danieldon

    I think any OS will deteriorate over time with use.

And pretty much the only time a normal user would ever need to reinstall OS X is if something went seriously wrong with the system files. It's a very abnormal thing to encounter. And even if you somehow need to do so, the option to preserve user information has been in OS X for a long time.

Interestingly, on the one that eventually got the home page indexed by bing, the bulk of the content is still not linked from the main page, but can be fully crawled via deeper links people have posted elsewhere. Google crawled it via those links, Bing still only sees the front page.

  Obsolete is a verb, but it is a poor choice. A better
  choice would be obsolesce, as in: "LESS.js will 
  obsolesce CSS"

With more and more projects moving to Issues (and being in the midst of everything getting updated for Rails 3), I've started running into this on a near daily basis.

I don't want to knock on github because the github guys have obviously been doing a fantastic job with it, but I really wish Issues didn't rely so heavily on Javascript.

I'll reiterate that I recommend highlighting gemcutter. qrush and the contributors have done an excellent job with it, it contains examples of how to approach a variety of tasks (even has examples of using metal, middleware and embeddable sinatra), the code is clear and adheres to conventions and it's used in a real production app that every Ruby developers has contact with.

If you don't know what I'm referring to, start reading the code, notice that there are a bunch of weird, non-standard methods that don't seem to be defined anywhere and notice that core classes don't work the way you expect. Then, maybe you'll end up needing to do what I had to, grep the project to find all the monkey patching here: http://github.com/stevenbristol/lovd-by-less/tree/master/ven...

That mostly undocumented plugin, which introduces changes used extensively throughout the app, is not the kind of thing that should be presented to new Rails developers as a good practice.

Aside from the monkey patching, lovd by less does provide some very good examples of how to approach a variety of things in Rails, but the monkey patching is so pervasive that it's unavoidable.

Also very notably absent is gemcutter (http://github.com/qrush/gemcutter) which is actually clean, modern and adheres to conventions.

What's really unfortunate is that the handful of features that the majority of people are really itching for don't require the kind of Big Rewrite/second-system effect that's currently going on. It's frustrating.

Sure, simple box positioning is easier and most of the stock jQuery UI library works fine, but it's precisely when you try to do anything moderately fancy that IE can quickly because a major hassle.

I don't have a precise solution. In my experience, zero tolerance for off-topic subjects like political discussions is the best way to keep online communities healthy. As the saying goes, give an inch and they'll take a mile. Somehow making the "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" clause stricter would go a long way to improving quality overall.

Most of the time companies just pay up, as in the recent Amazon licensing deal. Salesforce apparently decided not to.

Both this situation and the one with Amazon also suggest that they are now specifically targeting online/SaaS companies.

I don't know the actual extent to which copyright protection covers font software or derivatives. There is at least some related case law, but I've only skimmed it and am not an attorney.

    That means you can not use the fonts for any electronic
    documents whatsoever unless you convert them to bitmaps, 
    which means they are almost useless for PDFs.

What's your explanation for why IE is consistently out of sync with the rest of the browser landscape?

Because for the vast majority of web development, having browsers with similar performance to other browsers while supporting the same standards is vastly more preferable than having one widely-used browser with better performance in some areas that continues to make cross-browser development difficult or impossible.

You must be joking. It's great that they have finally decided to add SVG support, but bragging about SVG "hardware acceleration" when they won't even commit to supporting the canvas tag is unconscionable.

It's also this kind of thing that makes it clear that either the IE team has its priorities completely out of whack or that Microsoft is trying to throw a spoke in the wheel of progress on the web.

Edit: I don't know what you hope to gain by downvoting. It doesn't change the fact that IE is and, from all indications will continue to be, the odd browser out.

There certainly are some in the wild, but Microsoft doesn't need to have support for these old applications hold back progress. They certainly can (and do) have separate modes within the same browser, they could even run separate engines. They could also just distribute a separate "Legacy IE" application to support these apps.

But that's one of the many problems with Microsoft: they refuse to make hard decisions.

Even creating derivatives of fonts is often restricted, eg, the Adobe Font Folio EULA considers derivatives under the same license as full fonts and the Linotype EULA states "It must be ensured that the Font Software cannot be fully or partially extracted from said documents" (emphasis mine). So, presumably, it would be potentially problematic even if you are extracting individual characters and generating new fonts.

As I understand it, since fonts can't be copyrighted it's purely a software licensing & "piracy" issue. If you've figured out a way we can all get around that it would be a big deal. Maybe you are in a unique situation because you aren't agreeing to an EULA and, instead, simply extracting characters from fonts embedded in documents uploaded by your users. Hopefully you'll share the details of how your attorneys have advised you about what a website's liability is in this area using different techniques

Honestly, on one hand I'm hesitant to comment about it and give a voice or any encouragement to the foundries, but on the other hand it would be pretty shitty if scribd just skirts these issues and plays fast and loose with the situation while the rest of the web is still stuck using the same old font stacks because they can't afford to risk the legal fees.