Status IE – IE's feature status and plans - <AUTHOR> http://status.modern.ie/ <comment><USER2> I would like to know from the IE team if there's a specific plan to fix the browser update issue, that is the fact that IE is by far the slower browser when it comes to user upgrades. It's exciting to see features in IE1x+, but we all know that those will be a tiny fraction of users for a long time.

I think that gaining consensus in developers' mindset goes through forcing updates like Chrome and Firefox do; don't care if it's monthly, quarterly or yearly, but users shouldn't even realize that an update was pushed to their machine. This model has shown that it works for browsers, and not only that, it has also proven to be the best model. Is there any actual actionable plan on this?

Adding new features in IE15 is fine and good, but won't buy a dime in developer consensus, when we still waste time supporting 5-years-old IE browsers at any given time.

<comment><USER3> I'd argue that IE is primarily used in corporate settings, when silently upgrading software is a big no-no. Everything has to be tested by the IT/IS department and rolled out in a controlled fashion.

<comment><USER2> Last time I managed to find a study showing _daily_ browser market share, I noticed that the drop for old IE versions during the weekend was significant but below 50%. So over half of those users are not corporate users.

I don't like citing numbers without a source, but I couldn't find one in 5 minutes Googling. If somebody has a link that shows fairly recent _daily_ IE usage share, we can double check my recall.

I would also like to add that one technical solution for the "IE in enterprise" problem would be allowing parallel IE version installations. IE already allows to go into old version emulation mode, but it's not 100% faithful (I don't know the details).

If it was 100% faithful, sysadmin could simply update IE to the latest version for normal browsing (or even let it auto-update, since I'm sure no sysadmin believe that he/she can QA IE better than MS for general Internet usage), and forcing compatibility (through GPO) for Intranet sites that are broken in newer version.

But since it's not 100% faithful, the technical solution would be allowing to install an auto-updating IE in parallel to IE8, and then configure a policy to automatically switch to IE8 for Intranet sites (Chrome Enterprise does a similar thing; you can configure a GPO so that the user is automatically brought to IE when he/she browses to specific websites, e.g.: Intranet).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if a re-branding is in order. I suspect I'm not the only one who feels an inner discomfort with IE. I even associate the logo and name with thoughts like "outdated," "broken," "difficult," and "cumbersome."

I realize they've come a long way, but it's tough to shake off 10+ years of negative experiences and associations.

</comment><comment><USER5> None of the things listed as "not currently planned" are big surprises, though seeing WebRTC there is very disappointing. I've never seen "Object RTC" before, is it a competing effort, or a restandardization effort?

<comment><USER6> "MathML" is listed as "not currently planned".

<comment><USER7> Honest question: now that mathjax has a high-quality pure-HTML/CSS output engine, does anyone still care about browser MathML support?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Note that this site lists WebGL as "IE11+". That's false. IE11 has a flavor of webgl that's experimental (prefixed or not) that's reported as version WebGL 0.92 (this is basically an invalid specification conformant string, it's either 1.0 or something not done).

Huge gaps and bugs remain in Microsofts WebGL implementation which make it nearly impossible to use except for specific select usecases that Microsoft optimized for.

It took google and mozilla about 4 years to get a good WebGL implementation (and they're still not done). It'll take Microsoft years to come to bring their implementation on par with the rest of the WebGL world.

<comment><USER9> We shipped an update to the IE11 WebGL implementation to developers today as part of Windows 8.1 Update. We will roll this out to all IE11 users through Windows Update starting next week. There will be further updates to our WebGL implementation in the summer.

If there are specific use cases that you're interested in support for, please let us know what they are so that we can prioritise the order of our implementation.

<comment><USER8> The most important thing is to run the webgl conformance test (online [https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl- confo...](https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-conformance- tests.html) github [https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGL](https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGL)) every day on a variety of machines with different configurations (I assume you have an automated test farm).

Another measure that's also very useful is to run the webgl performance regression test suite every day to see if performance got worse or better with the changes.

Unfortunately there isn't a comprehensive GLSL syntax test suite, but GLSL has been much of a sore point in IE where some syntax that's valid GLSL would work except in IE (such as uniforms separated by a comma).

I've submitted some tickets to IE (and added more conformance tests to cover them) for some of the gaps (gl.SAMPLES, gl.STENCIL_BITS, gl.SUBPIXEL_BITS).

A thing that's also a sore point is IEs lack of support for very common extensions such as OES_texture_float_linear, WEBGL_compressed_texture_s3tc, WEBGL_depth_texture, OES_standard_derivatives, OES_vertex_array_object, ANGLE_instanced_arrays, OES_element_index_uint, WEBGL_lose_context. You can get an overview of the state of support on [http://webglstats.com/](http://webglstats.com/)

A note on floating point texture extensions. If you implement one extension (for instance OES_texture_float) you should really implement the companion extensions as well for texture_float_linear and color_buffer_float. Only the triplet of extensions provides comprehensive overview of support.

Personally I'd like to see these run in IE of course: [http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/feb/15/soft-shadow- mapping/](http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/feb/15/soft-shadow-mapping/) [http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/feb/04/high-performance- js-...](http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/feb/04/high-performance-js-heatmaps/) [http://codeflow.org/webgl/deferred-irradiance- volumes/www/](http://codeflow.org/webgl/deferred-irradiance-volumes/www/) [http://codeflow.org/webgl/trails/www/](http://codeflow.org/webgl/trails/www/) [http://codeflow.org/webgl/barycentric- wireframe/www/](http://codeflow.org/webgl/barycentric-wireframe/www/) [http://codeflow.org/webgl/ssao/](http://codeflow.org/webgl/ssao/)

I think the demos above are fairly good usecases for gaps that you might have, because they exercise a lot of functionality, they're not bound to some specific framework (like three.js) but they are WebGL conformant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would be nice to know if they plan on implementing special handling for asm.js. This info is nowhere on this chart.

<comment><USER11> Ah,yes, good suggestion to add to our list on the site. Look for an update soon from our JS engine (Chakra) team's plan.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for such a fast reply! :) I'm quite happy with Microsoft's recent push towards openness.

One additional suggestion: Perhaps you could also include a rationale on why a specific feature is not planned to be implemented: e.g. WebRTC. (Though I can anticipate this might not be feasible to do for strategic / management reasons.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Chrome's dashboard: [http://www.chromestatus.com](http://www.chromestatus.com)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the link. I always found it hard to know what is happening in new versions of chrome and which feature became available when. This is exactly what I needed - Thanks!

Also found chrome dashboard easier to use than IE dashboard but that's understandable as this is new effort.

And, if anyone from IE team is here, how about some consistency with developer tools with other browsers as well. The web developer UI in IE 11 is so different that I struggle to found simple things - maybe I am not good in recognizing new icons :)

<comment><USER12> I'm actually on the dev tools team. I'll pass along the feedback to the PMs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm bewildered by the many "under consideration" entries. When all the other major players support something, and you want to be taken seriously, why aren't you throwing more engineers at the problem?

<comment><USER11> If feature status were a Facebook relationship status, many might say "it's complicated." ;-) Most of the time, it's not actually a question of engineering resources. Stay tuned as we update more and more stuff to "In Development".

(I work for IE)

<comment><USER15> I'm curious--does this imply internal-politics problems (e.g. getting other departments to expose, and possibly backport, APIs that Chakra needs to consume to do the features), or just weird engineering challenges specific to the Chakra codebase?

<comment><USER10> I could see some conflicts of interest issues too. (e.g. implementing WebRTC could be against their interests - since Microsoft owns Skype, they might not want to lower the barrier of entry to a competitor.)

<comment><USER16> Microsoft are contributing to Object RTC, so I see this as unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can somebody on the IE team comment on when specific SVG features will be added? I am interested in using a <use> tag with a xlink:href to an element in a different SVG file. This is part of the SVG spec and works in the latest versions of Chrome and FireFox, but does not work in IE 11. Any plans to fix this?

My Stack Overflow question on the topic is at:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22516712/svg-use-tag- with...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22516712/svg-use-tag-with- external-reference-in-ie-11)

</comment><comment><USER18> No web audio API? Are they building in an alternative?

All other browsers support web audio. Why isn't MS following along?

<comment><USER16> It's under consideration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> You can also download Virtual Box VMs with different versions of IE [http://modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads](http://modern.ie/en- us/virtualization-tools#downloads). Indispensable when developing on Linux!

<comment><USER20> I wish they'd link the VMWare VMs for other OSes... They're available under the Linux option iirc, which works fine for windows/mac.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is somewhat misleading WRT to Flexbox. IE10 "supports" the abandoned syntax, which is incompatible with the new proposal. It would be very useful if this was explicitly mentioned in cases where the API for these things is in flux.

