tjstankus

Good points, all. I'm not advocating that they should upgrade. I understand they're in budget slashing mode. Just pointing out that the longview approach would likely be cheaper and that their "more cost effective" statement should probably include a caveat that it's based on short-term cost analysis.

I'd venture to guess that not upgrading from IE6 is more costly in terms of overall, sustained economic impact. Sure, it costs the government money to upgrade right now. But multiply the costs of continuing to support IE6 across all their vendors over time and I'd bet that number pales in comparison.

Barry Sears (of the Zone Diet), among others, has been saying essentially this for 15+ years. But I think ppl are starting to catch on, e.g., most know that corn syrup is terrible for you.

Pay attention to macronutrients (carbohydrates/protein/fat) and eat them in proportion to each other. You'll need to do some reading and a bit of experimentation to find what fits your needs best. Getting the right balance of macronutrients will postively affect your mental acuity. That and exercise. If you're getting enough exercise, it's much easier to get good sleep. Once these big picture things are in place, then worry about micronutrients (vitamins).

I love that there's a Facebook Like widget in the right column as you scroll down.

Most of the Nintendo DS games involve a lot of text. One example of a game that she played quite a bit recently is Fossil Fighters. The Nintendo DS games pretty much all assume you can read, though, so it's not hard to find ones that develop literacy. She used to play the Leapster quite a bit. There are many educational games for the Leapster. They develop skills that lead to reading, but they don't assume you can read. The browser-based games are hit and miss.

My wife studies multi-modal literacy as part of her PhD studies. She was, at one point, staunchly against letting our young daughter play too many computer games, but as a result of her studies has done a complete 180. We monitor what our daughter is exposed to, for the most part, but we find that introducing her to games that stretch her skills in literacy, music, logic, etc. has been really beneficial. The result? She was reading at 3 years old and reading well by 4 years old. She just turned 5 and is into chapter books. Is this result completely due to her game playing? No. But the games have definitely helped.

tl;dr version: in my opinion, based on experience, the right kind of games will help literacy development

You may be in for a rude awakening. I have health insurance for my young, healthy family of 3. (Two 30-somethings and a healthy 4-year-old. No prescriptions, etc.) I pay $700/mo., have a $50 copay for pretty much anything, and no vision or dental. It's consistently gone up 20% a year for the past few years. I keep getting less coverage, they keep raising rates. I keep paying my premium and rarely going to the doctor. The whole system in the U.S. is thoroughly fked.

I'm with you. I like screencasts for getting started with a new tool but once I'm up and running I tend to reach for in-depth written documentation or reference materials.

But, this makes screencasts really valuable IMO. When you have an hour to evaluate something a screencast seems more useful than a massive book.

About to show my age here... I still have the hardcopy issue of "Maximum Rock n Roll" that this article first appeared in. Albini is one smart dude. And he totally gets that Rock can be a thinking man's music.

I think President Bush used this technique as well.

(Sorry, couldn't help myself.)

What's also important, but not addressed in this article is the kind of app you are building. I'm generalizing a bit here, but Django seems to focus more on the CMS-y content type of applications whereas Rails shines more for non-traditional kinds of web apps.

I use RedLaser a bit and the scanning works better when I use the macro lens of my Clarifi case (http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/clarifi). Note: I'm not associated with Griffin in any way. Just thought I'd share this tip.

A comment in the techcrunch post tipped me off to http://ecouteapp.com/ Liking it so far.

Amen. I've moved to Songbird for playing music on my Mac. It's not perfect, but I prefer it to iTunes. And there's nothing out there that's more compelling. I still use iTunes to sync my phone, but that's what I've come to see iTunes as - a store + a syncing platform, not a music player. There's a real market opportunity sitting there for a slim, slick music player on the Mac.

I think most of us on HN realize it's gonna take more than a few days and a few pages of reading to truly understand what it takes to create a programming language, not to mention becoming the next Guido or Matz. The table of contents looks more like it's an introduction to the concepts with the added bonus of having working code by the time you're done reading. Don't get me wrong - I think the concept and content look great. It's just that you're telling me I'm going to be Larry Wall by Friday and I know that's not true. The message undercuts the content IMO.

My other gripe is with the price. $40 seems high for a 44-page document. I'd buy it if the price was lower.

BTW - thanks for Thin! Because I know your name and work the content came off as sarcasm to me at first, but I could definitely see how someone without this prior knowledge might think it's a scam. Best of luck with this book; it does truly look cool.

It's great that Apple are listening, but this quote from the article stands out to me:

"Technically, nothing specific has actually visibly changed in the last few days. I said I wouldn’t go back until I could see actual demonstrable progress being made."

