Out of a Rare Super Bowl I Recording, a Clash with the N.F.L. Unspools - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/sports/football/super-bowl-i-recording-broadcast-nfl-troy-haupt.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> On a technical note regarding archiving: the tape is Quadraplex[1]. Quad was the first video tape format and was replaced by much cheaper/smaller/quieter/better helical-scan tape. Very few Quad machines still function, and as far as I know there is exactly one guy[2] who refurbishes them. (I worked under him for a summer job in college 25 years ago when Quad was already long obsolete). Not sure if anyone will take up that business once he retires.

Makes an interesting real-life example of the problem with archiving anything for a long period of time.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadruplex_videotape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadruplex_videotape)

[2] [http://www.zinvtrworks.com](http://www.zinvtrworks.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand why the NFL can say (as the article lays out):

"Haupt owns the recording but not its content, which belongs to the N.F.L. If the league refuses to buy it, he cannot sell the tapes to a third party, like CBS or a collector who would like to own a piece of sports history that was believed to be lost."

Copyright law does not (as far as I understand it) actually give someone "ownership" of a work. Rather, it criminalizes making copies of the work without the permission of the copyright owner. But the author of a book cannot prevent you from selling your copy to a library, a friend, or a rich collector.

My view would be that Troy Haupt ought to be able to sell his videotape to anyone he wants (just as he could sell a book). He ought to be able to show the content to anyone he wants (although a "public performance" is a different matter). If the NFL complains that the copy was made illegally, then they should sue Mr. Haupt's father (or his presumably long-settled estate).

Perhaps the legal theory here is that the NFL never authorized the recording so it's existence is the equivalent of stolen property?

<comment><USER4> Copyright law (and not just US copyright law, but international law) is pretty consistent that people have the right to make copies for archival purposes, for personal use -- but that they have no right to share those copies with anyone else.

When you buy a book, you are actually buying a copy. When you videotape a TV show, you're not buying anything, you are MAKING a copy. That is the critical difference here. It would be more like if you borrowed a book from the library and made a photocopy, and then tried to sell that copy to someone else.

I'm not making a moral judgment here, just explaining my understanding of the law.

<comment><USER5> That's why it's also different from him buying a tape of the game from the NFL, and then re-selling it.

When you buy a tape, CD, book, etc., you have the right to re-sell it. As-is, without making a copy.

If his father had been at the game, and recorded it himself on his own video camera, he would be able to sell that tape. No one else could broadcast it, as that involves making another copy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One interesting thing to note is that any copyright analysis using today's acts is possibly wrong :)

These tapes predate the most recent major copyright act (they were made in 1974, the act was passed in 1976).

For example, among other things (i'm lazy and quoting wikipedia, which is correct in this point): Under the 1909 Act, federal statutory copyright protection attached to original works only when those works were 1) published and 2) had a notice of copyright affixed.

If no notice of copyright was affixed to a work and the work was "published" in a legal sense, the 1909 Act provided no copyright protection and the work became part of the public domain.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if his copy has a notice of copyright recorded. If not, and the NFL doesn't have a copy, how can they prove that the notice was affixed during the broadcast?

<comment><USER6> They may have people able to testify that they did it to all copies, etc, but it will end up a jury question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The NFL consistently demonstrates such a high level of greed it's astounding. I get it that you don't get rich writing checks, but what happened to doing right by people and the community at large.

Maybe I'm just wishy washy.

<comment><USER9> In cases like this it's not clear to me which side has the most compelling greed, so I'm always interested in hearing some reasoning about what makes your preferred side in the conflict the right one.

<comment><USER8> They've offered a sum and refused to negotiate. I think I'd be indifferent otherwise if the NFL had shown they were willing to negotiate and not dictate the value of something that would have immense value if there were an open market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Two options: 1\. Offer to destroy the tapes in a manner decided by highest bidder(s). Perhaps the NFL would act if it knew that the recordings would be burned for possibly $5. This is the Mark Ecko approach [1].

2.There is a commercial on the recordings for True cigarettes, a brand that was owned by R.J. Reynolds. If they don't still own that trademark, could he sell the tapes for that commercial and apologize for the Super Bowl footage that the purchaser will have to deal with?

If he started a kickstarter for option 1, I bet a lot of people would pitch in a few dollars just to piss off Roger Goddell (NFL Commissioner).

[1] [http://m.mlb.com/news/article/2231076/](http://m.mlb.com/news/article/2231076/)

<comment><USER11> I agree that a lot of people would chip in for #1. Especially if he does prominently call out Goddell in the Kickstarter. Could he get more than $30,000? I'm not sure, but even if not, I feel like it would be worth it.

I think option 2 is way too risky, and those who want the video will want the SB recording. Those people would still not have rights to air or show it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Too bad the over-arching discussion is about money, because if Troy Haupt would ditch the line of trying to get cash for it, there's probably a lot of wiggle-room in Fair Use to provide the tape to an academic venue as some type of historical artifact.

Might be good to keep in mind that basically the guy has a "bootleg" copy of the game and there's no possible future where I see any kind of exemption to allow bootleggers to profit off of the material they obtained.

<comment><USER13> If Troy gave the tape to an academic venue, can't the NFL get it from the same venue and rebroadcast it since they have the rights to it?

<comment><USER14> I believe they could, but then anyone view it by going to the same academic source. Only the NFL could profit from it, but by then the game would be freely available.

I'm also curious about the reproduction of "the work". If I write a symphony, that arrangement of melodies and instruments is mine. If you "performed" my work and recorded a copy of it, that copy is yours. I would probably take issue with you profiting from this copy without my consent, seeing as I own the IP rights, but what rights does writing the symphony give me over a performance of the work. If a school orchestra decides to perform my symphony and a proud parent records it, how much right do I have to the contents?

The analogy is rough at best. I use it to point out that there was effort in the production and maintenance of the copy, so the NFL may still not have the right to broadcast that "private production" without Haupt's consent, even if it were made public in an academic venue.

This is similar to how a fan's cell phone recording of a play belongs to the fan, even though he can't go about selling copies. If the NFL got ahold of the cell phone video, they also wouldn't have the right to broadcast it just because it's a recording of their IP.

Copyright law gets complicated and I'm certainly no expert. If someone can correct or clarify any of the above, be my guest.

<comment><USER12> Regarding your reproduction example of the symphony, from my understanding the composition is protected by copyright from the moment its put to paper (unless explicity noted as CC or public domain). As a musical composition in the US under current copyright rules, for anybody to record a performance of that composition (like a cover song), that entity would have to pay a mechanical license to you. The public performance is a different issue, by my understanding, but definitely addresses your IP rights with respect to compensation. In theory the protections align with your rights as an artist with respect to the recordings.

You're right that copyright law is complicated - way too much so in my opinion - and we didn't even discuss whether you would be considered a member of a collection society (ASCAP/BMI) which would forbid the performance of your work in any venue which does not have a license from one of those societies! That comes up every once and a while when some record company finds out a coffee shop (not paying ASCAP/BMI) is hosting "Open Mic Night!" type events and people play cover songs by major artists. The coffee shop owners feel like getting a $2,000+ surprise bill isn't fair, which the societies would rightfully counter it's not fair for the coffee shop to make money from the Open Mic Night business without paying for the material that's increasing their business.

Fun stuff eh!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder what other options are available. The NFL owns the content of the tapes, but Haupt owns the only known copies of that content. Haupt and the NFL are collectively the owners of the 1st Super Bowl, but can't agree on what to do with it.

The loss or destruction of the tapes won't meaningfully impact the NFL. They didn't have a copy of the work beforehand, and so nothing changes if they don't come to an agreement. On the other hand, a special viewing of the "lost copy of Super Bowl I" could be very lucrative to the NFL and the airing network. Haupt has something valuable to the NFL. There is obviously an incentive for the NFL to make a deal.

What would the ramifications of submitting the tapes to a museum or other historical archive be? It might incentivize the NFL to make a deal if they know there is another legitimate course of action that Haupt can take to make the copy less rare. I'm not sure what the legal implications are.

</comment><comment><USER15> Get them appraised by an expert. Donate them to a museum. Take a huge write off on your taxes.

Otherwise, wait another 45 years when the copyright runs out and sell them then.

</comment><comment><USER4> I originally made this comment on a child post that was deleted while I was writing it, so I've decided to post on the parent.

Copyright law is so complicated. I'm not a lawyer, but here is what I understand, I welcome corrections and input.

In general, copyright rights are additive. For example,

* Alice can write a piece of sheet music, on which she owns the copyright

* Bob can then perform that sheet music. He owns the copyright on the performance. However, he can't publicly perform the piece without getting permission from Alice.

* Charlie can then make a recording of Bob's performance. He owns the copyright on that recording. However, he can't sell that copy without permission from both Alice (for the sheet music) and Bob (for the performance).

(I should add here that for music, this process has been greatly simplified in most cases by ASCAP, which dictates compulsory license fees for public performance and musical scores for pop music.)

In this case, it's further complicated, because I don't believe that the simple act of pressing "REC" on a VCR counts as creative input, and therefore probably doesn't generate a distinct copyright for this tape. Usually, when people talk about copyright for recordings, they are referring to the case where a sound engineer has captured the live sound, mixed it, and mastered it, to create a distinct new work of art.

<comment><USER12> I think you did a great job to demarcate those three facets of copyright law as I understand them too (not a lawyer, big time IP hobbyist though).

There are two other aspects that might be relevant, and are only presented as complimentary, not contradictory.

