no_more_death

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Come on! This is one of the most remarkably run companies around today. They never do anything halfway. If you balk at $350, you either aren't their target market or you don't think very highly of Dropbox.

$350 is about an hour and a half of work, at $215 per hour. That's chump change. Most significant conferences are about $300, such as ConvergeSE which happened just a couple weeks ago.

Dropbox knows that people will buy tickets because they believe in Dropbox, and then Dropbox will make it awesome. Then everyone will know that when you've got a company that does things right, you can trust them with a tiny percentage of a typical webshop's daily paycheck, which they already knew anyway. And if $350 seems like a lot per person, when you add up all the costs involved it's really not that much. Money adds up quickly when a conference is done right. Most conferences pay a full-time employee for months just to make sure that the wifi won't melt under the load of hundreds of conference goers. There are a huge number of things to think about and make sure that everything goes right.

I'm shocked at this thread. Utterly shocked. Someone else actually complained that the three letters DBX are already taken. Come on! Every possible three or four letter acronym is taken. This thread is crazy. There is nothing of value here, at all, period. Not sure what happened to HN here.

Yeah, in high school in the early 00s I was a big Oberon fan. I had booted the system from diskette on my windows computer. I also had Blackbox and built some really basic things. Overall it was a huge amount of fun, and I have fond memories of the Object Inspector and connecting references together on forms and stuff. It was really Brett Victor's "tangled" before Brett Victor came along with these ideas. Actually, it was a lot like hypercard, based on what I've read of hypercard. LayLa was a cool layout system kind of like flexbox. They had a lot of cool applications. The flat filesystem was weird (no directories), but it was certainly simple.

Over time it was so disappointing, though, that the system never went anywhere. My biggest takeaway was to not be such a programming language purist. Now I'm a javascript fan. It's not pure or perfect, but it's simple and it nails the important things. Plus for the foreseeable future it's the most widely supported computer language in existence. Simplicity and pragmatism are really key.

It's not that extreme of a groupon. I think that businesses typically get 25% or less of the cost of a groupon, so it's closer than you think.

Valve doesn't have a CEO. It's an undifferentiated mass of people, at least as far as power structure goes -- sort of like a slime mold. I think that's a lot different than having a CEO who prides himself on being an inspirer instead of a controller (if I'm reading the article correctly). In other words, it sounds like he is a constitutional monarch. (Of course, that bursts the whole "American miracle" thing about him being like the president.)

Seivan, I apologize deeply for getting your comment off track, and I hope others will not follow this further from your main point.

However, I would just offer a quick point of advice. Don't spend keystrokes saying you might be down-voted for something. It's actually bolder to just say what you're going to say. When you reference downvoting, you stigmatize it and influence people not to do so. I would rather know if people are going to have a downvote reaction to my comment than shame them into not downvoting me. I've had the exact same tendency to observe "well I might get downvoted for this," but I think it's a tendency that should be resisted.

Installing a new Android home launcher, setting up llama, etc on Android is NOTHING like trying to work through an automanual and make changes to your car. This analogy is utterly wrong..

...or you could get an Android for much cheaper and install some home screen widgets.

Apple fanboys insist that Android features, such as widgets, are unnecessary. Then they go crazy over iPad dashboard apps that weakly simulate Android functionality.

Hmmm, could someone build a text "scrambler" that would intentionally create broken English? I have also noticed that "broken English" is more effective by some measures than ordinary English.

Note also that the broken English here is not the author, but it's Google Translate. The text has been machine translated from Russian. Also interesting that Google Translate is much more effective translating the mathematical portions than the other portions of the text. Another case of what people find hard computers find easy, and vice versa.

I think it works great on desktop via keyboard shortcuts. I use it all the time and I hate it when I have to use other systems.

Uninstalled. I checked, and Facebook took up more memory than any other application I have installed, even more than TSF Shell. (By the way, a MUCH more "feature-rich," useful, and snappy app than facebook!) Facebook isn't doing anything comparable to what TSF Shell does, not for me anyway. I bet this is why my phone recently started taking 30 seconds to make a phonecall (!).

I can't believe an app requires 8M RAM just for method names! That's 3% of my entire usable memory (what's left after Motorola Blur takes its share) -- just for the method names for a single app. Surely I must be misunderstanding what goes into that buffer. It's unimaginable to me that they really need such a vast amount of space. It's unimaginable that they really expect their app to work at all on an old phone without choking it to death.

If I grasp this correctly, printing just the method names would create a book double the size of the King James Version of the Bible. Maybe you are going to argue having so many methods is good programming practice, not bloat. But don't argue that you "support" a system when just the method names total around 3% of usable memory for that system. And there are a lot of devices with considerably less memory than what I've got.

Why don't you release a stripped down, "lite" version of the app that works on an Android 2 phone even if it has more than 5 applications installed? Some phones don't even allow uninstalling facebook. They are simply stuck with the bloat (I mean, good programming practices :-).