Karma on HN - <AUTHOR> I have been here a couple of years, but I never post/comment. So to get karma => 2 (to get my keybase.io proof) I post this in hope of someone upvoting! Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> If you never post, and never comment, why should you get any karma?

Give me a good reason and I'll consider upvoting you.

Provide value.

<comment><USER3> Seems a bit harsh.

<comment><USER2> Do you really think so? I've been at community events where nearly everyone has mucked in and done stuff, from litter clearing to clearing ground, building sheds, erecting fences, and more. Usually at the end of the day there's then a barbecue or similar to reward everyone and enhance to sense of community.

If someone comes along, sits on one side, drinks beer, watches the work, and contributes nothing, should they get a free meal? Are they part of the community? Should they be welcomed and accepted despite not contributing at all?

That's an interesting question - your reply has prompted me to think more about that. That's valuable to me, and worth an upvote.

<comment><USER3> He/she could be shy, or feel intimidated by the level of conversation here (not wanting to comment since not wanting to appear inexpert in a crowd of experts). I have felt this way on forums before, and have hung around for a while before making my first post.

<comment><USER2> That's a fair reason why they might not be submitting, but is still not a reason why they should be given karma.

Also, they say they've been here a couple of years, and their account is nearly six months old. Then the first post is asking for karma.

So still, perhaps it's harsh, perhaps you're willing to upvote the submission to give them that karma - no doubt others will - but I still ask the question.

<comment><AUTHOR> I absolutely agree with your statement. I've been reading and 'lurking' for about 3 years before I figured I wanted to start upvoting, save posts and maybe post some things. I just haven't gotten my ass around my head and done it yet... So when a friend of mine invited me to keybase and told me to link my accounts I thought I would do so. Only problem is that I couldn't do so since I have no karma.

I hope that is a fair enough explanation, but I would love to elaborate more when I'm done at work!

<comment><USER2> That's fair enough, and I've now clicked the "upvote" arrow, but I don't see any increase in your karma. Votes don't always match karma - there are other forces as work - so you may have to wait till some more important people actually upvote your post or comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh well. Then I guess I'll have to find some topics and start posting/commenting. Thank you anyway :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> ... Your user profile claims it was created 173 days ago ...

<comment><USER5> A lot of people lurk for a long time before they create an account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> lol!!!

You get one from me because it wouldn't be any fun at all if no one read what we post here!</comment>


Maple Match - <AUTHOR> http://www.maplematch.com/ <comment><USER2> This is official Maple Match here!

Want to help us build our web platform? We

Send a resume and links to cool things you've made to email@example.com.

Best,

Joe Maple Match Founder & CEO

</comment><comment><USER3> No Android version of Maple Match? Try Dating eh: [https://datingeh.com](https://datingeh.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> I would like to sign up for maple match but am unable to find it</comment>


VPC Flow Logs – Log and View Network Traffic Flows - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/vpc-flow-logs-log-and-view-network-traffic-flows/

<comment><USER3> This is an amazing service. At this point, combined with the CloudWatch to Kinesis announcement earlier, AWS can pretty much act as a near-realtime IDS. If every packet headed into the VPC can be collected, analyzed, and acted upon, the opportunity is endless.

On a practical note, I enabled this on an account and have setup metrics filters. Being able to see charts and graphs of failed SSH attempts and attacks by port is really cool.

<comment><USER4> The issue at this point is the lack of full packet capture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really wish they would give us a way to get full packet capture from the entire VPC.

Simply add a span option, that we can send all traffic to a specific network interface (ENI). Or at the very least allow us to define custom routers (verses the VPC routes), where we could then capture/span/analyze/etc - <USER2> would provide us the means to analyze traffic from one VPC to another and inbound/outbound traffic.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's so hard to keep up with all the new features. This is so cool -- I'm excited to see people use it. Now if only I had the traffic to play with it.

<comment><USER3> Even if you run a low-traffic or no-traffic instance you'll almost undoubtedly have REJECT packets. I enabled it on a VPC I barely use and had 100 events in a few minutes of rejected packets from port scanners and other attackers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great timing, troubleshooting an issue that this will come in handy for. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for the post Jeff! this is huge for us, we finally get a whole view of our networks in VPC.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are welcome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Add another one to the list of things my team didn't know about until a public launch..

<comment><USER9> you're not supposed to know about it until the public launch :) that was yesterday.

<comment><USER10> If you ask, you can request from your AWS account rep to sign an NDA, after which you can get insights into what features are upcoming.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime - <AUTHOR> http://www.redferret.net/?p=28724

<comment><USER2> Nope. Ubuntu won't be ready until upgrading Firefox (or any individual package) doesn't force insanity like opposite window controls or Unity without asking. Regular people aren't interested in seeing drastic and seemingly nonsensical changes like that for no reason, and almost certainly aren't interested in being part of some grand OS experiment. They want something that is consistent and works.

While package management is an excellent concept, the way Linux packages are handled--with shared dependencies--is what engenders the ridiculous milestone- distro system that I think is keeping desktop Linux back. Having to swallow upgrades to every single package on the system just to get one package (like FF) upgraded means that instability and unwanted change--exactly what regular users hate--will be ingrained in the experience.

The solution, I think, is either to get rid of the shared-dependency concept and move to a more Windows-like static install system, or form a truly stable rolling-release distro. The only big one is Debian/Mint, but from what I hear that's still too unstable for even power users.

<comment><USER3> > Having to swallow upgrades to every single package on the system just to get > one package ... [means] ...instability...

Just curious, have you really experienced instability by installing all updates on any mainstream distro? If so, could you share what happened? I've not had that experience but would like to know about it.

<comment><USER2> Yes. For example when Ubuntu switched to Pulseaudio, it borked my sound. Even with the release after that one (can't remember which one it was), I had to have a shortcut on my desktop for 'killall pulseaudio' because just playing music for more than 15 minutes would end up in garbled sound. Or in Karmic, when a regression in the Intel video drivers made even dragging windows stutter on my laptop with 4GB of RAM. Or when Lucid broke hibernate for my laptop. It was fixed in Maverick, then broke again in Natty. Literally every distro upgrade of Ubuntu for me has resulted in more than one serious regression in something that used to work.

<comment><USER4> Ubuntu and Fedora, though the most common desktop distros, also are notoriously NOT very stable. Fedora is RedHat beta-test playground, and Ubuntu is built from a Debian-unstable snapshot. OTOH many people complains that Debian, RedHat or CentOS are too long to implement the latest features, but this is the price to pay for extreme reliability. Know your needs, choose accordingly.

<comment><USER5> I just wish there was a middle ground though where you dont have to choose between extreme reliability + years of waiting and fast turnaround + notorious instability

<comment><USER4> Debian testing is both reliable enough (I think there were no more than 2 cases when an upgrade would lead to an unusable state in the past 8 years) and not too far behind the bleeding edge. Or you could use a rolling release distro such as gentoo, arch, or in a related world FreeBSD.