The first is that in that the recording the Engineer is doing is a "Work for Hire" as I see it. While they may negotiate 'points' of residual income from the sales of the recordings for their labor/efforts/contributions, the ownership issue is a lot more simple. The other angle is that 'derivative' works, especially for Fair Use, have a really high bar to clear in modern times - but it's possible.

So, if Charlie is a Professor and he recorded Bob's performance of Alice's work, expressly so he can play one full song as an example in his University class "The Art of Shredding on a Violin while Playing Harmonica and Jumping Up and Down Simultaneously," then Charlie's use of the work _should_ fall under Fair Use, and it doesn't matter the students are paying for the class or Charlie is paid an income by the institution. He's promoting progress of the arts and is protected in theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The NFL is greedy, but right. The value of the tapes is 0. The only entity in the world that can pay money for those tapes is the NFL, which means they are the entire market and can choose the price.

But this guy is also being greedy. If he wanted the world to have these tapes, he could give them away to a museum.

Wanting cash for these tapes is basically extortion.

It would be nice if the NFL gave him some money, but I don't see why they should/would.

<comment><USER17> Copyright controls only the right to make copies. The owner of the physical tape should be able to sell it to anyone he wants, since he's not making a copy.

<comment><USER4> Incorrect. He already made a "copy" (maybe we should call it something else: a recording?) by videotaping the original broadcast. He did not buy a pre- recorded copy of the tape.

<comment><USER17> OK, his father broke the law by making the recording, but how does that fact stop the son from selling the recording once it's been made?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A million dollars is freaking chump change to an organization the size of the NFL. They're being childish. Just write the dude a check and get your tapes you big babies.

<comment><USER19> >A million dollars

1/44th of Goodell's yearly salary

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Maybe a university archive or a wealthy collector could pay off both the NFL and this guy, so everybody wins?

</comment><comment><USER21> When I was reading this, and I have no horse in this race, I was asking myself "What are they afraid of?"

The only possible scenario I can think of is that they actually do have footage and are keeping it to themselves and essentially waiting until this third party footage corrodes and fails entirely due to time.

<comment><USER4> They are standing on principle. They want to reinforce that recordings of NFL games have no commercial value under any circumstance, and them forking over cash for a copy of a recording would make a mockery of that argument.

If they had footage, they would use it, since they are the only authorized users. This guy's tape would then be completely worthless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> As someone famously said to Will Smith:

"You're going to war with a corporation that owns a day of the week!"

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe the guy who owns the recording is being too greedy, but given the NFL's track record it's likely the NFL. The NFL should buy the recording and play it on the NFL Network. That should be a decent draw during the off season or in the run to to the next Super Bowl.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wouldn't the copyrights legally expire in 45 years in this case, and the content be in public domain?

edit: s/70/45/ assuming the expiration delay is 95 years after publication not 120 years.

</comment><comment><USER25> Donate them to the Library of Congress?

<comment><USER26> Indeed -- isn't Congress exempt from copyright law?

And is the Smithsonian then an entity that could legally preserve it if not display its contents?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There should be an exemption for historically important footage that trumps any legal ownership.

<comment><USER28> That's a humongously bad precident to set.

        You happened to record, using your cell phone, a major news story?

        Whoops, sorry. That video is no longer yours.

It's far better to fix the Copyright regs that have been so modified recently that is causing this. Thanks, Disney.

<comment><USER29> I think an exception for historically important content would be useful. At the very least historical archiving should be allowed, even if you aren't allowed to show it until copyright expires.

But that wouldn't really solve this problem. The owner wants to get paid.</comment></comment></comment>


An open source license to increase your street credibility - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jooq.org/2014/03/03/an-open-source-license-to-increase-your-street-credibility/

<comment><USER2> 'DannyBee, an attorney specializing in OSS licensing and, just to make me feel worse about my life, expert compiler toolchain hacker, does not like these licenses:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733050#up_5733477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733050#up_5733477)

Two big problems, whether your "cool" license says "maybe give me a beer" or "what the fuck ever":

1\. Risk to users: when a license makes answers to questions implicit rather than explicit, that license potentially leaves it up to a judge to decide what the "reasonable" terms of the license are, and resulting enforced terms might not be the ones you want.

2\. Risk to the developer: the obnoxious all-caps disclaimer of warranty is there for a reason. The law says warranty disclaimers need to be conspicuous. Leaving it out altogether makes it possible for you to get sued --- as I understand it, you might probably win that suit, but being vague about your license might make it harder to get that suit dismissed up front.

<comment><AUTHOR> I absolutely agree. The ASL 2.0 is much better for anyone who doesn't care too much than these "cool" things</comment></comment>


Scientific Expertise and Craft Practice in Molecular Gastronomy (2013) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/bios/docs/roosth_foams_formalisms.pdf

<comment><USER2> Herve This is not... uncontroversial among modernist cooks ("modernism" being the emerging accepted term for this style of cooking), and it is a weird survey of modernism indeed that leaves out Ferran Adria and El Bulli, Heston Blumenthal and the Fat Duck, Wylie Dufresne and WD50, Grant Achatz and Alinea, and, for that matter, Nathan Myrvhold and _Modernist Cuisine_.

Search for [dave arnold herve this] to see someone very reputable come pretty close to calling Herve This a fraud.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Molecular Gastronomy_ \- every time hear this buzzword marketing comes into my mind.

"Food chemistry" is not sexy enough, a already occupied and defined by scholars.</comment>


Barnes & Noble Charges Microsoft with Misusing Patents  - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110427052238659 <comment><USER2> Barnes & Noble is forced to fight this one from a position of relative weakness because it does not have its own patent portfolio from which to mount defensive counterclaims. The patent misuse theory works insofar as it goes, assuming it can be proved, but the evidence presented is sketchy and only time will tell on that one. This case, though, does illustrate that Android remains the waif child of the mobile device industry, the one who gets periodic beatings, whether from Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, or any other entrenched proprietary player, with software patents often serving as the whip. Meanwhile, Google is frantically scrambling to buy up its own patent portfolios and is filing its own patents like mad to position for the future. A fascinating spectacle, to say the least, and Groklaw once again gives us a front-row view of some of the goings on.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone have any real insight on what chance B&N has? Reading this they seem to be asking for 1 - the entire thing to be thrown out (including the patents) and failing this 2 - a trial by jury.

How likely is #1 (i can only assume _everyone_ asks for this..)? Are cases like this normally heard by a jury? Are B&N's claims actually solid? Is there any chance of other companies supporting B&N?

Everything about this reminds me of First they came... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came%E2%80%A6>

</comment><comment><USER4> From the layman free-software nerd point of view, this appears to be exactly what is happening in a number of situations. This is a way to assign a cost to your competitors who are giving away solutions for free.

1) Microsoft approaches companies using Linux. They claim they have patents that Linux infringes. Either pay Microsoft's licensing fee (Amazon) or get sued (TomTom). Now Linux isn't free. This has been going on for years, long before Android.

2) MPEG-LA looks to be considering the same path with the WebM patent-pool they are forming. I assume they will start using this same pitch on smaller companies once WebM starts being used more.

3) Both Apple and Microsoft are going after Android in this manner.

It is a brilliant strategy that exploits shortcomings of the patent system. You get paid for allowing people to use your competitors' free solutions or, at the very least, the free solutions end up having legal fees associated with them. The only downside is negative publicity among certain groups of customers.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love reading software patents. From the article:

32\. Of the patents Microsoft threatened Barnes & Noble with in the past, Microsoft has only sued Microsoft on the '780 patent. Barnes & Noble denies that the accused NookTM and Nook ColorTM devices infringe any valid, enforceable claim of the '780 patent. The '780 patent appears to cover nothing more than placing a loading status icon in the content viewing area of a browser. In that patent, Microsoft concedes that loading status icons and content viewing areas of a browser were both known in the prior art. The prior art placed the loading status icon outside of the viewing area, but it is nothing short of obvious to place it in the content viewing area (since there are only two locations for such an icon—either in or out of the content viewing area).

</comment><comment><USER6> BN seems to want to make this something it isn't. It's a standard patent infringement suit, with licensing opportunity. BN's motive speculations don't add anything as using patents against competitors is common.

The whole Nokia thread is odd. They're not a party in any way of this lawsuit. And furthermore IP cross licensing amoung partners is extremely common, if not the flat out norm.

BN should stick with trying to invalidate the patents, and not conspiracy theories.

<comment><USER7> Intent is important. Microsoft is using those patents to disrupt an ecosystem it deems threatening to its need to (illegally) leverage its desktop OS monopoly into the mobile space in order to gain market share there. Android is a threat to Microsoft's desktop market because it furthers the trend away from PCs and towards mobile devices.

Microsoft is also using its "war chest" to threaten less well financed players with long and expensive legal battles, the costs of which it can cover rather easily.

Oh yes, I am criticizing Microsoft. Let the karma burn.

<comment><USER6> That's a stretch. Especially since the largest players over to past decade haven't been attacked in this way by MS... Apple, Palm, RIM.

In the tablet space even Android is a niche player compared to the iPad. Additionally until recently the Nook was pretty much just an eReader, with the most popular software client running on Windows.

My point is this is a stretch, like any good conspiracy theory.

<comment><USER7> The fact Android is a niche player in the current market is more or less irrelevant. What's relevant is the desktop market will become less and less important because of a shift towards server-based computing and mobile (or thin) clients.

This threatens the survival of Microsoft like no previous player (like you mentioned, Apple, Palm and RIM) did and that alone is enough to explain Microsoft's lack of action at the time. Mobile devices and easy connectivity signal the end of the only market Microsoft has been able to dominate completely.

