pak

If anybody wants to know the punctuation symbol that "::" is, it's called Paamayim Nekudotayim, better known in programming as the scope resolution operator. PHP (because of its Israeli roots) calls it by the Hebrew name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_resolution_operator

What, Gruber used an overly selective example from Apple to prove some point while subtly asserting their superiority? No way!

Chrome tabs are some of the best-behaving and best-looking tabs on any OS, though. See TotalFinder for a Finder mod that applies Chrome tabbing to all Finder windows. Makes D&D a snap.

http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/

I agree with you. While other people above have bantered above about how absolute a "law" is supposed to be, in my opinion if you are going to call something a scientific "law" you had better be prepared to explain or at least enumerate all the exceptions. This guy just seems to get flustered and run off when people point out the exceptions to his oversimplified conclusions.

This is not a revolutionary idea. Economists have studied the productivity curves of businesses for decades. "Diminishing marginal returns" is part of most basic microeconomics courses. Here's the page where Mankiw describes it using the enthralling example of "Caroline's Cookie Factory":

http://books.google.com/books?id=oRgQ2goeFzwC&lpg=PP1...

Apparently, though, this "discovery" made a real impression on this NY Times writer. I don't like it when people take well-established ideas from another field, dress it up in new lingo and statistics ("corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, was entirely sublinear") and try to market it as new research.

That was the impression I got from a lot the results claimed by this guy; I think he's wrong to pass off gross oversimplifications as scientific progress. I can see why he gets cited, and it's part of the mistake with correlating citations with influence: they were probably mostly negative mentions. To be honest this behavior is a little trollish. As we can see here, he gets his publicity for it.

Somebody said below "Title should be 'A Physicist Plays Economist'"--yes, indeed.

Exactly. They just want some publicity so that people use Chrome. What better way than encouraging people to open lots of Chrome tabs?

Most researchers already agree that it will be soon possible to cure HIV. Antiviral therapies, while not yet well known, are becoming mainstream. I wouldn't call this a "cure", but rather evidence that one person's immunity to a specific form of HIV can be transferred to an person infected with that form to prevent it from replicating. It supports existing claims about the role of CCR5 in HIV's life cycle and the protective effects of its mutation. There is no reason to preface this with "For The First Time In The History Of Man" or anything so dramatic.

Nitpick: Viruses don't consume food for energy, they feed off of the energy metabolism of their host cell. CCR5 is a receptor that HIV binds to while entering human cells. If it is mutated in a certain rare way, HIV has a hard time entering cells, and it needs to be inside the cell to replicate. By swapping out this guy's immune system with one that has mutant CCR5, they've prevented HIV from replicating in his body.

Viral diseases most definitely can be cured with current research techniques. If anything, they present a much easier target than cancer or other end-of-life diseases, because viruses are comparatively simple little infectious agents and comprise the sole cause of the disease, so a cure only needs to attack one thing. Their genome is on the order of a few thousand base pairs, usually only 10-100 genes. You should check out all the new antiviral drugs that have been developed over the last decade, it is really the product of the new age of genome-level research. [1] The main problem in developing antiviral drugs is toxicity, because viruses co-opt certain parts of the cell and have proteins that are usually similar to normal human genes, and you have to find treatments that only target the viral activity. For example, the first commercially successful antiviral [2] targets reverse transcriptase, which performs a function that normal human cells never do (transcribe RNA -> DNA).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiviral_drug

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acyclovir

No, he is using it in exactly the sense the article goes to great lengths to illustrate: approaching any situation by thinking outside of usual conventions. As far as clothing goes, you can't argue Lady GaGa doesn't think outside of the box. Some of the items she has turned into clothing probably took a lot more creativity than finding a way to use three chopsticks in one hand.

rms' definition of hacking doesn't necessarily involve technology. That was the whole point of the chopsticks story.

You bring up a good point, actually: since Chrome OS is almost entirely open source as Chromium OS, couldn't just about anybody step in and provide a reasonable level of support for a fee, in the unlikely event the Google decides to quit?

I don't think other world powers would be totally cool with us putting superweapons into low polar orbit right over their heads... you should totally expect those satellites to be shot down as soon as you put them up there.

