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Latest Stable release: 1.03 / June 15, 1998

Thanks for the recommendation!

I think the hard part is to walk the line between stagnation & over-expansion. This is a dilemma we all face in organizations large and small as well as individually.

Building systems and processes (a.k.a Habits) that allow us to assume and integrate some new set of "stuff" without having to think about them (so we can move on to the next new "stuff") are what sets these companies apart; Amazon has been brilliant at this; however, from my perspective, looking at all the high-rise office buildings going up, it seems like maybe Icarus has flown too high...

But again, I could be building a narrative to fit my preconceived ideas... I'm definitely no authority here. Maybe this is just another blip... I think more troubling to me is the overall degradation in quality of the things I have formerly taken for granted in Amazon -- the quality of the products and ratings.

Funny how this comes on the heels of aggressively expanding their workforce and trying to leverage themselves in a hundred different directions...

Maybe it's just me and my confirmation bias at work, but it seems that the core value proposition that Amazon provided -- high value, low margins on products -- has been eroding before our eyes.

Seems so much like the transition Microsoft made... too much focus on "synergies" and leveraging... not enough on keeping the bilges dry and the engine running.

It's funny... Fred Brooks wrote about this in 1975... and we're still making the same mistakes forty years later. There are real limitations to how quickly any organization can grow. Even awesome companies who are excellent at building organizations -- places like like Amazon and Microsoft -- can't organize this law of software development away.

Entering into a business relationship with an employee bears its own responsibilities; however, all parties know that it's a business relationship. Everyone understands the limits of the responsibilities associated with that relationship & employees always have another employer they can go to if need be.

The same can't be said for a family.

Yeah, it's interesting, I've had the same experience. There's not so much magic lurking beneath the surface. Things are relatively easy to track down when you do need to figure things out; otherwise, things are pretty intuitive.

And when it comes to performance, threads and queueing, not having to deal with duct-tape and gum solutions like Resque (Ruby's "One Ring" (I love it and I hate it)) makes such a big difference.

Sorry, I think I got a bit sidetracked in my response.

I do hope that your current situation gets better or that you find somewhere that isn't so preoccupied with navel gazing.

Huh... didn't even know what POODR was...

Guess I've been faking it for the past nine years... I mean, I did start a company that used Ruby/Rails as the primary platform. And I've worked the last six years in a shop that currently has a team of about 12 Ruby/Rails developers...

Don't get me wrong, Ruby's a tool in my toolbox; I use it like I would any other tool. I like solving problems. Most modern languages make it easy and fun to solve problems.

I don't like when it's easy to see where a language is encumbered by poor choices (I seem to have a diametrically opposed viewpoint of your opinion of the Javascript community; to me, the redundancy, low quality and churn of community libraries is one of Javascript's greater liabilities). But if it works for you, that's great.

Language Holy Wars are necessary for young, budding languages and young, budding programmers. Language Holy Wars help young communities draw others to their banner and young programmers define themselves. Unfortunately, having causes and "bad guys" is a big part of the underlying way we work as people.

But at some point, once a language's adoption has reached critical mass & once you've reached a point where you're comfortable with the underlying paradigms of programming, these Language Holy Wars get left behind for more interesting problems.

I mean, I definitely have opinions about what language I'd prefer to be working in and why, but at this point, I make my determination of technology based on the right tool for the job, not necessarily my opinion of any given language.

most insightful and relevant: Stitch Fix topping out relative to other companies in the same industry because they don't really offer a "whale" option.

the takeaway for me: make a product level for the whale, even if it seems a waste of time, it could very well make or break my business.

(I'm not captain obvious, but I play one on TV)

the enemy of the good is the perfect.

There is no "objective" news; people will always have different ideas of truth; however, i think in this case it's easy to discern a difference by the objective of the actors.

Some actors are purposely attempting to distort colloquial understanding via persuasion and misinformation, others are attempting to describe that colloquial understanding to the best of their abilities.

Our modern shortcoming is that we've just lumped all of these things under the shorthand "News" and thereby implicitly gave them all the same credibility and importance. It used to be that the Editorials and Opinions were clearly denoted and segregated in the newspaper... not anymore.

Though we may disagree on the semantics of what constitutes #realnews determining whether someone is attempting to describe the world through the prism of their own perspective or proactively trying to persuade others to think the same as them is pretty easy to see.

We can get mired in the idea that nothing is perfect, so why bother, or we can make the best of what we have & understand that it will never be perfect.

(apologies for the offtopic nature of this diatribe, this is something I've been spending a lot of time thinking about lately)

couldn't figure out why you were downvoted, your comment seemed to add to the conversation... until I got to

the GP sounds like one of these people, which may explain many of his experiences.

I'm not sure where you get that from what was written in the post, or why you think it would add value to the conversation, but in the future, I'd recommend keeping in mind that unjustified accusations directed at individuals render pretty much anything and everything else you write moot; they become what people take away from what you've expressed.

Ha, my first gig with a hosting company, 2950 was at the top of every. single. rack. We grew that company from a rack to about 40 racks using 2950s. Each one of those racks had hundreds of VPS customers. We didn't have issues with 2950s not doing what they needed to do, in fact, they were perfect for the job -- performance, price and design were just right & the success of the business kind of underscores that.

