markdennehy

You mean "App Store did a really good job copying a standard practice in the software world to a specific domain that Steam was doing a really good job in already, and though brand and lock-in, managed to survive where on pure merit, it wouldn't have".

So... stop using a debugged and stable tool whose limitations and problems are well-known and understood and replace it with six bits of software duct-taped together, two of which aren't working yet (if they even exist), without any idea of how they interact when they hit edge cases.

I mean, "don't use X, use ShinyX instead" is one thing (and most of the time it's a bad thing but it does occasionally turn up good ideas), but this is just So Much Worse...

That's not what I'm advocating. What I'm advocating is not wasting time and effort rewriting working tools just because the rewrite would be newer.

Which is not what you're saying I'm advocating.

(a) To some of us, that's not that long ago :D (b) Vim is an IDE. No, seriously, if you can run the debugger, the compiler and a plethora of other tools from within it, it is an IDE. You might not like it, but... (c) IDE, DDE, doesn't matter. Some of us work faster in IDEs, some in DDEs. Now, if you don't grok what's happening from your source down to the metal, that matters.

(d) When did I specifically pick out IDEs as the sole example of new and shiny? Or did you just read my comment without parsing it?

Or you could just use LaTeX, which has been used for writing books for decades (the word you're looking for is "debugged" and the phrase is either "well understood" or "well documented").

And yes, there are efforts underway to improve it (LaTeX3) but 2e works so well, there's not been much drive there.

And if you find LaTeX is so hard, there's always LyX...

Newton would have some things to say about that, but you wouldn't hear him because of your doppler shift.

Why expend manpower and energy improving a working solution just to do so when you have so many other broken things that need fixing first? That's a fairly self-answering question. There's a reason the expression is "If it's not broken, don't fix it".

> It baffles me why in 2014, some developers still prefer to work as if UNIX System V had just been released.

Because (a) some of us aren't convinced that things like IDEs give a better view of what's going on in the system; (b) some of us think that fundamental tools like terminal emulators, editors and so on should be debugged and stable because we have to earn our mortgage payments using them and chasing the shiny isn't on our job description; (c) any actually useful new idea winds up in Vim anyway.

You want to use a new shiny unproven editor, grand, have a ball. But don't ask me to purely on the basis that it's not new and shiny.

1) You run latex twice only on really large and complex documents like books, and if you're writing books (not editing, see antipope.org for details) in Word, then you need professional help.

2) Markdown and LaTeX are designed for different tasks. Next you'll be telling me that if you have a leafblower, you have no need for a chainsaw.

3) Find me the structured and annotated data streams first - and show me that the structure and annotations are correct - then lament the lack of a shell that can route them to the programs that don't interpret stdin and stdout and stderr that way anyway.

4) I use vim to write latex when I write latex, but "in a bash shell" doesn't make any sense. You fire up vim from bash, yes, but unless you're trying to do an ex-style editing session, you're not editing in the shell any more than you're editing in the kernel or the tty driver...

Because if you want to argue over the meaning of the word billionaire, you start with why we shouldn't have changed the meaning of the word billion :)

When you're talking about personal wealth, there's a real danger of money going from a tool to do stuff; to being a way to keep score. And that latter road leads to the worst kind of arsehole-ry (damn, that needs a better word).

You might give more credit to the hundred or so people (all the equivalent of our PhD graduates today) who were doing the actual work for him.

Edison's contribution was to pay them enough so they could eat and live, and point them at a project.

And Edison's an even more interesting example to bring up in a Jobs discussion because of the whole history between himself and Tesla (and if nothing else tells you about the man's character, the elephant-electrocuting nonsense during the current wars would tell you all you needed to know).

> It's well agreed upon that paper trading is nothing like trading with money on the line. It's ALL about psychology.

It's also pretty well agreed on (mainly from scientific studies into the actual results of investors) that this is not only bullcrap, but believing it's true was a major contributing factor in the enormous economic disaster we're all still living through right now. I'd like to say how galling it is to see someone hasn't learnt the basic hubris-based lesson we paid so much for -- except that I really can't express that in words adequately.

Wow.