Of the legitimate concerns Steven Frank raised, did Phil Schiller commit to anything actionable or measurable?

I've been considering an iPhone-native app for a web app I'm creating. But honestly, I've never been enamored with the App Store. Submit for approval? Gimme a break. Instead, I plan on developing a targeted UI for Safari on the iPhone. If that's not sufficient, I may begrudgingly go with a native iPhone app.

The spirit and message of this post remind me of one of the best books I've read: The Practicing Mind. (http://www.amazon.com/Practicing-Mind-Bringing-Discipline-Fo...)

I fight myself over striving for perfection constantly. When I get closer to the "practicing" mindset I'm happier and more productive. It takes discipline and constant reminding, but it's worth the struggle.

Upvoted for researching the cost and posting that information here.

Well, since my comment on nytimes.com apparently got moderated out of existence, I retrieved it from my clipboard history. Here it is. (And maybe someone can help me figure out why this would get ditched by the moderator.) Keep in mind this was written for NYT audience, not HN audience.

The problem with online backup is not the lack of existing services. I've tried a few and they each more or less get the job done, with Dropbox and ZumoDrive being exceptional.

The problem is lack of bandwidth in the US. I have a "high speed" internet connection and pay for the "turbo boost" package. Despite the cute marketing terms and the hefty bill, what it boils down to is grossly asymmetrical bandwidth that's piss-poor on the upstream side. At best, I can push 200MB an hour. At that rate it takes about 500 hours to upload 100GB, which is not even that much data in these days of massive photo files, HD movies, etc. I gave up in frustration and went back to external drives.

While other countries, most notably Japan, work to provide fiber connections to the majority of their citizens, we're still partying like it's 1999 here in the US. As a web developer and heavy internet user, I feel strongly that the bandwidth issue is more than just a PITA; it's hurting our economy.

Don't think for a second that Google doesn't know how terrible the user experience is with online backup. They've been buying dark fiber on and off for years. But until that fiber gets to the curb, my guess is that they'd rather not deal with the support issues that would arise from a large-scale consumer-focused online storage system.

I commented over on nytimes. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/online-backups-coul... (might still be awaiting moderation)

The gist of my comment is that the issue is not backup services, it's the bandwidth.

What bothers me about posts like this, and some of the reaction, is that it boils things down to absolutes. While it's true that there are decisions that should be made quickly and on gut instinct, it's also true that there are decisions which require careful thought and planning. Being a good problem solver is about weighing consequences, planning, and taking action accordingly. Sometimes planning takes 5 seconds, sometimes it takes 5 years. It is true that getting real feedback quickly is invaluable. And with software, we can often take the "ready, fire, aim" approach because change is usually cheap and easy.

Actually, I'd argue that quote is a pretty good description of Henry Rollins's behavior and work ethic. Of course, if you also consider that he started his publishing company while living and working in a tool shed, it might be hard to call him overly professional. And yeah, I get that the Rollins reference is a joke. But I'm a fan of Old Man Hank; I couldn't help but chime in here.

To be honest this rant didn't really inspire me much one way or the other, but the suck.com linkage is definitely worth the read.

I hope this is not true, but it looks like you have pretty good evidence. I've been a happy emusic subscriber for years. I don't mind spam so much only because Gmail's filters are pretty good. But, I do get quite a bit of it. > 1000 in my spambox right now. And it's totally uncool if emusic is responsible for any of it. Upvoting in hopes this catches the attention of emusic. I might even submit a support request with the link. I'd love to hear their side.

UPDATE: I submitted a support ticket with a link here.

I would tend toward that idea: a module that can be included. Injecting a sum method into the object's ghost class also maintains scope of responsibility, but feels a bit more magic. I'd opt for less magic. At first, anyway. :)

I don't think global variables were mentioned in the article. Do you mean the global (top-level) namespace? If so, then yeah, "Don't do that" is pretty much the solution.

Yup, proper use of namespaces would solve the problem, in part. Supposedly Rails3 will be using namespaces quite a bit more than the current version of Rails. That will allow things like mounting apps inside other apps, aka slices.

What I take away as the overall point of the article though is: monkey patch with care.

I've read similar numbers elsewhere, but came to an entirely different conclusion. Wall Street lured a lot of really smart people by promising them a lot of money. Then, in turn, they asked of those same smart people to create as much money as they could, as fast as they could. Smart people are good at solving problems, so they created all sorts of new and interesting ways to make money quickly. Nobody in management worried about the long-term ramifications and didn't ask the smart, creative folks working for them to worry about the long-term either. Blaming computers or Harvard or narcissism is illogical. Greed trumped foresight while they all got rich, simple as that.

My favorite Cameron Crazies chant ever: "Whose your Daddy? Battier."