Research: Android taking over the tablet market from iOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.phonearena.com/news/ABI-Research-Android-taking-over-the-tablet-market-from-iOS_id47802 <comment><USER2> I'm sure a lot will say now that "It was inevitable. Android is made up of multiple OEM's, yadda, yadda...".

But I seem to remember not too long ago that "iPad was the iPod of tablets" or something, and therefore will always have 80+ percent market share. I guess that didn't turn out true.

<comment><USER3> You're absolutely right. That people could hold these two ideas in their head at the same time still boggles my mind:

1) Tablets are the future of personal computers 2) The tablet market is more like the media player market than the phone market.

This was absolutely a popular belief just a couple of years ago, although the people who said this have become quite silent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The tablet market is not like the phone market. In many ways, it will be easier for Android to gain market share, since the channel isn't controlled by carriers in some markets. Any OEM can enter this business, and many many will.

Tablets are the post PC device, and the skip-the-PC device.

Tablets will be the inexpensive personal internet access device for Asian markets that now rely on internet cafes. Apple will take only the luxury market here, but will make plenty of money at that.

Tablets will displace PCs from the desks and especially the non-desk-bound workers in enterprises who can't justify the support costs of a PC. Apple will be a stronger contender here because of their long head start, but Android has some technical advantages as well as cost and choice of OEMs.

One thing that's missing is software that takes advantage of tablet power and screen real estate. My prediction is that this will happen first in enterprise software where budgets will support more ambitious software development, and that it's possible it will happen on Android first because it's easier to make a suite of cooperating apps for Android.

<comment><USER5> > Tablets are the post PC device, and the skip-the-PC device.

It really depends what people mean by "post".

If it's post as in "will replace", then it's nonsense: laptops and desktops are going to be around for a very long time.

If it's "will complement the laptop/desktop market", then I completely agree.

<comment><USER6> Nah, the only people who actually need a laptop/desktop instead of a tablet+bluetoothKeyboard are people who need a lot more power than tablets can provide today. So that's digital artists, developers with their VMware/VirtualBox/etc and servers. I look to my non-techie dad(though he use to do those punch-card stuff) as an example; got him an iPad and the _only_ thing he misses from his previous laptops is the keyboard.

I'm very interested in what other people think about this. Does the general public need anything more than a high-end tablet + bluetooth keyboard? Or maybe, just because some people enjoy a big screen, a tablet with a docking- station providing the keyboard, mouse and big screen?(which is basically a PC, I guess). Some of my coworkers predict a day where smartphones are so powerful, that you'll just put them in a docking-station at work and it'll be just as powerful as a high-end notebook today.

Today's consumer laptops/desktop are like Adobe Flash. They're both dead and the tech to replace them exists, we just haven't completely agreed on how to go about it - but they are both definitely dead.

<comment><USER7> > the only people who actually need a laptop/desktop instead of a > tablet+bluetoothKeyboard are people who need a lot more power than tablets > can provide today

So anyone developing mobile apps then ;)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, exac- ..wait, [http://i.imgur.com/j74SykU.gif](http://i.imgur.com/j74SykU.gif)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I own an Asus TS300 tablet, and one thing comes to my mind, Android is mediocre, I've tried the iPad and the Surface and their quality is 10 times better, so I presume this numbers are due the cheap $59 tablets that have become popular, but just for the price.

<comment><USER9> The article claims the average selling price of non-iPad tablets (which must be 99% Android) increased by 17%, while the iPad mini pulled the iPad ASP down by the same amount, so your theory is at odds with the facts.

<comment><USER10> You have to know the real numbers to make that determination. Increased 17% from 100 is 117. iPad decreasing from 550 to 450 (pulled out of my ...) would mean the parent is still right.

<comment><USER9> That's not how averages work. More $59 tablets will only increase the ASP if it's below $59.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Relevant:

> I'm not trying to cherry-pick data. I'm simply observing, based on Apple's > sales data and Google's activation data, that the tablet market doesn't > today look anything like the smartphone market ever did. The iPad didn't > enter the tablet market. It created the tablet market. The iPad's role in > the tablet market much more closely resembles the iPod's role in the digital > music player market a decade ago than it does the iPhone's role in the 2008 > phone market.

> > [http://daringfireball.net/2011/07/ipad_dominance](http://daringfireball.net/2011/07/ipad_dominance)

> There's an iPad market, and the iPad could be classified as a tablet, from a > hardware-centric viewpoint. But the market for non-iPad tablets is about as > big today as it was before the iPad, which isn't nothing, but it's close > enough to nothing that Apple doesn't need to worry about it.

> [http://www.marco.org/2010/12/31/there-really-isnt-much- > of-a-...](http://www.marco.org/2010/12/31/there-really-isnt-much-of-a- > tablet-market)

<comment><USER11> Also relevant: the dates of those posts.

<comment><USER3> Those posts were making statements about the future, and both were unequivocally wrong.

<comment><USER12> that the tablet market doesn't _______today_ __ __* look anything like the smartphone market ever did.

That was correct back then. Also the smartphone market is defined by several competing platforms, form-factors, tech and capabilities.

The tablet market is defined by the iPad, and the android trying to be the iPad.

<comment><USER9> That claim was only correct in the US, and while Gruber thinks the US system has unfairly aided Android, it's fairly clear the opposite is true.

<comment><USER12> Back them truckloads of tablets worldwide was shipped. But all of them were market failures. Only iPad have traction + mindshare.

BTW: "it's fairly clear the opposite is true." The opposite of what?

<comment><USER9> No, they were market failures in the US, they've been doing well in Asia especially (as have big Android phones), see my link elsewhere in this thread. This is not particularly unusual, e.g. Xbox vs Playstation sales mix varies by region. And South Korea, Japan and China are now important markets for Android games companies.

The "opposite is true" means that it's fairly clear now that the US subsidization model hides the cost differences between phones, and puts an effective floor on prices for handsets, which favors iPhones because they are designed around the American price system.

This effect is much less strong or non-existant elsewhere on the planet and Android benefits from the ability to compete fairly on price. Android tablets have followed the same pattern that Android phones followed in these less distorted markets, though slightly faster since Android phones have already created a beachhead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How do I square these numbers with the fact that I've only seen two Android tablets in the field?

<comment><USER14> I've seen a lot more than that here in Toronto as I'm on transit—but far more often I see either eInk readers (Kobo, Kindle, rarely Sony) or iPads (mini or full-size). In the last few weeks, I think I've actually seen more Playbooks than Android tablets, but that's unusual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Minor point, but from a business perspective, this isn't helping hardware vendors. They are selling a nearly zero margin product. Apple's taking the profits, everyone else is fighting for the leftovers, the unprofitable part of the market.

This is to be expected from the flood of $100 Android tablets, but to be honest this isn't hurting Apple, this is hurting Microsoft.

Apple has their very profitable segment of the market, Android is taking the low end, and there just isn't much of a place for Windows tablets.

<comment><USER16> It may not be from a business perspective. But in terms of whether the market is working its wonders, I'd say it is perfect. Consumers benefit because there is a lot of fierce competition.

Exactly the way it should be for a hardware product like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wait, wait. So in a quarter where the newest iPad is 6 months old, there were less iPads sold than every Android tablet manufacturer in the world combined?

APPLE IS DOOMED

<comment><USER18> Apple is far from doomed. But those who were saying that Apple would dominate the tablet market forever were wrong. PS please don't answer "but look at the profits". They will come down too, as it's only right in a competitive market.

<comment><USER19> I don't think anyone of note has said Apple will dominate the tablet market forever.

<comment><USER20> "The iPad didn't enter the tablet market. It created the tablet market. The iPad's role in the tablet market much more closely resembles the iPod's role in the digital music player market a decade ago than it does the iPhone's role in the 2008 phone market." [http://daringfireball.net/2011/07/ipad_dominance](http://daringfireball.net/2011/07/ipad_dominance)

It was a popular meme among Apple fanboys a couple of years ago....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Stories like this are interesting me because while sales numbers show Android doing well, usage numbers from all over the internet seem to indicate that not many people are actually using their Android tablets, at least not in the numbers people are using iPads.

And then you read the last paragraph and wonder why you just wasted your time with this linkbait article.

> _And while Android appears to be making headway against Apple and the iPad, > the truth is that Apple remains the top selling tablet brand by a huge > margin. While Apple sold the aforementioned 14.5 million tablets from April > through June, Samsung was the closest competitor to the Cupertino based > manufacturer with 8.1 million tablets sold. in the period._

<comment><USER9> > usage numbers from all over the internet seem to indicate that not many > people are actually using their Android tablets

That's not true. US usage figures don't match up with _global_ sales and people forget there's a big non-US world out there:

[http://www.tech-thoughts.net/2013/08/reality-android- tablet-...](http://www.tech-thoughts.net/2013/08/reality-android-tablet-usage- browsing-share-region.html)

Also note that usage is a trailing indicator of sales since previously sold devices are still in use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This makes the front page whereas google being tried for wiretapping does not. No pro google bias here. Move along.

