anto1ne · HackerTrans

anto1ne

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vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

Chinese internet is like the rest of internet. Chinese people don't care about censorship of external sites, because they don't care about them, the same way you don't care about youku, weibo, kaixin, taobao, etc.. you use youtube, they use youku. And whoever want to bypass censorship can buy a vpn (they're easy to find and reliable). The only thing that can be said about internet in china is that it's dead slow for a foreigner, but that's due to bad overseas connections and L7 filtering. If you go on chinese sites, it's totally ok. I stayed 3 years in china, and was 24/7 on vpn.

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

Well, his account was probably sold in china, it's common (at least it still was a few months ago) on taobao (the chinese ebay), they sell you "gift cards" to be used within 12h after purchase, it's in fact accounts. I guess that's why Apple started to ask CCV for purchases.

There's also a practice in China to use apps as a kind of fraud, or maybe money laundering. I've seen once a chinese wallpaper app, with each wallpaper for sale at $99, making thousands on the appstore.. when you think about it, it's easy to post an wallpaper app, set the price, and you get money through Apple, without any traces.

What I really hate about all this is that Apple still force you (or make it very difficult not to) to have a CC linked to your itunes account, even though you plan to never buy anything.

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

1. do all of this

2. realize that point 15. is by far the most difficult and time consuming of all steps

3. ...

4. no profit

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

too bad there's not so much said about optimizing latency, serving a lot of traffic is not that difficult, but getting the best latency to serve your files 50ms faster can make a big difference

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

I guess this http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VBox_vs_Others makes it clear

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

To me the former is not being fluent, it's just knowing basics, the later is being fluent. But then there's being bilingual which is a completely different level, much more difficult to reach than being fluent IMO.

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

And it would have been fair.

I completely agree with the article, but I was quite surprised by the subject after the link I clicked.

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

They're so far behind because they're dedicated to release only when they think it's bug-free enough (for all packages, including all dependencies), which can be long after they freeze versions and features.

Another thing is they release the same distrib version on 9 different architectures, not only i386/amd64.

Considering this, and the fact they're volunteers, I don't think they're that far behind.

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

marketing, marketing, and marketing.

I use dropbox forever, was in the closed beta, and at that time I was using win. And until today I never heard about syncplicity, even though I know and tried similar services.

It's not about features, platforms, or whatever. I've seen the worst product succeed only because of marketing.

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

With most of dedicated server providers now, you can get any server with a 1 month contract, no strings attached, for a fraction of the price of an equivalent ec2 instance, and good IO as a bonus. And good providers usually delivers within 24h.

I love aws services and use them myself, but for ec2, but I doubt most users have such volatile needs. The main advantage I see, for aws users (non ec2) is to have everything in the same place.

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

They're being cautious I guess. I've been using it for a few months now, with test-releases, having it open 24/7, always with a lot of tabs, and it's pretty stable (maybe 3 or 4 crashes). There's regular updates, and new features. Great job they're doing!

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Downtime is ok, shit happens. to everyone. But availability issues which are going on for 6 weeks now (still major IMO), is it? I can't think of any technical problem that would take 6 weeks to solve. And being tumblr, attracting the best system admins, with all clouds resources available today..

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

here's a bug open at chrome : http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=69777 but the issue is at twitter really. I noticed it a few days ago too, and chrome didn't update.

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

And Black Swan was a masterpiece too, way better than The Social Network IMO. IMDB seems to agree that Inception > Black Swan > TSN which makes me wonder who are the judges of golden globes ?

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

It's bullshit because the biggest part in the price of a paper book is for printing and distribution. and VAT too in some countries, 20% instead of 5%, but it's going to change.

So the Agency pricing scheme is only changing the pocket where money goes.

And keep in mind that in countries like China, the same books cost usually $3, after translating rights, printing, distribution and publishers costs. And publishers still live on this, in a country where people buy much less books.

So what is fucked up is that someone is making money, and it doesn't even benefit the authors.

It's more or less the same problem as in music.

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

I don't know about Heathrow-5 but I can tell about Beijing-3, and I think everyone telling it's a great airport has no clue. The flows are terrible, you often board at the farthest gate away, sometimes by buses, even though most of gates are empty, and most of the airport is empty (the middle part is still closed but the international part is further away). The customs bottleneck is the worst ever, it's not uncommon to wait 45mins, there's like 12 counters for all international arrivals. The building does actually look like the bottleneck, and it is. The waiting areas have nothing special, and they certainly feel old for a 2 years old airport. Some of the duty-free shops looks untouched since the 80s.. The roof already starts to fall apart, there was some parts ripped off by the wind lately, and there's concern about the build quality.

And well, it's unfair to compare cost and construction time, one was built by thousands of workers, working 24/7 for a minimum wage, the other... And btw, Beijing T3 was designed by a dutch consortium and a British architect.

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

can't agree more with this, even in high-end places, service is awful. But I don't think tipping has anything to do with it.

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Most of the apps I use are not there too, we'll have to wait a bit I guess. What about Chrome and Firefox. are they forbidden and they didn't bother submitting ?

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

App Store app is just a different interface to the itunes servers, you can try to copy links in App Store and you'll see the exact same kind of url as for tunes, movies, iOS apps, etc... In fact I don't understand why they didn't integrate App Store in iTunes. Maybe they realized iTunes is crap, or they didn't want to change the icon once again. Doesn't make me feel like they have long term strategies lately.. kind of the same with Facetime desktop not being in iChat.

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

even faster summary: install yslow and PageSpeed, follow recommendations.

I've seen enormous improvements on site which didn't follow any of this rules, something like load time divided by 2 or more, but of course it depends how bad is the site you start with.