</comment><comment><USER22> I still don't understand why IE still mark Content Security Policy (CSP) under consideration given all other major browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera) have at least some version of CSP implemented.

I am actually very surprised they don't yet have HSTS implemented. IE is so much behind these security standard IMO. I don't know why they would push Web Crypto into 11+ when they don't even have CSP or HSTS implemented yet.

Given the standard, they should have HSTS, then CSP, then Web Crypto and then subresource integrity (which will probably take another year or two to stabilize a final draft for v1).

Is this list even up-to-date?

</comment><comment><USER23> I see WebP but no mention of WebM video at the moment. Any reason it's not there?

<comment><USER24> If they do add that, they should specify VP8 and/or VP9 and/or Vorbis and/or Opus rather than just WebM.

The Opus audio codec, which was co-developed by Microsoft subsidiary Skype, would be useful both for WebRTC, and the alternative Microsoft favours, ObjectRTC.

VP8 and Opus both get mentioned in passing in the ObjectRTC spec that I found, but I don't know if they have the same status as in WebRTC (mandatory for Opus, optional for VP8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Has the Irish domain registry lifted its rules on .ie domains? It used to be that you only register them for Irish businesses, even getting yourname.ie was not straight forward. It's a little disturbing to see this domain.

</comment><comment><USER26> Semi-related for cross-browser ES6 compat:

[http://kangax.github.io/es5-compat- table/es6/](http://kangax.github.io/es5-compat-table/es6/)

Shows future versions of Firefox and Chrome but not yet IE.

<comment><USER27> Future versions of Fx and Chr are available constantly (on multiple channels at different stages), what is not the case with IE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Thanks.

Please add a change log so we can quickly know when features get added/rejected/shipped/...

Also I found that sorting by status was broken (a block of IE10+ features in the middle of IE11+ ones).

</comment><comment><USER21> This is great. I realize that there are probably political hurdles to doing so, but it would be awesome if these linked to MDN in addition to MSDN / W3C / WebPlatform.

</comment><comment><USER29> WebRTC is not even in their plan yet. _Sigh_.

<comment><USER16> Object RTC is under consideration instead.

<comment><USER30> It's OK. You can implement WebRTC as a JS library on top of ORTC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm not really interested in IE news unless it's "IE will use webkit rendering engine from now on."

</comment><comment><USER32> Does that mean we won't be able to see ES6 modules coming to IE anytime soon?

<comment><USER16> I believe the data from the Chakra (IE's JS engine) team hasn't been updated yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> try view-source, it's build using angular, bower and bootstrap.

</comment><comment><USER34> heheh. This website has a hard dependency on chromestatus.com.

<comment><USER11> Yep, and we're already chatting with the Chrome team on how browsers can collaborate on this type of data. We encourage people to use our data too. It's openly licensed.

<comment><USER35> You can use CORS to access the data at [http://status.modern.ie/features](http://status.modern.ie/features) :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> _> WebRTC - Not currently planned_

Fail.

<comment><USER37> But Object RTC is under consideration. I believe (but don't quote me) that most of the efforts at the W3C are focused on this over WebRTC. Also, you'll notice that the IE team is taking a slightly more conservative approach to the new features. Since many features are still in draft mode and can significantly change, they're implementing features as they mature.

<comment><USER36> MS tried to sabotage mandating free codecs for standard real time communications, but W3C managed to put Opus in WebRTC. Not sure what's going on in parallel efforts in this regard but it's a pretty important issue and MS is on the wrong side in this one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> They are comparing IE to other real modern browsers - it's rather surprising to see. Like saying "The competitors are far ahead, here what they already do and we don't and out of that what we plan to do next and what not.".

<comment><USER16> There are only 13 features listed there not currently supported in IE and supported by Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Of those, 4 are currently in development.</comment></comment>


Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.useit.com/ <comment><USER2> "It's time to show most passwords in clear text as users type them."

I stopped paying attention after that.

<comment><USER3> Nielsen often is quite radical. This is i.e. displayed by the layout of his own website but he is one of the most respected usability experts in the world. He has been fighting for more usable websites for quite some time and the prizes they award to e.g. Intranets are qite prestigeous.

IMHO it is worth listening to his point of view. You can still disagree but if you think twice about what he is saying it often makes sense.

If you think about the password example, how much more useable has the iPhone's password-field become because you see the last letter you typed?</comment></comment>


Small, slick design makes Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 the PC laptop to beat - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/review-dell-makes-a-great-laptop-better-with-the-xps-13-convertible/ <comment><USER2> I just ordered a (non-2-in-1, Kaby Lake) 13" XPS yesterday. To be honest, I was against ordering from Dell after reading about all of the quality control issues (just see the Dell subreddit for the sheer volume of problems), but got sucked in by a very good sale price (am paying CAD ~ $2000 including taxes for a 13", 16GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, 4k Touch). I haven't even received the laptop and I'm already regretting my purchase. My order was "held up" and I had to call in to speak with a Dell sales rep for about an hour to get it to go through. What I discovered later by doing some reading is that essentially what happened is that my order was of high enough value that it was flagged, such that the sales rep could cancel the online order, replace it with a new one, and collect a commission on it. I'm more than slightly annoyed by this because in doing so, he invalidated a rebate of about $200 that I would have collected on the initial purchase (through ebates.ca). I know it sounds outlandish, but this happens consistently to people in forums that I have read. The sales rep even half-admitted it to me that the order was flagged because it reached a certain price threshold. This is Dell Canada, so other countries may have different experiences. Super shady business practice, if you ask me.

I know I'm saving a ton of money over a similarly-(but still inferior)-spec'd MBP (would run me about $2600 Canadian all-in, with no touch bar), but I already have such a bad taste in my mouth that unless the machine is flawless on delivery (the odds of which seem low, based on reading other people's experiences), it's getting returned and I'll take my business elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> That sounds awful!

 _I know I 'm saving a ton of money over a similarly-spec'd MBP (would run me about $2600 Canadian all-in, with no touch bar),_

I bought a MBP 2016 last Saturday. It was defective (basically, the kernel would panic in a couple of minutes, probably bad memory). We called Apple support on Sunday (they actually called us within two minutes on request, no need to call and wait). Although they gave us the incorrect advise to make a genius appointment, we went to the store the next day, got the option to either get the money back or get a new machine. No questions asked. I didn't even have to show the defect.

MacBooks have a pretty large margin, but you typically get it back in service.

<comment><USER4> Frankly, I don't know where you live in Canada, but in Quebec, anything you order that arrives defective can be replaced at no cost. It's not good consumer service, it's the law. (Lemon law.)

I've bought tons of stuff at NewEgg and never got problem getting either refund and replacement. I bought a refurbished Acer V3 13" (Skylake, 6GB RAM, 256GB SSD, full HD touch screen) for 700$. Works flawlessly.

<comment><USER2> This is true, but the hoops you have to jump through to prove a defect and get said return varies greatly between companies. I think the point of the Apple story is they do it without asking any questions. From what I've read, Dell for example will have you spending at least an hour or two on the phone or in a chat with someone who may end up arguing with you about whether something is an actual defect or not. There's a big difference in how customers are treated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The XPS is a Linux showcase laptop. I have run Fedora latest on this laptop (which installs like a breeze. ubuntu has problems with the latest NVME ssd). Gnome is the UX to beat in laptops now.

Gnome is optimized for sheer developer productivity and looks very slick. Fedora with kernel 4.9+ is excellent. Everything just works on the XPS.

<comment><USER6> Is that true across the board on the XPS line? I thought they used slightly different parts for the "Developer Edition" \- intel instead of Broadcom wifi, off the top of my head. If it is true then I'm sold - I'm looking at picking up a Windows laptop in the next couple months and was thinking of grabbing a Surface Book if MS get another revision out soon. But if the XPS series is a first class citizen in Linux then that may clinch it since I'll have a nice fallback when I get sick of Windows :D

<comment><USER7> I'd like to know this too. I see no mention of Linux in the article or the product page[1] (which ars doesn't seem to link to in the article, only link to other articles they've written about dell stuff, which seem like common practice these days. What happened to organic linking?)

[1][http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-9365-2-in-1-laptop/...](http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-9365-2-in-1-laptop/pd)

<comment><USER5> I have the non-developer version of the laptop.

Imho the only thing that really differs is the network card. And in the XPS, you can replace your network card. Having said that , I have the non developer version and have had out of the box experience.

In fact, it has been a long time since I saw network problems on any laptop for a long time. The biggest issues you will see are around secure boot and UEFI configuration. Dell has an excellent BIOS that takes care of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lovely machine but I personally can't stomach the 16:9 aspect ratio. This usually limits my options when it comes to hardware. Wish Dell came out with similar but sporting a 3:2 or 16:10 screen (with Linux support).

<comment><USER9> What do you find problematic about the 16:9 aspect ratio?

