Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/posts/steve-jobs-sometimes-lies/ <comment><USER2> My wife: "Will you take the trash out?"

Me: "Yeah, for sure. I'll take it out tonight."

Tonight rolls by and the next day she tells me "You didn't take out the trash. You lied."

Did I lie? Or did I have honest intentions of taking out the trash with circumstances getting in the way? Maybe I just forgot?

I don't presume to know Jobs' intentions but without a history of lying during presentations I'm going to assume his were true. Maybe the team pushed back? Maybe he just changed his mind? Maybe they are still working on it?

"Steve Jobs Lies" just attracts allot more clicks I guess than "A Year Later, FaceTime is Still Just A Tech Demo."

I would have preferred the later.

<comment><USER3> You lied. You said something that turned out to be a lie (an inaccurate or false statement) and although people have trouble hearing the word, it doesn't make it any less true. You do not fit a few of the definitions of "lie" but you fit at least one.

edit: to all the downvoters, pick up a dictionary

<comment><USER4> If someone asks me a question, I give them an answer based on my understanding, and it turns out not to be so, I am not lying. At the time, I thought it was to be so.

By going along a strict definition of a lie being "an inaccurate or false statement," I think it is misleading especially compared to the other definitions: "a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood" or "something intended or serving to convey a false impression;"

These other definitions relate to intent, which is a factor in determining whether a statement is a lie or not.

<comment><USER3> _If someone asks me a question, I give them an answer based on my understanding, and it turns out not to be so, I am not lying. At the time, I thought it was to be so._

No, whether you like to _hear_ it or not (which you clearly are a person who does not want to hear it) you lied.[1] There is no other noun/verb in the English language to describe the act of telling a false statement.

Naturally, telling a false statement with intention to deceive is morally unethical, whereas just being the bringer of false statements is not. I think that's where you and everyone else gets hung up on the word "lie" because you firmly attach the notion of intent to the word. That is not the case with every lie, and if I need to reference the dictionary to show that you are wrong then so be it. It is just often the case that a lie said with intent to deceive, but it by no means is the rule.

If people would work as hard to remove the negative connotation around the word rather than trying to do mental gymnastics to get out of being labelled with it we would all be more honest and better off. We all lie sometime, after all, but what we can always avoid is intention of deceit. Doing some mental gymnastics to try and avoid being labelled a liar actually, in itself, makes you deceitful.

[1] <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/lie>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ' "Open" isn't just a buzz word. People like the word "open". Marketers love it. '

A very valid point, everyone these days in jumping on the open bandwagon.

This problem isn't limited to just Apple unfortunately - several companies have been guilty of twisting open to suit their needs (HTC not releasing some modified Android code which was under GPL a while ago, and Google not releasing the Honeycomb source come to mind).

Not that any of these are wrong from a legal standpoint (OK, maybe the HTC one was) but it's still twisting the nature of open standards & platforms to suit business / marketing agendas. Open is quickly becoming the next Web 2.0.

Apple & Google have both done great things for the open standards community ( Webkit, Android etc.) but there is always a conflict between 'true' openness & business interests. Never forget, corporations exist to serve their shareholders - embracing openness is simply a means to that end.

<comment><USER6> What I heard on the Google/Honeycomb was that they released it earlier than intended. Part of it was the Xoom driving it, some was to compete with iPads, but it wasn't so much of a planned release. Google actually requires you to sign a license agreement if you want to release a 3.0 device, from which I've heard, requires for you to not change your hardware for X years. The next release, 3.1 Ice Cream Sandwich, is the planned release and will be open source.

<comment><USER7> Which is just as damning. "This software is so bad we won't show you the source code."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I might care more if I'd ever actually observed someone using FaceTime. I have 3 MacBooks, an iPad, an iPhone 4, my coworkers and girlfriend and friends have FaceTime compatible devices too, but I've never seen anyone use it. Maybe they don't open it because it is a dead product.

<comment><USER9> Of course of course, because if our own circle of friends are all [x] then everyone everywhere must also be.

Ever since Facetime came to the iPod Touch, I have used it routinely with my parents on the other side of an ocean, and it remains the only video solution I've seen that actually WORKS. Skype video and Fring video on the iphone are just horrifyingly bad in comparison, occasionally comically bad, with seconds per frame blobs of color that vaguely resemble heads). Facetime just works, with quality that matches the output when you record an HD video on the device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reading this makes me think of the iPhone commercial about FaceTime. <http://youtu.be/EmAIptWS7Mk>

"If you don't have an iPhone, you don't have FaceTime on your phone."

Perhaps it was the marketing department that was not informed of Steve's intentions to open up the FaceTime protocol, or maybe Apple really has changed their position on opening up the protocol.

I really wish they would open up the protocol. It would be very cool. And just think, all these android users would have to get iTunes accounts.

<comment><USER11> _And just think, all these android users would have to get iTunes accounts._

I don't think you will find a international standards-body which will standardize anything which requires an iTunes account. I may be wrong, but I sure as hell hope not.

<comment><USER10> True, but I wonder if Apple really needs to have a standards body overseeing it. They can still open up the protocol without going through a standards body, which is probably in their best interest.

Then third party developers would develop FaceTime apps for Android, etc.

But then of course you won't get the seamless user experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My understanding of the situation has been that most of the FaceTime technology is indeed in the open just because they mostly used already existing technology. What is not in the open is the cryptographic key that is used to sign all the FaceTime client keys. So technically you could create a FaceTime compatible client by following open specifications and filling the gaps by reverse engineering, but Apple devices wouldn't want to talk to it without Steve's cryptographic signature.

</comment><comment><USER13> You have a great point, sir, and Apple (along with other companies) does need to be called out when they say they will allow the general user access to something and they do not put it into practice. What can we do about it, though?

<comment><USER14> Whatever gain (if any) they had from claiming that FaceTime would become an open industry standard must certainly dwarfed by the embarrassment of being unable to actually make that happen.

Or, to put it another way, had Steve Jobs known that their attempt of making FaceTime an open industry standard would fail (for whatever reason) he would never have said that Apple wants FaceTime to become open. It just wouldn't make any sense.

<comment><USER15> I dunno, they got a great deal of press when they announced FaceTime, and a huge amount of it harped on the "open standard" feature. A year later, no one really cares. It's not an embarrassment. It's a shrug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh gosh, I'm glad all these good people on HN have lined up to defend Steve Jobs, I don't know what I would do if I found out that he, at any point in time, lied to me. I would just... I would probably faint. Just thinking about that possibility has made me all lightheaded. I need a fan. I need to sit down. Steve Jobs will not lie to me! He is a good man! He makes the devices I crave! Electrolytes!

<comment><USER17> I sense a bit of disrespect for the community in which you opt-in in order to participate here. In general, HN is the most logical and reasonable internet community I have ever come across outside of NNTP (certainly on the web). Please don't make this community "snark-central".

EDIT to add: Curious what the counter arguments to mine look like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What are your thoughts on this?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facetime#Standards>

It would appear that FaceTime is built on top of open standards, is Steve more explicit than that in the original presentation (for example, does he say that access to Apple's FaceTime servers will be available openly, etc.)?

<comment><USER19> If you watch the actual presentation ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1edQuxclUs&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1edQuxclUs&feature=player_detailpage#t=5806s)), Steve makes a clear distinction between being built on open standards and what they plan to do. What he means by going to standards bodies and making Facetime an open industry standard isn't really clear, but it is clear they didn't do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here's the only information we have publicly about what happened with the FaceTime open standard: [http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/11/facetime- standar...](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/11/facetime-standard)

</comment><comment><USER21> "Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You" but following other posts... "Does he respect you in the morning?"

I'm sorry, but re: FaceTime, not opening it up is old news. There is probably more traction in following what is going on in the RTCWeb world than there is in any particular company's opening of their video calling API. Keeping eyeballs in the realm of the proprietary app is key.

Many companies are in paying attention to WebRTC, but it's not there yet. Some companies, I suspect, like Apple, probably don't care (at least for now). It's better to focus on the primary customer experience.

Speaking of experience, I haven't researched, but how do the assorted non- facetime apps compare w/ facetime?

</comment><comment><USER22> Most people have a motive for lying. I don't really see that here. What does Apple have to gain by suggesting FaceTime would be an open standard? Did lines of people show up to buy iPhones because FaceTime would be an open standard? I doubt it. Quite the opposite I think. If you could only FaceTime between iOS devices (and Macs) that might be a competitive advantage. My guess is they simply calculated it was not worth the effort in the end. Making something an open standard and supporting centralized authentication/etc is a nontrivial thing for what purpose?

<comment><USER23> Well, the motivation is not the issue here, is it? Nor is whether opening FaceTime is a competitive advantage. The issue for the author is that a promise was broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm genuinely curious why it even matters whether it's open or not. I get that he said it would be open and now it's not. But beyond that why does it even matter? I can use Tango, Qik, Skype, etc. I think there's an iOS app out there that does Google Talk video. They are even easier because I don't have to explain to my parents how to connect the phone to wifi.

Maybe with the proliferation of all these other video chat apps opening up Facetime became a lower priority?

<comment><USER25> None of them inter-operate. So, when you have a friend on Tango, a friend on Qik, and a friend on Skype, you have to install Tango, Qik and Skype.

We don't have a single protocol for everyone to standardize on, and we don't even have enough access to the various protocols to build a Trillian-like client that supports everything.

<comment><USER24> That makes sense, but opening up Facetime doesn't necessarily solve that problem. It has to be open and all these video chat vendors have to decide to embrace it, possibly abandoning years of investment in their own protocol.

In general, I prefer open protocols and standards. I'm just not sure opening Facetime meets any pressing demands of consumers. I suspect this is a matter of not wanting to allocate resources to something no one is asking for. I can't say I'd blame Apple for that decision if it is, in fact, the case.