<comment><USER13> It's an obvious bum wrap...</comment></comment>


WSJ: Mojang Could Be Worth $1 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323807004578282142065371984.html

<comment><USER3> I love Minecraft, it is genius, original and tons of fun, but you need at least two points to draw a line, one hit does not a trend make.

The game world is littered with 'one hit wonders' but it is very hard to repeat that success, doubly so on the scale of Minecraft.

For those that say Mojang is somehow unique, that Notch is the messiah of indy gaming, all I can say is survivor bias. The game industry is chock full of brilliant, passionate peeps who build really original games that just fail to spark the imagination of a large audience for one reason or another.

Hope the best for Mojang and co, love their work on Minecraft and hope they can follow it up with something just as unique, but this article is making some big leaps.

<comment><USER4> I've been working on video games for 20 years and from my perspective Minecraft is not a one hit wonder, it's the coming of age of a genre. It reminds me of when I first saw Doom running. It was graphically beautiful for the day and a real technical accomplishment. Although it was by no means the first FPS, it was a huge hit and drove a lot of other companies to go into the genre. That industry has peaked today with Call of Duty being a $1b franchise.

With Minecraft, Notch took some really good games and put them together in a way that had much more Universal appeal. I wouldn't be surprised if the genre expands and matures and takes 15 years to play out. I think it's likely Mojang will lead that process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Surely this depends on if they can continue to produce smash hits like minecraft.

While I love the idea of 0x10c I don't know if it will replicate the success.

It's something I find it hard to explain to people who don't understand things like programming and emulators. It could just be too hard to have the sort of mass appeal that minecraft did.

<comment><USER6> Surely the same thing could have been said about Minecraft, having little to no mass appeal, before it became a huge hit, no?

<comment><USER7> Lightning never strikes the same place twice, etc

<comment><USER8> I never got that analogy. Lightning will strike the same place over and over again[1], because that place has the least resistance for charge to flow between the clouds and the ground.

[1] <http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/wea00/wea00354.htm>

<comment><USER9> After lightning strikes it probably doesnt :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _It takes 3,000 employees for Zynga Inc., ZNGA -0.38% the largest social- network game company in the world, to generate at least $150 million in annual operating profit.

From an office in Stockholm, a largely unknown company brought in more than half that sum. Its employee count: 29._

Ugh, this type of statement does a massive desservice to the programming service provider industry.

<comment><USER11> And it ignores the thousands of people writing mods for minecraft.

<comment><USER12> With something close to absolutely no support from Mojang, even though they've appropriated some of the community's features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just finished talking with a colleague whose six year old loves minecraft and I remember talking with a twelve year old who was similarly obsessed - <USER2> the point of knowing the patch numbers and all the details. The community which grew organically around this game is incredible, and that kind of peer- to-peer promotion is priceless.

<comment><USER14> and if you don't want to play it there are many people who stream their playing of this game.

I have used twitch.tv for perusing games I am interested in as well as screening games for my niece and nephew, usually I send a link to my sister and ask if the game is acceptable and would her kids enjoy that.

<comment><USER13> That was another thing he mentioned - his kid watches all the minecraft youtube videos too. I'm sure if you get bored of doing your own thing you can take a look at what other people are making and come away with a whole new perspective on how to play the game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For the people who criticize Minecraft as an underwhelming gaming experience, you need to look at the game from a different perspective...

For a young child, this game has a tremendous lure... it's very simple to visually take in. All of the objects you build with bricks are abstract representations of real life things. For a child, visualizing a castle in minecraft is much easier to process than showing them one in a Lord of the Rings movie.

The other thing is that there's really no rules. You can pretty much do whatever you want... build stuff, explore, play the actual campaign, fight bad guys, etc. This is the exact opposite of the 'cinematic' experience most other games try to create. Kids will bec creating their own storyline in their minds.

Minecraft is the ultimate game of imagination and kids will eat it up like candy. This is why it's made so much money and has become a cultural phenomenon.

<comment><USER16> Is it really a child's game? I got the impression it had pretty broad appeal especially as it's programmable.

<comment><USER15> It definitely has tremendous broad appeal, but I think the characteristics I mentioned above is what puts it into this category of it's own. Notch has done an amazing design job of baking in advanced gameplay without affecting any of the accessibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm surprised to see an article that requires a paid subscription on the front page of HN.

</comment><comment><USER18> Minecraft isn't WoW (that's a good thing). WoW is pretty much aggressively targeted to make large amounts of money, which is why they're valued so high. Mojang seem to want to make things that are cool and fun, more than they want to set up large subscription bases, add on packs and so on. Could Mojang become a billion dollar company? Sure, maybe. Anything can happen. Is it a good comparison between them and Blizzard? I'd say no, they seem to have distinctly different goals.

You know what's cool, being a company that is happy making things rather than being a billion dollar company and dealing with the headaches of stock price related soothsaying.

</comment><comment><USER19> For those having trouble getting past the paywall: [http://wsjwap.mo2do.net/s/4150/388?articleId=SB1000142412788...](http://wsjwap.mo2do.net/s/4150/388?articleId=SB10001424127887323807004578282142065371984&fullStory=fullStory)

</comment><comment><USER20> This link works: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732380700457828...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323807004578282142065371984.html)

<comment><USER21> not for me :(

EDIT: Googling the title got one that works (for me).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Sales occur digitally rather than through brick-and-mortar stores ...

This isn't true. I bought the Minecraft (activation card) for my son through Walmart.

</comment><comment><USER23> Please don't submit articles behind pay walls.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think one real lesson here is that super-shiny high end graphics are not what counts. The gameplay is by far the most important ingredient in any game's success.

More than ten years ago back when I playing Counter-Strike (CS still being immensively succesful btw) I was using a "low poly" mod: this would replace the models of the players with models made of fewer polygons (the head became a cube, etc.) because it would give me a faster framerate.

And the shitty graphics didn't matter: the important thing was the gameplay.

If you can have both great gameplay, great graphics and great perfs, go for it.

But if you have to choose and want to get succesful: cut down the graphics budget. That's not what's going to make your game succesful.

</comment><comment><USER25> It just goes to show that social proof is extremely powerful. 1. Create a really crap game that's not really a game. 2\. Create a site with a bullshit stats page showing how many geeks are supposedly buying it and how fast. 3\. Spam about it on geeky sites. 4\. Watch all the geeks throw money at you as they try to prove that they are geeky enough by buying a sandbox game that they "totally get." Mojang, I salute you.

<comment><USER26> Wow, you could not have misread Mojang any worse. You must be intentionally obtuse here -- I refuse to believe that you're this ignorant.

You feel like some washed up older guy pissed off that his idea didn't make it, content to sit and pooh-pooh anything else that comes by. "My idea was so great, but no, stupid little blocks is what idiots around the world want" is the vibe I get from you.

"Crappy game" "bullshit stats" "spam it"

You're jealous and content to sit there and throw your sour grapes at anyone who dares actually like Minecraft.

Honestly, you're an insult to the spirit of this site and the people who come here. To shit all over a start up that is wildly successful for no other reason than you dislike it -- Shame on you.

<comment><USER27> He can be wrong without being a personal failure driven by spite. Your comment is not so nice.</comment></comment></comment>


Super-nice people may be more likely to betray you - <AUTHOR> http://mentalfloss.com/article/73406/super-nice-people-may-be-more-likely-betray-you <comment><USER2> Or is it a case of Super Nice untrustworthy people more likely to catch you out as you won't be expecting it?

the article seems to suggest that the title needs changing to someone suddenly changing to being super nice should be taken as a warning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, I don't agree to such binary classifications either. Still, an interesting/important thing to keep in mind.

(The comments on the article page are interesting.)</comment></comment>


Oldschool planar graphics and why they were a good idea - <AUTHOR> https://codeplusplus.blogspot.com/2019/02/oldschool-planar-graphics-and-why-they.html <comment><USER2> Another trick I believe you can do with planar graphics is overlays.

Suppose you have 6 bits per pixel. One thing you could do is have 64 colors. Another thing you could do is use 3 bits for one color palette, giving you 8 colors, but designate one of those colors as a transparency value. If the 3 bits match the transparency color, then refer to the other 3 bits.

