Google's $179 Moto G puts every single cheap Android phone to shame - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/12/review-googles-179-moto-g-puts-every-single-cheap-android-phone-to-shame/ <comment><USER2> If Google's plan is to leave the high-end of smartphones to its Android "partners" and stake out the low end with Motorola, that seems pretty smart. Its partners get to keep the high-margin hardware business that Google doesn't need anyway, Google puts a floor on how bad the low-end phones can be and still make it to market. And yeah, Google isn't in the position of competing with companies that it needs.

<comment><USER3> The divide between "High end" and "Low end" devices is beginning to blur. The improvements to high end devices are providing diminishing returns, while all the "essentials" have trickled down to low end devices.

<comment><USER4> This is actually why I've got a Moto G on order. This will be my first smart phone. Before I heard about the Moto G I always assumed my first smart phone would be a Nexus device, because I refuse to sign a carrier contract and I would rather have a dumb phone than carry around something that cost $600 in my pocket every day.

But with the Moto G, I get a cheap-ish device with all the features that actually matter to me (high res screen, good camera, reasonably fast processor, decent amount of RAM) and it doesn't come with a contract or a crazy price tag.

I saved $150 over buying a Nexus 5, and I doubt I'll even notice the difference (if anything, I'll like it better because, IIRC, the Moto G is a bit smaller than the Nexus).

<comment><USER5> hope you don't plan to travel. nexus 5 would work on most network. also get ready to be disappointed with the camera. even the motoX gets owned by old nokia phones.

the sad thing about google/moto only churning out low end phones, is that we now will have to give in to weird rooting/unlocking if we want basic features, like a simple sd card or removable battery.

i dread the day i have to abandon my old nexus and start fiddling with Odin and whatnot to unlock a high end phone. (odin is code you have to use to unlock samsung phones. nobody has the source, and it is allegedly stolen property from samsung... shady stuff, and that is what will update you phone bootloader. no thanks)

anyway, really wanted to have a high-end option that was free as the nexus claim to be (claim because the radio, camera driver, etc are never open source. but thats the best we can get, well, could.)

<comment><USER6> The fantastically inexpensive motoX has two flaws, and you're already down on it. Wonderful.

It's good to know we should be unsatisfied by budget devices that don't have _every single feature_ of a flagship device. After all, what kind of _slob_ would be satisfied by a phone that doesn't do _everything_?

<comment><USER7> Seems like you are confused. This is a tech site in which we're discussing technology, pros/cons of devices, etc.

Not some religious forum promoting humbleness and gratitude.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but GP's comparison is moot, IMO: I'm sure the GGP _knows_ that his $179 phone isn't going to blow anyone away in terms of camera potential. It came across as exactly like that typical "my phone is better than your phone" crap, even if it might not have been.

Also, I don't get his point about travel. It's got Quad-band HSDPA... honestly, that covers pretty much anywhere most people travel, or at least anywhere I've ever wanted to go. No-one uses 1700mhz for HSDPA apart from, what, T-Mobile in the US?

*shrugs

<comment><USER9> And the North American version of the Moto G actually does support '1700mhz' AWS HSPA+ too (so it's 100% T-Mobile USA compatible everywhere they offer HSPA+)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is getting really interesting. Between this, the Nexus 5 and the various Lumia's a $649 iPhone is starting to look very, very expensive.

Smartphones at the moment seem to have got 'good enough'.

<comment><USER11> iPhones are not intended to be purchased for $649 except by the very impatient (or people who break/lose their uninsured phones). If you wait your 2 years, it's $100 or $200 on-contract.

Of course it's different in emerging markets where contracts aren't the norm, but smartphone prices in the US are pretty damn close in terms of 2-year TCO.

<comment><USER12> I don't understand why people in America are so keen to pay for expensive monthly plans.

I pay $5-$10 dollars per month on average for my cellphone on prepay. It doesn't make sense all to buy a phone on plan.

<comment><USER13> Your problem is that you believe sensible plans are offered in the American market at all. Look at all the love people express for t-mobile's $30 / month plan. That's because it is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else you can get.

In China, I pay about US$15 every 3-4 months for a level of texting and voice talk that would easily cost $30 / month by itself in the US. (I don't have a data plan.)

I've tried going prepaid (also t-mobile) in the US. The economics worked out as long as I never expected to use my phone at all; if I expected anything, it was a money loss. And _even while I expected nothing_ , I had to keep paying $10 / month so that all my paid credit wouldn't suddenly expire.

<comment><USER14> The irony of capitalism working better in China the the US is strong. What failed in the US? Under or over regulated? Or is it the lobbyists thing?

<comment><USER13> The market for phone voice service isn't exactly the entirety of each country. "What failed in the US", if we want to compare only the situation in the US with that in China, could easily be that people in the US have so much more money that phone service prices are nine times higher.

<comment><USER14> I didn't mean to imply entirety with my comment, but it does read that way, apologies. Another issue could be the artificially low value of the Yaun?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Google is making a big play on smartphone for everyone model. Now if they could get carriers to agree to cheaper data model, their hand would be really strong. To some extent this favors T-Mobile and other no-discount/cheaper plans carriers.

<comment><USER16> They don't need to. You can get an unlimited data + 100 minute no contract plan from t-mobile for $30/month.

<comment><USER17> Where's that? I can only find $50, $60 and $70 plans:

[http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone- plans/individual.html](http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone- plans/individual.html)

<comment><USER16> Go here: [http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/sim-card](http://prepaid- phones.t-mobile.com/sim-card). Check your device, and once you know which SIM type you need, click the "Add to Cart" under "Phone".

I literally just did this, so the timing of this post is nice. Even more nice is that they are waiving the $10 SIM card fee right now.

You buy the actual plan after you get the SIM and activate it. I don't know what they charge for activation, if at all.

<comment><USER17> So it's not available to current T-Mobile customers unless you want to change your number, then?

<comment><USER18> Move your number to Google voice

Then you can use your unlimited data for calls (if I'm not mistaken)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd extend this statement and say that the Moto G puts _every single_ cheap phone to shame. Not just Android. It becomes very hard to justify a Lumia at $400 or an iPhone 4S at a ludicrous $450 when we have a flagship Nexus at $350 and now the Moto G at $179.

Combine that with the defiant cries against consumerism and wastefulness with Project Ara, and Google has really raised the bar by quite a bit for what a mobile phone OEM is capable of. It will be interesting to see what happens 3, 4 years down the line when the market fully resaturates with more price- friendly and DIY-friendly phones.

</comment><comment><USER20> Moto G is a great balance of price and performance. It is also much more sensible for a Google-owned OEM to pursue a distinctive niche in the market than to compete with Google's partners across their whole product line.

BUT that's just one handset. Nobody knows what Motorola will do next. Is Google shining it up to sell? That would be sensible.

Motorola is a huge addition to Google's headcount that produces far less than the typical Google product group. Motorola competes with Google's partners. Google would be better off with Motorola as an OEM partner than as a subsidiary.

<comment><USER21> My understanding is Google bought Motorola primarily for their patent portfolio, so they'd have some weapons to aim at Apple and ward off lawsuits through mutually-assured destruction.

Is it possible for them to sell off Motorola's hardware operations while retaining their IP?

<comment><USER20> Many people assumed this is what would have happened by now. Maybe it's a problem Google is avoiding: What if OEM + patents adds up to nowhere near $12B? Google risks distracting management and annoying partners by dithering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think questions need to begin to be asked about Google getting close to giving the hardware away in return for user information. It gets dangerously close to the kind of practices that got MS in trouble, especially the way it ends up poisoning the market for anyone else.

The problem is competition is good, and if users want their privacy they probably should be going to pay for it, but I'm profoundly uncomfortable with essentially condemning those that can't afford it to having to surrender their rights to privacy.

<comment><USER23> "I'm profoundly uncomfortable with essentially condemning those that can't afford it to having to surrender their rights to privacy."

You appear to be implying that you can get extra privacy by buying a more expensive phone. However, the Moto G does not actually seem to be any more or any less invading of privacy compared to any other Android phone out there (and arguably not moreso even compared to Windows Phones and iPhones). Even if those phones are much more expensive than it.

Furthermore, the inevitable popularity of the Moto G only means that you will be able to load it with a custom ROM that gives you as much control as you want, like Cyanogenmod/OmniROM without Google apps.

Google rightly gets flak for privacy issues, but I think you're going too far by getting the privacy debate into hardware pricing as well.

<comment><USER22> OK, I admit it's not a perfect viewpoint, but I don't think any is!

The problem here is these things should be private by default, with the option to break from that, since installing things like Cyanogenmod have external dependencies (like PCs) that cost money and people may not have access to. Features such as weather forecast widgets should not break if you choose not to share your location with Google, and right now many will.

Further, I think Google are monopolising areas such as push email to such a degree they should be forced, MS in EU style, to give you a choice of accounts you can use to access things on the device when first started up. For example, there is no technical reason you couldn't use your twitter (or any OAuth) account as your ID, even when accessing Google services like the Play Store, but they are using all this to weasel Google+ in everywhere.

<comment><USER24> _Features such as weather forecast widgets should not break if you choose not to share your location with Google, and right now many will._

I (and I think most people) like their weather forecast to show where they actually are?