<comment><USER10> Low verticality and too much width, which sucks when reading long snippets of code which are 84 columns wide.

<comment><USER11> I use a 21:9 screen and can definitely report that it does not suck. I can now stack 4 snippets of 84 column wide code across my screen instead of one.

<comment><USER12> Going column to column doesn't disorient you?

<comment><USER11> Not at all. If it's combined with a tiling window manager it is bliss!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The webcam shows your nostrils, is it really the PC laptop to beat? Everything else looks good but having such a big issue that will make you look strange during interviews/meetings (i.e. important moments of your work life) makes it hard to believe that it is the best laptop available.

<comment><USER14> >> is it really the PC laptop to beat

The problem with the headline for me is the implication that everyone is looking for the same thing from a laptop, when it's obviously not true.

<comment><USER15> Honestly, this thing checks off almost every piece that people have said they hate about the new MacBook Pro. No USB-A ports, only 16GB of RAM max, low performance CPUs, shallow keyboard. I'm surprised anyone is giving it the time of day around here.

<comment><USER16> That's because people who want that stuff can simply choose a different laptop. With Apple however, you're screwed if their top-of-the-line product doesn't provide the things you're looking for.

And of course it's made even worse by the fact that you're not allowed to run macOS in a VM, effectively forcing many developers to buy Apple hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is neat, but why do we need Thunderbolt when we've got USB Type-C? I thought that was supposed to be the One True Port moving forward.

<comment><USER18> USB-C is the connector, most systems have USB3.1 protocol running over USB-C. Some phones have USB 2.0 protocol running over USB-C connector. And the new MacBooks and some new PCs have Thunderbolt3 protocol running over USB-C.

The protocol will self-negotiate and fall back to the most advanced protocol both devices speak.

<comment><USER17> Then why does the article state that it's got both a 1xUSB Type-C and a 1xThunderbolt 3? Why does it differentiate if Thunderbolt 3 requires a USB Type-C connector?

<comment><USER19> > Why does it differentiate?

Because Thunderbolt 3 is faster than USB, and allows for more powerful devices.

All USB Type C ports support USB, but only some USB Type C ports _also support_ Thunderbolt 3, so they are labeled differently to show that.

<comment><USER17> OK but why would they ever have a USB 3 USB Type-C port if they had one Thunderbolt 3? Why would they put a crappy one in if they also have a good one? Why not just have two good ones?

<comment><USER20> Why have a crappier version of anything? I suspect it is because it is more cost effective and the average customer will not know the difference, as most devices don't speak (and don't need to speak) thunderbolt yet anyways.

<comment><USER17> The customer will notice the difference when the TB3 device only works on one side of their laptop and not the other. This brings us back to the fallacy of USB Type-C and the idea of One True Plug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Has anybody tried putting Ubuntu on it? I'm using an older XPS 13 with Ubuntu 16.04 for non-work-related tasks and overall it's convenient enough I'm ready to stick with XPS 13 for the next one.

<comment><USER22> Dell sells and supports a Developer Edition of this laptop with Ubuntu 16.04.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In January I had every intention of picking up one of these. They are beautiful and seemed to have everything I wanted. But I took a moment to look again at alternatives and I'm glad I did. After doing some research it seemed clear that the HP Spectre x360 was actually the ultrabook to have.

I'm not sure how good Linux support is, but with a 512gb M.2 SSD, 16GB, a U series Kaby Lake processor, and better battery life than the XPS, it felt like a non issue. I have no problems running VS and my CentOS VMs.

<comment><USER24> I've got a 15" HP Envy with a Skylake, and its performance as a Linux machine has been flawless. I also put Windows 7 on it, and that was _significantly_ more hassle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does this charge over USB-C?

Edit: seems so, [https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2017/03/DSC06...](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2017/03/DSC06291.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER26> just to add, its available with preinstalled ubuntu 16.04 LTS from dell.

<comment><USER27> I don't think it is. Not seeing that option at [http://www.dell.com/en- us/shop/productdetails/xps-13-9365-2-...](http://www.dell.com/en- us/shop/productdetails/xps-13-9365-2-in-1-laptop)

<comment><USER26> maybe its not available in US? Its available in some eu countries.

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/3161861/linux/the-new-dell- xp...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/3161861/linux/the-new-dell- xps-13-developer-edition-is-the-little-linux-laptop-that-can.html)

[http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd?3x_n...](http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd?3x_nav=OS_BRAND%3DUBUNT&3x_page=1&filterCollapsed=true)

select OS option above.

Here is the original blog from dell engineer himself. [https://bartongeorge.io/2017/01/09/welcome-the-new-ubuntu- ba...](https://bartongeorge.io/2017/01/09/welcome-the-new-ubuntu-based- precision-line-up-mobile-workstations-plus-a-new-all-in-one/)

<comment><USER28> Different models. OP was talking about the new 9365 (2 in 1), not the 9360.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How does Dell warranty work? ie: If I buy it from another country?

Reason I go with Apple laptops is that their warranty goes across borders. Just enter a serial number, and then your done. No more receipts, etc.

</comment><comment><USER30> Nice upside down logo. Really slick!</comment>


Use BitBucket for private repos? Be careful - <AUTHOR> http://screencast.com/t/wYTfVA5as7KR

<comment><USER2> They have an auto-complete for adding people to groups too which is similar to what you're seeing. It's a tradeoff between convenience and privacy, your account existence is not a secret but everything on your profile can be [1].

[1] param's profile [https://bitbucket.org/param](https://bitbucket.org/param)</comment>


On Reddit, Intimate Glimpses of Addicts in Thrall to Opioids - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/us/opioid-reddit.html <comment><AUTHOR> fwiw, yesterday, there was a thread on a Guardian article that focused mostly on r/opiates and how it "became a lifeline" to those struggling with addiction: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14805145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14805145)

This article focuses mostly on the now-banned r/opiaterollcall and the last messages of users who apparently fatally overdosed.</comment>


New York stock exchange has its first female leader in 226-year history - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/may/25/stacey-cunningham-nyse-first-female-president-wall-street <comment><USER2> I never knew there's a sculpture of a fearless girl staring down the charging bull in front of the stock exchange building -- the media always just shows the bull.

<comment><USER3> It's new. I also believe the "staring down the bull" location is not a permanent location.

It was created to advertise an index fund.

The bull statue is not located in front of the NY Stock Exchange building; it's located at Bowling Green Park ~2 block away.

The sculptor of the bull statue is extremely opposed to the "staring down the bull" location; he believes it corrupts the meaning of his statue and exploits his work for profit. Which, IMO, is a fair position to take even if you are 100% in favor of gender parity.

BONUS fun fact: The charging bull statue was originally unsanctioned guerrilla art.

<comment><USER4> The whole set-up is such an interesting work of art.

If you asked a visitor who didn't know the background, "Which statue was installed by a corporation and which was guerilla art?", they would probably say the bull was corporate and the girl was unauthorized street art. And they would be 100% wrong.

<comment><USER5> Given the proliferation of CDO executive roles in contemporary corporate world, it's pretty obvious which one is corporate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Sangster told the Guardian she too found it 'frustrating' that we're still celebrating when women are named to top positions."

Then stop celebrating it. I swear the only reason journalism publications highlight this stuff is because they know it translates into clicks. This isn't the 20th century anymore. Women in executive roles aren't shocking.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not to be a debbie downer but... just in time for floor traders to become completely irrelevant. But I guess it wouldn't be news worthy if are you counting the women running the trading bots because they have been around for a long time now.

</comment><comment><USER8> As a point of comparison, the London Stock Exchange had its first female chief executive in 2001[1].

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

</comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one on earth who doesn't care if the head of the NYSE is a man or woman?

</comment><comment><USER10> How come there's not enough women ditch diggers? or male nurses?

I am tired of the selective outrage in diversity.

<comment><USER3> [http://www.nawic.org/nawic/About_NAWIC.asp](http://www.nawic.org/nawic/About_NAWIC.asp) \- Core Purpose: To enhance the success of women in the construction industry.

[http://www.aamn.org/about-us/mission-vision](http://www.aamn.org/about- us/mission-vision) \- Mission: To shape the practice, education, research, and leadership for men in nursing and advance men's health.

<comment><USER10> Do either of these organizations get featured in the Guardian?</comment></comment></comment>


Trump and the nuclear codes - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38651616 <comment><AUTHOR> "...once he has authenticated his identity as commander-in-chief, using a plastic card ... the president has selected his strike options from a long- prepared "menu"..."

This bit astounds me - it's basically a Bank style chip-and-pin reader, with a menu of nuclear strike options!</comment>


How to stop brain cancer–with rabies - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/how-stop-brain-cancer-rabies <comment><USER2> This (and dendritic cell vaccines, and inactivated poliovirus, and...) all can be traced back to an observation that the only people with good outcomes from glioblastoma were those with listeriosis in the past.

