trebuch3t

Thanks for the contrarian perspective. Sure, there's the pain of dealing with drivers and settings and tweaks with Windows, even with Win7, but it's certainly not any worse than getting Linux to work.

> What if the nightmare imagined by George Orwell in 1984 were real? What if you had to live in a country where radio dials were fixed to a single government station? Where the surroundings were entirely black-and-white except for the red lettering of the propaganda signs? Where you were required to keep a large portrait of the president on your living room wall and bow to it on national holidays?

This sounds like an incredible read. I just ordered a copy from Amazon. Thanks for the recommendation!

Writing a book on Modern Perl is nuts.

As the author of this post points out, there have been about twenty releases since Perl 5.6, when the book was published. Features like the "switch" and "state" keywords have been introduced. If you look away too quickly, another database interface crops up, or people are doing objects differently. Perl changes so often that writing about it is like trapping a unicorn.

It's impressive that users of a 25-year-old language are not afraid to improve upon it (with the caveat that it stays backwards compatible). But since I started using $OTHER_LANGUAGE I don't have to worry about keeping up to date because language features change twice a decade.

Agreed. I assume this is font ligature magic, like when you type "Zapfino" in Zapfino?

The issue is less about the UN trying to take control of Internet authority, it is more about what seems to be growing discontent with the US having all of the control. See the Chinese RFC about "internal internets" mentioned yesterday.

This seems to come up every few years ago, then there's buzz about it, and then everyone realizes that the Internet works just fine and everything goes back to normal.

I'm always amazed that a country which refuses to properly educate its people in math and science is able to pull off technological feats such as jamming GPS and distributing malware.

Agreed. I tried for a few days before giving up. Unless you're happy with Chosen's default options you'll spend days trying to customize it.

I was going to get details from status.heroku.com but that's down too.

That's it. This thread sold me. Installing zsh now!

Agreed. Facebook has turned into a stream of blabber and pictures of people's kids (no offence).

What is NOT noisy is:

* Path (just my close friends)

* Pair (just my girlfriend)

* Google+ (the "what's hot" news feed is actually pretty interesting)

Backbone has pretty much changed the way I write JavaScript apps.

It's not soviet but if you're interested in this you should also see all of the programs used in the Apollo and Gemeni missions:

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/links.html

I think it's impressive that an algorithm can crack the CAPTCHAs. I get them wrong most of the time.

Smart. Facebook nailed photos and now they need to nail mobile. No wonder they bought Instagram.