Using geo-location makes it simpler for users, which I think is a good thing, isn't it?

<comment><USER22> Have you heard of GPS? It's pretty good.

<comment><USER24> So many ways to answer that...

Have you heard of GPS to POI?

How do you think Google gets your location when you look up the weather (and see later for a discussion of network location vs GPS location)?

Your GPS location is useful, but you need to convert it to a named location to get the weather. There are some services that do that for you.. but then you need to send your location - which seems to be what you want to avoid?

Of course, for most weather-type services, "network location" rather than GPS location gives sufficient precision. With that you still need to convert that to a POI, though.

<comment><USER25> > Your GPS location is useful, but you need to convert it to a named location > to get the weather.

Why would any app need a named location? Seems trying to match a string is way harder than finding the nearest weather data by coordinates...

<comment><USER24> In those cases, doesn't querying by location sharing your location?

<comment><USER22> Google aren't providing the weather APIs.

The problem is using Google Play Services for location instead of GPS (the satellites).

<comment><USER24> Google Play Location Services are backed with GPS and/or network location(!?)

It's just a wrapper that has some nice functionality around trying to preserve battery use by sharing location requests between the multiple applications that need it. See [1] for the details. Here is a useful quote:

 _Applications cannot specify the exact location sources, such as GPS, that are used by the LocationClient. In fact, the system may have multiple location sources (providers) running and may fuse the results from several sources into a single Location object._

How do you think Google works out your location otherwise?

[1] [https://developer.android.com/reference/com/google/android/g...](https://developer.android.com/reference/com/google/android/gms/location/LocationRequest.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It looks great, but as I've mentioned here before, I have some concerns about the cost. It's a great short term boon to consumers getting a device of this high quality at this price point, but the margins have to be razor thing on it, so how do they make money for R&D? What about Company X? What do they do, slice prices to match to keep market share or hope they retain a profit share? If they slash where do they get the R&D budget from?

The smartphone market is starting to get truly interesting, I just hope it doesn't get dominated by the companies with the deepest pockets, it's a short term gain for consumers (we all like things cheaper), but could long term stagnate the market.

<comment><USER27> You can see this with Jolla- interesting new entrant, aims to provide a less monolithic, more hackable device, built on the Nokia N9, which was widely acclaimed. But it's double the price of the Moto G, with equivalent or even slightly worse specs.

If Google is selling its handsets at or near cost, and relying on the long- term value of advertising and data, then it will be almost impossible for anyone without the same revenue streams to engage in serious competition.

<comment><USER28> I guess if you're google, you might worry that someone could come along and do this to you. Someone say for instance Amazon decides to sell a very good quality phone at near cost and starts to capture marketshare. From Google's perspective, better for them to preemptively do that if that's where the market is heading anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _> It's tempting to think of the Moto G as some kind of "Nexus Jr.," a cheaper way to buy into the clean UI and quick software updates that Google's reference phones have always received. However, Google is making no promises about versions of Android beyond version 4.4, and speculating about whether Android 4.5 or 5.0 or whatever will roll out to the Moto phones as quickly as KitKat is a pointless exercise._

Again shooting themselves in the foot.

<comment><USER30> How so? The quick software updates is a selling point to devs but not so much to consumers. We aren't their target market. It seems like a good place to cut costs since you don't have the huge reaccuring engineering costs and there is much more freedom on part selection

<comment><USER29> Google is interested in building Android as a platform. Having 80% of your install base stuck 4 versions behind[1] is a crappy way of doing it. Even after they've moved more and more of the platform into the Play frameworks you're still leaving users without a bunch of improvements to the core platform, not to mention security fixes. iOS is miles ahead on this front exactly because it controls the hardware. That Google doesn't do the same now that it also controls the hardware seems short-sighted.

Building a 150$ great phone would allow them to set a feature/quality floor for the market. If they forced their suppliers so the hardware in these phones is properly supported upstream, targeting new versions of Android should be pretty easy. When Ubuntu launches a new version it doesn't need to go and retrofit it to the thousand different types of laptop out there. The state of Android though is that the GPU/Camera/whatever drivers are binary blobs locked in to a specific kernel version.

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

<comment><USER31> and they could/should have done this 4 years ago, minus the hardware, simply by tightening the licensing model. you want to say you're "android" and use our software? You have conform to these minimums.

 _most_ people could predict from a mile away that when there's no restrictions on it, the carriers and manufacturers will generally race to the bottom in terms of quality and support. _ESPECIALLY_ when the google name is tangentially attached to something, why would they bother making a good hardware model or updating it regularly? laypeople - who they are targeting - will blame google before they blame a handset maker or carrier.

<comment><USER32> Four years ago Android was well behind iOS, RIM was still around, OEMs were still considering having their own smartphone OSes, and Google had minimal leverage. There's a good chance the OEMs would have refused to go with an Android with a tighter licensing model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> That price point is now full of phones with 1920x1080 5" screens; 1280x720 is very much "last year". The camera specs are beaten roundly by my year old $200 phone. The physical design is almost identical to said year old phone (which is to say it looks pretty much like the Galaxy SIII).

And said phone also has removable battery, _dual_ SIMs, and support for a 32GB SD card.

This might put ever single "cheap" Android phone of a brand _well known_ in Europe and the US to shame, but from the specs given it's middle of the pack fo cheap Android phones overall (it's likely to be a bit faster and with better graphics performance than most low end Android phones, but lower resolution and lacking camera and storage e.g.)

<comment><USER34> >That price point is now full of phones with 1920x1080 5" screens; 1280x720 is very much "last year". The camera specs are beaten roundly by my year old $200 phone. The physical design is almost identical to said year old phone (which is to say it looks pretty much like the Galaxy SIII).

I think you missed the fact that that's the non-contract no subsidy price... Your $200 dollar phone was probably 500 or 600 off contract so this costs about 1/3 as much.

<comment><USER33> You are jumping to (wrong) conclusions. My $200 phone was without contract. .

Here's a few examples of current Chinese phones in the Moto G's price range or below:

2GB RAM, Quad Core MTK CPU, 5" screen, 12.8 megapixel camera down to $121: [http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Full-1-1-i9500-MTK6589-S4-Pho...](http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Full-1-1-i9500-MTK6589-S4-Phone- Android-4-2-2-Quad-core-2GB-RAM-1/1494987491.html)

MTK based Galaxy S4 clone for <=$150: [http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mtk6589t-S4-1-1-Perfect- Galax...](http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mtk6589t-S4-1-1-Perfect-Galaxy- Siv-I9500-2G-Ram-16GB-32GB-Rom-Quad-Core-1920x1080/1520496758.html)

Note 3 clone for ~$190: [http://www.aliexpress.com/item/3200mAh-battery- Galaxy-N9000-...](http://www.aliexpress.com/item/3200mAh-battery- Galaxy-N9000-N9002-Note-3-III-phone-Android-4-3-MTK6582-Quad- core-5/1401325774.html)

Most of these phones are very good quality and the main "problem" to be aware of is that the MTK SoC's are not the fastests alternative. Then again, neither is the one in the Moto G.

<comment><USER35> The issue is that you don't get any support with this phones, while with Moto G they will just replace your device with a new one If something happens. To many average customers this factor is enough to deter them from buying phones you mentioned.

<comment><USER33> Sure you do - warranty replacements is no problem with the dealers I've dealt with for these types of devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> $179 is way too much for a phone that sends all of your login information for different pages and services to Motorola's servers in plaintext...

<comment><USER37> What are you talking about?

<comment><USER38> Just the regular "NSA/Google is evil/wake up people" troll.

Ignore and carry on.

<comment><USER39> Nah, this one is credible: [http://www.beneaththewaves.net/Projects/Motorola_Is_Listenin...](http://www.beneaththewaves.net/Projects/Motorola_Is_Listening.html)

<comment><USER40> default android phone sends your location to google, as well as your contacts, app list, app usage, calendars, todo list and some other things.

You can disable a good part of it manually, thanksfully. Still, he sure has a point.. its not like if that data wasn't sent. It fucking is.

<comment><USER41> > default android phone sends your location to google, as well as your > contacts, app list, app usage, calendars, todo list and some other things.

By default it does none of those things. You have to hit "yes" to enable the location reporting which defaults to off but which you are asked to enable the first time you add a Google account.

The rest isn't done at all unless you are using the Google services to sync that data. Which is only an option if you've added a Google account.

<comment><USER42> ever try to use an Android phone without a Google account?

know anybody that does?

<comment><USER41> Sure, it's not that hard. Sideload Amazon Store or F-Droid to get your non- Google app store fix, and the rest is pretty straightforward.

<comment><USER43> It's pretty nice, and as a bonus the apps from F-Droid don't do stuff like "flashlight app that sends you contacts somewhere".

It sucks for some apps, like bank-specific mobile banking apps, that aren't possible to get outside of Play store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> My Lenovo P780 was only $80 more expensive, but its battery has the highest capacity on the market, 4000 mAh. The phone holds the charge for >2 days of quite intensive use. I had Samsung Galaxy Note before this one, but now don't understand why anyone would choose top end phones from the brands like Samsung or Apple, if half of the cost of a phone goes to profit their shareholders.