Steve Forman at City of Hope has reported some excellent results using CAR-T cells in GBM ([http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1610497](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1610497)) and Linda Liau at UCLA has seen good results combining checkpoint inhibitors with dendritic cell vaccines ([https://insight.jci.org/articles/view/87059](https://insight.jci.org/articles/view/87059)).

The fundamental problem with aggressive brain cancers (the most commonly diagnosed kind in adults, unfortunately) is that "excellent" means "the patients survived an average of two years instead of one!"

It's nasty stuff. I work on acute leukemias, which aren't much better, but at least we see some durable cures now and then.</comment>


Steve Jobs email reply generator - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1384.html

<comment><USER2> 1 minute of time to use it and i can't even copy and paste my email..dogh!

</comment><comment><USER3> It needs a Randomize All Choices button to really work. A separate area where the choices parts are in text instead of a menu for easier reading would be nice, too.

</comment><comment><USER4> Steve should just have a Markov-chain Palin-bot reply to his fan mail.

</comment><comment><USER5> They missed "It'll be awesome!" from the list of possible Steve's replies.</comment>


Sloan Kettering's Deal with Startup Ignites a New Uproar - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/health/memorial-sloan-kettering-cancer-paige-ai.html <comment><USER2> Thats nothing compared to the work in China right now. In ten or 20 years, the west could be permanently behind.

From [https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/data- sharing-...](https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/data-sharing- giving-chinese-ai-firms-a-head-start-36039570.html)

> DeepMind, the AI lab of Google's Alphabet, has laboured for nearly two years > to access medical records... Last month, the top UK privacy watchdog > declared the trial violates British data-protection laws, throwing its > future into question.

> Contrast that with how officials handled a project in Fuzhou... The summit > involved a vast handover of data. At the press conference, city officials > shared 80 exabytes worth of heart ultrasound videos, according to one > company that participated. With the massive data set, some of the companies > were tasked with building an AI tool that could identify heart disease, > ideally at rates above medical experts. They were asked to turn it around by > the autumn.

<comment><USER3> I don't think the issue here is so much the data (which is anonymized), but the conflict of interest. I know conflict of interest is par for the course in China, but for the individuals who made the decision that this startup should be given exclusive access to the data to then be given stakes in the startup is clearly a conflict. Doubling that conflict is the fact that they work for a non-profit, which has tax-preferred status and also received a stake in the startup.

Let me make an analogy here: I advise several startups and am given shares in those companies in return for my time. A few of them make software or sell solutions that the company I work for could use. At my company I can influence whether or not we use these startups as a vendor. It is clearly unethical for me to be involved in any decision that pertains to a company where I hold an ownership stake. It would also be unethical for me to take an ownership stake after I was involved in a negotiation with those companies. I would disclose and recuse myself from any such decision. That's without adding the extra (legal) wrinkle around non-profit status, which doesn't pertain.

<comment><USER4> > which is anonymized

How reliably is the anonymization? Based on very little reading, data can at least sometime be de-anonymized. If that becomes possible 5 years from now, what happens then to the data already made public? How will individual's privacy be protected?

<comment><USER5> Unless they are in the business of selling advertisements or life insurance, there is probably very little incentive for them to de-anonymize the data. The bigger risk with that data is that they don't secure it properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The company has an exclusive deal to use the cancer center's vast archive of 25 million patient tissue slides, along with decades of work by its world- renowned pathologists."

In general, the world is better off with more information: why not open source the data if better cancer diagnosis is the goal?

<comment><USER5> Reminds me of the time I was browsing through a scrap yard in a large mid- western city for art supplies and happened across an oil drum filled to the top with discarded chest x-rays. Kind of disturbing both from the sheer number of xrays as well as the deformities visible in many of the images.

Point being, hospitals have a very poor track record regarding their disposal of medical equipment and records so a motivated individual could probably easily find this data in a recycling center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Datasets like this need to be public. They're too valuable to be silo'd by some little AI startup.

<comment><USER8> My same concern about the ethics of this. I might have felt a little differently if this AI startup had paid for all of the data collection proactively (although I would have still had concerns about the exclusivity of any such agreements to patient access), but as it is this seems unethical.

The biomedical-industrial complex in the US makes my stomach churn. So many conflicts of interest, rent-seeking, monopolies, and nepotism.</comment></comment>


PopVideo:  ESP Game idea applied to video - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwap.com/gwap/gamesPreview/popvideo/

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if they will attempt to reconstruct a complete transcript of what is said. Perhaps they will use data from this game to enhance the output of speech recognition software.</comment>


Free legal documents for entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2009/08/03/free-legal-documents-for-entrepreneurs/ <comment><USER2> This looks very interesting, something I need just at the moment. Anyone out there informed about legal issues enough to give an opinion on this, good or bad?

<comment><USER3> Any documentation that comes out of a firm like Orrick will be first class (I have done startups for years and know the difference).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great to see a legal team get involved in the community like this and offer a helping hand. I'm sure it will be good for there business in the long run.</comment>


Why Is the Most-Viewed Gaming Video on YouTube About Cars 2? - <AUTHOR> http://minimaxir.com/2015/06/cars-2/?hn=1

<comment><USER2> This reddit comment by Hyroero:

>It's kids. They literally all have ipads or some other tablet (most of the children I look after even at the age of 1 or 2 have their own tablet...).

>Cars 2 was craaaaazy popular with children, it's the same as how frozen is crazy popular right now.

>That explains a few other entries in the list like Pocoyo which is a popular kids show too.

>These children basically watch the same video over and over and over (not sure if that gives additional views or not) then select what ever looks cool in related videos, rinse and repeat.

>Edit: Just felt like adding another example, one of the children I care for is obsessed with the Lego movie and is often watching random game play from the Lego movie video game as if it were a show. He doesn't understand it's a game, in fact his parents don't play games either so he's had no contact with games.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/38xjhp/i_created_a_l...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/38xjhp/i_created_a_list_of_the_top_mostviewed_gaming/cryoei0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, it's the only video on the list that I've seen and it's exactly because my 2 and 4 year olds commandeer my iDevices and watch those videos. See this article about one woman making $5 million from reviewing Disney toys and you'll start to understand: [http://www.buzzfeed.com/hillaryreinsberg/youtubes-biggest- st...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/hillaryreinsberg/youtubes-biggest-star-is-an- unknown-toy-reviewing-toddler-wh#.gtyEPb6aoE)

<comment><USER4> So advertising on those videos is probably near worthless then?

<comment><USER5> Those kids also influence which toys daddy will buy.

<comment><USER6> The linked article seemed to imply that because YT sees grown-up user info when kids use devices that belong to their parents, it will show grown-up commercials, e.g. Target and ATT. That would be worthless, since kids don't care and their parents don't see it.

<comment><USER7> Which is why advertisers consider the video being viewed, not just what user they think is viewing them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think people understand how widespread YouTube viewing is for kids.

The Psy "Gangnam Style" video is the most popular video on the site because kids watch it over and over again. (If you ever wondered why it was so popular.. that's why) Same reason why that Disney collector is the most viewed YouTube user.

Kids love YouTube.

<comment><USER9> My son was a YouTube viewer before he could talk. He is now 2 1/2, and every day he spends 20-30 minutes watching videos. Occasionally more (esp. when his parents are sick.) Sometimes he follows a video stream. Other times he asks us to put specific genres up for viewing.

He will unquestionably be able to type on the iPad long before he can actually write.

It is very much going to change the next generation.

<comment><USER10> My 4yo nephew will watch youtube vids of tractors until he falls asleep. He can't write and can only read a few words, but he will put characters into the search field and choose the suggestions he recognizes.

<comment><USER11> I saw a 3~4yo on an airplane once playing on an iPad (some infinite runner game). He would try to buy everything in the store after each round, probably because he couldn't tell how many coins he had or needed. Most of the time the dialog to pay real money for coins came up, and he would close it.

It was just weird to watch him do that so much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My daughter learnt to speak English and I'd much better than her peers, just by watching and learning from Peppa Pig[1] on Youtube. She was about 3 years then. Quintessential, she also got her quivered accent from that British Series. We have been surprised many a times by the words she used, for her age and that we're not in an English dominant place at all - India.

Ever since I taught her to use the Voice Search, she stopped asking me to search her videos. I just make sure the Filtering is set to Strict.

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

<comment><USER13> My 2 1/2 year old niece is OBSESSED with Peppa Pig. She watches the same DVD all week until her mum can't stand it and has to change it.

I see her using the iPad and using YouTube suggestions from where she's previously seen PP. she'll happily re-watch the same clip, so I really wouldn't be surprised by the findings on reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think you got close to the answer at the end of your article - some videos just hit hard with younger children and the type of children who will love to watch something again and again and again, on near-permanent repeat. Cars 2 is exactly the kind of franchise that would be of significant appeal to that group.