Later on, I was working a network overhaul at a private college dedicated to video game creation (DigiPen). Each student was provided a desktop with their own roaming profile. These profiles got huge because there were things like 3D Studio Max projects being transferred to whatever computer the student happened to be at during that period. So we're talking about hundreds of students signing on at about the same time & massive amounts of data being transferred in a very short time. The old network topology was melting down on a regular basis causing the entire campus to come to a halt.

We fixed that by putting in a pair of -- you guessed it -- OpenBSD/PF routers. Now this wasn't some "oh crap" kind of bandaid fix; we had planned this all out & implemented over the summer months when there were no students. It was all planned out (the only problem was that the original plan called for FreeBSD & PF, which crashed -- once we had OpenBSD running, it was 'set it & forget it.')

Maybe I'm just too dumb to know the difference, but those 2950s and OpenBSD routers helped me sleep a lot better at night... they were perfect for what they were intended to do.

And as more than a decade of experience since has proven, the right tool for the job is often the one that gets scoffed at as a "toy" or good "for small projects."

Sorry, but there's not much to support the idea that Nokia could have magically made it if only they had picked Android.

The first Samsung Galaxy was shipped in 2009[0] -- over a year before Elop was made CEO of Nokia [1] and nearly two years before the "Windows Phone Strategy" was announced.

In 2011 -- years before any strategy shift to either Windows or Android would have been able to be implemented, Samsung was already shipping more smartphones than anyone else -- including Apple [2]. Nokia didn't ship their first Windows Phone device until November 2011.

It would have been a Blackberry Storm kind of stupid to try taking on Samsung with Android as the platform. There's no compelling reason to pick Nokia over Samsung when the target market is just looking for value. At least with Windows Phone, there was some differentiation they could hope to appeal to consumers with.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop

[2] https://gigaom.com/2012/02/07/npd-apple-sold-most-smartphone...

Back when crushable foam helmets first came out, there was just an elastic cover wrapped around a foam helmet. The effect of the helmet impact was that it always broke apart; the helmet cover just kept the pieces together after impact.

Most helmets now have a plastic skin over the foam which provides some structural integrity while the foam is being crushed [1]. But you are correct, the helmet only works because the kinetic energy is being absorbed by a material whose composition (closed cells) will naturally break apart into smaller pieces when enough kinetic energy is applied.

[1] http://www.bhsi.org/general.htm

I'm sorry, but doesn't this completely ignore the fact that the state has not sanctioned partnerships between same-sex couples and codified that relationship universally? And where those partnerships are sanctioned, it has only happened recently?

And doesn't this ignore that a partnership lasting ten years between adults intrinsically has more gravitas than the 'boyfriend' moniker implies?

I don't make my living writing, but I can easily think of a word that better represents that relationship. Someone who professes to be a professional writer, but can't do that either shouldn't be writing, or has an underlying agenda they are trying to fulfill by using what is obviously the wrong word for what is being described.

I can't see the Blockbuster analogy fully working here. It seems that a big reason why the old video rental model died was simply convenience. .com is the more convenient choice due to inertia.

It seems to me that a better analogy is that the new TLDs seem more like suburbs to a city. .com still lies at the city core, but the suburbs provide for a new type of Internet resident -- those who are willing to trade convenience and location for price and value.

Like Detroit, or the rust-belt in the 80's it's possible that the core becomes rotten, but it seems in those cases, the nexus still remains, but becomes depreciated. It will be interesting to see how domain real-estate follows the patterns exhibited in real-estate as the new TLDs become more ubiquitous; will there eventually be a revival of .com similar to the urban revivals we've seen? Or maybe that's just stretching the analogy a bit too far :)

routing should be 'sticky' to an ip address; connections to any given ip address should use the same outbound route for the duration of that connection.

from http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/mwan3

Linux outgoing network traffic load-balancing is performed on a per-IP connection basis – it is not channel-bonding, where a single connection (e.g. a single download) will use multiple WAN connections simultaneously

It would be awesome to extend this into a library based on FontAwesome; create an abstraction layer which would allow easy reference like CSS.

Yes, one has been able to graft nix to Windows since NT; however, it's still like a third arm dangling off of C:\whatever.

If Microsoft can make a POSIX layer like OS X did -- one that ships with the OS and feels like it is part of the OS -- I'd be very, very interested.

I've been on OS X since Apple was nearly dead (still have my 10.0.6 CD somewhere around here). Before jumping on, I bounced from the promise of Linux distro to FreeBSD, to OpenBSD -- trying to find something that worked as a desktop environment. Once OS X was released, I knew I found what I had been looking for. It definitely wasn't because it was from Apple (back then, using Apple was being counterculture, if not somewhat risky as the business wasn't doing so well); it was because there was finally a desktop OS that had a POSIX layer and a GUI that didn't feel like a third arm grafted on to /usr/local/whatever.