I'm a new iPhone user so I haven't necessarily kept up to date with App Store developments until recently, but I believe that prior to Facetime Apple was a bit reluctant to approve video chat apps. Maybe that played into the announcement to open it up.

If people start clamoring for open video chat standards I'm sure someone will step up to the plate.

<comment><USER26> Obligatory xkcd link: <http://xkcd.com/927/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> At least Apple's failure to deliver on their promises on Open FaceTime leaves an opening for other folks to deliver (e.g. <http://jointheseen.com/sdk>)

</comment><comment><USER28> Good point. Skype haven't been too quick about innovating anywhere lately, but companies like Tango and Fring, would be all over it if it was open. And maybe Google too, given GTalk, Android, and Google+.

</comment><comment><USER29> The lack of any apparent activity regarding an open FaceTime protocol is pretty annoying. Has anyone emailed Steve to ask what the holdup is?

</comment><comment><USER30> wrote this a while ago. might be relevant for the debate - <http://www.funkykaraoke.com/2010/10/on-facetime.html>

</comment><comment><USER31> You cannot _successfully_ run a business without lies.

</comment><comment><USER32> "Open" does not always equal "Open Source."

<comment><USER33> "Open" at the very least means "interoperable". FaceTime is neither open source nor an open standard right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Didn't Apple do something similar when they forked KHTML? I think it took them a few years to make it completely open source after they said they would.

<comment><USER35> They still take up to a year to release the changes they made to khtml for a given iOS release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> He's not in political office. He's not beholden to your or me. Unfortunately they didn't open it. It would be great if they had. But it's just a dead feature. Steve Jobs actual legally binding responsibility is to the share holders that he will make Apple money. Why not reverse engineer FaceTime and release a OpenSource version?

Anyway,if you REALLY want someone to dilly dally with the term "Open", you should get an Android phone.

</comment><comment><USER37> one cent for every lie, and i'd be millionaire by now..

(this had to be said and will be worth the massive downvotes)

<comment><USER37> Also, on a more serious note:

Why isn't there a website for all those massive marketing lies about every company throws at the customers, it's sickening.

<comment><USER38> Sickening? ITS MARKETING. The promise that something will make your life better is rarely true, but we deceive ourselves into thinking so because it helps fulfill the prophecy being told.

<comment><USER39> There is a difference between saying "FaceTime is awesome!" and "We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think Facetime is already open. You can use it on your Mac, on your iPhone, on your iPad. Looks like this is open to Steve Jobs, open to all your iOS devices. Why would you need to have another kind of device anyway?

<comment><USER41> Is this fucking Scientology, where we replace the meaning of words with their opposites?! The fact that Apple is the only provider of FaceTime software and it's only available on Mac and iOS means it's proprietary. Jobs said they're going make it an open standard. They didn't. There's no third party client, there's no FaceTime for Windows or Android.

<comment><USER40> I was being ironic.

<comment><USER42> Poe's law: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There are plenty of (insert absolutely any apple product here)-killers that are loudly touted by the manufacturer, and any apple-hater that we have never heard of since. Do we whinge that there hasn't been more proof that the iphone/etc are best? Silence isn't incriminating, it's silence.

How open is Honeycomb, or Ice Cream?

<comment><USER44> > How open is Honeycomb, or Ice Cream?

Do you have any idea how much _crap_ they are getting for that? People made a stink, and they learned their lesson.

<comment><USER45> And it's a cool thing. I hope Apple learns their lesson too, with articles like this.

My guess is that, in both cases (Honeycomb and FaceTime), it was more a problem of corporate inertia or laziness rather than evil.

<comment><USER43> Sounds evil to deliberately allow anyone to see the 2.x source but not the 3.x which is only a continuation, not a rewrite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This strikes me as an affront to Jobs' integrity a little more severe than his failure to deliver a white iPhone in a timely manner. In other words, this author is going to need to write an article of PG-level insight before I read another word of his. This is almost as bad as the "5 reasons why exercise makes our startup awesomer" guys.</comment>


Pre can deliver the goods - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/06/BUJU181PRS.DTL <comment><USER3> The Pre does look nice, but I think it is a lot of money to spend on a phone that can't do anything other than what it does out of the box. Sure, eventually people may write apps, but why would _you_ want to gamble on that?

I was considering getting a Pre (since the US carriers are way behind on Android; no way am I buying a G1), but I looked at the API and realized I couldn't even download it and write software for my own phone. WTF? Even if I could, the API doesn't seem powerful enough to, say, write a ssh client or port over a real programming langauge (like ECL). The icons are nice, but I don't think there is room for two completely-closed mobile platforms. (iPhone and WebOS). It's not worth the developer effort.

(Windows Mobile is closed, but very easy to write software for. And Android is completely open, and has some of the coolest apps as a result. My guess is that WebOS will get some really nice Twitter clients, and that's about it.)

<comment><USER4> See here for an opinion from an SDK beta tester: <http://daringfireball.net/2009/06/palm_saturday>

Scroll down to "Regarding the Mojo SDK and Eating Their Own Dogfood" for the goods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel as if I'm the only one who is incredulous of the evangelism surrounding the Pre. The device rips off everything innovative about the iPhone including the accelerometer, the ambient light sensor, the proximity sensor, multi- touch, the App Store, notifications and hardware design.

Color me skeptical that a company that has only produced mediocre handheld PDAs is going to compete head-to-head with the widely successful iPhone. You can't beat Apple at their own game by cloning their design. Apple entered the cell industry forty years late and changed the game. It's deplorable that no competitor can muster enough innovation to compete with the device.

Give me innovation. I want to buy a book and the screen will instantly switch to eInk and I'll be reading said book. I want seamless syncing with my desktop across the room, or across the world. I want to record high definition video and I want to play it back on the built-in holographic projector. I mean, it's the 21st century; give us something worth getting excited about.

I'm sure the Pre is an excellent phone. All I'm saying is, to any reasoning person, the iPhone will win versus its second-rate copycat when they are at the same price point.

<comment><USER6> "to any reasoning person, the iPhone will win versus its second-rate copycat when they are at the same price point."

what flawed logic!

There are many differences, for example, does the iPhone have a keyboard?

I think you are mixing up what an iPhone is. They didn't invent the ambient light sensor, for example, the blackberry has had ambient adjusting screens for years, the touchscreen isnt an Apple invention either, and there are more than a few other touch screen phones out there...

"only produced mediocre handheld PDAs"

hmmmm, another factual flaw, did you ever use a Palm, 'back in the day' - <USER2> were class leading devices...

You can already sync from anywhere ... using the internet.

"Apple entered the cell industry forty years late and changed the game"

hmmm, I wasn't aware of a cell [phone] industry 40 years ago... Lets get facts straight before gobbing off. And Apple haven't changed anything, they bought out a cool touchscreen phone, that's all, they are being outsold by RIM still in the US and worldwide the iPhone sales are nowhere near many other phones.

"It's deplorable that no competitor can muster enough innovation to compete with the device."

I presume you're just trolling, because if you were to look at the spec of many (most) other newly introduced smart phones I think you'll find the iPhone is not even close to being competitive. Its just cool and popular in the US.

"I want to buy a book and the screen will instantly switch to eInk and I'll be reading said book"

eh? I think that's called a Kindle, not a book, books are printed on paper.

There's plenty to get excited about, you just have to crawl out of the basement and take a look around you :)

<comment><USER5> Are you seriously quibbling on moot points to make the argument that the Pre is not an iPhone knockoff?

Yes, the iPhone has a keyboard. I can type 40 WPM on it.

I didn't say touchscreen; I said multi-touch of which Apple has a patent for. Apple also has patents on the application interface, hardware design and pinch zoom gestures that Palm ripped off from the iPhone. The Pre team is full of ex-Apple engineers. The Pre emulates an iPod so it can sync with iTunes for heaven's sake.

I had the Palm V and it was nothing special.

The Kindle is not a phone. It does not have a color screen which can switch to eInk.

I didn't say Apple dominated the cell market; I said they changed the game. How can you deny this fact when cell manufacturers everywhere have scrambled to clone the iPhone? The Pre is simply another knock-off like the Voyager or the Instinct.

I am not the one using flawed logic. My arguments are sound and I think you missed the point. Palm is not going to beat Apple by copying them.</comment></comment></comment>


When Will We See Collisions for SHA-1? - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/10/when_will_we_se.html

<comment><USER2> AFAIK GPUs are far more cost effective. I've just produced this estimate.

      2xAMD 7970 : 8000Mhash/s ~= 2^33
      Seconds per year ~= 2^24
      Total Hashes ~= 2^57

      1kW * $0.15/kWh * 1 year ~= $1315
      Rig cost (guess)  ~= $2000
      Total cost ~= $3315

Price for 2^60 hashes in a year: 2^60 / 2^57 * $3155 ~= $25000

If you assume a 6X discount in 2021, then it will be <5k. Still, it takes a year, or more money for machines. Corrections welcome. Trying to run sixteen 7970s for a year straight is probably a total crap shoot.

The hash rate is from <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/04/speed- hashing.html> .

[EDIT: I wouldn't be shocked if FPGAs could do it with 1/10th the power and heat, with the same variable cost (hardware & power) but with an additional fixed cost to build the devices; I'm basing this estimate on bitcoin mining boards like these: <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison> ]

<comment><USER3> I think this is the correct way to look at. a CPU is vastly slower at performing rainboow attacks than a GPU. Many of the largest bitcoin rigs could probably find a SHA-1 collision in a matter of months.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I haven't made any provision for the other calculations required by the attack, so maybe those take a lot of resources, maybe they don't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Worth mentioning here that practical collision attacks do not automatically jeopardize all security protocols that depend on the hash. For instance, MD5 is totally broken, but there are no known practical attacks against HMAC-MD5. I hope it goes without saying that this stuff generally does not apply to password hash constructs either.