This allows you to do stuff like redraw or scroll a lower or upper layer without changing the bits for the other layer. It takes less processing power and memory bandwidth to update 3 bits than it does to update all 6.

Oh also, even if the hardware doesn't have an overlay mode, you can make this happen by filling up your 64-entry color palette carefully.

For example, if you want 000 to be the 3-bit value indicating transparency, and you want 001 to be pink, you copy the RGB for pink into the palette at every index that begins with 001. So you set pink in 8 color palette entries (001000, 001001, 001010, 001011, 001100, 001101, 001110, and 001111). For the 8 colors that make up the other level of your overlay, you just set them once in the 8 positions that start with your transparency color.

<comment><USER3> Even without overlays, being able to reuse the same bitmap with multiple stretches of the palette (by combining it with a solid colour as palette offset) was nice. It got you a bit more variety in the scene when memory was tight, and memory was always tight.

Back in my greenhorn days on the Amiga, I remember feeling very pleased with myself for "inventing" (hah!) a cheesy semi-dynamic lighting system using a 1-bit stippled gradient plane to effectively switch the main bitmap between "bright" and "dark" sub-palettes, at no performance cost.

I'm sure this wasn't original, of course, but back before the Web most hobbyists were trapped in their own little silos reinventing the wheel over and over again. It was fun. Then Quake came out with its -ahem- rather better lightmapping and... yeah, couldn't really kid yourself any more.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I did the same on my Atari, fun times :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Planar graphics was also a thing because of the slow RAM bandwidth of the day. RAM was fast enough to allow the video hardware to stream a 1bpp image at the rate needed by the electron beam of a typical CRT -- but higher rates like 4 or 8bpp were troublesome and 24bpp was out of the question. However, by arranging the data in planar format, you could pull the bits for a single pixel from more than one RAM chip at a time, and through such parallelism achieve the much higher throughput it took to display high-color images. Innovations in the late 80s/early 90s, like high-speed VRAM, made true-color "chunky" graphics practical.

Of course this also made the Amiga's HAM mode even more impressive, as they managed to squeeze out 4096-color (effective 12bpp) imagery out of the slow RAM of the day by allowing each successive pixel to be encoded in six bits by modifying only one component of the previous pixel (the famous Hold and Modify technique).

The major downside was that you had to do some computational contortions to build an on-screen image out of computed pixel data, but of course if you were lucky enough to have a hardware blitter (pc suxx0rz!), planar graphics was no impediment to drawing lines or compositing images at arbitrary positions quickly.

<comment><USER6> Yep, this is consistent with my understanding, I'd never heard the rationale put forth in the linked post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> They werent, and pretty much signed Amigas death warrant. Planar is a cute trick when you are moving around static, limited in color shapes on the screen(less colors less writes), but fails miserably at single pixel addressing. All of a sudden updating one pixel costs you 5(ocs), 6(ecs) or 8(aga) individual writes! thus no Wolfenstein3d/Doom on Amiga. Commodore finally tackled this problem 7 months before going bankrupt, just in time as it ran out of money to actually manufacture new product, while still paying its CEO better than IBM.

>Imagine a 320x200 screen with 32 colors. If we had padded each pixel out, it would require 64,000 bytes.

>but you cannot really cut up an array of bytes into 5-bit chunks easily. You could pad it

Sure you can! Nothing forces you to put full 8 bits of actual memory inside video address space. You could transparently translate memory accesses between 5/6 bit and 8 bit in the background, mapping 40-48KB real ram area into 64KB byte addressable window. You could even transparently translate between planar and "chunky" (Akiko). Those were never technical problems, but a result of a lack of affluent leadership. Projects at Commodore were mainly driven by accountants (lets get rid of all the outdated garbage in the storage = C128) and ignorant non technical execs.

<comment><USER8> Like many optimizations it's hardware dependent.

As you gain more bandwidth, memory, and computing power you want different tradeoffs. Look at the history of DirectX for example and you see a huge range of different approaches show up and then get discarded.

Trying to keep up with this curve takes a lot of resources for R&D which is why so much consolidation happened.

<comment><USER7> "mapping 40-48KB real ram area into 64KB byte addressable window" is couple hundred transistors to implement. VGA came out in 1987.

<comment><USER8> That's not really the issue. With a 16 color pallet and planor graphics you can update one byte to change 8 pixels from one pallet to another. This also means you can really cheaply compress images if you only need say 8 colors.

These trick becomes far less useful if you have cycles to spare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Apple II's somewhat exotic "hires" mode didn't even HAVE an indexed palette. Instead you just wrote 1s and 0s for pixels directly to the display memory, and their _arrangement on the screen_ determined their color. This all owing to the fact that the Apple II only had color at all due to some crazy phase-based hacking of the NTSC color standard.

EDIT: Oops I partially messed up this description. The MSB in each byte of the display memory did set the "palette" (phase, actually, according to Wikpedia) for each set of 6 pixels. So you could either have blue/orange or green/purple in that set with the exact color depending on whether or not you had one alternating pattern of bits or another.

<comment><USER10> You have any links for this? It sounds both terrifying and clever as hell.

Similar to the Amiga's HAM mode[1], where you could get 4,096 simultaneous colors, but the restriction was that the succeeding pixel could only differ from the preceding in just one of the R, G, or B values.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And- Modify](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify)

<comment><USER11> "terrifying and clever" describes a lot of the Woz's work...

So I am a little fuzzy on the NTSC standard, because it has been a while since I looked at it... but the hack goes something like this:

Monochrome TV puts video on an upper vestigial sideband with the carrier at (IIRC) 1.25 MHz up from the lower edge of the 6 MHz channel. (The high frequency parts of the lower sideband of the video signal are whacked off with a filter.) The FM sound subcarrier is up closer to the top edge, I forget what the offset is exactly.

Then color came along... so they added a color subcarrier just below the sound subcarrier. This reduced the bandwidth available for luminance, but got you color in return. The color subcarrier IIRC is kind of a flavor of independent sideband, but is really two double sideband signals on the same carrier, 90 degrees out of phase with each other, one skinny, and the other fat but with a notch filter applied to allow the skinny signal to ride in the middle. Or something like that.

Anyway... if you send a monochrome signal with high-frequency components (high frequency == high dot rate) that fall in the range of the color sub-carrier, you will get color artifacts. This is because the color decoder simply responds to the rf it is getting, whether on a proper subcarrier or not.

Another thing I used to know but am fuzzy about is I am pretty sure you need to put out the standard color burst on the back porch of the horizontal sync. Otherwise, the TV receiver will not sync to the "color subcarrier" that you are faking with artifacts.

<comment><USER12> You are correct. Something like a colorburst must be there. Turns out you can abuse that very considerably. And still get stable, useful displays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I once worked on a project that ran 4 monitors off one Amiga.

Using a graphics card to do a byte per pixel main display (polygon + scaled sprite 3d), and three monochrome displays taken from the red green and blue output of the Amiga's standard video out. Each of the monochrome displays used a single bitplane plus shared a random static bitplane. By adjusting the palette you could individually control which monitor the image appeared on, how bright it was and how much static interference to display. Various other failure modes were also added via copper tricks (roll, glitching etc.) without modifying the base bitmap.

</comment><comment><USER14> This arrangement is highly questionable, but it does have one advantage, touched on in the last paragraph: you can write a 1bpp drawing routine that does whatever you need, and it can deal with any number of planes. Like, if you've got 4 planes, and you need to draw a line in colour 7, you just use your 1bpp line drawing routine to draw a 1 in planes 0, 1 and 2, and a 0 in plane 3.

</comment><comment><USER15> I remember working with the Amstrad PCW, which had an interesting layout for the video memory. The pixels in the 90x32 character monochrome display were stored in character order. The 1st 8 bytes were the leftmost character, the next 8 were the character to the right, and so on. This wasn't the only complexity as there was a lookup table to give the memory location of each of the 32 screen lines. The advantage of this table was very quick character scrolling, at the expense of computing the location of individual pixels. It was rather tricky to write quick Z80 code to draw line with this quirky setup, but some people managed some rather nice vector games, such as Starglider.

<comment><USER16> The BBC Micro had a similar arrangement in some of its screen modes.

<comment><USER17> I think both machines must use a Motorola 6845 CRT controller, which is intended for character-based screens. It does not scan the video RAM sequentially, but in the way described by the GP, (all first char rows, then all second char rows, etc, with each chars rows stored sequentially in RAM)

<comment><USER17> I spent some time looking into this and found I was wrong - CRTC does generate linear addresses but the beeb (and possibly the CPC) translates them to the character-based screen format in hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Bit planes are pretty easy to implement in hardware. One of the nice things is that the bit calculation is the same for each plane so you feed that value, bit offset, and plane start address into a barrel shifter and out pops the bit you want. those you gang together into a register and poof you can read them all at once. The ARM Cortex-M bit mapping memory region does this computation.