<comment><USER6> The problem with Debian Testing is that once something breaks badly, you usually have to wait two weeks until it is fixed, because changes need to trickle down from Sid. In my experience, Sid is more useful as a desktop. But it's certainly not for the beginner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dorian-graph What an awful article. Nothing here was 'new' but rather the same things that have been said in near every other 'Year of desktop Linux!' articles. Replace the post date with any year going back to ~ 2006 and it wouldn't be out of place at all. Also, any writer that is suggesting primetime usage of a Linux distribution and then suggests to use WINE or a VM solution is out of his mind.

It's amusing how the writer referenced Ultimate in order to show the apparent high cost of Windows yet how many people actually need Ultimate? Also, his 'success' story in regards to his wife isn't too realistic or at least common—how many people have a husband who is willing to look for DbxConv (A command app) and do all that work for her.

The site itself looks as if it's stuck a few years back. I'm a little disappointed Windows ME wasn't referenced and no use of 'm$'.

<comment><USER7> >Replace the post date with any year going back to ~ 2006 and it wouldn't be out of place

There have been breathless articles about this being the year Linux is ready for the desktop ever since the late 1990s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used Linux (Ubuntu primarily, but I dabbled in the other distros from time to time) as my only OS on my netbook for 5 years (through college and my first few internships / job). For that atmosphere is was great: it taught me the UNIX philosophy, I can work a command line shell and vim like a beast, I knew a lot more about OSs and programming in general than if I was using Windows, and it overall prepared me excellently for software development in the future.

That said, I was young and had the time to deal with its inadequacies. I could spend a whole weekend getting a driver to work properly, and fiddling with kernel options. These days I get a few hours of free time when I come home from work, and then I have my weekend. If I am on the computer at all, I don't want to waste my time dealing with that stuff any more. It's either to sit down and knock out a sizable chunk of a personal project, or play some video games for entertainment.

I have a proper place for all three OS flavors. My desktop runs Windows (for gaming, heavy VM work, and games development), my primary development machine is a Macbook Air (running OS X), and any servers I have run Linux. I feel like these are the perfect tools for their respective jobs, now that money isn't a factor as a poor college student. Using OSX over Linux as a development environment was like night and day.

For servers, Linux is king. Having it be a usable personal OS (for the average user and programmer) will take a lot more time. While it's true that most of my time is spent either in the terminal or in the browser (I'd say about 75% of my computer usage), for the other 25% paying for a machine that runs OS X is completely worth every penny twice over. The quality of tools, utilities, and applications that aren't a browser or terminal is light-years ahead of anything that Linux offers, in terms of usability, UI, and functionality.

<comment><USER9> > I could spend a whole weekend getting a driver to work properly, and > fiddling with kernel options.

I haven't done that stuff since around 2005. I just install a standard distro, and leave it to do what it does. It Just Works out of the box. It even detects my Raid5 and sets that up for me. Debian is my choice because of the rolling updates in testing -- I don't even want to think about version numbers.

I use Linux because it means I don't have to think about package versions, I don't have to worry about finding drivers after installing, I don't have to search around for software, etc. Thanks to distro choice, I don't even have to think about what version I'm running.

<comment><USER8> If you're lucky enough to own a machine that works out of the box, with all of its components, while running Linux: all the power to you. I've owned many computers over the years, of all shapes, sizes, brands, and/or custom parts, and I've never had a single one "just work."

<comment><USER9> I've had it just work on a Fujitsu tablet, several Thinkpads, and a couple of HP laptops. And any desktop I've cared to try so far.

<comment><USER10> Pretty much what I was thinking. I've messed with Linux HP, Lenovo Thinkpads and Ideapads, and most other major manufactured laptops. From Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Slackware, Mint and plain Debian, I've never had major issues with hardware.

IIRC, the last time I had a hardware/driver issue that pissed me off to no end was back before Fedora even existed.

<comment><USER11> I have an HP dm1z, and I still haven't gotten the wireless drivers to work (RALink)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> No,it's not.

The article seems to suggest that ubuntu is an OS that the non-geek joe can install and use without experiencing any issues, it just works. Well, just wait until he decide to upgrade to the next ubuntu release or try to install some restricted driver. Good luck to these newbies if they don't have a friend who knows linux.

I've just upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04 yesterday and only after 5-6 hours i've found the right kernel+ati driver combination to make my system work again (after the upgrade the GUI freeze after a few minutes of use, i've made a few tests patching 2.6.38 for BigKernelLock, trying different driver releases, checking the installed packages for incompatibilites,etc...). A newbie would have never come out of this alive.

Imho, 11.04 shows that the Ubuntu releases are still made in a rush, with unfinished things that get included anyway (Unity, but every release has its own unfinished or barely working new functionality). My suggestion for Ubuntu? Test more. And don't be afraid to push forward the release date if there are still severe bugs open that need to be addressed.

<comment><USER13> > The article seems to suggest that ubuntu is an OS that the non-geek joe can > install and use without experiencing any issues, it just works.

While my mother (a 76 year-old lady) asked me to install her computer, she has been using her trusty IBM desktop always running the latest Ubuntu since 2006 or so. Never had an issue. She can read her e-mail, share files with friends. The only ability she lost was to infect her machine with the most horrid forms of malware. I don't think she misses it and I, certainly, don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ubuntu is no replacement for Windows. It can be a potential alternative, but it is in no way some sort of drop-in replacement.

This particular article reeks of someone who doesn't actually need to get work done "Free is unbeatable!" and "Windows is a poor value for the price!" -- uselessly ambiguous and all-inclusive statements.

If you are a PC gamer, big into video editing or professional image editor using the Adobe suite, Linux is not an option for you. Please ignore all the people that tell you WINE "totally works great" and has "no problems!" and is "rock solid"... I would recommend jamming glass in your ears if you see someone talking like that.

You are certainly welcome to try and take them up on that, but you'll decide in under a month that all the little gotchas you only find once you dive deep will drive you crazy.

I understand the intent of these articles ("The year of Linux on the desktop!") but people have been writing them since 1998 and it has never been true, all that has happened is each OS has grown up to fill its particular niche and if your use-cases fall in that niche, then you are all set... otherwise the move will be a complete waste of time for you.

The only reason Linux has been able to make more headway (IMO) is a good majority of our lives have moved online with web-based apps so the reliance on Linux matching parity with the software on other platforms has lessened.

There is no amazing new office suite for Linux, it's still OpenOffice and always will be. I don't know if KOffice will ever hit critical mass or individual GNOME-based efforts will grow beyond clean v1 implementations.

There is no fantastic PIM software that finally replaced Outlook.

There is no awesome, stable, robust video player except 75 different shitty GUI interfaces to mplayer's codecs that work for the most part then core dump sometimes oh but then are easily fixed by recompiling with the --bullshit flag turned on.

It just goes on an on... of course your mileage will vary depending on what kind of user you are, the more intense/hardcore you are the more warts you'll notice and try and fix/workaround (key bindings, mouse button support, audio card, hardware acceleration, optimal power saving management, etc.) and after a month of pissing half your day away with some broken configuration for the 10th time, you'll go back to some other OS.

The lighter or more online user, you'll probably be just fine.

That is my own personal opinion from 13 years of trying to _finally_ adopt Linux as my primary desktop OS, even giving up games to make it so and finally giving up with Ubuntu 11.04 after realizing I was always going to have the same magnitude of problems... no matter what.