<comment><USER45> _> don't understand why anyone would choose top end phones from the brands like Samsung or Apple, if half of the cost of a phone goes to profit their shareholders._

When consumers spend money to buy products, where the money goes (whether it's costs of production or shareholder profit) almost never factors into the purchase decision.

<comment><USER46> Rightfully so. For instance, a new manufacturer comes in, and has high costs due to inefficiencies and lack of economies of scale, how does that help me in making decisions?

While low prices can make purchase more compelling, the lack of profits never does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I love watching race for enabling next billion people with cheap smartphone. We will see double of people on Internet today just in five years.

</comment><comment><USER48> Well, all I can say is that until last week I was still using my Nokia 6500c. This Moto G is the fist smart phone that for me does enough to warrant the price; UK £120, unlocked. So, I bought one.

<comment><USER49> I am in the same boat. Had it for a few weeks now and loving it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Is Moto-G now good enough to replace an iPod touch? for a no-contract 'smartphone' that doesn't need to be up on 4g all of the time (say w/good wi- fi acesss)? Because it sure seems like a better deal in terms of functionality. The main limitation/constraint IMHO is the memory [8 or 16 GB NAND flash], which seems arbitrarily low. (ie, >5 years out of date).

<comment><USER51> Yeah barring the storage part - it is definitely a great iPod Touch replacement. You might be able to live with the 16GB if you stream stuff instead of playing it locally. There are many media player apps (Archos one that I use is great - even the free version) that can play videos from SMB shares etc.

<comment><USER52> Archos developer here, glad that you like the app :)

<comment><USER51> Any plans for Chromecasting/AirPlay support? I know it's not that simple but would not mind paying $4.99 if the paid version supported it. Thanks!

<comment><USER52> Looking into it. I understand there might be legal issues around Airplay and that Google did something to Chromecast to disallow "unofficial" use cases :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Right move to target market in India and China , its way affordable than Iphone 5C and comes with the brand name too.

<comment><USER54> Unfair to compare Iphone 5c with Moto G. Iphone 5c vs Moto X is a more meaningful comparison.

<comment><USER53> Comparing only with respect to price and only with respect to articles which referred Iphone 5c is targeting Asian markets especially India and China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Half price Firefox OS phones like the _ZTE Open_ are more impressive and better for your freedom.

Google want your communications, thinking, location, habits... this is worse than Mastercard or Xperian issuing you a phone. It's fundamentally evil, regardless of how they dress it up.

Support Mozilla FirefoxOS and internet freedom.

<comment><USER43> While Firefox OS is indeed impressive and good for freedom, for someone used to better screen the 320*480 screen of ZTE Open is pretty terrible to use.

I hope that soon we can get something like Moto G with FxOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I've got good recommendations on Lenovo A820 ([http://www.gsmarena.com/lenovo_a820-5462.php](http://www.gsmarena.com/lenovo_a820-5462.php)) which has about the same price but a little lower. What would you buy? A Moto G or a Lenovo A820?

<comment><USER15> It looks like Moto G has slightly better screen, newer OS, and better integration with Google services, while A820 has micro sd slot and better camera. If none of that is critical for you - I would say get a feel for both of them and go with one you like better. There is nothing fundamentally better about specs on either phone.

<comment><USER57> Keep in mind the A820 has an MTK SoC which could affect the timely adoption of later firmware vs the Moto G's Qualcomm Snapdragon 400, which is well supported by many ROM authors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I've used this phone and the lack of dual-band wifi causes some issues with wifi-connectivity. Its range is less than my Nexus 4 and it will sporadically lose connectivity over wifi, more often than other Android devices I've used.

</comment><comment><USER59> As someone in the US, I'm not really willing to buy a phone with no LTE in this day and age, and carriers will loathe to put them in stores. I think even HTC's Facebook phone from last year is a better attempt than this, goes for free on contract, and could probably be obtained as cheaply off ebay. I doubt this is really meant to sell in the US anyway, though.

</comment><comment> yc-kjh Battery NOT User-Removable. Phone NOT User-Buyable.

<comment><USER60> To me this was a huge WTF? If they went to the trouble of making the back easily detachable, why did they deliberately do that? Almost feels like they're trolling the user: "Ha! Fooled you!"

Even more so when they officially refer to it as the "battery door" in the documentation! [https://motorola-global-en- roe.custhelp.com/app/answers/prod...](https://motorola-global-en- roe.custhelp.com/app/answers/prod_answer_detail/a_id/97374/p/30,6720,9050/action/auth)

<comment><USER61> Seriously. I take major issue with devices that you can't cut the power to.

As far as I'm concerned, that renders it as an eavesdropping apparatus.

If I can't remove the battery, I'll never know when the microphone is truly off. I'll never know whether it's logging GPS geolocation data or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I don't get it. If you're using a smart phone for all the things that smart phones do (audio, photo albums, video), 16GB just isn't enough. Even my 32GB iPhone requires active file management to avoid hitting the limit.

<comment><USER63> I have not had a phone with over 32GB for the past 2 years and yet I've never had to perform "active file management" or delete any media from my phone. I consume all my music through Grooveshark and Play Music and watch videos on Netflix or YouTube.

<comment><USER62> Do you only use your phone at home or when you have Wi-Fi access? (Do you live in South Korea?) Most US cellular data plans don't allow very much streaming audio, let alone video, before you hit a cap. Certainly not a month's worth.

Source: I've easily hit my cap when I mistakenly turned off Wi-Fi.

<comment><USER64> Smart music services (such as Play) will use this radical new technology called caching so that you don't have to stream everything you listen to if you have things you listen to more often.

<comment><USER62> Cool. Where are they "caching" the content if not on your device? In the ether?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I hope someone at Motorola loves the Pro+ as much as I do and they bring out a low end candy bar qwerty.

Every time a company releases a new touch screen keyboard, God kills a kitten.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm surprised they didn't mention more about the Bluetooth 4.0 (low energy) support. I would take ble support over NFC . good writeup otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER67> I can't wait for a Verizon version (apparently 1Q 2014) to pare up with PagePlus, so I can dump my VZ contract and only pay half of what I do now.

<comment><USER68> I bought 3 moto g's and on the day they arrived switched the entire family to tmobile. I had enough of Verizon and now my bill is $100 a month. Can't beat that.

<comment><USER69> I'd like to do that. Which plan?

<comment><USER70> There's only one family plan on the T-Mobile site now, called Simple Choice. It's $80/mo for 2 lines with unlimited talk + text + web (500MB at 4G per phone then slower speed), and $10/mo for each line after that. There's no contract or credit check, and you either bring your phone or buy one from them -- unsubsidized but payment plans available.

<comment><USER69> For $30 per month per line (no contract), there's also:

100 minutes talk, unlimited text, first 5 GB at up to 4G speeds.

Plan is only available for devices purchased from Wal-Mart or devices activated on T-Mobile.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Why, it is Nexus 4 with half of RAM and cheap plastic case.

<comment><USER37> Except you can't buy Nexus 4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> This is what I though iPhone 5c would be.

</comment><comment><USER73> I like my Nexus 4. They barely mention it.</comment>


The chaos and tangled energy of living cities - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/the-chaos-and-tangled-energy-of-living-cities <comment><USER2> Tangle is interesting because it adds texture to the experience of living in a city - but it comes about organically. In Singapore, where I live, the city center is fairly interesting, but the urban public-housing neighbourhoods outside the core are mostly uniform in appearance and lack the variety of forms and colors that would consitute tangle. Everything is similarly arranged on a flat landscape of housing blocks and patches of green spaces; wiring and services are all hidden behind walls or underground to keep things "neat" \- the place was built by conformist public planners. There's a minimum of shops scattered around these areas, because inhabitants are presumed not to want the bustle and risks of crowds near their homes.

In contrast, the major Japanese (& European & American) cities have much more variation and exposed complexity - more tangle. Their neighborhoods weren't planned to the same extent, with the same drive towards neatness and hidden complexity. Thus density alone doesn't generate tangle: age and the organic bolting-on of new layers/services is required as well.

This man would have us living in the chaotic, multilayered megacities of dystopian sci-fi - Kowloon Walled Cities writ large and cast into the future. It's not an entirely unpleasant vision.

<comment><USER3> It's an entirely pleasant vision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was beautiful. Just moved from Chicago to Austin, and this article articulates everything I miss about Chicago better than I ever could. Spot-on.

The conclusion w.r.t "smart" cities was curious, though. I'd see "smartifying" as something that would _add_ to the tangle, not subtract from it. Another layer on top of all the others.

<comment><USER5> Similarly, this article made me homesick for London.

I suppose one angle on smartness is that it provides a simplistic lens on the tangle. If rather than observing the intersection of life, industry and history around us, we tap a single-purpose button on our phones and stare until like magic, the thing we want appears -- if the layers on a city become intangible -- then we lose some of the glorious chaos that is urban life.

<comment><USER6> Tangle is the thing I love about London. I'm from Perth, Australia, where the tangle is very thin indeed - it's a big suburb. Melbourne is a bit better, but I moved to London in 2002 then visited Melbourne again in 2004, and was shocked how untangled it felt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One good reason to go "fuckit" and untangle is things like accessibility. Retrofitting this is an _absolute arse_. Making inner London accessible would basically require rebuilding it from scratch.