What would you do in their shoes?

<comment><USER8> >Mobile devices and easy connectivity signal the end of the only market Microsoft has been able to dominate completely.

Mobile devices signal the end of PC? I see you have bought this Post-PC bs hook, line and sinker. PCs are going to be important for quite a while, I don't see many people replacing their PCs with tablets or phones, they seem to be just using it as an additional device.

<comment><USER7> > PCs are going to be important for quite a while

Like trucks remain important today. We will have a lot of other information processing/retrieval devices around us. Up to now, we had mostly one type. Shortly, we'll have a far more diverse ecosystem.

> I don't see many people replacing their PCs with tablets or phones

Don't look to PCs if you want to see people replacing them. Look at people who prefer to do their scheduling or e-mail on phones or their reading on tablets.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The smallest uninteresting number - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/12/31/fuzzy-logic/ <comment><USER2> This isn't a paradox. It's simply a proof that all natural numbers are interesting, if we accept the premises. We shouldn't accept the premises, because there really is a real paradox lurking around the corner, but this isn't it.

The paradox occurs when we replace "natural number" by "ordinal". Then the same line of reasoning demonstrates that all ordinals must be interesting. But surely there can only be countably many interesting ordinals! (Because "interesting" is really code for "definable".) Which shows what the real problem in the premises were -- we failed to distinguish between definable in some particular theory and definability in the meta-theory.

See: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_paradox>

</comment><comment><USER3> Theorem: All natural numbers are boring.

Proof (by contradiction): Assume the set of non-boring natural numbers is nonempty, so it must have a smallest element. Call it x. So what? _yawn_

QED

</comment><comment><USER4> 2013 is sort of interesting - first year with non-duplicate digits since 1987

<comment><USER5> While interesting, that is property of _decimal notation_ rather than the integer number itself. In hexadecimal notation, 2013 is the first (since 2007 -> 0x7d7) _with_ duplicate digits ;-)

        1987 -> 0x7c3
        1988 -> 0x7c4
        1989 -> 0x7c5
        ...
        2007 -> 0x7d7
        2008 -> 0x7d8
        2009 -> 0x7d9
        2010 -> 0x7da
        2011 -> 0x7db
        2012 -> 0x7dc
        2013 -> 0x7dd

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps this is the point of the original article, but couldn't one say that the actual "smallest uninteresting number" is actually the second smallest uninteresting number? The first smallest uninteresting number is only interesting by virtue of being otherwise uninteresting, but once we have a second number that is only interesting by virtue of being uninteresting, it's no longer a novelty to be uninteresting. So it's legitimately uninteresting.

<comment><USER7> So it's the first legitimately uninteresting number, that's pretty interesting if you ask me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Uh, the smallest uninteresting number is clearly 14.

<comment><USER9> "14 is the smallest even number n with no solutions to φ(m) = n."

(<http://www2.stetson.edu/~efriedma/numbers.html>)

<comment><USER10> According to this table 391 is the smallest uninteresting number.

<comment><USER11> Some of those are a bit of a reach. "57 is 111 in base 7"? 111 in base 10 isn't interesting because it's a sequence of the same digit. "22 is the number of partitions of 8" is an interesting thing about 8, not 22, I would argue, since it's not a property inherent to 22.

Mind you, 22 is a sequence of the same digit, so I guess that counts as interesting for some reason...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> relevant: [http://www.njohnston.ca/2009/06/11630-is-the-first- uninteres...](http://www.njohnston.ca/2009/06/11630-is-the-first- uninteresting-number/)</comment>


Justice Dept. Seizes Times Reporter's Email/Phone Records in Leak Investigation - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/us/politics/times-reporter-phone-records-seized.html <comment><USER2> Reminder to NOT use any 3rd-party VPN service if you truly value your privacy. ProtonVPN, PureVPN, Private Internet Access, etc. Do not use those services if you're intending to do some "shady shit". I know first hand that Google has a (semi)-automated web-based process for law enforcement to submit their subpoenas and get the entire access history of a particular Google/Gmail account. They don't get access to the contents of the account, but they get to see IP addresses and user agents that accessed that account in the last N days. A warrant to see the contents of the accounts would be trivial if the investigators wanted to pursue it.

<comment><USER3> That's going too far, I think. Sure, you can run your own VPN server, on an anonymously leased and managed VPS. But then, how do you anonymously lease and manage that VPS? As far as I know, your options are pretty much limited to VPN services, Tor and I2P. Also, VPS traffic is readily logged by providers, so your "anonymity" is pretty fragile.

Your best bet is distributing trust among multiple parties, such that no one of them can compromise you. VPN use is common, so start with nested VPN chains. Then Tor. If either the VPN chain or Tor resists compromise, then you're still safe.

After that, you can use any PM or email that you like. Because it's not connected to your meatspace identity. If content is end-to-end encrypted, the provider has nothing useful to share with adversaries. You and correspondents must, of course, avoid leaking metadata through account names and subject lines.

<comment><USER4> > But then, how do you anonymously lease and manage that VPS?

At least on DigitalOcean, it's possible to create an anonymous account (no name required, not even by their TOS) connected to an anonymous email provider and funded by a cash-purchased Visa gift card. And a $5/mo droplet running IKEv2 VPN traffic (see Algo) is very secure and provides more than enough bandwidth/throughput for several people.

That would only leave the traffic itself (particularly the IP address(es) that initiate connections to your droplet). DO has a policy of not logging traffic unless an abuse alert is triggered.

<comment><USER5> > DO has a policy of not logging traffic unless an abuse alert is triggered.

I'd be willing to bet they log all the info about the signup process though, including the IP address used. It's how you prevent abuse.

The question then becomes, how do you hide your IP address from the DO signup process. I know, used a VPN! Wait a second...

<comment><USER6> Mullvad.net (a VPN provider) gives 3 hour accounts for free. You solve a captcha and they give you an account id to use to connect to their servers. If you want to keep using that account id for more than 3 hours you have to add money to that account. You can pay them in cash (they're in Sweden though) or Bitcoin, credit card, etc. They don't even ask you for your email and they claim to not keep logs that would allow to match an IP and a time stamp to a user [1].

[1] [https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-services-anonymous- review-2017-...](https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-services-anonymous- review-2017-170304/#mullvad)

<comment><USER4> One more thought - connecting via a temporary Mullvad account from a public or obscured entry point (perhaps during an international trip or at a McDonalds) would probably be the most straightforward method. The worst you're giving away is that entry point (to Sweden's loggers), but the DO/VPS fraud detection is less likely to fire if you're going through Mullvad.

To be clear, my own goal in all of this is primarily to get through residential ISP snooping -- I don't trust them not to sell my personal info. Staying out of the state dragnets is also a plus (I don't like the idea of snoops in a building somewhere reading my personal emails; same reason I close the living room curtains in the evening).

<comment><USER3> Yes, one can "anonymously" use WiFi APs. But it's hard to get close enough without becoming observable. And more and more, without being videoed. I've played with a Ubiquiti radio and parabolic antenna, and can hit APs at several km. But then, the dish is pretty big, so you need a large window. And unsecured APs have become harder to find.

<comment><USER4> It's a lot easier to escape surveillance in the suburbs and rural areas. That being said, the ratio of McDonalds franchise density to population density goes higher the further out you go (at least in the US).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > "Freedom of the press is a cornerstone of democracy," Ms. Murphy said. "This > decision by the Justice Department will endanger reporters' ability to > promise confidentiality to their sources and, ultimately, undermine the > ability of a free press to shine a much-needed light on government actions. > That should be a grave concern to anyone who cares about an informed > citizenry."

Sure. But Ms. Watkins could have used better OPSEC, and trained her sources to do the same.

Edit: You can't "promise confidentiality" if you're depending entirely on the behavior of third parties.

<comment><USER7> And government officers could not blatantly violate their oaths to defend the Constitution.

<comment><USER8> There's no clear claim that any such oath -- or other law or guideline -- has been violated.

Consider this statement from Watkins' lawyer:

"It's always disconcerting when a journalist's telephone records are obtained by the Justice Department — through a grand jury subpoena or other legal process. Whether it was really necessary here will depend on the nature of the investigation and the scope of any charges."

It'd look different if MacDougal were confident that the DOJ had violated process or law, including constitutional rights. As it reads, it sounds like he recognizes that right now, there's no apparent violations, and it's plausible that actions like this, disconcerting or not, may well be fully legal and justified.

<comment><USER9> I think one could make a plausible argument for an expansionist reading of press freedom that would cover this case.

<comment><USER10> Courts have consistently held that freedom of the press means freedom of the press-as-medium, not press-as-industry. Reporters have no more rights than you or I. What would the rationale be?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Link to the indictment: [https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/press- release/file/1069836/d...](https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/press- release/file/1069836/download)

> The former aide, James A. Wolfe, 57, was charged with lying repeatedly to > investigators about his contacts with three reporters. According to the > authorities, Mr. Wolfe made false statements to the F.B.I. about providing > two of them with private information related to the committee's work. They > did not say whether it was classified.

Ah interesting. They definitely have metadata but they don't have (or don't admit to having) all the data. So they know who talked to who and when and caught him in a lie which can end up badly. But it seems they don't know the content so they can't say "on this day, in this message you divulged this classified information". They disclose a few Signal messages but they were simple like "Great job" or "I am glad I made your career" etc.

Lying to FBI is not good but disclosing classified information is even worse. It seems in this case he is only charged with lying.

I wonder had he refused to talk to the investigators what would have happened? Given he was an employee with clearance, did he even have a choice in saying "I am not answering your questions, talk to my lawyer"...

> Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department prosecuted more leak cases than all > previous administrations combined.

I wonder if there were simply more leaks because there were more dissenters, more media channels, more disappointed employees or those in charge ordered more resources allocated on finding and stopping the leaks.

It is scary that they are going after and collecting all of reporter's communication going back for years. I can imagine that would be very scary.

<comment><USER12> > I wonder if there were simply more leaks because there were more ...

No, Obama had a personal thing against leakers. None was too many for him. I followed it in the news, but couldn't tell if it was motivate by being a lawyer, so some kind of omerta.

OTOH, previous administrations used leaks as trial balloons, so had a more balanced approach.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/10/obama-leaks- ag...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/10/obama-leaks-aggressive- nixon-report-prosecution)

<comment><USER13> Really? I'm not really a news junkie, but I can't recall a single time hearing anything about Obama having a dispute with anyone, whereas I've heard stories about Trump virtually every day for the last year. Maybe he's even worse than they say?

<comment><USER3> That's because Obama was generally careful about what he said in public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> James Wolfe, 57, Director of Security of the Senate Intelligence Committee for 29 years... leaks intel on Carter Page to his "girlfriend" (she was 21 years old at the time) at BuzzFeed, who publishes a huge scoop and lands a job at the NYT.... [1]

Sounds like a script from House of Cards.

[1] - [https://www.nytco.com/ali-watkins-joining-washington- bureau/](https://www.nytco.com/ali-watkins-joining-washington-bureau/)

<comment><USER14> And just wow.... this tweet from her in 2013:

[https://twitter.com/aliwatkins/status/347800186195701760?s=2...](https://twitter.com/aliwatkins/status/347800186195701760?s=21)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Even The Intercept got it their disclosure wrong once, and these guys are probably the experts: [https://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed- reali...](https://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reality- winner.html)

But unencrypted email certainly isn't the right way to go if you're leaking.

<comment><USER16> Does using gmail count as unencrypted?

<comment><USER17> General Patraeus was caught leaking through Gmail. And, amusingly, they didn't actually send the emails, they just shared an account and wrote draft emails for the other side to read.

Granted, sharing an account with a co-writer turned out to be suspicious behavior, but apparently the government was able to get access to the draft emails that were under Google's control (and I haven't heard of any changes to Gmail that would make it more secure now).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Using any electronic text messaging as a means to communicate state secrets strikes me as lazy, regardless of encryption. Data, metadata and breadcrumbs are left littered amongst an unknowable number of endpoints and 3rd party servers, permanently.

Leaking state secrets isn't supposed to be easy and convenient; there's not an app for that.

<comment><USER19> A staffer working for the Senate Intelligence Committee was dating a reporter who was writing stories based on exclusive intelligence leaks.

They weren't exactly being super careful.

<comment><USER3> I wonder what they were thinking. I mean, maybe something like "I'm a reporter, so they can't ask about my sources." I'm reminded of David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell.

<comment><USER20> I bet they watched House of Cards and thought, hey it works for Zoe Barnes...

Edit: I hope she does not have the same character arc of Zoe Barnes, which I won't spoil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Any idea how the DOJ got their Signal communications? I've never used the app, but did he just not delete his messages or something stupid like that?

[https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/1004913094772944896](https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/1004913094772944896)

<comment><USER22> The most likely explanation would be that he simply didn't delete his messages, or have auto-delete enabled; or, perhaps, he had the auto-delete window for these particular contacts set too long.

<comment><USER23> Most definitely this. Bad messenger OPSEC is a real problem, still. Just recently Paul Manafort backed up his encrypted WhatsApp messages to iCloud, for example.

Many users of these apps don't realize that they are opening themselves up to security issues by performing certain behaviors. Are there any guides to good messenger OPSEC available for the general public (or even at-risk people like journalists or politicians?)

<comment><USER24> While it may be true that Manafort incidentally backed up WhatsApp or Signal messages to iCloud, the FBI supporting statement in the motion to revoke parole indicates that the messages cited were preserved by the receiving party and voluntarily turned over to the FBI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Im surprised that majority of the comments are about how they are dissapointed about their carelessness and not noting that leaking classified information is bad regardless of your ultimate aim. This is exactly what we should expect to happen when people leak classified information regardless of your ultimate motivation

<comment><USER26> Dan Carlin had a podcast about this. He said something to the effect of, "what if you had a stamp and every time you stamped something, your boss would never find out about it. How long do you think it would take before you start putting the stamp on your mistakes?"

What he was trying to get at is, how does a democracy function properly when it has no idea what it's leadership is doing, because the leadership makes everything secret and classified? It's a good question and I don't really have an answer.

<comment><USER25> On the reverse side of that, how can a government function when everybody feels like they are privy to know everything about its operations. Its like having a meeting with too many people in the room. Nothing ever gets done. Democracy functions in that we have a democratic process to elect those who represent us, and at some level we need to trust them with certain elements of operations because everyone knowing everything could cause harm in some cases. If we dont trust who we elect to office then thats a seperate issue that we need to tackle on its own.

<comment><USER27> > _Its like having a meeting with too many people in the room. Nothing ever > gets done._

I'm not sure I accept the metaphor - visibility is not participation. Too- large meetings are useless because they have too many _participants_ , and everything falls to bike-shedding. Plenty of organizations, from public companies to the Federal Reserve, get things done with _visible_ meetings where interested parties can't speak but do see the minutes. In my version of the metaphor, non-secrecy is totally consistent with small-meeting democracy: we elect people to go and represent us, but demand information about how they did so in order to hold them accountable. (If Congress voted by secret ballot, do you think it would represent us better or worse?)

(The question of information which is harmful to share is a fundamentally different one than a general argument for privacy, and a much harder one. Those cases are real, but it's also true that there's a long track record of government claiming information is harmful to release when it's actually embarrassing or unethical.)

> _If we dont trust who we elect to office then thats a seperate issue that we > need to tackle on its own._

Great, we haven't tackled it, and without clear information about what officials do it's not clear how we can.

There's never been an era of declassification and leaks where we looked around and said "yep, everything in there looks like it was done in good faith". I'll embrace an end to leaks around the same time they stop containing evidence government bodies knowingly classifying horrible misdeeds.

Hell, I'd even settle for "no war crimes lately", but we haven't managed that yet.

<comment><USER28> > I'm not sure I accept the metaphor - visibility is not participation. Too- > large meetings are useless because they have too many participants, and > everything falls to bike-shedding.

I was about to reply with exactly this point. Transparency does not entail everyone gets their say, merely that the factors and interests considered in a decision are ultimately disclosed with no secrecy. Then perhaps there can be a public commentary period before proceeding so there is some participation, but participation at every step isn't necessary for engendering trust via transparency.

This obviously gets trickier on national security matters, but the judiciary is supposed to judge what is and isn't too sensitive here. Secret court proceedings are skirting dangerously close to crossing that line though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maybe I'm overlooking something here, but I don't know why leakers don't just use a forever stamp and drop something in the mail. Securing electronic communications seems freakishly hard by comparison. Is there some reason that is an obviously bad idea?

<comment><USER30> Using the postal service might be lower-risk, but it's not risk free.

If you try that, don't forget about the Mail Covers [1] program.

If you're mailing a reporter at the NY Times, you're at risk if you use your own handwriting. You might also be at risk if you use a printed label [2].

There's also the risk that your mail will be intercepted, and I wouldn't be too shocked to discover that government agencies were selectively (or not-so- selectively) reading our mail [3].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_cover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_cover)

[2][https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do- not-d...](https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display- tracking-dots)

[3] [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/53dk3n/this- camer...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/53dk3n/this-camera-can- read-a-book-without-opening-it)

<comment><USER31> Its really sad how low trust in the rule of law has become. US Mail used to be sacrosaint. Damaging a mailbox is a felony to give an idea of how strong the law is in this area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Interesting to see this shortly after the release of the movie The Post. Obama attempted something similar. Basically Nixon had more respect for the independence of the press than current administrations.

</comment><comment><USER33> Apparently this reporter was at BuzzFeed (not NYTimes) at the time of the messages. [https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedBen/status/1004904034132725760](https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedBen/status/1004904034132725760)

</comment><comment> huy-nguyen Who in their right mind would communicate confidential info to a reporter via email and what kind of reporter would allow their sources to do that? The minimum acceptable way to do this is end-to-end encrypted messages via Signal or GPG-encrypted emails via a service in a jurisdiction beyond the FBI's reach (e.g ProtonMail).

<comment><USER34> The Times provides the information necessary to do just this right on their tips page, including instructions for PGP, WhatsApp, Signal, and SecureDrop.

One would hope that serious whistleblowers would heed these instructions.

<comment><USER35> Everyone needs these directions, they need to be clear and followable to the letter with ease.

It doesn't matter how competent you are, if your blowing the whistle then you not want the slightest chance of making a mistake - got to be a high stress situation, someone holding your hand through a critical portion makes sense to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The indictment talked mostly about using Signal so the comments here making fun of using email seem unfair.

<comment><USER22> If, as seems likely, the messages were revealed because they weren't auto- deleted, then the flak email takes is especially well deserved. People are bad at deleting IM messages (even with apps like Signal that will auto-delete them if you ask). But scrubbing an email conversation is actually challenging, and people are notoriously bad at it. Email gets archived, and email replies and threads repeatedly quote and repeat fragments of the conversation; we've all read email "discussions" that were a single message with a long quote history in it.

<comment><USER37> >we've all read email "discussions" that were a single message with a long quote history in it.