Ok, I've lead with my neck out, everyone go ahead and comment about how their desktop is "rock solid" and I must be brain-damaged and doing something wrong consistently for the last 13 years to always have this experience.

<comment><USER15> My 'buntu desktop environment is the most solid I've ever used, with the caveat that once a year I can expect to spend a few hours in driver hell. I think this balances out with the once-a-year BSOD hell I encounter on Windows.

I agree with you that WINE is terrible, but I have Win7 running brilliantly right now on VirtualBox. Other than that, linux has all the specialized tools I need for coding and web development, I switched over to console gaming a few years back because I was tired of the hardware upgrade treadmill, and the Microsoft productivity stack, while better than Libre Office, isn't compelling enough to tie me to that platform. Also, I'm not sure what problems you had with video players. VLC has served me well on Windows and linux.

I guess the real killer app for me is sudo apt-get install [some incredibly useful open source library I really need right now, dammit]. The open source infrastructure on Windows is so anemic it drives me nuts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find the UX in Ubuntu much better than Windows and OSX ( haven't tried Ubuntu 11) mainly because of how fast and instantaneous everything is. Every time I try a Windows machine I am appalled at how unresponsive it is and how often programs freeze. OSX is better but I still find it has usability issues. I think if I'd become a regular user of OSX and learn the keyboard shortcuts I would be a satisfied customer. However, for a casual user like me (pretty much just for xcode), I find myself often annoyed at my mac. I curse at OSX, every time I use iTunes, every time I plug my iPod and the photo application locks up my mac for seconds even though I've never used this application, when windows pile up everywhere and there is no task bar to quickly switch between them, only slow multiple step processes with annoying animations.

I'm also surprised at how many OSX features are a poor implementation of old unix ide features. For example, I'm used to have multiple desktops on Linux. I've been using this since the mid 90s. Gnome has it, kde has it, I've used it on CDE the Sun interface. OSX has Spaces but it is horrible mainly because there isn't a taskbar icon that allows you to switch 'space' with one click. Worst even, the Spaces doc icon is a tease that looks like a proper desktop switcher but doesn't work that way.

In term of hardware support (and to a lesser degree software support), I admit Linux is behind. But this is a chicken and egg problem. If more people used Linux, hardware manufacturers would make sure their drivers worked with Linux. I have zero interest in doing manual configuration, so in the past ten years, buying a computer has consisted of bringing a Live Ubuntu disk to Bestbuy and poping it in to make sure everything on the computer works out of the box. By using this method I never have to fiddle with anything to get Ubuntu to work. It's very easy to do and my computers end up costing me half the price of macs by allowing me the choice of a smaller 1.5 hour battery (I'm almost always plugged in anyways) and lower quality display (so the contrast is not as good, big deal). My current laptop is a one year old (corei3, 4GB ram, 500GB HD) that cost me $600 (useless Windows licence included!) + $100 for a two year extended warranty and Linux makes it feel much faster than any other computer I use. Chrome on Ubuntu is a crazy fast web experience.

I've been hesitant to suggest Ubuntu to non technical users mainly because I don't want to be responsible for providing technical support but I do believe Ubuntu is probably ready for it. Maybe I should suggest it more given that they call me for problems with their win7 or osx anyways and I often find myself thinking: this wouldn't happen on Ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER17> So who's going to step up and become the premier Linux hardware vendor? I was just looking at Linux laptops this morning and the problem is battery life. The System76 Lemur 13 gets... 2-3 hours of battery. That's not going to work. The ZaReason Strata Pro 13 gets... I don't know because they don't advertise it and I can't find a review that mentions it.

The conventional wisdom is to get a Thinkpad, which I might have to come to, but it would be wonderful for one of these Linux vendors to step it up and put out something that's competitive in terms of battery life with the improvements that have come in recent years. Apple, Lenovo, Asus, even Toshiba are all putting out laptops with 8+ hours of battery. I wouldn't consider buying one that gets less than 6.

<comment><USER18> Asus tried Linux on the EEE PC. They unfortunately tried an odd version called Xandros, with some modifications and a cut down IceWM theme. I'm not sure they enjoyed supporting it. This article says they've stopped pre-loading Linux: [http://www.pcworld.com/article/196987/has_asus_abandoned_net...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/196987/has_asus_abandoned_netbook_linux.html)

and this article says they're going to start pre-loading Ubuntu: [http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2075819/asus- preloa...](http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2075819/asus-preload- ubuntu-linux-eee-pcs)

<comment><USER19> Good to know they know better than to write the whole thing off after making some bad decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A few times a year, I download the latest version of star-office / open-office / libre-office and try it on a MSWord document from work. My most recent attempt was 2 weeks ago. I have yet to see a correctly-formatted result. In the beginning, simple things like bullets were wrong. These seem OK now, but equations are completely messed up, as are figure numbers, etc.

This stream of office suites is probably fine for creating new documents, especially if they are simple. But they still do not work adequately for any task that involves collaboration on MSWord files.

I despise MSWord as much as one can despise any software. But if that is what is demanded by a funding agency, I am quite sure I am not going to use anything else.

<comment><USER21> That (continues) to say much more about the inner brokenness of the Word "file format" than attempts to reverse-engineer it. That's a quoted term as the format has little to do with a typical mark-up-version-saved-to-disk, as was standard on such modern formats as ... WordStar and WordPerfect in the late 1980s.

Granted, it doesn't help you much when you've got to interact with someone using some random version of a borken instance of MS Word.

I'm aware that MSFT have moved to an XML-based markup, and that support may have improved. I find the word-processing model (with its assumptions of a static, un-shared paper-based document) fundamentally broken. Most of my communications are in text files, Wiki documents, or on the odd occasion, Google docs or similar which allow simultaneous shared online edits.

It's also curious that nearly 30 years since its release, there's no simple reader for MS Word. Yes, Microsoft released one such. If you hit space (or any other character), say, to scroll through the document as you would a 'less' pager or PDF viewer .... a dialog appeared telling you that this was _not_ an editor. Which you had to dismiss. Every. Fucking. Time.

And somewhere deep within Redmond, someone is still wondering why MS Word DOC format didn't become a universal document interface interchange format.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Which is a pity when you think about how crappy and unfinished the unity UI in ubuntu 11.04 is. In years this is the first time I've stopped using a standard ubuntu (now I'm using Gnome 3, which is almost as bad).

<comment><USER23> Unity is the incarnation of everything I hated (and worked hard to disable) in Windows 7. I rebooted and selected Ubuntu Classic as the default, and haven't looked back.

<comment><USER22> At an internship at MSR I recently used windows 7 for real, and after I got through the first week the general experience was maybe more pleasant than ubuntu with unity. Even things that annoyed me at first (grouping windows by program in the task bar, for example) grew slowly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Could this article be more wrong? I took the Linux challenge last month, making Ubuntu my main OS. The experience was terrible and I switched back to Windows. Linux is still _almost_ awesome and I've retained a Linux install as a "work machine" to keep me away from my video games very nicely. But the fact that I can successfully use Linux as an "isolation chamber" betrays the fact that it's really not ready for prime time at all.