It also means you can build things like pixel copy of arbitrary width pixels with a single bit copy engine running 'n' times.

With memory and transistors getting cheap though, all of that became unnecessary it seems.

</comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone know why VGA "hacks" 320x240x256 and 320x400x256 modes operated planar instead of paged like 320x200x256?

It makes sense for less than 8-bit per pixel colour modes, but now for 256 colours.

Pondering this question after 20 years.

<comment><USER20> I think it had something to do with the 64K segment limit in real mode x86...?

<comment><USER7> If anything it would be ISA VGA being visible thru a 64KB aperture at A0000, and even that wasnt it. Why would you specifically program VGA into planar instead of nice "chunky" pages? It was an artifact of the way VGA CRTC worked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > but you cannot really cut up an array of bytes into 5-bit chunks easily

But you can do RGB 565, which is exactly what mobile GPUs do (or used to do, back when memory cost and bandwidth were more limited).

<comment><USER22> Two bytes per pixel for, say, a single 640x256 pixel screen would already use more RAM than available on a 256k Amiga 1000.

RAM size only ha to double a few times for this to become an entirely outdated concern, but that's what they had to work with at the time they designed the chipset. Still no excuse for AGA!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is like Array of Structures vs Structure of Arrays[1].

As mentioned, with a SoA approach it's much easier to replace a subset of the entire data. If you have control over the array pointers you could simply swap pointers, leading to an essentially free update.

Downside is that it's a lot more work (and usually less cache friendly) if you need to update all the data.

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

<comment><USER2> I guess column-oriented databases are also conceptually similar, though structure of arrays is certainly a closer analog.

Back in the days of planar graphics, usually cache didn't matter because there wasn't one. The difference between CPU and memory speeds was not so lopsided as it is today. Or you could say, memory was fast enough because CPUs were very slow.

<comment><USER24> > I guess column-oriented databases are also conceptually similar, though > structure of arrays is certainly a closer analog.

Isn't a column oriented database pretty much just an SoA on disk. And a row oriented database is pretty an AoS on disk. modulo some complexity around indexes?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How times change. Back in the day OpenGL had a paletted texture extension (EXT_paletted_textures), but nothing supports it anymore. I guess the extra indirection doesn't work well with GPU hw architectures?

<comment><USER26> It's trivially done in shaders, there's nowhere to extend that.

<comment><USER19> Do game engines still use palettized textures to save memory?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This takes me back many years. I remember writing code to display pcx images from the pcx spec for ega and vga displays. This was pre-web so no help there. Some of the best fun I've ever had coding.

</comment><comment><USER28> I am surprised the reasons for planes being to fit in odd bit sizes. Although I suppose that is _a_ reason.

Planes are a nice abstraction, because they allow you to use the concept of a raster surface for all kinds of things. These things might be bits of colour, but they might be metadata in an image analysis program, or a masks in a graphics editing program, z-buffers for 3-d graphics, or really anything.

(Admittedly, I am talking about an abstract concept of "plane", whereas the original article is presumably talking about the concrete behaviour of hardware.)

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm glad someone finally explained this! It makes some sense, but I'm curious, was the combining of the bits of the plane to get the index to look-up done in hardware? Because it sounds like storing 3 5-bit pixels in the expected way in 2 bytes (with a bit left over) wouldn't be any harder in software than combining 5 bits from different planes. But if the hardware handled assembling the various bits, then I guess it would probably be faster. Am I understanding that correctly?

<comment><USER30> Even if it was done in software, it was still easier to write against planes because you had to run on hardware with wildly different hardware capabilities, so drawing routines were far easier to parameterize over planes than over various bit packing mechanisms.

<comment><USER7> >wildly different hardware

what do you mean? NES never changed, Amiga was always compatible with itself, nothing changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Pfft, you kids with your frame buffers. Try having to reload the display line- by-line during the blanking interval, like on an Atari 2600.

</comment><comment><USER32> I believe that this is the same techniques that were covered in the excelent series "How oldschool graphics worked"[1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfh0ytz8S0k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfh0ytz8S0k)

</comment><comment><USER33> Planar graphics are still a thing, in YUV (YCbCr) formats. The Y component is usually stored separately and UV are interleaved in a second plane.

</comment><comment><USER34> Interesting. First time no graphic no code just English clearly explain graphic code.

Together with two posts below about ram speed and >64k, seems quite clear. Thx.

</comment><comment><USER35> We stopped where we are at because the eye cannot see more colors. The same goes for 4K displays. More resolution doesn't make sense. 4K pixels is more pixels than there are cones in your eyes.

<comment><USER36> Go look at any CIE chart. The human eye is far more sensitive than the standard sRGB colorspace. For that matter, it's _impossible_ to represent the full perceptible colorspace with just three colors. And even if you use a wide gamut, 8 bits per channel is not enough to prevent banding. Particularly over the full brightness range the eye can perceive, which is considerable. That's why "HDR" screens are at least 10 bit nowadays. We didn't stop at all.

As for 4k displays - most of those cones are in the center of your FOV, and eye movement is part of human vision (saccades). That's why 4k VR headsets still look pixelated. Also, you don't just sit in front of your screen staring straight ahead like a zombie (at least, I don't). You move your head. You lean in. By your logic, the edges of a screen shouldn't even be in _color_!

It's like saying a keyboard with more than 10 keys doesn't make sense because we only have 10 fingers.</comment></comment>


Google Service Drops Support for Opera - <AUTHOR> http://planetbotch.blogspot.no/2012/06/google-service-drops-support-for-opera.html <comment><USER2> This whole "supporting browsers" thing should be gone, and very soon. There are specifications that browser makers should follow, and if they are all supporting those specifications, then they well be well-supported.

The only differentiator between page rendering among browsers should really be speed.

(I believe Opera is actually one of the browsers that adheres most closely to the specs.)

<comment><USER3> LOL

Opera _is_ the browser that adheres to the specifications most closely, and yet it is the least usable. Why? Because web developers don't test with it. Specs are irrelevant. Testing is relevant, and testing is caused by marketshare.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, Google's reverse image search is unusable with Opera... unless you change the user agent string and tell Google you're using Firefox.

Then they whine about how Facebook and Apple are trying to destroy the open web.

<comment><USER5> Quick tip: On images.google.com, go to 'Quick preferences' (either F12 or right click on the page), hit 'Edit site preference', then set the user agent under the 'Network' tab.

I'm tempted to do this for all google related services, because they are such browser prudes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Worry given of all the browsers Opera has been the most standards compliant. No reason why Google can't support it as by supporting other browsers they supoprt Opera and with that if you change the browser ID then it just works - funny that.

I Have noticed that Facebook have been bashing google indirectly and directly and maybe Opera are deemed part of Facebook now for some reason and got dragged into this.

I have also noticed the google search landing page having below in effect adverts for there new products <https://www.google.co.uk/> gives me the line below with link to buy a chromebook "From zero to online in seconds. Introducing the new Chromebook" - same results nomatter what browser I use.

Not sure if Facebook have purchased Opera and google got wind of it and acting all evil or if it is a gross oversight. Either way something smells.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure what you mean by the last sentence, but despite rumors, Facebook has not bought Opera. I highly doubt Google would punish Opera because they _might_ be bought by Facebook.

<comment><USER8> I don't know about google but I "punished" them already when I heard they're looking to sell and the buyer might be facebook. I doubt it's just me.

Opera is not open source, they distribute only binaries. If the new buyer stuffs it with rubbish you don't want, there's nothing you can do about it other than switch. Might as well switch to chrome and learn to use chrome's developer tools when I'm not in the middle of something.

Of course, I will continue to test anything I make on Opera, it's just been dropped as my primary browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I didn't use Wave because it didn't work in Opera, and apparently I chose correctly.

My assumption is that the Blogger service is faced with cutting costs, and dropping non-mainstream browsers makes sense in that context. So, at the moment I see this as a negative indicator for Blogger, not for Opera.

Wake me when Gmail or Voice officially drops support.

</comment><comment><USER10> google is frankly starting to enrage me, they are seeming to become more and more a company with only one obvious goal - own the internet. They have made some good products ( the chrome developer tools are great ), but I'm sick of them just blowing over anyone or anything that stands in their seeming quest towards a complete monopoly ( the google books settlement is a good example ). What happen to the good ol days where google at least seemed open and supportive of the internet, its community, and innovation?

<comment><USER7> The Chrome Developer tools are almost entirely based on the open source Webkit Web Inspector.