Those emails are notorious for leaking information - especially when you loop someone external in and forget to scrub the long 3 month-long trail at the bottom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> More of the same from the last 9 years.

<comment><USER39> Sort of. But I think it's important to note how many people were applauding the seizure of communications when the target was Trump's lawyer...

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Is there a material downside to the _Times_ switching external e-mails to E2E encrypted and to be deleted after N months?

<comment><USER41> Johnny can't encrypt so their sources would probably still send them unencrypted email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Well that's not at all disconcerting.

<comment><USER43> If you're only feeling unsettled now, then you haven't been paying attention. The previous administration waged a similar war on leakers and their journo contacts since at least 2012.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Anyone know what she was reporting on that caused the Justice Department to censor the coverage?

</comment><comment><USER45> Send a letter.

<comment><USER45> I would leak printed documents - preferably not with a Laserjet - by sending them, not sent from my hometown but random (does this make it less secure? pattern detection? gas stations linked to my VISA?) towns. And make sure - difficult (re-OCR to text? high contrast?) - they are not marked (dot-marked, whitespace-marked, font-marked, ...) to me.

I'd prefer that way to any long chain of online trusted systems of which only one needs to leak. To me digital OpSec feels more difficult to maintain.

Add a printed PGP key and the reporter can post more questions online on their homepage (could the NSA detect cut&paste? JS-events with injected JS?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Times, let me introduce you to ProtonMail.

</comment><comment><USER43> Pretty cheeky to be the director of security and be leaking to a reporter that you're fucking.

What is the correct way for the USG to behave in this manner? Some people are upset that they seized her communications, but what other choice is there? Just let leaks go unpunished? Or should senate aides et al sign a 'no privacy' agreement, where the USG can do whatever they want to intercept their communications at all points?

<comment><USER47> They could have just revoked his security clearance, forcing him to resign. Think about the resources being expended on criminal prosecution of lying to the FBI.

<comment><USER48> It's meant to act as a deterrent. Nail one leaker to the wall, and others will be more reticent to leak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Of course this is assuming the NYT didn't voluntarily give up the source and then ask the government to send them this letter. Given the NYT's history with whistleblowers, I have trouble seeing how anyone is taking this story at face value.

<comment><USER50> While the reporter works for NYTimes now, she was working at Buzzfeed at the time. It wasn't a NYTimes source.

<comment><USER49> That actually makes more sense. Still though, it's pathetic that the NYT pretended like they were going to publish the story about mass illegal wiretapping by the NSA and then buried it to get Bush re-elected, and now are complaining about the government reading their reporter's emails. As if this isn't completely deserved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences turns out to be a really shitty idea when it happens to people you agree with.

</comment><comment><USER52> The Executive Branch is going after both the press and the Congress, and the article doesn't convey anyone putting up too much of a fight. Unless I missed something, I only see statements of concern or principle, from 'we'll see if this is bad' to "we're deeply troubled"

> "Freedom of the press is a cornerstone of democracy, and communications > between journalists and their sources demand protection," said Eileen > Murphy, a Times spokeswoman.

> Ms. Watkins's personal lawyer, Mark J. MacDougall, said: "It's always > disconcerting when a journalist's telephone records are obtained by the > Justice Department — through a grand jury subpoena or other legal process. > Whether it was really necessary here will depend on the nature of the > investigation and the scope of any charges."

> Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, said in a statement, "We're > deeply troubled by what looks like a case of law enforcement interfering > with a reporter's constitutional right to gather information about her own > government."

<comment><USER53> This really isn't that surprising. If, by reporting you are directly involved in a crime - you're gonna have a bad time. We can argue all day about whether information should be classified, but the fact remains that disclosing classified information is illegal in the US. Had the reporter engaged in murder or theft while reporting, would there be any outrage? I admit it's a bit odd, because it isn't a crime for the reporter -- but they are definitely involved in the commission of a crime.

<comment><USER52> > the fact remains that disclosing classified information is illegal in the US

It's not as simple as that; a few points:

1\. The Constitution's protection of freedom of the press can outweigh any laws on classification, though the courts haven't said that.

2\. The unauthorized release of classified information has many times been important for democracy to function, for government to be held accountable, and that is exactly the role and function of the press.

3\. The classification of information is believed by many to be excessive. Much that is classified is not dangerous and doesn't need to be classified. I've read several examples of information classified to cover up government activities.

4\. Classification obviously could be used to intentionally reduce accountability to the public. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where the President commits a crime, and it's covered up by classification. Arguably, this happened with NSA spying and CIA torture.

5\. Until the Obama administration, Presidents did not prosecute leaks regularly, indicating that they were not viewed as dangerous. Generally, not nearly all laws are enforced; 'it's illegal' is not a threshold, or it seems almost everyone could be prosecuted for something.

> Had the reporter engaged in murder or theft while reporting, would there be > any outrage?

Not comparable.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any jobs in the Denver area? - <AUTHOR> I'm a Senior in college and am looking for Junior position development jobs, preferably in Denver area or even remote!
I'm excited about about Javascript and the web of frameworks that have come out of it. I have also been diving into functional programming and see it becoming essential for large code bases.
Any help would be much appreciated. <comment><USER2> You may try the Boulder area. Both TechStars and Boomtown Boulder have programs based in Boulder and thus many startups flowing through the area. You may be able to find an internship or entry level position through one of their portfolio companies or even try reaching out directly to the program to see if they may know of any of their companies looking.

</comment><comment><USER3> On Monday will be posted automatically a thread for jobs. Remember to look and post in the correct thread.

Last editions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring)

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://denver.craigslist.org/search/sof](http://denver.craigslist.org/search/sof)

Not necessarily where you'll find your job, but it shows some demand. A lot of those are probably posted by contracting agencies, and there are a number of contracting agencies where you also might find something.

In Denver there's a lot of telecom and defense, as well as the Boulder mini- oasis.

You say Javascript, so I'm assuming you want web work, but software lets you do much more than web, in almost any industry. Instead of focusing on your technology, think if there's any industry that sounds really interesting.

</comment><comment><USER5> Shoot me an email, in profile -- there's a Denver developers slack channel that has a few job listings. And it's a good place to meet other devs in town.

I'd also suggest taking a look at [http://www.builtincolorado.com/](http://www.builtincolorado.com/).

</comment><comment><USER6> There used to be a staffing service around the turn of the century where I had success finding work in my field. 'Denver Technical Staffing' was their name. Dunno if they're still in business now though.

</comment><comment><USER7> With that skill set, you probably want to check out the firms at Denver startup week.

[http://www.denverstartupweek.org/sponsors](http://www.denverstartupweek.org/sponsors)</comment>


Scientists find way to reverse aging in mice - <AUTHOR> http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Health/20101129/reversing-aging-mice-101129/ <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1952077></comment>


Verbatim: Stats guru Jeff Sagarin - <AUTHOR> http://college-basketball.si.com/2013/08/26/verbatim-jeff-sagarin/?sct=uk_wr_a1

<comment><USER2> The point of this submission being....?

The fact that someone runs statistics calculations in Fortran (a language whose most recent standard is dated 2008) should be shocking only to the recent generation of coders who have become "code hipsters." The guys looking for the Next Big Thing™ in programming languages.

These are the guys trying to cram Python into every possible goddamned use case, whether that be embedded systems or computational fluid dynamics. Whether it's the right tool for the job or not. The same guys who are implementing a Ruby interpreter in Haskell, running on a VM written in Rust. Why? Because damn it, their language of choice is shiny and new, and therefore it must be the best.

Nope. You use the best tool for the job. If you're already familiar with a language and that language is perfectly well-suited for the task at hand (in this case mathematics) then you use that language.

Fortran is old, which means it's seen a lot of development. The compiler optimizations are very, very efficient and Fortran code runs extremely fast. In fact, Fortran was explicitly designed for running mathematics algorithms on computers.

tl;dr Fortran is actually a great choice for this application and I hate hipsters.

<comment><USER3> Is Fortran actually the best choice for this application? I don't know how heavy the calculations are for sports analytics, but I'm guessing it's less advanced than scientific simulations. Who cares how numerically efficient your code is if you use 10x the lines than a modern language and spend half your time struggling to maintain it.

<comment><USER4> On the sports analytics question I don't have any knowledge or experience, but I can see operations there turning into multi-matrix statistical correlations and such.

On the subject of being the best language for the job, Fortran does not use 10x more lines than more modern languages. In fact, in many cases it uses less. When I was working on real-time signal processing algorithms we used to prototype algorithms in Fortran[1], then implement them in C. I also used to use Python with SciPy and NumPy for analysis, as well as Matlab. Matlab's huge toolbox library notwithstanding, the Fortran implementations were usually shorter, simpler, and easier to understand than any of the other languages. It was only bias and preconceived notions that kept it from being used in the real system. I would have loved to see Fortran subroutines running the algorithms underneath the C distributed framework.

[1] Until someone in management and the customer team decided to have the scientists write their algorithms directly in the real-time C. That is a rant for another day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm guessing the title was chosen because the submitter thought coding in Fortran was stupid, or old, or whatever. The reality is that Fortran has been updated frequently and for what he's doing seems like a reasonable choice (plus he probably has a store of routines that he likes to use for certain analyses).

Old language != Bad language

From TFA:

"SI: Is it true you still code in Fortran?

JS: Yeah, what's wrong with that? It's a good language. Fortran is real good for doing mathematics and running it real quickly. I'm not doing Photoshopping or anything like that. I'm just running numbers."