The first thing I'd say they need to fix is installation. There should be one install protocol to rule them all. Whether the program apt-gets, installs .sh, or just sits there and runs as is, it should be forced through a setup process to remove user confusion. That might be as simple as a Python script that asks where you want to copy files, but it just needs to be consistent for every program. I never have to read an installation instruction or ReadMe on Windows, why do I have to read one on Linux?

<comment><USER25> You pretty much just use the package manager for your distribution. The big distributions have pretty much every program you're going to need. I barely ever install something manually.

And for the things you do install manually, it's almost always one of two methods. If the software creator is kind enough to provide a package for your distribution, you download and double-click it. Otherwise, it's a .tgz file that you extract and (almost always) do:

        ./configure && make && make install

<comment><USER24> Yes, I'm aware and that's the problem: I have to be aware of this sort of thing _even for consumer software_. Contrast Windows: I download, double click and it goes. No knowledge needed.

<comment><USER26> But there is knowledge needed with Windows. You just already had that knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I switched from a Mac with OSX to Ubuntu about a year ago, and I haven't looked back. I'm a developer, and I have found that everything in the Linux world seems to be set up with me in mind.

Dependencies are easier to install, there is a larger, more knowledgeable support network (compare the Ubuntu forums to any Mac forum, it's not even close), and I have discovered how powerful the command line is as a development tool.

Also, when I run into a hitch during development, Google takes my operating system into account. Googling answers to development questions provides me much more relevant results on Ubuntu than it ever did on the Mac.

Plus, being able to develop web apps on the same or a similar operating system to the environment it will be deployed on is incredibly convenient.

I will say that most of my leisure time now goes to developing personal projects, rather than to gaming or other multimedia - things I often did on my Mac. But I think that's a good thing. When I do invoicing or I need to work with clients' data on spreadsheets, OpenOffice and LibreOffice, respectively, have served me just fine.

If you live in a multi-computer household like I do, I think it makes sense to have one machine that dual boots the latest Windows and Ubuntu to be able to take advantage of games and other multimedia. However, for the PCs that are only being used for day-to-day things like email, web surfing, and office tools, then Ubuntu is the best value there is.

<comment><USER28> >Also, when I run into a hitch during development, Google takes my operating system into account. Googling answers to development questions provides me much more relevant results on Ubuntu than it ever did on the Mac.

This isn't said enough. Type a coding question into google and 9 out of 10 hits seem to be good tutorials involving the linux terminal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "6. Linux makes older hardware sizzle."

No it doesn't. It might seem so because Windows "gets dirty" with time if not properly maintened (running a defragmentation, removing unused programs and residents, deleting temporary files, ... : things most people don't know/care about). So to linux credit this should be "Linux does not get as dirty as windows".

Even so-branded "minimalist" distribution make things like a pentium III seem slow as hell. X itself is simply slow. On a netbook purchased in 2009, the difference between running Win XP and running X is actually visible (greater delays when switching windows for instance).

"8. Ubuntu is totally non-geek friendly"

> When you have used for a week you might say so. But changing even minor > things to one's liking quickly becomes a pain in the ass and degenerates > into wizard level hackery. On other OSes you can often rely on installing a > freeware and for it to work out of the box. But the 100's of ways to do the > same thing on linux + packaging issues and dependency soup makes it hell > there.

"10. Security is a nice warm fluffy penguin feeling"

> Greetings from myth planet ! There's no reason things are inherently more > secure on linux than on Windows, for instance. For both, the major problem > is security breaches in applications.

</comment><comment><USER30> The point about it running well on old hardware is well taken. Installing a new OS onto an old box very often results in an apparent speed-up. I was amazed at how fast my old pc was when I upgraded to a new pc, and re-installed XP from scratch on the old one. It was amazing. Unfortunately we then started loading software on it, doing all the normal day-to-day stuff on it, and it's since slowed down again.

Unfortunatly installing Ubuntu on _new_ hardware is a different thing altogether. There you're far more likely to encounter problems as you have newer hardware (espaecially graphics hardware). We got two new "desktop" machines a year ago to use as file servers. Nice Intel motherboards, integrated high-end graphics and so on. A week of trying though (and we tried hard) and we simply could not make the graphics work right. And don't get me started on the RAID support. In the end we started again with Fedora and were up and running in a day. Fedora was more conservative with window transitions and so on, but I could get it to run for more than an hour, and VNC worked.

We use Linux a lot for servers, but I'm in no rush to roll it out for workstations. We'll keep trying every couple years, but it seems like 2 steps forward, one step back sometimes.

<comment><USER31> > Unfortunatly installing Ubuntu on _new_ hardware is a different thing > altogether.

This. I made the unfortunate mistake of trying to install Ubuntu on one of the new Toshiba Porteges. I was not expecting such terrible device support (built- in Intel graphics would freeze or kernel panic in full-screen; insert/remove to the HDMI port would cause X to run up to 100% of CPU and be unresponsive to input; screen dimmer would seemingly randomly dim and light while I was working; etc.).

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately laptop support somewhat lags behind in Linux, mostly due to bizarre hardware idiosyncrasies. Toshiba, Sony are particularly despised for their botched BIOS and ACPI, strange hardware management, and complete lack of alternate OSes support. Most of the time Asus, Dell and Lenovo laptops work, though.

However it's unfortunately a good advice to always check with a live CD that your distro actually supports decently the laptop you're about to buy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've often been told that Linux will work well on old hardware. I can confirm this is true with distros like ArchLinux but I've never had Ubuntu run well on old hardware.

A year ago I got a free PC. A P2 with 128MB of RAM. Attempted to install and run Ubuntu. Incredibly slow. I also attempted a windows XP install and I was amazed to see that it ran just fine. Heck, I could even fire up VLC and watch a video. Yes, it was slow but it was certainly more usable than default Ubuntu.

Now my latest experience with Ubuntu comes from a new purchase of a netbook. Samsung N150. It was cheap, it has 1GB RAM and an Intel Atom 1.66Ghz. I decided to do a dual install of Windows 7 Starter and Ubuntu 11.04. Ubuntu just chokes. Windows 7 fares better. Both are slow but windows is not unbearably slow.

I've tried many distros and WMs and so far stock Ubuntu has provided me with the simplest install but the worst performance.

Anyway, just my experiences.

<comment><USER33> > _A year ago I got a free PC. A P2 with 128MB of RAM. Attempted to install > and run Ubuntu. Incredibly slow. I also attempted a windows XP install_ //

It doesn't sound like you're comparing like with like.

XP was released in 2001. Last years Ubuntu was released last year, 2010 and was targetted mainly at hardware that isn't 10 years old. You could at least try Xubuntu or something that was made for old hardware. P2 came out in 1997 so XP working on it is not that great a surprise.

Try Win7 on that old PC and get back to us how well it runs ...?

FWIW I run Kubuntu 11.04 on an Athlon 1.1 with 768MB RAM - it's slow but works without any real issues. I've tried DSL and Puppy on a pendrive and they both pretty much blaze on this hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've been using a Linux as my desktop for around a decade. It's great for programming/programmers and sysadmin types. It runs the apps I need: perl, sh, apache, php, vim, and stuff from the various software repositories.

