'We good now China?' South Park creators issue mock apology - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/oct/08/we-good-now-china-south-park-creators-issue-mock-apology-after-show-reportedly-censored <comment><USER2> I have to say, this is really the only way to respond to China when it comes to their no-humor censors: just come out and mock them. They don't really have any way to reply.

One wonders if there is an entire revolutionary class within China sharing South Park videos for freedom.

<comment><USER3> Sometimes we forget that getting disappeared in china is not just a meme.

Police will show up to arrest you just for posting comments online: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCOAbkTs_a4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCOAbkTs_a4)

<comment><USER4> Well, lets not forget their detention camps for ethnic minorities they don't like: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/23/china- footage-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/23/china-footage- reveals-hundreds-of-blindfolded-and-shackled-prisoners-uighur)

I mean at this rate, I seriously think in a decade or two, we're going to find a Holocaust level event has been going on in China that's going to make the Nazis look like amateurs. But instead, we're focused on stupid left/right political differences and figuring out whether gender binary bathrooms cause anxiety.

<comment><USER5> For your information, Mr Hitler killed over 5 million people.

Mao killed way over 30 million. Absolutely incompetent, he manage to remain in power just using terror.

The other day there was an 70th anniversary of the founding of PRC and this criminal's gigantic picture was at the hotspot.

<comment><USER3> Technically speaking it's not really apples to apples. One is due to malice (hitler was actively trying to exterminate a race). The other is due to incompetence (mao would've preferred if those people didn't die but was too stupid to predict the result of his actions).

Not trying to defend either of them of course. But just for the record books we would should have a saner way of counting.

If you're going to attribute deaths due to lack of foresight then the inventor of cars probably have one of the highest kill counts. Or Genghis Khan for fathering such a large population of mortals who eventually needs to die.

<comment><USER6> > When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let > half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.

I think you are overattributing his stupidity here. Engineered famine is a fantastic way to make sure populations that don't like you are less of a problem in the future. The Holdomor and Irish Potato Famine are two other obvious examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Before this episode I always wondered why they kept making those bad transformers movies, turns out China loves em.

I think its fine if people want to make movies for the China market, but what I find alarming is copycat behavior trying to bring that sort of censorship here.

It doesn't make any sense to me why anyone should apologize or censor themselves creatively just because someone got salty about it. I find the notion limiting someones creative expression to someone else's judgement of "appropriate" to be despicably egregious.

Sure you can vote with your dollar and time by not watching something you don't like, but its the creators prerogative what to create and what not to create.

Anyone arguing the contrary on the effects of censorship has not looked into the origin of the word.

<comment><USER8> It's really not about morals at all. It's about money. China is the world's most populous country, and a surprising number of American industries are fairly dependent on revenue from Chinese customers. This effectively gives China indirect control over multiple major US corporations. Until recently, this has been hidden behind the scenes exceptionally well, but the curtains are being pulled aside as China is becoming much more brash in their demands. They're effectively demanding that Americans censor their speech in certain contexts or else China will hurt American corporations doing business there. And they're getting away with it.

<comment><USER9> Why don't they create a version specific to China and censor it all they want? Why do we all have to be bundled in that censorship? Only because it is easier marketing and the are saving on logistics?

<comment><USER10> If western companies happily comply with their censorship demands, why would they bother?

<comment><USER9> Yes, it comes down to saving a few $$$ for the next quarter. And when box office decrease due to alienating the western viewers the executives shrug their shoulders and blame it on streaming instead. To be honest, I couldn't care less, the stuff geared to the lowest common denominator for a few continents is not on my watch list anyway, and hasn't been for a long time. The only problem I foresee is on my part, explaining my kid why we won't be watching such and such Disney show.

And I don't mean that I will make sure my kid won't be able to consume such content because it is censored or dubbed down to please Chinese markets, kid's to small to understand, but to the increasingly crappy quality of these shows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's kinda funny is how made fun of China was in past South Park episodes[0] and China didn't care at all about the show, but last week's episode was the one that set them off.

[0] "The China Probrem": [https://images.app.goo.gl/mDqxY6pSuNHtA66M8](https://images.app.goo.gl/mDqxY6pSuNHtA66M8)

<comment><USER12> Going off the Wikipedia plot summary of the episode, it looks like it makes fun of (a) Chinese-American _people_ (not the Chinese government); and (b) paranoid fantasies of Westerners about China invading the U.S.; and ultimately "Cartman decides he'd rather be Chinese than "a nation of unethical dick shooters"".

My model of the Chinese government at the moment is that they primarily care about opposition/disrespect/criticism of the Chinese government. Does anyone have data points as to whether they care about, say, present-day racist insults of (a) Chinese-Americans; (b) Chinese living in China? Might be interesting to see where the lines are drawn.

<comment><USER13> Without touching on the ethical / moral aspect of stereotyping or disrespecting large groups of people, I'm curious if "racist" is the right adjective here, vs some other term that relates more to nationality vs biological ethnicity?

<comment><USER14> The way South Park employs xenophobic/racist/sexist tropes is interesting - they are either so silly that its really hard for anyone to take offense, or they spread it around so much - no one group is ever singled out - and no one group is ever spared. That gives us all permission to laugh at them, and laugh at ourselves, when the time comes.

Or... the portrayal isn't actually targeting group of the character embodying the trope. It's targeting those that hold such tropes, in a way that exposes the absurdity of them.

There was a movie few years ago, Tropic Thunder. Robert Downy Jr is in black- face the entire movie, and it's hilarious - and somehow he isn't cancelled. Why? His character in the movie is a white, self-serious method actor (he stays in character all the time), who had medical treatments to alter the pigment of his skin in order to portray the African-American lead in a movie. And his depiction is one giant super charged trope. But the actual butt of the joke isn't black people - its actually the pretentious actors and Hollywood in general. In essence, its making a statement about the absurdity, self- importance, actors, studios, etc in Hollywood, and the lack of the social justice and equality there.

South Park wields "*ist" tropes in a similar way, and I think its incorrect to think of it as racism, or xenophobia, etc.

In South Park, there's one black character in the cast, and his name is Token. As in the token black kid. Out of context, and on its face, it might seem racist. But its saying something else, just like RDJ's role in Tropic Thunder.

<comment><USER15> To be more precise he's the only black fairly major child character. He has a family, there was Chef in earlier seasons, there are a few black minor recurring characters besides those, and there are black single-episode characters. But yes, after the death of Chef it turns out Token is the only major character who is black.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Click the link to watch the episode:

[https://southpark.cc.com/sitewide/img/messages/geoblock/gb.j...](https://southpark.cc.com/sitewide/img/messages/geoblock/gb.jpg)

The irony is not lost...

<comment> Paul-ish I'm not sure what your point here is?

<comment><USER17> I think the irony is that South Park is self-censoring for the European market. I know that's not equivalent to state censorship, but it's still ironic.

<comment><USER18> That's not true. When I've been living in one of 5+ European countries, South Park has always been available. You just have to follow the link in the bottom and use the regional version of the website. No self censoring here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I never thought South Park would be America's last hope.

<comment><USER20> eh, don't be so quick. radical Islam forced them to censor

[https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/arts/television/23park.ht...](https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/arts/television/23park.html)

<comment><USER21> South Park didn't back down, Comedy Central censored it post production.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> More discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21186916](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21186916)

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't get the Winnie the Pooh meme. Is that a real thing Chinese people get upset about?

<comment><USER24> It's a meme that came from a picture a few years ago with Xi and Obama. Source: [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/xi- jinping](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/xi-jinping)

> Is that a real thing Chinese people get upset about?

Most likely not their people, but their government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Who knew CCP would be able to censor the west with, gulp, the might dollar. The irony.

<comment><USER26> Americans on any problem: "You've got to vote with your wallet to change the world! That's the spirit of the free market and liberal democracy!"

China _votes with wallet_

Americans: "This is 'authoritarianism'"

<comment><USER25> China doesn't really vote with wallet. It's CCP telling/herding/forcing people of China what to do and the populace is going along, because the alternative isn't pretty for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Xi doesn't look just like Winnie the Pooh at all -- damn that is one heck of an apology LIT AF:)

</comment><comment><USER28> Despite knowing that Chinese people and the government are trained to react poorly to mocking, and there are a long history of why such reaaction is based on factual events in the history.

People are still trying to the same thing, instead of engaging a conversation (for both parties). But people need to understand that such mocking will later be used another proof that westerners are not sensitive enough to Chinese people and government's feeling...

I am ATM plainly paralyzed by the superficial self-indulged righteousness from both parties...

</comment><comment><USER29> So we should meme everything and see how much we can get banned from China ??

</comment><comment><USER30> As this yet another reason the U.S. needs to rely on China in terms of manufacturing And other things. The looney tune in office's stance isn't so dumb after all.

</comment><comment><USER31> There was a time when the fact that they're Americans would definitely protect their right to do stuff like this, but these days I'd worry that China will invalidate some Ivanka trademarks, and the creators will find themselves under very heavy pressure from above.

<comment><USER32> I truly doubt they would cave to any pressure at all.

Those two thrive on this kind of controversy, I can basically picture them sitting back and rubbing their nipples while watching this unfold.

We need more people like Trey Parker and Matt Stone who aren't afraid of starting some controversy to get a conversation started. They choose to do it through cartoons and satire, but I honestly believe they understand our society at a fundamental level.

<comment><USER33> You have to give some credit to Viacom, the media company, for allowing the show to air. Viacom owns Comedy Central, MTV, Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks, and CBS among other media properties. They certainly have business interests in China.

