michaeltwofish

The work happens at https://github.com/habari/system, which is very active.

I can't answer for @ringmaster, but for me it's client work, though it's a sideline to my main job at the moment.

That was my submission, not the author's words.

Fair point.

As soon as you've got millions of years worth of metals, you saturate supply, the price falls and you're back to a mission that isn't economically viable.

I completely agree that you learn all sorts of unexpected things doing a PhD that are often unrelated to the specific field you're working in. Lots of these things seem to be common across the experience of many people, but some of them while be uniquely yours.

But lots of what you'll have to do won't be cool or new, it will be tedious and time-consuming drudgery. Of course, it still might be worth it, but don't expect it to be all sunshine and light.

While longevity may be important, I think there are other more interesting advantages of plaintext, namely that I can edit in my editor of choice, I can use a host of existing tools, such as sed, grep, etc, to process it, and it plays well with standard source code management systems.

Fair point, though I was speaking more generally about heroes :)

I like that. A lot of heroes go quietly about their business of making the world a little better, without having to wear their underpants on the outside to draw attention to themselves.

That's right, Safari doesn't support Ogg. See http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works.

A well-designed quiz that exposes some subtleties of Javascript. The discussion in the comments as people try to work out what's going on in each of the questions is really interesting and valuable, I found.

This article provided my "aha!" moment for prototypes.

Thanks for the link. There's nothing quite as educational as watching experts discuss a topic.

Note that Drupal specifically excludes Javascript, images, Flash, from being GPL'd.

http://drupal.org/licensing/faq#q7

Sounds like it failed because the VCs wanted their return too quickly, and so changed how the business fundamentally ran to something they were more familiar with. In other words, they tried to make a successful open source project into traditional proprietary software.

Maybe they just chose bad or unmatched VCs?