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Does anyone remember dot-matrix printers? You also didn't need a paper tray: http://imgur.com/4tsSx2W

acegopheron Handling Growth with Postgres

I think it's taken off since Oracle bought MySQL, Inc.

acegopheron Happy Birthday: KDE is now 15

I have been using Gnome 2 for a number of years, but recently decided to test a bunch of different wms: Gnome 3, Unity, awesome, xmonad, LXDE, and KDE. I gave each at least 2 weeks of use to get over the "change" hump.

I hadn't used KDE since Mandrake days in the late 90's, and had a negative impression from the KDE 4.0 issues. But have been pleasantly surprised at its utility and configurability while still looking good on both my 10" laptop and 24" desktop.

acegopheron Bjorn Lomborg: Our lifestyle is unsustainable and why that's irrelevant

I think the original comment about political statements costing trillions are when say the government subsidizes corn ethanol.

There is good consensus that corn ethanol is energy negative, and that it doesn't result in cleaner air or less greenhouse gases due to production costs.

This mis-allocation of capital hinders development of truly better alternatives, and sets back innovation. These setbacks, beyond the cost of the subsidy and the lack of improvement in the areas targeted, do cost trillions.

acegopheron What operating systems the Plan 9 Google guys are using

Which do find yourself using the most often?

acegopheron A Local Revolution?

All industries have "centers":

finance -- New York, Boston automobiles -- Detroit entertainment -- LA etc.

There are natural reasons for that: new companies are often founded by execs who think they can do better than the big companies they leave, infrastructure gets built up that benefits all in that given industry, talent begins to congregate in those areas, etc.

I think that different types of startups might be congregated around different geographic locales: biomedical startups would likely flourish near big research hospitals, etc. Service industry startups likely aren't clustered: restaurants, etc.

With technology startups, yes there is a natural clustering in Silicon Valley and Boston, but I think that's because tech startups are fairly new. I hear lots of good things coming out of Chicago, Austin, Columbus, Minneapolis, and elsewhere. It's definitely spreading.

acegopheron What caused that outage

The server goes down, and when it comes back up the front page is filled with stories about Erlang. Coincidence?

acegopheron At 38, am I too old for a startup?

No. I'm 38 and a year in as CTO of a startup while moonlighting on another "hobby" business I've had for a couple of years.

Oh, and I have two kids, a wife, and a yard. I actually know my kids and they know who I am :-). But, I don't watch TV, the only video games I play are with my kids, and I'm having the time of my life.

You can do it. It's just a matter of desire and priorities. Me, I have more fun getting code to run than watching TV or playing an RPG. And that's really the only "sacrifice" I've made, and I think it's a rather good one, personally.