<comment><USER34> I wonder if they were aware of the controversial nature of the episode. I'd bet really money, though, Viacom et. al. wouldn't hesitate for a second to censor South Park if it starts hurting their bottom line.

<comment><USER35> Outrage attracts eyeballs. This is good for their bottom line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There's potentially going to be more to come in Wednesday's episode given their "apology" and it may start WW3.

<comment><USER37> Comparing the causes of WW1[0] and WW2[1], seeing the name "South Park" on the WW3 wikipedia page [assuming the world still exists] would be the most bizarre thing I could imagine. That being said, it may just happen!

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I)

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

<comment><USER38> That would go down as the single dumbest reason of civilization collapse, surely?

<comment><USER37> Without a doubt!

<comment><USER39> Or the best! you know what they say, if you gonna F __ __things up, do it in a epic way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> In my opinion this fight is important but futile at the level of individual companies. The USA as the only nation in the world with true free speech protections should make free speech a requirement in their trade negotiations. Even with Europe, we should not get certain tariff improvements until free speech goes into law that deserves the name and is equivalent to the US level of free speech.

<comment><USER41> "The USA as the only nation in the world with true free speech protections"

Is this accurate? Legally, I understand that free speech is protected in the US constitution. I'm sure it's not the only country in the world with free speech laws, but I don't know how the specifics compare.

Culturally, the US seems less tolerant of free speech than plenty of other places in the world. Obviously China is orders of magnitude worse, both culturally and legally speaking.

<comment> barry-cotter >> The USA as the only nation in the world with true free speech protections.

> Is this accurate? Legally, I understand that free speech is protected in the > US constitution. I'm sure it's not the only country in the world with free > speech laws, but I don't know how the specifics compare.

There is at least a very good case to be made that the US has by far the strongest free speech guarantee. Commonwealth countries and the UK have nothing as strong as the first amendment. Canada's free speech commitment is derisory in law because of the notwithstanding clause, the UK has the Official Secrets Act and Australia doesn't have a right to free speech in its constitution.

I will pass over European countries with their Holocaust denial laws, bans on swastikas and the ECHR deciding that saying Mohamed was a paedophile as obviously having very weak commitments to free speech.

Maybe not the _only_ country with true free speech protections but certainly it has the _strongest_.

<comment><USER42> Ahem

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

<comment><USER21> This is a gross misunderstanding of the concept, and it pisses me off.

Just because you have the right to free speech, doesn't give you the right to someone else's audience. It doesn't give you license to harrass. It doesn't give you license to trespass (including a properly licensed/permitted event on public property). It doesn't give you license to disruptively yell over whoever you might be protesting. It doesn't give you the right to be obnoxious for the same of getting attention, like blocking traffic.

Hijacking someone else's gathering is infringing on both their right to free speech and their right to peaceful assembly. Go have your own assembly somewhere else. There is no right to disrupt. If you can say the same message _anywhere else_ in the country without restriction or repercussion, then you're freedom of speech hasn't been infringed.

That said, and even by that standard, the US is the most tolerant of free speech by far.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Which text editor do you use? (Launched new site. Interested to get comments) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pollbag.com/poll.php?id=473

<comment><USER2> With a poll you need to be taken to the results when you vote... clicking on results while easy is really annoying and makes you feel like your vote didn't count.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good tip. We should probably look into that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You have to mouse over a 3d pie chart to see what the fields represent. It should probably be labeled. I'm using Chrome/Vista if there's something I'm not seeing.</comment>


As a San Francisco Skyscraper Leans, a Call for Stricter Building Codes - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/us/san-francisco-building-codes-earthquakes.html <comment><USER2> I wonder why this article didn't even mention that _the Millennium Tower is not even anchored to bedrock_.</comment>


Ping.fm: Update all of your social networks at once - <AUTHOR> http://ping.fm/ <comment><USER2> I haven't tried it yet - too chicken to give someone all my info - but my friend Andrea is addicted.</comment>


MyTown is bigger than Foursquare and Gowalla (6x as many checkins) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/14/mytown-booyah-location-iphone/

<comment><USER2> Keith & Sam (the founders) are top-notch talent doing great things. However, take "6x as many checkins" with a little salt... the game's scoring system encourages you to checkin repeatedly to a single location to quickly get points. That said, this is the only game for the iPhone I've found that my wife has enjoyed.</comment>


Show HN: Appbase - Fast graph data store for building web apps - <AUTHOR> http://appbase.io/

<comment><USER2> Sounds interesting ! Waiting to try 't out

</comment><comment><USER3> Are there any free credits for new users?

</comment><comment><USER4> Let's together!

</comment><comment><USER5> Go appbase!

</comment><comment><USER6> Great!</comment>


How I cured (most of) my anxiety (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://levels.io/anxiety/ <comment><USER2> _But we 're also filling ourselves up with giant cups of coffee every day. And then to release the stress we get drunk. The next day we feel even worse and we drink more coffee. Meanwhile, we're more isolated than ever and thus have less of an outlet for the stuff we're worried about._

Damn, reading this hit me like a ton of bricks.

It perfectly describes me when I'm in crunch mode and probably is the reason stress has begun to be a big concern for me.</comment>


Great Works in Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/courses/670Fall04/GreatWorksInPL.shtml <comment><USER2> I'm a bit surprised not to see any papers by Simon Peyton-Jones (of Haskell fame) on the list. I guess most of the papers on this list were old classics and many of the authors have already passed away or retired.

SPJ is one of the most relevant programming language researchers of the past 20 years, but maybe his work is "too new" for this list. Reading his books and papers taught sparked the interest in programming languages in me.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps it's still questionable whether his work will have any actual effect on the industry as a whole, as opposed to just academia.

<comment><USER4> Are you serious? SPJ's work has been incredibly instrumental in bringing functional features (such as LINQ) to C#

See: [http://www.infoq.com/interviews/simon-peyton-jones-about- mai...](http://www.infoq.com/interviews/simon-peyton-jones-about-mainstream- programming-languages)

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/simonpj/papers...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/simonpj/papers/haskell-retrospective/ecoop-july09.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You know what'd be even better?

A public vault of this articles so we can all learn easily instead of having to go through journal publishers.

EDIT: Why thank you, Lazyweb!

<comment><USER6> Greatest of the great:

C. A. R. Hoare. An axiomatic basis for computer programming: [http://sigpl.or.kr/school/2005w/slides/2_17_1.pdf](http://sigpl.or.kr/school/2005w/slides/2_17_1.pdf)

Peter J. Landin. The next 700 programming languages: [http://www.thecorememory.com/Next_700.pdf](http://www.thecorememory.com/Next_700.pdf)

Robin Milner. A theory of type polymorphism in programming: [http://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs421/sp2012/project/milner...](http://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs421/sp2012/project/milner- polymorphism.pdf)

Gordon Plotkin. Call-by-name, call-by-value, and the λ-calculus : [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/03043975759...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304397575900171) (PDF link at upper right of page)

John C. Reynolds. Towards a theory of type structure: [http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2289&c...](http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2289&context=compsci&sei- redir=1)

Pretty great works:

Luca Cardelli. A semantics of multiple inheritance: [http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Inheritance.pdf](http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Inheritance.pdf)

Luis Damas and Robin Milner. Principal type schemes for functional programs: [http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~cs4536/c12/milner- damas_principal_typ...](http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~cs4536/c12/milner- damas_principal_types.pdf)

Edsger W. Dijkstra. Recursive programming: [http://oai.cwi.nl/oai/asset/9253/9253A.pdf](http://oai.cwi.nl/oai/asset/9253/9253A.pdf)

Edsger W. Dijkstra. Go to statement considered harmful: [http://www.massey.ac.nz/~kahawick/159331/Goto-Harmful- Dijkst...](http://www.massey.ac.nz/~kahawick/159331/Goto-Harmful-Dijkstra.pdf)

William A. Howard. The formulas-as-types notion of construction: [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Howard80.pdf](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Howard80.pdf)

Robert Kowalski. Predicate logic as programming language: [http://220.127.116.11:81/collect/computer/index/assoc/HASH0183...](http://220.127.116.11:81/collect/computer/index/assoc/HASH0183.dir/doc.pdf)

Peter J. Landin. The mechanical evaluation of expressions: [http://ropas.snu.ac.kr/lib/dock/La1964.pdf](http://ropas.snu.ac.kr/lib/dock/La1964.pdf)

John McCarthy. Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine: [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.111...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.111.8833&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

Eugenio Moggi. Computational lambda-calculus and monads: [http://pdf.aminer.org/000/267/711/lazy_lambda_calculus_theor...](http://pdf.aminer.org/000/267/711/lazy_lambda_calculus_theories_models_and_local_structure_characterization_extended.pdf)

Greg Morrisett, David Walker, Karl Crary, and Neal Glew. From System-F to typed assembly language: [http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~xyfeng/reading/p527-morrisett.pdf](http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~xyfeng/reading/p527-morrisett.pdf)

George C. Necula. Proof-carrying code: [http://www.utdallas.edu/~kxh060100/Papers/necula96.pdf](http://www.utdallas.edu/~kxh060100/Papers/necula96.pdf)

Gordon D. Plotkin. LCF considered as a programming language: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/03043975779...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304397577900445)

Gordon D. Plotkin. A structural approach to operational semantics: [https://www.alice.virginia.edu/~weimer/2006-655/reading/plot...](https://www.alice.virginia.edu/~weimer/2006-655/reading/plotkin81structural.pdf)

Guy Lewis Steele Jr. RABBIT: A compiler for SCHEME ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AITR-474.pdf

OK, I think the first two sections are plenty. You can search for the rest yourself on Google Scholar (I found most of these as the first hit on Google Scholar, one or two took looking through a few hits or doing a Google search as well)

<comment><USER7> Awesome! When I was reading the article, I thought, "This was what God had in mind when she created links. Where are they?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 'Can Programming Be Liberated from the von. Neumann Style?' by John Backus is another great work very worth studying:

'Conventional programming languages are growing ever more enormous, but not stronger. Inherent defects at the most basic level cause them to be both fat and weak: their primitive word-at-a-time style of programming inherited from their common ancestor—the von Neumann computer, their close coupling of semantics to state transitions, their division of programming into a world of expressions and a world of statements, their inability to effectively use powerful combining forms for building new programs from existing ones, and their lack of useful mathematical properties for reasoning about programs.'

