sielskr

Since the link is in a comment that begins, "MS is not a horrible stack to develop on," and ends, "I'm glad I went with .NET for my startup," a reader could get the impression that the link somehow provides support for your pro-MS position.

The writeup on what Quora is built on say that, "Quora uses Ubuntu Linux as it’s OS of choice," and does not mention any Microsoft technologies at all.

Read this passage again:

>"The dirty little secret," a former AOL executive says, "is that seventy-five percent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it." [emphasis mine].

The OP (at Huffington Post) very strongly implies that they do not need it because they connect to the internet through DSL or cable. I take that to mean that these customers use web services and client software that AOL offers for free or at a much lower rate if the customer does not need AOL's dial-up service, i.e., basic TCP/IP connectivity, to connect to the internet.

I like the UIs of HN and Craigslist much better than most sites.

This promises to remove the only obstacle to my spending $99 on an Apple TV box, namely, my fear of being locked into Apple's content distribution system.

Will someone unaffiliated with the project please describe their experiences with using this software to watch mp4s of movies? Any restrictions or gotchas?

"Note that you will have to repeat this process every time you upgrade your Mac OS to a new patch release (10.6.5 -> 10.6.6)."

"If visual contact was essential for forming significant relationships then the blind would be unable to make friends."

Maybe the blind are much less successful at making friends. What is your evidence to the contrary?

Wait because the software is busy. E.g. OS X's spinning beach ball.

(Emacs is single-threaded, but so is a Unix shell.)

I would rather have an Emacs that offers fewer choices but looks good out of the box.

Example: the software supplied by Apple with a Mac does not have any themes except for the choice between Blue (colorful) and Graphite (subdued) in the Appearance system preference pane.

OTOH, I regularly have to wait for the software supplied by Apple and I almost never wait for Emacs.

I regret the trend towards gray rather than black maintext.

Thanks for the AdblockPlus rule!

I'd like to grayscale my browser while leaving Emacs in color.

Actually, I'd pay good money for a grayscale version of Firefox.

"Submissions are cheap and skippable."

By that logic, you will not mind if I spam your mailbox since emails are cheap and skippable.

Can a person join an existing Posterous Group using only email?

"big budget entertainment will increasingly have to compete with more and more free and low-cost entertainment options on the internet"

By "free and low-cost entertainment options" do you mean pirated content? I do not see non-pirated content competing effectively with big-budget movies and television the way that non-pirated textual content (blogs, sites like HN) competes effectively with newspapers and magazines.

I saw compiler flags for OSX in the source tarball [1] but to install on OSX probably requires installing from source, and if my experience with using macports to install Conkeror and uzbl is any indication, installing all of the dependencies correctly is likely to be something that requires hours of tedious effort unless one is an expert. The reason for that is that luakit (and Conkeror and probably uzbl) rely on a very large stack of "non-Mac-like" software including the GTK toolkit and the X windowing system.

If you can get around in Linux, I would test drive the software on Linux to make sure it is as useful to you as you imagine it to be before doing the work of figuring out how to install it on OSX.

I will add that the difficulty of installing relatively unpopular Linux packages on OSX is one of the biggest disadvantages of OSX for me. (The unavailability of laptops in which everything Just Works is of the biggest disadvantages of Linux for me.).

I've tentatively given up on relying on software that requires X while I am using OSX: I plan to keep on test-driving such software (on Linux), and if I decide I have got to have access to it, I will switch back to Linux.

[1] https://github.com/mason-larobina/luakit/blob/develop/config...

because the authorities have no control over the supply of cash, would never try to outlaw cash, or never require banks to report the withdrawal or deposit of cash.

Sure, but I did it because the OP did it. Also, there's a good chance that Orwell would have just as much of a problem with "estate tax" as with "death tax", "estate tax" being the choice of people with an agenda after all.

When I saw "the Deaths of Four People Cost the U.S. Government $6.5 Billion" I imagined the government taking 6.5 billion from taxpayers and spending it extremely inefficiently. But I am not a journalist living in New York City (if the blogger wrote the headline or an editor for the New York Times if an editor wrote the headline of the blog post)! What the headline is really talking about is the government's failing to collect death taxes that it could have collected if Congress had voted differently.

So apparently according to this journalist every time the government fails to collect X dollars that it could have collected through the legitimate operation of elections, Congressional votes, etc, that failure "costs" the government X dollars. I am having trouble escaping the implication that the headline writer believes that any money that Congress could have voted to collect rightfully belongs to the government, and if the money remains in private hands, maybe that is worth a blog post in the New York Times!

Well, now that Assange has demonstrated the effectiveness of using internet technologies in this way, yes, Assange is probably replaceable.

If (as I suspect) the technology to do what Assange did was available 10 years ago, that is evidence that if Assange had not acted then it might have take a lot longer for someone else to do what he did.

Good point. Before concluding that things have permanently changed, maybe we should wait for some large leaks for which the leaker does not get caught.

Because using code plus data where just data can be used introduces security risks and limits what people can do with the document. I would have hoped that the industry would have learned that already from PostScript, PDF, COM and the Microsoft Office formats.

"work with someone else, with each one being able to look at the other's monitor."

This trick works even when the other person is remote: for the last 6 weeks, I have spent about 25 or 30 hours a week using VNC to watch someone 11 time zones away while he in turn watches me. While we watch each other, we spend almost no time procrastinating.

We both work from home, do not have TV sets in our homes, and do almost all of our procrastination on the internet.

Both of us would like to increase the number of people using this trick, so if you are interested in trying this way of using VNC to reduce procrastination, write to vladimir.slepnev@gmail.com.

