CoreDumpling

IE6 is packaged with XP. A large part of why it's around is that people who bought XP couldn't be arsed to upgrade to anything better.

If some corporate IT department wants to upgrade to Windows 7 but still reinstall IE6 over it for some crufty legacy app compatibility, I think they'll probably have much bigger problems that would make the OS upgrade pointless altogether.

Granted, Windows 7 currently ships with IE8, so we'll still have the same problem for a while.

Have you tried listening to Shostakovich? He was moderately successful at blending jazz and classical elements, as well as at polarizing critics in the process.

By this logic, English-language opera (yes, it exists) ought to be doing well in America. Check your local opera house schedule and see how many performances you can find that are not in Italian, German, or French.

There is some merit to this argument, that some music can't be appreciated as easily unless you attach it something people can easily relate to. Even classical music isn't immune to this, hence the existence of program music like Beethoven's 6th symphony and many other works from the Romantic era. Today, it's mostly film scores that fall into this category of instrumental music that is best understood within a certain context.

I think the difference today is that the context itself has changed. We've transitioned to an urban, fast-paced lifestyle and have lost touch with the beauty of nature from which many instrumental pieces draw inspiration. We've become more materialistic, hence the prevalence of "bling" in rap songs. The host on my local classical station once remarked that there are only two serious topics in music: God and sex. Though I'm not religious, I can tell that these days it's much less of the former and more of the latter.

That said, I wouldn't be so pessimistic right now. Think long-term: in 100 years, how many people will still be listening to Brahms, and how many will still be listening to Britney Spears?

Sorry, my sarcasm meter needs some calibration. While HTML5 video driving forward web standards is certainly nice, I can't even bring myself to believe that we will rid ourselves of the rotting carcass that is IE6 within the next three years, let alone Flash as a video delivery platform. I don't think Mozilla feels threatened yet, but we'll see if they change their minds once they see this affecting their bottom line.

Strangely enough, my gripes with Firefox have driven me to Opera, despite the "cute but useless" label you have slapped on it in such a cavalier fashion.

The point still stands, though: the app doesn't digitize the sheet music, it displays it from sources that have already digitized it.

Unless the scores are beying keyed in by hand, the actual digitization of the sheet music is basically a specialized OCR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_OCR

IANAL answer: if you want to release under a different license, you are urged to do a "clean room" implementation that could not possibly have derived anything from the original. If it's a mere translation from one language to another, your version of the library almost certainly falls under the "derivative work" category and needs to be GPL.

If your library implements a well-known algorithm, try to track down a text description of that algorithm (say, a research paper) and redo the code based on that original source. Looking at GPL code can contaminate your final product.

The real trick is to figure out a way to both charge $350 to the people who are willing to pay $350 for it, while also collecting 99 cents from the people who won't pay more than that. I wonder if a viral $349 off coupon would do the job...

Heh - is TweetForACause coming next?

I think the more appropriate analogy is "shit filter."

I really appreciate project managers that know when the customer is full of shit and can filter that out from our discussions, keeping me and my colleagues focused on the things that actually matter.

On the other hand, when I did front-end work, I was really annoyed that the management would keep the secrets of customer feedback to themselves and only let through the things that aligned with their own "vision." Honest feedback and actual usability testing never seemed to be something that the higher-ups cared about; they simply wanted to go through the motions. I wished they could just let some of this information through.

I don't mind being a subordinate so long as I can use the "just following orders" excuse whenever something blows up in a customer's face. Part of management's responsibility, after all, is to shield us mere developers from the ugliness out there.

Sadly, I've dealt with management that was more interested in protecting themselves than the people they "managed."

Well, at least my profile on HN will no longer be the first result for a Google search for my username (it can now revert to some blog that's not mine). But I really wish HN were searchable; I try to find insight on the comment threads here all the time.

I agree. I "work for a living" (whatever that means, though in the context used here it's as opposed to being a "greedy banker"), and I can sympathize with the plight of the unemployed, but I've also made sure I had sufficient savings as a rainy day fund and am also prepared to reduce my living expenses if necessary.

I think that I have every reason to be concerned that my little nest egg might be devalued. More apropos to the community here, this could also mean a shorter runway for a bootstrapped startup; I don't see how founders would be pleased by such a move.

As a nice bonus, Lilypond is also usable via a graphical interface, Denemo [1]. I've never used Sibelius or Finale so I can't comment on how they compare.

What I really wish were available, however, is the IMSLP catalog [2] in digital form (not PDF scans). Is there an app out there to OCR sheet music?

[1] http://www.denemo.org/index.php/Main_Page

[2] http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page

The first time I used emacs, I thought half of its features were easter eggs. Even today I'm still not sure.

For an extremely weak version of "compliant," and definitely not out of the box. You'd have to grab Services for Unix, Cygwin, etc. to even get close.

That sounds plausible to me. I wonder if anyone would have noticed if they slipped "theological" in there, just to continue the trend.

Fair point. I've basically resigned myself to the fact that Apple, Nintendo, etc. are happily raking in the green from developers who are willing to play by their rules and consumers who are content with living in their walled gardens, and that their relationship with developers who desire more flexibility should be left at a healthy mutual disregard.

