287 karma · joined June 24, 2010
That's also why I spun up a separate VM for each desktop environment that I looked at, rather than just installing all of them one one VM. I wanted the "muscle memory" of starting from a bare bones installation and walking forward from there.
I never experienced any difficulties with any of the the vm images. I used the "pkgng" packaging system for 99% of the software I installed, and built a couple of things from ports.
In my tests I was evaluating FreeBSD 10.0 as a developer's workstation. Chromium, Firefox, vim, git, VLC, ruby, gem, rake, etc - everything installed painlessly and worked as expected.
BTW, my preferred desktop environment is now XFCE (1) plus slim (2). I've been a happy KDE user for years, but I realized that I don't use 90% of what KDE gives me. Speaking for myself, XFCE does everything I need.
(1) http://www.xfce.org (2) http://daemon-notes.com/articles/desktop/slim
I suspect that a comment made by user Zangrief is right on the money - enterprise users will increasingly take over maintenance of the 1.x branch out of necessity.
Can't you just host your own copy of JQuery? If your web app needs version x.y.whatever, is there some reason why you can't just host your own copy of the library on the same servers the provide the rest of your web content?
I understand the convenience of using some CDN's copy of JQuery, but I'm unsure why it's anything other than a convenience. Maybe it's about money: "It'll cost us an extra $X per month in bandwidth fees to host our own version of JQuery." Maybe it's about user experience: "By hosting JQuery on our own site we add 100ms to page load times."
To the people who seem most unhappy about the version bump, can you describe how hosting your own version of JQuery would complicate your lives? Just so there is no ambiguity, I'm asking from a point of ignorance, not snark. I would genuinely like to read the answers.
You can reasonably argue that a project team should already have and enforce a coding style guide, so specifying a "tab" isn't a big deal. But what if you're part of two separate projects which different coding standards? Do you use Editor A for Project A, and Editor B for Project B? Or do you maintain separate configuration profiles, one for each project? Granted, this also isn't a big deal: Just "git checkout ProjectA" in the directory where you keep your preferences before you start coding. But it is an extra step in your workflow.
You can use the "-t" or "-tt" flags to spit warnings or errors if someone mixes tabs and spaces, so any conscientious group can easily catch whitespace incompatibility problems. But Python's whitespace usage has organizational consequences, and it can affect a developer's choice of tools and/or workflow. For some people, this is not a superficial impediment.
I certainly understand why other people might not enjoy the perpetual cold, damp, and fog of San Francsico. But every time I need to add another blanket at night, or put on a jacket during the day, or close the window against a chilly July evening, I give a happy, contented, slightly chilly sigh.
I suspect the downvotes come from the way 'diminish' phrased the question. Linux is implicitly being used as the standard against which FreeBSD is measured, but the question implies ignorance of FreeBSD. Imagine the tone of the responses if the OP has written, "I know linux but not FreeBSD. From a technical perspective, where do they not overlap?"
I've consistently used Apple hardware for many years because of the combination of multimedia-friendly Unix on ultra quiet hardware. I currently use an iMac because I get a large screen, a small desktop footprint, and no fan noise. Is there a hardware vendor who makes very quiet machines, whose components are well supported by Linux, and whose sins are modest enough for you to recommend them?
What makes Perl interesting to me is the philosophy behind the language design. "Since Perl was designed (loosely speaking) by an occasional linguist, it was designed to work smoothly in the same ways that natural language works smoothly." (1)
The three mantras that I remember from my days writing Perl are: "tim-toady" (There's More Than One Way to Do It); "Easy things should be easy, while hard things should be hard;" and (borrowed from Voltaire) "don't let perfect be the enemy of the good."
Perl is messy, because language is a messy business. Perl is expressive, in part because it is messy. Perl is fun to write, and if you have the spare cycles it's worth your time to explore, purely for the mental calisthenics.
What App.net desires is for a trusted third party to say, "Yep, they're legit." So first, you would select an auditor who has a good reputation financially, technically, and ethically. Presumably, you'd line up a couple of secondary sources to publicly reinforce the auditor's reputation and bless the auditor's methodology.
It's been literally decades since I took any accounting classes, but I think you would need to follow the entire chain of some transactions, and this would necessitate showing real investor/customer data at some point. If you can secure that investor's/customer's permission, then sharing the data becomes a non-issue. How you get that permission becomes the issue.
If your auditor's reputation is strong enough, their name alone may be sufficient to secure permission. But you can also take steps to create a "security narrative" designed to put the investor/customer at ease.
You'd need to give the auditor access to your data, while preventing the possibility that they could leak this data. So the auditor would work in your offices, on your machines.
You'd provide laptops so that you can disable all peripheral ports. You'd secure the laptops to the table. The machines would have no optical drives. Those machines would net boot, have wired LAN access but not WAN, and no wireless access at all. They would run the software the auditors required but nothing else.
You'd confiscate phones and cameras from the auditors before they entered your audit environment. You could go a little crazy and record video of the auditors at work, with cameras angled so that you can see what notes the auditors are taking but not what screen they're looking at while they're taking notes. You could go a lot crazy and prove that the auditors are not sitting in front of any windows, thereby exposing data to high powered lenses across the street.
You could sanitize the data your auditors see, so that the auditor initially sees "Backer N" or "Vendor Y" instead of an actual person or company name.
Armed with some variation of the above security narrative, when the auditor says "I'd like to talk to backer N or vendor Y," you can present that narrative to the backer or vendor to secure their permission for auditor access to the information. I wouldn't be surprised if the average backer gets impatient and grants permission well before you're done explaining the security narrative.
Political terminology in the United States is MASSIVELY warped by entities who spend literally millions of dollars in an effort to connotatively redefine words. When you (re)define words like "conservative" or "liberal" you risk alienating people who have been conditioned to have an emotional response to either definition. If you define a term in a way that seems pejorative to your reader, the reader will weight every subsequent statement against the rigor they think you brought (or did not bring) to those definitions. Your essay will entirely fail to persuade if it rests on (perceived) faulty definitions.
When writing to a largely US audience, no attempt at honest communication will be aided by the application of political labels.
Here's a test: can the essay be rewritten without that political terminology? Reader "nirvana" used the terms "cowboy" and "architect" to describe his two axes. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4367328 ) I very much prefer those terms. Yes, they're also connotative and subjective, but as analogies they map much better onto the subject being discussed.
Your use of the phrases "welfare society" and "mass healthcare" strengthen the above suspicion. You next suggest that the "welfare society" (which has been practiced by a small fraction of the global population for - what, four generations now?) might already have reduced the effects of natural selection.
First, let me opine that welfare societies and mass healthcare would not "reduce the effects" of natural selection, they would simply re-order the traits that were being selected for.
Second, let me respectfully suggest that you would benefit from a more detailed study on the topic of natural selection.
Lastly, I would encourage you to consider the evocative power of the words you use in your arguments. Because of your choice of words a lazy reader, or one who arrived at this thread with conflicting opinions, might write you off as a politically conservative creationist who does not understand some (or several) of the terms you are using. You would be well served by avoiding shorthand terms like "evolutionist."
I haven't used any Android-based phones, so I can't say whether or not existing offerings match the fit and polish of an iPhone. Judging by your own comments, I will assume that none currently do, which makes me ponder a few questions.
Question One: If an Android-based phone were to achieve a level of integration between hardware and software comparable to the iPhone, would that put the lie to Apple's claims that keeping everything under one roof is their recipe for success? Or would a hardware manufacturer have to "own" the operating system for this to occur? Will Amazon eventually achieve Apple-like user satisfaction with the Kindle Fire because they forked Android?
Question Two: Is Jony Ive really as talented as the business press claims? Is he - or, more generally, is superior industrial design - Apple's secret weapon?
Question Three: Assuming question two is true, is Ive's level of design talent really that rare, that Samsung, HTC, Amazon, or Motorola cannot find an individual with competing skill?
Question Four: (Again assuming Ive's talent is a significant differentiator) Given that Ive was marking time, unrecognized and unappreciated, within Apple until Jobs' return, is it likely that a company requires a (hopefully benevolent) Dictator For Life in order to achieve the greatness that so often eludes decision-by-committee? Are there examples of best-of-breed products (in a similar or related industry) produced antithetically to Apple's methodology?
Eric Schmidt's executive experience includes Sun Microsystems, Novell, and Google, and he spent time on Apple's board of directors. How could Microsoft staff and stockholders NOT treat Eric-as-CEO as a middle finger to the last decade's efforts? I imagine the stock price would be savaged by such a choice.
"Ghazali has sometimes been referred to by historians as the single most influential Muslim after the Islamic prophet Muhammad.[6] Others have cited his movement from science to faith as a detriment to Islamic scientific progress.[7]"
It's not surprising to me that an ambitious man like Jobs, who (arguably) failed with Apple the first time around, then failed with NeXT, then became seriously ill while leading a resurgent Apple, might decide that the touchy-feely bits of his youthful worldview are less important than a more tangible legacy.
I'm not saying it's the correct choice, or laudable, but it is understandable.
I find the "cult of apple" and "apple is a religion" memes amusing because, including myself, the majority of Apple users that I know are atheists.
Personally, I think "spectator sports" makes for more constructive analogies than religion. People develop very strong associations to their favorite rugby/football/etc team, delight in their team's victories, and bemoan their losses. Some people cheer on favorite tech companies in the same way. It's silly, but no more so than a die-hard Detroit Lions fan.