<comment><USER5> I need a "digital public notary" service, where I send some hash to the notary, they sign it and give me back a signed copy (with the notary's system or public key of choice, e.g. 4096 RSA or 256 bit ECDSA or whatever)

If I want it to be considered reasonable valid proof that I did, indeed, have the data leading to the hash when the notary signed it, and I want stuff I sign today to be acceptable 10 years from now, would you consider HMAC-MD5 viable? How about HMAC-SHA1? I guess plain MD5 and SHA1 are out of the question according to this article.

Speed is not a concern here, so I would be happy with HMAC-SHA3 or anything else... Also, I keep reading that multiple signatures (MD5 + SHA1) are only as strong as the strongest one, but that does not make any sense to me - If you have two differently seeded (initial internal state) MD5 hashes, it should already be much harder to exploit (perhaps not double the number of bits, but surely a large load factor)?

<comment><USER6> You can hedge your bets with hash combiners: <http://homepages.cwi.nl/~pietrzak/publications/FLP08.pdf>

C_{4P}(SHA-2-512, SHA-3-512) should remain solid for a long long time. Your point of failure is, now, the signature scheme. To last for decades, do not use RSA or DSA. Use elliptic curve DSA or similar (EdDSA comes to mind).

<comment><USER7> What's the reasoning for why RSA/DSA with a sufficient key length would be vulnerable sooner than elliptic curve?

<comment><USER4> Mathematicians are making progress with the multiplicative groups used by RSA and DSA, which indicates that the security margins for RSA and DSA are lower than they are for elliptic curve groups. I can't pretend to be literate here but Daniel Bernstein would point out the numeric field sieve as an example of something that threatens RSA and DSA but not ECC.

As I understand it, ECC is also significantly faster.

<comment><USER5> Does anyone know of a smart card that implements ECC? Accessible from Linux is a plus.

(And in a related issue - does anyone know why smart card deployment in the US is so far behind Europe? Why is it that I need to get a PGPcard from germany and can't find anything comparable in the US?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The fallacy of "A 32-core server is fast, and I can rent servers for 4 cents an hour, so I can rent a 32-core server for 4 cents" is unfortunaltely more common than I'd wish. If that simple error is in this analysis (and affects the cost analysis by at least 2^6), what other errors are in the math that I'm not as qualified to catch?

</comment><comment><USER9> GPU's are obviously more cost efficient than general purpose x86 CPUs. But as we are learning, specialty hardware using very little power can be an extremely effective hashing device hash as butterfly labs is doing with SHA-2[1]. If a similar device were developed for SHA-1, I'm not crypto- proficient enough to know the difference, but I imagine it would be extremely efficient as well.

[1]: [http://news.yahoo.com/butterfly-labs-announces-next- generati...](http://news.yahoo.com/butterfly-labs-announces-next-generation- asic-lineup-054626776.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Crypto-newb question: is there any reason it takes the "number of computations" difficulty as a given, rather than estimating the rate at which attacks will get smarter and require fewer computations?

The analysis that's given includes estimates of decreasing computation cost from Moore's law, but no corresponding estimate of decreasing cost from patterns found in the SHA-1 hash function.

Also, why does the cost estimate focus on commodity CPUs, rather than GPUs, which are much better at the (parallel) computations that hash attacking involves?

<comment><USER11> He's only providing a lower bound for this numbers, he specifically spells your concerns. He mentions that any improvement on:

* number of cores per CPU

* number of CPUs per server

* any improvements in cryptanalysis

* instruction set improvements (arm sha1, gpus)

Will only make his number even scarier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how the upcoming generations of Bitcoin mining hardware will change this calculation. They are all SHA1 FPGAs/ASICs that implement SHA1. It would also be interesting to see how GPUs perform.

<comment><USER13> Bitcoin is SHA-2-256 I believe.

<comment><USER12> oops, close enough :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The bitcoin network does >20 terahashes per second now in total (but SHA-2, not SHA-1). Those 2^60 hashes would take only 16 hours at that speed.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Since this argument only takes into account commodity hardware and not > instruction set improvements (e.g., ARM 8 specifies a SHA-1 instruction), > [...] the need to transition from SHA-1 for collision resistance functions > is probably more urgent than this back-of-the-envelope analysis suggests.

So the ARM 8 SHA-1 instruction contributes to making itself obsolete? :-)

</comment><comment><USER16> It is sad to see an Intel engineer misstate/misuse Moore's Observation. The actual observation was that the number of transistors you could put on a chip doubled every 18 months, _not_ performance. For a long time more transistors meant more performance but now that isn't the case. So people put more 'cores' on to a chip to use up those transistors.

That said, the ARM threat is under estimated since the power budget is so much lower and the cost per CPU is also lower. So 10,000 ARM8 cores with SHA hardware are cheaper than 10,000 x86 cores doing the calculation in software.

<comment><USER17> When talking about embarrassingly parallel problems, it _is_ okay to equate more transistors with more performance.

<comment><USER13> Especially when we're talking about something like SHA-1 that was designed to be efficiently implemented in hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From the Varnish documentation, addressing an assumption of the Varnish source code that unique inputs will produce a unique SHA-1 hash: "The risk of collision is very small however, and I can all but promise you, that you will be fully offset in fame and money for any inconvenience a collision might cause, because you will be the first person to find a SHA256 collision."

[https://www.varnish- cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/varnish_does_no...](https://www.varnish- cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/varnish_does_not_hash.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> Not everybody agrees that Moore's law will continue, see for example "Dark silicone and end of multicore scaling"

<http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2000108>

ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/dburger/papers/ISCA11.pdf

They use existing data to model CPU perofrmance increase and conclude with "Through 2024, only 7.9 average speedup is possible across commonly used parallel workloads, leaving a nearly 24-fold gap from a target of doubled performance per generation."

<comment><USER20> I imagine "dark silicone" would be quite different than "dark silicon".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What is the use case for this? At best, I could see replacing data with something with the same hash but is gibberish. Why would a "crime syndicate" want this?

Also wouldn't an n-tuple of multiple hash methods and the file size be even more impossible to replicate than a single hash, but not be that much harder to generate initially?

<comment><USER5> There are humorous examples from the past, where there 20 PDF files prepared in advance, all having the same MD5 hash, where each one of them says "We hereby predict X is going to be president".

You publish the hash in advance, and after elections you only publish the right PDF file, thereby "proving" your clairvoyance.

More seriously: You can get a notary (e.g. Microsoft Authenticode) to sign one file, and then provide another with the same hash.

For now, it only helps you with planned fraud, not after-the-fact forgery.

<comment><USER22> md5? I think you mean md4. There are few examples of md5 collisions: <http://stackoverflow.com/a/1224282/92493>

<comment><USER23> No, MD5. See, e.g., <http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/Nostradamus/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think we can assume that governments are capable of cracking SHA-1 today, and all common internet encryption protocols like AES-128 last year. The costs of building such a facility would be trivial and could be hidden within almost any TLA agency's budget.

<comment><USER25> You obviously know something about AES that I do not.</comment></comment>


The medical AI floodgates open, at a cost of $1000 per patient - <AUTHOR> https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2020/09/06/the-medical-ai-floodgates-open-at-a-cost-of-1000-per-patient/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for this, really interesting read. The medical world is such a minefield to get technologically revolutionised... always a game of catch up</comment>


Ask YC: Did you apply to the Summer YC session? - <AUTHOR>

Did you apply to the Summer YC session? If so, with what business/idea? Feel free to use general terms if your company is still in "stealth mode"<p>Tomorrow is the day, good luck to everyone! <comment><USER2> Got a question for any of the YC participants or partners... in the past, what percentage of YC applicants have gone on to the interview stage? According to the comments there were over 500 applicants, and the end result is around 20 groups.. I'm curious as to what the middle ground tends to look like.

<comment><USER3> Me and some friends of mine applied for Summer YC too, a few new ideas around online publishing.

Good luck all!

Regarding the number accepted vs interviewed, excerpted from Matt Maroon's awesome post: "[From the interview they] just kept all of the ones they liked last time. I think it was 19 out of 54, but I could wrong there. so you might think you only have roughly a 1 in 3 shot. But if they keep everyone they like, and they like you, then you have a 100% shot. So just go make them like you. Like most investors, they want to."

Full link to the article (great read, recommended) <http://mattmaroon.com/?p=247>

<comment><USER4> Thanks for posting Matt's article, it's great. Good luck tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We did and we'll be pursuing it regardless of whether or not we get accepted in to YC. Although, like everyone else, we'd prefer to get accepted.

</comment><comment><USER2> My partner and I submitted a "life management" app, but also touched on a learning aid in the "other projects" section. Unfortunately, my partner was out of town during most of the development of our demo, and I'm not very satisfied with what I had together come submission time. What I'm happy about is that I feel the work making the demo was a growth experience. (An entertaining one, as a bonus!)

Of course, we're still going to work on it, regardless of whether or not we get accepted. I'm going to start actively using it for its intended purpose within a week, which should be really informative.

Also, good luck with your businesses, to everyone who applied! Whether we succeed or fail, we'll all grow from the experience in one way or another.

</comment><comment><USER6> We applied with what we think is a pretty big idea related to learning. We've been working on it since last Sept and we can probably launch an initial version around the start of the YC summer session. Our initial launch won't contain the big ideas yet though (we're hoping YC wants to join forces on those :).

