monkeyfacebag

I would get yourself a copy of The Good Parts. As someone who also went from Python to JS, it didn't fully click until I sat down and read through the book. Now there are aspects of JS I actually prefer over Python.

Sort of cool, but all it takes is a 1 minute read through of Stephen Wolfram's most recent blog post to realize there are more interesting and useful ways of presenting this data. A lot of potentially useful information on sleep and work patterns is being eliminated by data aggregation. I wish more personal analytics tools would give users control over presentation.

> Is an "innovation" that nobody wants really innovation, or merely change-for-changes-sake?

It's not clear, at least to me, that nobody wants Microsoft's innovations. I think it's more that they don't want them from Microsoft. Windows is a tough beast to change. The near ubiquity of the platform in the 90s and 00s means that there's a lot of people out there who "imprinted" on the Windows UI model.

It doesn't just affect Microsoft, though it may affect them disproportionately because of brand association. While OS X is a screaming success now, Apple's transition from OS 9 was anything but. It took 3 major revisions of the software before it was usable and a lot of people hated it at the time.

In contrast, Apple's introduction of iOS received a much warmer reception because there was no incumbent. Changing a major technology platform is hard.

"Window management hasn't changed much"

To be fair, I think this is true across platforms. On what platform is window management better than it was 5 years ago? Sure, Windows lacks a good way to get an overview of all open windows (such as Expose), but I honestly think Aero Snap is a killer feature for desktop use (especially because it supports the keyboard so well). When programming, I often like to have my editor and reference material side by side and Aero Snap make this literally a snap, which is great when the reference material changes frequently. Sadly, when programming, I also like to use a suite of GNU tools, which makes Windows a bit less compelling.

Although you seem to think it's gotten less good, I still think keyboard navigation remains Windows' strongest competitive advantage over OS X. It's also the only thing Windows does better than Gnome Shell which is otherwise the best desktop UI I've experienced.

"While Windows 7 is great and all and I love it compared to XP, what does it actually give you to justify the price?"

I think the UI improvements alone (desktop search, Aero Snap) are worth the price. Isn't this how Apple justifies charging for new versions of OS X? I still use XP from time to time and 7 is far and away a better experience. FWIW, I think it also provides a better experience than OS X, although, sadly, without the benefit of a POSIX layer.

"blame the utter lack of progress by MS"

It's not like MS has been sitting on their hands of late. Kinect demonstrates this. Windows 8 demonstrates this. I just don't think there's an appetite for MS progress or innovation. What people like about Windows computers isn't (and hasn't been for a long time) Windows. It's pretty hard to innovate when no one wants what you're selling.

To be fair, I don't "blame the users" for this. When MS had a tight grip on computing, they did little to make their products more compelling and they are realizing the consequences of this now: Windows' name is mud.

"have you ever known anyone around you starving to death?"

Sample bias. Just because you do not perceive it, does not mean the thing does not exist. LMGTFY: http://ukpmc.ac.uk/abstract/MED/10064320

Sure, it's not very recent, but nothing that happened during the 00s would leave me to believe the problem has somehow been solved.

"WSGI in Python gets you part of the way there, but you still need to import a library to talk to the server. This makes PHP just plain easier to get off the ground for web applications."

The first sentence is mostly accurate, but I disagree strongly with the assertion in the second sentence. Grouping related functionality into libraries reduces the cognitive load of programming. The same could be said for his assertion about the benefits of HTTP as a "first-class citizen."

I do agree that getting a PHP application running on a LAMP stack is easier than say getting a WSGI implementation up and running, but this has nothing to do with libraries.

To be fair, he did qualify it as a design in progress.

That said, I think standing out from the pack is far from the worst thing they could do. I love the live tiles idea, but the rigid design language gives everything a very "samey" look that I think could impact the usability of Start screens with lots of applications. How many one color icons will it take before they all start to look alike?

I'm curious how you ended up implementing lock-picking? The big problem I notice with most implementations (leaving aside flaws such as incorrect number of tools) is communicating the tactility of lock-picking. I've played a game (Fallout 3? I don't exactly remember) that attempted to introduce a tactile aspect through controller rumble, but the effect didn't adequately reflect the lock-picking experience.

Yeah, except he didn't say compensation was flat. He said wages were flat. The fact that we have a higher percentage of our compensation tied up in the skyrocketing cost of health care only underscores his point.

> Buzz was rolled out to all Gmail users without sufficient testing or input from regular people.

Excepting use of the word "sufficient", this strikes me as pure conjecture. Was Buzz a failure? Undoubtedly. But I would be literally shocked to find out that Google released it without extensive user research. It's not an exact science (or a science at all, really). When people try to make new things, they fail more than they succeed.

FYI, the word 'subtitle' is misspelled on the submission form. I submitted Introduction to Information Retrieval; can't believe it wasn't already on there!

> $100 million CEO is worth $50 million more than a $50 million CEO, so your economic outcome is the same regardless of which one you hire

What you're suggesting here is not that there's no correlation, but that there is a latent correlation hidden by the market. Another scenario is that some CEOs do well for their companies and some do poorly and this doesn't depend on how well they're paid. In other words, I'd vote for possibility 2, except instead of saying CEO pay and company performance are totally random, I'd say they're independent of each other.

> all you need to do is identify a few very effective and very well-paid CEOs to argue that this is false

No. If there's no correlation between CEO-pay and performance/market cap, finding a few interesting counter-cases doesn't further your argument. Inherent randomness and lack of accounting for other factors are far more likely to be the culprits here than market efficiency.

EDIT: Further, zero correlation isn't a "middle-ground" between positive and negative correlation. If it implies anything it's that one variable (performance/market cap) doesn't depend on another. If there's no correlation, CEOs can still be overpaid, they just can't do worse for their companies as pay increases.

This article makes a valid point about the hive mind, I'm just not sure that it's reddit-specific. If there were no karma on reddit, would we see markedly different behavior?

Further, there's an assumption here that everyone has an opinion on everything, which isn't the case. I think a related, and potentially more insidious problem is that the first well-crafted opinion in a thread tends to inform the opinion of followers-on, accumulating karma all the while and becoming the default position of the group.

I don't see Microsoft's problem here being fragmentation. Sure, some versions of Windows will run the Aero desktop and some won't, but everyone will have access to the same touch interface in Metro UI. This is markedly different from the Android ecosystem in which every device has its own spin on the interface. Further, it was clear from Build that MS is clearly propping up Metro as the future of Windows, regardless of whether you prefer mouse and keyboard. I think it's safe to say that need for the Aero desktop will decline over time.

The real problem Microsoft has then is not fragmentation, but getting users to accept its vision.

Aptitude handles package removal, especially orphaned dependencies much better. I think it's now included in the Debian base system, so there's very little reason to prefer apt.

Are they? For sure they have the largest market share, but isn't lack of substitute goods a necessary condition for monopoly? IANAL, but I use Bing all the time on IE9 because it's the default search engine and most of the time I can't even tell the difference. I certainly haven't found a reason to change it.

I reject the premise, namely, that Google is a monopoly supplier of Internet search. Bing, Yahoo! and DuckDuckGo are perfectly suitable search engines. I don't think any of them are necessarily as good as Google, but a) I use Bing all the time when I'm on IE9 and I hardly notice and b) that's a poor criterion for monopoly. As a bonus, the switching costs for changing your search provider are approximately zero.