Thankfully, 30+ years later these problems are widely fixed ;)

[http://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_l...](http://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_lecture.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> The most recent paper in the first section was written in 1978.

The majority of the ones in the first two sections were written before I was born; only three were written in the 1990's.

The only one from the 21st century (published in 2000) is in the least- prestigious third section.

Does it take time for good ideas to accumulate the recognition needed to be included in this list? Or was all the low-hanging fruit quickly picked in the early days of the computer age, and only hard problems remain on which little progress has been made?

Haven't any new ideas been introduced by the innovations of modern languages like Python, Lisp, Haskell and Ruby? Or even C++, Java and JavaScript?

Or is language implementation, almost without exception, a series of engineering refinements that happen in a decades-long process after theoretical foundations are first published?

<comment><USER2> > Or was all the low-hanging fruit quickly picked in the early days of the > computer age, and only hard problems remain on which little progress has > been made?

Yes, most of the ground breaking theories were researched and documented decades ago. And some of that stuff has yet to make itself to mainstream programming languages (e.g. type inference).

> Haven't any new ideas been introduced by the innovations of modern languages > like Python, Lisp, Haskell and Ruby? Or even C++, Java and JavaScript?

Apart from Lisp and Haskell, the "modern" languages you mention are rather boring when it comes to programming language design and there isn't too much research behind them. There has been a lot of practical work and research in garbage collection, run time systems, compiler back ends, just in time compilation and virtual machines. But when it comes to language design, the mainstream programming languages are really conservative.

<comment><USER10> Too, Lisp was described for the first time in _1958_. See "Pretty Great Works", #8.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Since the list is a lot about typing I wanted to see Liskov-Wing "A Behavioral Notion of Subtyping" in there.

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=213...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=213162B5E8875E6BDB3D104B452F036B?doi=10.1.1.39.1223&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

I found that pretty interesting and it caused a lot of discussion.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ugh, if you look at the bottom of the pretty great works you will see Guy Steele's master's thesis where he defined the Scheme programming language and its compiler.

I know when I was writing my thesis I was pretty disgusted that he ruined it for all of us mere mortals. ;)

<comment><USER13> I think Claude Shannon's (of information theory fame) master's thesis beats out all others in the field of computer science.

"A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits", 1938, proves that you can use electrical switches to do boolean algebra! He basically invented the digital computer, as a master's thesis.

<comment><USER14> Not to diminish Shannon's genius at all, but he wasn't the first to make logic circuits. [http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS/Repository/1.0/Disseminate?vi...](http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS/Repository/1.0/Disseminate?view=body&id=pdf_1&handle=euclid.bams/1183541145) On page 917 you can see Charles Sanders Pierce and Alan Marquand made some in the 1880's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this count?

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

It's a masterpiece!

<comment><USER16> That is wonderful. As a physicist whose first language was FORTRAN, I particularly like "It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If anyone doesn't know, Benjamin Pierce is the author of a highly regarded book, Types and Programming Languages. (I'm yet to study it, its advanced supposedly...)

<comment><USER4> I was looking for Featherweight Java[1] on that list before I decided it would have been vein for him to include a paper by himself on the list.

[1] [http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~bchandra/courses/papers/Igarashi_...](http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~bchandra/courses/papers/Igarashi_FJ.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Only one paper by Filinski? I've been picking through 'Declarative Continuations and Categorical Duality' where he shows the duality between values and continuations by generalizing lambda calculus to a symmetric version. It's incredible beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER19>
      My second remark is that our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static
      relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively
      poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our
      limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and
      the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in
      text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.

From Dijkstra's "Go To Statement Considered Harmful"

</comment><comment><USER20> More of Plotkin's publications:

[http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/gdp/publications/](http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/gdp/publications/)

</comment><comment><USER21> When I saw this was hosted at upenn.edu, I was _certain_ it was a Kenneth Goldsmith project.

<comment><USER22> I too was expecting something very different. Something nice and uncreative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great reading list! How about "The Semantic Web" by Tim Berners-Lee?

<comment><USER5> Oh, the one by the Web Developer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> >Robin Milner. A theory of type polymorphism in programming. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 17:348-375, August 1978

It is in the top 5 and yet none of the go developers will acknowledge that it exists.</comment>


Breaking smart: serendipity through technology - <AUTHOR> https://breakingsmart.com/en/prime-radiant/ <comment><AUTHOR> "To traditionalists, particularly in the United States, the car is a motif for an entire way of life, and the smartphone just an accessory. To early adopters who have integrated ridesharing deeply into their lives, the smartphone is the lifestyle motif, and the car is the accessory. To generations of Americans, owning a car represented freedom. To the next generation, _not_ owning a car will represent freedom."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps this would have been a better link: [https://breakingsmart.com/en/season-1/](https://breakingsmart.com/en/season-1/)</comment>


Redis Hot Patch - <AUTHOR> http://benmmurphy.github.io/blog/2015/06/09/redis-hot-patch/

<comment><USER2> Back in the days when Playstation2 did not had updates, the awesome team of Insomniac did self-explotation of their own game "Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal" to get it updated: [http://www.insomniacgames.com/self- exploitation/](http://www.insomniacgames.com/self-exploitation/)

</comment><comment><USER3> well, it only works on OSX

        (error) ERR Error running script (call to f_57391bcdbf300562e6ad7201a1578740bccffb11): @user_script:4: user_script:4: Not OSX => Linux

<comment><USER4> I have a version for Linux but apparently there are a lot of open unpatched Redis servers on the internet and it doesn't take much to change the patcher to do something else.

<comment><USER5> You're not helping by keeping a fix out of people's hands.

<comment><USER6> There _is_ a documented, reliable fix in everyone's hands, namely to shut down Redis and upgrade it. This is a cute hack with a chance of crashing everything.

One thing I learned from working at Ksplice was that the amount of effort needed to build _reliable_ live patches was huge, way more than the amount of effort needed to build a live patch good enough for your average script kiddie, who often doesn't care about crashing one percent of machines, and definitely doesn't care about it just not working on 90% of machines. There is, unfortunately, an engineering imbalance between the difficulty of the good guys' and bad guys' goals. (This is why there was no truth to the claim that Ksplice was helping the bad guys build rootkits: the technical ability to build rootkits was there all along, since Ksplice was out of tree -- the innovative engineering in Ksplice was just making hot-patches reliable.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Similarly: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helpful_worm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helpful_worm)</comment>


When does shaming racist kids turn into online bullying? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/11/09/when-does-shaming-racist-kids-turn-into-online-bullying/

<comment><USER2> Immediately, I would say. Regardless of why it's being done or who is being targeted, isolating and ridiculing an individual is a form of bullying.

Whether they realize it or not, those who are the most vocal against bullying or intolerance often end up being among those people directly engaging in such things.

One inherently can't speak out against a particular bully without partaking in bullying himself or herself. Likewise, one can't truly promote tolerance if he or she does not tolerate those who engage in intolerance.</comment>


Entitlement issues (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html <comment><USER3> Periodically someone will ask me if I've read any of the Song of Ice and Fire books. My answer is always no.

Then I launch into a rant about the Wheel of Time series. I got sucked into that series on book one and chewed through it all the way to book 7. At book seven I had caught up to the author and the fact that he hadn't written the next book in the series yet gave me an opportunity to take stock. I realized that the books had been getting less satisfying and more work to read than before. I also realized that Robert Jordan didn't know how to finish the series. He hadn't met a plot line he didn't like. I was sure he would die before Wheel of Time was finished. Right then and there I decided I was done and would no longer give my money to the series or any other series that showed signs of the same problem. I totally called the Wheel of Time. Robert Jordan died and they had to bring in Brian Sanderson to finish. Brian definitely knows how to finish. But for me the magic had already gone.

It's not out of a sense of entititlement. I just don't enjoy unfinished stories. It bugs the crap out of me. George R. R. Martin strikes me as an author with different symptoms but a similar problem. I'm not sure he knows how to finish it. I won't spend my money until he proves it.

<comment><USER4> I used to have a similar stance, and I agree on most points. Long series tend to become less and less interesting, and weirder as they go along (Dune, Gormenghast, Hyperion, ...) Maybe it is the novelty that wears off, the author has used his most powerful ideas first, or the last book is written because of children's college tuition. Moreover, even if I enjoy reading, I think that if the author hasn't managed to enclose a proper story in 500-1000 pages, there is probably something that is off.

