marcusf

Nitpicking, perhaps, but I really would like the author to motivate why Haskel (sic!) is more weakly typed than say Ruby, Java or C#? Not sure how Ruby is less dynamic than Python either (besides the fact that his definition doesn't really admit a sliding scale), but that might be my relative inexperience with the languages showing.

It seems that this could be misused for politics in the worst possible way since ones measure of ones performance is inherently subjective (even writing a simple 'I did X' you might omit or forget collaborations with colleagues etc).

It could be that I'm Swedish but I'm not sure I'd enjoy this at all. At our shop we do weekly retrospectives. A session about 30 minutes to end fridays with where each team sits down (about 4 ppl/team) and talk through the week and their efforts and measurable ways to improve next week and long term. This then gets logged. Fairly standard scrum/agile stuff.

Of course this shifts the focus from individual to team, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing?

I think we'll see a year or two of abuse going forward as this starts eating Flash, and people become overcome with experimentation. This seems the adaption pattern with most technology. I know I'll spend a good amount of time abusing this just to familiarize myself with the new opportunities. Things seem to balance back to a more modest (and as we say in Sweden, "lagom") state after a while.

In a way, it mimicks what Tim O'Reilly wrote on piracy earlier today: "History shows us, again and again, that frontiers are lawless places, but that as they get richer and more settled, they join in the rule of law."

Good to see an article with some justifications and data instead of random assertions. Usually articles like this are filled with platitudes in lieu of real research, and the whole 'preaching to the choir' thing can get tiresome even if you're part of the choir.

Though I'm not sure the QSM article is strong proof of much anything, really. They don't seem to test for e.g. language or problem domain, and while SLOC has a relationship to the defect rate I'm not entirely sure I agree it's a good comparison metric, nor does it say anything about the success rate of the projects.

That said, one obvious reason for having a 30 man team to develop something is because it's composed of a multitude of disciplines. A software/hardware project might require people with deep skills in digital electronics, analog electronics, software development not to mention domain experts for what they're interfacing. Assuming the thing has an interface you might want a UI guy, then there's the supply chain and manufacturing to take in to account.

It's not hard to see that it could swell to thirty people quite quickly.

Giving some benefit of the doubt, I really think the author was thinking "Done without images", not "Done without JS" when he was writing pure CSS. That change in perspective makes the title less misleading.

I for one think it's a hell of a job. I'm impressed with the work involved, especially in small things like the positioning of the clouds on the Mail.app, and the loudspeaker design.

Completely obliterating Apple! Squashing them I say! Hear, hear!

Must be case of trying to avoid genericizing the trademark, as has happened with 'googling' or 'aspirin' etc.? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark)

Anyway, it doesn't seem inappropriate to at least make a show about trying to enforce it.

This is slightly OT, but if someone from Sugru is reading, the page looks weird in Chrome. The background is very jittery when you scroll (Chrome 15.0.874.121). It stays fixed in Safari and scrolls down in Firefox, and both look fine, but Chrome looks a bit weird.

I was thinking this as well. Why not just register a protocol handler calling out to the battlefield client. Seems much more x-browser. Why wouldn't that work, and why is the browser plug-in real interesting? What am I missing?

Doesn't it feel slightly disingenuous and shallow to just quote that statistic outright and not look at the why's behind it? Especially in the context of this discussion?

I really don't want to argue the point too much. We've obviously got different views on this, and differing experiences with the swedish judiciary system. PM Reinfeldt would not sign anything in to law regarding this, and parliament would never approve it. There's no basis in history for assuming anything like remotely like that would occur.

Also "Julian Assange är en våldtäktsman" returns 360 hits, not 1.5 mil, where most of them are the suffix of the meaning "If Julian Assange is a rapist...", so your interpretation is a bit off. As others have stated, the verdict is still out. Swedes are not smelling blood, and I resent that interpretation of Swedes as a collective and the accusation that he would not get a fair trial in Sweden.

Neither of them have any control of the courts, though. And of course our press will latch on to a juicy story, as would any.