Thus, "tangle" is, in engineering terms, "technical debt".

I am a _huge_ fan of tangle in a city - it's what makes it livable and takes away the artificiality of a new suburb. But engineering maintainability is the countervailing force.

<comment><USER7> The problem, it must be said, is that unlike software engineering, ripping out code is the equivalent of making many, many people homeless, even temporarily, and gutting their history and culture. Sometimes that's the right thing to do, but only sometimes.

I have yet to see any kind of cohesive philosophy giving guidelines on when this is okay and when it is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've often thought that cities represent a good metaphor for software development: large systems, different designers through time, constant maintenence, adaptation to odd quirks.

<comment><USER9> "[…] _And these are programs that have existed for ten years or perhaps fifteen years, growing piece by piece as one craftsman after an other added new features.

Sort of like cities in France you might say, where you can see the extremely old buildings with additions made a few hundred years later all the way up to the present. Where in the field of computing, a program that was started in 1965 is essentially that. So we would always hope for tourists to become system maintainers, and perhaps then they would get hired, after they had already begun working on system programs and shown us that they were capable of doing good work._"

— Richard Stallman, 1986

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman- kth.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html)</comment></comment>


Ditch ad-based business model & build a better web, says inventor of Pop-Up Ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> If Maciej Ceglowski's non-advertising business model is so profitable, why does he need to set up begging campaigns like this:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/431908798/send-idle- wor...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/431908798/send-idle-words-to- antarctica)

He claims he is making a lot of money from his ad-free website, and yet he cannot afford to pay for his holidays by himself.

<comment><USER3> You can both be profitable and set up "begging campaigns". I've never made a secret of Pinboard revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Advertising is the original sin of the web.

I like that quote. I'm going to remember that.

<comment><USER5> _Intrusive, fraudulent_ advertising is the original sin of the web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Investor Storytime"... I love it!</comment>


Latacora – Security Teams for Startups - <AUTHOR> https://latacora.com/ <comment><USER2> Interesting.

I would be hesitant to give access to a company without a single name on their website.

<comment> V-eHGsd_ I think tptacek is latacora.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: how would you protect a URL redirection service from spam? - <AUTHOR> I run DecentURL.com, and many people have found it pretty useful to date, but the problem is that now most of the URLs submitted are spam. Legitimate users don't see this, which is great, but as sysadmin I don't like the fact that 95% of the links in my growing database are spam (or that spammers are then using DecentURL as a kind of spam proxy).
Mostly it's some site like nycshorttermrental.com submitting say 200 times with a different random title each time, over the course of a day or two.
Something like Akismet doesn't work, because there's not enough data. All you give DecentURL is one URL, and Akismet can't tell it's spam from a bare URL (you can try it at http://www.voidspace.org.uk/cgi-bin/akismet/test_akismet.py).
Any suggestions? How do other URL redirection services kill spam? (Or do they just ignore the problem, and let the spam come in?) <comment><USER2> If you don't take a peek at the content on the other side of the URL then your options are somewhat limited. If I were faced with this problem I would probably start by doing broad "spam site" classification based on the domain name (which would probably eventually involve things like doing DNS/whois lookups and weighting by registrar.) Once you have likely targets you can silently blackhole the known spam sites and maybe create a "this might be spam, press the button to continue at your own risk" landing page for sites in the classification grey zone.

</comment><comment><USER3> For ri.ms and tinyarro.ws, we've actually seen significant reduction in spam just by banning abusive IP addresses. So far, that has had the biggest bang for the buck in terms of dropping spam considerably.

In other words, we periodically do human review and obvious spammers are IP banned. It's a neverending problem, but they don't use so many IPs that things are out of control.

If you do come up with a better approach that doesn't ruin usability, I'd love to hear it, too!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. Unfortunately what I'm seeing is that each time they submit it's with a (somewhat) different IP address. For a given link, they might be all within 173.x.y.z, but if I ban 173.*, won't there be legitimate IP addresses in that range?

<comment><USER3> Yeah-- we do specific IP addresses and not ranges. We thought at first they were all different, but they weren't. There were hundreds of different, but lots with of multiple spam posts, some every day. Group them by IP address and you should see some that are bugging you all the time.

Hard to say though-- could be a different "shape" to your spam than what we get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Add a captcha, if you aren't using one already.

Rate-limit link creation based on the user's IP.

Check submitted links against a URIBL. Prevent users from adding links which are on the blacklist, and remove links which appear on the blacklist.

Reject links to newly registered domains outright.

<comment><AUTHOR> Checking a publicly-available URL blacklist is a good idea, thanks!

I may well end up adding a captcha of some sort. However, that effectively means I can't have a public "create a DecentURL" API call like I do now -- they'd have to sign up and have an API key or something. That's a bit of a bummer.

<comment><USER4> The utility of an API for this sort of service is honestly pretty limited. If you're doing things right, most of your links should be getting created by casual users (for pasting into chat/email/twitter) - it's not too much of a hassle for them to hit your site and fill out a form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd let the spam come in the first instance and not publish the link, based on rules, or algorithms once you have more data. Later on you can block certain ip addresses. Also try creating a blacklist to get you started.

</comment><comment><USER6> they are probably done almost solely by bots, institute sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org on your service and rate limit.</comment>


Giving Every Student an Opportunity to Learn Through Computer Science for All - <AUTHOR> https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/01/30/weekly-address-giving-every-student-opportunity-learn-through-computer <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11001705](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11001705)

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the reasons why programmers and computer scientists love their job so much, relative to many other fields is that CS was not part of the school curriculum.

I hope CS and programming is integrated into science and Math. I bet most students would love to solve real-world science problems instead of solving abstract puzzles. I wish I had exercises like:

1\. Write a program to predict the trajectory of a free throw.

2\. Collect Fitbit-like data from every student, find interesting correlations and perform qualitative analysis too.

3\. Perform basic image processing tasks using matrix multiplications.

Instead of:

1\. Integrate sqrt(tan(x)) [IIT 94] (Yeah, Indian text books highlight questions from previous years' exams).

2\. Memorize a bunch of chemical equations without understanding how they work.

3\. Find the determinant of this ridiculous matrix using an arcane trick.

</comment><comment><USER4> Taking money from a state's citizens, then giving some of it back with strings attached isn't actually "helping" them do anything. It's telling them what to do and charging them for the privilege.

<comment><USER5> It's actually worse than that, it's a $4 billion forced donation to one of the president's favored constituencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A lot of new funding is being made available through the NSF. Maybe now I can finally get a grant proposal accepted!

</comment><comment><USER7> This worries me, a lot.

There has been a strong trend of sexism in education for a long time now. Reading between the lines,

"Americans of all kinds – from the Spanish teacher in Queens who added programming to _her_ classes to the young _woman_ in New Orleans who worked with her Police Chief to learn code and share more data with the community – are getting involved to help young people learn these skills. And just today, states like Delaware and Hawaii, companies like Google and SalesForce, and organizations like Code.org have made commitments to help more of our kids learn these skills. "

Code.org makes no bones that it prioritises girls on its homepage. Obama gave two examples of women. Why are we driving gender into learning? It shouldn't even enter the equation, unless our goal is to encourage one gender at the expense of another, like code.org does so brazenly. With failing grades for boys over the last two decades, you think we'd be horrified for young boys, but the campaign to discriminate against them is strong.

Interestingly, there are very few articles willing to discuss why this non- subtle trend has occurred. It's usually explained that boys have become sexist or become slow learners in recent years. I found this article that seems to tackle the topic of "why" in an open and plausible way.

[https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/eliminating-feminist- teach...](https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/eliminating-feminist-teacher-bias- erases-boys-falling-grades-study-finds)

One such quote of many,

\- In science and general knowledge, as in math skills, the data showed that kindergarten and first grade white boys' grades "are lower by 0.11 and 0.06 standard deviations, even though their test scores are higher." This disparity continues and grows through to the fifth grade, with white boys and girls being graded similarly, "but the disparity between their test performance and teacher assessment grows." -

<comment><USER8> If you have to read between the lines to squeeze out a weak example of discrimination then is it really discriminatory? I'm sure all the boys who get plenty of encouragement to pursue computers/tech elsewhere in their lives will not be deterred by a copywriter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yep, got to drive tech salaries back down by drastically increasing the supply asap.</comment>


Nintendo says it doesn't have plans for any additional Super Mario Run content - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/20/no-more-super-mario-run-content-coming/ <comment><USER3> Nintendo comes out and offers a game with a few free levels, then pay-once, and you get the whole game. Seems like exactly what everyone ALWAYS asks for. We constantly see complaining about micro transactions, etc, and Nintendo goes with the traditional pay-once model AND gives you the ability to try for free and people freak out.

This industry is so incredibly frustrating. You can't please everyone, but it seems like you can't please anyone, ever, anymore.

If you hype it, they will hate it. This seems to be the new world we live in. You almost have to subtly release something, let crowds pass it around online and feel like they are responsible for its success, put some of the "ownership" behind those hyping it, and then they can't hate on it when it comes out.

