neild

Can I definitively say that this will hold for all my current Steam purchases? No, of course not. I can, however, say that Valve has demonstrated the ability to keep giving me access to my games over a period of more than a decade.

In contrast, I have many games on CD that I can't play any more, because they don't work on modern operating systems. Some of these I've repurchased through gog.com, just to get working versions. Some I've repurchased even though they still work, just to get versions that don't require five CDs to install.

Buying a game from Steam is a calculated risk. It comes with advantages: No need to fiddle with discs, automatic patch updates, and access to all my games from any networked computer. It comes with one big disadvantage: The potential of losing access to my games at some unspecified point in the future.

That's a pretty good tradeoff for me. Maybe it isn't for you, and that's okay. When I consider Valve's established track record, however, I believe that the odds of Steam providing my games for long enough are very good--where "long enough" is "until the game ceases to work on newer operating systems and/or becomes available for repurchase for trivial amounts of money".

And if they fail me, there's always piracy. After all, I'm hardly going to feel guilty or morally culpable for resorting to piracy to reacquire access to something that I already own.

Absolutely, positively do not "get as much water as your stomach can handle". Your stomach can handle enough water to kill you.

You assume that votes are a good indicator of who holds the most accurate opinion. My experience says that they are merely an indicator of who holds the most popular opinion, or who argues their point in the most convincing fashion. The latter is a particularly insidious case, since accurate information does not always go hand in hand with good debating skills.

The books I read, the movies I watch, the music I listen to...I really can't think of how any of it could be described as "disposable by design".

I read a book written in 1966 the other day. That's young by the standards of literature, and yet it's older than I am.

Netflix's entire business model is built on movies not having an expiration date.

And to call music "disposable" is a statement that I don't even know how to respond to.

That's a beautiful way of putting it.

I absolutely can be productive in a coffee shop. The best ones are busy enough that I feel social activity going on around me and loud enough that I can't pick out individual conversations without effort.

The ambient sociability, as you put it, lets me feel some sense of connection to the world. The fact that I don't have any actual connection to the people surrounding me lets me focus and get work done.

The Amiga was effectively dead before 3D games became notable.

I'm a hacker. I work at a company that employs sales people, marketers, and support staff. The software I work on makes my company money--far more than my salary. Without sales, marketing, and support, however, that software would generate no revenue at all.

I could quit my job and go into business myself making the same software. Now I need to do my own sales, marketing, and support, none of which I'm any good at, and I have no time to work on development.

Working for a company makes me significantly more productive than working for myself, because I can specialize in the things I'm good at.

This doesn't mean that I might not do better financially by going into business for myself. I absolutely, positively would not do better technical work, since I'd be constantly distracted by non-technical tasks.

Supporting IPv6 is absolutely nothing like "ripping out your spinal cord and putting a new one in". It's largely trivial if you aren't doing anything tricky--and, notably, it requires nothing that an IPv4.1 wouldn't require. The Berkeley socket API was designed with support for multiple protocols from the start, so you shouldn't have to touch much beside your address structures and name resolution code.

And I say this from the standpoint of someone who added DHCPv6 support to a DHCPv4 server, which actually is tricky, since DHCPv6 is an entirely different protocol from DHCPv4 and substantially more complicated to boot. It still wasn't all that bad.

Most importantly, IPv6 is done. It's been done for years now. The router support is there. The OS support is there, with the exception of some laggards who really should get around to implementing DHCPv6. It's in active use. (Do you have a DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem? Congratulations, you're using IPv6!) The biggest obstacle to deploying IPv6 is just doing it, and again that's not going to be any easier with an IPv4.1.

That's not entirely true. I don't recall the exact timeline, but there was a Tcl plugin for Netscape which could be viewed as playing in much the same space as Java or Flash. A bit of work on media display and animation, and it might well have taken the space that Flash came to dominate.

Unlike browser Java of the time, the Tcl plugin didn't try to bury itself deep within the roots of the browser, was fast, and worked. :>

Run enough tests, and you will get statistically significant but bogus results.

    # Print included files.
    ack --output '$1' '#include <(.*)>'

Glycemic index measures the glucose response to consuming a fixed amount of carbohydrate. Since different foods contain different amounts of carbohydrate, the amount of food consumed is not constant. To consume 50g of carbohydrate, you can eat 100g of white bread...or 600g of carrots.

Glycemic load adjusts the glycemic index of a food according to portion size: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_load

You assume that the number of people with the ability and desire to circumvent your defenses is a small fraction of your total audience, and ignore them.

Many introverts are quite good at talking to crowds. Speaking as an lifelong introvert myself, crowds are easy. It's individuals that can be difficult.