When I need to interact with data from coworkers at my non-techie organization, I use Windows. Why? Because the people there barely know how to use MS Office, much less something more complex. We use Linux on servers, but not desktops. Not yet at least.

When we need to deal with video, we send it out. We can do some in-house, but it's time consuming and kind of expensive. We use Sony Vegas on Windows (which is fine), but the real pros use Macs. So we have some Mac drives around.

The same goes for printing jobs. We do most of the in-house stuff in Office, and I've been pushing Publisher (which is a POS, but is available). For dealing with the outside world, though, I need to use Adobe Illustrator, because that's the standard. (At home I use Inkscape.) At the printers, they use Macs and PCs, but do most of the real work on Macs. The UI is just better.

The next platform is going to be the iPad. It's kind of a POS for non- managerial work, but some people just use email and don't really do computer- based work. They're already using phones, or just don't do the computer thing too much.

The Linux desktop is not going to displace Windows. Windows' edge is not the OS but the ISV (independent software vendor) environment. It's the most mature low-end ISV market. The Mac's was decimated with the demise of the old OS, and they're trying to rebuild it, but it's not doing well. The iTunes app store is potentially a challenger. The Android market is not a challenger. Linux's exists only for upper-end enterprise software.

Linux could displace Windows is by having a single dominant platform, and having an app store for it that is successful enough to fund a software ecosystem and pay the programmers. Then, people would choose Linux based on the apps.

At least that's the business model that worked for the Apple II / Visicalc, the IBM PC / Lotus 123 / dBaseII, the Mac / Aldus Pagemaker, Sun / SunOS and later Java, and Linux as a datacenter node.

</comment><comment><USER35> There is a version of Linux that's ready for primetime. It's called Android. The desktop OS ship has sailed.

</comment><comment><USER36> I actually agree with the article (having installed Ubuntu and Windows countless times over the past few months made me appreciate how much nicer Ubuntu is), but I take issue with one point:

"Windows is expensive and bad value for money."

No, it isn't expensive. You deliberately chose the version of Windows with extra features that mean nothing to the average user. A more proper comparison would be with W7 Home Premium, which at the linked site is £100. And that's only if you're upgrading- most people just leave whatever Windows version that was preloaded on their system on there, and there's rarely any reason to actually upgrade (since W2000, anyway). It's essentially free.

</comment><comment><USER37> I just returned to linux after a ~7 year hiatus and have found it to be a night and day experience. My xp install had gotten so bad that I was forced to escape and decided to try ubuntu on a whim. I'm so glad I did because the OS is really snappy and I'm able to do everything I was doing on xp and I'm not subject to random crashes. The reason I think ubuntu is ready for the masses is because the install process, which is the first obstacle to adoption, is mindblowingly fast and smooth compared to what it was like 7 years ago when I was using debian 2.x. Two major pain points that are now fixed (at least for me):

-The wubi installer lets you effortlessly install a dual boot win xp / ubuntu machine in about 45 minutes. Previously I would have to use QParted or Acronis to carve a new partition and then run a linux installer, which for me wasn't that bad, but would be unseemly for a newbie. With wubi, you set everything up inside of winxp and it reboots your computer, installs the distro, and you instantly have linux on a dual boot. Anyone, no matter how little computer knowledge, can give ubuntu a try because of this.

\- Driver support is much better than it was. It used to be a major pain to get important hardware such as wireless and video adapters working. When I installed this time, everything worked out of the box. This is huge for newbs.

After my latest ubuntu install, I'm going to try to fully transition my personal computer to linux. I'm also comfortable recommending it to those less computer savvy than me.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is an awful post. Starts with saying how Windows XP crashed and continues with a bunch of anecdotes.

Here's another anecdote. I have yet to use Ubuntu on a machine where everything just worked. I love Linux and use it every day. It's not ready for prime time but it is, as it has been for almost 20 years, a reasonable alternative for those willing to learn.

</comment><comment><USER39> I actually remember Windows ME as a better OS than Ubuntu 11.04. It's bad and not ready for primetime and it will take years before it's ready.

The last 6 months I was first forced to switch from Gnome2 to Unity because of Ubuntu 11.04 and that made me ditch Ubuntu. I had heard so many bad things about Gnome3 so I stayed away from ArchLinux and moved to Sabayon which still had Gnome2. One month ago Sabayon did an update to Gnome3 and after testing it for some time I decided to try Xfce (after the Torvalds post). I have spent so many hours tweaking and finding the source behind bugs that it nearly makes me cry.

There are so many small glitches and the only reason I stick with Linux on desktop is because it's free and it brings me freedom. That's the reason behind acceptance of all the glitches and mediocre user experience.

</comment><comment><USER40> My parents (mid 50's non-techies) run Ubuntu and love it. I installed it at first, but they've been able to do the rest. Including installing the updates, new printers, Chrome and similar things. I don't see how they can be that much of an exception to the average Joe. Just an anacdote...

</comment><comment><USER41> I thought this was an old article, from a few years ago. Seriously, Ubuntu has been a decent OS for developers and also newbies for a long time. (I am prejudiced - I downloaded Stackware using a 2400 baud modem (in 1992?), and Linux has been core to my business since then.)

That said, Windows 7 and OS X are probably better for the consumer market. Non-techie friends just bought a Windows 7 all in one computer (like an iMac) and it is amazing what they got for $600 (including a touch screen!!), and it all just works for them. I tried to give them a Mac last month and they promptly returned it to me because of the learning curve for switching to OS X, and the switch to Linux would be even more difficult.

</comment><comment><USER42> Could be ready for primetime, but Ubuntu hugely suffers from a lack of QA polish. Maverick was working well for me after lots of updates, but the upgrade to Natty was a disaster ... a broken window manager which had to be replaced. Volume doesn't stick after reboot, etc, etc.

Oh, and they love to remove working functionality and don't bother to replace it. The services control panel, gone, no replacement. Sessions gone in Natty, I now have to set up my terminal the way I like it every single time I log in, etc, etc. Will write a script I guess. Constant churn, see pulseaudio and unity.

I'm eager to hear recommendations for a more stable (fewer regression) distro that keeps packages up to date.

</comment><comment><USER43> How timely. I just spent 2 hours re-installing grub2 after Windows wiped it out (I knew it was going to happen but I hoped it wouldn't be any trouble to restore it). As I use LVM, I had to copy the /dev/dm-* devices to /dev/mapper/<lv>-<vg> in order to install grub (this is what took 1h50mins to figure out). Then I had to boot in to Ubuntu and update the grub config again to pick up Windows.

That said, Ubuntu has improved _a lot_ and despite the grub issue, I still love Ubuntu. I have converted both my parents to Ubuntu and I haven't had a support call from them since the switch.

<comment><USER44> That's not Ubuntus fault. I'm thinking it wouldn't be easier to fix your boot loader in Windows.

<comment><USER21> Actually, it's pretty simple. Boot a DOS disk. Run 'fdisk /mbr'.

Mind: my preference would be booting FreeDOS, not some borken Microsoft crap. But all the same.