I'm hoping that MS catches the drift that DOS is dead & can kill that sacred cow; I'd love to get a Surface tablet & develop for Windows Phone, but having to deal with DOS is like moving out of a house and trying to live in a tent. My experiences with Powershell haven't been all that much better. It's definitely not got the same problems as DOS, but in my experience it didn't implement the paradigm of a pipeable set of simple tools to accomplish singular tasks.

I'd love to see a POSIX compliant Microsoft OS. And to me, these recent changes bode well -- it seems that Microsoft realizes it must be a part of a larger ecosystem. The is the kind of OS I want to work with has this kind of thinking at its core.

Not sure how sincere you're being, but I'll explain: Robotics is expensive, which is why people are still doing these tasks. 3D printing helps make robotics ubiquitous. Think back to the golden era before the PC, or the days of yore, when the only guys using a 'cell phone' were guys in limousines.

Now, I can go get a computer more powerful than a Cray for $200 & put it in my pocket; not to mention that I can also talk to other people on it.

We're on the shoulders of giants right now, my friend. And in kind, work being done today will give the programmer the capacity to replace cheap, forced labor with cheaper robots.

Probably not; however, their 3D printed robot in a kiosk probably would.

This is an interesting thought, and I really like how you've expressed it. The metaphor of mediaeval monks to your canonical computer scientist and of the modern university to monasteries is so rich, but you only hint at it.

Considering how relatively recent our cultural conversion from orality to literacy was, and how quickly society shifted, your metaphor becomes even more rich and meaningful.

Shakespeare stands at the border between the worlds of orality and literacy. Kind of makes me wonder who the Shakespeare of today will be in five-hundred years.

I understand that the Smalltalk like syntax of Objective C can be difficult to understand at first glance; however, once you've worked with it a bit, the syntax becomes quite expressive -- each argument is labeled; something like using named arguments in Ruby, but it's not optional.

Not sure what you mean about the APIs being nasty. Can you elucidate?

Jumpcut is fairly close to what you're asking for. I guess you could map command + v to Jumpcut & override default paste functionality. Personally I prefer to use option + v.

http://jumpcut.sourceforge.net.

I can say that when I was stationed in Germany that I felt safer.

I grew up around guns. I was a pretty good shot -- expert with the M16, M60.

But I own no guns now. I never will.

I simply don't understand how someone can feel safer around a loaded gun. It's a fallacy to think that because you've gone through training, or that you go to the range, or whatever, that you are better equipped to handle a weapon; it's akin to claiming that you are safer walking around with a lit stick of dynamite -- just because you have done it a lot.

Which leads to why I felt so much safer in Germany. It wasn't the idea that criminals didn't have guns, it was that every empty-headed fool didn't have one. The real problem is that I am subjected to every fool's second-ammendment rights. It's not just that they can blow their own head off with their foolishness, but that me and my family are also endangered by them.

Although they may be our family, friends and neighbors; although they may be good people; they endanger us through their "rights." I would much rather live in the "danger" of a place where only criminals, police and soldiers carry weapons than to live in the "safety" of a place where any fool with a pinch of paranoia who has watched too many action-adventure apocalyptic movies can play soldier.

I commute through downtown Seattle every day & wear headphones. It's not very evident when you're in a car, but the wind in your ears is very loud. Loud enough that you can't use your ears to hear the cars behind as they approach. I've found a mirror to be a much more effective way to be aware of approaching traffic from behind.

The headphones I wear are not just some ear-buds -- they are seated in my ear & block out most ambient noise. I wear them to preserve my hearing.

Personally, I enjoy my rides more not having the sound of thundering traffic rolling past over the roar of wind rushing past my ears. I'm quite aware of the traffic around; I can still hear them as much as I would if I didn't have the headphones in. But it's much less intimidating (not to mention the music makes things even more enjoyable).

my solution to this is to have an auto-login non-admin account on the machine that's not my own account.

Give them enough access to get on the internet & use the machine. Keep my files stored in my own account.

I do understand the chain of command associated with the DOJ. What this article implies as well as your response is that the Whitehouse should be taking an active role in any matter of criminal investigation.

Because the DOJ falls under the executive branch to fulfill its duties, doesn't mean that it's at the behest of the Whitehouse, nor should it. It's very disconcerting that anyone would think it should be.

Do you think the Whitehouse should start investigating people on the basis of a petition?

Should the Whitehouse have anything to do with any investigation at all?

You imply that it should by this thread. As if the Whitehouse should be manipulating the justice system to whatever your ends du jour are. It's a conflict of interest that the Whitehouse should be involved in any investigation.

Maybe you don't realize that. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt although this thread smacks of half-baked bomb throwing and an implied guilt-by-association more appropriate for redstate or dailykos.

Only the first use would need remote access. Assuming that the user just downloaded from the app store, that should be fairly safe assumption.

After the initial connection is made and the trial started, the trial end date can be verified via remote connection but fallback to internal clock for the current timestamp.

Not sure why you couldn't set up a trial version using in app purchases and a server that records device ID and trial dates.

Seems like all the parts are already there and it would not be difficult to implement.

You rely on a server for trial functionality, but in the end you have much more control of the system...