<comment><USER15> I agree somewhat with that kids' theory, but I'd that were truly the case then there would be other videos like this that had so many views. And the frozen video being so far away in the list makes me wonder.

Could also be that the video is embedded in a site or sites and on auto play?

<comment><USER14> Frozen won't have anything like as much appeal to young, barely lingual children, who know that they like brightly coloured cars with faces, can probably say "cars" to their parents, and who will watch a video with those cars from end to end and will then immediately watch it again.

Just as young children seem to have an endless capacity to watch the same kids' DVD over and over again.

This is far from the only example on YouTube - there are thousands of simple videos that get staggeringly high view counts, which become "fascinators" for kids. I saw one not so long ago which was literally just someone playing with a Play-Doh set. Nicely shot, no dialogue, just two hands making brightly coloured food-shaped items out of Play-Doh. Millions of views, right there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "..., since making videos appear more popular than they actually are can help lead to genuine virality."

"genuine virality" is a term I need to think about for a while.

</comment><comment><USER17> A simplier answer. It's the only cars 2 content on YouTube and it's particularly enjoyable for two year olds. Guessing that many parents show it to their kids.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm kinda surprised a Disney children's property has weapons like Gatling guns and rocket launchers.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, it's weird. My sons (2 and 4) absolutely love the first Cars movie, but they won't be watching the second until they are a bit older. It's quite a step up in menace and violence, sadly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> About how much money has YouTube presumably paid out to DarkZeroTV for this video's 119 million views?

<comment><USER21> 119,000K views * $7.00 cpm = $833,000

i found the average youtube CPM with a google search

<comment><USER22> It's more like $1-$2, maybe even lower for an audience that is mostly children. Still a lot of money.</comment></comment></comment>


Inside Google's Secret Lab - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/118812-inside-googles-secret-lab

<comment><USER2> Perhaps it is just late and I'm cynical but this screamed "hey we're still cool, c'mon see?" There were a series of articles about Microsoft's research projects that had the same vibe. Perhaps it is the BusinessWeek lens. Hard to say.

I cringe though on that title, if its a "secret" lab then you wouldn't know about it, so it isn't secret, so what is it?

<comment><USER3> It's easy to get cynical about business articles and anything with "secret" in the title. I get that way myself. But since the demise of Bell Labs, it feels like there's a big void to be filled. It probably never will be filled in the same way, but I'm happy to see a big company take on big projects. Other than CERN or NASA, I don't hear too much in the news about big budget R&D / science projects.

<comment><USER4> University teams around the country have partially filled that void.

DARPA is doing some pretty neat things as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The UAV or aerostat balloon broadband relay thing heavily hinted at in this article is one of the more amazing ideas. Totally feasible with current technology and highly beneficial; it seems like an obvious thing to do even now.

I guess I'd care about it more for disaster or conflict zone operations vs. ongoing operations in poor countries (since vastly more money is available in the short term in the first case), but it would probably make sense everywhere. At 50k feet, you can cover a pretty large area with spot beams, and probably do aerostat to aerostat relays. Combined with undersea fiber, you could do a good job of providing high speed communications services to some underserved markets.

I assume you'd use high altitude aerostats to provide low bandwidth coverage to large areas, and then local, lower altitude balloons or uavs, fed by the high altitude stuff, in areas of high user density.

<comment><USER6> Another use case I see is their potential use at sporting arenas for high profile events, cause you know people get bored/distracted at their football games and congest the network with massive traffic.

<comment><USER5> Or even more usefully, in random places which have concerts/festivals only infrequently. You'd think a sports stadium could have permanent RF reinforcement gear installed (and just turned on sometimes).

<comment><USER6> Possibly, but maybe it would be cheaper for them to pay for the service from google or whomever (depending on how frequent their network is overly congested) and not have to worry about having special staff on hand to manage something themselves (maybe even the not having to worry about it is enough to shell out cash in itself).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am reminded of my former company's CTO who once told me that true and disruptive R&D can only be done by a company with a monopoly power, so they can hide their true margins in blue-sky work. I for one hope they can do this as long as possible, since I love Google and I love Google X and I worked for two great R&D departments that were cut short on all long-term projects by controllers looking to post higher margins in competitive environments.

</comment><comment><USER8> This sounds like something straight out of Wayne Enterprises. I wish more companies could do things like this and see what can be created and achieved. An area that I could see being able to do something like this without having to face Shareholders, management, etc. that most companies have to do is Universities. University students should be able to take advantage of the resources that universities have and universities should encourage this. They could essentially have a new flock of minds every year to help innovate projects. I believe Georgia Tech started something like this a few years ago.

</comment><comment><USER9> The awesome things you can do when your key product masquerades as a mint.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's an honest question: how do the unluckier 90 percent, who face calibration scores and Perf and closed allocation, not find themselves in revolt when they learn that others work in a blue-sky environment on challenging problems that will build their careers?

How is the fact that most people at Google won't get to work on stuff like this not a gigantic HR issue?

<comment><USER11> Your "honest question" contains several false assumptions, as you well know, Michael. Who do you think you're fooling?

I'm not sure who the "unluckier 90 percent" are, because a) X is much, much smaller than 1% of the company, and b) you're not laying out any other 90%-sized subset of the company with your other comments.

People inside X also have calibration and perf, of course.

Your ongoing ranting about "closed allocation" is more complicated; I think you make (elsewhere) an in-theory-mildly-interesting point, but you hugely overstate the significance. It's true that new googlers get relatively little control over allocation (though often not as little as you claim), but it's well-understood, even by you, that 12 to 24 months of good work at your starting post gets you a lot of flexibility. (Most knowledge workers, at least those past the first blush of youth, accept that a year or two of merely- awesome work are a fine stepping stone; we already know that you disagree and claim to want to change the world immediately, starting today.... how's that approach working for you?) If people don't want to work on something, they don't work on it.

Nearly everyone at Google works on challenging problems (well... I have no idea if the cafeteria staff think their work is challenging, so let's restrict this to engineering, sales, legal, and finance). Everyone at Google is building their careers. Can anyone doubt that?

Some of us are jealous of the people who work in X (I am!), most of us are not (I don't know why), but in what universe does it make sense for the existence of X to make me _less_ happy than the non-existence of it?

\----

More generally, most people do not believe that they are entitled to dictate their salary AND what they work on. And that goes double for people who don't yet have a proven track record of success.

I can pick what I want to work on, if I'm willing to accept whatever salary comes, including $0. (I've tried that, heh. What a surprise, no one wants to pay me for my opinions about board game design, nor my amateurish programming- language-design skills. I know, I know, I can't believe it either.) Alternately, I can make a great wage, working on something that's pretty awesome, but not exactly what I want to work on. Why would I be angry about that choice? If I want the best of both, obviously I'll have to work on making myself valuable enough that it makes sense for X to hire me.

<comment><USER12> "I have no idea if the cafeteria staff think their work is challenging"

The cafeteria staff works amazingly hard at their jobs and there're a bunch of challenges involved in feeding 30,000 employees well on a weekly budget. Go to Chef's Table at Jia (if you're in Mountain View) and ask about the job, or even just find the cafe's head chef (they're usually standing around the food looking proud of it) and strike up a conversation. They usually love to talk about their work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> o0-0o Here's hoping the lab is NOT ONLINE. Because maybe it seems that China might possibly want to kind of hack it.

<comment><USER13> come on google glass in china ! so that the cizitens will photograph and video all the abuse that they are subjected to with the world in real time . i do not think so

<comment><USER14> they already have cellphones, you know :)</comment></comment></comment>


SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System - <AUTHOR> http://www.symbos.de/ <comment><USER2> Symbos is pretty cool but it's a crying shame that it's closed source. A lot of people in the z80 community don't understand the value of open source, but will give away binaries for free.

<comment><USER3> _A lot of people in the z80 community don 't understand_

Don't be so patronizing. Of course they _understand_ it, but what they want is something different from what you want: status in the demo scene. If they open source it they're likely to end up as a footnote in their own projects rather than basking on difficult-to-scale peaks among their peers.

It's not like open-sourcing it is going to enrich them in some more concrete fashion than social currency; in fact, authors of very popular open-source projects regularly find themselves in the humiliating position of having to beg for money.

<comment><USER4> _status in the demo scene_

...and since the demoscene is closely associated with the cracking/warez scene, the implicit message is always "if you want to know how it works, get a disassembler and figure it out yourself."