<comment><USER11> Which was mostly developed by Google. They are the biggest contributor to open source WebKit these days, eclipsing even Apple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The reason I felt it important to pass on this news to non-Opera users is that I'm wondering if Google are going to stop at Opera? I get the sense that this could be the thin end of a wedge, and that Opera may not be the only browser which ends up getting the cold shoulder."

I doubt Google will give a cold shoulder to browsers with actual market share.

I'm glad Opera exists to keep a check on the other browser makers... I'm also glad Opera only has 1% market share so I can ignore it when I make own websites.

<comment><USER13> A user base of 300,000,000 means they can't have less than 4.2% market share, even if the whole population of the earth were online.

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure that number includes opera mini / opera mobile users. I don't know what the numbers for opera desktop are but I'm certain they're a fraction of opera's mobile offerings.

<comment><USER15> Yup. According to Statcounter data from last month, Opera accounts for about 2% of desktop page views and 21% of mobile page views worldwide.

<comment><USER16> It's still a significant number overall and has large shares in some countries. From the Wiki:

As of December 2011 Opera has a 1.3% to 2.6% worldwide usage share of web browsers.[111]

The browser has been more successful in Eastern Europe, including about 47% market share in 2009 in Georgia, 43% in Ukraine, 39% in Kazakhstan, 36% in Russia, and 8–11% in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic.[112]

In July 2011, Opera broke its previous download records when Opera 11.50 was released and was recorded to be downloaded 35 million times during the first week of release

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Go Opera! Go!

How would one buy a computer in East Europe?

You go to some PC shop (the vast majority of them were not in a chain of shops, just one guy selling PCs in one area and that's it). You barely had enough money for the machine so nobody was buying software. Anyway, the shop owner (a technical person) knew that it can't work unless he installs some OS. So Windows was installed for free. They could also install some other software for a small fee (the fee was for the work to install it and not for software), or you could buy CDs with software. When they installed software they would usually install the best there was (because anyway, nobody was paying for it so why not?). That meant best software in the category and the latest version of that software. For browsers that meant Opera.

How did you fix the PC?

You just get you technical friend to do it or the shop owner that sold you the PC. When these people would see that you still use IE they would (start to cry and) immediately install what they used: Opera.

So Opera adoption was driven by technical people installing, repairing PCs.

Why it's not so popular elsewhere?

Marketing. MS was telling you how to get on the internet in ads. Firefox was fighting a big monster in articles. I don't recall seeing either for Opera at the time.

</comment><comment><USER18> As a long time Opera user, I have always seen Google treat Opera badly. When Google+ came, I didn't realise there was the notifications bar until I logged into Chrome. It never came on Opera.

<comment><USER16> Wow that's a very good point. I heard people talking about the bar but never saw it myself because I always use Opera. Ironically, they hurt themselves a little because G+ needs all the help it can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a long time Opera user, I like to say that I am proudly part of the 1%!

<comment><USER20> I don't use opera, but I guess I'm part of the other 1% in that I don't use any google services (outside of basic search).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "They're not exactly forcing Blogger users who currently run Opera to migrate to Chrome, but they are making Opera untenable, and suggesting Chrome in its placev"

I have also had this feeling that Google is trying to monopolize the web. Hopefully this is only a misstep or my paranoia.

Chrome is very nice browser, but so is also Opera!

<comment><USER22> Is it routine for you to have `feelings` about Google, or what it's trying giZm0? We don't usually share feelings on in this forum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "they are making Opera untenable"

I disagree. Opera's desktop marketshare is making Opera untenable. Even though Google is a major corporation, I doubt they can afford to spend the time fixing issues in a browser that gets lower single digit uses. Its not economically viable. No one will argue that Opera is a better browser than IE8, but IE8's marketshare dictates it should be supported.

Google is no more forcing users to use chrome than they are forcing them to use firefox or IE

<comment><USER24> > Even though Google is a major corporation, I doubt they can afford to spend > the time fixing issues in a browser that gets lower single digit uses.

You're joking, I hope? Of course Google has the resources. It's one of the biggest companies in tech.

Not only does Google have the money to do it, but it really looks bad by not supporting Opera and telling people to use Chrome. Just to prevent that bad publicity it would be worth the money to just support Opera.

Furthermore, yes, Opera has low market share - a few percent globally. But it has very high market share in a few countries in Europe. Not supporting Opera is basically saying they don't support that country. Again, wouldn't it be worth the very small cost (in Google terms) to just support Opera?

<comment><USER25> Didn't Google give up on IE6 for some of their services when it had less than 20% market share? Opera has 1-2% market share. Granted, it should be a lot easier to tweak their code for Opera, but the difference in market share is pretty big, too.

<comment><USER26> >Granted, it should be a lot easier to tweak their code for Opera

In fact, most things would just work in Opera as they do in the other browser if there weren't any Opera-specific sniffing code in place locking Opera out.

<comment><USER27> If that's literally true then isn't this not really a problem? Opera has a user agent switcher built in, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I love Opera; it's incredibly fast (until the past few years Opera was king of the JavaScript speed) and very standards compliant. I hope this doesn't become a trend.

<comment><USER29> As long as it's standards compliant, it shouldn't be too bad of an experience.

<comment><USER30> You can support all the standards you want but it won't help you if the server sends you a gimped page because your user agent string doesn't contain "Webkit."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I started using Opera in the days when its free version was supported by adware (I actually purchased a license). It was always a technical innovator, so the question of why it failed to garner market share is a good one. The answer, of course, is that technical superiority is never a prerequisite for commercial success. Marketing trumps engineering every time.

</comment><comment><USER32> Philosophically, I'd like every web page/app/widget/etc to be browser agnostic, and deliver an A-Grade user experience; but this is getting blown out of proportion.

1\. Blogger ditching support for Opera, means the population that uses Opera to administer a Blogger blog is affected. Of all Opera users, how many administer a Blogger blog?

2\. Browsers are just applications. Doesn't mean you have to do _everything_ in one browser. Administer your Blogger blog in not-Opera; use Opera to consume your favorite web cotent.

Easy solution? Download another browser. If it upsets you that much, move your blog to another platform.

</comment><comment><USER33> Google is pushing all other browsers out of their way. How is this not evil?

<comment><USER34> Opera walks on to a site. And Google says: We dont serve _your_ kind here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> >I get the sense that this could be the thin end of a wedge

 _sigh_

Can Google do nothing without invoking the "evil slippery slope"?

</comment><comment><USER36> I see a lot of posts here make fun of opera.

Just a gentle reminder: they are the ones that invented tabs among other things.

<comment><USER10> your comment got me curious. It looks like opera was not the one "that invented tabs" after all. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(GUI)>

<comment><USER37> Browser tabs.

<comment> iso-8859-1 >in 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser.

<comment><USER37> Opera at least had MDI then, though I don't know the exact timeline of making that more convenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I really want to like opera....it tends to be a memory hog (at least for me) and it tries to do too many things. In any case, if they open sourced the software it might see more adoption.

Opera does not take a lot of dev work at all. I do like some of the dev tools (unlike firefox - excluding firebug).

I could never get opera to work properly on Google Apps. Lets be honest, it's not like google made an effort to begin with.

I just find this kind of odd. It's kinda like when Microsoft thought it was too hard to support Firefox on msn.com. Look how that turned out.

<comment><USER39> I think you are confusing Firefox with Opera:

<http://news.cnet.com/2100-1032-1008869.html>

<http://people.opera.com/howcome/2003/2/msn/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Browser war upcoming. Facebook recently added Chrome to their list of unsupported browsers ([http://www.zurb.com/article/991/facebooks-unsupported- browse...](http://www.zurb.com/article/991/facebooks-unsupported-browsers- whats-goin)) and this is obviously a counter-attack from Google. Google seem to be pretty sure that Facebook will in fact buy Opera.

</comment><comment><USER41> Opera should turn the tables and add "webkit" to their user agent string.

Don't just back down Google because they have clout.

<comment><USER42> Opera has user-agent switching built in. You can just masquerade as Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Opera owns fastmail.fm. fastmail.fm could be seen as competition to Gmail. Related?

<comment><USER44> I would think Fastmail is fairly insignificant to the Google thinking. My guess is they are most interested in the mobile presence, especially as Opera are moving further into advertising. Also they would probably like to see them generally weakened so a competitor can't use them as a entry point such as Facebook recently attempting to purchase Opera.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I do web development, I test in Opera at the very end after I have fixed all issues in IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari and guess what?

I never had to make one tweak for Opera. Ever. Opera has almost a religious focus on coding to standards. While I bet there are specific issues with implementation, whatever happened to the concept of coding to the standard and let browsers do their work?