You do get, don't you, that there's no real difference between personal wealths of $100 million and $1000 million? And that there shouldn't be? Why do so few people get that there's a ceiling here? You earn enough money so that you can live off the interest of what's in your bank account, and congratulations, your financial worth is now $MAX.

Seriously. $MAX is a real thing in the real world. It's where you can stop working for money and start spending all your life with your kids, or doing the things you want to do regardless of the mortgage and the food bills and the school bills and so on.

Folks who think $MAX is a naive concept... need to grow up a little bit and remember that life ends and if you don't enjoy it during it, you don't get to enjoy it afterwards.

> It turns out people like Woz need people like Steve Jobs, and people like Steve Jobs need people like Woz.

The former is truly unlikely and the latter is desperately true but omits the context completely and paints things in an almost pleasant light which frankly seems wrong to me.

It turns out that people like Woz have a completely different metric for things like happiness and success than people like Jobs. If Jobs had been hit by a bus before Woz met him, Woz would have gone on to have as long and happy a life as he's had because he'd still have made cool stuff and that makes him happy (something most of us, I would guess, can grok). He wouldn't, in all likelihood, ever have had a problem getting work doing fun stuff because talented people are rare and so tend not to have that problem. And he'd probably have made enough money to be comfortably well-off, he might even have struck it rich, but it wouldn't have been a necessary condition for him to be happy and fulfilled.

On the other hand, had Woz been hit by a bus, Jobs probably wouldn't even be a footnote in history at this point and would have died miserable because his metric appears to have used the accumulation of wealth as the definition of success and happiness; and he wasn't capable of building things without guys like Woz. Guys like Jobs, without guys like Woz, are generally just unproductive drains on society. Wooo, you had a long-term vision for a new product. Yes, you're special. Because nobody else ever watched star trek and then thought a tablet computer would be neat. Nobody ever read or watched science fiction and thought to try to make the gadgets described in there.

Yeah, right. I know who I'd point my son at as a role model, and it's not Jobs.

Churchill's an interesting example to bring up in what has become a thread about hero worship. The man was revered during the war and in all the gosh-wasn't-it-a-romantic-age reminiscences since; so much so that they gloss over things like his having proposed the Battle of Gallipoli and being sacked from the cabinet for that; his being the first person to push using gas on the Kurds (beating Saddam to it by quite a few years); and him being the only wartime leader to be ousted by a landslide majority before the war ended (and thus getting himself chucked out of cabinet in both world wars -- I don't think anyone else managed to do that either).

It does rather support the idea that hero worship is a really bad waste of time at best, and downright dangerous at worst...

> And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products?

On the former, it's a fairly modern phenomenon for anyone to start multiple companies that succeed and grow to a large size (unless you look at historical periods now recognised as having been infamously financially unstable, like the Dutch tulip boom years). Those who were equally if not more successful than Jobs just didn't bounce from company to company, but invested their efforts in one place.

As to the latter question, I think you'll find that there are quite a few people who could lay equal claim to (a) producing that many great products, and (b) having created the products Jobs is credited with.

Personally, I think you're all overlooking something. The people who work in our industry are by and large professionals. And a professional does what the boss says because that's what the salary is for. It's not like we get the salary anyway and then do what the boss says if we feel like doing it or think he's inspiring enough!

So, to give an anecdotal example, when the iPad prototype comes to Jobs and he does that fish tank routine and says "aha- air bubbles, therefore you can still squash it down more", that's just being an arsehole to people who work for you. What, you think they had a dozen prototypes just so the boss could dunk one in water, destroying it? They're paid so that if he says "squash it more please", they go do it. That's what engineers do. The teenage drama queen nonsense isn't required.

And if you believe the arsehole-ness is a necessary thing to be a genius and get things done, you have been watching far too much House for your own good.

Honestly, the more you learn about Jobs, the less you see that you'd hold up to your kids as a role model; whereas the more you learn about Wozniak, the more you see that you'd hold up.

And we're still only talking about the technical work; nobody's commented yet on the moral issues surrounding the actual manufacture of products like the iPhone. Lovely device; but is that worth the human abuse it takes to manufacture it?

You know what you call a product you don't put much effort into for some time and which is still in daily use by happy users?

Working.

/mutter.

