Niten

This is offtopic, but I'm really impressed with whoever designed InfoQ's interface for watching presentations and interviews. Being able to watch the slides and the presenter simultaneously in separate panes is an approach I wish more sites would copy.

I also recall a recent interview I watched on their site: there was a list of topic summaries below the video, and you could click on any of the topics in the list to skip right to that point in the video. It's a very functional user interface as these things go.

Has anyone here tried pkgsrc on OS X?

Sure, but I think the salient point here is this: we've gotten good enough at filtering spam that looking through your email inbox is no longer a major headache. That's how I frame the war on spam, anyway, and in that sense I'd say we're definitely winning. Maybe not won, but winning.

For what it's worth, apparently Office 2010 is finally getting support for common ligatures.

Agreed. Neglecting issues of open vs. closed source (for whom that matters), the question boils down to "would you refuse to use an arbitrary program because it's named IE". Of course not.

I guess you've never tried PDF-XChange or Sumatra PDF, then.

Well, trivial in relation to a company rebuilding its product on a new programming language or paradigm.

Also, where conditions allow, the developers who know better will generally prefer better languages than PHP--leaving disproportionately more of the people who don't know better on the PHP side of the fence...

Yeah, it would be nice if unionization weren't necessary. Unfortunately history (or even a cursory examination of the world today) clearly shows that, in the public and private sectors alike, employees are inevitably abused when they do not stand up for themselves.

The real world isn't black and white. Unions can do harm, to be sure, but a balance must be struck between the needs of the employer--public or private--and the needs of the employees, and it's never as simple as saying "we shouldn't have unions".

For instance, in my local school district, the superintendent is being criticized for seeking a raise in the middle of budget cuts. Among his most vocal critics have been the teachers. In response to their criticism, the superintendent proposed new rules that would effectively require teachers to take dozens of hours of useless(1) "technology training" on their own time, without pay; thankfully we have a union capable of protecting teachers against such abuse.

(1) Literally, useless. These courses are part of an ongoing initiative the only point of which, as near as I can tell, is so the superintendent can say X number of teachers have participated in Y number of hours of additional training under his reign. The teachers who already have a clue about computers get nothing from these courses; and unfortunately, the courses are so poorly designed that those who actually do have a thing or two to learn get nothing out of them, either.

I have to wonder how much of this is due to the limited capabilities of the iPhone, and how much is just the psychology of "physically" interacting with your apps.

Even the most computer-illiterate people I know need, on a daily basis, the ability to switch between multiple running applications.

And tcpdump, too.

Anyway, if you're looking to build that custom OpenBSD firewall / gateway, might I recommend the Alix 2d3 board. It is so choice:

http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d3.htm

I really appreciate the author's rigorous scientific stance on the actual utility of these suggestions; I went into this article expecting pure pseudoscience (judging on nothing more than the title).

More likely in a Gmail Android app, at this point.

Can anyone enlighten me on this? I noticed the same thing:

* Viewing this page in Firefox 3.6 on Windows caused Flash to crash, taking the browser down with it.

* Viewing it in Chrome on the same machine caused the Flash plugin subprocess to crash, resulting in an error message in Chrome.

* However, no crash occurred in Opera. This despite the fact that 32-bit Opera on Windows does not appear to use isolated subprocesses for running NSAPI plugins.

So what's going on here? Does Opera use some sort of in-process isolation to protect the browser from its plugins? Or is there perhaps some quirk of running in the Opera environment that caused this Flash crash not to be triggered like it was in Firefox and Chrome?

In what world does nobody care about Java?

As uneasy as I am about what the iPad might say about the future of personal computing, if it can deliver the death blow to Adobe Flash then I'm all for it.

However, I do have my doubts. This article compares the iPad's Flash problems to Firefox's early problems with sites that were designed specifically for IE, but that's really an apples-to-oranges (Apples to Orange Foxes?) comparison. Firefox succeeded despite early incompatibilities because it targeted power users--the kinds of folks who can live with recurrent web browsing glitches, who can recognize broken sites and don't mind alt-tabbing back to IE where necessary.