Just showed it off today to a guy that runs a local new media group and he was totally floored. That made us feel pretty good, although we're still so nervous to find out about YC tomorrow! Good luck everyone!

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know if the emails go out one-by-one, or en masse or what the usual is? I'd like to minimize the scope of the checking-email distraction tomorrow.

Good luck to all!

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure they all go out at once, at night, like around 9-11pm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yup. Applied. Good luck everyone! Hope to see you in Cali!

"NewsCup is search ownership and personalization. The niche is between Social Bookmarking and Search, but not a combination of each. Rather, NewsCup fills a human need for automatically organizing, _finding again_, and generating revenue for you from your "search work". Uses innovative, simple interfaces and natural language processing to enhance the quality of user experience."

</comment><comment><USER4> I did. My thing is Streem: <http://streem.us>

I'm pretty confident in the idea but from what I know about YC I can see a few reasons why they'd be reluctant to select me -- I'm the sole founder, I'm more of a designer than a coder, and the amount of work I've done already makes it unclear what I need another three months to accomplish. I had a lot of fun filling out the application though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I checked out Streem, I like the design style. I think your home page is great, but then again I am partial to highlighting =)

Have you thought about a browser button or bookmarklet?

<comment><USER4> Glad you like the design. Yeah, bookmarklets are a popular request. A few other missing features are more important right now (post editing, account deletion), but it's definitely on the list.

Awesome Highlighter is a cool idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes, music.

If not accepted, will pursue ninja assassin career.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm...maybe you should have applied with "ninja assassin" as your idea. I bet pg would sponsor your ninja training if you gave him 2%-10% of the money you made from assassinations.

<comment><USER11> I actually did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yes I did and I'm sure I have a great opportunity in my hands but I also have some difficulties to face. I had a co-founder which was the coder and unfortunately he had to drop off the idea because personal reasons. We were working in a online investment social network which I'm pretty sure is great but now I can see some reasons to not be selected. I can do really little coding and I'm a sole founder right now. Let's see what is going to happen.

<comment><USER13> Have you checked out socialpicks.com? Sounds kinda like what your doing. I know about it because I was working on a similar idea that never took off a few years ago. Gotta be aware of the competition :)

<comment><USER12> Yeah, like socialpicks there are many others but my idea is not about stocks. It is another type of investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yes, and best of luck to everyone. Remember, if you have a great idea that you're passionate about, don't let not being selected deter you from working on it!

</comment><comment><USER15> How many startups are applying for YC these days?

<comment><USER16> Something over 500

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nope, but good luck to those who did!

</comment><comment> craig-faber Yes. I've got a really stupid marketing idea for FOSS. My really stupid marketing idea is to actually do some.

I've got a lot of strikes against me. I'm a single founder of a company that needs three partners, with different areas of expertise, to be viable, and I'm not a programmer. Nevertheless, whatever I hear from YC, I'll be appealing for partners in a few days.

<comment><USER18> you shouldn't apply with stupid ideas. One startup article I read said paraphrased. that YOU must believe that your idea is a good one. If you don't believe it then how will you convince others.

That being said most stupid ideas are good ones.

You sound in somewhat of the same position I am. I'm looking for co-founders but haven't found anyone worth my time. It's a good thing I didn't offer it to the couple I was thinking of, he turned up dead today :( he was my friend. _sigh_ alright moving on.

If I don't win this round I'll apply again for the next.

I'd just like to hear (even if I don't make the cut) what they thought of my ideas. you know basically, you didn't make the cut because 'x'. Because I'd fix 'x' next time, I was on short notice this time.

<comment> craig-faber I was being facetious about "stupid." I meant that it's really obvious and that it's stupid that no-one else is doing it.

I don't think that most stupid ideas are good ones. I do think some good ideas can seem stupid, that is, incredibly obvious, later, after someone's thought of it.

Sorry about your friend. That ain't easy.

<comment><USER18> facetiousness like sarcasm can be hard to see on the net.

well perhaps I phrased the 'most stupid ideas are good ones' wrong. On the other hand it more likely depends on who is calling it stupid. The average person thinks computers are stupid, the funny thing, is they have no idea how right they are. I think myspace is stupid... (not the concept just the implementation). So by that logic stupid is good ;)

thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Czech Communists may get share of power after snap election - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/20/us-czech-politics-idUSBRE97J0MT20130820

<comment><AUTHOR> Routers seem to be polarized a lot more than usual this time.

The fact is that the PM's secretary and mistress used military counter- espionage agency to monitor his wife. Unbelievable, right? That's typical Czech right wing party behaviour since the Velvet Revolution.

On the other hand, commies seem to be the only party who actually has a sensible agenda, have not privatized banks (unlike the main socialist party) and have not been involved in any power abuse scandal since the revolution.

There is a saying, running around in Czech nowadays: "What is the biggest crime of Communism? They left only 20-years worth of wealth to exploit."

<comment><USER2> And 150 million deaths, concentration camps, unborn child.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I always wondered how they managed to do that in one state with population lower than 20 million people. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Czech communists have been members of parliament consistently since revolution so it's not very surprising they might become part of the government at some point.

Most left-wing and right-wing Czech politicians including all Czech presidents have been members of communist party at some point in their life. So in reality, Czech republic had communists in power ever since the revolution.

Czech communist party is standard left-wing party. They just didn't drop the name "communist" like everybody else did. That's all.</comment>


Every Sci-Fi Starship Ever, In One Mindblowing Comparison Chart - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/every-sci-fi-starship-ever-in-one-mindblowing-comparis-1391608737

<comment><USER2> This seems to pop up every couple years. They're missing a big piece with V'ger and some other big ones: [http://i.imgur.com/vSoNU2f.gif](http://i.imgur.com/vSoNU2f.gif)</comment>


Is Any Job Better Than No Job?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2263335/

<comment><USER4> I'm in this position right now, actually. After being unemployed for a while, my resources are finally almost depleted.

About a week ago, I found a job for a software tester that asked for experience with a number of programming languages, so I assumed it would at least be a technical position and it might be a nice change of pace.

They called me for an HR interview n Thursday, and that's when I discovered that they apparently no longer needed anyone in my area. They said they could need me in another city relatively nearby (4-5hr. drive from here, so I'd need to relocate), but the position was just black-box, no-code testing. They also asked me for my salary requirements, and when I hesitated (as I knew it would likely be below my expectations), she spoke up and told me the typical range for the position - about $10k less than I was making before.

I decided I needed the money, so I did their technical interview the next day. I think it went really well (there were at least two instances where I answered a question she was about to ask as part of the question preceding it) so I'm expecting an offer, but it still feels like a major blow to my ego to even be considering taking the job.

I figure I'll set a one-year limit on the job, training however I need to in order to get out of there by then, and I'll use my salary to help fund a project I want to build. Lemonade from lemons.

The point is, sometimes you just need to do what you need to in order to keep going. If an employer is offering insulting wages or seems abusing/untrustworthy, or if the job would be too big a burden (uprooting your family for relatively low financial gain), that's one thing, and I fully understand declining those jobs. If the job is reasonable, and you can't afford to be out of work any longer, then your ego needs to take a back seat to survival.

<comment><USER5> > so I'm expecting an offer, but it still feels like a major blow to my ego to > even be considering taking the job.

If they sensed that, it might hurt your chances of getting an offer. (I don't mean to be a downer, and I really hope you get it and it's better than you expect.)

Oddly enough sometimes an employee kicking ass during a technical interview and coming off as a "great deal" is a bad thing. They may realize you'll likely leave in 6 months and they'd rather invest in someone who will need to stick around longer.

<comment><USER6> This exact scenario actually happened to me. I thought everything went extremely well, but I was ultimately rejected for fear of me using the position as a stepping stone. I find that logic to be pretty flawed - <USER2> someone who was unemployed for a few months, wouldn't my best interest be to hold a steady job for a decent amount of time?

<comment><USER7> Why would it be?

Employment is like dating - you're more desirable if you've already got a job. The number of companies willing to speak with you dramatically increases - <USER3> why wouldn't you trade up if given the opportunity, especially if this current job is "below" your standards to begin with?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Most interesting sentence, to me: _The median income in 2008 was below what it was in 1998._

GDP in 2008 surely isn't below what it was in 1998.

What we're seeing here is yet another indication of the big increase in inequality in the US over recent years.

<comment><USER9> Or debt-fueled spending has been adding to GDP between 1998 and 2008. Did we by any chance have a massive debt fueled speculative bubble from 1998 to 2007?

(If you borrow $10 and spend it, GDP has increased by $10. If you spend it on something other than services, income won't go up commensurately.)

<comment><USER10> ?

Every payment is a transfer from one person to another. If you spend $10 on, say, golden rocks (gold), it doesn't get eaten and wiped from existence by the God of Golden Rocks, but rather goes into the pocket of the gold miners and owners of the gold mining capital. It doesn't make a difference that gold is a commodity, not a service.

Net product is equal to income. You learn this in Macroeconomics 101. Example financial statement: [http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTa...](http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=43&FirstYear=2002&LastYear=2004&Freq=Qtr)

<comment><USER9> I believe gjm11 was talking about personal income (i.e., wages/tips/capital gains), not total income to all entities. At least, that's usually what people talking about inequality are discussing, since that's the only thing the government keeps statistics on.

So buying $10 worth of golden rocks will increase GDP by $10, and the balance sheet of Gold Inc by $10. This will only increase personal income if the owner of Gold Inc sells $10 worth of stock or receives $10 worth of dividends in the same year.

<comment><USER10> This could be true, but I find it more likely that the original poster simply doesn't understand what he's talking about. For example, take your thought experiment, and modify it such that Gold, Inc. pays out all $10 in compensation and dividends, and grows its balance sheet by $0.