Do Blogger features really need HTML5 WebGL 2.0 or something? I can understand some layout issues and willing to excuse them, but to not support them functionality wise is really sad, especially when you're the biggest web property on the internet. This is a throwback to the days of "Best works in IE(TM)".

To add insult to injury, I sometimes get messages like "Need a faster browser, Get Chrome" on Gmail.

<comment><USER45> > This is a throwback to the days of "Best works in IE(TM)".

Exactly, it seems that a whole new generation of web developers have forgotten history.

Is sad that when we thought we had left behind those awful times, and that we had learned the lesson, we have Google kicking us back to the dark ages of the web.

If standards are worth anything, all browsers that follow them should be supported equally.

<comment><USER46> The c't had a good opening "story" about this a couple months back. I, for one, will keep using firefox even if chrome is tempting, because I haven't forgotten what happened the last time someone got a monopoly on the browser market: The stiflement of web evolution for a decade.

And make no mistake, IE6 was revolutionary at it's time too.

Google is abusing it's monopoly on search and other things to convert people to chrome. Good, in many ways (if you visit google with an old IE, it displays a chrome ad). But now that I think about it, I'd rather have to bear IE for a year or two than give google the power over what becomes part of the web and what doesn't. Anyone remember flash?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It's been this way for a long time. Opera is such a fantastic browser, it's a shame to see giants like Google turn their backs to it for whatever reason.</comment>


Show HN: PJON 12.0 an independent, decentralized, open-source protocol - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gioblu/PJON/releases/tag/12.0 <comment><USER2> Every user of Arduino and similar devices who do not know PJON should take a look. Especially the SoftwareBitBang strategy is genious, allowing lots of devices to communicate over a single wire (plus ground) over long distances on a bus, without wasting money and space on communication shields.

I use PJON as a basis for a library I created for my home automation, and it works flawlessly ([https://github.com/fredilarsen/ModuleInterface](https://github.com/fredilarsen/ModuleInterface)).

<comment><AUTHOR> ModuleInterface is really cool, I have a couple of projects where I will for sure apply it! Compliments!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is the new frontier for the Arduino's users. Absolutely visit the website, it's really interesting and very well done. Sincere congratulations.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> More info here: www.pjon.org</comment>


Don't be evil? A survey of the tech sector's stance on lethal autonomous weapons - <AUTHOR> https://www.paxforpeace.nl/publications/all-publications/dont-be-evil <comment><USER2> It wasn't autonomous, but Dallas police killed a sniper with a robot placing c4 explosives on the back of a wall he was leaning on. [https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/12/us/dallas-police- robot-c4-exp...](https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/12/us/dallas-police- robot-c4-explosives/index.html)

<comment><USER3> Recoil on a bot is bad. Guessing they start making structural explosives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > This report investigates the role of the global tech sector in the > development of lethal autonomous weapons, or killer robots.

Geesh, I'm glad they're not using emotional language there.

<comment><USER5> I find it funny in not using emotional languages for war, but using emotional languages for crime, so you can "think about the children" (tm). Tells you a lot about power structures.</comment></comment>


An Identity Theft - <AUTHOR> https://pointer.kro-ncrv.nl/artikelen/het-verhaal-achter-een-identiteitsroof#lang=en <comment><USER2> A classic instance of site design getting in the way of storytelling.

Neither w3m nor Outline.com work on this article: no content is produced, and copy is in Dutch rather than English, despite a language URL parameter.

Print-to-PDF produces 57 pages of output, most with only a few lines of text on them.

Why do people even do this to themselves?

Is there a plain text version somewhere?</comment>


Eric S. Raymond's Patreon Campaign: I build things you use every day - <AUTHOR> https://www.patreon.com/esr <comment><USER2> ESR has always been self promoting but wow, this takes the cake. I can think of many many people who are far more deserving of patronage than Eric. Has he written a networking stack? A VM system? A file system? In terms of system stuff he's not done much that I've seen.

I'm not saying he has no value but if you viewed this as an investment in systems software I predict the ROI is going to disappoint. If you want to support him for some other reason, go for it.

He's done some stuff, one thing I still use is his rewrite of the pic manual, we share a love for that little language. And he's done lots of little Unix like tools for fairly obscure problems.

But systems programming? That's my wheelhouse and he's never been considered a part of that crowd by the systems people I know. Systems people benchmark themselves against the original unix people (if you are old enough) or Linus or Cantrill or someone similar. In my opinion, ESR is definitely not a peer of those people. Doesn't make him not useful but it's a big stretch for him to be claiming to be a systems programmer. Have to wonder what Linus would say if

</comment><comment><USER3> Eric Raymond's words helped change the world (Cathedral essay). He inspires me every time I read his work, sometimes I disagree, often agree, usually both but he never fails to get me thinking in new ways.

IMHO Eric is one of the elders and I pay tithe to this man who I respect and learn from. I value his forthrightness, especially in these times of chilling effects - he head is firmly above the parapet and of course he takes flak.

Eric's list of Open Source & Free Software contributions [http://www.catb.org/esr/software.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/software.html)

For me personally, it is an honour and a priviledge to be on the same planet at the same time as Eric S Raymond - super stoked to fund his work - his work merits it.

Eric on the Cathedral & Bazaar from the browser wars (when M$ nearly pwnd the net) [https://youtu.be/jw8K460vx1c?t=38m30s](https://youtu.be/jw8K460vx1c?t=38m30s)

</comment><comment><USER4> > Every time you use a Web browser, locate yourself on Google Maps, draw money > from an ATM, or play on a game console, you rely on computer code I wrote > and gave away.

I am puzzled. What does he refer to? [http://thyrsus.com/gitweb/](http://thyrsus.com/gitweb/) there's nothing here that resembles a network stack, the Wikipedia page doesn't mention anything. [https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/CREDITS](https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/CREDITS) mentions him as the ncurses co-maintainer and terminfo master file maintainer. What am I ignorant of here?

<comment><USER5> Eric's ego is apparently way ahead of his actual self-promotion skills. If he's so important to everything, why hasn't he been on staff at red hat or the linux foundation or google or some such for the last, oh, 15+ years?

Also, _most_ of the functionality behind all of the services he names is implemented by people doing regular jobs at technology companies.

<comment><USER6>
        "The Internet was built by people like me." - Eric S. Raymond

I guess that's kind of like if Tim Berners-Lee said:

        "I built the internet."

Maybe this author can fit some Eric S. Raymond's content into his blog post:

[http://james-iry.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/brief-incomplete- an...](http://james-iry.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly- wrong.html)

If Eric S. Raymond doesn't spend wastefully, he should still have tens of millions:

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/eric-raymond-how-ill-spend- my-m...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/eric-raymond-how-ill-spend-my-millions/)

He's a great software engineer, but I didn't like the tone of this campaign for monthly donations either.

<comment><USER7> I was going to ask what happened to his VA Linux money, but then again, it was stock valuation. How much did he cash out before the 2000 bust?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "NTPsec - improving Internet time service Published Aug 20, 2015

[http://www.ntpsec.org/](http://www.ntpsec.org/)

Today it can be revealed that I am one of the principal developers of NTPsec, which has been quietly ramping up over the last eight months and aims to field an improved and (especially!) more secure Internet time service.

Welcome to the NTP Security Project. Our goal is to create a safe, reliable NTP server that is community based and decentralised with multiple contributors and maintainers."

\-- looks like Eric has this particular work in mind.</comment>


iTerm2 Shell Integration - <AUTHOR> https://iterm2.com/shell_integration.html <comment><USER2> I'm here to answer questions anyone has about this. It's a newish feature so feedback is welcome, and bug reports are greatly appreciated.

Also, credit goes to FinalTerm for the inspiration. RIP.

<comment><USER3> I'm using a german keyboard and the shortcut cmd-; is inaccessible because ';' is shift-,

I couldn't find a way to customise the shortcut in options. Sorry if I was too stupid to find it.

Great work otherwise.

<comment><USER4> Same here in Norway (and the entire Scandinavia).

<comment><USER5> Lots of stuff seems broken by default if you are on an exotic layout. I am on a Macbook with a Danish-layout, and ALT+ARROW_LEFT/ARROW_RIGHT doesn't work out of the box in iterm2, however it seems to work if you rebind, or type this into .inputrc:

      "\e\e[D": backward-word
      "\e\e[C": forward-word

I'd love to switch to an american keyboard, because lots of Unix things seems impossible to type with my current keyboard, but maybe I am just being stupid.