The point is not how provincal or remote we are; the point is that this would establish a legal precedent. It's common for legal precedents to be cited across the border between the UK and Ireland; and if this showed up in the UK, it's now able to spread to a lot of other places.

And that'd be just fine for certain well-funded lobbying groups...

I've seen some folks do that, and hats off to them; but I learnt vi before emacs, and despite trying to learn emacs a few times over the years, I just never did get to the point where I'd feel comfortable using it for work. So org-mode was always out for me. But it works well for others...

My pleasure. I just wish someone had shown me the cornell system before year one of college :(

Vimwiki, amongst other things (and I'm still learning) supports not just its own wiki syntax, but also markdown and mediawiki (there's an option to be set and it has to be after v2.0); it has a decent diary system with automatic index page generation; it can automatically convert the entire wiki+diary into html if you want that; and it has a few other nifty things like checkboxes for to-do lists and the like. Worth taking a read through the features part of the project website at least.

Exactly, and you're also assuming I could trust the data to dropbox. Sorry, but no, I'll trust photos and nonsensitive personal data to it without too much worry, but NDAs are legal contracts and the whole cloud storage thing and EU law are murky enough to make me just step away from the keyboard. McGarr's (an Irish solicitor) has a good summary here: http://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2009/09/11/cloud-computing-eu...

vimwiki does support markdown out of the box as of v2.0, though you have to set an option for it...

let g:vimwiki_list = [{'path': '~/my_site/', \ 'syntax': 'markdown', 'ext': '.md'}]

It sounds interesting, but one of the things I didn't want was something tied to a specific system. This is a notebook that goes across several jobs - and depending on where you work, you could be using JIRA, or Mantis, or bugtac or something homegrown, or someething horribly legacy. So I didn't want it tied to anything specific, but to be a standalone tool.

Mind you, if you were working a lot with JIRA, I could see the appeal...

Yup, and using dropbox was something I was looking at for vimwiki as well, but the whole "stored in the cloud" thing and the whole "NDA, sensitive data" thing didn't mix (especially in the EU, where you have a whole host of other things to worry about).

Ah, feic. It's Cornell format notes - for some reason I keep calling it Cambridge, I don't know why. Google Cornell Note Taking System, and learn it; if you ever have to take notes at a conference, seminar, lecture, meeting, phone call or anything else where people are talking, it's the best method around.

Absolutely; and I keep mine still for doodles that become patent ideas (signed and dated), for taking cornell notes of meetings and phone calls, and that kind of thing. I prefer these though: http://www.leuchtturm1917.com/en/content/medium-notebook (and the dotted paper is more useful than the squared). Tried moleskins, tried Paper Blanks, tried a few others, but the 1917s are the best I've found...

...but they've become my first draft, rather than my only notebook. It's just too easy to grab a chunk of an email or a graph's png or a code snippet and lob it into the vimwiki; and it's where I work up most of the stuff that goes into papers or patents.

Fark. Apparently landing on HN at 1800 on a friday is a fast way to kill your server :D Think it's fixed now... though it might not be a speed demon...

It's similar I suppose, but you'd have to be committing every 30 minutes or so (maybe your memory's better, but I find if you asked me to summarise what I did in the last 30 minutes I can fairly quickly; if you asked me to summarise my day, I'd forget half the stuff I did). And you'd have to be always working on the one code base (I've worked in places where you wouldn't have been doing that) or else you'd have entries scattered all over the place.

But yes, if you did those things, you could have that log in the commit logs, but it wouldn't be a fantastic resource - it's more useful to me to have that in a local file here, with just my entries (as opposed to having to extract my entries from the entire team's), in grep-able plaintext.

And you'd also be missing the notebook part of the picture; the stuff in there shouldn't be in commit logs (you're talking about notes from meetings, design notes, patent notes, paper notes, that sort of thing).

That's not an example of bad design though. It's the most elegant design possible on a tool designed for one task. In ordinary use, the design is perfectly safe because nobody has any motive to do what you'd have to do for it to be dangerous and everyone is trained to avoid that danger.

I mean, you might as well say a chainsaw was a bad design because it has moving parts that you could hurt yourself with. One does not follow on from the other.