ago, if you're interested: [http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/yesterdays-drugs- are-...](http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/yesterdays-drugs-are- tomorrows-medicines/)

<comment><USER7> Welcome to HN, by the way!

Aeon and The Appendix have both been sources of some excellent posts here. We'd like to see more such material—the more in-depth, the better. I'm excited to see what you do with The Appendix. There's a crying need for more substantive general-interest articles online.

HN has a largely technical orientation, but its mandate is for intellectual diversity and we're a little low on historical nutrients these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope this was horribly mangled by some chthonian sub-editor, because I hate to think that this rambling disconnected potpourri is considered acceptable output from a PhD candidate as the bio claims.

<comment><USER5> As the PhD candidate in question, I would have to agree that it is rambling - but I hope you wait to read my actual dissertation before judging my scholarly output as a whole!

I should also add that I have no connection to the O.T.O. or any similar group (and speaking frankly, I find all such contemporary occult groups to be faintly silly). But I do think their intellectual genealogy is super interesting.

<comment><USER8> It's a great subject, which I think is why I was so disappointed in the article. I was looking forward to a few thousand words on the odd modern history of alchemy and its continuing allure, but I really feel you tried to pour a quart into a pint pot here. I would be _delighted_ to read a scholarly dissertation on this or a tangentially related topic.

<comment><USER5> My dissertation is actually about the origins of the drug trade, but I think you'd be interested in the journalist George Pendle's Parsons biography, Strange Angel, which I think does a great job of teasing out what alchemy meant for 1940s practitioners: [http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Angel- Otherworldly-Scientist-W...](http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Angel-Otherworldly- Scientist-Whiteside/dp/0156031795)

I also touch on the topic a bit (albeit from the perspective of the history of medicine) in the Aeon article that I link to further down in the comments, although that's also aimed at more of a popular audience. Another person who you might find interesting is Pamela H. Smith of Columbia University, who's actually recreating an early modern alchemical lab there as we speak.

<comment><USER8> Thanks, I will look into Pamela Smith's work - I was already familiar with George Parsons, and in fact there was an interesting thread on here about that a few weeks ago.

Your dissertation sounds just as interesting, I'd like to read it when it's done. I'm going to read your _Perspecties_ article on it this evening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For clarification, this article is unrelated to the well-known gaming company Wizards of the Coast: [http://company.wizards.com/](http://company.wizards.com/)

<comment><USER10> Another clarification: _the Philosopher's Stone_ may be known by Americans as _the Sorcerer 's Stone_. The US publishers of the first Harry Potter book thought American children wouldn't want to buy and read a book with the word "philosopher" in the title, and so renamed it to suggest magic and instant gratification, rather than thought or learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What does this have to do with technology or "hackers" ? Real wizards code in Lisp.

<comment><USER12> The history of Queen Elizabeth's court astrologer, John Dee is a very interesting chap.

He was well versed in Western Astrology, as well as the joint creator of a symbolic magic called Enochian Magic. He was also considered as Elizabeth's spy.

For what there is in the occult, I really am surprised that more technologically minded people don't dabble. Things like Chaos Magic and the like are well suited for applying scientific method to the esoteric.

<comment><USER11> I suppose what I mean is that I don't think it's fair that fundamentalist christians don't get to post on HN about how they have a savior who performs miracles but yet it's relatively socially acceptable to have posts about "Magic" which is a reference to the same type of thing as miracles but yet it's considered "esoteric" instead of "religious" and is therefor socially acceptable. I mean lets not forget that with the discussion of Dee and Kelly we ARE talking about the scrying of the same Archangels from the old testament, so in some way it is related to the abrahamic religions. That's why I don't see why it gets a special category instead of being labeled 'religious'

<comment><USER13> Fundamentalist Christians are still seen in the U.S. as the "oppressing majority" that want to impose their belief system on others or want at least to make others feel bad for not adhering to their beliefs or not conforming to their moral code. This view is outdated.

The Evangelical+Fundamentalist Christians had their latest political and cultural heyday in the 1980's with the "Moral Majority" movement. They've been in steady decline since, with the book "The Great Evangelical Recession" ([http://www.amazon.com/Great-Evangelical-Recession-The- Americ...](http://www.amazon.com/Great-Evangelical-Recession-The- American/dp/0801014832)) arguing that the U.S. population can count only between 7% and 9% as part of the "true believer" Evangelical or Fundamental Christian set. The other 30% to 50% that loosely associate themselves with Christian churches have only limited knowledge of what Christianity teaches.

Politicians, advertisers, tastemakers all are slowly realizing this declining influence and focus of Christian groups. Many "free thinking" folks though still see Fundamentalist Christianity as the big bogey-man. Those dabbling in the occult or most other religions are generally seen as interesting and as having no agenda to impose moral beliefs, and so are much less threatening and downright fun and interesting. The California occult even had raucous sex parties, yay!

<comment><USER14> Doing any form of magic is political suicide in mainstream politics. You might win a spot here and there but you will never have any pull in this country if you practice magic.

<comment><USER12> And political aspirations tend to wither away when one starts working with the occult.

You realize how significant and how insignificant one is. And as well, you focus on the betterment of oneself and your environment. Political energy and fervor seems at best tertiary. There are much more important things, like finding oneself.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Moot On The Origin Of 4Chan And The Evolution of Memes - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/02/founder-stories-poole-moot-4chan-memes/ <comment><USER2> they managed to forget a verb on the very first opening phrase.

And interviewing moot.

Tech crunch on a new low.</comment>