"Introverted" and "shy" are not the same thing.

Many entertainers are introverts--the actor who vanishes back to his trailer the second the cameras stop rolling is almost a stereotype. Introverted politicians are less common, but they exist as well. Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter are both famously introverted.

The distinction between introvert and extrovert has little to do with willingness to appear in the public eye. It's about where you find your energy: The introvert is drained by dealing with people and recharges in private, while the extrovert finds social interaction invigorating and solitude draining.

Which is, of course, still cheaper than the web+smartphone+tablet plan.

    UIButton *button = [UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeRoundedRect];
    [button setTitle:@"Button" forState:UIControlStateNormal];

Of course, if you want to display the button:

    button.frame = CGRectMake(10, 10, 80, 20);
    [view addSubview:button];

Now, when you put together all the objects in a moderately complicated UI, you will end up with hundreds of lines of code. Some people find it easier to work with this visually in Interface Builder. Others find it easier to manually construct the UI in code. Either method works perfectly well. I generally use a mix of both, depending on the nature of the UI element I'm working with.

Take the developer DVD that came with your Mac, put it in the drive, and double-click the install icon?

We're still together, five years later.

I'm probably an outlier, but hey--match percentage works some of the time!

You state: "your analysis assumes that the coffee shop market is divided between 'Starbucks' and 'Independents'." It does not, and I'm not certain how you can read it that way. Also, describing what I referred to as a "back of the envelope calculation" as "analysis" is silly.

Furthermore, the comment that I was originally responding to did not distinguish between chain coffee shops and independent ones, so your insistence on excluding Starbucks from consideration is bizarre.

Do you have anything to offer other than insults and an anecdote? You appear to be arguing with some passion for the proposition that coffee shops are money losing operations. Provide some evidence, some reason for believing this other than a single Slate article about a single failed business in trendy part of Manhattan.

First off, it's not clear to me whether the establishment the author opened was a coffee shop or a restaurant. The subtitle says "coffee shop", but the article then talks about finding someone to "whip up pretty crepes". I recognize that the dividing line between restaurant and coffee shop can be a bit fuzzy on occasion, but it's there and relevant. Most restaurants fail.

The really notable part of the article comes at the end, however: "There was, of course, one way to make the cafe viable: It was written into the Golden Rule itself. My wife Lily and I could work there, full-time, save on the payroll, and gerrymander the rest of the budget to allow for lower sales."

Yes, Mr. Michael Idov, you could have done that. You should have done that, from the start. That's what small business owners do: They work. That's what your competitors were doing. The goal may be to eventually make enough money to hire people to do all the work, but that's not where you start. You start by busting your ass.

That's the story of a dilettante who opened a restaurant as a fashion statement and went the way of all such fools.

Anyway, back to coffee shops. I don't know if Mintel's stats include the chains. They probably do. You might note, however, that the article I referenced is entirely dedicated to the proposition that Starbucks's presence in the market has been good for small, independently-owned coffee shops. Furthermore, even if we assume that no chain stores fail at all, a 10% industry failure rate would still have independent coffee shops doing pretty well. (Back of the envelope calculation: 14,000 independent coffee houses in the US in 2005, 11,000 Starbucks in the US in 2010, so let's say indies are only 25% of the total. If 10% of the total fail and all failures are indies, then 40% of indies fail. 60% success rate isn't bad for small businesses.)

And, finally, you're right that the margin on coffee beans doesn't determine the margin of a coffee house. That's what happens when your cost of goods is effectively zero, and I assure you that any restaurant or retail outlet would love for their margin to be solely determined by wages and rent.

My favorite coffee shops are loud enough that I'm not distracted by other people's conversations. Either the music is loud enough to drown them out, or enough people are talking at once that it all blends into a meaningless susurration. A place which is too quiet--like most libraries, actually--amplifies distractions.

The failure rate for new coffeehouses is a mere 10 percent, according to the market research firm Mintel, which means the vast majority of cafes stay afloat no matter where Starbucks drops its stores. Compare that to the restaurant business, where failure is the norm.

- http://www.slate.com/id/2180301/pagenum/all/#page_start

There's a reason you can find coffee shops--both franchised and independent--everywhere you go. Selling $.16 of coffee for $4 is quite profitable!

The fact that "Android" and "Droid" are becoming synonymous for many people is very, very good for Verizon.

It's that Microsoft has no confidence in Bing. They aren't willing to trust their algorithms to produce the best search results. They've decided that, some portion of the time, the single best search result they can return is whatever Google is returning.

They've given up on trying to be better than Google, and are settling for being a cheap, off-brand knockoff that rebrands stale Google search results.

That's rather shocking, and I frankly thought the Bing team were better than that.