StrawberryFrog

> I don't know about the quality of the English translations of his books

I don't know about the quality of the original Polish, but ... some of his heavier works are well, heavy in the English version. I'm thinking of "Solaris", "His Master's Voice", "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub". They are good books - but so are Dickens, Tolstoy etc. which require a bit of effort from the modern reader.

However the Cyberiad is an absolute pleasure to read. I read it when I was in my early teens and I ate it up - it challenged my mind, made me laugh and was very easy to read. Other lighter ones - "Tales of Pirx the Pilot", "The Futurological Congress", "A Perfect Vacuum" are easy to read too.

It's very similar to the argument that Jeff Atwood gave a while back that "If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no matter what" ( http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/programming-is-hard... )

And taken on those terms - not on the cost accounting of cloud vs local - it makes sense to me. Is it a convincing "no matter what" argument against cloud hosting in all cases? I'd say no - there will be cases where sheer scale or fluctuations in scale make cloud hosting more attractive. as the article admits.

It looks like he's using their logo too.

> By your logic, if the Iranian government accuses someone of sluttiness, spying or apostacy, we should extradite the accused to Iran.

If they were accused of sluttiness while they were in Iran, by an Iranian citizen or two, then there might just be a case to answer. Like what happened to these two unfortunates: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7673046.stm

> Considering Assange has probably been pretty careful and paranoid

You'd expect that, wouldn't you. But then his whole career show less risk-aversion than most people. To put it mildly.

Conspiracies are pretty rare, but opportunistic behaviour by governments is not hard to believe. Pissing off governments is like running for president; your transgressions will be dug up and used against you.

Are you finding it hard to believe that the US government is trying to disrupt Wikileaks by unusual means, outside of any potential legal proceedings? But this is not theory, it's known fact - both Visa and Amazon dropped Wikileaks after pressure. It's been successful too.

I agree that lack of email is mad. But how big a decision can this be? If it can run programs, it can run an mail client. Even an exchange client. "it won't have an email client" is not part of the hardware design, it's just that the software hasn't been written/ported yet.

That's not quite right though; there is a CSS level 3 and these specs are in it.

In summary: no, they're in CSS3; but it's all modular and might not be implemented at the same time.

There is incentive for MS Grids to go forward soon, they're important to MS for use in Windows 8.

Also, they're cool, or rather they're a sane layout scheme and it's awful that CSS hasn't had one up to now.

The irony is that Firefox and Chrome will implement them at about the same time that they become official. But we won't be able to use them widely until IE7,8 and 9 have faded from the web. MS giveth, MS taketh away.

Are the ms-grids and the multicolumn layouts in CSS4? It doesn't look like it from that draft. Are they just free-floating proposals at this stage?

It shows that the DMCA and Patriot act were not an aberration, were not an anomaly that would be rolled back; but the shape of things to come, part of a trend. Note the use in the title of the words "back" and "worse than ever". This is not a one-off.

Have you tried reading a PDF on a kindle? It works. technically. But it's not pleasant.

> > In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.

> I think Yegge's just defined the best characterization of the 1%

"she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human" - William Gibson, "Count Zero", 1986

Maybe, but I enjoyed reading all of Steve Yegge's rant. It was informative and funny. And I don't even work for google. And it wasn't really even 10 pages long. The criticism of its length is fatuous and flippant, and not substantive.

In pg's Hierarchy of arguments http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html , "I stopped reading after x pages" is "DH2: Responding to Tone" and therefore always unconvincing.

Maybe it's my unenlightened European perspective coming out here, but why is this a big deal?

Facebook chose to do business in Europe, Facebook chose to be governed by European law.

"oversized" is different to "larger"

I'd guess WordStar. Or failing that, WordPerfect.

WordPerfect was more commonly seen, but WordStar fits the description of "Runs on CP/M and is not supported" better.

Edit: See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar#Abandonment

> Actually there is no difference between search page result sites like the OP and what you said

Uh, yes there is. http://www.somesite.com/index.html?q=foo is obviously a search (right down to the choice if q for query), but http://www.somesite.com/buy_foo_now.html does not look like one.

You might say that technically they could have the same back-end, but the web is flexible - just about any URL scheme could resolve to the same back-end. The difference is that the first is honest and the second one goes out of its way to hide what it does.

Great comment.

