a slab of concrete has been found with an uptime of 3737 years

maybe the sysadmins liked them but as a developer i hated solaris boxen. the libraries were always years old, nothing modern would compile, the cli tools were slightly incompatible with linux scripts, ...

power corrupts. absolute power corrupts absolutely

"one codec to *stream* them all"

wow - lots of negativity in the comments so far. yes, on one level this is obvious, but in reality i've found this difficult

i use google voice as my primary number and most days i don't buy prepaid service (i'm spending $100 per year for the last 2 years) - so i'm wifi only. when i'm on a linux box (with a hardwired ethernet) i use the gmail to make calls. but i haven't found a great solution for my phone - google nexus s. what i'm doing is have google voice forward the call to ipkall (free pots to sip gateway) and then answer the call on my phone with csipsimple (seemed better than builtin, though i haven't tried the builtin sip since i upgraded to ICS). for testing, i do the same thing on my linux box using sflphone. the quality using gmail is much better than what i've gotten from either csipsimple or sflphone (i'm on a 1Mbit dsl connection)

so an android app that talks directly to GV seems incredibly useful to me. anyone know how this works - eg, are they just running a pots-to-sip gateway or have they actually implemented the GV protocol (i think it's jingle with some extensions). any other apps that are doing something similar, especially one that's Free ? or linux programs (on my laptop, leaving gmail open eats my battery) ? anybody else using GV + wifi as their primary means of communication ? how does the voice quality compare with gmail ?

yes, the article isn't great. but the idea is 100% geek - embrace it. in the meantime i'm going to go investigate GIPL and see if anyone else is implementing the GV protocol

i'm an idiot ... the article says they show up with a "sponsored" tag

not sure if i've ever seen one of these sponsored posts ... does facebook have to disclose that the post is a paid advertisement ?

http://mashable.com/2009/10/05/ftc-blogger-endorsements/

in semi-communist china the music copyrights you

i'll second this. and add that netbeans (and i'm sure other IDEs as well) is great with javascript, including libraries such as dojo. auto-completion, pops up javadoc-style comments, rudimentary refactoring, search for usages. once i got my mind wrapped around the closures and prototype-based inheritance it didn't feel that different than java. though the lack of strong typing is always going to be a limitation - no two ways about that

http://blog.nqzero.com/2009/08/dojo-api-code-assist-in-netbeans.html

wow ... won't fix. portrait mode is getting harder and harder to use. between 16:9 aspect ratios (1080 wide) and this "design decision" to *fix* the panel to the left side, you've probably only got 1024 useable pixels - cutting edge when XGA came out back in 1991

guess i'll try it on my laptop and see what i think. but on the desktop, it sounds brutal for anyone that prefers portrait mode - you get almost twice as many lines of code on the screen in portrait as you do in landscape, but those horizontal pixels become precious. i splurged and went 1920x1200, so i'm not in terrible shape - though the viewing angle is so bad, i have to keep the lcd turned 5 degrees

GNOME / Linux

not quite what you're looking for, but in the same vein. i'm using the nexus s on t-mobile prepaid with a google voice number

at my desktop: gmail voice chat over a 1Mbps, $10/month dsl connection
mobile with wifi: sip on the nexus s
mobile without wifi: t-mobile prepaid

everybody sees the same (gv) number. for sip i use callcentric + ipkall incoming, and anveo ($0.012 per minute) for outgoing. i'm using csipsimple instead of the builtin sip stack. i haven't tried sip over 3g. call quality with sip has been inconsistent, but i think i can improve it - i still need to tweak the echo cancellation params and figure out how to enable QOS on my router. i should also try skype-out

not a slam dunk, but calls are very cheap or free, sms is free - i spent $3 in the last month. when i need data it's $1.50 per day. it works because i'm at a computer most of the day, have wifi available most places i go, and don't make a ton of calls to begin with. at the price, it's hard to beat

this is a step in the right direction, but on top of that you need to layer something that allows persistence to messages, since the ad hoc networks aren't going to be able to route most of the messages that you want to send. maybe bittorrent or even smtp

A and B are in separate nets. A sends a message to B. everyone in A's net saves the message and when they connect to a new net they pass it on (to everyone in the new net). eventually someone finds B and delivers the message. as formulated highly inefficient, but should be tweakable to allow for short messages

been using google since beta, have 7 google accounts (that i'm working to reduce down to 2), have my own google apps domain, google voice is my primary number, chrome is my browser, perform dozens of searches a day

and had a workaround for an annoying problem ... google's use of synonyms makes it hard to search for something specific, appending "&nfpr=1" to a query disables it. even have a keyword search set up to automatically append it

and after all this time i learn that the "+" operator does exactly what i want without the kludge - thanks whitehaint - and i guess you can add me to the list of people that don't *really* know how to use google

from google.com/phone: nexus-s
Quad-band GSM: 850, 900, 1800, 1900
Tri-band HSPA: 900, 2100, 1700 HSPA type: HSDPA (7.2Mbps) HSUPA (5.76Mbps)

fcc filings seem to confirm (umts iv is 1700/2100) everything but the hspa-900

so the 850 is for gsm, not 3g
believe at&t 3g is 850 and 1900, so it looks like no 3g with the nexus s on at&t
the t-mobile version of the vibrant (on which the nexus s appears to be based) is umts 1700/2100 + 1900, and it's reported to get at&t 3g on the 1900
think umts 900 is for europe, but not sure how widely it's deployed atm

when the kernel accesses the slow disk, it is aggressive in trying to cache the read. if there's free memory this is obviously the correct thing to do, since if the memory is needed the cache can be dropped. but if memory is full, the kernel needs to decide whether to drop some file cache, or swap out a process. the default settings tend to favor disk cache, meaning every time you try to access anything on the desktop, the application has been swapped out and it has to wait for disk access to swap back in (often several seconds on my machine)

setting /proc/sys/vm/swappiness to a low value, eg 0, tells the kernel to favor processes at the expense of caching disk reads. this helps a lot in keeping the desktop snappy. kernel trap has a good summary of the issue and the developers motivations

swappiness doesn't help with applications that want to access a file repeatedly, but rely on the disk cache instead of an internal cache. eg, an IDE might have 10 source files in tabs, but instead of keeping the files in memory, it could just reread them each time a tab is switched. as long as the file remains in cache, this works fine. but when you copy a huge file, the source file gets dropped from cache, and the tab takes forever to refresh

not sure if there's an easy way for the kernel to know the difference between an application just copying a file, and actually reading it. but if there is, it would make sense to favor reads