My experience is that fixing Linux GRUB issues is also pretty straightforward. Helps to understand chroots and stuff, but still: boot a bootable distro (Ubuntu or Knoppix on a USB stick rawks), chroot into your installed root FS, mount /boot if necessary, and run 'grub-install' or 'update-grub'.

Mostly just works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> As an Ubuntu user I think this is just wishful thinking. My estimation is, that if Ubuntu has enough stamina and accelerates in the following years, maybe in 10-15 years they come much closer to where Windows is today.

</comment><comment><USER46> It can't sync music to iPhones or iPod touches. My dad loves his iPod and would scream if I tried to replace it.

The ubuntu solution? Just run XP in a VM to run iTunes!

I bought him a Mac.

</comment><comment><USER47> I don't think so. The user interface still looks like a dog's breakfast. When was the last time you used Linux without opening a terminal session? Installing new software can be incredibly tedious and error-prone. Drivers may not work or be installed and need to be hunted down (the author raves about how everything just worked out of the box, except of course that HP printer driver, which he had to find - not easy - and install). Windows 7 and MacOS X are ready for prime time. Linux is still an OS for hackers.

<comment><USER48> I disagree on "Installing new software can be incredibly tedious and error- prone" with centralised package management, I much prefer installing something on linux than in windows, all it takes is "pacman -S" whatever, or alias that to something shorter, it also means searching for software is easy. In windows I have to go and search for it on the net etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I was introduced to Ubuntu in the fall of 2005. I remember when I got the free disc to install and also how I struggled to get Ubuntu installed. The thing that sticks with me though is the reason I was trying to install Ubuntu is because it was already said to be ready for primetime.

Ubuntu walks the edge of good enough for random computer user/good enough for super user. But in reality the facebooking/photosharing computer user would rather not have to do it on Linux.

</comment><comment><USER50> Ubuntu is great, I have it up and running on my laptop since about 2 years. But I have WinXP, too. Just because I need Fireworks (I absolutely can't get along with PS or Gimp) and Wine is okay, but it makes the applications so slow...

That is really the only damned reason, I still have to switch between Win and Linux on my Laptop. If Adobe's products would run flawlessly on Linux, I'd never touch Windows again.

<comment><USER51> I used to be like that, until I tried Inkscape in Ubuntu.

Past the learning curve, and you will never need Fireworks again.

<comment><USER50> Hm yeah I recently discovered Xara Xtreme, what seems to be quite similar to Fireworks from my point of view. I once tried Inkscape but it literally grossed me out just like photoshop did. Maybe eventually I'll give it another try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The logic here is that Ubuntu is "ready for primetime" because of what happened with another OS? For a single user?

This type of commentary simply places headwinds on Ubuntu and other Linux OSes from actually gaining desktop traction.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you develop software that runs on anything that's neither an Apple or a Windows machine, Ubuntu has been ready for prime time since 2006 or so. It all depends on what you use your computer for.

</comment><comment><USER53> So, 2011 will be the year when Linux goes mainstream on the desktop? At last!

</comment><comment><USER54> Tried Ubuntu 11.04 yet? Try that and write back to us. Their new unity launcher isn't very good. Yes, there's ways around it, but that's the default...

</comment><comment><USER55> This is exactly the same article that has already been written by every geek who blogs and has recently tried Linux. Nothing new or interesting. Flagged.

</comment><comment><USER56> Year n+1 is the year of Linux on the desktop!

<comment><USER57> In other news, we've had several legitimate years-of-the-Unix-desktop courtesy of Mac OS X :)</comment></comment>


Why Most Stars Have Twins - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/space/most-stars-have-twins.html

<comment><USER2> I thought for sure that this was going to be an article about celebrities and their children.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pshh. The only stars I look up to are light years away from us.

<comment><USER3> I guess you've never met David Hasselhoff then. :-)

(I met him once. He's 6'4". I had to look up.)

<comment><AUTHOR> hahah.

I look up to Tom Brady. 199th pick that was 'too skinny' but still won 3 super bowls and married a victoria's secret model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just don't tell our sun. Seriously, another star could just come out of nowhere to join it, and we'd all be fried.

<comment><AUTHOR> that would be a major buzzkill. we have it pretty good here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> But is our Sun really a single? Consider the hypothesized 'Nemesis':

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_%28star%29>

<comment><AUTHOR> wow. never knew about this. so many mysteries still remain...

I bet you other sentient civilizations have 'iPhones' that can detect star systems like we detect wi-fi signals. haha</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you ask someone to join your board? - <AUTHOR>

It's time for my gaming company to choose our first board of directors, and I've identified a number of potential members that could help a lot with their wisdom and experience. The thing is, I don't know many of them, and they're important people who probably get approached about a lot of things.<p>Does anyone have experience "cold calling" a request like this, or advice on how to approach them? <comment><USER2> One approach is to use LinkedIn or similar and go friend-of-a-friend. On the downside, you could end up with a board of people who are all on the same page to the extent that they don't challenge conventional wisdom or ask the hard questions.

Why not make contact through your firm's lawyer? People will always pay attention to contact from a law firm or general counsel, and your lawyer will be able to give you some good advice on appropriate compensation, obligations, conflicts of interest etc. etc.</comment>


Bash process substitution - <AUTHOR> http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/process-sub.html <comment><USER2> I use this a lot in a couple of different contexts.

First, it's a convenient way to turn around pipelines inside scripts in situations where you need to feed a command output or pipeline into a read loop but the loop needs to be part of the original script process so it can manipulate variables, etc. Meaningless example of optionally incrementing a counter in a loop based on the output of a pipeline of commands:

        while read LINE; do
            if grep -q xyz <<< "$LINE"; then
                COUNTER=$(( $COUNTER + 1 ))
            fi
        done < <(awk '{print $4,$7}' infile.txt |cut -d, -f3)

If you did it in the "awk ...|cut ...| while read LINE..." order, COUNTER would be getting incremented in a subshell, and the value wouldn't stick around after the loop.

The other most common way I use it is to diff a couple of sets of pipelines or even just files that need sorting before comparison:

        diff <(sort -u file1.txt) <(sort -u file2.txt)

Saves a ton of steps. As pointed out by jkbyc, the >() construction for output process substitution becomes really powerful when combined with tee.

<comment><USER2> Another example of using diff on two process substitutions I did this morning. I've been quarantining some files from various paths that all have unique basenames into a single directory. I have a CSV file listing the original path in the first field followed by some other metadata. I wanted to compare the files in the CSV file ("quarantined-files.csv") to the files I had moved into the "quarantine" subdirectory. I came up with this:

        diff <(cut -d, -f1 quarantined-files.csv |xargs -L1 basename |sort) <(ls ./quarantine/ |sort)

(Yes, the listing from "ls" comes out sorted, but it's always possible it'll sort certain characters a bit differently than "sort" does depending on locale settings, aliases, etc, etc. Piping both outputs through "sort" should ensure the same sorting collation in all cases.)