Now, we have $10 in debt-fueled spending, $10 in increased personal income, and the original poster is still wrong.

<comment><USER8> I fail to see how your criticisms indicate that I simply don't understand what I'm talking about, though of course that's always possible.

Aggregate personal income is typically roughly proportional to GDP. GDP has grown quite a bit over the last decade, which suggests that aggregate personal income has too. The population hasn't grown much over that time, which suggests that mean personal income has also grown quite a bit. (More quantitatively: US GDP growth has been something like 40% per decade recently, US population growth more like 10%, so mean income has grown by about 30% over that period.)

If median income goes down and mean income goes up, that typically indicates that richer people are gaining while poorer people lose. (It doesn't _have_ to; imagine, e.g., that everyone below the median income jumps to $1/year below the median. Result: the median stays the same while the mean goes up. This is not at all what typically happens, though.)

If the growth in aggregate personal income has been slower than that in GDP, that indicates that businesses' profits are growing faster than what they pass on to their employees. That translates in the not-much-longer term to more money for the owners of the businesses. Who are, surprise surprise, on average substantially wealthier than median. So, again, more gains for the wealthy than for the not-so-wealthy; so, again, increasing inequality.

What any of this has to do with the bizarre notion that when you buy gold the money gets eaten by a golden rock god, I'm not sure. (I can kinda see how you might have got the impression that _yummyfajitas_ thinks that, but immediately after making the golden-rock-god comment it seems like you start speculating on how I probably have no clue what I'm talking about. Highly mysterious, but I'm probably just being dim.)

<comment><USER10> I mistakenly thought both posts made by Mr. yummyfajitas were made by two different people. Sorry about the confusion.

<comment><USER8> Aha, understood. I hadn't appreciated that, and hence thought that when you said "the OP" you meant me rather than yummyfajitas. Sorry for getting confused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> if a job is in Dubai then it is surely not worth it. I have heard horror stories of people who went to work there.

Indians, Europeans (My guess mostly from western poor countries) go to Dubai because 30K $ a year is a huge salary jump, but for US citizens its not much different from they would get here.

<comment><USER12> The airline industry typically pays poorly in the US, it wouldn't surprise me if the figures were in-line with domestic airline pay.

<comment><USER13> Right, but the job is not in-line with a similar job in the US. Working for Emirates involves immigrating to another country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A nice improvement to the current system would be to continue unemployment benefits for three months after someone starts a new job. As it is, the termination of benefits [edit: upon taking a new job] is a disincentive to take new job, unless it is an awesome job.

While serving to reduce the likelihood of a sharp crash, the extending of unemployment benefits is also slowing a recovery by reducing the incentive for people to do work or start a business, even if it doesn't pay well.

Edit: for clarity

<comment><USER15> The termination of benefits is a disincentive to take a new job? I would think the continuation of benefits would be a bigger disincentive to going out and finding a job.

Why not just eliminate unemployment benefits altogether? As a working American, why is it my responsibility to foot somebody else's bill while they search for a job they "like"?

<comment><USER16> It is not your responsibility. The unemployed person receiving unemployment paid into the system with deductions from his/her payroll.

Had that person not been employed last year (2009), and began working in 2010, and was subsequently laid off, that person would not be eligible for unemployment.

<comment><USER15> At the state level, but not the federal. There are federal unemployment benefits being granted. We didn't pay into that through past payroll deductions, so where is the money coming from if not current workers servicing the federal debt?

<comment><USER16> China?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think one has the right to be picky. You do your job for a large part of your waking hours during the week. You want to be appropriately compensated for this time.

However, this all depends on your current financial situation, if you need the money and you have more then yourself to support, its time to start looking at any job is better then no Job. Its better to have some money come in rather then no money even if it is only while you are looking for something better or even in your feild.

</comment><comment><USER18> _part owner Mark Sperry says he has been looking for $13-an-hour machinists since early last year_

Apparently, either they aren't needed all that badly, or else they're finding some. Otherwise, he surely would have raised the wage offered.

<comment><USER19> I don't know where he's hiring, but $13 is an _incredibly_ low wage for a competent machinist; it sounds more like he might just looking for a machine operator.

<comment><USER18> My point is that, whatever it is he's looking for, he's been looking for a year and a half, and hasn't yet found it. By the laws of supply-and-demand (the basis of the free-market economy) he's not offering a high enough wage.

Of course, it could be that his business is marginal enough that it wouldn't be profitable at a higher wage, in which case it's likely that the days of his business are numbered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> No. I think that "any job" is not better than no job. I've done both, and the "any jobs" were not worth it other than learning that the "any job" was not what I wanted to do. "No job" offers a lot of non-monetary benefits like free time, flexibility, friends and community. I stopped feeling desperate that I needed to have a job, and I let go of major things in my life that cost money: rented sleep space, and most store-bought food. "No job" is probably not for everyone, or maybe "no job" looks totally different for you. In maintaining my "no job" lifestyle, I found that well-being, maintaining health, became important.

I am employed at a job now, but not just "any job" because I actually love what I am doing.</comment>


Evolution of the Scrollbar - <AUTHOR> https://scrollbars.matoseb.com/ <comment><USER2> Would love to have had the Open Look and Athena scrollbars.

Open Look was super cool looking, but awful to use. Athena was (is?) awful looking and lacked any affordances for beginners, but was terrific for expert use.

I am fond of Open Look, and keep a copy of the Open Look GUI Functional Specification (Addison-Wesley, 1989) on my shelf, much as some people venerate the Apple HIG, except that mine is much less useful.

Here's a nice post that came up in a search for the Open Look scrollbar: "Evolution and design of scrollbars" [https://pim.famnit.upr.si/blog/index.php?/archives/153-Evolu...](https://pim.famnit.upr.si/blog/index.php?/archives/153-Evolution- and-design-of-scrollbars.html)

<comment><USER3> Open Look scrollbars would be impossible to implement properly in the web browser without using the Pointer Lock API that let you "warp" the mouse cursor position, because when you click on the elevator or cable, the elevator cab actually pushes the cursor up and down with it.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_Loc...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_Lock_API)

Here's a demo of Open Look scrollbars from Brad Myers' "All The Widgets" video, which he produced for the ACM CHI 1990 conference. It also has demos of many other kinds of scrollbars and other widgets. (Sun Microsystems, Inc. OPEN LOOK, 1988):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=12m57s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=12m57s)

>All the Widgets (Fixed v2) - 1990: This was made in 1990, sponsored by the ACM CHI 1990 conference, to tell the history of widgets up until then. Previously published as: Brad A. Myers. All the Widgets. 2 hour, 15 min videotape. Technical Video Program of the SIGCHI'90 conference, Seattle, WA. April 1-4, 1990. SIGGRAPH Video Review, Issue 57. ISBN 0-89791-930-0.

When I was working on The NeWS Toolkit at Sun (an Open Look toolkit implemented in PostScript), Jonathan Payne implemented the Open Look scrollbars, and I thought they had such a cool interesting 3D shape with their elevator, cable, anchors, ridges and arrows, that I carved an 3D Open Look scrollbar for him out of soap as a birthday gift. (He also implemented JOVE: Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs for Unix, and JED: Jot EDitor for TNT.)

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_NeWS_Toolkit_scr...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_NeWS_Toolkit_screen_snapshot.gif)

Google Wave also had elevator-like scrollbars with arrows on the elevator, but since they were implemented in the web browser without the Pointer Lock API, they could not push the cursor like Open Look scrollbars, so they implemented a weird shadow and didn't move the elevator until you moved the mouse away, with was very confusing to users:

[http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll...](http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scrollbars/)

>Using Google's scrollbars, it's also possible to scroll by clicking, but since the arrows are attached to the thumb, that creates a bit of a problem. Typically, the thumb indicates the scroll position. But since you can't move the thumb while the user is clicking on it, Google has introduced a second element, a «shadow» that is displayed below the thumb. This shadow indicates the current scroll position:

[http://ignorethecode.net/upload/217/click_scroll_google.mp4](http://ignorethecode.net/upload/217/click_scroll_google.mp4)

>If the user moves the mouse away, the thumb will eventually move to the shadow.

>I did not notice this until a commenter on Hacker News pointed it out. He also notes that the scrollbars seem to perform poorly with longer waves.

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944012](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944012)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20100308003557/http://www.comple...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100308003557/http://www.completewaveguide.com/guide/Master_Wave's_Interface#The_Non- Standard_Wave_Scrollbar)

>The Non-Standard Wave Scrollbar

>Figure 6-1. Unlike the scrollbar in your web browser, Wave's scrollbar is the same height no matter how long the list it's scrolling, which keeps the up and down arrows always the same short distance away.

>The scrollbar on the right side of Wave's panels works a bit differently than the scrollbar in your web browser. Like most scrollbars, you can drag it up and down to scroll, or click its up and down arrows to move it. Unlike most scrollbars, the Wave scrollbar's height doesn't change. It's always the same, small size, which puts its up and down arrows in close proximity to one another, as shown in Figure 6-1. Google's intention is to benefit people accessing Wave on mobile devices or netbooks with a limited mousing area, but it has thrown off some preview users.[2] Google explains "the deal" with the scrollbar in Wave's Help section:[3]

>You might find that the scrollbar in Google Wave behaves a little differently from scrollbars in other Google products. To use it, you can drag the bar or you can use the arrows on either end of it—clicking the arrows without moving your mouse allows you to very quickly scroll up and down the page.

>Even at this early stage, at least one developer has created a Google Chrome extension that reverts Wave's custom scrollbars to Chrome's native scrollbars.

