erez

"It was Robert who negotiated the business deals, Robert who represented Origin’s interests with the Software Publishers Association, Robert who put a sober, businesslike face ... Robert who found himself trapped between the practicalities of running a business and the desires of a famous younger brother"

It was also Robert Garriot's way of running a business that killed Origin eventually. So don't waste any tears for the guy. He made a lot of money running a company on the back of his brother's vision and cash-cow games. He was very happy letting said brother maintain a personal fantasy world, which meant he was holding the corporate reins alone. And making sure Richard Garriot was kept out of the actual running of the company he created and the products of whom he was responsible for.

I always tell non-programmers (and sometimes programmers interfacing with the systems I maintain):

Don't tell me what I need to do, tell me what You want to do. Mostly clients seem to think they need to come up with the way to accomplish stuff, rather than express the need and let the programmer figure out how to meet that need.

Human-readable json would've been a great idea, if it wasn't for the fact that json was NOT MEANT TO BE HUMAN READABLE.

It is meant to be generated by a machine and not created by hand, neither it should be readable by humans, only parse-able by a computer.

Treating your data interchange/serialization/configuration/markup formats as languages that should be human readable/writable is a cardinal sin of any person or company that engages in such practices.

Once reported/found, study the bug, reproduce it, debug it, and try to understand as much as you can about it, but once you get stuck, even for a couple of minutes, take all that you have found about it, form a simple, clear way of presenting this problem to someone else, contact that person and deliver the explanation.

From here it's collecting three things, answers to future questions, better understanding of the system, and more efficient ways of finding out about a bug. These three complete each other and would help you reach faster either the solution, or the question to your colleague/friend/support person/IRC/forum/other.

emacs the Operating system is both the idea of the LISP machine and the situation that since it is extremely extensible, you can use it as a shell, for irc or mail, read pdf and view images, listen to music and do anything that doesn't require a modern web browser, or video player.

For me that was the situation for a while, nothing but Firefox and emacs. I even used it for IM and Twitter. All I needed was for it to render the web and I could ditch anything but it.

I've been using Calibre for several years now. It's managing my ebook library on every machine and I have yet to encounter a bug in any of its features. I use it to sync to my Nook, handle book metadata, convert from format to format, all without a hitch. In any ebook community Calibre has long since become the standard application. Many of the question are simply answered "install Calibre, it has what you need".

Kovid Goyal, the creator of Calibre has been, for me, as much of a poster-child of FOSS as Firefox or Linux. He has a point release every week, and you could just update the software without worry - nothing would break. He's open and frank about the development process - nothing hidden, or "thrown over the wall" no open-core features to abuse the power user, no excuses for stuff that isn't ready to release.

I have no idea why only now he reached 1.0 - it's been feature complete for my needs for a couple of years now. But as it stands, I wish to congratulate him for reaching the milestone and to thank him and everyone who supports the project - by submitting code, patches, bug reports, helping in the forums, donating money, and using the software.

Is the world a 3d hologram created by clustering of sub-microscopic, atomic units of matter perceived by translating photon transmission to electrical pulses?

YES.

This isn't a problem with vi(m) but with application implementing vi keyboard navigation. Neither vi nor emacs are just their navigation keys and I have a similar problem with anything that is like emacs in that there's always a shortcut missing.

There is no indication of whether you need to be in the northern hemisphere to watch this, and in which countries.

"Teach yourself" is actually a fancy-pants way of saying "learn".

Google, like every other company, "forgets" that when its users delete something, they want it purged from all the servers, not just marked as "deleted" in the database. While the practice is very common, it shouldn't be used when it comes to your customers, even if those are basically the product, like in Google, and others, case.

"Conspiracy theorists don't need reasons to argue."

Yes, but that's still no reason to release a known "fake" image. Also, you can tag it with captions and disclosures, and someone might still link to the image as "look, there's no antenna on his head unlike other photos, proving the landing is a fake".

"Yet, in this case the reporter knows to which degree the information was tampered with - and the reporter has no problem verifying it either."

Publications have a no-doctored-images policy, it doesn't allow for exceptions, even if the length of the manipulation is known, especially when the original is available.

For example, the moon landing is a subject of many conspiracy theorists who claim it was fabricated. A doctored image (esp. by NASA) published just gives them another reason to argue that there was never a moon-landing as all the images from it are obviously fake.

Second, any reporter must verify his, or her sources, otherwise they are subject to manipulation and if a source is falsifying information, for whatever reason, that information must not be used as the reported cannot know to which degree was the information tampered with. It might have been just a minor cosmetic touch-up, or it might have been a complete fabrication. So while the demand to remove from the archive a famous 43-year old image sounds odd, it's very much on par with a practise that any decent publication must follow or risk the integrity of their whole publication.

Here's a very comprehensive archive of images that have been manipulated by the source, or by the publisher: http://www.fourandsix.com/photo-tampering-history/

I remember asking the web-devs at the company I used to work for several years ago why do they support IE only, and their reaction was that they will not be able to pull off all the neat tricks they can pull off in IE in any other browser. Their reaction to any suggestion of standards was "I don't care about standards, if that means I can't do whatever IE enables me to do".

