clinth

Working intermittently (10%) from home. Checking in on a production system that's going to get its first big whack of data load later today.

It's also cognitive load. Facing infinite options with no guide isn't great. You don't read the entire internet, and likewise you're not looking for all options when looking for an application. Apple hosts all iOS apps, they have to sell the prospect of an open platform, so AppGratis acted as a filter.

Much of the paid-blogosphere is acting as a similar filter to this end. BoingBoing, waxy, and other early-web popular aggregators are known for reliably pointing at new-and-cool, not for being cool. Now blogspam aggregators are a business with margins.

The company is Steve Jackson Games, their telling of it is here: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

I'm not the OP, but it's more likely to point at Mongo. Easy scalability through sharding is one of its advertised strengths.

He was in a public professional setting, representing the company with a badge that said Sponsor, which more than likely paid for his entire trip to go and represent that company there. He was on the clock.

Off-hours work friendships are not at all comparable.

You mean personal conversation. Their conversation wasn't private, it was in the middle of a conference hall.

Nobody is forcing you to stay at the conference?

Good faith means less when you're selling an ongoing service and accept money. When they promised an ongoing service to host purchases, they laid the rug out and stood on it.

Agreed. However, you can grind out a book with more certainty than you can create a prominent open-source repo.

Amazon rewards the thought train of: want to buy smart book, need device to read smart book on, buy iPad. Seems enlightened to me.

As the article said, development ran long. Sony completely funded 33 months of a 10+ person team to make Journey. At $10-20 a copy, it would take a lot to break even.

We use the open source version in our wing of the Broad Institute for our external web application (python based), and we're absolutely thrilled with it.

We're a Atlassian/JIRA shop internally, and the JIRA plugin. It's not better than having a bug free product, but it is amazingly reassuring to the customer when they contact us with an error and we're already looking at the stack trace and fixing the problem.

Thank you for this incredible product.

You're right!

In this case though. the site is run by drivethrurpg / rpgnow, who have been at pdf selling for some time. This should have a decent chance of success.

> there not enough jobs at That One Company That's Changing The World

I met some Counsyl devs at PyCon last year, they were wonderful. We talked about meaningful work.

There are so many companies and nonprofits trying to change the world. They need help with software. A partial list:

Broad Institute: http://www.broadinstitute.org (disclaimer, I work there)

JCVI: http://www.jcvi.org

Sanger: http://www.sanger.ac.uk

23andme: https://www.23andme.com

Just downloaded and gave it a minute. Mute doesn't work. Reproduce: start app, hit mute, start game, and this tremendous gong noise rings out when the round starts. Would uninstall right there.

Also, on the Play Store, it's "Empire Of Sudoku - Single", while in my app list, it's "Sudoku Empire". I had to look for it after installing it.

Single data point: I've been on the fence for cancelling them, but I'm calling them to do so tomorrow.

And shoot every indoor scene twice?

The real cost is in manufacturing and maintenance.

What is the cost of replacing every machine, every factory, every load tolerance specified in every standard? Every screw, every nut.

Things that need to work, in place for decades, which we can't arbitrarily take down. Power plants, water filtration systems. How would you roll it out?

It's because the US is so large and industrialized that makes it expensive.

The four books are:

The Macintosh Way (1989)

Database 101 (1991) -- pdf does not include free disk inside, wow I'm old

Computer Curmudgeon (1992)

What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us (2012)

http://www.yousendit.com/download/WUJZZUNndWNlaFRMYnRVag

edit: added link to the download page, for the G+ averse

The clearest example is from the LWN article you referenced.

> "Once a developer assigns copyright, they are at the mercy of the assignee to enforce the copyright. In this particular case, one can speculate that the failure to pursue the violation was likely a shortage of human resources. As Richard noted, "We have staff for GPL enforcement, […] but there are so many violations that they can't take action on all.""

As the LWN article notes, statements like this are a huge distance between FSF in practice, and FSF's own reasoning behind assigning copyrights to it (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html).

When a project has assigned copyright to FSF, the project workers have no recourse when the copyright holder opts not to fulfill its part of the bargain.

I really enjoy Pelican. It's simple.

For other devs: if you're familiar with Jinja, then you're 80% of the way there.

Strange to see so many Windows 7 products listed. Free stuff makes news, and I would have guessed that they'd try to drive all news to Windows 8.

I see that you're the author. Thanks for replying!

> Sure, there's plenty of software development which doesn't involve fancy algorithms or data structures... avoiding computer architecture, operating systems, mathematics, networking, databases, and distributed systems as well is a bit harder.

This is at odds with the statement in your article that jumped out at me:

"If you can't answer the majority of the questions on these four papers, and you're working or intend to work as a software developer, you should ask yourself why--"

I disagree, and furthermore, adding more topics means that your assertion is going to be less accurate.

Of course, it's better to know more, and I'm glad to have a computer science degree. However, I think that conflating having a computer science background and general software development is confirmation bias. I don't have data to back me up, but I believe that it's more common to simply not need to know what a bipartite graph is, or even a majority set of these topics. Given the theoretical grounding of the question in your first block, I'm guessing that parts 2-4 will be similarly structured.

Computer science is one slice of software development. Software development is a huge, deep field. A software development exam could just as easily contain an exam including the following topics: communicating effectively through email, distilling requirements from customers, writing meaningful commit messages, testing theory, or hundreds of other non-theoretical topics.

What I'm trying to say is that your exam is a good reminder of computer science at the root of many of the fields of knowledge in software, and is fun, but it's not representative of software development. In a given year, most software developers are going to spend more time puzzling through garden-variety implementation bugs than thinking about any two of the questions you list. Which is why they're not "lucky". :)

> or you're lucky enough to be working within a narrow area where your deficit doesn't matter

This implies that non-algorithmic work is a narrow area. In my experience, it's the vast majority.

Yes, but all objects are not iterables. If you list1.extend(object1) as the cheat sheet describes and object1 has no __iter__, it won't work. Likewise, you can iterate strings, so understanding the target of the iterable will be frustrating for list_of_strings.extend('newstring').

This is better described in python's native help documentation:

  $ python
  >>> help()
  >>> list

searching for extend via '/extend':

   |  extend(...)
   |      L.extend(iterable) -- extend list by appending elements from the iterable

Concise and correct.

Apologies, I based my comment on atop's README:

    For interactive use it is sufficient to install ATOP with the command (as root):

        make install

I wouldn't have guessed the reference to root was optional! Thanks for the pointer.

Not in its documentation, but atop requires root. If you're on a VM somewhere, you might be happier with htop or glances.

Tools like Bootstrap are a means to an end for a lot of people. It's enough to get theme there, and not be horrible — gets them back to focusing on their original problem.

(Also: thanks for SexyMap, my wife and I loved it! On default settings.)

Like you said, I don't think it has to do with the open-sourcing per se. The open sourcing is good news.

I'm not a TextMate user, but from what I've seen, this is confirmation that the TextMate author isn't going to release TM2 even though he advertised it as an incentive to buy TM1 several years ago, and has subsequently continued to promise.

Agreed. Github is popular even though git itself is obtuse.