However, I have recanted my previous position because if every series tend to go downwards, why not reading the first few books? I'd rather enjoy the journey even if the final destination is a bit underwhelming. In the worst case, if the latter books are absolutely atrocious, I can live with reading a quick summary on Wikipedia.

<comment><USER5> > I think that if the author hasn't managed to enclose a proper story in > 500-1000 pages, there is probably something that is off.

I really don't agree with that:

1\. a series can be way more than a single story, The Dresden Files is 15 volumes of 300~500 pages each (let's call it 6000 pages), each story is mostly free-standing but they follow chronologically, it's a very episodic format if you will. Discworld has similar thematic subsets.

2\. some stories just don't fit in in 1000 pages. Malazan Book of the Fallen suffered from a lack of editing at times and could probably have been a fair bit shorter, but not _10000_ pages shorter, not by a long shot, the depth and breadth of the subject just wouldn't allow it.

<comment><USER6> This is OBVIOUSLY my 2 cents...

Re: 1. I think this is a different thing. If you want to tell a bunch of stories that are linked, that's fine. If you want to tell one giant story then at least have a plan. There's no indication that Jordan had "a plan". (I think this is the point the great-grandparent is making)

<comment><USER7> I seem to recall when the first book came out, that it was planned as a trilogy. After the second book, it was going to be a double trilogy. I don't think Jordan's overall plan reached his final 12-book estimate until book 8 or 9, and Sanderson couldn't even fit the final material he picked up into two books, so it hit 13 by the end.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that in general. Sometimes you write an outline, and in the process of penning down a quarter of the story and fleshing out the characters and setting you come up with more and more ideas. There's two ways out of that: either you let the story get control of the writing, resulting in a historical-feeling narrative with no clear overall plot, or you take the time to edit and revise what you have into smaller, self-contained stories.

I vastly prefer the latter, especially if there _are_ hints to an overarching plot. 13-book meanderings like Wheel of Time don't do it for me these days, but Dresden Files (15 books and ~20 short stories) or the Honor Harrington series (13 books, plus 18 spinoff short stories or novels)? I will chain-read those like crack, and still feel satisfied almost regardless of where they stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's disappointing to me that this needs to be said. I read the first _Song of Ice and Fire_ book in the middle of 2013, and I finished the fifth book this past March. That's several thousand pages of fiction in less than a year. Clearly, I like the books.

But I can wait for the sixth book. I did fine in 2012 without _ASOIAF_ , and I'll do fine in 2015 and 2016 and even 2017 if it comes to that.

Last year I discovered I prefer novels and assorted nonfiction to reading random articles on the Internet. I prefer to chew on one idea for a long time than a thousand little ideas at once.

So what I'd really like is a way to find other books to read that I enjoy as much a Martin's work. I've signed up for GoodReads, but nothing has come of it just yet.

Does anyone have any suggestions other than browsing Amazon or strolling through a Barnes and Noble?

<comment> barry-cotter Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen is a monstrous 10 book (finished) series with a huge, ancient, complex universe, a great mythos and some epic plotting. Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber is pretty dark and very well written. That's all I've got for darkdark fantasy. I can recommend everything Gaiman has written though you'd be better off starting with the Sandman, his best work.

<comment><USER9> Personally, like your suggestion for Gaiman, I highly recommend anything written by Roger Zelazny.

If you enjoy the Chronicles of Amber, you might also enjoy Jose Farmer's World of Tiers series. Along a similar vein but dissimilar enough that it's worth the read.

<comment><USER10> If I recall my Sandman, I think Gaiman would also recommend anything (or at least some things) written by Roger Zelazny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Expectation is a fascinating thing.

Gaiman is essentially describing the dichotomy in expectation between products and consultancy.

This is particularly complicated in fandom, because creators often say (and legitimately mean) that a body of work exists _because of_ (the encouragement of) their fans. That's true, but it doesn't mean that what they're creating isn't a product first, and not bespoke work on the authority of and responsible to fans.

Apple has fans too, but took basically no heed of complaints that the Mac Pro hadn't been updated in years.

</comment><comment><USER12> Creative writing is, much like software development, one of those jobs where you need to enter a different kind of mental state to be really productive. And that state cannot be maintained indefinitely.

George R.R. Martin writes big, fat books that are highly multithreaded, as part of a series that is already complex enough that it makes real life seem simple. If it were a software project, there would already be four or five more developers working on it. But he's trying to punch it out solo.

I don't expect him to finish, really. He's probably burned out for the second or third time, at least, and is getting too much fan pressure resulting from the television adaptation bump to focus on regenerating the artistic mojo.

If you ever read bestselling authors, they're always thanking their support people in the dedication or foreword or colophon or wherever. Most of them only need a few part-time or shared employees, like their editor, agent, and publicist. Martin probably needs at least one full-time assistant just for indexing and continuity.

This is why I like books that say "third book of the Whatever Trilogy" and the other two are right there on the shelf next to it. It lets me know that the author can finish something, and I don't have to wait for it to happen.

I did read the first few books in Martin's series, but I borrowed those copies. I don't really want to get sucked in and be left hanging like those people who got into Wheel of Time. With something like this, you never really know if the bus that just pulled away was the last one on the route for the night. So if you sit on that bench, the next one may never come.

</comment><comment><USER13> I enjoy the musings of the contract between writer and reader. If the author doesn't agree, on some level, to finish the series and it's the reader's requirement that a whole series must be read, then the reader is left with no choice but to wait until a series is finished before beginning. In various degrees of depth, we enter into obligations to others by beginning something, whether writing a book, having a child, ordering food etc. Seems the blog author's opinion is that GRRM has no obligation to his readers. I'd argue he has some form of professional obligation, but certainly no contractual ones w/ recourse.

<comment><USER14> There's clearly no obligation whatsoever.

The transaction is quite simple: you spend $X, you get $BOOK. Perhaps later you spend $X2 and you get $BOOK2.

That's it, end of story.

That's the case for the legal/contractual side of things, but _also_ for this "professional obligation" side of things.

The flip side, of course, is that readers are under no obligation to _buy_ a book. If somebody _needs_ to read an entire series, then they should wait until the entire series is available. To start reading a series that isn't finished yet, when you _need_ to read the whole series, is stupid.

There's _no_ implied obligation of the nature you discuss as when happens when you have a child. If you want there to be one, then I suggest contacting the author and offering to pay him in advance for writing the next book in exchange for a promise to complete it and some sort of hard deadline. Of course, you may find that this costs several orders of magnitude more than the ~$25 you'd pay for the initial release hardback if you just sat back and waited.

<comment><USER13> >The transaction is quite simple: you spend $X, you get $BOOK. Perhaps later you spend $X2 and you get $BOOK2.

I believe this has analogues to how Jack Welch says (paraphrasing) "At the end of the week when the you have your paycheck, you and the company are even"\-- implying that there is not further obligation. I find this hard to believe on a professional level. If I am a key person on a team, I have an obligation to give no less than 2 weeks notice, and probably much more if I want to remain in good professional standing w/ the company I work for (eg, more notice for small companies) . Why? Because despite the lack of contract and resolutions, there is more at stake than just what is stated on paper, there is reputation, business continuity and implied continuations in the relationship.

I see it similarly with an author. Yes, there has been a transaction that takes place and is complete. But if GRRM wants to keep relationship and reputation intact, then there is more to the picture than money in and book out. There is the way the customer feels when they hear the series is cancelled, for example.

<comment><USER14> Welch may get it wrong for an ongoing relationship where you're dedicating 25% of your life to the company, but I think he has it exactly right for an occasional one-off that you pay a small amount of money for, and where the other guy doesn't even know who you are. I mean, you're talking about a situation with two weeks notice as somehow being relevant to a situation where the _ideal_ involves multiple _years_ between transactions.

You say "if GRRM wants to keep relationship and reputation intact...." I agree with that. But "keep relationship and reputation intact" is completely different from "obligation".

Yes, if GRRM wants to maintain his reputation as the author of a series worth reading, it would be helpful if he could get new installments out on some sort of regular basis. (But who are we kidding: people will buy them by the million regardless.) But if he decides that he _doesn 't_ care about people buying his books anymore, that's his choice. There's no obligation on his part to maintain his reputation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Title should probably have [2009] added.

</comment><comment><USER16> While I agree wholeheartedly with the article I feel there is a flip side to this: announcing what you're going to do can be a way to put some pressure on a late project. Be it a business project (signaling we're in crunch because we've half announced it), or a personal (as in a way to fight procrastination).

Now I don't know how much GRRM tells about his progress on his blog, because I don't follow it, but I'm sure some authors in the past have used this technique to feel some pressure to finish up something.

<comment><USER17> Martin is in a tough spot, and Gaiman points that out.

It's a known quirk that announcing you're going to do something decreases the likelihood that you'll actually get it done.

[http://sivers.org/zipit](http://sivers.org/zipit)

But if you actually publish a book that's labelled "BOOK ONE OF A SERIES" then you're implicitly saying that you will be working on a sequel. You don't need to say anything to anyone. This is why Gaiman says _" Both of these things make me glad that I am not currently writing a series"_.

<comment><USER16> Interesting read. I wonder how universal that is. Some years ago I told a bunch of friends that my new year's resolution was quitting smoking and if they were to see me smoke they were allowed to call me an idiot. It worked pretty well for me.

<comment><USER18> Ah, but that was adding social pressure as opposed to just saying "I'm going to do X."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very bad intro for the main article, because apparently Gaiman doesn't realise that American Airlines is 'not his bitch' either, and similarly he has no right to be _outraged_ that his laptop didn't plug into their power adaptors.