<comment><USER4> I think the bigger complaint is the (unprecedented for iOS) always-on internet DRM requirement.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's unprecedented - I thought many F2P games have the same requirement. Though I guess F2P games have a "good reason" for needing always- on internet whereas Mario Run shouldn't need it but does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was so overjoyed when I heard during the Apple event that this would be a one time purchase game and not have annoying IAP like many other games do. Nintendo definitely made the right choice in not annoying users with the "one- time pay to play" model. But since the app store is used to cheap 99 cents pricing for most apps and games, people are upset at something costing ten times that. If I as a user see value, I'd rather have more games follow the Super Mario Run model of a limited trial with a single IAP to unlock everything than the prevailing in-game pseudo-currency based models that end up making the gameplay experience worse as time passes. I hesitate to update many games because they become worse over time as developers try new and annoying ways to monetize them. Overall, the app store pricing structure is a mess and creates a frustrating experience.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, the gameplay is usually compromised by virtual currencies.

Worse, if you look at the big spenders, you usually find people with mental health issues, and money launderers using stolen credit cards to level up and then sell accounts.

[source: anecdotes from acquaintances with experience with multiple sides of these issues]

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nintendo priced this game fairly and appropriately. The game is absolutely packed with content and beautiful design and I'm glad they went for a traditional one and done pricing scheme rather than what other mobile games often use. It's the investors clamoring for more content to sell, not the people actually playing the game.

IAP is an issue but it's not Nintendo's fault. They clearly wanted a way to try before you buy to entice more people to download, and this is the standard model that Apple has put together.

<comment><USER9> Beautiful design? It's redesign of stock OS UI is gross and annoying. The spinner when it looks for a network connection and fails is not good. The picker at the beginning - how is this good design. Paying some attention to the platform and not requiring an internet connection would have resulted in a better looking, better behaving game.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I immediately passed when I heard the game required an Internet connection. Their stated reasons are ridiculous [0], or at least questionable given the many number of high quality games that manage to have an offline mode.

[0] [http://www.polygon.com/mobile/2016/12/9/13897536/super- mario...](http://www.polygon.com/mobile/2016/12/9/13897536/super-mario-run- internet-connection)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does it need more content? As it is, we've become spoiled by endless content and $0.99 cent games. Half the 1 star reviews for this game are that it's too expensive or too easy. My only gripe is the lack of family sharing and the constant internet / DRM problem. Otherwise, it's well worth $10, it's a very polished game. IAP is one of the worst things to happen to gaming.

<comment><USER12> Super Mario Run 2 could easily be just an in-app purchase where you just choose which game to play once the game loads. That saves you from hunting through a bunch of similar looking super mario run icons on your home screen while also making it easy for people who like the game to find out about the new one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Only tangential, but I really hate the "free to download, IAP to unlock" model. Why? Because IAPs don't "share" on family plans, so if I buy it, I need to buy it again for each of my kids. No thanks.

<comment><USER14> It's annoying, but it has to do with how Apple bifurcates the free and paid tiers. If you want to get the visibility, you almost have to stick with the free tier. Why? Because people are much, much more likely to download something that's free and try it out than even something for a nominal fee, but if you have a separate 'free demo' app, then each app has a separate download count, and suddenly you've got a lot less downloads you would have gotten otherwise (some people would skip the free and download the paid, and a lot less people will download the paid in general anyway).

Hardly anyone discovers apps outside the 'featured' and 'top paid' or 'top free' lists on the app store, so any loss in downloads drops you down those top lists, which can cost you a serious loss in potential revenue and is thus unacceptable.

Also if you have a free and paid version you're forcing the user to download your game all over again just to purchase it, which adds friction to the purchase, which anyone in sales knows even a single extra click lowers the odds of people buying something by a lot.

So the only thing that makes sense for most apps is to make your app free and allow people to spend money in the app to either unlock or acquire something in the game.

There are some apps that are better served on the paid tiers, but those are usually apps that have enough visibility (or built-in audience, i.e. Cartoon Network games) and possibly a high enough price on other platforms that people would expect to pay something anyway (i.e. Minecraft Pocket, Square Enix games), or serve a niche audience of people that don't mind paying (i.e. app versions of board games whose prices are set at fraction of the price of buying the physical board game).

<comment><USER5> > It's annoying, but it has to do with how Apple bifurcates the free and paid > tiers.

Indeed. I don't think Apple gets enough blame for how they've (mis)managed the app store - especially in terms of available pricing models. The current approach encourages lots of "free" apps and games loaded with IAP and micro- transactions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They say no more, now. Then after everyone flips out we'll have a version 2 or added content later. On the merit of price, most Wii U games run in the $40-60 usd range. It feels like the free to play crowd wants to ruin a traditional product model like they ruined the rest of mobile.

</comment><comment><USER16> According to Reuters[0] about 8% of all downloads converted to sales for the full game. That's not that bad technically, but I guess expectations were high after Pokemon GO.

[0] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-nintendo-supermario- idUSKB...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-nintendo-supermario- idUSKBN14A0U0?il=0)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'll gladly pay the $10 once they remove the constant internet connection requirement.

</comment><comment><USER6> > A Nintendo spokesman said the company didn't plan to release additional > content, either free or paid.

I find the term "new content" a bit weird here. What does it mean? New levels? New characters? New items in the shop? New challenges? New gameplay mode? Any of these? If we assume that a new type of challenge or a game play mode would count as new content, Super Mario Run just sent an in-game notification that a Toad Rally type game could be played with friends as a friendly challenge, without gaining or losing any coins or toads. How many times one can play this everyday depends on the number of worlds conquered and the number of friends one has on the game. Of course, this is free for the current players without updating the game from the app store. This feature wasn't available before. So Nintendo had already built this into the app and just flipped some switch today. Who knows how many such hidden features exist that would be turned on gradually to sustain player interest and keep them engaged?

I didn't purchase the full game because, compared to many others, I find these games difficult to play and win. I have some other nitpicks as well - <USER2> are basically useless (except to build some decorations), Toad Rally tickets are hard to win, getting the colored coins beyond the pink ones is quite tough and sometimes even impossible without using the bubble to go backward. So it didn't seem worth spending so much money to just play a few levels with limited advancement.

I would've liked the game to have a range of difficulty levels on the plus and minus side of what currently exists.

<comment><USER11> Agree that it's ambiguous. I fired it up and saw a new play mode available today (rally free run).... so not new levels, but new gameplay option.

<comment><USER6> I feel Nintendo probably didn't grasp that Toad Rally would be the gameplay sequence more appreciated by people than the World Tour. Toad Rally is more fun and gives more replay value. But it needs to be tweaked for better player matching, easier ways to get Toad Rally tickets often (or remove the ticket system altogether), allow to challenge friends for toads and coins (not a "friendly run") and so on. Adding Game Center support for friends is a better option than being tied to inviting friends through a different system or creating a Nintendo account (though Game Center ties the relationships to iOS alone).

If at all anyone from the Nintendo team that built Super Mario Run is reading this, please focus on making Toad Rally more accessible and better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well i just got an iOS notification a few minutes ago saying "Super mario run - new feature - friendly run is available". But I assume (given that the game was only released a few days ago) that it was intended to slowly roll out whatever this 'friendly run' mode is...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I loved the game. The best part of the game is actually getting the colored coins and Toad Rally. I tend to run out of tickets fast and would love to buy more tickets. I think this could be a great way for Nintendo to make a constant revenue stream in the game.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't get it. Didn't they just add some Christmas items for Kingdom Builder a few days ago? And a 'friendly' mode for Toad Rush earlier today?

That sounds like additional Super Mario Run content for me. Just the free kind people like.

<comment><USER20> No more additional paid content.

<comment><USER3> It looks like the quote in the article also says "free content" so there is definitely some confusion here. Yet the notification I received IN the game today was titled "new feature added". So, maybe features aren't content, but that seems like an update to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As a shareholder, I don't think Nintendo is doing all they can to capitalize on their IP and industry position. I played the first three levels and the game seems fine. But why build a two-hour game and stop there? Once you've built out the infrastructure, isn't the hard part done, and additional art/level assets are comparatively less expensive? Wouldn't a 30 level expansion be inexpensive to develop and well received by fans?

<comment><USER22>
        But why build a two-hour game and stop there?

Over saturation, artificially create more demand. Nobody goes back to an all you can eat buffet because the steak was so well prepared.

        Wouldn't a 30 level expansion be inexpensive to develop and well
        received by fans?

Generally no. DLC doesn't typically sell at a high rate. Also a Nintendo shareholder you should be aware they don't sell DLC's.

I don't even understand your support over this business model. ATVI supports this model and is down ~$2 on the year. While NTDOY has avoided it and is up ~9 on the year. KING who heavily practiced this model is no longer trading.

Going out 5year there has been little difference in the per-share profit. So the market really doesn't validate this business model. It is a model, it works, but it isn't wildy successful... The only justification I can see for it is chasing trends.

        Once you've built out the infrastructure, isn't the hard part done,
        and additional art/level assets are comparatively less expensive?

This is also true for releasing future games at a premium point.

Why sell 30 levels for $1. When you can sell 5 for $1 every 6 months? One is a far steadier revenue stream.

<comment><USER5> > Also a Nintendo shareholder you should be aware they don't sell DLC's.

This is completely false. There's plenty of DLC (new characters, maps[1]) for Super Smash Bros. Wii U & 3DS.

