docmach

How is this related to Duff's device?

I use SubEthaEdit or TextWrangler depending on what I'm writing. SubEthaEdit has better syntax highlighting for some things, including Go, but TextWrangler acts more like I want it to.

I've also been using it for a few months and I tried a restore. What I found out is that the large zip files they create don't work. They warn you about creating zip files over a certain size, but I tried it anyway. I couldn't get it to unzip successfully on Mac OS X or Solaris using a variety of programs.

I'm also skeptical of their data integrity. From reading about there setup it seems that they have no checksumming and their only redundancy is RAID. So bad blocks or multiple disk failure could cause data loss. It's still worth it for my because it's so cheap, but I wouldn't make it my only backup.

It is and there is no tax on people who don't have road crossing insurance. It's a risk that you can choose to take. If you choose to not have medical insurance and you can't pay for medical care then you might die, but it should be up to you choose if the risk is acceptable or not.

Health insurance is optional. My parents never had health insurance and were always able to pay for medical expenses, even with six kids. I also don't have health insurance and so far I've also had no problems paying for medical care. I don't know where the idea that health insurance is a necessity comes from, but it's not based on fact.

How does Coke have the better product? Maybe Coke's dominance is due to choosing the right logo and sticking with it instead of constantly changing their visual identity.

How would this work? Spammers aren't going to use a web browser with this feature, so it would only bother real people.

How is forcing companies to give services away for free a good idea? What if most people decide that 1Mb is good enough and don't pay for anything? It seems like this is bad for the people who are willing to pay.

Where people live has a huge impact on the cost of providing internet service to them, so why shouldn't it matter where they live?

Why would icc help more?

That is exactly what ZFS does.

I don't know if it would be cheaper or not, but since they don't need to be written to they could just use read-only solid state memory instead. I think it could easily more durable and convenient and I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet.

How writing a compiler not cool? Just because someone uses a book and targets the JVM, which is a great target platform for a lot several reasons, doesn't mean they aren't doing it just because it's fun.

I'm pretty sure Sun isn't worried about Backblaze as competition in the enterprise storage market. Building cheap storage boxes is much different than building what Sun provides.

Why?

That's because Apple provides new API features in new releases of the OS and software developers take advantage of them. It's not that hard to write software that runs on many versions of OS X, but it does limit the features you can take advantage of. I think it's worth not being able to use some apps on my older computers if they provide something worthwhile, so this doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.

Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) offers feature 4.

I'm not saying piracy is ok, I'm just saying that piracy is not the same as robbery and that taking credit for something that you didn't create is separate from piracy. The creators should have some control over their creations, but they don't have absolute control over it once they share it with other people. How much control they should have is still an open issue for me.

The net result is not the same. Revenue may be taken from the creator, but credit is not.

Those are very imperative concepts and while imperative programming is good for some things, a language that teaches and allows for higher-level programming is probably a good idea. Languages like Python and Ruby allow functional and object-oriented programming which are becoming more and more common.

Being a superset of JavaScript doesn't mean it can do more, it just means that all valid JavaScript is valid Objective-J.

I disagree with your assumption that no serious programmer would use camel case. Apple's APIs use it and I don't think I've ever seen any program that uses them without using camel case. I find it very easy to read and prefer it to hyphens and underscores.

What don't you like about their version of Solaris?

One problem I have with Lisp is that there are a lot more fanatics than in other languages' communities. They are easily upset by even the mention of other languages and seem to see Lisp as the ultimate language with no room for any others. This produces blog and newsgroup posts extolling the virtues of Lisp and telling everyone who doesn't love Lisp that there is something wrong with them. People who say they know Lisp and still choose to use other languages are looked at as particularly defective. It's not just that they don't want to use other languages, it's more like they don't want other languages to exist. They spend at least as much time trying to make other languages look bad as they do trying to make Lisp look good.

I know this doesn't describe everyone who uses Lisp, but these fanatics are very vocal and the reason I stopped reading comp.lang.lisp and decided to try other languages. I am not against being excited about a language and trying to convince other people to use it. I love Haskell and tell people about how wonderful it is all the time, but I understand that they have reasons for using the tools they do. I am more interested in the theory of a language than in how good it is at solving some practical problem, but some people don't care at all about theory and just want to get things done. I don't understand why, but I accept it. I think that the most important thing the Lisp community can do to be more popular is to be friendly to newcomers and those who disagree about Lisp's superiority. There are some very helpful and friendly people, they just need to be more vocal and drown out those who are not.

Do you still want to program for the 486 or are you looking to program using a more modern environment? If you are going to program for a modern platform, which one would you like to target? No matter which platform you choose you will probably want to use OpenGL. For that I recommend http://nehe.gamedev.net. If you want to develop for Mac OS X then I recommend http://www.idevgames.com and in particular http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11896.

UTF-8 can represent any Unicode character.