I'm actually a bit sad that Gaiman went with "is not letting you down" rather than "is letting you down, but seriously, it's not that big a deal". If you build an audience with an expectation, and you don't see it through, you've let them down. That doesn't give the audience the right to do anything nasty to you, but you have disappointed them.

If you, as a writer, have stated an intention to make a series of X length, but any of the Life things that Gaiman mentions happen and you fail to complete it, that's fair enough. Life happens. But you've failed to see through on your commitment - that's a disappointment to people that wanted to see it through. It's not the end of the world - those people don't lose their jobs or their cats or whatever - but it's still a let-down.

The final moral of the story really should have been "So what, move on, Life happens", rather than implying that the questioner is a bad person for expecting someone to see through on something that they said they'd do.

<comment><USER20> Or perhaps the AA interlude was very intentionally ironic.

<comment><USER19> I thought it might be at first, but I didn't see anything else in the body of the article that tied back to it. It wouldn't make much sense if it was intentional, because it undermines the very lengthy point he was making in the rest of the article.

<comment><USER21> I think it reinforces it rather brilliantly. As someone else mentioned - he's a very bright writer :)

<comment><USER19> There was a Mad Magazine article that said that you know you've made it as a successful movie director when critics started finding symbolism in your movies that you'd never put there in the first place. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think part of this is the contract that exists would be between Martin and the publisher. They're the ones that would need to get the finished product from GRRM.

But what about kickstarter projects? If I'm now the one funding or partially funding does the artist then, in Neil Gaiman's words, "become my bitch"?

What the difference in expectations when you're a consumer of a product (GRRM to me) or a funder of a product (kickstarter to me)?

<comment><USER23> I think part of the difference there is that you haven't pre-purchased GRRM's next book. Maybe you're good friends with your local bookshop, and they've agreed to put a copy aside for you when it comes out, but that deal hasn't made it up to him.

To use Gaimen's terminology, GRRM may be his publisher's "bitch", but at this level of success they're probably pretty happy to have him. His contract may in fact say "when it's done" rather than "June 3, 2014, minimum 20,000 words, and someone the readers love must die".

<comment><USER24> > someone the readers love must die

Other than royalty terms this is actually the entire contents of his contract with the publisher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Authors have been missing deadlines pretty much as long as they've been writing books. If you wish to have an expectation that author X or book Y isn't going to fit that pattern then feel free, but I'm not sure you should be terribly surprised or outraged if / when it doesn't happen.

The simple solution would seem to be that if you are someone who likes reading things in a nice predictable pattern the wait for the series to complete before starting. After all, it's not as if there are a lack of things to read in the meantime.

</comment><comment><USER26> Ironic, the entitlement he feels about having an adapter on his AA flight before complaining about entitlement issues from his/GRRM's audience... or was that the point?

<comment><USER27> I'm sure that was the point. Gaiman is a pretty smart guy. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If he made it an app instead people would be up in arms the updates don't come fast enough too. But with books at least they would pay him again if he released a new one.

</comment><comment><USER29> Site's dead. Can someone summarize better than the title?

(edited an hour later, nobody's posted a cache link and nobody's summarized the actual post... so all I got is along the lines of "somebody's expectations collided with reality" and a bunch of off topic yet interesting literary discussion. And it seems to have something to do with the multiple laptop power standards that I already know about for aircraft and their airlines)

<comment><USER30> "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch."

<comment><USER31> That felt a little hostile; maybe I wasn't reading it in the proper voice, or reading the letter writer in the proper voice, but in my head the letter writer seemed to _know_ that GRRM didn't owe him anything, and just wanted some more meat put on those bones of an idea.

<comment><USER32> I think that even with free software authors, it's easy to act entitled to their work. (Undervaluing people's work is one of the world's great issues...)

<comment><USER31> True. I remember people getting angry at the TrueCrypt guy(?) for daring to quit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I can only say that I was very glad that Robert Jordan had time to plan out and pass on the whole of his story to another writer.

I know it's entitled - but I really expect GRRM to make considerations to ensure that the whole story will be told. I don't think he owes me the story _now_ , I don't mind waiting for him to do the writing as he envisions it - but I do kind of feel that he owes me a complete tale.

<comment><USER14> Why do you feel he owes you anything at all? Unless he held a Kickstarter in which he promised to finish the series if he got enough money, or something like that, why is there _any_ obligation of any kind whatsoever?

I feel you owe me a reply, so get to it. (Kidding, but I hope you see how absurd that is.)

<comment><USER34> There's a convention, when you sell a book, that it's a complete story. An implicit contract, if you like. If you sold a book that was half a book - <USER2> stopped mid-sentence and you had to buy a different book to finish the story - most people would consider that a dick move. Likewise a book that's advertised as part of a series can be understood to come with an implicit promise that the rest of the series will exist.

Why do I feel he owes me anything at all? Well, I did pay him for it. If I bought some software and the author refused to fix bugs, I'd feel cheated. An unfinished story is somewhat like that.

<comment><USER14> Clearly there is no such convention that books are complete stories, because then series wouldn't exist. And clearly there is no such convention that a series will be finished, because then there wouldn't be permanently unfinished series out there, and there are a lot of them.

You paid him for the book, which you received. Transaction complete. Debt paid. He no longer owes you more.

<comment><USER35> I feel this kind of reasoning is weird. If an author writes a book as a part of a series he's clearly telling you "this book is part of a bigger story which I have my most sincere intention of telling and reaching its conclussion, eventually". There's clearly a convention here, which doesn't necessarily translate into an actionable obligation (which is what you wanted to say).

You don't want to get into that implicit contract? Then don't write a series, or write it for yourself and don't publish it. I don't agree with those who whine because Martin doesn't finish the series, but I also don't agree with those who say that we should expect nothing from him.

When I started reading this series (about 15 years ago) they were supposed to be 4 books to be released at 2-year intervals. Then he added more books, took a lot of time to write them (between 5 and 6 years for the last 2) and now I can't even say "could I at least expect that you will finish the series sometime?".

<comment><USER14> Many series simply go on forever without any plan for a conclusion. Many series plan for a conclusion but it doesn't work out for a variety of reasons. What's the point of declaring an "implicit contract" for something that is so frequently unfulfilled?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> GRRM is not my bitch. Point taken, for sure.

However, I hope GRRM realizes that the opposite is also true. His readers aren't his bitch either. Without new quality material, interest in his books will fade. Also, HBO isn't his bitch either. If he doesn't produce new material, the TV show plot will pass the book's and he will lose some control over what people consider _the_ real tale.

<comment><USER37> On the HBO point, that was my thought while reading Gaiman's thoughts. Us readers have no claim to his work. Buying his books doesn't form a contract that means he owes us something.

But HBO is a completely different story. They do have a claim to his work. When they bought the rights to bring his books to TV, they most certainly did sign a contract and I'm sure that, given the series was unfinished when the contract was signed, there were provisions for the possibility that he wouldn't finish in time.

The way things are looking, it's a pretty good bet that HBO's writers will be the ones that finish GoT and he'll eventually have to write the last two books to follow the plot that HBO settles on. Hopefully he'll be consulted on plot points, but HBO isn't going to put the show on hiatus while they wait for him to finish it himself.

<comment><USER38> > The way things are looking, it's a pretty good bet that HBO's writers will > be the ones that finish GoT and he'll eventually have to write the last two > books to follow the plot that HBO settles on. Hopefully he'll be consulted > on plot points, but HBO isn't going to put the show on hiatus while they > wait for him to finish it himself.

ISTR reading that GRRM has provided, and continues to provde, HBO's writers plot outlines and drafts ahead of what has been published, as well as being actively consulted on plot points in the show (which don't always follow the books precisely.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> While I agree with the comments with respect to GRRM, I can't let Patrick Rothfuss off the hook.

I started reading the Kingkiller Chronicle with the understanding that he had already finished the books, and would be releasing them each year for three years. Now that he's blown each deadline by a couple years, I'm a lil' salty.

Was I incorrect to infer some light social contract there?

<comment><USER40> It seems like the general idea for the full story was done, and "The Book" (as he called it) "existed" in a very rough draft, but with each release he's going back, re-editing and re-working them, adding bits here and there, improving the story until it's to the point that he wants it to be. It would make sense to me that, with each book, the ripple of stuff that needs fixing in the story later on needs more and more re-work.

I believe the first two books were released 4 years apart. It seems that that's the cadence for the books. And hey, Auri novella this fall! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> GRRM could take a leaf out of Douglas Adams' book(s) and just declare ASOIAF a trilogy.

</comment><comment><USER42> And there's a song about this: [http://scifisongs.blogspot.com/2009/08/sci-fi- song-20-george...](http://scifisongs.blogspot.com/2009/08/sci-fi- song-20-george-rr-martin-is-not.html).

</comment><comment><USER43> "Sometimes it happens like that. You don't choose what will work. You simply do the best you can each time. And you try to do what you can to increase the likelihood that good art will be created."

Great advice.

</comment><comment><USER44> Favorite bit that I constantly struggle to explain to people who are biding for my time:

"But what if he wanted to paint his house?"

Great find :)

</comment><comment><USER45> tl;dr GRRM is not your bitch. Remember that.

<comment><USER46> This blog post has become so famous I just assumed the title was "GRRM is not your bitch."

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> If I promise to produce a piece of work in a time frame and then didn't produce that work in that time frame then I would expect to take some shit.

<comment><USER48> Who did he promise?