<comment><USER5> This

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the OS is open sources here are a few Machines it could be ported to with the Z80 processor:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Z80-based_home_comput...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Z80-based_home_computers)

Also the Z80 was in a lot of game systems and arcade machines. Imagine Sonic and Pac Man multitasking:

[http://www.z80.info/z80gm.htm](http://www.z80.info/z80gm.htm)

[http://kmuw.org/post/z80-most-prolific-cpu-all- time](http://kmuw.org/post/z80-most-prolific-cpu-all-time)

</comment><comment><USER7> The Z80 will always have a place in my heart. Mostly because we used it in college to build a computer from scratch on a wire board. That was an awesome project, and one of the classes that I remember fondly from nearly 18 years ago.

<comment><USER8> What year was that?

<comment><USER9> 2018 - 18 = 2000

Maybe 1999 since the fact that it's 2018 is still maybe too fresh to have imprinted on many minds.

Maybe 2001 since GP says "nearly 18 years."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It reminds me of the Contiki OS. I wish the project was still going. It seems to have slowed down to crawl.

[http://www.contiki-os.org/](http://www.contiki-os.org/)

<comment><USER10> Adam Dunkels, the main guy behind contiki (and just an awesome dude, all around), went on to found thingsquare. I guess that's probably where new development is happening...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The specs on this are kind of weird.

Z80, 1MB memory, 2TB HDD.

Is this some kind of super Z80 clocked at 50+Mhz? I tend to think of Z80 systems as having 32-128kB of memory and 400k floppies for storage.

<comment><USER12> I think it means 1024 kB of addressable virtual memory.

<comment><USER13> The Amstrad CPC had 64K or 128K of RAM + 32K of ROM (in a total addressable space of 64K) using "RAM banking". The Amstrad PCW was the same but with even more RAM (up to 512K). This worked very differently from what we now think of as virtual memory.

On the CPC it worked as follows: There were two 16K ROMs, located at 0-16K and 48K-64K. The 16K-48K middle area contained 32K of fixed RAM.

The upper and lower ROM areas were shadowed by RAM. By writing to an IO port you could switch in either the ROM or a 16K bank of RAM individually into each of those two 16K areas. There was an elaborate system of trampolines to allow the ROM functions to be called, or for the ROMs to read/write to the bank of RAM "hidden" under them.

Edit: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16079674](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16079674) explains how RAM banking works in Symbos.

<comment><USER14> Indeed, you could plug extra RAM in the back of the CPC, and even stack these.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Discussed in 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10749206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10749206).

</comment><comment><USER16> Cool! Why exactly did it take so long BTW? (not complaining, just curious about the hard parts). Although the first computer I've used was a ZX Spectrum I was too young to program it at the time and have never had time to actually revisit it later. About a decade later (that was the epoch of Windows XP and Ubuntu already) I had a dream of running Visual Basic 1.0 for DOS on it, developing text-mode pseudographical winforms-like apps (clones of Total Commander and Excel :-)). Ever since then I have been passively curious about whether it actually is hard or not and why nobody actually tries this (isn't the GUI alone actually a fairly easy thing every computer can manage as long as we give up all the eye-candy effects and accept the fact actual calculations on data are going to be fairly slow?). Cool to see people have implemented something like this actually and have even done it in graphics rather than in just pseudo. Also, why can't we use modern languages like Python or their subsets to write Z80 programs, at least very simple ones?

</comment><comment><USER17> These sorts of things are great reminders of just how bloated modern software is and what is possible if you can avoid the bloat. These systems are less powerful than a typical modern washing machine or refrigerator.

<comment><USER18> Much of the bloat is from higher resolution graphics, and all the layers of mitigation of various security issues that comes with multitasking.

<comment><USER19> But orders of magnitude more bloat? I had full multitasking in the late 80's, on an Amiga 500 with 512K of RAM. There was no memory protection, but there was a GUI.

I remember running Linux (kernel 1.0 and earlier) with X11, in 8 megs of RAM or less, back on an old 486. I could compile kernels. Running emacs was a bit painful, however.

What we have today is more bloated than I could have possibly imagined 20 years ago...

<comment><USER20> > I could compile kernels.

Compiler bloat is definitely an issue. There has been a lot of work that goes into intermediate representations and all sorts of optimizations that results in very diminishing or no returns for many use cases.

Runtime bloat is a much bigger issue. You have multi-stage runtimes that have an interpreter, a bytecode compiler, and a JIT. Huge amounts of RAM use and very CPU intensive. This makes sense for webGL games, but totally pointless for the common case of running tracking adware on websites whose only real content is a page or two of text.

The main problem are applications with poorly written event loops and memory leaks. That is why modern computing feels bloated. Slightly better compiler output or another 5% improvement in JS runtimes cannot solve this problem. It is a type of induced demand - the more RAM and CPU you have, the more accessible computer programming becomes to people who have very little idea of what they are doing and how to do it properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice to see GEOS referenced in this article - it also was the underpinning for the Atari ST line of computers that did well Europe and swung well above their weight.

If only I could find an ST 1040 again to appreciate Revenge of the Mutant Camels on a machine that was as good at desktop publishing, animating, creating sprite based games and and making music.

<comment><USER22> I thought the ST line was all about GEM.

If you're looking for an ST, they pop up from time to time on Goodwill's auction site.

<comment><USER21> I might be mistaken and it might be GEM. There was the base os and then another window manager it would go into.

<comment><USER23> I think you probably confused GEOS (C64 OS/GUI) with the Atari ST's GEM, GEMDOS, or GDOS. Lots of similar names!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Oh wow, I'm getting Amstrad craving all over again.

<comment><USER24> They're still around. I've put one together over the course of years, a) for nostalgia value, and b) for my children to at least be able to use the system I learned to program on.

Mine is a 464 w/ DDI interface, 64KiB RAM expansion, SDcard based "floppy" drive, mouse, and RS232 serial port. Still only a green screen, though, and I've yet to make a ROM box.

Also see:

[https://github.com/Octoate/cpc-sdcc-rom/](https://github.com/Octoate/cpc- sdcc-rom/)

<comment><USER25> I had one of those Amstrad with green screen in the US. Sold mainly as a word processing system. My dad bought it since we couldn't afford a PC at that time. It did its job as a word processor well plus I had a great time digging into the guts of the CP/M operating system. What I really hated was that it had a 3" floppy which were hard to find.

<comment><USER24> Ah, you probably had a PCW:

[https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2017/...](https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2017/world- leaders-and-twitter.html)

Don't let the 3" drives put you off. These days SDcard based "floppy drives" make life a lot easier:

[https://hackaday.com/2016/02/28/floppy-drive-hides-sd- card-r...](https://hackaday.com/2016/02/28/floppy-drive-hides-sd-card-reader/)

I have one for my CPC. Note that in the particular case of the CPC464 (not the 664 or 6128) you'll still need the Amstrad DDI disk interface unit, as the base 464 has no disk controller built in.

<comment><USER25> Yeah that is the one. It eventually failed after many years. I remember typing up the Eliza program in BASIC for it and one of our neighbors kids still has fond memories of playing with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 17 years in development! Now that's what I call a side project. It's an amazing endeavour - a kind of K2 of Z80 programming.

</comment><comment><USER27> A bit late? ;)

</comment><comment><USER28> So could this be ported to anything with a Z80? Like, for example, a TI-83+ graphing calc?

<comment><USER29> I think you'll need a Z80 machine with bank switched RAM, that's how the multi-tasking side of things works.

<comment><USER30> The TI-83+ does not have bank switched RAM, but it's sister products the 83+ SE, 84+, and 84+ SE do. Regardless, you can achieve preemptive multitasking on z80 without banked RAM, you just need PIC.

<comment><USER29> Sure, but I think SymbOS specifically requires bank switching capability:

[http://www.symbos.de/symmodul.htm?0](http://www.symbos.de/symmodul.htm?0)

(relevant sections passed through google translate de->en)

 _Memory Management_

 _SymbOS supports up to 1024 KB of RAM, depending on what was connected to a memory expansion. The memory manager splits the entire RAM into individual blocks of 256 bytes, which can be assigned completely dynamically. A big feature here is the fact that SymbOS applications are always executed in a secondary 64K ram bank. Thus, each program is allowed to allocate and address up to 63KB in one piece. Screen memories and operating system routines are all in the first, severed ram bank. They are virtually invisible and do not stand in the way of the application. Of course, an application can also reserve more than 63KB for itself._

 _Banking Management_

 _If an 8-bit CPU is to manage a memory of up to one megabyte (which is theoretically at least 20 bits for the address bus), then it can possibly become very complicated. This is where the bank switching administration of SymbOS comes in, which regulates everything independently and transparently. Completely unaffected, e.g. System routines located in a completely different bank are called by programs as if they were in the same 16-bit address range. Using the so-called transfer ram area (the top 16KB of a ram bank) both the operating system and the application can access the same memory from two different 64K banks. Copying memory areas between any two RAM banks is also possible without any problems._

<comment><USER30> Yeah, fair enough. You could probably get it running on one of the models I mentioned above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Where can a machine be got to run this system?

