jpr

And here I had always thought that loser-pays was a universal rule. This explains almost everything that is crazy about US.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

The site seems to be down, or is it just me?

Because OpenBSD community isn't arrogant enough for you.

It can't be worse than sitting for extended periods.

But it still uses an internal combustion engine, which have a horrible energy efficiency. I wonder how such a bad technology has lasted for so long?

Maybe in the wet dreams of the DRM-lobbyists. I think this is closer to truth: http://funnythirdthing.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/GxzeV....

Sometimes I wonder how many gigabytes of flamewars about "coding style" C-like syntax has caused.

Is it really no IE or just no IE in top ten?

If this ever becomes popular, I expect orthorexia rates to soar.

I almost can't believe the #3, restarting a webserver for minor changes? That reeks of static, batch-language oriented solution. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with static batch-languages, but I wouldn't have thought Scheme is one.

No, they don't. People driving them kill people.

Great stuff. I think I'm developing a severe case of nerd crush on Zed.

The part about linguistic experience was especially good. I have thought for some time now that all configuration files, command-line options etc. should have simple and clearly defined syntax. Some already do. My dislike of weird, inconsistent and complex syntax (and semantics) is so severe that I've semi-intentionally not learnt shell-scripting, Perl or Ruby.

Sadly, there are very few systems that I feel I get a good linguistic experience(TM)(R) out of. I have come to think that GUIs as we know them are based on fundamentally flawed ideas - pointing and grunting - instead of using a language, the feature that separates humans from other animals.

I really wish good textual UIs (there aren't many that I know, but I'm using one for writing this comment: GNU/Emacs) became the norm, instead of the randomness of the contemporary GUIs or the bass-arckwardness of shell-like languages. I think UIs should aim to become Turing-complete, completely self-documenting and reflective. The distinction between a function, a program and an user interface is in my opinion mostly arbitrary and harmful, creating an unnecessary wall of misunderstandings between the author of a program and its users.

I see no reason to believe this will ever work.

These kinds of things make me really wish my country hadn't joined EU.

Backward compatibility may be a weakness in security, but a strength otherwise. I like it very much that I can still run many of my games that I purchased in the 90's on the Windows 7. AFAICT, Linux can't easily offer such a long binary backwards compatibility (please correct me if I'm wrong).

I also think that - along the lines of what tmountain said above - more important than open source code, is that protocols and formats are open.

I'd like to think that I have a good imagination, but I still can't imagine the look on Stallman's face if MS decided to fund the development of Hurd. I wish I could upvote you twice, once for good ideas, and once again for that one unimaginable thing.

Don't let hackers to cajole you into turning Windows to an open-source unix-clone, world already has way too many of those.

Oh my FSM please no! That would remove the one and only mainstreamish OS that isn't an unix-clone from the market, leaving the computing world permanently crippled. Why do people want that sort of monoculture?

Also, if you seriously think user experience is better on Linux, I wonder have you used a modern Windows lately?

Aren't dynamic loading (for plugins etc.) and dynamic linking two different things?

Is there really any place where floating point is the right solution or default? I mean, all general purpose languages generally use floating point, but for general purposes, floating point isn't what you want. Or maybe it is, but it certainly isn't what I want.

> many people say they are in "the Cloud" where they define the cloud as a server on the internet.

To me, cloud would mean that the service has very good reliability, which your run of the mill "server on the internet" does not necessarily have.

According to Wikipedia, only 5 lines:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobol#Hello.2C_world

What do you mean?

They also break the "scroll one whole page at a time" paradigm that many are used to.

EDIT:

I just realized that Chrome devs have apparently already decided that it's not worth fighting the idiotic bars, so Chrome scrolls less than one page.

NoScript is a symptom, not a cure. I haven't yet figured out a good name for the disease though.

"The term “freeware” has no clear accepted definition, but it is commonly used for packages which permit redistribution but not modification (and their source code is not available). These packages are not free software ..."

I think FSF would do itself a favor by not hijacking the term "free software" to mean something that has to explained .

> I have yet to see a language reference as good as the PHP documents.

Here you go:

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index...

> Attempts to help a user too much may interfere with the user’s ability to form a good mental model of the problem.

I think this is a problem with much of the software I dislike. I have no idea what it is trying to do and why because the software tries to conceal information from me.

I don't get it. Isn't one of the major purposes of using higher level languages to avoid writing in C?

If this is "real pain", I wonder what some of the weirder stuff of C++ would be, "surreal pain"?