So you got more or better or smarter friends or work partners in your life, which stopped your HN addiction?

Or by "someone in your life that inspires" do you mean a sexual or romantic partner?

Specifics please.

In various conversations on the internet, starting with comp.text.sgml where XML was born in the 1990s, I have seen many signs that someone hopes or expects some of the immense richness in meaning that humans assign to words and other symbols to be carried along by the XML.

In other words, I've seen many special cases of the mistaken belief that programmers of today can do things that only researchers of the future wielding human-level AI will be able to do -- and that just has to cause grief if those hopes and expectations inform IT decisions.

The tops of the keys are spherical, which I have not been able to find in a modern keyboard (with the exception that the 8 home keys on some Kinesis keyboards are spherical -- or at least were when I bought a Kinesis about 7 years ago -- but 8 spherical keys is much less nice than all spherical keys).

Most external PC keyboards have cylindrical key tops these days, and most laptops have followed the lead of Apple and Sony and adopted flat key tops, which IMHO are much worse than cylindrical ones, which in turn for theoretical reasons strike me as slightly worse than the spherical ones that used to be the standard in the 1970s (and 1980s?). I say "for theoretical reasons" because again I have not been able to get my hands on a keyboard with spherical key tops to try.

Good keyboard technique IMHO requires committing the position of the keys to "muscle memory" so that most keystrokes can be done in a single "ballistic" movement. (Some keystrokes will require a "windup" movement similar to the "backstroke" movement of a tennis racket before the "stroke" movement of actually hitting the ball although in an expert typist, these backstrokes will be extremely subtle -- the point being that these backstrokes are an exception to the general rule of only one ballistic movement per key press.) The theoretical reason for preferring spherical key tops to cylindrical and cylindrical to flat is that the curves give the brain more information about the exact position of the hand relative to the keyboard so that the next ballistic movement is more likely to find its target.

Most keyboards with flat keytops, like modern Apple keyboards, have the little pips or nubs on the F and J keys, and I rely extremely heavily on them when I type on such keyboards, to the extent that I use the hand that is not making a stroke to feel for the nub, but I really prefer the enhanced information about hand position I get from a cylindrical keyboard even if it is a cheap $20 Dell external keyboard or one of the (even cheaper) internal laptop keyboards on a Toshiba that is a few years old (the new ones follow the fad started by Sony and Apple for flat key tops).

Professional piano players can lose their careers if they get RSI, and I get the impression that the risk for piano players is greater than it is for programmers, and there was a piano teacher or consultant named Dorothy Taubman who had valuable knowledge about proper technique. Rather than reading about Taubman technique, it is better to go on Youtube and watch tutorials about it, BTW. As of 2008 or so it was possible to see what I mean above about the necessity (or extreme desirability) of backstroke movements this ways (using videos about the piano exercise called "scales").

Since good technique requires committing the keyboard to memory however, non-standard keyboard layouts (or more precisely layouts different from the ones the keyboardist is used to) are very "expensive" in time required to adapt properly to them, and sadly this Symbolics has a lot of keys in nonstandard positions.

Kinesis "ergonomic" keyboards (the $240 ones) BTW are the worst keyboards I have ever used IMHO because the keys are not coplanar and not "double coplanar" like the good ergo keyboards like the Microsoft Naturals were, so the typist has to memorize the elevation and (in the case of the Kinesis) two degrees of freedom worth of angle of each and every key, which I found pretty much impossible. (Yes, the $240 Kinesis keyboards have "mechanical" keys, and yes, they are superior, but get one of the many boards that puts those superior mechanical keys in one or 2 planes so that their postitions are not almost-impossible to memorize.) Modern Microsoft "ergonomic" boards (except the really cheap white "Natural" ones if they still make those) do not have coplanar or "doubly coplanar" (falling into 2 planes) keys either, and consequently they seem like awful keyboards, although unlike the Kinesis, I have never owned one to try it extensively, and unlike the Kinesis, at least the (spherical, solid) angles of the keys do not IIRC point drastically in all manner of directions (but rather it seems to be mostly the elevation (and for some keys, e.g., B and N, the position) of the individual keys that varies and consequently needs to be memorized).

I bet that the next time I go on Amazon, the pages I visit will still consist mostly of what are essentially advertisements whose main effect is to distract me from my reason for going on the site, and I bet that information I consider very relevant, like the year of of the publication of a book, will still be very hard to find amidst the visual clutter.

I've been unhappy with X since I learned enough (in the 90s) to have an opinion -- but not for the reason Shuttleworth gives:

"We don’t believe X is setup to deliver the user experience we want, with super-smooth graphics and effects. I understand that it’s possible to get amazing results with X, but it’s extremely hard, and isn’t going to get easier. Some of the core goals of X make it harder to achieve these user experiences on X than on native GL"

My unhappiness stems from my perception that the ways I have tried to customize X and things closely coupled to X (e.g., my window manager) have proved much more difficult (and in particular have forced me to contend with much more complexity) than they could have.

"NVIDIA made the decision to fully support linux a long time ago."

NVIDIA is not legally obligated to support Linux; are they?

>My experience with the RBL has been exclusively negative to date.

>a well meant but incompetent attempt at improving the situation

I do not mean to dismiss your frustration, but I wonder if you are comparing the present situation to an unobtainable ideal.

Yes, email worked great in the early 1990s. (E.g., most people who ran the net-news infrastructure demanded that there be a working email address in the From field of every message, and I cannot recall anyone back then disagreeing with that demand.)

But the internet is drastically different now. We cannot just go back to the way it was.