<comment><USER49> In the Author's Notes of Book 4 in 2006, he writes that he completed the book, and it was so large (2000 pages) that he was forced to cut it in half, and that first half was Book 4, and that Book 5 would be out the following year. Then he took another 6 years to publish Book 5, which was ostensibly done back in 2006. Granted, he said he changed his mind about a lot of things and had to rewrite stuff, but the fact remains that he said it was "done" in 2006. In the meantime, his blog posts were about his football predictions and painting his house.

I have sympathy for authors who don't put deadlines out there, but there's no excuse for being 6 years late after saying it was already done. Considering that the release of the 5th book coincided with a TV series, it strikes me as nothing more than a cash grab.

One of the (many) reasons why I don't support GRRM or his work anymore. Which is a shame. The aSoIaF series was fantastically written.

<comment><USER48> Maybe you and I have different definitions of the word "promise", then.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Red Flags for Freelance Web Developers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@littlesparkvt/red-flags-for-freelance-web-developers-90caa79f583f

<comment><USER2> Working for only a minority equity share seems foolish. I could instead work on my own ideas and keep 100%, and my ideas are better than those of people expecting me to work for equity/revenue share/free.

Other red flags:

Meeting me in a Starbucks.

Asking for an NDA before telling me their stupid idea.

Fixed-price contracts.

<comment><USER3> If I had a dollar for every "client" that asked to meet me at Starbucks and sign an NDA then I'd be a millionaire.</comment></comment>


Apple releases iTunes 11 - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2012/11/29/apple-releases-itunes-11-with-simplified-player-redesigned-store-and-more/

<comment><USER2> I would like Apple to release a damn API to the iDevices so that some other motherfucker can innovate on this clusterfuck of an old codebase

<comment><USER3> The new version is a ground up rewrite..

<comment><USER4> I find that difficult to credit - I don't have any insider info., but that's not how Apple goes, for the most part. Also, if they _were_ doing a total rewrite (as they did with FCP or iMovie) I would expect the outcome to be much _more_ different from iTunes 10 than 11 is.

<comment><USER5> _I find that difficult to credit - I don't have any insider info., but that's not how Apple goes, for the most part._

From my first experience, it does seem to be whole lot faster than iTunes < 11\. I also like interface more.

<comment><USER4> No question good work was done. But I imagine a complete rewrite would involve say non-modal preference dialogs just to pick a long-running irritation out of a hat.

<comment><USER6> Seconded. The preferences dialog appears to be completely unchanged from iTunes 10.

What's especially irritating about this is that modal preferences dialogs with 'Ok'/'Cancel' buttons have been discouraged since, as far as I'm aware, the 10.0 HIG.

<comment><USER7> > What's especially irritating about this is that modal preferences dialogs > with 'Ok'/'Cancel' buttons have been discouraged since, as far as I'm aware, > the 10.0 HIG.

When _has_ Apple followed their own HIG?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It works well for me on Windows but there are no significant performance improvements. Design is no doubt better.

I still wonder why Apple doesn't use their $100 billion to get some A-grade software engineers. Steve Jobs used to boast about A-level players and all that. But current mess that iTunes is can't be from A-level players.

And don't even get me started on Safari for Windows. Apple just seems to have dropped ball completely on it!

<comment><USER4> I wonder who you think works on clang/llvm (or CoreAudio, or xnu, or Quicktime)? People who can't get jobs writing Rails models for consumer web startups?

<comment><USER9> > I wonder who you think works on clang/llvm (or CoreAudio, or xnu, or > Quicktime)?

People smart enough not to get anywhere near iTunes?

(really, would you trade clang or kernel dev for that?)

<comment><USER4> Touché!

In fairness, though, the iTunes client team is a lot smaller than most people probably realize. Problems with the software are almost certainly the fault of management trying to do more with less, and not the competence (in my experience, extremely high) of the individual devs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> New version seems faster in some respects, but at least ridiculously slow in another: searching with the Column Browser open.

I have a huge library--~63000 songs; I'm a musician--and although iTunes 10.7 search was quite reasonable, the new iTunes takes several seconds to do anything after typing a query. Even if I turn off "Search Entire Library" (so that it only searches the active screen, like Music) it is incredibly unresponsive. I'm talking ~6 seconds for the UI to update and the program to become responsive again. If I limit the search to only one field (e.g., Composer) it is faster, but still substantially slower than iTunes 10.7 (~2 seconds for the UI to update, compared to the previous results of nearly instant), and it makes the search much less useful.

Closing the Column Browser speeds up filtering, though it's still slower than 10.7.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps iTunes 11 needs to index your library over again before the speed improves?

<comment><USER12> I doubt it, it seems to be using the same plist format(essentially, a glorified xml file) as previous versions.

<comment><USER13> the plist is only for external app, internally it uses a sqlite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> SG- It seems finally the green maximize button no longer toggles the mini player mode and actually does what it's supposed to do.

</comment><comment><USER14> I really like the new mini player. Its finally useful, as it finally includes all main music listening tasks including search.

<comment><USER14> I have to take that back. The mini player considers "space" the same as "enter" and just hits whatever has focus at the moment. Also, it tends to select "back" if you refocus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks a lot like iTunes 10. And … the bug I opened in 2008 is still there! Sweet. Sort your library by Album/Year, and then reverse direction (year descending.) Reverses album order. E_WONTFIX.

<comment><USER7> Not at all actually.

[http://images.pcworld.com/reviews/graphics/products/uploaded...](http://images.pcworld.com/reviews/graphics/products/uploaded/apple_itunes_10.html_664578_g2.jpg)

vs

[http://images.apple.com/itunes/whats- new/images/redesigned_p...](http://images.apple.com/itunes/whats- new/images/redesigned_player_libraryviews1.jpg)

There's no sidebar for quick access to things, you have to click album art to select a song, etc. It's a very large UI departure. You can return it to more normal though by viewing by "song" and then selecting View > Show Sidebar.

<comment><USER4> It hasn't added any useful metadata features. It doesn't appear to cache the downsampled synced versions of music. The default view is different, but it's trivial to get back to the well understood two/three pane layout. There's more iCloud stuff. The "Up Next" feature is pretty nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just downloaded this. I really like the new design, especially the new album view feature.

The most interesting update to me is iTunes Match: <http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/>

<comment><USER16> Hmm. As far as I can tell, not much about iTunes Match has been updated. It's been available since iOS 5 (and whatever the corresponding iTunes update was -- 10.x?)

<comment><USER15> Oh, for some reason I'd never heard of it until this update. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What's up with the awful bold fonts everywhere in the interface?

<comment><USER18> Haven't downloaded yet, but apparently they use Helvetica Neue Light for some interface elements now. Perhaps you don't have that installed and it's defaulting to Bold?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been using iTunes DJ a lot lately, but it doesn't appear to exist anymore. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER20> I'm still waiting for iTunes to have a normal queue that only plays the songs in it.

<comment><USER21> How would this differ from a playlist and/or Up Next?

<comment><USER22> I've been waiting for "Up Next" Since I migrated from Winamp - Being able to play a song, and then realize "I know what would go PERFECTLY after this", is very useful.

Or listening to music, selecting a much of tracks, and throwing them in the queue, without the hassle of creating a playlist ahead of time.

Very pleased!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> That reminds me just how awful iTunes is. About a year ago, I switched to RDio/Spotify and I have not looked back. I do not have any local mp3s any more. Just some flacs for audio testing purposes.

It has been months since I last used iTunes.

<comment><USER24> I use iTunes to play my collection of lossless audio (downloaded as FLAC, converted to ALAC in m4a containers). I also like to DJ occasionally, or send albums to friends. Spotify allows for none of that, and has no lossless playback options.

I'm not down on Spotify - I am a customer, as well. But don't pose it as the solution to actually possessing a music library. If all you do is listen to your music on earbuds, it's just fine. The moment you want to do more with it, you're stuck.

<comment><USER23> It is a solution for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I look forward to checking this out though I find that with Spotify/Pandora, iCloud iOS backups, and the Podcast app on my iOS devices, I open up iTunes less and less these days. It's not even on my dock anymore.

</comment><comment><USER26> I am pretty happy with Enqueue as a replacement for iTunes, it plays flac's too.

<http://www.enqueueapp.com/> (No affiliation)

</comment><comment><USER27> That logo just keeps getting more and more atrocious. Goodness.

<comment><USER17> Icon you mean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does it do anything more sensible with pdf's and epub's?

<comment><USER29> Nope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Here's the old icon for anyone that want's it.

<http://grnd.cc/LEbh>

</comment><comment><USER31> I wish they would release us from iTunes or at least let me use the damned thing with my work and home computer.

</comment><comment><USER32> The new UI is quite nice, although its striking similarity to Sonora's design leaves me with quite a bitter aftertaste. Unfortunately there seem to be no substantial improvements over metadata and format handling; it looks like I will keep missing foobar2k for a long time still.

</comment><comment><USER33> I still can't authorize more than 5 computers. Yes, 5 computers is a lot, but if you home/work computers for a couple with a shared account/library and a family room iMac, that's it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Can someone convince me there is a non-stupid reason for having to close Xcode to make the upgrade?

</comment><comment><USER35> Gotta be honest: although the new UI is very much functional, it looks like absolute shit.

<comment><USER36> Form follows function, in my mind.