<comment><USER6> _the submitter thought coding in Fortran was stupid, or old, or whatever_

I don't think it's stupid or old, but it's certainly _interesting_ : in the world where hopping from one newest technology to another is normal, somebody sticking to what they are used to is noteworthy. Some other examples are Bob Staake using Photoshop 3.0 ([http://www.bobstaake.com/pixfix/films.shtml](http://www.bobstaake.com/pixfix/films.shtml)) or OpenBSD using CVS (hehe) and writing their own version of it.

Maybe that's what the submitter thought.

(Yes, Fortran is still updated, but it's certainly not the cutting edge tech. Or maybe it will be, after this HN submission.)

<comment><USER7> _in the world where hopping from one newest technology to another is normal_

On the assumption that you're talking about programmers, I suspect it isn't. I suspect the majority of the world's programmers stay with the same few tools for years and years, sometimes (but not always) upgrading a version when they're forced to.

<comment><USER6> Sure, I didn't mean the World, I meant our small world of tech news / startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fortan isn't dead, by far.

There is a lot of scientific and industrial code (in astronomy, aeronautics, ...) that is in Fortran. And I'm not talking about legacy stuff that is only in maintenance mode. These codes are still evolving and get new functionalities. They're not in Fortran only for legacy reasons (though that plays some part). They're in Fortran because Fortan is still the right tool for the job.

Scientific computing, where is IO is pretty much never the bottleneck, is a completely different world from web development. Python/Numpy is usable for some tasks, but only because it delegates a lot of stuff to underlying FOrtran code..

<comment><USER9> Yeah, anyone who has installed numpy, matplotlib, etc has probably noticed that you need a Fortran compiler to build the native extensions...

<comment><USER10> Actually, you don't. A fortran compiler is optional, and used mostly for f2py and I think(?) for the LAPACK bindings. (The fortran bindings are more efficient than the C bindings for reasons I don't remember at the moment.)

Numpy's (and matplotlib's, actually) core is written in C.

Scipy is a different story, however. A lot of scipy's internals are written in fortran.

That having been said, fortran is a _very_ nice language for a significant portion of scientific programming tasks. IO in fortran is rather painful, though, i.m.o. Tools like f2py (which still doesn't really support fully modern fortran, unfortunately) make it very easy to combine fortran and python, for whatever it's worth.

<comment><USER9> Yeah maybe I was thinking of scipy. I've only built numpy and scipy from source once, and it was to install scikit-learn, which has both of them as a dependency. I had to install gfortran first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Absolutely nothing wrong with Fortran. In the 90s I worked on source-level optimizations in the HPF (High-Performance Fortran) compiler at Thinking Machines: not having a numerical processing background (and having only used Fortran for one course in college, which was Microsoft Fortran with each compiler phase on a separate floppy) it was fascinating to work on, and I found Fortran 90 to be pretty compelling in a lot of numeric operations. There is a lot of code out there that was written and debugged years ago and there is no reason to change.

</comment><comment><USER12> A lot of financial services academic modelling is still done in Fortran too. The old programs still run, and new results keep coming.

It was interesting that the NCAA doesn't include scores in their methodology, just wins and losses. Is that because they don't want to officially encourage teams to run up the score? It doesn't stop teams from doing that, but perhaps that's because they are trying to impress other audiences.

</comment><comment><USER13> If your emphasis is on crunching numbers Fortran is the best.

<comment><USER14> Or, rather, if your emphasis is on crunching numbers, and so many of them that performance is always a big issue, then Fortran is pretty much the best.

Not all number crunching is the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Like saying someone still codes in C.

</comment><comment><USER16> So do most of the world's cosmologists, you know boring stuff like the fabric of the universe, the beginning of time, the hunt for dark matter.

It's parallelisable - if that's a word.

Admittedly the stuff I have seen is all written without knowledge of the maxim "write your code as if the next person to fix your code is a mad axe murderer who knows where you live."

But they still unlock the secrets of the universe with it, even with unusual naming conventions.</comment>


How "oldschool" graphics worked [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfh0ytz8S0k&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> In the Legend of Zelda, the envirvonment's color rules were even more strict: You could use one palette for _all_ the tiles at the screen's edge or one tile away, and a second palette for _all_ the tiles in the middle.

That's the reason, if you zoom in on the water in this screenshot, you'll see that the edge of the lake has brown sparkles, and the inner lake has green ones:

[https://skoce.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/legendzelda-35.png](https://skoce.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/legendzelda-35.png)

<comment><USER3> Note though, that this extra restriction isn't a technical limitation of the NES, rather, it's a choice by the developers of Legend of Zelda for the purpose of shrinking the amount of bytes needed for each "screen" of the world.

By doing this, you only needed to store 2 palettes per "screen", rather than 16 tiles x 11 tiles = 176 palettes per "screen".

<comment><USER4> A clever hack! It exploits the tendency of each screen to have impassable obstacles (rocks, trees, walls) around the 4 edges of the screen, with optional openings. By using a separate palette for the middle area, the screen as a whole looks more colorful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've always had a lot of respect for Woz's color hack on the Apple, which will apparently be covered in a later part. But I didn't see IBM PC hacks on the list, so here's an overview of old & new tricks to get colors out of an old CGA card. [http://8088mph.blogspot.com/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors- new-m...](http://8088mph.blogspot.com/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode- illustrated.html)

<comment><USER6> Apple //e graphics were weird from what I remember.

Highres (hgr) 7 colors though 2 whites, 2 blacks purple, green, blue and orange. Certain colors next to each other caused weirdness I think thats why 2 black/white colors.

You could dump the video memory to disk though and load it back. Kind of like a modern screenshot with no compression. the disks couldn't hold a lot of images though made young me frustrated trying to make a graphical adventure. I did a maze game with the 16 color low res graphics..

You could directly manipulate the graphics with the poke command (push values into memory).

"call 62454" inexplicable changed the whole screen to the current color. You could have fun with a loop though the 7 colors.

good times

<comment><USER7> Yep. There were two whites and two blacks due to the pixel shift triggered by the high bit of the screen memory byte.

Unlike most every other machine, the Apple 8 bit computers offered 7 pixels per byte, with the high order bit shifting those just a little bit.

That shift presented the two sets of colors.

At the pixel clock of the Apple, artifacting basically offered a 4 color display. Two pixels on = white, two pixels off = black, and 01, 10 patterns were color.

With the pixel shift, the Apple 8 bit computers offered up a 6 color display. While the two blacks and whites seem redundant, they are actually necessary to get bit patterns lined up precisely, or to avoid additional color artifacts along some image boundaries.

<comment><USER8> And thus the Apple II is the only computer that was ever capable of shifting something half-a-pixel to the left.

Note: The Apple /// could probably do that too.

<comment><USER7> I think it could.

That little shift ended up being double high resolution in the later //e machines.

:)

Apple video is a total hack through and through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a companion piece I recommend Fuck the Super Game Boy [http://loveconquersallgam.es/post/2350461718/fuck-the- super-...](http://loveconquersallgam.es/post/2350461718/fuck-the-super-game- boy-introduction)

<comment><USER10> I thought this was certainly interesting as a companion piece (for a decidedly different era of graphics). I can't know this for sure, but I suspect a brief summary of the article -- in particular, an indication that it's not merely lambasting the Super Game Boy -- would have been helpful for folks who were turned off by the article's title.

<comment><USER11> Yes, the title is extremely unfortunate for such an interesting piece of technical history :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very cool, undersampling of color still exists in modern codecs, if you see something like YUV420 that means there's 2 chroma (color) pixels for every 4 luminance (brightness) pixels:

[http://i.stack.imgur.com/U7hxZ.png](http://i.stack.imgur.com/U7hxZ.png)

Since our eyes are more preceptive to detail rather than absolute color, you can lower your bitrate without perceived video quality.

<comment><USER13> A lot of these "rules" with color use some broad generalizations. When you work with video compression a lot, you start training yourself to see color differently and the illusions begin to fall apart.

For me: I really don't enjoy looking at 4:2:0 or 4:1:1 chroma subsampling (4:2:2 usually doesn't cause problems)

4:2:0 sort of works for live scenes which don't typically have sharp chroma boundaries but when you see solid red/blue graphics superimposed over a scene, the blocky bleed of color across the scene is like knives in my eyes.

<comment><USER14> > but when you see solid red/blue graphics superimposed over a scene, the > blocky bleed of color across the scene is like knives in my eyes.

I still wonder why that happens to red, mostly because it looks like someone's bleeding everywhere. I don't seem to notice it for green or blue. At first I thought it was the downsampling, but it has to be something else (a combination, maybe?), since JPEG seems to handle downsampled red comparatively better when highly compressed. Right now, I just think it's a flaw in H.264, it's encoders and/or decoders.

<comment><USER13> Bleed definitely happens with blue too but since solid blue chrominance is less common in graphics (graphics tend to use brighter sky/azure/royal blue) whereas solid red is quite common.

But bleed won't happen with green because green is basically the luminance channel in YCbCr/YUV. This means that green runs at full sample resolution compared to red and blue which run at 50% to 25% resolution (depending on subsampling).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This guy's videos are great. Just got sucked into a youtube hole for an hour.

<comment><USER16> Not the same era but if you like that, you might also love this dude: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQYsFshbkYw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQYsFshbkYw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Total tangent but the color cells reminded me of Fair Isle knitting, in which some of the most colorful knitted sweaters you've likely seen are done using only two colors on any given row. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Isle_(technique)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Isle_\(technique\))

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow, I love this. The graph-paper sprite design thing brought back a flood of memories from the mid 80s, as that's exactly how I learned to make sprites.