[1] [http://www.smashbros.com/us/dlc/](http://www.smashbros.com/us/dlc/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are any real numbers available? Has the game actually lost money? Maybe investors have been riding a bit of a bubble, assuming that _Pokemon Go_ would be the norm rather than the exception for mobile games based on venerable Nintendo franchises.

Criticizing the payment model seems fair, though. However cynical and toxic you might think the typical mobile game's monetization scheme is, when in Rome...

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13229607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13229607)

<comment><USER23> Combined with the 8% value from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13229499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13229499), that (according to my early morning math) comes in at something like (very roughly) $25M "gross revenue" (apologies if that's not the right term). That's just for whichever four days they set the records for.

A fair bit of money, but for a company like Nintendo I could see development costs already getting up there, to say nothing of advertising, ongoing maintenance, and so on. Maybe they really will lose money on it.

Mobile games are hard. For a game with this pricing model i.e. you pay up front, you get a high quality game, you play it ( _Monument Valley_ might be a similar example), even with really good market saturation (which is how I'd describe what SMR has accomplished but, again, I'm not an expert), $25M is _great_. To make a few comparisons based on probably-wrong numbers I found on Google for some excellent games, _Tiny Wings_ made about $5M and the fairly well-known _Monument Valley_ did about $15M.

Those developers doubtless kept costs down by limiting their staff and project scope and relying on word-of-mouth/viral/whatever marketing. As I see it, any other approach with the straight-up pricing model is simply not going to make you any money 99% of the time. The people really making money on mobile games have set up Skinner boxes where "whales" can drop thousands of dollars a year in "micro"transactions.

Maybe this is all bullshit; I'm just fascinated by the idea that you can release a relatively simple game, break download records on the app store with 8% of those downloads getting you $8-10 per (making some dumb assumptions about Apple's cut), and still lose money.</comment></comment></comment>


With LG patent in tow, Florida company sues Apple over OS X quick-booting - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/lg-patent-tow-operating-systems-solutions-llc

<comment><USER2> I'm not a lawyer, but I have to wonder if EFI (especially with the BIOS compatibility layer) is considered to be a BIOS in a legal sense. The only way I can imagine this would be is if they somehow convinced a judge that BIOS = firmware. This unfortunately isn't too far out of the realms of possibility as it would most likely be a jury trial (uninformed masses) and even a lot of Techs I know call any firmware a BIOS.

I do have to wonder how much they are asking for this patent, if they are looking for a small amount apple is likely to just pay them off as they have done in the past. No use spending $250k in legal expenses if they are just looking for $100k for a perpetual license.

</comment><comment><USER3> Patent specifically mentions BIOS. Apple uses EFI.</comment>


How does a computer restart itself? - <AUTHOR> http://superuser.com/questions/294681/how-does-a-computer-restart-itself/294736#294736 Really interesting explanation of how this is possible. <comment><USER2> Possibly the most detailed single explanation of this I've ever seen on the internet.</comment>


Ask HN: Where Can I Download Standford iPhone Development Course Materials? - <AUTHOR>

I haven't been able to find a website with the materials.<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> <http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php></comment>


The New Mac Pro - <AUTHOR> http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/349 <comment><USER2> _bangs head_

I'm sorry, but there are only two things that are new with this mac:

1) its a funny shape 2) it comes with two GPU boards by default.

I'm glad that you are enthused by a new platform, but there is really nothing new. Really. If you want to start writing GPGPU programmes, I congratulate you, its going to keep you busy for a good few months. But you can do that now, without a $10k mac "pro"

Over the next few months, we'll be hearing about how the CPU is dead and that all you need is GPU. However much like the initial flash/iphone argument it over looks the main point. The Mac pro only has one CPU because that's all they could fit in. It wasn't a bold visionary move, it was a compromise because of the form factor. (much like the original iphone, to get the battery life up, they had to use a tiny(by the standard o the time) CPU, which meant no flash)

There is one large elephant in the room when it comes to GPGPU and that is bandwidth. Getting stuff from main memory to GPU memory take a lot of time. Yes PCI3 is wonderfully fast, but compared to RAM<=>CPU its like reading a floppy disk.

That asside, there is really nothing new or special about the macpro. In fact for VFX land, its rather a disappointment. Yes Mari runs really really fast on it. But then its got two large GPUs and a stonking SSD. Everything other programme is going to be CPU constrained(unless they've been pushing stuff to the GPU).

Please excuse my rant, I've been inundated with people wanting new macpros, despite them already having a far more powerful z620 with fusion IO cards and quadro k5000s. cult of the shiny and new I suppose.

<comment><USER3> See, you don't get it. IT'S ROUND, FOR FUCK'S SAKE! That means that Apple is amazing and once more advances the state of personal computing.

Somehow.

In some way.

<comment><USER4> Well it's more innovation than the 30 years of beige box we had.

The shape and style is nice, and I think innovative in how it allows for better cooling of the system. But what do I know, I still run xp :P

<comment><USER5> "Beige box" ? No innovation for the past 30 years ?

It saddens me to see people compare a super expensive mac book pro case with the low end $30 cases. I'm not sure if its ignorance or blindness, but you should inform yourself on the high end market for desktop cases (and not just the external look of the case, the internals are what matters). It will cost between $150 and $300 for a really good model, but then again you're comparing it to a mac pro.

Companies like Antec, Lian-Li, Noctua, CoolerMaster, Thermaltake, ... Have spent the last decade or so making fans and cases that can cool down a maxed 2/3 GPU SLI running the latest game while still being silent for the high end gaming and power users market.

<comment><USER6> High end PC cases are mostly rubbish. I've had many of them, I've built many workstations over the years. None of them compare favourably to the (original) Mac Pro case. There has been very little "innovation" in that market segment. None of those companies have anough money or the market big enough to warrant R&D expenses.

<comment><USER7> I disagree - Lian Li has a V1020 case that I used and loved:

[http://www.techeta.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Lian-Li- PC...](http://www.techeta.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Lian-Li-PC-V1020-mid- tower-PC-computer-case.jpg)

[http://www.overclockers.com/lian-li-pc-v1020-case- review](http://www.overclockers.com/lian-li-pc-v1020-case-review)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > One of those GPUs isn't even hooked up to do graphics.

Not true, the GPUs are connected with a bridge and so share the workload efficiently.

> "New"

New to mac maybe but my desktop has 3 GTX 670s which provides some pretty serious computational power.

</comment><comment><USER9> OSX has been moving progressively further from desktop beasts and towards tablet/phone fusion. The hardware for the mac pro does have a striking design, but I suspect it will wind up being the same red-haired step-child Mac Pro's have been for years unless Apple does a huge about-face on the development of OSX. This certainly wouldn't be the first time Apple produced a cool-looking desktop machine that turned out to be a sales-dud (see G4 cube).

<comment><USER10> Eh, not really. That's just a popular delusion. Mavericks just further cements that Apple has no plans whatsoever of unifying OS X and iOS on a UI level. To me it even looks like OS X and iOS are moving further apart.

<comment><USER11> +1

I think sometimes people confuse interoperability with some sort of codebase merge. It makes sense for each release of osx and ios to be more interoperable, and even take lessons learned from one back to the other. It doesn't make sense to merge them, because they are different platforms with different needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When it comes to GPGPU there is one big problem with the Mac Pro: Lack of CUDA support. CUDA is the de facto standard for GPGPU programming in HPC. Software support for it is years ahead of OpenCL. I doubt the new Mac is going to change that, if anything it might give some impulse into new workstation design for the likes of Dell and HP, sporting NVIDIA cards. Of course there is still hope that Apple recognizes this and that it offers an NVIDIA configuration. A dual Titan Mac Pro could be a very compelling HPC workstation for those who prefer this to working on a cluster. Even more so since Unix/Linux is the standard OS for HPC and most software tools therefore have OSX/darwin support.

<comment><USER13> Apart from the initialization code which I'd agree is significantly less painful for CUDA, I haven't seen that much difference in terms of exploiting a GPU's compute units. I never wrote complex applications though, so am I missing something?

The bulky initialization is no longer a problem with a library like PyOpenCl - everything becomes much more elegant...

<comment><USER14> First of all, nobody is going to port few KLOC of CUDA to OpenCL or vice versa because of one developer's whim. Hence no choice of GPU is bad for developers.

And there are some differences which may be relevant for large projects: CUDA supports ahead-of-time compilation of GPU code down to the lowest level assembly (compilation of several KLOC project takes minutes), direct data transfers between GPUs or even GPUs and network adapters, some subset of C++ (classes without virtual methods, function/class templates, operator overloading) and probably few more useful features I haven't listed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am not interested in a Mac Pro, but I hope it marks the beginning of widely available computers with Cell-like architectures where a moderately powerful, general purpose CPU acts as a frontend scheduler for other parallel or specialized chips with negligible context switching costs.

</comment><comment><USER16> > One of those GPUs isn't even hooked up to do graphics.

Who says that? For all I know the cards are using AMD CrossFire.

</comment><comment><USER17> It is definitely the workstation to dream about, we've been waiting for a tech leader in the high-end professional space even if the market is not that significant anymore (relative to the $$$ Apple makes on consumer, anyways).

