mantis369

There should be a warning before a Web page captures keyboard input and prevents browser hot keys from working.

I work in managed content. I develop AMS and CMS and intranet portals for companies that do web publishing. My specialties are workflows and middleware connectors (for fulfillment, payment processing, LDAP, etc.). I used to be a bare metal frontend Javascript wizard, in the days when people used terms like DHTML and then AJAX.

I've been doing this for the better part of twenty years, so the writing is on the wall for me. It will soon be cheaper to hire 2-3 recent CS grads, with their lack of personal responsibilities, ability to work long nights, and affinity for the latest fad technologies (of which I am increasingly wary), than it is to hire me.

But I am not spectacularly skilled, merely competent. My primary usefulness is in feature solicitation and requirements gathering, as I have the weight of experience when it comes to determining what should be focused on, and I know what works and what doesn't, from years of working on various iterations of sites in different business domains.

As I said, the writing is on the wall. I have no desire to manage anyone. I paid my dues and went freelance, just before things got unfavorable, with respect to U.S. health and professional insurance. I don't really have an entrepreneurial spirit except in as much as I would like to work on important (not the same as "hard") problems with amenable people. I am no longer able to just find a client or employer where the people are smarter, because I am nearly a graybeard. I have sowed my wild oats, and my "I am the CEO / principal consultant / technical founder" days are about a decade behind me.

I don't know what to do next. I just don't think I have more than another 7-10 years doing what I do. The President is essentially calling my domestic clients Lügenpresse. No one seems to care about words printed on paper or eInk, or anything on a screen that is longer than this post. The need for complicated features such as a wiki or extensive document management and versioning are going away, as the clientele become more technical and barely need anything beyond a git repo and markdown at the highest level. I feel myself becoming obsolete, and I am ready for the next thing.

The arrow key cluster, it burns us!

Beware the throttling. You get that i7 or Xeon performance for the first 45 seconds of the compile, and then that and the testing (or encoding, or whatever) go down to i5 performance or worse.

I'm impressed that you got past that no-rings end boss gauntlet on the first try.

But they didn't upgrade the Mini, iMac, or Mac Pro. The Mac Pro has been the current model for at least two years. The iMac is a hack that uses two logical display panels to produce the 5K resolution, because there isn't enough bandwidth for a single one. The Mini is nearing the 3 generations old mark.

I don't understand the imperatives to make the machine thinner and increase battery life.

I would have paid for a 32 or even 64 GB model, but instead I'm going to delay my upgrade for 6-8 months so that I can see if something better than the new MBP comes along.

I am of the opinion that a Pro machine does not need to be the thinnest available model.

I doubt it. I walked past a whole shelf of Sega Genesis emulation boxes at Target. That and the Atari Flashback 7 seem to be heavily stocked.

What would that feel like in a DAW? You open the plugin, change its default configuration, get rid of it, and then add it back independently and let it tell the DAW how many outputs it has, so you can connect them to tracks (or whatever the analogue is)?

Any chance that you could make the output channels arbitrary? Just yesterday I built a sampler array with Kontakt, in REAPER, that used 28 outputs from a single plugin instance.

That's one thing I can say for Robotix: the pieces that move are virtually indestructible.

I have an old, four-motor Robotix system from my childhood. It's part of the reason I became a programmer beyond QuickBASIC for DOS. Having played with the Robotix kit, I encountered an articulated robot arm in tech ed, in 7th grade, and wanted badly to program it. I learned the basic command language, excelled in the class, found out that C++ was what it used for the advanced stuff, and started to learn C++ on my own. Sadly, we moved before I got to program it further in 8th grade.

Robotix is definitely inferior to Capsela, because the only gearings it provided were the things necessary to run the sample project toys you could build, such as the grabber arm (use the slower, stronger motor for the hand!).

I've found the French I studied to have more consistent grammar and spelling, and less variation in idioms. Its achilles heel for technical stuff seems to be vocabulary, in that new nouns and verbs don't get created, and the Canadian and French maintainers seem averse to loanwords.

I too have gotten used to firing up the developer tools and removing position:fixed. The second-most common thing I have to do is set restricted column widths. I get linked to pages that use a print stylesheet, a lot of the time, and just as I restrict the line length in my text editor, I don't want to deal with that in the browser.

Despite English being my native language, I am sorry that it won. There is a lot of ambiguity in it, whether you are writing on technical matters or not.

And what is with this scourge of position:fixed headers lately? I like to scroll with the space bar or page-down button, and the header always slightly overlaps the top of the new page, preventing me from reading a couple of lines.

In my case, delusions, paranoia, and the occasional inappropriate remark that could be construed as homicidal or suicidal ideation. Depression genuinely caused the latter ideation.

Lithium is a very harsh mistress, but if you have type 1, which is akin to emotional epilepsy, she will bring you to heel.

Silly Selective Service. You need the stone of Erech, and to be the heir of Isildur, to summon the army of the dead.

CSV is really slow to work with, because you have to check for well-formedness, like you do with XML. And in the end, I always end up making specific concessions for the files that my customers use (which must be patched again and again) or having to take a hard stance on what can and can't be in the "CSV" files.

I grasp the concept perfectly well. But this is theater. Look at the title ("When Will Patent Trolls Learn Not to Mess with Newegg?") and the ridiculous picture of the lawyer!

I have plenty of principles. However I am not a for-profit corporation. It is not cynicism on my part to assume that Newegg is motivated by economics. That is the very definition of a corporation. Maximizing return to shareholders.

Newegg are cheapskates. The publicity from doing this pays far more than the money they'd save by settling with patent trolls.

I don't think VCs are interested in anyone who wants to work at a sustainable pace. Also, the piece we're discussing doesn't make it sound like the author works at a sustainable pace.

I think you have to pick one. Startup or kids. You can work at a burnout pace for 5 years in the hope of getting rich, or you can be there for your young children. In my opinion, if you're going to try the startup thing, there's nothing stopping you from having kids afterwards. Except that if your startup(s) didn't succeed, your skills might translate perfectly into a career that can sustain a family. And having gone that route, you might have missed out on opportunities to bond with a good partner.