<comment><AUTHOR> Me too :)

I remember programming custom characters into my 9-pin IBM ProPrinter so that I could print certain logos and symbols directly as characters. It was the same layout on graph paper and convert to binary format. I think that was how I was first introduced to binary in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's interesting how the colour palettes of those old computers went a long way to define their character. I was an Amstrad CPC owner, and its games tended to have a bright, saturated look whereas C64 games always looked a bit brown and washed-out to me[1]. Later on, as an Amiga owner I was always a little jealous of the SNES for the quality of its colours.

It would be cool to see a video on Amiga graphics and the crazy things you can do with bitplanes and copper lists.

[1] check out these shots of Trantor on different 8bit platforms. You can tell straight away which one is CPC or C64 ([http://frgcb.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/trantor-last- stormtroope...](http://frgcb.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/trantor-last-stormtrooper- go-1987.html))

</comment><comment><USER20> Great video. Is there any reason why the color cells had to be split into an even grid? It seems like if the API allowed the software developers to define custom grids on the fly (perhaps with different scenes or levels), it would open up lots of creativity (though I suppose that would also use some memory).

<comment><USER21> The c64's default video mode was a 40x24 grid of 8x8 monospaced text characters. The video chip was designed around this: each scanline it would look at the characters occupying the current row, then use that plus how many times it'd displayed that row as an index into the 1k of character ROM to pull out the appropriate byte, and display its individual bits as pixels.

You could also tell the video chip to look somewhere in RAM for these character definitions. Maybe just to replace the standard font with something cooler; maybe some of your font would contain little 8x8 building blocks you could use to make bigger images. Most games would build their backgrounds this way - you'd only have so much variation available, but you also only had to move about 900 bytes around to scroll the screen, rather than 8k. Which sounds like nothing to a modern machine but was a serious difference for a 1mhz computer.

The bitmap mode jiggled with this a little, and ignored the 'look at the characters on this row' part in favor of just stepping through an 8k chunk of RAM over the course of the display. (Well, the multicolor bitmap mode looked at the characters in the row as well, but used them for color data rather than an index to the character map.)

If you want to know about this in more detail then try firing up a c64 emulator and going through the 'graphics' chapter of the c64 Programmer's Reference Guide: [http://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_programmers_reference/c6...](http://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_programmers_reference/c64-programmers_reference_guide-03-programming_graphics.pdf)

I'm not sure the acronym "API" even existed at this point in time. I sure never heard it when I was fooling around with 6502 assembly.

tl;dr: severely limited hardware, programmed right on the bare metal. API? What's that?

<comment><USER22> _The video chip was designed around this: each scanline it would look at the characters occupying the current row, then use that plus how many times it 'd displayed that row as an index into the 1k of character ROM to pull out the appropriate byte, and display its individual bits as pixels._

The C64 reads the current characters every 8 scanlines, not each scanline (well, you can get it to read on arbitrary scanlines by manipulating the vertical scroll register, but that's beside the point here). Due to the way the C64's data bus works, the main processor has to stop executing instructions while the graphics chip reads the character data.

You have to account for this if you're trying to synchronize code to particular scanlines -- on the scanlines where character data is read, you'll only get 23 cycles instead of the usual 63 (on a PAL machine, at least). For even more info, see [http://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/cbm/c64/vic- ii.txt](http://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/cbm/c64/vic-ii.txt)

<comment><USER21> Yeah, I should have been more clear on that. I didn't feel like explaining the care and feeding of badlines. _grin_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ha. This took me back to being 8 years old again. My mom loved/hated the fact that her kids had graph paper ALL OVER the house because we were building sprites for games on the C64.

Boy, assembly was a bitch at first.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wonderful production value and nice presentation. Looking forward to more of these.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's worth noting that when he says the NES had a limit of 64 sprites the limit is 64 per screen not 64 total. Each being 8x8 pixels in size. There was another limitation though, you could only have 8 sprites displayed on the same horizontal line (scanline). Games got around this by "flickering" the sprites so it would appear that more were displayed at once.

</comment><comment><USER26> One thing about computer graphics is that full color didn't really exist for the average computer until the mid 90's. During the 80's, full color 24-bit graphics were strictly the domain of workstations and high-end Macs with 24-bit graphics cards.

The average computer couldn't display a proper 24-bit photo until about when Windows 95 came out...

</comment><comment><USER27> Wow that was a pretty cool video. I have a lot of respect and admiration for the guys and gals who worked on these things back in the day.

But I am lost on the math part about the color cells. Why does each color cell only need 1 byte? If each cell is 8 bits wide and 8 bits deep, wouldn't that be 8 bytes?

<comment><USER28> You need one byte for the colors (4 bits to specify each of foreground and background) and 8 bytes for the on/off; if you have 1000 cells, then you need 9000 bytes in total.

Another common thing to do, especially on machines just a little bit earlier, was to use one byte for the colors, one byte for a glyph identifier, and then put the 8 bytes per glyph somewhere else, maybe ROM, which was way cheaper than RAM. You could only have 256 distinct glyphs on the screen at a time, and maybe you couldn't even reprogram them, but you could do quite a bit of useful graphics inside those constraints. Text especially, obviously. And you could do it with a lot less memory.

Nonprogrammable fonts were mostly just idiocy, because a quad-input NAND gate would have been sufficient to distinguish a 16-glyph RAM area from the ROM, and 128 bytes of RAM would have been sufficient for 16 8×8 glyphs; also, 5×8 glyphs were actually pretty common at the time. In the VT-52 and ADM-3A era, you had a good excuse; by the time of the VT-100 and H-19, it was just dumb. For better or worse, the less-idiotic Apple and Commodore mostly swept those pointlessly-crippled devices aside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I hardly ever subscribe to youtube channels, but I clicked it as soon as I finished watching part one.

</comment><comment><USER30> This was very awesome!! Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER31> Very cool! I wonder if the rise of isometric games have something to do with the pixel down scaling. Isometric games do make use of the 'horizontal pixels'.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is very similar to some of the tricks used in text mode[1] to give "pseudographics". You can basically view each grid square as a character position, and the definition of the tiles as a font.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA- compatible_text_mode#Fonts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA- compatible_text_mode#Fonts)

</comment><comment><USER33> I really need to play around with some of the more bizarre graphics hardware systems, as my junior nerd years were more D&D-centered than fiddling around with my C64, and compared to weird 8-bit systems, forcing the VGA card to switch to planar mode seems positively pedestrian...

</comment><comment><USER34> I wish modern computers had some reasonably efficient APIs for doing pixel- level screen buffer stuff in a straightforward way. Without using pixel shaders on polygons and other hacks.

<comment><USER35> Why not Canvas?

<comment><USER34> Canvas does exactly what I'm talking about, but for my purposes I would prefer something that works outside of a browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is well produced and fun to watch. Great memories, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER36> Now this just shows complexity of Metal Slug, mortal combat trilogy and SF :)

</comment><comment><USER37> Pretty good overview! Thanks for posting.

</comment><comment><USER38> Much like almost any video that's a person talking to the viewer, this would be much better as an article. The average reading speed seems to be about 300 WPM while average talking speed is 110-150, along with talking generally being less information-dense because of filler words and repetition. There is the option of increasing the video's speed at least.

<comment><USER39> Plus you can listen to or watch the video while doing otherwise mindless stuff like household chores.

<comment><USER38> That edge-case doesn't justify video over text in general

<comment><USER40> That is not an edge case by any stretch of the imagination. Most, if not all, people I know have videos playing while doing other stuff.

<comment><USER38> I've never done that or seen anyone do it, personally

<comment><USER40> I guess my most such cases are watching a video an browsing at the same time. Or cooking food/cleaning while watching videos. Not once have you done that? I find that odd, but each to their own.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Windows 10 is adding an Ultimate Performance mode for pros - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/14/windows-10-ultimate-performance-mode/ <comment><USER2> Will it still have adverts and all that candy crush shit in the start menu?

<comment><USER3> They actually 'fixed' this on latest builds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did I just read "nice performance you have there, it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it"? In other words, unless this is some truly groundbreaking way of going to ludicrous speed, my bet is "we're renaming High Power (or removing, unless you pay for the ultimate version), and introducing another, weaker set of settings named High Power."

<comment><USER5> A couple of years ago I would have written this kind of thing off as anti-M$ shilling, but the passive-aggressive authoritarianism if 10 had changed my mind. How has computing gotten so bad that most general purpose machines have an actively harmful, much hated OS forced onto them?

<comment><USER4> So would I, but alas, that's the current predicament. Trust me, I would be really happy for a Microsoft that actually listens for an answer to "where do you want to go today?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Gonna be interesting to see benchmarks especially after seeing how little the "Game" mode did

</comment><comment><USER7> If removing "features" improves performance, one has to wonder how much overhead those features have.

If I remove the UI/window manager from Linux and run software from the command line, I don't see a massive performance boost. That's not to say I would run a server with the UI, but it's not like I'm seeing a 100% improvement or anything. Thus, there must be some difference between the acceptable overhead of Linux vs. Windows.

It just makes me think that Windows continues to add features as long as that n+1 feature doesn't slow down the PC, and thus doesn't stop until the PC _is_ slowed down. Thus, every Windows OS will have a maximal amount of overhead.

</comment><comment><USER8> Windows 10 ruined my 8 GB RAM laptop. The battery life's gone shit and performance down the drain. Windows 8.1 was way better, strictly relatively.

