Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

A Brief Review of the Nintendo 2DS:

The Nintendo 2DS reminds me of the iPhone 5c in a lot of ways. The press asked, “Why introduce a model that’s not top of the line?” Then they began to write and repeat a flawed narrative around the product, using words like “cheap” to describe solid, budget friendly devices. Because the product doesn’t fit their wishes or desires, they start to write off the product by coming up with unappealing factoids and comparing feature lists with other products that might have more stuff, but aren’t necessarily better. It’s dishonest and unhelpful to characterize products, like the 5c or the 2DS, as cheap. They are anything but.

When I saw the thing announced, this is exactly what I thought. The hinge on the DS never made a lot of sense to me. Being on that horrendously short list of people that has replaced a DS Phat shell because of a broken hinge, well, let me say good riddance. And a mono speaker? Isn't that getting back to the original Game Boy roots? When you're holding it away from your face, does the "stereo" of two speakers inches apart really matter? And wow, the stereo from the original was incredible through headphones. That's always been the way to experience handheld games.

Anyhow, Fink's review is excellent. The 2DS is a lower-priced, smart shortcut-taking piece of quality hardware. I can't find the post now, but there was a great case made recently against the somehow groupthought idea that Nintendo is in trouble and needs to start making games for iOS. Sure, right. Nintendo needs to forsake millions of units selling at $40 a pop to cash in on that ripe $4-$7 a unit market that is iOS. I'll be putting down $40 for A Link Between Worlds in a few weeks, and that's more than I've spent on iOS games, well, since ever. And that's obviously not my only DS game.

Forget Samsung. As Fink says, Apple's competition on the consumer tablet is still, ultimately, Nintendo. They're one must-have innovation from awaking their sleeping giant.

Nintendo knows what it's doing. Maybe the Wii U isn't panning out, but the Game Boy still is. As the British say, the 2DS is a nice piece of kit. As a DS phat owner and the in-law of a 3DS, I don't see them doing much wrong.

Labels: apple, ds, nintendo

I need to go back and do a true link aggregation with prior posts on the subject, but in the past month or two, I've seen too many "Mac" bloggers -- and there's a community that I enjoy that seems to include John Gruber, Marco Arment, and, recently, Ben Thompson -- say that Microsoft has been eating hardware manufacturers' lunches for years.

They're not wrong (warning: youtube vid with cursing), they've just gone waaaay too far down the Apple rabbit hole. Sure, Apple won for several years, but what's the true cost of using Microsoft? And what's the value?

How much has HP, Dell, and friends had to know about creating and updating operating systems for the last twenty-plus years? How to burn an image to a hard drive. That's right. Essentially nothing.

How much has HP, Dell, and friends had to spend to create an operating system? Yes, billions to license one (and, okay, very little to use the other when they've bothered), but essentially much closer to nothing to develop Windows. There's a ton of obvious user maintenance, but R and D? Relatively speaking, zero.

How big of a risk was it for Apple/NeXT to continue to develop their own OS? That's an interesting question that deserves more investigation. Let's not talk so much about OS 9. That OS played itself out. It essentially failed. Apple took FreeBSD and started essentially over, building in NeXT/Cocoa and OS 9/Carbon layers on top.

How difficult is it to pull off creating an OS from scratch, or, more accurately, on top of a stable *NIX kernal? Enter exhibit WebOS. Ask Palm, Blackberry, Nokia, and HP how creating OSes contributes to the bottom line.

How can Microsoft be eating HP's lunch if HP can't cook on its on?

To quickly turn the metaphor, if you're not willing to take on the risk of creating an OS (or decided it's a dumb risk not worth taking), I guess you're stuck with cooks that are 70% pure. There's a company that's able to create cooks that are 99.1% pure (as I catch up on my DVR'd Breaking Bad Marathon), and they're proving difficult to kill.

Actually, Breaking Bad metaphors work better for Microsoft. They're like the cartel's chemist complaining about Jesse's, um, artistic approach to cooking meth (warning: more cursing from youtube). What matters is that Jesse gets to 96% purity and the cartel's team is, hrm, doing much worse. A few years ago, Ballmer was the chemist putting down the iPhone. Microsoft knows how to synthesize phenylacetic acid, but they can't cook.