It took me a while to really grok this sort of thing, but once it clicked, it's often the first thing I think of. Basically any time you might be tempted to dump something to a temporary file, you should ask yourself "can I use process substitution?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I sometimes use it to do parallel greps on large files:

      zcat large_file.gz | tee >(grep -F pattern1 > pattern1_results.txt) >(grep -F pattern2 > pattern2_results.txt) > /dev/null

If you stick _pv_ between zcat and tee you can even get nice info about the progress.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a powerful idea, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One neat trick I've found is using `exec` in conjunction with process substitution to effect and gather changes to the current environment within the context of a script (usually not as useful with a pty attached).

Example: how can you redirect stdout to syslog, a specified log file, and stdout? Easy, with tee, right?

``` $my_command | tee -a >(logger -t "$0[my_command]" -p "local0.INFO") "/var/log/my_logs/$(date +%s).log") ```

Okay, that's cool. But, I have to run it for every command in my script! How inconvenient. Is there a way we can make all stdout for the script do this?

Yes! Use `exec`!

``` exec &> tee -a >(logger -t "$0[my_command]" -p "local0.INFO") "/var/log/my_logs/$(date +%s).log")

$my_command ```

<comment><USER4> Forgive my botched formatting. Long time lurker here :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find it useful to read the Bash manual every couple of years.

It's not too long and very well written so it's an enjoyable read.

You almost always learn something new which you can integrate into your workflow.

[http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html](http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I use this all the time. It's at its most useful when you want to use a process as a source or sink, and avoid using a temporary file as input or output when a tool that doesn't operate on standard input or output. Often, these tools need to work with multiple files that have different semantic intent.

For example, `grep -f <pattern-file>` - grep works on standard input, but if you also want to provide patterns via process output, you need to use temporary files, fifos, or process substitution.

Here's an example:

        find | fgrep -f <(cut -f 2 tab-delimited-text.txt)

</comment><comment><USER3>
      $ echo "Process substitution is fun" | tee >(rev)
      Process substitution is fun
      nuf si noitutitsbus ssecorP

<comment><USER7> I've never understood the point of _tee_ without process substitution. I guess you could do the same thing manually by opening another file descriptor first an forking some process, but is it of any use in a normal simple pipe?

<comment><USER8> A good use case is to redirect output into a file you only can modify with sudo. Trying to do it like this doesn't work:

      sudo echo "fs.inotify.max_user_watches=1000000" > /etc/sysctl.conf

as the redirection happens within the shell, thus without root permissions. However, the following does work:

      echo "fs.inotify.max_user_watches=1000000" | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.conf

as the writing is done by the elevated tee process.

<comment><USER9> That seems like an anti-unixism (operating with multiple EUIDs in a single process group), though I'm not too sure what the equivalent unixism would be—maybe something with a daemon and a spool directory? Or a user-writable FIFO, redirected to the correct file by the elevated user in a separate command?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The fish[1] shell also has process substitution (without requiring additional syntax) in the form of psub (which is implemented simply as a fish function; see `type psub` from a fish shell):

      bash$ wc <(grep script /usr/share/dict/linux.words)
      fish$ wc (grep script /usr/share/dict/linux.words | psub)

The sugar in the bash form might be nice, but it isn't required.

[1]: [http://fishshell.com/](http://fishshell.com/)

<comment><USER11> One thing it seems to be missing is the bash

        >(wc)

which is obviously only useful with a few things like tee, but still useful.

dag from GitHub came up with[0] a quick way of using psub:

        bind \es 'commandline -ij "(|psub)"; commandline -f backward-word backward-word'

[0]: [https://github.com/fish-shell/fish- shell/issues/719#issuecom...](https://github.com/fish-shell/fish- shell/issues/719#issuecomment-17683844)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you would like to become comfortable with using bash process substitution, I recommend figuring out how many of the 'moreutils' utilities can be replicated using only bash process substitution and your generic linux utilities. It makes for a fun exercise.

moreutils [http://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/](http://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Diff and diff3 support reading from /deve/fdXX ... unfortunalety I don't know a graphic differenza (meld, kdiff3, ...) supporting this kind of input. It's a shame, 'cause I frequently want to diff the output of two program (or the same program with different inputs)

<comment><USER14> In zsh, you can use =() instead of <() to slurp all the data into a temporary file first to deal with this issue. Perhaps bash has this also.

<comment><USER12> Bash does not have `=()`, but with a few extra commands you could write to temporary files using `mktmp`. Or use zsh. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Although I can write a lot of my stuff in (much) higher-level languages like Python or even Perl, I prefer to do it in Bash. The thing that I hate the most is the lack of basic data structures - especially as function returns.</comment>


Zynga Shamelessly Rips Off 'Tiny Tower' With Canadian Release of 'Dream Heights' - <AUTHOR> http://toucharcade.com/2012/01/24/zynga-shamelessly-rips-off-tiny-tower-with-canadian-release-of-dream-heights/

<comment><USER2> This is business as usual for Zynga.

"They would sit and look at competitive products and write down all the features and make it obvious to us," the designer says. One contractor says he was offered freelance work from Zynga, related to mimicking a competitor's application, with explicit instructions: "Copy that game." [http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/09/zynga_pincus_cop...](http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/09/zynga_pincus_copy_games.php)

Pincus was heard yelling at employees, "I don't fucking want innovation. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers." <http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/>

More examples: [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-zynga-is-just-like- micros...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-zynga-is-just-like- microsoft-2010-1)

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, this isn't really even that bad. There are a ton of games ripped off of Zynga that are MUCH closer to the Zynga assets.

You could argue Tiny Tower ripped off Sim Tower etc.

The whole thing is stupid. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, even other giants.

<comment><USER4> Standing on the shoulders of giants generally means you evolve or build upon your predecessor. I haven't played either game, but this looks to be a plain reimplementation of the game right down to the mechanics with little or no change.

Based on other similar news stories in the past, it seems like this is Zynga's general business plan. While it appears profitable and is legal, it's hardly a laudable practice.

<comment><USER5> I could do a screen-for-screen comparison of Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 and you would have a hard time telling them apart. Each actually has distinct gameplay that sets it apart. I think it's a stretch to say there's clearly "little or no change" from 4 cherry-picked screenshots.

Zynga has actually had an improving track record in the last 6 months with Adventure World, Hidden Chronicles and Dream Zoo. They're still sticking to "hit" genres, but they have been pushing out of cloneville and taking more risks.

<comment><USER6> I see where you're coming from but I'd have to disagree. Battlefield and Call of Duty are both in a pretty much generic first person shooter genre.

The game made by Nimblebit looks like a fairly specific and deliberate Sim type game designed in a specific way for mobile devices. I think the screenshots chosen are good enough to come to the conclusion that it's a clone.

<comment><USER5> I'm not denying that it's a clone. I'm saying that Zynga's "ripoffs" have gone from literal feature-for-feature clones to progressively more "innovative" titles in the last 5 years. Back in 2007, my game was the second game Zynga ever copied. I've been there, I know what it feels like. It sucks.

What I'm saying is that Zynga is aware of their past and is moving towards less copy and more creativity. I think their _actually released products_ in the last 6 months are a testament to that. Dream Zoo is a great example of coming into a genre, "Zyngafying" it, and coming out with a hit product that's better than the competition. They even built new tech that they've open sourced and shared with the Cocos2d community. But no one talks about that because it's easier to hate Zynga than it is to make a reasoned discussion about them.