Google Wave: Scrolling. How to use the scrollbars in Google Wave.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxt2LXCSw5Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxt2LXCSw5Q)

<comment><USER4> I do recommend, for anyone who is interested in low level WIMP interaction design.... play with teleporting pointers! Not because it will ever work... it's too weird to really use in a production system. But just try it because it's really an interesting experience to have your pointer move while you use it.

It turns the pointer more into a physical object on the screen.

But try it in a place it makes sense. This scroll bar is an example. I first tried it in a zoomable interface where I wanted the pointer to stay in a consistent "local position" within a window, even though the window was moving and changing size.

Just a really interesting thing for me to feel as a UI designer at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Clicking in the gutter is inaccurate. On Macs, it advances by page, and in later versions animates; only option-clicking jumps the thumb to that position.

<comment><USER6> OMG! TIL about option-clicking the scrollbar. And here I thought I'd option- clicked everything by now...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is the "Mac OS Lion" version accurate ? If so it seems wildly inferior to the other versions :

\- it's hidden, meaning you don't know where to put your mouse to interact with it

\- it's hidden, so you don't even know in the first place if there is more to the current window than what you see, and how much

\- it's animated, making you lose time watching a pointless distracting animation every time you need to use the scrollbar

\- it lost the "previous position shadow" feature that older scrollbars had, but it's not the only one to have made that choice

<comment><USER8> Change is driven by marketing demands as much as by genuine innovation. For example, with Windows 10 Microsoft removed the outlines from everything so almost everything in the UI blends together with everything else. The lack of contrast and distinct borders makes user interaction slower and less accurate but hey, it looks really sexy in the advertisements.

<comment><USER9> > makes user interaction slower and less accurate

Does it? The windows flat UI gets continuous flak on HN and I'm wondering if there's any evidence for it being less usable, beyond opinion.

<comment><USER10> Bevels provide information about the relationships between controls. Visually "deeper" (concave) controls provide more detailed, contextual information. Buttons are convex because they act on the surface to which they're attached.

Windows 2000 professional was a high point for the language of UI design, if not the individual implementations...

<comment><USER9> I've heard explanations like this, yes, but I haven't seen any empirical evidence supporting the conclusion that flat interfaces are harder to use or learn or are prone to misclicks etc.

For my part I've used each version of Windows since 2.0, and have not noticed any decline in usability with the advent of the flat style in windows 8. Personally, I mildly prefer the current design language to the windows 2000 one (although I also consider that a local maximum), mostly due to the lack of visual noise. Personally, I have not experienced any of the usability frustrations evoked in this thread.

As someone increasingly moving towards UI design though, I'm willing to check personal preferences against hard data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm going to nitpick the title a bit. (Please downvote if inappropriate)

But this isn't evolutionary. It's a random sample of totally different takes on the same UI component. If scrollbars truly were designed in an evolutionary process, then all OS's would build upon the previous version and improve (or regress) from that. Or maybe I'm being too pedantic?

<comment><USER12> The site depicts a linear progression, but (like most things) it's more like a tree.

You can draw a line from Star → Lisa → System 1 → Windows 1 → Windows 3 → Windows 95, and maybe Windows 1 → NeXTstep, but it's more likely to be System 1 → NeXTstep.

MacOS 8's scrollbar comes from Win95, System 7, and NeXTstep (it was an option to have the arrow buttons at one end, like NeXT, or at both ends, like System 7), and MacOS X's scrollbar comes from MacOS 8's.

Windows XP's scrollbar comes from MacOS 8 (the grab handle), MacOS X (the bitmap-all-the-things theme) and Win95 (in function), and of course Vista's scrollbar follows on from that.

MacOS Lion's scrollbar actually comes from MacOS X and the conventions of mobile devices, which is a whole other lineage not even present.

And the Windows 10 scrollbar comes from MacOS Lion (and the minimalist design trend in general) and Vista.

<comment><USER13> The Windows 95 look and feel is almost entirely attributable to NEXTSTEP.

Proportional scroll bars on the Mac go back to Lisa and were used in GS/OS before Mac OS. Windows had nothing to do with their adoption.

<comment><USER14> That's false, actually. The Windows 95 look can be tied to IBM doing a massive amount of market research for their previous operating systems efforts; the monotone and 3D look was found to be the least-offensive UX globally.

<comment><USER15> And the _feel_ /function of a Windows 95 scrollbar differs from that of a NeXT scrollbar in almost every way possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Needs more RISC OS.

[https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/riscos37](https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/riscos37)

But it's not so much how they looked, as how they worked. Bidirectional scrolling using a 3-button mouse, so elegant that you didn't need a scroll wheel.

<comment><USER17> I personally liked plan9's scrolling quite a bit, I have no idea if RISCOS is the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I find it odd to the point of unsettling how fresh and unique XP's design feels today.

<comment> Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 Don't forget cohesive. I still remember how almost all my applications changed to match the OS styling when I upgraded from 98->XP, it felt like a brand new computer. It's difficult to imagine that these days, with most everything implementing custom versions of the OS controls.

I think the only ecosystem still trying to match the system's design is iOS, but given how each version is regressing in its usability, I'm not sure that's going to last.

<comment><USER19> KDE has a comprehensive suite of Qt applications which all adhere to the system theme. It also uses client-side decorations so all windows have the same decorations. Most popular Qt themes also have a corresponding GTK theme to make the rare GTK application (for me mainly Qalculate, Firefox, GIMP, and Gnome's Simple Scan) look and behave very similarly.

Fonts also all match in all desktop applications, and I have configured Firefox to ignore CSS fonts and use the same ones as the rest of the system.

I internally laugh every time somebody gets excited about a new dark theme for their application/OS - like they're coming out of a cave into the 19th century, while I'm living in the future.

There's a plasma-integration plugin for Firefox which makes scrollbars in FF match the Qt scrollbars! It also changes the Firefox scrollbars to click-to- warp instead of click-to-pgup/pgdn, to match with the rest of the system (I believe this happens in all GTK apps though).

There is only one inconsistency I have noticed - in Qt apps you can scrollwheel in inactive windows (configurable if desired), but sometime in the last year GTK changed so that this is no longer possible - I need to switch window focus to scroll GTK windows, except for Firefox. Also Electron apps stand out very much and feel unnatural to use - especially the theming and animations in the File/Edit/View menubar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One they're missing is the Apple IIGS (GSOS).

Oddly, at the time it was more useful than its Mac equivalent because it had proportional indicators.

<comment><USER21> The Amiga Intuition scrollbars were proportional as well. Proportional scrollbars took a long time to catch on. I remember being quite confused by Macs and Windows of the time, coming from the Amiga it seemed like an obvious idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why doesn't scrolling work on this page?

<comment><USER23> Horizontal scrolling works.

<comment><USER24> Ironically, there is no scrollbar, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if [https://twitter.com/ilistes/status/250658949467099136](https://twitter.com/ilistes/status/250658949467099136) was the inspiration for this (from 2012). I wish there were more scrollbars from cool Unix window managers, BeOS and such. Now that scrollbars are almost done it's a really nice idea to document not just their existence but also their behavior.

<comment><USER13> X window managers don't supply the widget set used within windows, they only provide exterior window chrome. You need a matched pair of window manager and widget set to get a coherent UI. This is the result of the "mechanism, not policy" design flaw at the heart of X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My favorite was the SGI scroll bar. It looked/worked like classic Windows but also had middle-click direct scroll and would leave a shadow of where it was on drag so it was very easy to return to where you were. "Modern" scrollbars are much less functional.

</comment><comment><USER27> A more comprehensive history:

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/1/20943552/scroll-bar- visua...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/1/20943552/scroll-bar-visual- history-30-years)

</comment><comment><USER28> I do miss NeXTSTEP since it had the scrollbar on the left instead of the right.

<comment><USER29> And the arrow controls next to each other so you didn't have to move the mouse to the other side to adjust the bar slightly in the other direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Two things which may be nice to add:

\- adjusting the display for LISA none-square pixels. Scrollbars were about the same size as on the Mac. (A few applications had additional features, like a window splitting widget or dedicated buttons for page wise scrolling, like the Star interface.)

\- including inactive window states and states for active non-scrolling windows (where the content doesn't exceed the viewport), since there were even more differences in those states and how they were signaling to the user.

<comment><USER31> Another thing to add: Make the damn thing scroll horizontally - for a website showcasing scrollbars, it sure doesn't work with mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I feel like we will never have a UI better than win 95 ever again.

<comment><USER33> Strong statement, but I agree that the Win95 scrollbar looks "right". Probably just an artifact of using Win95 during our formative years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I like that it also shows hover effects. However, I'm disappointed it doesn't have more obscure variants or even earlier variants.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is an awesome project. I have 2 questions:

* Did every OS treat clicking in the blank space above and below the scroll bar the same, like this website seems to suggest?

And,

* Why'd early versions of Apple's OS have the buttons on the bottom? What was the rationale & why'd they give in and move them to the top? I kind of like the bottom buttons.

<comment><USER12> Treating "click in the gutter" as "page up" or "page down" is pretty common, but at least on modern Linux desktops (GTK+3) it means "scroll to here".

On very old Unix desktops (classic Athena widgets), left-clicking anywhere on the scrollbar meant "scroll down" \- if you clicked near the top, it would scroll down a little, if you clicked near the bottom it would scroll down a lot, and if you held down the mouse button it would keep scrolling at that speed. Right-clicking meant "scroll up". You had to middle-click to actually move the visible bar to a particular point.