<comment> pi-rat I switched from a Norwegian keyboard to a UK keyboard with intl. English map on my MacBook. Default keyboard shortcuts suddenly made so much more sense - and I can code without having to use my nose when I run out of fingers for modifier keys. ()[]{}\|/:;' are all available using at most a single modifier (many of them without). Scandinavian characters are available using a single modifier for when I don't code, ex alt-a for å. Definitive productivity boost for me.

<comment><USER6> On the one hand, I appreciate that English is as pervasive as it is in software engineering, being an American... on the flip side, it's a bit disappointing how little effort is often made to make sites and applications less friendly to foreign inputs and layouts (including inputting names).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats, team! iTerm2 (esp in fullscreen mode) is THE reason I could never go back to windows development.

<comment><USER8> +1

I used to use cygwin on windows with screen, it kinda works, just everything is so slow. Every time I create a new screen window I had to peek HN for latest posts. LoL

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks great! I love iterm2 and have used it every day for years. My biggest problem is the configuration -- I just _wish_ it had a plain text configuration file that I could keep under version control. I've experimented with using PListBuddy and a git diff driver to keep the plist under version control but it seems unwieldy and I haven't found that approach useful yet.

Also I don't really understand the difference between the main configuration interface (cmd-,) and the "Edit Session..." interface (right click on iterm2 menu). Possibly related, I have a custom command configured in Advanced -> Semantic History but it keeps reverting back to no command and I just don't understand why.

I would love not to have to use a graphical interface to configure it, I would like a plain text file instead. I think I'm being dumb and a couple hours consideration would lead me to understand any issues I'm having but the fact remains that after years of use its configuration is something I find really painful.

</comment><comment><USER10> The popup on command completion is a neat feature actually which I've appreciated in gnome-terminal on Fedora 22, nicely integrated into the notification system

</comment><comment><USER11> Funny how we just finished a discussion about "why haven't you switched to Fish yet," and now this comes along with not-fully-baked Fish support. :)

<comment><USER2> Update: I just tested it and fish 2.2 works great out of the box.

I haven't had a chance to test it yet, but I believe fish 2.2 will allow the baking to finish. Fish cleverly parses the prompt to figure out how long it is (vs bash which requires you to wrap nonprinting sequences in \\[ and \\]). Unfortunately fish's support for OSC codes was incomplete. This was a problem because shell integration uses them to report the current directory, hostname, prompt location, etc., so fish would wrap at the wrong location. I submitted a patch a while back, but I can't very well ask people to run a hacked version of their shell. So until a few days ago it was half baked. Now it's like 90% baked :)

<comment><USER11> Cool, thanks for the update :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I use iTerm2 a lot in the "visor" (pop up from the top) mode. I have my iTerm2 plist file edited so that it displays no bar icon and pops up even over the full screen apps. It would be really nice to have a feature where instead of a popup alert, the visor window would just slide out, to let me know that it's done.

But all in all, sounds like an awesome set of features, will have to try tonight. Thanks!

PS: On an unrelated note, if later on you could add native support for pop out window to appear in full screen apps, and maybe do a check, so that if you are in full screen app mode, it pops over with 0 y offset, but if it's in a norma screen, it pops up with offset to accommodate the menu bar, that would be awesome. But no rush :), thanks for all the awesome work!

</comment><comment><USER13> Click to download or drop in to upload is really nice! I'm excited for this!

BTW if you're using iTerm, be aware that ⌘+clicking on a link will open the link in browser or ⌘+clicking a file in `ls` result will open the file with default app.

<comment><USER14> Even better, cmd clicking on a _. /path/file:line_ string will open in your editor at that line. Perfect for backtraces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really like this, but am wondering if something like ZModem over SSH would make the file transfer stuff more convenient...I feel like some things have become more complicated since the BBS days.

<comment><USER2> You can do that too, but the download.sh script is much more straightforward: [https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/blob/master/tests/downloa...](https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/blob/master/tests/download.sh)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd love to use a terminal with similar features on linux

<comment><USER17> Terminator comes close, but to be honest, iTerm2 still beats it with its user friendliness and features.

It's really interesting how OS X is the one that has a terminal emulator with the most features out there.

iTerm2 now comes with 24-bit colors, command completion popup, notifications, triggers, profiles, mouseless copy, split panes, search, and you can even have inline images/gifs all out of the box with zero or minimal configuration required. That's just awesome.

All of these features and iTerm2 still feels much faster than Terminator to me.

<comment><USER18> > It's really interesting how OS X is the one that has a terminal emulator > with the most features out there.

In my experience, the vast majority of web developers use OS X. Those of us doing server side and devops work spend a lot of time in the terminal

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The script downloaded over HTTPS then downloads further scripts over HTTP. Watch out.

<comment><USER2> Fixed, good catch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does it work with mosh ([https://mosh.mit.edu/](https://mosh.mit.edu/))? Thanks.

<comment><USER2> Looks like mosh swallows OSC codes it doesn't know what to do with. I'll let them know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does this update speed up things as well by any chance?

I like iTerm2 a lot, but one day when i coincidentally started using the normal Terminal i noticed how fast it was/how slow iTerm2 was, which is the reason i stopped using iTerm2 and switched to TotalTerminal (a plugin for Terminal.app).

<comment><USER2> Yes! The incoming bytestream is now parsed into tokens in a separate thread. There are various other performance improvements as well, such as a fastpath for when no double-width characters are present.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Speaking of shell integration, I use this Automator app with "Open with" to open Finder files in a new tmux vim window [http://pastebin.com/rxyB8c8k](http://pastebin.com/rxyB8c8k)

I use a similar script/Automator app to "Open this directory in iterm" by dragging it into the Finder toolbar [http://pastebin.com/1at3CXvP](http://pastebin.com/1at3CXvP) [http://i.imgur.com/QGqQSOJ.png](http://i.imgur.com/QGqQSOJ.png)

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow guys, this is great... I'd manually tried setting something up with PushBullet for a few long running commands, but just hitting a shortcut combo is much nicer...

brew installs and bundle installs and the like will be a joy now!

</comment><comment><USER24> Is it possible to enable/disable features? Since installing, my prompt has been rather buggy, and there are some features I don't particularly care for, but others I really like. For example, my python virtualenv prompt gets broken into two lines, both with a mark, which causes line lengths to misbehave too sometimes. Alternatively, not to sound like a downer, but is there a way to uninstall shell integration? Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd love to see something like iTerm for Windows.

<comment><USER26> Not exactly an iTerm2 clone but pretty close conemu [https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/](https://code.google.com/p/conemu- maximus5/)

<comment><USER27> +1 for conemu. It's approach and direction seem to be different than iTerm2, but still a must have on Windows.

<comment><USER28> +1 for conemu/cmder plus git bash on windows. again, different than iterm2 but also a must have

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I didn't know about the Toolbelt, that's pretty useful. It'll be really awesome to have history + recent directories integrated

</comment><comment><USER30> Great stuff, I've been using iTerm2 for a while and it's really good to see it evolve like this.

I use screen a lot (yes I know, I should switch to tmux one day!) and shell integration doesn't seem to work properly with sessions inside screen. Works perfectly if I ssh directly. Is it going to be supported eventually or is this the ultimate signal for me to switch to tmux?

<comment><USER2> By default, it is disabled in tmux. It works fine in iTerm2's tmux integration mode, but not in plain old tmux. I'm hopeful that this feature will prove popular and useful enough that I can get tmux to add support for it. To make it work in tmux integration mode just remove the check that $TERM == "screen" in $HOME/.iterm2_shell_integration.$SHELL.

<comment><USER31> Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately, right clicking on a mark is not working in tmux integration mode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I just love iTerm2, but I feel it's slow and unresponsive at times (Garbage Collection?) compared to Apple's Terminal. I still keep using iTerm2 because of its features. If there is any way I can profile these slowness and submit a bug report to have it fixed, please let me know!

<comment><USER2> I assume you're using 2.9.x here. Try turning off prefs>advanced>avoid repainting the screen when the cursor is hidden. Let me know if that makes a difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I like the idea of these features, but the "run this random shellscript from the internet" part really bugs me. Could / will you integrate it another way when it comes out of the nightly releases?

<comment><USER34> At least it's being served over HTTPS :-)

<comment><USER19> It is until you look at the script it downloads, which downloads further scripts over HTTP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm concerned about the wget to an external server part. This file should be local to prevent excessive slowness and potential security issues.

Also, is there a zsh version of this file? zsh is extremely popular on osx.

<comment><USER2> The linked page explains how to install by hand. I'd like to eliminate the curl|bash. It's tricky to deploy a shell script in a terminal emulator, so it hasn't been done yet. The ability to fix bugs without making users upgrade their client has been invaluable during early beta.