<comment><USER9> I agree, I worked in IT and was the last one to move from 8.1 to 10. I loved 8.1, it was rock solid. People on my team were always complaining about Windows 10 and I'm just sittin' here with my rock solid stable OS like "amirite?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> They should start with a barely acceptable performance mode.</comment>


Haskell typeclasses: Classes, Jim, but not as we know them - <AUTHOR> http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/MDCC-TechTalk-Classes-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-them

<comment><AUTHOR> SPJ is not only an amazing teacher and speaker but in his role as a Haskell community elder (leader?) he sets a really shining example in how he addresses people new to both haskell and functional programming.

For someone who has accomplished so much and is clearly so smart he appears to be very humble.

</comment><comment><USER2> Don't have an hour to watch this, but I always watch SPJ (and Rich Hickey's) talks. I'm guessing "hot topics" for ghc 7.4-ish are some permutation of

\- (polymorphic kinds)[[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/people/dimitris/fc-kind-...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/people/dimitris/fc-kind-poly.pdf)]

\- (superclass instances)[[http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/lexwc/if_you_want_s...](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/lexwc/if_you_want_superclass_instances_for_ghc_74/) ] and

\- (Pedro's generics)[[http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell- email@example.com/msg9448...](http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg94482.html)]

(hazy recollection of lots other things that might make 7.4 but can't seem to google.. anybody?)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is there so much content on Haskell coming out of Microsoft Research? I've seen multiple Haskell papers out of them and I think they're the initial developers on cloud haskell as well?

Does MS have any technology related to Haskell at all? Or is it just research for the sake of it?

<comment> tomh- Microsoft is the employer of two of the developers for the GHC compiler. Microsoft certainly has technologies related to Haskell such as F#. Also, a lot of the ideas for the new features of C# are based on the research and experience they've gained with Haskell. Linq, Lambda's, Task Parallel Framework etc.

<comment><USER4> also in the other direction! Simon Peyton-Jones and Phil Wadler wrote a paper where they basically backported (and improved on) some LINQ features in haskell's list comprehensions: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/simonpj/papers...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/simonpj/papers/list-comp/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone has a list of Simon Peyton Jones' talks? I find his talks are really helpful.

<comment><USER6> His homepage has some stuff

<http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> this also good, by Dr. Ralf Lämmel

[http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/C9-Lectures-Dr- Ral...](http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/C9-Lectures-Dr-Ralf-Lmmel- Advanced-Functional-Programming-Type-Classes/)</comment>


Ask HN: Why wasn't Adobe able to make Flash run well on smartphones? - <AUTHOR>

If I'm not mistaken, current smartphones (iPhone 4S and the latest Android phones) should have more computing power than my laptop 5-7 years ago.
So, if my laptop 5-7 years ago could run Flash content just fine, why does it not run well-enough on today's smartphones?
Is it the size of the RAM? Is it due to strict computing restrictions imposed on smartphones to help save battery life?
In what ways were laptops from several years ago better equipped to run Flash than the latest and greatest smartphones from today? <comment><USER2> Define runs well.

My macbook is silent until I visit a site with a flash banner at which point the cpu fan comes on. That tells me that flash does something computationally intensive even when displaying what looks like a 4 frame movie with a button that prompts me to click to the next destination. The time between loading a page and hearing the CPU fan come on depends on how ad-laden the page is. While my machine doesn't lag and Chrome Canary will occasionally lag a little when scrolling those pages the first time, I'd have to say that translates to high cpu utilization which would kill a phone's battery pretty quickly.

The other problem was focus - most flash games used the mouse pointer for directional control. The mouse pointer doesn't exist on a phone and a tap would correspond to a mouse click. Redesigning Flash to deal with those issues on web pages where HTML5 solves many of those issues convinced Adobe to concentrate on Air, and leave webapps to HTML5.

Flash won't disappear overnight, but, new development ceased. Whether they make it support GPUs before relegating it to a 'security release only' update policy is hard to say.

Personally, I have removed flash from my macbook and only Chrome/Chrome Canary(my primary browser) can even see Flash enabled pages/sites. Months ago it was very irritating when the version of flash bundled with Canary would crash on one page and violate the sandbox causing google.com/music to crash as well.

*still amazed at the irony of using Flash for google.com/music :)

</comment><comment><USER3> "current smartphones (iPhone 4S and the latest Android phones) should have more computing power than my laptop 5-7 years ago."

It depends on what you compare. Even if the CPU is fast, its speed is there to work less, not to be 100% all the time. See:

<http://www.anandtech.com/show/2782/2>

"although the system may require 3 watts or so to "hurry up", the power consumption goes down near .25 watts when idle. By averaging these two numbers, one can quickly see how quick start can extend battery life"

There are Flash-based ads that push CPU use to 100% on 6 years old computers for all the time you're looking at the page with contains them.

Second, the video decoding on the phones is done not in the main CPU -- there's a hardware decoder. If Flash video content is not suitable for the hardware decoder, Flash code has no chance to be efficient. Again, 100% CPU use.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would accept the battery life argument if Apple did not allow games in the App Store that drained the battery very quickly. Why is it acceptable (for users/Apple/Steve Jobs) for iOS games to drain the battery but not acceptable for Flash to drain the battery.

If there was a draconian 'thou shalt not drain the battery' rule in place, I can see how Flash would violate that. But there is no such rule in place, since other apps are allowed to drain the battery very quickly.

<comment><USER3> > there is no such rule in place, since other apps are allowed to drain the > battery very quickly.

Flash was not an app. It was supposed to extend the Apple's browser. Imagine you develop the browser, and you can decide if you want to allow me to "extend" it causing it: crashing all the time (see how it performs on the OS X), making the otherwise fluid pages "stuck" and unresponsive, and finally, not even having a ready version of extension for years. Furthermore, if you're aware that anybody who develops something new would have anyway to develop the interaction differently for your mobile device, and that the main benefit of my extension is for the already deployed code (the one designed for the desktops). But you know that the already deployed code simply cant be run "properly" (as in having a proper interaction) on the mobile device no matter how the extension is developed. Then would you allow me to diminish the value (making it behaving worse) of your already finished product?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "As Steve Jobs put it: "Flash was designed for PCs using mice"—which is true. When Flash was created back in the 90′s, the target platform that it was designed for, was the PC. Flash was designed for desktop computers, computers with a fast CPU and a power-cable. This is the root cause of all the hardships Adobe has had with mobile."

read the rest of the article here - <http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/09/why- adobe-failed/>

explains everything super well!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link, I'll take a look.

As for the following: > "As Steve Jobs put it: "Flash was designed for PCs using mice"

Well, HTML was also initially designed for PCs using mice, but it has managed to evolve to the new era of smartphones, so why couldn't Flash evolve to utilize the new touch interface?

> Flash was designed for desktop computers, computers with a fast CPU and a > power-cable.

I have several games on my iPhone (Fieldrunners being the example that comes to mind) that are are so power hungry that they deplete my battery in no time. And yet these are acceptable by users, but a Flash game that depletes battery is not acceptable. Why is this the case?

<comment><USER3> "And yet these are acceptable by users, but a Flash game that depletes battery is not acceptable. Why is this the case?"

If you ask ordinary "users" they'd want everything, including Flash on every device and in the browser too. Then they'd complain that "the internet" is to slow to even appear even if the page "just has a few ads." In Apple's case, Jobs, not "users", decided what he cared more for.

<comment><AUTHOR> But this is simply pushing the question further up the food chain.

That is, the question becomes: Why did Jobs find it acceptable to have iOS games on the iPhone that kill the battery within an hour, but found it unacceptable to have Flash that kills the battery within an hour?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the underlying (and completely unsolvable) problem boils down to user experience. There are myriad flash apps out there with atrocious hover-state- based interfaces that are annoying on PC, and would be completely unusable on a touch screen device. Activating flash on a mobile device would open the floodgates to countless apps that simply wouldn't work, without providing context to the user as to _why_ they don't work. In such a situation, it is simpler to control the user experience by simply not allowing flash.

<comment><AUTHOR> Aren't there countless websites out there with no Flash and only HTML/Javascript/CSS that have atrocious hover-state-based interfaces that are completely unusable on a touch screen device?

Why deal with hover-state-based interfaces differently for Flash and non-Flash websites?

Is it easier to show a user a mobile version of the site (with no hover-state dependencies) if that site is non-Flash than if it has any Flash on it?</comment></comment>


The Truth Behind Liveplace's Photo-Realistic 3D World And OTOY's Rendering Engine - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/20/the-truth-behind-liveplaces-photo-realistic-3d-world-and-otoys-rendering-engine/ <comment><USER2> I found all replies on TechCrunch are all trapped in an assumption: "For each client, the server has to render the whole scene again and again"

I guess in fact they don't need to do that. Here is my guess.

1\. Given a city model, it can be rendered according to camera location, orientation.

2\. If users are only allow to walk on the street. Which reduce the possible rendering camera position and possible orientations.

3\. If user can only move in fixed speed.

4\. Given 1, 2, 3. The possible camera positions, orientations are limited.

5\. The render farm render all possible scenes in system. They are marked by positions, camera orientation.

6\. Assemble all rendering scenes according to users' camera position, orientation and pace and stream the whole scene out.

7\. We can add one more parameter, time of the scene. So a city can have 24 hours and the change of Sun, Moon.

So the problem is reduced to how to assemble those scene fast enough and streaming them. And because it will be a movie, so one important thing is to find the difference between two scene and compress them quickly.

If they want to add users' avatars, the avatars may not need to be ray-traced. But just a object overlay in the scene.</comment>