> Before cars, towns were organized for churches or shuls to be within walking distance which means segregation.

It's not gone. Some areas of North London are full of kosher delis, men with black hats and side-curls, etc, some don't have any.

> At the end of day, you seem to miss my point altogether. Testing for the skill is not useful in itself. It is just an heuristic.

I see the point, I just disagree with it. There's some validity to using CS101 knowledge as a heuristic, but as you have admitted, it's not perfect. We just disagree on how imperfect it is.

> First, knowing your 101 Data structures is correlated to your Computer Science general knowledge.

I can't quite shake the idea that what you're really testing is if the applicant has been to the same kind of school as yourself.

> There are jobs that merely require churning out bland CRUD application code, and it does not make much of a difference if you know this stuff

I've seen some really interesting (and performance-constrained) code done in .Net that didn't use pointers or linked lists in any way. It's not either "bland crud" or pointers, that's a false dichotomy.

Of course, concepts like parse trees, A-B pruning or Hungarian method of optimization are things that are worth having a hold on. But "how often you expect to use the skill" of linked lists with pointers in many modern languages, Java and C# included, is effectively never.

No idea where the crap java code for a sorted list came from, hope you're not trying to put those words in my mouth!

In the .Net world, good companies do try to look out for "broader" developers who are aware of useful open-source software toolkits, and want to practice things like Dependency Injection, TDD, Continuous Integration etc. They generally make better coders.

> Even if we don't manipulate these data structures directly these days in code

We don't manipulate them indirectly either; .Net or Java lists aren't implemented like that.

> implement an algorithm that finds the value of the element in the middle of a linked list

I'm struggling to think of the last time I had to use a linked list for anything. I'd be tempted to give the troll answer: put the elements into a List<T> already, divide list.Count by 2....

Sure if it's doubly linked then you can walk it from both ends and meet in the middle, then think about how to handle the case where there are an even number of elements, but do you really want a serious answer about linked lists in .Net?

Good developers are hard to find at any price.

Oddly, I also recently switched to chrome. Firefox started randomly freezing up. Sadly, it looks like some corner-cases have slipped through the FF quality control now that they are releasing faster.

I notice that Firefox 7 has gone to 7.01 today. What's changed? It doesn't seem to have helped me.

As others have pointed out, a the point of a "phase 1 trial" is to find out how safe the treatment is. This drug passed.

Once that is done, how well it works is the Phase 2. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trial#Phases

> I've yet to see a positive comment regarding this new feature

Spotify -> Facebook integration used to be optional. Now it's becoming mandatory. It's hard to find an upside of that for users.

The only upside that I can possibly think of is that some ... "non-technical" users won't get confused by choices. So now the choice has now been made for them to exchange their privacy for happy fun friend feeds. Simple!

Correlation is not causation, so forcing all new users into that workflow won't necessarily make them the kind of people who would do that voluntarily.

Also, this is a statistical relationship - there will be users who were likely to buy premium membership but don't like facebook, who are now less likely to buy. Or who are now reconsidering their existing spotify subscriptions.

I'll take a guess at the pros and cons for spotify:

Pro: some users like the integration and the social features that it gives them. This doesn't explain why it's now mandatory, or why it's become mandatory right now.

Pro: Has Spotify done some kind of deal with Facebook, and Facebook insisted on this? I put "pro" since I assume that Spotify also got something out of the hypothetical deal.

Con: There are some users (like myself) who think that facebook knows enough about me already, and really do not want to integrate them into anything. I like the face that the web is not an extension of the facebook machine.

As an existing Spotify user this policy does not apply to me (yet?) but it's repellent. As a paying Spotify user I don't feel that I would be obliged to put up with that. I don't complain about FB too much since hey, I didn't pay anything for it and no-body actually forced me to use it. I know, "if you're not the customer, you're the product" - but with Spotify, I bloody well am the paying customer, they've got my money, they don't need to sell me to Facebook. They can take their Facebook integration and GTFO.

Edit: a friend has suggested that Spotify are angling to be bought by Facebook, and this will help them integrate for that.

It's worth noting that Spotify used to have optional facebook integration, i.e. "the standard Facebook - or - Default sign up page", and they have taken the effort to remove this for new signups. There must be some reason for actively removing this choice, and I don't think that "mass-market users are confused by having 2 different choices" is it.