<comment><USER36> Would it be possible for iTerm to "type" the whole thing in for me? It's already executing a curl, can it do the whole thing through the host?

<comment><USER2> That's the eventual plan. There are a million niggling details, so I didn't do it yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> That is actually some really nice features that i could see myself using on a daily basis.

However i feel that it might somehow fuck up some things, as it is using some rather unconventional stuff.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'd like to use Automatic Profile Switching to change the profile when I ssh to certain servers, but it doesn't do anything. What am I missing?

<comment><USER38> I should add that I use ssh_config. I tried the file download feature but I get an error, it tries to scp from MBP.local and doesn't seem to be aware of my ssh session at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> right-click to scp is particularly neat.

<comment><USER40> Except that it doesn't shell out, so it ignores ProxyCommand...

<comment><USER2> What do you use ProxyCommand for? It seems hard to support, but I'd like to know more.

<comment><USER41> I've used it in the past to ssh via bastion hosts and the like.

<comment><USER42> Yes. My config is something like this:

      # proxy n02 connections through bastion
      host n02.university.edu
      ProxyCommand ssh bastion.university.edu -W %h:%p 2> /dev/null

Almost all my remote shells require a similar setup.

<comment><USER2> Seems like this might be a common enough pattern that I could support it. I'll have a look.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Thanks for this.</comment>


Smearing Free Thought in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://quillette.com/2017/09/25/smearing-free-thought-silicon-valley/ <comment><USER2> This article is a great example about why there is a sexual harassment problem in technology. It's conflating two completely different things in the name of "free thinking": the facts about men and women and the severity of sexism. Are men and women different? Yes. Have those differences ever been shown to affect their ability to do the same job? No. Sexism exists because of the perceived answer to the second question, not the first.

The dismissal of Costolo's point about the urgency of addressing sexual harassment based on a false dichotomy summarizes the key flaw in the entire article. You cannot simultaneously have an intellectual debate about a topic when one of the parties involved is being actively demeaned and marginalized.

<comment><USER3> I'm confused by your last sentence. How else can we decide which side or sides is/are being demeaned/marginalized other than intellectual debate?

<comment><USER4> > How else can we decide which side or sides is/are being > demeaned/marginalized other than intellectual debate?

The problem is that "intellectual debate" often ends up just being thinly- veiled excuses for why it's ok to discriminate against the marginalized group. It's kind of like how "intellectual debate" about phrenology was used to justify attitudes about different races.

<comment><USER3> I notice you didn't answer my question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is this post flagged?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the policy of flagging without providing an explanation is becoming a problem on contentious issues. It allows a minority to have disproportionate influence on a discussion.

I think there are several conflicting ideas of flagging:

\- Reason: I'm tired of this topic (I feel like this doesn't happen much, or else all this bitcoin talk would have stopped 3 years ago, as well as "Building X in language Y").

\- Reason: I think this piece is non-factual and doesn't present any falsifiable claims.

\- Reason: I think this piece is demonstrably inaccurate

\- Reason: I think this is a controversial topic

I think controversy is an indication of the importance of a topic.

</comment><comment><USER6> > In the aftermath of the so-called Google memo affair, there has been no > shortage of misleading and in some cases downright inaccurate media coverage > painting the author, James Damore, and his supporters in a very unfavorable > light.

Personally I think the biggest problem is that people who criticize him keep going "he's wrong" "you can't say that" "saying women are less interested is sexist". It just lets others further their manufactured outrage and act like victims of oppression.

Vs he said things that strongly implied his female coworkers were less competent and he was fired because of the damage this did to the work environment.

> it is difficult to see how one could read his memo in its entirety and walk > away with the conclusion that it was written by someone who seeks to keep > women out of technology

uh huh. I'm getting really tired of being told I just didn't read it or understand it. I read it. I think Damore is a fucking idiot for writing it that way. I also think the basic idea "maybe less women are interested" is perfectly reasonable to talk about. I think bringing up how much more neurotic women are was incredibly fucking stupid. I think bring up the fact that he's a conservative was just him whining. I think the people who say "it's science" are missing the point. I think his memo was incredibly slanted and discussed no reasons beyond some tenuous biological links as reasons for women not to go into tech.

I also think a lot of the people who keep complaining about how they want a dialogue are being disingenuous, because when someone says something against the memo the response is that they obviously didn't read it.

> a political movement seeking to raise awareness of how gender inequality > issues affect men and boys that has long been smeared in the media as > misogynistic.

maybe cause it's pretty misogynistic. check their Reddit sometime (although it's not as bad as MGTOW).

> it is not a hate movement rooted in misogyny

but there does seem to be a lot of misogyny in it.

They have real complaints about some things, but I feel like it's pretty easy to why people are turned off by it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Every repugnant conclusion has always come coated in a veneer of rationality. No racist, sexist, islamophobe or any other kind of bigot has ever called themselves by these appellations or expressed their opinions without being able to bring in piles of dubious evidence to back up their opinions.

Let's take the example of the Men's Rights Movement discussed in the article. While there are of course many factions within the MRM, the very existence of something that arose specifically to counteract the rise of feminism is a slap in the face to the struggles brought forth by women. With the same veneer of rationality, its purpose is to drown out women's concerns by raising the voices of men to a raucous cry.

This is not to say that men do not experience problems, but the MRM is almost exclusively a reaction to feminism. It's an age-old divisionary tactic, of pitting an oppressed group against an even more oppressed group. The English American colonists considered the genocided Native Americans to be one of their biggest oppressors, the war-torn Germans took to blaming the Jews who have already been persecuted for centuries. It's easier to find a weaker target than to look for the deeper causes of oppression.

The problem with Damore is not that his stats are wrong, but their veneer of rationality. Disagreeing with his repugnant conclusions (such as, eliminating Google's diversity programmes), is not because we hate scientific discourse, but because his veneer of rationality is just that: a veneer. The causes and explanations are far more complicated than what he cites or could cite in the space of 11 pages, and in the meantime it's far better to err in the side of caution and offer an advantage to the underrepresented group.

<comment><USER8> Note the veneer of rationality in the above comment.

<comment><USER9> I must have missed it - could you elaborate a bit?

<comment><USER3> I think his point is that "veneer of rationality" almost serves solely as ad- hominem, because there is no way to establish which side is truly rational other than through debate itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> aaron-lebo It's still hard for me to get over the fact that the very first people Damore had interview him were Stephen "cult leader" Molyneux and Jordan Petersen. He's also got interviews with Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. It's totally possible that they were the only outlets that would give him a platform, but those are very biased and partisan outlets. If he was as objective and free thinking as he's depicted as, why was his first reaction to jump to one of the extremes?

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd mainly chalk that up to them being the only ones open to a genuine discussion with him. The articles coming out in the aftermath were all extremely demonizing of Damore.

I remember watching Peterson's interview with him, and Damore didn't really seem comfortable with many of the former's statements, just based on his body language. Maybe that was just social awkwardness.

Also, I don't follow Molyneux or Carlson, but neither Peterson nor Shapiro can be truthfully called extreme.

<comment><USER6> Shapiro seems pretty extreme, just more mainstream conservatism.

Peterson just has a head the size of ontario at this point.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does submitting a patent for an app/website/browser extension work? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Notice I am not a patent attorney, and you should ultimately seek legal guidance. Additional information is based on information in the united states.

General information.

Most likely you will submit a utility patent. This must be novel, nonobvious, and useful.

The US is now first to file, no longer first to invent.

Software patents are difficult to obtain.

A prior art search is done before you submit for a patent.

You have one year to file if you have made your invention for sale, or publicly disclosed it without an NDA.

You can file for a nonprovisional which gives you one more year to file your provisional filing.

I am not aware of your situation, so I would suggest watching the IP video provided by the US patent office, look at the following link, and contact a patent attorney for a 1 hour consultation.

[http://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/general- informa...](http://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/general-information- concerning-patents)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Much useful.

Have you filed a patent in the past (I assume so)? Do you have any idea how long does it take from submission to obtaining a response?

<comment><USER3> a couple of nits on twistedmack's generally good response:

* a prior art search is not required (that's the PTO's job) but i usually recommend it since it'll save money in the end if there's dead on prior art. it's also required if you want to expedite the process at the PTO.

* you can file for a provisional first then have a year to file a non-provisional based off that.

on your follow up: the time process varies wildly but its in the years time scale (not months or shorter). anecdotally i just gave the PTO a call regarding an application that has been sitting around waiting for an initial response for 2.5 years now, which is somewhat uncommon but not out of the realm of possibility. you can speed up the process, but the PTO charges a rather hefty fee for it.

disclaimer: i AM a patent attorney (and former examiner), but i'm not your attorney!</comment></comment></comment>