The point of putting the scroll buttons together was to make small adjustments easier. Scroll buttons are fairly small targets, and the other end of the scroll bar can be a long way away, so if the other scroll button is at the other end, it can take a while to travel precisely to it since humans can make small, accurate movements and large, inaccurate movements but not large, accurate movements. On the other hand, if the other button is right next door, you can get there quite easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I was hoping they'd poke some humor at what modern websites do to the scrollbar. Scrollbars have worked well for so many years, why must web developers change it to an un-standardized mess? I'm talking about features like css-enabled smooth scrolling and infinite scroll everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER37> I still remember in the early 00's there were software haphazardly ported from classic Mac OS to Windows and they retained the non-proportional scrolling indicator. It felt very off on Windows.

</comment><comment><USER38> Maybe there could be a universal gesture that instantly brings up a minimap of the document at the cursor position, like right-click for context menus.

</comment><comment><USER39> Wish there was a way of getting mac os x 10 lickable scroll bar back. Does anyone know any hacks to get it working on latest mac os?

<comment> crooked-v Assuming you meant "clickable" rather than "lickable"...

System Preferences, General, Show scroll bars, Always.

<comment><USER3> No, he literally meant "lickable". c(;

[https://www.quora.com/When-MacOS-X-was-announced-Steve- Jobs-...](https://www.quora.com/When-MacOS-X-was-announced-Steve-Jobs-said-We- made-the-buttons-on-the-screen-look-so-good-youll-want-to-lick-them-When-was- the-last-time-you-licked-the-screen-of-an-Apple-product)

>"We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them." Steve Jobs on Mac OS X's Aqua user interface, January 2000

[https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000...](https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000/01/24/272281/index.htm)

>Everyone expected him to unveil a new computer or two. Instead, Jobs showed off a flashy, completely redesigned Macintosh operating system called Mac OS X [ten], which, when it's delivered this summer, will put a glossy new face-- graphical user interface, that is--on the Mac. "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them," he says. (Some of the design elements he approved help illustrate these pages.) Just as provocative was a set of jazzy and useful free Internet services available immediately--online data-storage space, build-'em-yourself personal home pages and Websites, and a new kind of parental-control filter to keep kids from seeing the wrong kinds of Web content, to name just a few. These Web services, which Apple calls iTools, are designed to work exclusively with Macintosh computers, not PCs or any other kind of Internet device. Jobs' shrewd goal: to use the Internet to make Apple's computers show up Wintel PCs rather than merely stay even.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is awesome. And interactive! So cool. Labor of love to recreate these old UI affordances in HTML.

</comment><comment><USER14> It doesn't include the most superior scrollbar, Plan 9's.

Really interesting, though.

</comment><comment><USER41> Just love the "Mac OS X Lion" version

</comment><comment><USER42> X10R4 deserved an entry as did sunview

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't think the scrollbar is needed in the UI. So in 2020 there might be no scrollbar. What do you think? Why are scrollbars needed?

<comment><USER44> Scrollbars serve three purposes:

\- they offer an affordance (a control) for moving a viewport.

\- they offer the indication that there is more to see than just the current viewport

\- they can offer an indication of where your viewport is in the overall data window, and optionally what percentage of the overall data window is covered by your current viewport.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> When is the scroll bar start to disappear and have to trigger it, find it and chase after it. When I wonder!

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a discussion about disappearing scrollbars on c2 about "Long Enough To Force An Elevator Into The Scrollbar Discussion" that mentions Smalltalk-80's and Squeak's scrollbars, that float just OUTSIDE of the window, and DISAPPEAR when not required, so they don't taking up extra horizontal space in the window, or re-flow the text when they appear and disappear. Interlisp-D also had this kind of disappearing scrollbar.

[http://wiki.c2.com/?LongEnoughToForceAnElevatorIntoTheScroll...](http://wiki.c2.com/?LongEnoughToForceAnElevatorIntoTheScrollbarDiscussion)

>Squeak floats the scrollbar just outside the window when necessary, and only when the mouse floats over the pane. Bizarre. Apparently you can change this, but the magic scrollbar is as described.

>Bizarre by today's standards, yes. But also traditional and historical. Squeak's scrollbars, not surprisingly, are just like Smalltalk-80's scrollbars, which pre-dated all of the modern scrollbars. Commercial Smalltalks like VisualWorks allow you to change this and other look and feel items (didn't see a way to do it in Squeak right off). IMHO Smalltalk's scrollbars are easy to use and more powerful once you get used to them. For example you don't have to move your cursor up to an arrow button to scroll a line at a time. -- RandyStafford

Here's a demo of Smalltalk disappearing scrollbars from Brad Myers' "All The Widgets" (Xerox PARC & ParcPlace Systems Smalltalk, 1977):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=3m56s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=3m56s)

>In this version of Smalltalk, the scrollbars pop up when the mouse pointer enters the window. The scrollbar has three regions. The one on the right: clicking there causes the text to move up. The one on the left: causes it to move down. And the one in the center can be used to scroll smoothly to arbitrary portions of the total text. The square rectangle with respect to the entire scrollbar indicates the fraction of the text that you see.

Here are some illustrations and a description of the disappearing scrollbars from Smalltalk-80, The Interactive Programming Environment, by Adele Goldberg, Xerox PARC:

[http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractiveProgra...](http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractiveProgrammingEnv/TheInteractiveProgrammingEnv.pdf)

p. 33> Figure 2.1

p. 35> Figure 2.2c

p. 37> A scroll bar is a rectangular area, displayed adjacent to the left side of the view it controls. The scroll bar appears in the active view only when the cursor is actually inside the view. If you move the cursor outside the view (without pressing a button), the scroll bar will disappear. It will appear as soon as you move the cursor back inside the viewing area. Thus the scroll bar is a useful visual cue that the view will notice your typing or button pressing. Scroll bars appear only in those views for which scrolling is appropriate, typically in any view in which text can be edited or in list menus.

p. 38> Figure 2.3

The first hidden scrollbars were actually implemented in Bravo at Xerox PARC in 1974. They were just an blank region at the left edge of the window, that changed the cursor to an arrow icons when you entered the region and pressed any of the three buttons.

Here is a demo of Bravo scrollbars from Brad Myers' "All The Widgets" (Xerox PARC Bravo, 1974):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=3m06s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=3m06s)

>When the cursor enters Bravo's scrollbar, it changes shape to indicate that scrolling is enabled. Each of the three mouse buttons corresponds to a scrolling operation. When the mouse is depressed, the cursor shape indicates the enabled scrolling action. When the mouse button is released, the command is invoked. Scroll up moves the line of text adjacent to the cursor to the top of the document window. Scroll down moves the line of text at the top of the document window to be adjacent to the cursor. Thumb causes the entire document to jump to the location in the document corresponding to the vertical position of the scrollbar. The boxed arrow indicates the location in the document that is currently visible.

Here's a demo of Interlisp-D disappearing scrollbars from Brad Myers' "All The Widgets" (Xerox Corporation Interlisp-D, 1980):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=4m25s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=4m25s)

>Scrollbars in Interlisp-D appear on a window only when they are needed. The user indicates this by rolling out of the content area of the window, into the left or bottom margin. What appears is a scrollbar showing the position of the material that is visible as a small section which is grayed out. The length of this indicates how much is actually visible. Scrolling can be done by using the left button for going up, and the right button for going down. You scroll farther the farther you are away from the top of the window. In addition, the middle button is used to thumb to the place in the whole document that you want to see.

Xerox Development Environment and Xerox Star abandoned the idea of disappearing scrollbars, and Xerox Star moved them to the right edge of the window.

Here's a demo of Xerox Development Environment scrollbars from Brad Myers' "All The Widgets" (Xerox Corporation XDE, 1981):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=5m52s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=5m52s)

Here's a demo of Xerox Star scrollbars from Brad Myers' "All The Widgets" (Xerox Corporation XDE, 1981):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=6m36s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=6m36s)

Apollo Computer's Display Manager didn't have scrollbars at all, and just let you scroll with the keyboard.

Here's a demo of Xerox Star scrollbars from Brad Myers' "All The Widgets" (Apollo/HP Display Manager, 1981):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=7m19s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=7m19s)

Xerox PARC's Cedar document editor Tioga had invisible scrollbars on the left edge, that became visible when you pointed at them.

Here's a demo of Xerox Star scrollbars from Brad Myers' "All The Widgets" (Xerox PARC Cedar, 1982):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=8m21s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=8m21s)

</comment><comment><USER46> Ubuntu unity scroll is the best

<comment><USER47> Screenshot?

<comment><USER48> I can't really effectively screenshot what makes it different. The feel of using it is a bit different than you'd expect by even watching a video. The bar itself is only a few pixels wide and when you approach it with your cursor, a little thumb slider pops out that you can either click and drag, or click the embedded up/down buttons to scroll. I'm personally not a fan, but it's an interesting design.

Here's a random picture I found on the internet [https://linuxx.info/wp- content/uploads/2019/04/0efc591e71f10...](https://linuxx.info/wp- content/uploads/2019/04/0efc591e71f101d687dd4db40eb6bb33.jpg)</comment></comment></comment>


Google applies for another Glass patent, controlling your home - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/21/google-glass-patent-controls-fridge-garage-door/ <comment><USER2> There's an assumption here that if you're going to be using your Google Glasses to open a garage door, you'd presumably be wearing them while you're driving. I hope they finish driver-less cars first.

Other uses listed in the patent include: "For example, target device 14 could be a household appliance or device, such as a refrigerator, television, dishwasher, audio system, video system, alarm system, thermostat, garage door, etc. Alternatively, target device 14 could be an office appliance or device, such as a copy machine, fax machine, projection system, security system, etc. Other examples of target device 14 are also possible."

[http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...](http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- adv.html&r=14&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=\(20130321.PD.+AND+Google.AS.\)%mtsegdgt&OS=PD/20130321+AND+AN/Google&RS=\(PD/20130321+AND+AN/Google)

<comment><USER3> Why wouldn't one wear them while driving?

