mtts

I hear Blackberry is still going strong in Indonesia as well. Still, worldwide, they're doomed.

And the great thing is that your country, being entirely surrounded by EU countries, has no choice but to implement all those "stupid regulations" as well as it won't be able to do business with its neighbours otherwise.

My VISA ... I don't have a credit card

Visa is a credit card, however. In Europe, it's often tacked onto a regular debit card, but it's a separate thing not everyone has.

I was aware of that. But parent did raise an interesting point. Google Wallet isn't doing too great. Why?

Credit cards are big in the US, maybe, but in the rest of the world not everyone has them.

Google Wallet is actually fairly useless. To load it up you need a credit card. If you have a credit card, you could just as well, uhm, use a credit card.

In earlier articles the "quality" of the song was in fact accounted for - if a song did better in the semi finals than its position within the network of countries giving each other points by default warranted, it was considered to be a better song.

That said, while the predictions had Sweden on top, it also had Norway in third place. Obviously the effect of a song being good isn't as strong as this model thinks. The top three had two countries that have lots of friends, Russia and Serbia, that had not-too-terrible songs that therefore managed to scrape away points even from countries that aren't friends.

* The great thing about Chrome is that it remembers your preferences across all your computers—I only needed to switch to Bing on my desktop, and there it was on my laptop, too. (Thank you, Google!)*

Which is done by storing your preferences on ... Google

Lisp's s-expression syntax was very much not intentional: IIRC McCarthy specifically wrote that he left implementation of the syntax as an excercise for the reader. As it turned out, very few readers chose to devise a syntax and instead worked on s-expressions directly.

Interesting take. I'm not a Lisp programmer either, just know enough about it to be dangerous, but it seems to me all programming languages, including Lisp implementations like CL and Scheme, are mere instantiations of Lisp, with (byte) compilers merely parsing down into a syntax tree that a Lisp-like engine can then execute.

ML I know nothing about, BTW.

It's different this time.

BeOS booted up in 10 to 15 seconds on a fairly run of the mill Celeron 333 back in the day :-)

I think what this is referring to is that Unix is not especially designed to give priority to desktop processes. BeOS was.

In principle you are correct. To an advertiser it's much more significant what it is you do when you're on the internet than who you do it with. So in that sense Google is much more valuable than Facebook.

The problem is humans are social creatures. So if all there is is Google, humans will do stuff on the internet and Google will know about it, but the social aspects of life remain offline and therefore inaccessible to advertisers. Facebook has managed to get people to spend a much larger percentage of their time online by moving part of their social lives there and they're gambling that a significant portion of that time people will do things that advertisers will be interested to know about.

Personally, I doubt this gamble will have the payoff they're apparently expecting. The primary focus during social interaction seems to be on, well, social interaction. Consumption only plays a very small role (though I'm sure Bacardi would like to pop up ads while you're chatting with your buddies on Facebook). Facebook basically catches people only when they're in the mood for fun and relaxation, whereas Google captures people right when they're in the mood for consumption and for spending money and to an advertiser that is much, much more valuable.

Aside from some unfortunate smudginess here and there the end result is surprisingly good. It reminds me of 17th century texts I've seen: fairly wide, by modern standards, spaces between individual characters, and rounded serifs.

For drawing Inkscape is a better tool, yes, but I did the drawing, both pencils and inks, on paper and then scanned the result for further processing which was mostly removing smudges and correcting mistakes: pixel based operations.

Thanks for the compliment!

> I used the GIMP as my primary art asset creation tool for several years. It was miserable.

I used the Gimp for < spam > http://rommelhok.com/en < / spam > (48 pages worth of old fashioned adventure comics). Not for the drawing itself, but for the cleaning up, the coloring and the lettering. It was fine.

Everything worked without a hitch, once I got used to some new shortcuts (which can easily be set to the Photoshop equivalents if you want) and some minor differences from Photoshop, some of which were, in fact, improvements (the color selection tool is much nicer in Gimp than the color range selection box in Photoshop, for example).

The only area where Gimp definitely falls short is type setting. In Photoshop, you can tweak kerning, spacing and font size within a text layer for every character individually. In Gimp, you can only do that for the layer as a whole. This wasn't much of a problem for me, however, since computer lettering is already inferior to hand lettering (IMHO) and using Photoshop's superior tools wouldn't have decreased the suckiness of the lettering all that significantly.

The other main shortcoming of Gimp, of course, is that it can't do CMYK colors but that will only become a problem when someone decides to publish my comic, in which case having to redo the colors will be a nice problem to have. I made one printed copy of it for myself at the local copy shop using the RGB Gimp files and that turned out beautifully.

In Gimp, however, if you save to a format that does not support layers when your image has layers, you get a warning. Likewise if you save to a lossy format like JPEG you get a warning. Every time.

This works for me. YMMV.

It's not as simple as that. If it's just Adobe WhateverIUse that breaks, sure, people will blame Adobe. But if it's Adobe WhateverIUse that breaks AND WordPerfect WhateverSomeoneElseUses and maybe also Borland SomethingSomeoneElseYetAgain uses word will get around that the new operating system "breaks things" and people will stay away from it.

Even if noone will ever use all three of the broken apps.

In this sense, maintaining backwards compatibility is simply a matter of reputation management.

We're so enthusiastic about the possibilities the internet offers us that we want to do everything online now, even things we're hardwired to do irl. Inane chatter in real life causes your body to release hormones that make you feel good. Inane chatter on facebook not so much. So maybe the future is indeed that we learn to take the internet for what it is: a fantastic tool for disseminating information and doing business, but nothing more. So the challenge will be to give people meaningful ways to interact with each other in real life now that the human component has been taken out of things like education and shopping.

I'd love for this to be true, but I think it isn't. An internet of stuff depends on raw materials being dirt cheap. Unfortunately, during the last five years or so the price of raw materials has started to increase, not decrease, and for reasons so fundamental it's unlikely this process will end soon.

So rather than an internet of stuff the new paradigm in the making will probably have something to with scarcity. No idea what, exactly, but my bet would definitely on a future of scarcity rather than a future of abundance.

Happened to me at a small company as well. Actually it's probably more of a small company problem as "not my job" doesn't really work if there isn't anyone else to pass the job to.

Vic Gondutra said they've reserved the white space for an upcoming feature.

Search artists by first name only. Not very useful. But the resolution is indeed impressive.

No. It's not really an article to learn things from (if only because it's dated). It is, however, an entertaining read. Treat it as such: huddle up on the couch with it and enjoy.

You've been lucky, then. I love Perl, but there are so many ways to do it you're bound to run into someone who does something in an entirely different way than you. The worst experience I had with this was a colleague who knew the entire Camel book by heart and insisted on using every damn trick there was. He was fired very quickly as the code he produced was impossible for a more normal person to understand

That's a very good point, but let's also not forget that at the time she didn't know any better and expected working for 2 dollars a day at a sweat shop to be normal (viz the slaves in Mauretania mentioned here on HN yesterday who couldn't conceive of there being anything wrong or unusual about their being enslaved).

If you look up what gets covered by the relatively innocuous term "Human trafficking" you'll find it can get much, much worse.

"Illegal immigrants" : forced to work off their debts to the people who smuggled them into Europe, usually in illegal sweat shops or worse:

"Eastern European prostitutes" : a subset of illegal immigrants who are forced to work as sex slaves.