<comment><USER14> Off ebay, An Amstrad CPC 6128 will do.

Though you may want an SD Card adapter to get the files onto it.

As the banner on the site mentions, it works on Amstrad CPC, MSX, Amstrad PCW and Enterprise 64/128 (I'm not sure what this last one is).

<comment><USER32> The Enterprise was a British dream 80s computer that most people could not afford.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_\(computer\))

<comment><USER33> For me this started the trend of the render being much nicer than the final product.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/24/elan_flan_enterpris...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/24/elan_flan_enterprise_micro_is_30_years_old/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Ok, this project is precious and makes me wistful for the old days. Need a golang port for this.

</comment><comment><USER35> (Sorry, I can't resist) ... Is it vulnerable to Meltdown and Spectre?

<comment><USER36> Sadly, no. No memory protection, you see.

<comment><USER37> Back in my day, when we saw something in RAM that we liked, we just _read_ it.

<comment><USER38> My BBC Micro (6502) even had a memory viewer in ROM that ran at ~50fps and I remember the fun looking at running timers and keyboard/joystick ports getting activated and such.

Years ago I wanted to do that on windows and found out that there was something called protected memory, now it finally looks like I can experience that fun again, although at a slower pace it seams ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Why does every OS screenshot (not from a big company) always have to have a few pictures of women in it?

It's ridiculously unprofessional in my book.

<comment><USER40> You would rather only have men? I'm not sure what kind of anti you are.

<comment><USER41> If you need to have pictures, take landscapes.

<comment><USER42> Is this really where we are at now? Don't demonstrate any software using pictures of people, even in a niche hobbyist OS for a retro CPU architecture, just in case someone gets offended.

<comment><USER41> I dunno, apparently. I personally like landscapes anyway, but am not offended by pictures of people... Just naming what might please others. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


America's Stacked Deck (OpEd) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/opinion/americas-stacked-deck.html <comment><AUTHOR> _" One glimpse of the structural unfairness in America is this: A dumb rich kid is now more likely to graduate from college than a smart poor kid, according to Robert Putnam of Harvard University."_

Hasn't it always been this way? Even when you graduate, finding a _traditional_ job in your graduate field can be , who you know rather than what you know.

A valid counter point, measurement vs credentials. [0]

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html)</comment>


Are New Programming Languages Bad? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitwisemag.com/2/Are-New-Programming-Languages-Bad <comment><USER2> "We haven't even yet said what the really Big feature of Sapphire will be - the thing that motivated us to develop it in the first place (we will only give the full details when we are closer to having a working implementation)."

I will do such things - what they are yet I know not - but they shall be the terrors of the earth.

</comment><comment><USER3> New programming languages are only bad if you're afraid of learning.</comment>


Looking for someone to take over dental practice appointment alert software - <AUTHOR> We have developed a really powerful dental appointment alert SAAS platform with rules based triggers, SMS, and many other features.  It needs skinning at this point, and as with all software platforms, the future feature list is infinite.  I no longer have the time to continue building this code.  I am looking for someone to take over the code, I will ask for some payment upon revenue but totally negotiable.  Please let me know if you are interested. <comment><USER2> What language, platform is it written in?

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you have any customers currently?</comment>


CI/CD Pipelines with Gitlab - <AUTHOR> https://solidstudio.io/blog/ci-cd-pipelines.html <comment><USER2> Since when YAML had become a standard to specify the commands to run. It's supposed to be used as a configuration specification. I am pretty sure there could be a better way of writing such files.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. For a while now my CI flow has basically been:

        ./script/prepare-env
        ./script/build
        ./script/test
        ./script/deploy

No matter the language, OS, or CI platform (minor changes are needed, ie for different environment variables).

The CI config files are then very simple, just defining the various stages and what to cache/archive.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Parked for iPhone, my first app - <AUTHOR> http://rpowell.me/projects/parked/

<comment><AUTHOR> Note the screenshots on that project page are from v1.1 which I assumed would be out by the time my Australian Business Number was processed. The update should be out within a week or so.</comment>


Ask HN: Strategy for dealing with timewaste biz-dev meeting invites? - <AUTHOR>

Lately I've been finding myself in conversations with people claiming they want to discuss a partnership between their company and one of my projects.  As these partnerships sound good on paper, I take the meeting and we talk.
About halfway through some (not all!) of these meetings, my spidey-sense starts tingling, and I realize that either
a) This person does not have the authority to do the deal that was used to get me out here.
b) This person is really just trying to pitch me on their idea and the partnership thing isn't a two-way thing.
I like hearing about what people are working on and understand not every idea works out, so I'm not bugged too much when this happens, but I was wondering if people on HN had similar experiences and how they dealt with them.  When I first started WindyCitizen.com, I was desperate to get anyone to listen to me and understand that feeling, but I'm pretty busy and my time is important.  Someone getting me excited about a deal that's not really going to happen is frustrating and a waste of my time.
How do others handle these sorts of invitations?  I'm half of a mind to start requiring some "proof of seriousness" before entering some of these discussions.
I'm also now of a mind to just disregard most if not all of these "let's work together" offers unless it's a clear "you pay me for X" or "I pay you for X." <comment><USER2> Ask them a bullet point list of what action points would they hope to set as a result of this meeting. Both for themselve and you. This will provide you with 2 defense lines:

1)They have to make an extra investment in this meeting. This will weed off the types who have a memorized pitch and dump on whomever they can find.

2)They will have to make their intention clear before the meetind. No bait and switch.

This actually works for all types of meetings. I've seen a radical decrease in invitations and time spent at meetings,

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea, thanks. "Send me some bullet points." is a great, hard- to-refuse response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I generally tell them to summarize their offering in e-mail, with no guarantee of privacy. If its good enough and they're serious, they tend to invest in marking something up. I also ask for examples of business practices (things they've actually gotten accomplished). There is a ton of talk but little work these days...

Nice job. I'm specing out a similiar concept for a different geo. Drigg & D6?

<comment><AUTHOR> More or less, yes.</comment></comment>


Apple and Facebook helped bust the world's biggest torrent site - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/21/kickasstorrents-apple-facebook-homeland-security/ <comment><USER2> Creating database of music and movies metadata (titles, descriptions, song names, file checksums) is treated like terrorism in todays world. The only difference of Wikipedia is that it doesn't contain that checksums. So seems that these checksums are something like plutonium so even Homeland Security is fighting against it. And every country in the world agrees to send any its citizen to american jail for torture for just hosting these checksums. We're living in medieval times.

<comment><USER3> _> The only difference of Wikipedia is that it doesn't contain that checksums_

That's false. A typical magnet link looks like this:

        magnet:?xt=urn:btih:264886d841442158b3efc861bbfca5ef91d8f68b&dn=
        Mr.Robot.S02E01.720p.WEBRip.AAC2.0.H.264-KNiTTiNG%5Bettv%5D&tr=u
        dp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fz
        er0day.ch%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3
        A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desy
        nc.com%3A6969

Notice all the tracker URLs.

<comment><USER4> Most torrent clients will work fine if you just give them the hash.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but that's not my point. My point is these torrent sites have links, not just hashes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Did he upload and distribute torrents tho? It sounds like he just run the platform and "forgot" to tax his advertisment income.

Also i really don't get how the U.S. is involved in this at all. Did poland/ukraine specifically allow the U.S. to catch a tax evader? I mean seriously, how is this legal? Why can the U.S. hunt foreigners in forgeign countries?

Edit:// Seems he hosted in the US once. I take my accusations back (mostly), what a stupid mistake to make.

<comment><USER6> Probably because foreign countries trade with US, so they need to maintain good relations. Also, I don't think EU or Ukraine care too much to protect this guy.

<comment><USER5> i dont doubt it was easy. but i question on which juristic base this was done. I dont get why the US is even involved, this guy seems to have no relation with the US.

<comment><USER7> The victims were US companies. (i.e. the media companies which own the copyright to the materials exchanged on KAZ). I disagree with a lot of copyright law, particularly criminal and international parts, but this is the USG belief of jurisdiction.

<comment><USER5> Not sure if you are serious, but i dont think that is how it works.

Let's say i sell candy with the profile of Kim Jong-un online, based on your answer that would justify North Korea to hunt me down in other countries and take me back under their jurisdiction? Gladly that's not how it works.

<comment><USER7> 1) USA is not North Korea. Both because the USA has ~infinite power, and because it has (highly imbalanced) power relationships with most other countries -- particularly Poland and Ukraine who are basically clinging to the hope NATO (i.e. USA) will save them.

2) Selling candy with profile of the Dearest Leader is not recognized as a crime in most countries by treaties they've signed. Copyright crime is in many countries, hence it's extradition-possible.

2b) Copyright crime isn't a capital offense, so "but he might be executed" is not a bar to extradition here. Most countries would view lese majeste in Best Korea as a likely capital offense and wouldn't extradite on that basis alone.