One of my first ideas for Glass is to act as a HUD for driving information. Especially for motorcyclists, having speed information and even rear view camera easily within your field of vision sounds like an excellent use of this technology.

<comment><USER4> The most important information while driving is in front of you and not on a HUD.

<comment><USER5> I think that is actually his point. If you don't have to turn your head to the side to look back, at your speed, etc., the road ahead stays at least in your peripheral vision, at most an eye movement away.

I mean, have you seen how some people fiddle with their radios while driving? Personally, I'd be happy if at least a part of those people had the chance to keep their eyes on front while they do that. I might be biased though, due to the german speed limits and not being a driver myself :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this seriously the future? Where people are so lazy they can't use any strength at all to open a fridge or pressing a goddamn _button_ to open a garage?

Guess I should have seen it coming. I'll commit suicide long before this kind of "technology" arrives.

Only because it's not technology. It does nothing to advance the human race except make them lazier. Stop the madness.

/old person rant

<comment><USER7> >I'll commit suicide long before this kind of "technology" arrives.

That's kind of strong...

>It does nothing to advance the human race except make them lazier.

You seem to believe that humans are _supposed_ to use their muscles to do stuff. But why should we not voluntarily "evolve" to become intelligences that control our environment through our brains and harness it through minimal interactions? Is our goal not to discover everything and discard unimportant distractions such as opening the fridge and going to the mall from the seeking of knowledge?

It's a matter of opinions, but just remember that this is not intrinsincally bad. If we can alter our bodies to become detached from physical needs such as feeding, sleeping and everything that we do to prevent our deaths, I can say I'd embrace it.

<comment><USER6> I admit, the suicide part was far-fetched, but tell me once that you'd like to sit in front of a computer all day, absorbing knowledge endlessly.

No food. No walking. No sleeping. No sex.

Tell me that you would want that.

Who wants to be a brain?

<comment><USER8> I am a brain, wired permanently to a pretty primitive first-run body. It works okay, but it's all downhill for the next fifty-eighty years or so.

Why on earth wouldn't I want to upgrade that?

<comment><USER9> Your body is not primitive, try becoming advanced at a complex martial art, a sport or an artisan of a beautiful craft.

Look into history at the things built with our bodies.

The only thing primitive is thinking that our bodies are not exquisite works of artistic science in this utterly beautiful universe.

<comment><USER8> Imagine a descendant of humanity fifty thousand years from now unearthing my bones and tell me I'm not primitive.

When you worship the beauty and wonder of the universe, don't forget to include the most wonderful part: the _future_.

<comment><USER9> While that may be true, your conscious only experiences the Now, and focusing on what other form conscious will take in the future and not enjoying what you are now could rob you of deeply experience what you already are.

<comment><USER8> One of the things I'm experiencing Now is a sense of limitless unfolding possibility for the future. Ignoring that would also rob me of a deep experience of what I have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like a modernized X10 (which I haven't seen much of since the 1980s).

</comment><comment><USER11> > Google applies for another Glass patent. controlling your homw

Do people even take the time to proofread their titles before submitting?</comment>


Why VC-Backed Companies Fail - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/12/14/top-ten-reasons-why-vc-backed-companies-fail/

<comment><USER2> A lot of these apply to all companies in general.

A VC-backed company's main drawback is that a VC's goals aren't always exactly aligned with a company's goals. A VC needs a $XX,000,000 return on investment. Even if a company's natural valuation would only be in the $X,000,000 range.

This puts the company in danger as they bet it all to try and go up an order of magnitude in valuation.</comment>


Facebook considered harmful for adults (a letter from my aunt) - <AUTHOR>

I love my Aunt, but, I fell off my bed laughing while reading this.
=====
Mike,
I am not sure why but [REDACTED] has invited me to be his Facebook friend. I do not know him and I worry about his motives. I know he is a linux user and I worry he will hack me. I do use my bank accounts here not that I feel he would steal but I worry the info is vulnerable to someone who knows what they are doing.
Ok so here is my issue. We are not friends. I have never spoken to him only a few emails.Why in the world would he even go looking for me on Facebook. I'm sure he is a nice enough guy but really, I have only recenlty even started going there at all when I have messages.
What do you  think..
PS, He has no idea im your Aunt. XOXOX.
=====
I should mention that she and my uncle own their own craft business and have the kind of life that most of us would kill for. <comment><USER2> Maybe it's just my own raging adulthood, but I don't get the joke here, much less see what would cause you to fall off your bed laughing.

She fears that her computer may be vulnerable to hackers, and believes that Linux users are more likely to be sophisticated computer users who "know what they are doing." Both sound like reasonable assumptions to me.

She finds it creepy that someone she hardly knows went to the bother to look for her on Facebook, and then attempted to "Friend" her. Once again, I have to agree. Speaking only for myself, I tend to take a Groucho Marxian position, and think that anybody who actually wanted to "Friend" me on Facebook must be such a loser as to be someone I'd never actually want to be friends with, and conversely, all of my real friends know me well enough to communicate with me through other, more appropriate channels.

So, tell me: what's so funny? Unless what you mean is really "Facebook considered pointless by adults", in which case I have to concur.

<comment><USER3> _So, tell me: what's so funny?_

That innocent childhood naivety ("Mom! This looks scary!") coming from a very unusual source.

I'm 29, an age where a few of my friends "grew up" online, and a lot of them did not. It's remarkable to see the behavior of those that "did not": they tend to have really different attitudes toward things like sharing photos and exposing information about their lives to people. Social network "Friends" are a great example of this: people that grew up "offline" tend to treat the social network friend links like true friend connections, but "online" people tend to assign social network "friend" status to acquaintences.

Someone that grew up "online" might really find the "offline" behavior amusing or endearing, particularly when accompanied by such a dose of tech- antisavviness.

Counterpoint: I grew up "online" but ended up with somewhat severe sociopathic tendencies -- I go to lengths that surprise myself in order to keep my real and online names disassociated.

<comment><USER4> I am 29 as well, and have also noticed the odd gap between people who found the "social" web before MySpace and those who found it after (all those facebook kids!). I almost want to say it's possibly a "generational," phenomena, but probably not.

Maybe it's more or less cliquish. The machine built before the hype machine is _much_ more elegant.

Facebook does remind me of a data mining monster. And being that it was "founded" by one who is younger than me, I can't say I trust it any further than it can be metaphorically thrown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I honestly think she did a bang up job assessing what might be a threat, and then seeking help before making a rash decision she wasn't comfortable with.

She articulated her fears pretty well, and she had a clue that Linux was a platform for savvy individuals that would put her at an immediate disadvantage to him.

I wish more people let alone motherly aunt figures could articulate their fears that well.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is the big gap between the Internet generation(s) and previous: when your life wasn't automatically public, there was a much greater aspect of fear to the thought of losing your privacy. I recently was helping my mother to send a large collection of pictures to her own father. I told her that, since the pictures were in Picasa, the simplest method would be to enable the Photo Sync feature for the album, and then send her dad the link to the uploaded album (though not in so few words.) She seemed to be fine with this, until, in a slight rephrasal, I told her that she could send the same link to her sister, because the pictures were "on the web." She froze up at this with a look of shock and revulsion, And told me to take them down. I explained that the link was private, and that no one could access it but the people she sent it to; I explained that people put pictures of their houses and vacations up completely publically all the time, and nothig ever happens to them; I explained that hackers really don't care about her pictures, but she wouldn't listen to any of it. Her response: "loose lips sink ships."

<comment><USER7> _the link was private, and that no one could access it but the people she sent it to_

 _nothig ever happens to them_

She already has many points of reference; she knows this isn't true. Why don't you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> First thought: your aunt is trolling you.

Second (and more serious) thought: This speaks to the fear our elders have with computers. Many of us used this to help ourselves through college as technical repair, and Best Buy has done a good job as well. This, however, reminds me that we should be thinking about startups that solve this pain. It's the 50-year old equivalent to "will this help me get laid?" What will give that target demographic peace of mind about their computer use?

</comment><comment><USER9> A lot of my thirtysomething friends put things on their FB profiles that would be useful in a social engineering attack. Things like when they graduated high school, photos of their first car, etc, often as the answers to "25 Things," or quizes, or such.

Some of those nuggets of information provide answers to questions that online banks ask for account verification.

</comment><comment><USER10> "I know he is a linux user and I worry he will hack me."

For this I must share with you: <http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html>

<comment><USER11> Too funny!! Lunix! "In order to get rid of it, you will have to send your computer back to the manufacturer, and have them fit a new hard drive. Lunix is extremely dangerous software, and cannot be removed without destroying part of your hard disk surface." ----you've made my day!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is a scary world we live in. I am always worried about some linux user waiting a dark alley to break my windows and steal my identities..

</comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps you should shop laughing and start listening...

1\. 90% of the rest of the world has no idea what we do. It's all magic to them. But they're not dummies. So when they say something ridiculous, we should help them, not laugh at them.

2\. Most of your future customers will (obviously) come from that 90%. If they sense your attitude, they will take their business elsewhere.

3\. Their fears and ignorance = your learning opportunity about your market.

4\. She's your aunt, for crying out loud, and she actually bothered to email you. Show a little compasion and be glad. Lots of us never hear from our relatives.

<comment><AUTHOR> Huh?

I think that you may be overreacting a bit.

I immediately called her back, explained what Linux was, how Facebook works, and a little about IP addresses.

This woman was like a mother to me, she laughed herself after I explained everything to her!

<comment><USER7> _I think that you may be overreacting a bit._

Maybe.

It's so easy for a bunch of hackers to fall into "group laugh" that I thought I'd even things out with an alternate point of view.

Sounds like you have a great relationship with your aunt. Good for both of you!</comment></comment></comment>