The point is that hardware manufacturers were unable to commoditize their complements -- nor was Microsoft able to make more than mobile equivalents to those manufacturers' beige boxes to put their OS on -- and Linux and OSS have been unable to create a replacement-level OS alternative. Unless you count Android. For today, let's leave Google out of it. Google's eating everyone's advertising lunch.

Microsoft has earned the money they're collecting on Windows. It's not extortion when you're the only risk-reducing game in town.

Labels: apple, hardware, hats of money, licensing, linux, microsoft

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Serving ssh on Windows -- !freeSSHd Well, that was a waste of time - LinLog: Yeah.... So remember how I was messing with freeSSHd last weekend? I'm thinking that was a waste of time. So instead, I decided to go the old-fashioned way and just install Cygwin and use their OpenSSH server. And you know what? It was completely painless. I just used this handy LifeHacker entry to get the auto-config command and the necessary settings, and I was done. I only wasted about 20 mins, but I was headed towards the same result with freeSSHd. Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but the information at the above link implies even when it's working, freeSSHd isn't Scottish. Labels: fail, free, windows posted by ruffin at 10/30/2013 09:54:00 AM

Tuesday, October 29, 2013
An Honest Nintendo 2DS Review A Brief Review of the Nintendo 2DS: The Nintendo 2DS reminds me of the iPhone 5c in a lot of ways. The press asked, “Why introduce a model that’s not top of the line?” Then they began to write and repeat a flawed narrative around the product, using words like “cheap” to describe solid, budget friendly devices. Because the product doesn’t fit their wishes or desires, they start to write off the product by coming up with unappealing factoids and comparing feature lists with other products that might have more stuff, but aren’t necessarily better. It’s dishonest and unhelpful to characterize products, like the 5c or the 2DS, as cheap. They are anything but. When I saw the thing announced, this is exactly what I thought. The hinge on the DS never made a lot of sense to me. Being on that horrendously short list of people that has replaced a DS Phat shell because of a broken hinge, well, let me say good riddance. And a mono speaker? Isn't that getting back to the original Game Boy roots? When you're holding it away from your face, does the "stereo" of two speakers inches apart really matter? And wow, the stereo from the original was incredible through headphones. That's always been the way to experience handheld games. Anyhow, Fink's review is excellent. The 2DS is a lower-priced, smart shortcut-taking piece of quality hardware. I can't find the post now, but there was a great case made recently against the somehow groupthought idea that Nintendo is in trouble and needs to start making games for iOS. Sure, right. Nintendo needs to forsake millions of units selling at $40 a pop to cash in on that ripe $4-$7 a unit market that is iOS. I'll be putting down $40 for A Link Between Worlds in a few weeks, and that's more than I've spent on iOS games, well, since ever. And that's obviously not my only DS game. Forget Samsung. As Fink says, Apple's competition on the consumer tablet is still, ultimately, Nintendo. They're one must-have innovation from awaking their sleeping giant. Nintendo knows what it's doing. Maybe the Wii U isn't panning out, but the Game Boy still is. As the British say, the 2DS is a nice piece of kit. As a DS phat owner and the in-law of a 3DS, I don't see them doing much wrong. Labels: apple, ds, nintendo posted by ruffin at 10/29/2013 09:10:00 PM

Friday, October 25, 2013
Mary finishes her release -- because she's using git, not TFS Gitflow Workflow \| Atlassian Git Tutorial: Mary finishes the release Once the release is ready to ship, Mary merges it into master and develop. And she does that because she's not on TFS 2010, which only (afaict) allows one generation's worth of relationships. In gitflow, green is orange's child. So is yellow. In TFS, Sister Yellow would have to merge into Father Orange, and then Father Orange would have to merge into Brother Green to have the complete chain of inheritance. That's insane. In git, you can be someone's great grand-cousin dodecahedrically removed and still merge into anyone you wanted. Please avoid any jokes about the south. Labels: git, tfs posted by ruffin at 10/25/2013 10:58:00 AM

Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Mavericks breaks iPhoto? Installed Mavericks on my older 2009 MacBook. Whoops. I didn't know my "login keychain" password, and things went to heck. Ended up being forced to create two [sic] new accounts as the install process seemed to be confused whether it was installing on a new box or not. The worst part, however, is that iPhoto has the "forbidden" circle over it like old PowerPC only apps had at some point. Maybe my hardware doesn't cut it for the new version for some reason, but then, well, don't let me upgrade. Doesn't Apple think I might want my digital hub to access my personal photos? Hello again, Picasa. Hopefully I'm an update away from iPhoto working again, but though the App Store updated iTunes for Mavericks, nothing for iPhoto yet. Labels: os x posted by ruffin at 10/22/2013 11:32:00 PM

Thursday, October 17, 2013
How can Microsoft be eating HP's lunch if HP can't cook on its own? I need to go back and do a true link aggregation with prior posts on the subject, but in the past month or two, I've seen too many "Mac" bloggers -- and there's a community that I enjoy that seems to include John Gruber, Marco Arment, and, recently, Ben Thompson -- say that Microsoft has been eating hardware manufacturers' lunches for years. They're not wrong (warning: youtube vid with cursing), they've just gone waaaay too far down the Apple rabbit hole. Sure, Apple won for several years, but what's the true cost of using Microsoft? And what's the value? How much has HP, Dell, and friends had to know about creating and updating operating systems for the last twenty-plus years? How to burn an image to a hard drive. That's right. Essentially nothing. How much has HP, Dell, and friends had to spend to create an operating system? Yes, billions to license one (and, okay, very little to use the other when they've bothered), but essentially much closer to nothing to develop Windows. There's a ton of obvious user maintenance, but R and D? Relatively speaking, zero. How big of a risk was it for Apple/NeXT to continue to develop their own OS? That's an interesting question that deserves more investigation. Let's not talk so much about OS 9. That OS played itself out. It essentially failed. Apple took FreeBSD and started essentially over, building in NeXT/Cocoa and OS 9/Carbon layers on top. How difficult is it to pull off creating an OS from scratch, or, more accurately, on top of a stable NIX kernal? Enter exhibit WebOS. Ask Palm, Blackberry, Nokia, and HP how creating OSes contributes to the bottom line. How can Microsoft be eating HP's lunch if HP can't cook on its on?* To quickly turn the metaphor, if you're not willing to take on the risk of creating an OS (or decided it's a dumb risk not worth taking), I guess you're stuck with cooks that are 70% pure. There's a company that's able to create cooks that are 99.1% pure (as I catch up on my DVR'd Breaking Bad Marathon), and they're proving difficult to kill. Actually, Breaking Bad metaphors work better for Microsoft. They're like the cartel's chemist complaining about Jesse's, um, artistic approach to cooking meth (warning: more cursing from youtube). What matters is that Jesse gets to 96% purity and the cartel's team is, hrm, doing much worse. A few years ago, Ballmer was the chemist putting down the iPhone. Microsoft knows how to synthesize phenylacetic acid, but they can't cook. The point is that hardware manufacturers were unable to commoditize their complements -- nor was Microsoft able to make more than mobile equivalents to those manufacturers' beige boxes to put their OS on -- and Linux and OSS have been unable to create a replacement-level OS alternative. Unless you count Android. For today, let's leave Google out of it. Google's eating everyone's advertising lunch. Microsoft has earned the money they're collecting on Windows. It's not extortion when you're the only risk-reducing game in town. Labels: apple, hardware, hats of money, licensing, linux, microsoft posted by ruffin at 10/17/2013 09:20:00 AM

Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Square Cash and profit Square's free 'Square Cash' service allows users to send money via email: Currently, transfer values are capped at $250 per week for the basic service, which can be raised to $2,500 with a few additional steps. While still free, the higher dollar amount requires users send Square their name, date of birth and last four digits of their social security number. Alternatively, a Facebook login can be used for verification. Okay, free advertising. I get that. But other than that, how is this not SNL's Change Bank? How do we make a profit? Punchline: Volume. Debit transactions would go up. I assume the banks pay for that usage. Do account holders pick up the tab? Are Visa and Mastercard paying Square? Do people receiving money get slightly less than what you sent? Where's the money I should be following here? posted by ruffin at 10/16/2013 12:43:00 PM