3) Dude wasn't a citizen of the country where he was caught. Non-citizens have substantially inferior rights in most countries, particularly in this kind of matter.

4) Ukraine isn't in EU.

5) Because it's the ultimate factor here, it bears repeating: the US Government has essentially unlimited power globally. It is restricted primarily by its own policies, and by secondarily realpolitik concerns. Only in extremely few places is its power actually checked by another actor (Russia, China, and in some contexts, the EU, and in other contexts, Iran and North Korea).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >Using similar tools, Homeland Security investigators also performed something called a WHOIS lookup on a domain that redirected people to the main KAT site. A WHOIS search can provide the name, address, email and phone number of a website registrant. In the case of kickasstorrents.biz, that was Artem Vaulin from Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Wow, he put his real name in the WHOIS records?

<comment><USER5> now i can only think this is only a sock puppet who got cought.

<comment><USER9> Possibly, especially given how easy it is to get a sock puppet, but not necessarily. If I remember correctly KAT was even hosted in Ukraine at the beginning and no one in Ukraine was really hiding back then.

<comment><USER5> Thats a good point and relativates it a bit. Afaik also privacy protection was rather expensive and rare, not as today for $2 (or even free) with any new domain.

<comment><USER8> But could he not just have put any name into the WHOIS?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a person who occasionally pirates tv shows because I can't find any decent streaming services in my country, this is sad news.

<comment><USER11> You might consider looking into private trackers. Piracy can't be abolished.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So Facebook doesn'tviolent crimes investigation(like in Brazil) but help when it favors their growth strategy. Isn't time to break these companies (fb, alphabet, Apple) into N pieces? Like Standard Oil Co in the past.

<comment><USER13> Brazil wants Facebook (WhatsApp) to release information it doesn't have -- it's not clear to me what data exactly, but presumably message content which they historically did not store and now, due to e2e encryption, cannot store; or maybe message metadata which I'm not sure they store (does anybody know?).

This is about data Facebook, like most web sites, does store (site access logs including IPs). Though I wonder how long they store these kind of logs; different jurisdictions may have both minimum retention times as well as maximum retention times for personal data such as IPs.

<comment><USER14> Brazilian authorities have actually already accepted that previously sent messages are forever out of reach. Their last blockage of WhatsApp happened because they where requesting that a specific group of users to be tracked with previous notice.

If this is technically feasible I can't say, but I don't imagine FB creating a precedent so that any state authority can require tracking of specific users. IMHO, this solution wouldn't take so long to start being exploited.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the correction. Most (recent) articles annoyingly only go about the blocking and unblocking, and don't actually say what the Brazilian authorities want.

Do you know what "tracking" entails? That could mean anything from revealing message contents to revealing social networks or tracking a user's geoposition or reporting all the IMSI/IMEIs associated with any given WhatsApp user.

<comment><USER15> The last case involved a judge asking Whatsapp to implement a backdoor in its services.

<comment><USER16> Kudos to facebook for resisting the government of brazil but why would they help the U.S. government nail media pirates and not help another government nail terrorists? This does not add up.

<comment><USER17> The method of assistance involved is different between these two cases.

One case wants them to introduce a deliberate backdoor into their software. Negating the _entire_ point of their recent move to end-to-end encryption and a major reason they're such a big player in the communication service market.

The other case was a warrant for, "What IP addresses accessed this account?".

The second one is trivial to comply with and to compile. The first is going to require them to alienate most of their customers, destroy their business, and spend a few man-weeks (minimum) to put together.

<comment><USER12> Bullshit. The first makes them have less power and profit less, the second do the opposite. It's a "fair" choice, don't you think? At least if you are the billionare owner that don't care with anyone and pretends that he is pursuing an open world.

<comment><USER17> Sure. Let's go with that then.

EDIT: That was just straight snark. Sorry.

Want a better response? I've seen your other comments regarding WhatsApp/Facebook on past related discussions. If you really think Brazil is being held back by these companies (WhatsApp in particular) make a competitor. Win over the Brazilian market. And deliberately make it insecure so your government can eavesdrop on any conversation. Good luck at keeping that market.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I'm developing a competitor. Guess what? We don't have zillions of dollars and if we don't answer the justice right, we bankrupt. Facebook don't. So yeah, it's part of the development of my product to stop the unfair benefits foreign technology companies have in my country.

EDIT: FB eavesdrop to US gov didn't stopped their growth. Actually, I would bet that it helped.

<comment><USER17> WhatsApp, before it was owned by Facebook, didn't have zillions of dollars, which was also when it exploded in Latin America.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Shame on them both.

I was glad to see KAT bounce back so swiftly. I don't have any emotional ties to the site, but it was time 10 years ago that big media corporations wake up and realize their business model is _dead_. They need to stop trying to force the world to play by the old rules at the barrel of a lawsuit, and find ways to adapt to the technology instead.

They have failed so far, and so piracy has filled the gap. The lesson here is people don't f'ing care about the laws when nobody is getting hurt, they're going to do what they want. That's what freedom is about, and it's never going to stop, and gestapo tactics will never ever defeat it.

Shame on Apple, shame on Facebook, and shame on anyone who assists in attacking torrent sites. It used to be that you had to actually host files to get in trouble. Next they'll want to make saying the word 'torrent' illegal.

</comment><comment><USER18> That's a clickbait title. They had absolutely minimal involvement.

<comment><USER19> And they probably didn't have a choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder, why don't these torrent sites pop up elsewhere, where they're virtually impossible to shutdown? Thinking of IPFS or Tor.

<comment><USER21> The Pirate Bay has a Tor address, which is the only sure way to get to it in the UK.

<comment><USER22> Then don't connect from UK but use a VPN if your government censors your Internet connection...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> According to the article:

> It was a short campaign, but it was enough to link KAT to a Latvian bank > account, one that received €28 million ($31 million) in deposits -- mainly > from advertising payments -- between August 2015 and March 2016.

$31 million income in just 7 months? That seems rather high, but if so there'll be no shortage of sites to replace it.

<comment><USER24> I believe it: [http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/kat.cr](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/kat.cr)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> That's not really surprising at all. When served with a subpoena they don't have much of a choice, I take.

Well, except for the iPhone breaking one.

Now, deporting a foreigner from across the ocean makes me think what would happen if, for example, had his e-mail hosted on an european provider. Would the provider be forced to comply?

<comment><USER17> In the San Bernardino case they did not, due to FBI meddling, have a way into the phone anymore.

In this case, they had the purchase records of the individual:

      Der-Yeghiayan was able to link the email address found in the
      WHOIS lookup to an Apple email address that Vaulin purportedly
      used to operate KAT. It's this Apple account that appears to
      tie all of pieces of Vaulin's alleged involvement together.

      On July 31st 2015, records provided by Apple show that the
      me.com account was used to purchase something on iTunes. The
      logs show that the same IP address was used on the same day to
      access the KAT Facebook page. After KAT began accepting Bitcoin
      donations in 2012, $72,767 was moved into a Coinbase account in
      Vaulin's name. That Bitcoin wallet was registered with the same
      me.com email address.

Tying the email address to the person. That's what was used. A _purchase record_ tying the email address and the IP address together. Paired with the concurrent access to the KAT Facebook account. It doesn't matter what email provider he'd been using. It was the simultaneous access from the same IP to two different accounts. One his personal and one his business that the investigators needed. It may have been harder if it hadn't been Apple (or another US provider), but not impossible, just find other services that that email address was connected to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Using Chicago-based NS was not ... smart. Also having no Jersey LLC for handling the money without disclosing beneficiary trust. Ah, and no using UK trust. Like Tony Blair alike persons do. Lack of business culture will often lead to confinement. If you are a pirate, rob like civilised robbers do.

</comment><comment> Talha-Ansari That's really sad, I used to download many torrents through KickAss Torrents. It was quite helpful for me to locate the right file with the help of comments of users and seeders.</comment>


SugarCRM's to iPhone/iPad app may be doomed due to license change. - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/13/sugarcrm_ipad_html5/

<comment><USER2> " _Sugar moved its mobile application to Appcelerator so it could have one version of its application run on Apple, Google's Android, BlackBerry, Palm, and other devices without the need for its engineers to build completely different versions._ "

This is a class of serious smart phone users that I don't think Jobs is thinking too much about. In fact, to the extent SugarCRM customers find themselves switching between types of smartphones I'm sure many would prefer the UI stays the same. And I seriously doubt any Sugar customer cares that the iPhone version of this isn't as spiffy and i<whatever> style as it should be.

In fact, I could see companies like Sugar slighting i<whatever> development, just getting something minimal out while they hope Apple comes to its senses or loses enough market share (perhaps only by others getting bigger) that it drops this because it's no longer giving them an advantage.</comment>