zcrar70

Sam is quoting this (as opposed to making the statement himself), but putting it at the top of the page seems to indicate that he agrees with it.

My understanding of the post is that Sam also deplores the rapid pace of change, and has automated his test environments as a workaround.

In fact, it's bad enough that I've been looking for alternatives to Rails for each new project I've started in the past year or so, but always give up because I think it'll be quicker to use what I know (and then usually end up regretting it later.)

That's true of this article, and often of Economist articles generally; this isn't necessarily a negative though, because it provided an enlightening insight into circumstances that weren't necessarily obvious beforehand (to me anyway.)

I'd like to understand what drove the Japanese and American industries to turn around, and how much of that is applicable to China.

I get the impression that the business models of America, Japan and China are quite different; I don't think the US or Japan started out like China and then changed, on the contrary I think they set out in different circumstances and therefore with different aims.

I get the impression China is attempting to compete almost solely on cost, which wasn't the case of the US (innovation) or Japan (a combination of cost/quality and innovation.)

I'm interested in this - do you have any numbers to back this up?

The most widely available reader on sale here is Sony's at around 250GBP, so something costing 80GBP less for similar functionality sounds quite enticing.

This being said, I have an iAudio and, using the same headphones, the sound is noticeably better than my girlfriend's (more expensive) iPod.

Unfortunately, that type of thing happens all over the world, not just in the EU parliament. I don't think that disbanding the EU would resolve the problem of politicians making decisions about things they have little to no understanding of.

Perhaps a kind-hearted friend might consider it for his next birthday?

You could also argue that by pulling out a Mac laptop, you're sending out the signal that good design is the only thing you're capable of evaluating.

I agree that Macs are good-looking machines, and that OSX is aesthetically superior to Windows and Gnome/KDE, but surely that shouldn't be the main driver for choosing an OS or a machine over another?

There isn't a day that I don't wish my Linux desktop looked better, but I still use that over the Mac because I find it a better development environment, even if it doesn't give me a warm glow inside each time I look at it.

Not wishing to troll, but I'm not sure that Ruby/Rails is you're looking for if you're obsessed with performance...

For those too lazy to read the article, here it is: http://search-pdf-books.com/

Or pay for someone else to do it - but then, how would you enforce it? The costs of hiring a lawyer to threaten to sue would be greater than the money made from selling the typeface.

No - telling someone something so patently unlikely sets a disconnect between a goal and the effort required to reach it (as if the only thing required to be president of the USA was to want it.) Two possibilities: the person ignores the message (if they're sensible), or they take it to heart and then get dejected when they fail.

This is also the current thinking on teenage girls and anorexia; presented with supermodels in the media and the (implied) message that they should/can emulate those role models is what is thought to cause self-esteem problems in impressionable teenage girls, which can lead on to more serious disorders.

I think it would be better to teach people how to make the best of their circumstances (and by this I mean personal attributes as well as social surroundings), rather than encourage unrealistic expectations.

That's almost completely impractical. How would you find out when someone steals your typeface?

Image libraries and photo agencies face a similar problem (I used to work for one.)

* there is more of a tendency to go for immediate satisfaction than for challenging listening as we flick through the large amount of available music to find things we like

* we move away from listening to music an experience (including the disc as an object, the cover art, and the visual associations it can create) and consuming music as more of a commodity

In summary, the high availability of content online means that the content itself is devalued. The availability is great, but it's a shame if the increase in range affects depth.

It also means that comments about an event don't get fragmented into multiple threads.

The only reason I can see to post in separate threads is to gather karma, which is a shame as it doesn't benefit the site as a whole.

Second Life uses Mono for scripting. Quite a few games (including iPhone and Wii games) are written using Unity, which runs on Mono. Mindtouch Deki is a web wiki/CMS that runs on Mono.

Not overwhelming, but not far from being a failure.

It definitely doesn't sound too technical...

In Java, you could also always use List or HashMap without thinking about Sets, Trees, or weak references, but that's not the point; the Java collections API isn't an alternative to 'should I use Hash or Array', the use cases for the two APIs are completely different.