> Every two weeks, he held all-hands meetings to beg people to work, unpaid, for another two weeks. That went on for two years.

What's really astonishing is how long he managed to keep this up. He must have been an extremely good motivator and hired lots of incredibly dedicated employees. If he didn't get his eventual lucky break, these people's lives would have been wrecked.

There must be a lesson to be learned here, though I have some doubts if it is repeatable.

I sincerely hope Tufte can successfully counteract the Washington tradition of applying the methods from How to Lie with Statistics. A good visualization can just as well expose the fraud from a contrived one.

I'm not sure I understand your position. At the risk of beating a dead horse with another contrived analogy, in my opinion dealing with the App Store as the only channel for apps is akin to buying a house and being forced to get all my furniture and housewares at Crate & Barrel. On top of that, the house is built such that anything I buy from another retailer either won't fit in the door or might unexpectedly cause the roof to collapse.

I'll concede your point that real-world stores can be just as difficult to work with, if not even more so, but this doesn't change the fact that having the App Store as the sole arbiter of what's allowed is introducing artificial barriers to restrict consumer choice. Even WalMart has to deal with competition from other distributors.

In the "real" world, you're also welcome to buy from a different store when you have different values from the vendor. Nobody can force you to buy from Target when you're happy with what's carried by WalMart. You can't do this with the App Store, and Apple goes out of its way to prevent you from loading software from elsewhere.

On top of that, the inconsistency of the enforcement of App Store guidelines and the moving target set by Apple makes it seem like they are suffering from some growing pains. It doesn't look like they've really made up their mind about what impression they want people to get, other than some "slick" user experience.

Bottom line is that on top of dealing with the unpredictable market out there, developers also have to put up with a very fickle supply chain with no alternative channels. I'll pass.

I'm curious how this might be applied to startups, as well as how it meshes with pg's advice to work in a startup "hub" like Silicon Valley, where the cost of living is anything but cheap. Is it really worthwhile to be subjected to the mind-numbing gold rush culture* at the expense of many months of "runway," simply because that's supposed to be motivating?

*OK, exaggeration guilty as charged, but you see my point.

> You can't use traditional chroot kind of setup with nginx.

I'm curious why this is the case. If even a beast like apache can be run from a chroot jail, shouldn't it be easier to do it with something lightweight like nginx?

I wouldn't put it that way. Think of the subsistence farmer struggling to make ends meet after the social safety net got taken away. Or the factory worker whose newborn child has birth defects likely induced by hazardous pollution in the work environment. These people fall well within the category of "work pretty hard" but they are also the most likely advocates of reform.

I think the article got it right -- the "conservatives" simply feel they have more to lose. China's urban baby-boomer generation grew up during the Cultural Revolution in the '60s and '70s, where it was effectively mob rule by the Red Guards at a local level and many were sent to the countryside for re-education. They've seen what misguided "reform" can do and are not clamoring for it to happen again.

1. Do highly-paid consulting work for 1-2 months.

2. Move to your cheap country and take the rest of the year off.

I hear Richard Stallman can actually pull this off in a not-so-cheap country, too.

I realize that El Reg has the reputation of a tabloid, but I didn't think it could be this embarrassing.

A quick search on the author revealed the following:

GCG was founded in late 2001 by Dan Olds and is based in Beaverton, Oregon. The company focuses on enterprise information technology, including TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), IT virtualization, servers, server consolidation, and a wide variety of other issues that explore the intersections between business and technology. The goal of our research deliverables is to de-mystify technology issues and concepts so that they can be readily understood by a non-technical, business-centric audience. [1]

This doesn't look like very effective self-promotion at all, which I thought was part of the reason why people submit these articles.

[1] http://www.gabrielconsultinggroup.com/about-topmenu-39.html

Heh, that's rather humbling. But then, if I may borrow the wisdom of Cato the Elder: "I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one."

This seems to be extremely common among artists and musicians, which I suspect is because their livelihood is tremendously dependent on reputation as it is hard to objectively judge their work. They have very high standards to meet and very little room for error, hence the tendency for extreme perfectionism, even to the point of destructive behavior.

Johannes Brahms, who spent more than 20 years composing his first symphony, did not want to be judged on the basis of any of his unfinished works or personal letters, so before he died he dumped them all into the river. Jean Sibelius burned the manuscripts of almost everything he attempted in the decades after his final published work. Camille Saint-Saëns suppressed his now-famous Carnival of the Animals because he thought it was too immature for someone of his stature and that people would stop taking him seriously.

I think the effects of impostor syndrome become greatly magnified when one has a reputation to protect, especially if it's one that would persist after death. But I think most of us can find some comfort in the words of Sibelius: "Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic."

In spite of all the hate IE gets, I have to concede that their developers are rather decent people. I'm sure the cake [1] they sent to Mozilla was a gesture of honest goodwill.

[1] http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=24004

Seeing that you require an email address, the first thing I looked for was your privacy policy. Unfortunately, the lightbox screen doesn't scroll in my browser (Opera 10.10) so I couldn't skim through all of it.