Yeah, it seems that prototype-based programming fits his needs better. With prototypal inheritance you make no assumption that what you inherit from is a strict superset of the class. It's more like saying "This object is like so-and-so, except..." every time you create a link in the inheritance chain, and that fits the way people classify things a little better. Steve Yegge put it best: "The most specific event can serve as a general example of a class of events."

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/universal-design-pat...

Lego gears only come in specific sizes (and therefore are limited to certain ratios).

Maybe they cache it to improve performance :-P

It seems they are also open-sourcing a web client, maybe not exactly the same UI as the official client, but I can't see why they would go to the trouble of changing it. Kudos to them for calling it "Wave in a Box", J Tim would be pleased.

http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n...

I think he meant that if you consider yourself invisible as a motorcycle you can drive safer, not that driving an invisible vehicle is safer than driving a visible one.

Hasn't Google been producing some very Microsoft-esque news as of late--they join some product space late, with a product that doesn't really differentiate itself except by having Google scale from the beginning? I'm just seeing this as a increasingly frequent thing: Checkout, the Android Market, Buzz, Google TV, HotPot, and now this... can't wait for Google Me or "the Facebook retort" to come out and be completely underwhelming.

It seems at a certain point a large company cannot help but be more reactionary than revolutionary, despite the culture and mantras and everything else.

IP address blocks are allocated by IANA, which is managed by, you guessed it, ICANN. Just sayin'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Autho...

It all is top-down at the core. (And it kind of has to be, because as much as we think of the Internet as "decentralized", it is a communication network, and so centralized administration is often the most efficient and sane way of doing things.)

It goes to show that even if space and bandwidth are cheap (and they will only get cheaper), creating content will always be enormously expensive.

I don't think you were referring to these, but there are actually a few windowless, fortified concrete skyscrapers in New York that were built as telephone switching centers. Here's one in Lower Manhattan that is 29 stories:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street

They were likewise designed to withstand nuclear fallout. Because telephone switching equipment has shrunken over the years they now rent out some of the floor space as a hosted ultrasecure datacenter.

Well, it appears that this solution scales vertically, not horizontally. Vertical scaling for bike locks is a commercially solvable problem but ROI drops precipitously after about 20 feet.

You should check out http://raphaeljs.com/ , which basically unifies the SVG API in a cross-browser way. In IE, it translates everything to VML on the fly. You need to transcode your SVG to Raphael's JSON-based format, but it's not hard to do.

I didn't downvote you, and I've spent enough time on reddit to stop questioning downvotes because they are too stochastic to spend braincell-seconds trying to interpret. But when I read your comment I immediately questioned why you would call canvas best suited for rendering vector graphics. If anything, VML/SVG via something like Raphael.js is best suited for that, because you can use graphics data exportable from a vector graphics editor like Illustrator, and manipulate the data in your page in a structured way--Raphael somewhat mitigates the painfulness of DOM operations.

I would say canvas is best suited for rendering/processing sprite or pixel-based graphics that does not need mouse interaction, if I had to pigeonhole it. Sure, I've used it via Flot to draw charts, and for purposes that were decidedly vector-ish, but I would never expect to be able to manipulate that stuff without complicated collision data and redraw logic. The API for drawing with the canvas pen is moderately featured but drawing imperatively and trying to act on <canvas>-mouse interaction just isn't scalable or maintainable.

I wonder if that was related to "\n", or if the synthesizer intentionally mapped nonprinting characters to sounds (that would seem to make the command set more complicated than necessary, but bytes were precious then so what do I know.)

Except in Office 2008, where Cmd-‘ is broken! If they didn't fix that in 2011, I am going to switch to OO.o out of spite.

Wait a minute. Unless you already built RDBMS tables with that relationship in mind, you are just as screwed there as you are in Couch. And if you are talking about the time it takes Couch to build a new index for some custom view, I'm sure it's nominal compared to the number of times you feel the need to change or create one.

Re: https with a different domain. XHR doesn't let you access a different domain, you'd have to use JSONP which won't let you trap errors easily. And if I weren't sitting at a page served by HTTPS, I would not enter credit card information, and most web users are trained to look for the padlock icon and all that.

I stand corrected!

Eh, some pseudo-elements have semantic meaning. My best example of this would be :link, which distinguishes between hyperlinks and bare anchors. I would typically associate :before with styling that happens visually before an element, and :after the opposite, but they have been both used here to provide for an icon before the element.