But the iPad's target demographic isn't the power user, it's the technological neophyte. iPad users may be less tolerant of things not "just working", and the iPad may therefore have a harder time of bridging that incompatibility gap than Firefox did.

(And while Firefox users always had the option to fall back to IE--using Firefox and using IE were not mutually exclusive choices--what's the fallback option for iPad users when the content they want is only available with Flash? Carry a laptop with them, too?)

But why? Really, is there any fundamental reason we should expect Google to remain perpetually on top of the search engine business?

I think the difference in quality between Google and Bing search results is negligible; at this point it's just a matter of mindshare as to whether people, on average, go to www.google.com or to www.bing.com when they want to look something up. There's no vendor lock-in propping up Google, to the extent that there is behind the Windows or iTunes monopolies. Mindshare can be altered, Microsoft just needs to figure out how to do it.

Because we all know how much more comfortable it is to stare at e-ink than at a backlit LCD for hours on end? Also, battery life.

"The only two (somewhat related) things Apple does that I would classify as vendor lock-in are 1: XCode, and therefore OS X, is required for iPhone development, and 2: You need a Mac to run OS X."

What about the fact that they actively sabotage efforts to make the iPod work with music library managers other than iTunes, or to make iTunes work with MP3 players other than the iPod?

Note taking is not just for real estate agents, either. One thing I'm surprised people aren't talking about more is that a well-designed tablet could be a hit in college and even primary school lecture halls and classrooms. Considering Apple's historical prominence in the higher education market, this seems like a natural target for them.

I guess there is an app for that.

I agree that this probably isn't the place for religious debates, but it's plainly absurd to compare Richard Dawkins to Sarah Palin (presumably) with regard to the substance of his arguments, or to imply that he has not added anything worthwhile to this debate.

Heh, Scott sure sounds bitter, doesn't he? "Kudos to Dan for being able to overlook something this important."

Anyhow, I'm also of the opinion that a phone is really about the network. My coworkers will go on and on about their beloved iPhones, and yet they can't even place a phone call from within the same building where my $60 Verizon handset has no trouble whatsoever.

I get where you're coming from, but let me play devil's advocate. The NSA has a possibly unique position of being able to protect the United States' information infrastructure from emerging threats, on account of their well funded, top-secret research in this field.

Now for better or for worse, Microsoft Windows plays a major role in US business infrastructure. So isn't it a good thing for the NSA to use its position to strengthen the USA against new attacks that, perhaps, only this agency has the ability to see coming?

"I guess you get what you pay for."

Let me guess: you just bought Windows 7 and you're trying to persuade yourself that the ridiculous amount of money you put down for that piece of software was well spent. Not too far off the mark?

In any event, this is not a case of "getting what you pay for"; this is almost certainly a bug in Flash, not in the free software stack. In other words, I don't suppose you believe that Flash player works better on Windows because you paid for your copy of Flash player, do you? (On the other hand, I guess someone who would buy Microsoft Windows on the precept that "you get what you pay for" might just be foolish enough to shell out cash for Flash player, too.)

In other news, Microsoft considers addition 'interesting'.

Wrong. They do say. It was, in fact, for sleeping on a sidewalk. Did you even read the article?

The very fact that he had a "criminal tresspassing" charge in the first place — for sleeping on a public sidewalk, as you neglect to mention — reinforces the thesis of this piece.

"It looks like, once again, other notebook makers will have to play catch up to Apple in this department."

Apparently this reviewer is unfamiliar with the modern lineups of non-Apple manufacturers. For example, the Thinkpad T400 with nine-cell battery, which also weighs 5.5 lbs, gets 10 hours of battery life at 60% screen brightness. (The biggest difference being that the T400 has a battery that can be swapped on the go, and it costs less to get a Thinkpad of equivalent specs to a given MacBook Pro.)