Is that innovation? Some would say yes. I think that most of these only became innovative once they began to be available to larger audiences, which coincides with the rise of Firefox and later on Chrome. Also, most of the conception of IE as non-innovative and stagnant came from the 5 years gap between IE6 and IE7 (and the added 3 years between IE7 and the real "new IE", IE8), during which Opera and Firefox carried the innovation torch. Most of IE's innovations came when it was fighting the browser wars, pre IE5.

I'm trying to figure out what's "Open Source code" actually means. Judging from what little is shown at the video, and without watching any of that programme, I think the idea here isn't "open source" as in "Free and Open Source software", but more of "code examples freely available on the net", in the same vein of someone copying information about a book from the Internet for school and gets an F with a "No, Lurch and Uncle Fester were not characters in David Copperfield."

That is not a jab at open source. I don't know how a virus could be inserted in a code snippet copy/pasted from the web, but I guess that's what the scene refers to.

Any connection with Hiveminder (hiveminder.com)? Both are ToDo lists with reminders etc, both have a bee icon, and the names are all but identical.

Are you referring to SQL the standard (which isn't a programming language), or to any enhanced flavour of it?

It's completely and totally within the rights of an employer to demand and mandate the usage of any tool. It's usually not a problem when there's a small, single-digit number of programmers, but once you reach a certain number, mandating procedures, code-conventions, style, tools, even the machine you work on to guarantee as little difference between developers becomes a necessity.

My pet peeve are books/tutorials that spend most of their time in the interpreter. I appreciate interpreters for what they are, but I don't thing the ability to type 2+3 and get 5 is relevant to any programming language skills.

Not an opinion about ext3, but "I have many machines using it" does not mean a system is obsolete or not, for obvious reasons. Besides, with companies still running COBOL/FORTRAN software on decades old hardware, what is "obsolete"?

"Good artist copy, great artists steal" Anyone?

Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

"It's more sensible if the set of values is larger than just three ... It's even more useful if you reference the same set more than once"

Both are correct, I am strictly referring to his rationale being it's too verbose.

One pattern that this guy misses is "better to be clear than to be clever". His "a == x || a == y..." example is a case of verbosity being a good thing, and probably the reason why most languages don't have a == (x or y or z) in their syntax. And then, if this isn't convoluted enough, he hides it behind an abstraction, which is another anti-pattern: Whatever you need to hide, you need to refactor. Hiding your cleverness away from the user is never a good idea. He even excuses it with "This refactoring allows others to read the code in context to the domain, without having to comprehend the internal logic." Sadly, this "Don't make me think" attitude is very common.

Having a generic brand name doesn't mean other companies can do that, as there is no legal term defining generic brand names (i.e. a brand name that became synonymous with a product). What does happen is that people start referring to other products using the brand name, and you might lose the identity of your product. If people use "to google" for performing an Internet search, it can mean they will automatically use Google.com, which Google want, but it also could mean people will start "google" stuff using bing, or duckduckgo.com and if the term becomes generic enough, it will lose the immediate attachment it has to the actual search engine.

Another issue is that it carries connotation. When you say "This model was photoshopped to look thinner/prettier/etc." you create a negative connotation with the brand. Adobe fears people will hear "photoshop" and immediately think "falsifying images, creating false reality, hiding stuff" etc.

It also causes the brand to be identified with a single product, which in Adobe's case is not such a huge deal, as Photoshop is the product, but in other brands, like Apple, or Google (again), means a whole slew of products across different fields, this is also why the Apple sign was removed from the Macintosh' keyboard.

When 'Everything is a toy', there is no real meaning whether it's an ebook, a book, a cutting board... The question is, whether a book allows for anything special, or is removing books 'robs a child of a variety'. I think not. We can't all have every stimulus available for our children. I never experienced snow until I was 30. Some kids never see an ocean. Some live in the city, some in a more rural environment. Some have pets, some don't. Future generations will not live with paper in their household. They will not be robbed of anything.

Keep in mind, this isn't saying ebook readers are suitable for everything. No ebook reader, at the moment, can match a huge, colourfully printed kids book, not to mention their fragility and price isn't suitable for kids. The same goes for feelies, pop-up books, cards with animals, or colours or other such educational toys, and so on. Take those out of the equation, and there are no advantages for print over digital. Actually, there is no advantages for print over anything if those are taken out, since a child will just refer to them as yet another toy.

ebooks have texture, color, they can make sounds, you need to interact with them to move. What you think of are toys, not books.

Crtl-Z, you mean. Ctrl-A is for start of line in bash and emacs, so that won't do

This is a very narrow, romantic view of things. If a future kid finds a 40 year old e-book reader, would that be less of a find than the comics? more? Are books better because they wear and tear? I can buy a new book, then leave it outside in the sun and dew for a week, would that make it better? Why isn't a digital edition, that could also supply a kid with references to the original mythologies and books worse?

Would you like your child to learn about the world from a dated, occasionally incorrect encyclopaedia, simply because it weighs more? What is the difference between a print of a picture on paper than on a screen? Neither is an original creation. An artist can create a 100% digital image on his PC, but according to this logic, printing it in a book gives it some magical "quality". Books are not physical objects because they have pages. You're superimposing your own values, as someone who grew without computers on this era. Leafing through an old book isn't more or less enriching because of the weight, the yellowing pages and smell of old glue, but because of the discovery and learning.