<comment><USER7> Upvoted for getting screwed and still remaining objective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find it truly bizarre just _how many_ employees Zynga has, considering the number of products they produce. Mobile development has shown us time and time again that a game like Farmville can be easily made with 5 employees. There must be a gigantic bureaucratic they have to fight in order to get anything done with that gigantic mass of employees.

<comment><USER9> Focusing on number of employees is pretty pointless, since outsourcing randomly makes departments internal or external. Zynga has an accounting department and HR and janitors and receptionists, which 3-person companies just do not have. Heck, the guys who make Tiny Tower don't even have someone to do music since they licensed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can see NimbleBits being miffed a bit, but they have not released an update in a very long time. I tweeted @eeen and he said there is no update anytime soon.

My wife cannot play Tiny Tower anymore, she has every floor possible (153), 12 vacant floors (waiting for more floor types to build), 30 million coins and 250 bux.

Is this what an "iPhone Game Of The Year" acts like?

It seems to me that Tiny Tower was a great fad.

<comment><USER9> Well, the other half of having 3 employees is that you move on to the next game, and the old one is left as-is.

<comment><USER10> indeed. I get that for sure and the game was free.

I still sort of wonder how much work it would be to release an update that i just new floors, not other new functionality.

I imagine it is work..still sort of want it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. As long as Zynga is not directly using digital materials from Tiny Tower, I don't see the problem.

The game industry is a massive fest of copying each other. How many Doom clones are out there? Or the Pacman variety? Or the Breakouts? Space Invaders?

<comment><USER12> I can't bring myself to feel bad for Tiny Tower specifically. But if Zynga were to stomp on all small teams that released a popular game, it is easy to see how that would harm innovation.

I am in the process of saving private $$$ for a game project that _I think_ will break even in the long run. If there was a good chance of being cloned before that happens, I wouldn't bother.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> this is sad. zynga is sad. specifically, this habitual rip-offery. i won't call them _shady_ , which i think is a popular opinion. not because i don't think they are, but just because i don't want to have to defend that position. i will however defend that it is sad.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been doing this 30 years and I've never seen a title that didn't have some connection or another to some hit title. Some have it stronger than others.

I always say, when asked sage game design advice, that a hit game is like the center point of a circle. The closer YOUR game is to the center the more likely it's a clone. If it's far OUTSIDE the circle that it's just to far from what people know to be a hit.

The goal is to hit the line of the circle, which makes the circle move to include your game and maybe make it the new center point.

</comment><comment><USER15> replace Zynga with Epic and Tiny Tower and Dream Heights with Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament.

Video game companies copy each other. It's up to the consumer to decide which version is worth their money. I for one welcome some competition to Tiny Tower, especially after the game was ruined for me when I found out that setting the iPhone clock ahead allowed you to cheat the game..

<comment><USER16> >replace Zynga with Epic and Tiny Tower and Dream Heights with Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament.

Bad example. UT and Q3A were released withing 10 days of each other. The development time for an FPS such as Q3 doesn't leave much time for it to copy UT. On the other hand, Tiny Tower has been around for about half a year, plenty of time for Zynga to imitate as it pleases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If they don't like Zynga re-implementing their idea, they should keep adding features and innovating so their game is better.

You can't be against the patent game the big guys play but for protection against this kind of behavior.

edit to add: If I worked on the blatant copy, I wouldn't exactly be proud of that work.

<comment><USER18> _You can't be against the patent game the big guys play but for protection against this kind of behavior._

Clearly you have no idea what concerns many people here about patents, otherwise you wouldn't be making a comparison like that.

<comment><USER17> Care to elaborate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And tiny tower is arguably just a tweaked version of sim tower. Whoopie doo.

But seriously, the whole time I played tiny tower, all I could think about was where was the rage over copying yoot saito?

<comment><USER20> Sim Tower is basically an elevator management simulator with some very basic tower management that's similar to something like Sim City. Tiny Tower is a very simple game about building floors putting people in the right floors. There's no comparison beyond the fact that they both take place in towers.

<comment><USER19> I disagree; I've played both and they share many of the same game mechanics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It seems to me that the reasoning in the Temple Island Collections case could apply to these situations (with respect to UK law), depending on how closely the second game copies the first, but IANAB.

</comment><comment><USER22> It is funny that some of the same people that claim that using and sharing other people work is ok and that copyrights and IP are evil also think that what Zynga did in this case is "stealing", "rip off" or immoral, at best.

Why would it be ok to just copy other people work and enjoy it, while creating something similar to something else is not ok?

</comment><comment><USER23> Fuck Zynga, including whoever put together those admittedly tasty graphics.

</comment><comment><USER24> game mechanics cannot be copyrighted. some of the best games out there are blatant copies of other games. still I feel for the team that made tiny tower.

</comment><comment><USER25> Zynga is a bullshit company, they know it, we know it, but in the real world the people playing their games really don't give a shit as long as they can earn one banana per click. So they keep clicking, over and over. Welcome to the real world of internet marketing.

<comment><USER26> Except we have good reason to believe that Zynga has peaked. They haven't been able to replicate the success of Farmville, their active user base is shrinking, and customer acquisition is becoming prohibitively expensive.

All in all it certainly looks like the "glorified slot machine" formula of "social gaming" is dying, and that is immensely gratifying to me.

<comment><USER25> That's exactly the same thing as saying the number of people who fall prey to email marketing has peaked.

<comment><USER26> How so?

I want to make sure I'm reading your comment correctly: are you trying to say that people are too stupid to figure out they're being played, and that they'll run on the Zynga treadmill for as long as Zynga pleases?

I think data presents a reality less cynical than yours.

<comment> eric-hu It sounds like he's saying that Zynga's business model will plateau, with 'the new suckers born every minute' replacing their fed-up customers that leave.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> FYI Nimblebit ripped off others before they had Tinytowers.

<comment><USER20> Really? Scoops, Sky Burger, and Pocket Frogs don't seem ripped off in any way. Care to elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is terrible. Shameless and unsettling about their morals.

</comment><comment><USER29> Just one more nail in the hopefully soon to be completed zynga coffin...</comment>


Are You Ready for the New Peer-to-Peer Economy? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/03/11/are-you-ready-for-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy/

<comment><USER2> Hm, so with the example given, rather than pay cash to the elderly hobbyist farmer at the farmer's market for his tomatoes and apples, we can cut in some big financial conglomerate for a slice of the action. And this is being promoted by said financiers as an improvement over cash.

<comment><USER3> Am I too cynical thinking that the real key is that said financiers will be able to get a slice of transactions made by hookers and dope dealers?

<comment><USER4> Ha! If 'Inside Job' and 'Client 9' are correct then said financiers are spending a lot of their institution's money on said hookers and coke dealers. Then expensing it as research.</comment></comment></comment>


Lavaboom's response to warrants - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lavaboom.com/lavabooms-response-to-warrants/

<comment><USER2> Everything they are doing is legal. Sadly, the laws will be changed to criminalize normal behavior, even if they are in Germany.

<comment><USER3> That's why the EFF are so valuable. We need EFF to have bigger presence in Europe - I think a couple of their people have moved to Berlin recently.</comment></comment>