<comment><USER2> I know its not fashionable, but HP really still is the tech leader when it comes to workstations: [http://www.hp.com/united- states/campaigns/workstations/z620_...](http://www.hp.com/united- states/campaigns/workstations/z620_features.html#.UcWE9ev7Bbs)

When the next gen Xeons come along with the release of the new macpro, it'll be literally twice as fast. in side by side comparisons*

*there maybe some apple GPU special sauce for inter GPU communications

The other awesome thing about the z series is that they have a three year next day engineer on site warranty.

<comment><USER18> Too bad you can't run Mac OS X on it.

<comment><USER19> Why do you want OS X? I'm really genuinely curious and flabbergasted by people wanting apple stuff . What is it that you cannot get cheaper with more flexibility and choice on linux or windows?

<comment><USER20> It's like Linux, only, it:

* Runs Office, which means it runs Excel (and Word). Gotta love Excel. I'm sure there are unholy combinations of calendering software that mean I can interact sort-of sometimes with the Exchange server in the office, but Outlook Just Works too, on a Mac.

* I never ever ever ever have to interact with XF86Config. Literally days of my life wasted on that.

* Runs Omni(Outliner|Graffle|Plan|Focus). I guess I could cobble together something from org-mode, some terrible Visio clone, etc.

* It does sleeping properly when I close my laptop. Always. Reliably.

I just don't have time to run Linux on my laptop.

<comment><USER14> Your hardware support experience is exactly opposite to mine. My laptop runs Linux just fine and all hardware works correctly, but OSX doesn't even want to boot on it. Weird.

<comment><USER21> Grandparent wrote "Just Works too, on a Mac", he didn't state OS X Just Works™ on any random Acer thriftbook.

OS X works better on Macs than Linux distros and Windows do. OS X rarely works well on computers other than Macs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I find it easier to think of it as an upper mid class workstation. It's not a high end workstation. Exciting and weird thing about is that all extensions to it are planned to be external, we'll see how that works out. Also, my concern is about the cooling design, looks like it will suck dust from below, like a really inefficient vacuum cleaner. Doesn't matter it's supposed to go on desk and not on the floor. Dust is always an issue, no matter where you are. Also, ATI graphics is not something I am excited about.

</comment><comment><USER23> All Apple really had to do was produce an HP Z820 equivalent machine running Mac OS X, and everyone would have been happy.

</comment><comment><USER24> Again, always be careful with buying the first iteration of any hardware. Especially at that price.

<comment><USER21> > at that price

No price has been announced. Apple may surprise us. Before they came out with the iPad, journalists and analysts thought Apple's tablet would cost $1000 or more[1].

The current entry level Mac Pro costs $2500, while the most expensive iMac costs $2000. I expect the new Mac Pro to cost between $2000 and $2500.

[1] [http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/19/minor_issues_could...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/19/minor_issues_could_result_in_june_launch_for_999_apple_tablet.html)

<comment><USER25> Apple's big advantage here is that it certainly hasn't paid rack rate for those "pro" graphics cards. How much of that saving it will pass on to buyers is the question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I agree with the idea, this is Apple having a radical rethink of what it means for a pro level workstation going forward. The majority of criticisms have been levelled at the lack of expansion, not at what the potential for the machine is.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is this a Mac fanboi's idea of writeen(1) porn? It reads like a diary of a boy about to go out on a first date, while already dating... Actually, it's kinda cute. Or is it creepy? Lets hope the writer doesn't end up, er, "injuring" his or her self on this new computing phallus.

Anyway, I think the writer needs a cuddle.

(1) Well, yes, initially it was a typo, but on second thoughts I like how it worked out.

<comment><USER28> pointless and tasteless

<comment><USER27> If it really was, why do you think you need to tell people? Do you think people are a bit stupid know and need telling? Do you need to tell every one for your own sense of well being?

Or are you just a karma whore?</comment></comment></comment>


SproutCore (Web App Framework) 1.0 is Done - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sproutcore.com/post/459714079/sproutcore-1-0-is-done <comment><USER2> Kinda curious about how this stacks up to Cappucino (<http://cappuccino.org/>)

Has anyone tried both? I'm thinking about diving head-first into one of these, so I'd love any direction on which is better for a programming newbie.

<comment><USER3> I evaluated both pretty extensively and eventually decided to go with sproutcore.

Cappuccino is in many ways more revolutionary and the SC, as it completely throws out any notion of dealing with HTML and CSS. By completely abstracting the presentation some things become easier, but some things become impossible (for example: they cappuccino devs haven't implemented all of CGGraphics, and that makes some things that are trivial in CSS, like rounding the corners of an image, effectively impossible). With SC you're working with HTML and CSS, though most of the HTML is generated by JS. I found the latter approach more flexible, especially if you can target CSS3-supporting browsers.

Both are based on cocoa, though Cappuccino takes its influences much more seriously. I love cocoa but I'm not terribly enamored with Obj-C syntax, so I don't really see why someone would want to take JS's superior syntax and replace it with Obj-C's, as cappuccino has done. Cappuccino also lacks a data store framework, while SC has a very good one.

Finally, SC uses native browser rendering as much as possible, which should make SC apps faster.

That said, I think Cappuccino has a lot of potential, and 280Atlas, a visual editor for cappuccino apps written in itself shows that. As it matures and the basically non-existent docs improve I think it will become increasingly worthwhile.

<comment><USER4> For what it's worth, your CSS corners probably won't work in IE. One of the reasons some things are hard in Cappuccino is because they are unreliable in many browsers. We've focused more on cross platform ways of doing things. Of course there are some things we just haven't done yet too.

Anything that's possible with HTML/CSS is possible in Cappuccino. There's either a different way of doing it, or you can drop down to native code if you must. The latter is just generally not a great idea.

JavaScript is an OK language, but it's syntax is far from superior to Objective-C's. More importantly, syntax is irrelevant. What it lacks are features. Features like code importing, and dynamic message passing, and native classical inheritance. Those features (and more) are available at the language level in Objective-J.

Not sure what you mean by "native browser rendering".

The docs aren't great, for sure. But one of the advantages of using a proven set of APIs like Cocoa, rather than implement your own untested APIs, is that there's an incredible amount of quality resources out there that are almost completely applicable to Cappuccino. The APIs aren't "inspired by" Cocoa, they are the same, and so many of the books and tutorials are the same.

<comment><USER3> Sorry if I was unclear by my remark on rendering. What I was referring to was Cappuccino's habit of rendering a lot of stuff using canvas, which SC (at least natively; obviously developers can use whatever presentation layers they want) does not. SC also relies on the browser to do much of its work–from resizing to animation—without using any JS.

As for the relative merits of Obj-c and JS, I supposed that's a matter of taste. As mentioned above, SC does implement classical inheritance, but I actually find prototypical inheritance to be very powerful. In general I find my Obj-J (and -C, for that matter) code much more verbose than my JS. Perhaps that's my failure, but still it's something to keep in mind.

<comment><USER4> Cappuccino doesn't render anything in Canvas, with the possible exception of a couple minor pieces of the tableview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your css stylesheets on the linked page are returning 404's.

[http://www.sproutcore.com/static/shared_assets/en/c7cb6bb82d...](http://www.sproutcore.com/static/shared_assets/en/c7cb6bb82dc338ffd9db5a4f48319560f9550038/stylesheet- packed.css)

[http://www.sproutcore.com/static/sproutcore/standard_theme/e...](http://www.sproutcore.com/static/sproutcore/standard_theme/en/6beab73826ba9e40c6cb69fc8e248a0804ee9e03/stylesheet.css)

[http://www.sproutcore.com/static/blog_template/en/2ff3e0eada...](http://www.sproutcore.com/static/blog_template/en/2ff3e0eada826a4a26f5f71c9627c798e278003e/stylesheet.css)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been doing a lot of sproutcore development in last six months, and I can say it's a really powerful platform. The docs aren't great, but once you get you're head around it it's very productive.

For me, it feels like the biggest paradigm shift since Rails. Rails made it easy write dynamic ajax-based websites, but they were still websites. With SproutCore, you're truly writing web applications, which run entirely in the browser and only go to the server for data. This means desktop-level responsiveness.

Congratulations for the dev team on the release, and I look forward to the exciting stuff to come in 1.1!

<comment><USER6> > you're truly writing web applications, which run entirely in the browser and > only go to the server for data

I see this as a huge step backwards towards client/server. The web is a win because it's made of addressable, reusable semantic resources in open formats. Instead web apps ship data around in undocumented and unstable formats which are only understood by one ephemeral piece of code that you have to trust. If this really catches on it will wreck the web, leaving us only with the same pile of siloed apps we had in 1990 (but without the native code).

<comment><USER7> Do you mean that reading in html (data with formatting mixed in) is preferable to reading JSON or XML? AJAX / AJAJ? What I am trying to say is I think eval(JSON) or parsing XML is > scraping HTML.

<comment><USER6> The lesson I took from the MS Office XML fiasco is that a poorly abstracted single-client data model remains impenetrable no matter how you serialize it. It's not impossible to commit to a documented and stable wire format behind a web app, but almost nobody has the diligence to actually do it when it's so much easier to make random changes and then tweak your own client code to handle whatever you did (instantly making your client the only one that still works). Before javascript happened, HTML wasn't that easy to scrape, but it at least had the virtue of forcing everyone to generate output that made some kind of sense _without_ first being munged by one idiosyncratic piece of code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> SproutCore, for those who don't know, is an HTML5/JS application framework that works mostly on the client side. I've been playing around with it for the past week or so.

