dbbo

I wasn't being 100% direct either. The author still credited, or better yet, blamed Jobs for something he didn't actually do-- design the iPad. It seems pretty common, at least with non-techheads, that "Steve Jobs" is used interchangeably with "Apple".

Not necessarily this one instance, but many people that I've talked to tend to credit Jobs with many technical achievements, if not everything Apple ever did.

What really bothered me was the uploader credited Steve Jobs with coding something.

No, it isn't. Da Vinci used a paintbrush to paint. Steve Jobs did not use C to program, because he never wrote any code or even designed anything according to at least one verifiable source[1].

It's more like saying the paintbrush is more important than anything some really successful art dealer ever did.

http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/steve-jobs-never-had-... (the book mentioned in the blog post, not the post itself)

DDG is a great search engine. I was stoked to see that the Midori[1] browser adopted it as the default search engine. However, if I can't seem to find something there, I try Scroogle with SSL[2]

1 - http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php?/pages/midori_summary.html

2 - https://ssl.scroogle.org/

I can't believe that a gist somehow turned into a 4chan thread. I found that infinitely more horrifying than the fact that a hello-world program nearly crashed my browser through sheer size.

To make things worse, most of the time when I hear the term "psychopath" or "psycho" in colloquial speech, the speaker actually means "psychotic" or even something as general as "crazy".

I don't think the term "psychopath" is used clinically anymore, except by Hare et al. who insist that there is a difference between sociopathy and psychopathy. I have read at least 5 separate explanations of the differences between the two, but I couldn't tell one from the other. Even the DSM-IV criteria for antisocial personality disorder are quite vague, as I see it. Aside from Hare, other psychologists like Millon have basically introduced their own classifications of people with antisocial tendencies. Millon's subtypes are even less useful because they overlap other personality disorders, like narcissistic, schizoid, and histrionic.

But consider Mr. X, who has several characteristics of schizoid personality, was described as alexithymic by a clinical psychologist, scored an 8 Simon Baron-Cohen's Empathy quotient[1] (whereas most people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism score about 20), scored equally low on the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS)[2]. If Mr. X shows any kind of aggression, he might very well be considered to have ASP. Without the aggression, he seems to fall somewhere in the Autism spectrum.

Then there are also conduct and dissocial disorders, which have a lot in common (lying, stealing, violent behavior) with ASD. As far as I know, only the ICD-10 definition of ASD attempts to rule out conduct disorder.

To me it seems like most of the terms in the antisocial realm are pretty much generic labels that aren't very useful. The "psychopath" kind of touched on that implicitly in his letter a few times. It's at least some food for thought.

1 - http://glennrowe.net/BaronCohen/EmpathyQuotient/EmpathyQuoti...

   (this is not a test used in clinical settings)

2 - http://cooccurring.org/public/document/sias.pdf

I'm converting the individual PNGs to GIMP pattern files, in case you don't want to download all of them in a single Photoshop pattern file: https://github.com/dbb/subtle-patterns-gimp

Tile one, add a radial gradient, and you've got a killer desktop background/wallpaper.

Unresponsive script froze FF 6.

When he's censured like that outside the legal system, his rights are being challenged-- e.g. "He shouldn't have said that" is an expression of disapproval that to me suggests "People shouldn't be allowed to say that". It's pathetic to me that some people seem to think that free speech should only apply to people with whom they agree.

Could you give an example of what he could have said to express the same idea at this time _without_ offending people?

I don't really think popularity is a reason to suppress rms' constitutional rights (he is a US citizen as far as I know), no matter how crazy or alienating his opinions are.

At the risk of getting repetitive: I think rms was speaking strictly from a utilitarian perspective-- that is, Jobs' absence is overall a good thing for the FOSS movement (even though that might not actually be true, unless Cook is more committed to FOSS than Jobs). I can see how some find his statement tactless, but I'm not offended by it because Jobs was not an important person in my life. That doesn't mean that his life had no value, but his life wasn't more valuable to me than the life of any of the thousands of people who die every day from preventable causes. I honestly don't understand why so many people claim to be sad because Jobs is gone. Why did they feel so connected to a CEO? Steve Jobs was not your uncle. You have no rational reason to be upset over his death, and especially over what a coot like rms says about him. If you're upset enough to "fork the FSF" you're probably suffering from some illusory feeling of connectedness towards Jobs. I don't agree with a lot of what the FSF says, but one single comment made by one single guy is not going to make me turn my back on the whole organization. I will no longer be reading Larry's blog if he thinks this kind of flighty and ostentatious display of disapproval is warranted.