Tuesday, October 15, 2013
$144 for a $2 hex calculator app? At first blush, useless, right? But the more I think about it, the neater I realize that really would be, especially for Atari programming or when I'm reading bytes out of a raw file. If they'd add "display as ASCII" and maybe a UTF-8 version as well, we might have something. Thanks so much, NuGet advertisements, for timesinking me here. But why $144? Why not $128? I mean, really. What are we talking about here? ;^) posted by ruffin at 10/15/2013 10:00:00 AM

Friday, October 11, 2013
Data mining [your] endorsements Google Sets Plan to Sell Users’ Endorsements - NYTimes.com: If a user follows a bakery on Google Plus or gives an album four stars on the Google Play music service, for instance, that person’s name, photo and endorsement could show up in ads for that bakery or album. Is it worse if they pay the people whose "endorsements" they data mined? Labels: ads, Google, hats of money posted by ruffin at 10/11/2013 01:17:00 PM

Wednesday, October 09, 2013
KDiff3: "There is a line end style conflict" If you're perplexed by KDiff3's message, "There is a line end style conflict. Please choose the line end style manually," then you're probably about as good at noticing drop-downs alone on the right middle of your apps as I am. Voila. Labels: kdiff3, noteToSelf posted by ruffin at 10/09/2013 09:20:00 AM

Saturday, October 05, 2013
Arguing that minimized JavaScript is in "Executable form" MPL 2.0 FAQ: Q16: Is "minified" JavaScript Source Code? No. Minified JavaScript, while not an "executable" in the software engineering sense of the word, is difficult for humans to read, edit, and modify. As such, it is not "the preferred form for modification" and so it is not Source Code as defined by the license. Therefore, minified JavaScript is the Executable form, and the responsibilities set out in the license for distribution of the Executable form should be met when you distribute minified MPL-licensed JavaScript. Compare to OOXML. Like interpreted code, you could (and, I believe) should argue that purposely obfuscated human-readable code and standards are operating as executable/proprietary code. Labels: javascript, licensing, mozilla, ooxml, open posted by ruffin at 10/05/2013 06:05:00 PM

Thursday, October 03, 2013
Alex Le’s Blog � Blog Archive � “safer” parseInt() for JavaScript with plus unary operator Alex Le’s Blog � Blog Archive � “safer” parseInt() for JavaScript with plus unary operator: Additionally, parseInt and make different assumptions about the radix when there’s a leading zero. ”012″ returns 12, but parseInt(”012″) returns 10. The leading zero causes parseInt to treat it as an octal number in probably all browsers, despite octals being summarily deprecated in ES3. Of course, you can use parseInt(”012″,10) to get around that. Ran into this while looking for info on using the "unary plus". See? This is another reason why Crockford's not full of it, for those who still think he is. Missing radix !== jslinted. Labels: javascript, JSLint posted by ruffin at 10/03/2013 01:55:00 PM

Tuesday, October 01, 2013
The "ASP Loophole" TV is SOCIAL, again: The Honest Public License: What motivated this new license now? We have a general availability version of Funambol coming out in September. I already know there are commercial companies that are live with our code and do not return anything. More than two years ago, we did something similar, switching Sync4j from BSD to GPL. There were companies taking our code and running away with it, without returning anything. One even managed to get public with software based on our code, and our community never saw a line of their modifications. Now is no different. I've seen this argument for using GPLv2 libraries with edits on commercial web servers before, and from some large companies and government organizations. Most interesting to me in that post was seeing someone with good, FSF values outside of FSF. But I'm also reminded of my "GNG Manifeso" post years ago (over 11. What traction!). You can't really get mad at someone for "getting public" if you release under BSD. From me: This is also why I dislike the X11, BSD, and MIT licenses. These licenses don't do enough to protect the contributions of the people that made the code -- they essentially enable legalized plagiarism. It's certainly one's right to make code that's this unregulated, but these licenses are nearly overly altruistic motivations. And, as we see here, the mistaken use of the BSD didn't match the intent either. But does that require GPL? I don't think so. I'd like to think you can strike a balance between making a company release everything and making a company release any improvements to the logic you helped create in your OSS lib. Labels: F/free, licensing posted by ruffin at 10/01/2013 10:59:00 AM

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