It can do some really cool things, and works a lot more like desktop GUI toolkits than most web app frameworks. (Both in terms of how it works, and in terms of how it performs.) I've been told it's much easier to learn if you know Cocoa, but I don't, so I can't comment on that.

</comment><comment><USER9> This page: <http://demo.sproutcore.com/sample_controls/>

Just stays empty for me, and Firefox (3.6, on OSX 10.6.2) gives me:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Security error" code: "1000" nsresult: "0x805303e8 (NS_ERROR_DOM_SECURITY_ERR)" location: "[http://demo.sproutcore.com/static/common_assets/en/efcc10e74...](http://demo.sproutcore.com/static/common_assets/en/efcc10e747291521495b10d9b48be9b9d3c489be/javascript- packed.js) Line: 3150"]

</comment><comment><USER10> Is this better than Google GWT?

Could one build something with the same graphics and responsiveness like Googles "Speed Tracer" plugin which is way cool?

<http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/speedtracer/>

<comment><USER11> It depends. There are a group of people who dislike Java so whatever the arguments are, they will not see SC or Cappuccino better than GWT.

GWT has typical Java attributes/properties: lots of tools and libraries, growing communities, a bit verbose, some setups, a bit heavy (not performance, but from a developer perspective).

<comment><USER12> The irritating thing with GWT it that it takes a long time to compile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is anybody else concerned about the buggy demos? <http://demo.sproutcore.com/sample_controls/>

On "Collections" moving the bottom right slider doesn't resize the cells. On "Containers", dragging the blue square is pretty buggy. There are others too. That kind of stuff would be a problem for me.

</comment><comment><USER14> I eagerly await the time when those frameworks will be able to do what Adobe Flex can do. I'm itching to try my hand at rewriting our app in javascript, but so far they all seem too immature and generally broken (and cross-browser incompatible) to be worth considering.

At the moment, for an RIA that's going to be used by enterprises, Flex still appears to win hands down, unfortunately. I'd love to be proved wrong, though! However, based on the comments in this thread, it appears that Sproutcore is not there yet, by far.

<comment><USER15> I like the concept of Flex but I've tried to create some apps and the UI designing was a pain, plus you have to deal with the fact the most users don't have the flex runtime app.

However flex uses AS which bring a nice belt of libraries to play with.

I don't know how it's now, I played with it a year ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Getting dark text on a dark background on my phone. Can't read it.

<comment><USER17> Pretty sure they borked their site on the way out to celebrate.

\---

I'm happy to announce that SproutCore 1.0.1046 is the official "1.0" release of SproutCore. We've had the gem out for nearly two months now without any show stopper issues forcing an update, so I'm pretty confident with it's stability.

Thanks again to the many people who contributed code to SproutCore 1.0. You've built something you should be very proud of.

This project was in the works for 18 months. We rewrote 20,000 lines of code, added nearly 6,000 unit tests, and significantly improved the clarity and consistency of the API.

Most importantly, SproutCore 1.0 is a performance beast. It feels really good to be able to recommend SproutCore to people building complex app that will push the boundaries of the browser knowing that we have the goods to get them there.

If you've been holding off on SproutCore 1.0 until it was really really done - well it's ready so come and get it!

Now What?

Ironically, most of the core SproutCore team has moved well along past the 1.0 candidate. A lot of work is already going into the next release with some really fantastic results. So must so that I will spend most of my talk at jsconf in April covering the new stuff instead of 1.0.

The good news is that 1.5 (or whatever it's called) will be a much shorter release cycle - probably starting this summer. And this time a lot of the development is happening in the community so it is a lot easier for everyone to get involved.

I'll save some of the big surprises for jsconf but suffice to say the next few versions of SproutCore will be major moves forward. 1.0 was about laying the ground work for some big things down the road. These next few releases we start to reap those rewards.

See you at jsconf.

<comment><USER16> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apple's Mobile Me service is built on this. It has its problems, but it's a pretty impressive web app. Amazing things can be done with this.

But the _fucking_ documentation!

I've 'dived in' to SproutCore a couple of times (spending about 2 days each time) and beyond the initial tutorials and a few random blog posts on third party sites there is almost no useful documentation. A lot of the info on the wiki is out of date or irrelevant to anyone but the developers. (I've been advised to visit the IRC channel numerous times, and it's great that it's there, but that's support not documentation.)

You pretty quickly end up reading the source code, and wasting time on trial & error approaches.

Look at the user guide for Code Igniter, a PHP framework, <http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/> — SproutCore desperately needs one of these.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is very broken on my (Android) phone. There's no way to scroll lists or resize containers and many of the popup panes don't work.

Supporting phones, tablets and mystery-gadget-of-tomorrow is verging on, if not already mandatory. The traditional monolithic desktop widgets don't adapt well to novel form factors. The flexibility of the web permits more usable interfaces than the desktop anyway.

There is a huge need for a layer that makes beautiful AJAX apps easy to build _and_ helps with the device-independence issue. Recreating the desktop GUI on the web is not the solution. It may be that SC is not limited to this, but it certainly seems like the main purpose.

</comment><comment><USER20> As I understand it, this is client side only. That means I have to duplicate some of the code on the server side, right? I'm thinking of stuff like input validation. And I have to say I have become a little wary of anything called framework.

</comment><comment><USER21> How do SproutCore and Cappucino compare to Google Web Toolkit (as far as the client side)?

<comment><USER11> What do you want to compare?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is awesome, hadn't heard about this before.

So it sends data to your server asynchronously in the background? So you write it in Ruby or something like that, and it compiles to js for you?

This could be huge.</comment>


The definitive Thorium guide. Energy we will never run out of - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

<comment><USER2> Hey everyone - I think we can all agree that Thorium tech has nothing to do with the current nuclear power industry. This industry opposes Thorium tech since the government decided to abandon it's research in the 1960s. Why? Thorium fussion is safe and turns itself off in the case of a power shutdown or emergency. That's what makes it better. However, during the 1960s arms race, the other dangerous high-pressure reactors using Uranium+Plutonium were adopted because they have dangerous byproducts - use in - you guessed it, nuclear bombs!

Hence Thorium, which is as abundant in the Earth as lead and actually creates all the heat inside our earth (read: magma) was abandoned. It was a true mistake because thorium is so abundant and so safe, it actually has more than 1 million times more energy efficiency when compared to fossil fules. It truely might be the solution to global warming.

Why? The Chinese are planning to completely control LFTR Thorium technology within 10-15 years, and they will also use energy and heat from this tech to power all their recent plans for global domination of de-salinization technology (hence, control fresh water sources as well). We're really stupid to not pick up where we left off in the 1960s and finish this tech. Don't direct your anger at Thorium like it's somehow connected to the Nuclear Power industry - it's not. The current industry opposes this tech because it has no profit in terms of selling an otherwise abundant fuel (Thorium) when currently they make 99% of their profits selling dangerous Uranium+Plutonium-based fuel to current nuclear power plants.

IF YOU SUPPORT THIS REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGY, PLEASE SIGN TH WHITEHOUSE PETITION TO GET THE BALL ROLLING IN WASHINGTON!

[https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/%21/petition/provide-f...](https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/%21/petition/provide- funding-liquid-fluoride-thorium-reactor-lftr-research-and-development-energy- independence/JkwTRBlv)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nuclear industry: "We swear we're telling the truth this time about thorium. Honest."

Too bad the nuclear industry has lied so many times about risks about real current nuclear technology risks and real current costs nobody can trust whether what they are saying might be really true or not about future technology.

How many weeks/months was the nuclear industry lying about everything single thing it said about Fukushima?</comment>


Stevey Yegge's Google Platforms Rant - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX

<comment><USER2> Discussed 2 years ago on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876)

</comment><comment><USER3> How can this be news? The fall of the Berlin wall is far more important and current!</comment>


Italia Startup Visa - <AUTHOR> http://italiastartupvisa.mise.gov.it/#landing-section <comment><USER2> tl;dr (navigation is terrible there): if you have EUR 50K or someone with some established name in startup scene in Italy is willing to give you that amount, you quality. Correct?</comment>


A new LibreOffice strategic marketing plan - <AUTHOR> https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/4pLtn9xn76BkxFK#pdfviewer <comment><AUTHOR> "LWN recently covered the effort within the LibreOffice project to find ways to support the companies doing the bulk of the development work. The project has now posted a revised marketing plan [PDF][2] with a number of changes, including the removal of the "personal edition" name. Regarding LibreOffice Online: "Following our normal development process, the Ecosystem will release their own versions in their own timing, allowing some features to reach their Enterprise versions before they are subsequently shipped in TDF builds (this allows the Ecosystem to positively differentiate by contributing new features & functionality)".

[1] [https://lwn.net/Articles/826217/](https://lwn.net/Articles/826217/)

[2] [https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/4pLtn9xn76BkxFK#p...](https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/4pLtn9xn76BkxFK#pdfviewer)</comment>