Apparently the Debian kernel team agrees. I just noticed this while building a kernel package:

test -n "$k" || perl -pli~ -e 's/\$\{shlibs:Depends\}\,?//g' debian/control

I think rms was speaking strictly from a utilitarian perspective-- that is, Jobs' absence is overall a good thing for the FOSS movement (even though that might not actually be true, unless Cook is more committed to FOSS than Jobs). I can see how some find his statement tactless, but I'm not offended by it because Jobs was not an important person in my life. That doesn't mean that his life had no value, but his life wasn't more valuable to me than the life of any of the thousands of people who die every day from preventable causes. I honestly don't understand why so many people claim to be sad because Jobs is gone. Why did they feel so connected to a CEO?

I would guess that that's all a significant number of unix-like OS users do with sed, and in those circumstances, it does make more sense to use sed than a more extensive language. For simple substitutions like that, I'd just use an alias: alias ped='perl -lpe' to save the extra keystrokes.

The copyright section of sed(1) suggests that the Debian package sed (I'm running wheezy) is Gnu sed 4.2.1[1]. Plan9 sed is also available in the 9base package. I'm running perl 5.12.4 (also from Debian testing). I don't see any significant difference in speed with vanilla 5.14.1 and the commands I mentioned earlier.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/sed/

To quote "The Awful Truth about sed" section of the Grymoire, "It is not your fault you don't understand sed."

I do, however, understand Perl, so that's what I use. E.g.: `echo 'fubar' | perl -lpe 's/fu/foo/'`

It might be a few milliseconds slower-- for example, commenting every line of my 352-line .zshrc (via s/^/#/) takes 0.007s total with Perl (so does `s/^/#/ unless /^\s*#/`) and 0.005s with sed. Commenting out every line of /usr/share/dict/american-english (98569 lines) takes 1.124s with Perl and 0.813s with sed.

Since I already know how to do more complicated things with Perl (like conditionals, named backreferences, etc.) it doesn't seem worth it to take the time to learn how to use sed effectively. I can wait the extra second since I'm not on any kind of deadline or under any efficiency constraints.

I am not trying to say that Perl is better than sed or any other text processing tool. I also don't mean to imply that speed is sed's only advantage-- it's just one example. I think that for someone who already knows some Perl, learning another similar tool doesn't make sense. I'm sure there are exceptions. This is only my humble, personal opinion.

For people who do need/want to learn sed, the article did a pretty good job of showing you how to get a lot done without a whole lot of reading.

I'm getting a 500 error. Could it be the HN effect? Cached:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jXZtssY...

This explains HN, but not general news sites like the NY Times or the Guardian.

That might be true, but I don't develop web apps so I can't argue and I'll respect your opinion. Consequently, I don't understand why posting a relevant, evidential opinion is grounds for negative karma. I'm not complaining-- I genuinely don't get it. I thought that was for violating the guidelines (I concede that if anything this comment is the one the should be treated as such for that reason).

I know memory is fairly inexpensive these days, but I think 4GiB of RAM is excessive. I did have a 2x1 dual channel kit in my laptop until one of the sticks went bad about a year ago. I never bothered to replace it, and I haven't suffered either. Right now I'm running a browser with several tabs open, a few shells in one terminal emulator, a couple of file manager windows, a PDF viewer, and an editor with a few tabs open (this is about all I typically use when programming), and I'm using around 615MiB-- a little over half-- of my mem and 0MiB of swap. I wouldn't have much to gain from another 3GiB of memory even if it is only a few dollars more.

So, CSS3 is flash?

The game is a lot easier if you act like a total sociopath (e.g. don't buy your mom's medicine, let your pet suffer, etc.)

I would like to see the data they're using to target ads at users (i.e. the metadata assembled from a user's input).

Is there a similar law in the United States? If so, I've never heard of it.

Infinitely many mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one says: "I'll have a pint of lager." The second one says: "I'll have half of what he's having." The third one says "I'll have half of what he's having," and so on.

Then the bartender says: "You're all a bunch of assholes," and pours two pints.

Baez has a lot of cool stuff on his site. Whenever someone asks me "What happens when a flashlight is traveling at the speed of light and you turn it on?" (this happens more than you might think) I refer him to this page: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLigh...