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Noticeably missing were numbers for <$language sucks> and <$language rules>. Job ads definitely count as endorsements, but somehow I don't think of Lambda The Ultimate as a bastion of Java love.

There are casual games -- but you're not going to be working on the cool 3D stuff unless you bow to the giant studios and work 80 hours a week.

Monotype fonts are tough to get right. The Latin alphabet evolved "off the grid", as did all of its prominent variations -- for example black letter (sometimes called "gothic"), humanist (the fore-runner of our "roman type"), and chancery cursive (the fore-runner of our "italic"). The only precursor for monotype is the large, decorated capitals at the beginning of chapters and sections -- "illuminated letters" -- that were approximately square.

Some consequence: the poor spacing of the letters 'i' and 'l', and the squashed, dark appearance of the 'm' and 'w' in monotype fonts. There is something of a hopeless in the task, though, since any good monotype font will have hundreds of characters in it: punctuation, numbers, European letters, mathematical marks...

Making them all look right together, with the additional constraint of identical size, is a Herculean task.

This is cute, but it would be even cuter if the JDK worked on Leopard. Little snipes at Windows -- which has gotten more stable with time -- only draw attention to the fact that Apple's house is not in order.

seconded

I agree with (1), but most "functional" languages aren't just functional.

As for (2) -- "A rising tide lifts all boats."

This is cute but first-class functions would be better. I've had to switch to Python to find them.

This approach should be sensitive to sample size, but I don't see any discussion of that. If he's tried it a lot, there should be some discussion of error on the first 10 hours, 100 hours, 1000 hours...

This is neat. We can hope for more entrants in the "CSS platform space" -- the base-line for web site usability will improve as a result, as most designers will be able to move up to a higher level of "typographical abstractions" without getting stuck on one or two bit-rotting libs.

Eat with them every day for a week. You will find out a lot about each other.

> ...because I know emotions can fog up the intellect and really mess up your decisions.

Is there a particular emotion that's giving you trouble? I wouldn't distrust all of them...

Spiritual truths can be so saccharin.

The MQ extension for Mercurial lets you manipulate and version control the _patches_ as well as the actual code. It's kinda weird -- "higher-order version control".

I'm working with a client whose chosen Mercurial. I like being able to group relevant changes into one commit, comment it and then move on to the next commit, without interfering with the trunk.

Mercurial leaves much to be desired in the efficiency of it's copies -- it's file backed, not db backed, using copy on write for copies; whereas Subversion delta encodes everything. While cheap storage is not such a big deal for managing source code, it does matter when using version control for art assets.

Do you use either one?

Why was this post down-modded?

Do efforts to save Lisp just detract from the growth of functional programming in general?

This has a little of the flavor of "Valley Wag" -- subtly slamming innovators for failing to fix the internet/economy/government. Scribd allows people to share content and, lo and behold, people use it to share porn -- just like Facebook, youTube, Flickr...

The author can't really make up their mind as to where Scribd is in error: are they using porn to drive up traffic, or do they fail to have right the disclaimer? Going so far as to ask whether it is "acceptable for a VC backed company to drive growth via porn?", the author back pedals and asks for an "Are you OK with this?" dialogue, though the site already has it. (Maybe that changed recently?)

Industrialism was less of a jump for China and Japan (and maybe the other places you mention -- I am not too familiar with their history) because they already had regimented work, national markets, centralized governments, &c.

> > I would be happy to tell you how stupid you are based > > on some unhappy incident in your people's history. > You misunderstood me...

My point is, many of the "smart" peoples of the world were embroiled, not too long ago, in the pleasures of fascism. Consider also the Chinese -- they are smarter than all of us. What kind of government have they got? Not one characterized by its trust of the people...

I know a few smart women. Even if there are important statistical differences between men and women in the way of analytical ability, we still have to take individual men and women on their own merits.

It's too bad that colleges are unfairly admitting sub-par women, but then again, that's probably not as bad a thing as admitting all those god damn business majors...

Why would a brilliant autocrat decide to trust the people's decisions?

The political and economic freedom of Western Europe and its friends is substantially the result of historical accident -- as is the poor state of Africa. Many of the post-colonial nations experienced autocratic catastrophe, seemingly in proportion to the degree in which industrialism was a jump for them.

If you want tell me what ethnic group you are descended from, I would be happy to tell you how stupid you are based on some unhappy incident in your people's history. I, for one, have a lot of German in me. Are Germans smart for their rockets or dumb for their Fuhrer?

I'm 26. I was in college for two years, studying Physics and then CS. I left to study Zen, in California, and then went into contracting.

Good point, thanks for bringing that up.

What about a good shell environment, stability, package management?

An OS is a lot of different things. It's too bad that the OS market is dominated by superficial concern with 'interoperability' (defined in the narrowest sense) and appearance. You can't get the best of everything, all in one nice package. Make sure the things you want the best of are really the things you can make the best use of!

I followed that routine for three weeks with FreeBSD -- the first time I had ever worked with a UNIX family OS. After I finally figured out the basics of partitioning a drive, setting the locale and time, I didn't 'reinstall' again until, three years later, I switched to Gentoo Linux.

The author hints at a major issue with corporate deployments -- old machines. It's all fine, well and good that Vista runs on machines it shipped with; but many large shops have to turn down an upgrade to Vista just because the performance is egregiously bad on older machines. By extension, it is unwise for developers to assume that Vista will be there when they need it, making it unsuitable as a platform for the near future.

You could just learn to compile a kernel. Not that tough, really -- and a valuable skill if you want to know about Xen and other things.

I think he's missing the point by focusing on the GUI -- it's a uniform userland, not a uniform appearance, that facilitates interoperability. User management, permissions and a model for resources go a long way toward making a platform.

As Firefox, Silverlight & al. become more and more like desktops, virtualization allows Linux to become more like a cross-platform application environment. Web apps often find themselves recreating userland fundamentals. The people at Vita Nuova caught on to this a few years ago, and released a version of Inferno (Unix relative) as a browser plugin.

I use vim and gvim.

It is precisely because there is risk involved in giving a loan that there is any profit to be made. If the legal system actively enforced repayment through debtors' prison and the like, there would be no basis for interest.

> My question is this: is envy a good thing?

Well, envy causes suffering, and suffering is bad; so no, envy is not good. You can not want something so badly that you get it. It's true that chance favors the prepared mind, but not always.

What can you do to be happy now? It's not that hard. There is honor and pleasure in cutting an onion well.