<comment><USER35> Yah, just surprised they couldn't achieve both, as they often have. Won't stop me form using it.. Just not sure this change was worth the effort.</comment></comment></comment>


Moto 360 review – Beautiful outside, ugly inside - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/moto-360-review-beautiful-outside-ugly-inside/ <comment><USER2> This article is very strange, on page 2 they spend tons of time lamenting the 360 for having a terrible CPU, then run tests they themselves created which don't really support the level of disdain they're showing.

They then almost completely ignore the results of their own tests but tack on a point about "well floating point sucks, so that explains our criticisms." Except it doesn't. A much more likely candidate (which they themselves hint at) is using poorly performing storage or having software glitches.

So I cannot tell if the author didn't understand the results or just wanted to moan that the 360 had an old CPU and didn't really care what the data actually said (they also provide no source for the power consumption claims).

I won't be buying a 360 simply because it has terrible battery life and costs $250. But this article is a little off. The second page just isn't consistent with itself.

<comment><USER3> The CPU benchmarks don't make it a good CPU. It's old and power hungry, that's primarily why it sucks.

<comment><USER4> The age is not an issue, people thought the iPhone 4 was wicked fast at the time, the speed seems adequate for a smart watch I would contend the software is too bloated - Java is not the fastest tool in the shed. However the fact that it's power hungry is a deal breaker in a watch.

<comment><USER5> Cortex A8 was considered power hungry even for its time, among other 40nm chips.

Cortex A9 was both a more efficient and more powerful chip. Now, what most OEMs use in low-end phones, and even smartwatches is Cortex A7 which is roughly as powerful as Cortex A8, but far more efficient, both because of its design but also because it comes at 28nm.

I think this comparison was made by ARM itself:

[http://archive.linuxgizmos.com/ldimages/stories/arm_cortexa7...](http://archive.linuxgizmos.com/ldimages/stories/arm_cortexa7_comparison.jpg)

It's really strange that Motorola would go for the 3 year old Cortex A8 core, when Cortex A7 has been available for more than a year, and several chip makers produce them in different varieties.

<comment><USER6> Cost and Availability are two big reasons to use an older technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The Bluetooth phone-to-watch connection is unstable and loses connection randomly. Every android wear device we've tested does this".

I've tested all of them (literally), on 3 very different phones (GS5, LG3, Moto X) , and _never experienced this_.

Without any more data on the test environment, one might think they would stop to check whether the problem is on their side if it happens _all the time_ on _every device_.

It's like saying "Every table we tried had objects roll off them. Therefore, they are bad tables" (or you know, the floor you put them on wasn't level)

<comment><USER8> Bluetooth is _very_ finicky.

* The version of the OS running on the phone can impact BT stability

* What other BT devices you are paired to can impact BT stability

* The RF environment you are in can impact BT stability

Reliably replicating Bluetooth bugs is... interesting.

<comment><USER6> One of the advantages of being Apple.

They have almost all their users on the latest OS, they control the stack end to end and everyone is quite fine if features are only supported on certain models.

<comment><USER9> One of the advantages of having a Nexus/Play Edition Device.

They have almost all their users on the latest OS, they control the stack end to end and everyone is quite fine if features are only supported on certain models.

<comment><USER10> What about the other 79.1% of android users?

[http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html](http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html)

<comment><USER11> 71.2% can be ignored since android wear doesn't support them. My own experience in wearable tech is that 68.7% of our android users are running 4.4 and the nexus 5 is twice as popular as the next most popular phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The battery life is crucial on a device like this. Moto screwed this device up big time. Old outdated processor that isn't as power efficient as current gen processors. Battery that lasts 24h at most, for a watch, that is off unless you turn your wrist. I would have paid more for higher battery life and a modern processor. This processor is from 2010, I just don't understand.

<comment><USER13> Agreed, I was looking forward to this smartwatch and don't really care about the raw "speed" of the CPU (as long as it can run the watch face displays well and have basic music controls I'm good, not going to ask it to do much...), but by all reports (common theme in all the reviews I've seen) the battery life is pretty horrific.

There's no way I'm ever buying a smartwatch that doesn't _easily_ get 1 full day worth of life without a recharge. I wouldn't put up with that on a smartphone, and a smartphone is MUCH easier to randomly recharge during the day than something strapped to your wrist is.

OTOH, there's no way I'm buying a clunky dorky smartwatch either and the Moto 360 is by far the best looking of the bunch, so I guess I'm waiting until next year's batch until Moto fixes the battery problem or some other company fixes their industrial design problems.

<comment><USER14> YMMV based on amount of notifications/calls, but I'm getting around 36 hours on the G Watch. Obviously it isn't what you'd call pretty, but looks like with the R they're making progress toward a proper watch design. Maybe next year they'll have full screens that look like the Withings one...

<comment><USER15> That's about the same as I would get on the Gear Live if I skipped charging it for a night. On a normal day, I take it off the charger around 8:00 or 8:30, and I'm usually going to bed around 2:00 with 45-ish percent left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The comparison chart and cover photo show other "real watches" like the "Tag Heuer Aquaracer 300M" which costs only.. $2,300 ( [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0055NBVDM](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0055NBVDM) ).

Ars Technica reviews are usually good but they couldn't have found a watch that's not 10X the Moto's price to compare aesthetics to?

*Edit: Corrected site name.

<comment><USER17> I think you meant Ars, not Anandtech.

As for the comparison, I'm sure that was a bit tongue and cheek. No one buys a > $1k watch for functionality. Anyways, if you ever get a chance to attend Basel World, I highly recommend it.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the Basel World link, I hadn't heard of that before but their brand book is really cool.

[http://media.messe.ch/epaper/BASELWORLD/2014/Baselworld_Bran...](http://media.messe.ch/epaper/BASELWORLD/2014/Baselworld_Brand_Book_2014/index.html)

[http://www.baselworld.com/en-US/The- Show/BrandBook2014.aspx](http://www.baselworld.com/en-US/The- Show/BrandBook2014.aspx)

<comment><USER17> I went there on a whim when I was living in Lausanne. It was crazy: the lowest priced watches on display were around $40K.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > While the outside is a good expression of what a smartwatch should be, the > inside is fatally flawed. Motorola inexplicably chose an ancient 1GHz > single-core Texas Instruments OMAP 3 SoC to power the 360. For some > perspective, that's a 2010-era processor in the same league as the iPhone 4 > or Nexus One. Smartwatch processors don't need to be as powerful as their > smartphone companions, but there is no reason for them to be old. It's > almost as if Motorola raided a dumpster outside the TI factory for parts.

Haha, this is a good joke. Why do you need to have so much CPU power for a smatchwatch anyway, that won't be driving tons of pixels every microsecond ? What's really the issue there? We still use MUCH older processors in calculators as well, for very specific reasons too and for battery life.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, a single core seems like it ought to be enough for a watch. The real problem is that it's an old, power-hungry core with an old GPU.

<comment><USER15> Pretty much all the watches are single-core. Most of them are using a Snapdragon 400 (quad-core) but with all but one of the cores disabled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Smartwatches will fail. It _seems_ a cool idea, but like Dick Tracy's wrist- phone, wrist-calculators, and wrist-watch computers (they've been around for many years), they won't take off. Most of us stopped wearing watches the moment we got cell phones. Smartwatches are awkward, and an even smaller display than a smartphone - which are currently increasing in size.

Better is a bare headsup device - a "display" as big as you like, without being bigger. Google Glass _sans_ camera (so no privacy concerns til we're ready for it). It can even have the time in the corner...

 _EDIT_ yes opps, s/phone/watch/. Ironically cut/paste was failing on my smartphone, as was I.

<comment><USER22> "Smartphones will fail."

I guess you mean "smartwatch". Phones have been pretty successful so far ;)

Anyway, I think I do not agree with you, since I got the early ugly firstrun Android wear device from I/O, the LG Watch.

My experience is that the watch is by no means the next step in the evolution of personal computers or anything. But it is a very useful accessory for the computer you already have in your pocket.

Once you have it on your wrist you notice that

\- phone ringtones are awkward and annoying to anyone around you.

\- opening and unlocking your phone 125 times per day (This numbers is from Google) just to check for information and if there is something you need to act on right now is incredible annoying.

\- voice commands, as limited as this is right now, is only useful if you can trigger it immediately when you need it. The few voice commands I find useful (set alarm, remind me to...) are much much more convenient if I can just say them.

So my point is that the watch is much more useful than a case, and only slightly less useful than headphones. If they start being equipped with more sensors and the cost falls below $80, they will become even more interesting.

<comment><USER23> I gave up on watches when I was a PC service tech. Anything on your hands or wrists was just an invitation for the jagged-edge-fairies to get their claws in.

So I haven't used a watch for about 20 years.

I don't look at my phone anywhere near as often as 120 times per day. I have headphones with play/skip buttons, so that covers about 97% of my interaction with my phone during the day.

<comment><USER24> The form factor may not be for you however I find my smart watch to be an amazing time saver. That's the joy of diversity... the ability to have products that match our preferences. I never ever wear headphones with play/skip buttons but I understand their appeal for people they work for.

I get the same benefits noted above from my smartwatch, first the Pebble and now the LG. They have become a priceless part of my daily routine.

<comment><USER25> Out of genuine curiosity, what do you use the watch for that you would associate with time savings? I've been curious about these things, but haven't been sure as to if they're a product in search of a problem for the current implementation and limitations.

<comment><USER24> I was gifted a Pebble over a year ago and I admit I thought it was a bit of a gimmick at the time. I did however start wear it out of consideration for the person that gave it to me and the novelty of a new toy. :) (note too that I am an old-timer who still wears a watch regularly)

What happened however surprised me. I found the simple change of having notifications pop up on my wrist was saving me from pulling the phone out of its holder over and over during a day every time it chimed with an email or message. I get a ton of communication during the day but 70% of it doesn't require a response from me immediately... the remaining 30% however does. I was now able to filter incoming messages with barely an interruption to what I was doing at the time.

From there I expanded Apps to bringing up my calendar overview, putting navigation directions on my wrist, using silent alarms (wrist vibration) to alert me during meetings, etc. It allows me to be more connected to my phone, without being more connected to my phone, if you know what I mean.

Now I have since moved to an LG watch and I do like it. No more week long battery life but it will go over a day easily. Lots more gimmicky applications like remote camera control, etc. but also useful things, like ticking items off my Keep grocery list as I wander the store... without holding my phone.

Is it perfect for everyone? Nothing is. :) But I will stand corrected for my early mocking of the form factor. I "don't leave home without it" now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I find it weird that they're critizing the CPU for being old, as if age itself is a bad thing.

I find it hard to believe an OMAP3 at 1GHz would be insufficient to power a smartwatch. Perhaps something is wrong with the software, they're using slower memory chips, or the NAND is of the slow & cheap variety.

I currently have a 1GHz MIPS-powered Android smartwatch (pre-Wear though), and it's plenty fast. Battery life is not great (1-2 days), but this is a cheap SoC, produced on 45nm, with WiFi and bluetooth running all the time.

I'm honestly quite amazed at how much technology we manage to push into such small, battery powered packages!

<comment><USER27> > I find it hard to believe an OMAP3 at 1GHz would be insufficient to power a > smartwatch.

That's not the claim being made, especially given it's compared to similarly- clocked SoC.

The article makes two claims: 1. the watch stutters which may be caused by the low floating-point performances (benched very low), and 2. the SoC is power- hungry leading to miserable battery life.

The difference? The other SoC are based on Cortex A7, which was created in part to provide equivalent performances but much better efficiency than the A8: [http://images.anandtech.com/doci/4991/Screen%20Shot%202011-1...](http://images.anandtech.com/doci/4991/Screen%20Shot%202011-10-19%20at%2012.30.25%20PM_575px.png)

<comment><USER26> I find that floating point story hard to swallow. It looks like they went "huh, this CPU benchmarks roughly as fast as the others, but we find it slow in practice. Only floating point benchmarks lag behind the competition, so that must be why!".

Floating point instruction are rarely used in common software. They're important in rendering (which is offloaded to a GPU in this case) or scientific computing (which is irrelevant here, unless you were planning to fold genomes on your watch).

It's possible that this OMAP came without an FPU to save space and power.

Most Linux software for ARM is compiled with softfloat anyway, because it rarely matters for end users, and lots of ARM boards don't have an FPU. Some distributions have a separate armhf version, which does use hardware floating point operations.

<comment><USER28> The quoted /proc/cpuinfo reports vfpv3 and neon, so it does have an FPU (and it even has the Neon SIMD instructions, which not all SoCs of that era do).

From my perspective the softfloat-vs-hardfloat balance has tipped and I would say that "most Linux software for ARM" is now hardfloat rather than softfloat. But your view on this kind of thing depends a lot on whereabouts in the embedded world you are: if you're at the trailing edge then you'll see a lot more ARMv5 non-FPU devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can someone tell me why they're using a full Android stack for Android Wear?? To me its doing nothing that small (read very power efficient) micro such as an STM32 or an MSP430 could do with much more efficiency.

There is no reason whatsoever to run Linux/Android/Dalvik/etc on a device that just needs to run a Bluetooth stack & LCD. Doing this using an STM32 would give you an order of magnitude (guess) improvement in power efficiency with no difference to the user.

<comment><USER30> It reminds me of Microsoft's early attempts at portable devices, where they seemed to think they needed a huge chunk of the Windows desktop API and its conventions in a phone or tablet. Watches are not phones, they're peripherals, and they don't need such a bulky software stack. Maybe Apple will handle this differently.

<comment><USER31> Apple already have a more efficient software stack. However Apple are also targeting fewer hardware differences (which, I suspect, is why Google is sticking with a bytecode-based language, to target "everything").

Google's ART (Dalvik "replacement") initiative might help with power usage a little (as well as loading times). But unless there is a massive shift in the way Android works, I cannot see Google making enough changes to make Android a really great watch OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm a bit disappointed this review doesn't go more into details on how the watch is to use on a daily basis. We've had months to talk about the technical specifications and looks, but now they've finally got one! Did it make them use their phone less? Did it last from morning to evening at typical use? When was it the most useful? When was it the least? The article doesn't seem interested in these issues at all.

</comment><comment><USER33> All in all, I think it's too much of an experimental product to be spending $250 on. I'm not exactly wealthy to throw money away like that.

</comment><comment><USER34> I should preface this by saying that I know very little about batteries and consumer electronics, but a little about watches.

The problem of how to keep a mostly or completely analog watch wound throughout the day was solved a very long time ago. I wonder how feasible it would be to use something like the rotor weight from an automatic mechanical[1] or automatic quartz[2] watch as a trickle charger.

Would that just be too little added energy for the added complexity?

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_watch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_watch) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_quartz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_quartz)

<comment><USER35> [http://www.withings.com/activite/en-US](http://www.withings.com/activite/en- US) This watch takes a different meaning of smartwatch, but it's closer to a year of battery life.

<comment><USER36> It's not really a smartwatch (not that it matters). I do like the different approach and I think it's very promising, but it's still very specific in what it does. It's an activity tracker plus watch. There is nothing wrong with that, but it's also limited to just that. I would expect more from a smartwatch (but maybe no one needs a smartwatch anyone and this is a much more promising model for the future).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The bottom line is it's a "crushing disappointment after six months of hype".

</comment><comment><USER38> This watch looks really great except for the battery life. I hope that Motorola keeps working on it. I would love a longer-lasting successor. I'm worried that the poor reception due to the battery life might kill the whole concept.

</comment><comment><USER39> With an e-ink display the battery could last month (think of Kindle e-ink display).

<comment><USER40> E-ink doesn't update fast enough or well enough for a watch. Have you ever used a Kindle? The Pebble uses an "E paper"[1] display which doesn't use a backlight and that watch can last a week. Battery life is proportional to how often the display is updated.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Wristwatches](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Wristwatches)

<comment><USER41> Aye. I saw the Moto360 battery Hangouts test results and thought, well, I'm happy I got my Pebble Steel this year. It's an awesome device with fantastic looking always on screen that doesn't try to be too much (I have a smartphone for that!). And battery life is measured in days, not hours.

When my low battery warning comes on at 20%, I've still 4x longer to go than a fully charged Moto360 - given a few notifications on each device.

<comment><USER42> Pebble Steel looks great. If only it had a round display.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think it's fine to create an artificial battery benchmark to compare watches, but unless that is representative of actual use, it shouldn't be used as the "real battery life" or anything.

<comment><USER44> They say as much right in the article. They know their test is artificial and is only useful as a comparison between the devices.

> The test sends a Google Hangouts message to the watch every 15 seconds, and > uses ADB over Bluetooth to turn the screen on every 15 seconds. It's a > fairly heavy usage example, but it allows us to compare battery life across > Android Wear devices with a fair amount of scientific rigor.

<comment><USER43> Exactly. I just worry that 219 minutes will get bandied about as "what Ars got for the battery life."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> What does "terrible performance" mean? Why is there some convoluted benchmark instead of a description -- better yet, a video -- of how it actually works?

What is it like to use one every day? Is it useful at all? I don't get hangout requests every 15 minutes, does the battery last a day of normal usage?

I remembered why I don't ready tech press any more.

</comment><comment><USER46> Dat wrist tho....

<comment><USER47> It's a brown metal bar.</comment></comment>


What's a Browsewrap? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2014/08/whats-a-browsewrap-the-ninth-circuit-sure-doesnt-know-nguyen-v-barnes-noble.htm

<comment><USER2> Takeaway: make sure your users click-to-agree on your terms of use. Referencing them in the fine print somewhere isn't safe.

Professor Goldman often makes this comment: > "there are two types of online terms: mandatory click-through agreements and everything else, which I'll call ' _things that aren't contracts_.'"

Secondary takeaway - you probably want a _mandatory arbitration_ clause in your terms of service. Discuss it with your lawyer, but arbitration is often far less expensive and less distracting for a startup (compared to litigation).

</comment><comment><USER3> The future is scary. There isn't the time in the day for anyone to read all this legalese for every single service they use.

Imagine if you had to read the terms & service of every supermarket you walked into. Every convenience store.

<comment><USER4> Time to invest in a Cherry 2000?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urS8GmwmeWQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urS8GmwmeWQ)

(mildly NSFW bad 80s puns)

Despite being insane 80s-post-apocalyptic cheese, Cherry 2000 was quite visionary in this core plot point: when dating requires two lawyers and to negotiate the contractual for your "standard one night arrangement", a lot of people will choose the hassle-free android instead.

From this, we can conclude that teledildontics is probably one of the better long-term investments. :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I got about halfway through before my eyes glazed over. Anecdotally, this sentence struck a chord:

"But in the court's eyes, this is not enough. The court seems to say that there should be 'something more' drawing the user's attention to the terms, such as contrasting text or a warning...."

We were recently advised by external counsel that our privacy policy and safe harbor links were not adequately visible (they're just plain text at the bottom of every page), and restyled them accordingly. ymmv.</comment>