I don't even see the code anymore; just blonde, brunette, redhead...
(In all seriousness, the karma number quantifies the approbation of your peers; and a good reputation is highly valued by most people--and rationally so, I'd say).
It could have been expensive for Microsoft to license single click window closing on a per copy basis and it could have set an expensive precedent. So, they devised numerous methods of closing a window without infringing on the patent. One method was to open a menu on the top left corner of a window, and with or without a second click, selecting the window close item. Another method selects the same menu item by using keyboard sequences. However, no method allowed you to close a window by using a single mouse click.
After the patent expired, the keyboard sequences were retained for power users who were already familiar with the sequences. However, the prominance of the menu has declined.
> it doesn't work on Firefox
I'm not surprised. Firefox on Windows implements its own menu primitives. Many other applications have different versions of the same libraries statically compiled. Obviously, the Firefox implementation doesn't implement a legacy window.
I'm not convinced about the perceived difficulty to learn git et al. You and the other FreeBSD developers are OS hackers. You're telling me it's hard for them to learn a dvcs in a few days? Look at all the Rails developers and users. They seem to have few problems switching to git.
I don't think that cperciva said that it is difficult to use it. It's not just because DVCS are in fashion that they must be adopted, that's his point.
I'm a happy mercurial user, but that does not make me look down on someone who uses CVS/SVN/Perforce and is okay with it.
Many languages focus more and more on multi-core and distributed programming. Mainstream language like Java and C# will get more tools and libraries, but other languages will likely be better. One thing i like about startups is that you can freely pick technologies that are better or faster in solving a problem. You don't have to cope with the conservatism problem.
Personally i think that languages like Scala, F# and Erlang will be good to learn, depending on what platform you prefer. And Clojure also seems very cool. I know it's blasphemy around here, but Clojure is the only Lisp like language that i would like to learn.
Clojure is cool, and definitely worth a look if you fancy using STM. However, it's still early days, and although single-threaded performance is reasonably close to Java's (recently, very fast numeric vector operations were added) I haven't heard much about performance of concurrent applications. I suspect it might be a while before the STM implementation comes close to the optimal case, but I think it's pointing in the right direction, promoting pure functional programming and lazy evaluation with the built-in immutable data structures. Plus you get easy access to all Java libraries.
Finally, the Clojure implementation itself is pretty hackable and the mailing list is active and helpful. (I've made some minor contributions to the code myself)
I've done parallel programming in C, C++, and Fortran, using OpenMP, Pthreads/Win32 threads, and even using lock-free techniques, but it's always been an incredible hassle. It'll be interesting to see if Clojure manages to gain any significant traction. Long-term though it will need to gain some kind of support for massive parallelism. Something better than MPI.
I'm a small investor and i get free real time streaming data for Euronext Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris from my broker. It also shows the outstanding orders in the order book. It's fun to watch but if you observe closely it is very obvious that trading (instead of investing) is a game for the big boys who use intricate financial models and a massive amount of computing power. It's like competing directly with Google.
What if they're locked up for a safe breeding of more of a threatened or endangered species, or for the purpose of education and awareness of the threats facing wildlife around the world?
I've been to some zoos that just make you want to cry, and I've been to other ones where the animals seems happy, well taken-care-of, and had enough activities/entertainment to keep them from getting bored, and where there was a huge amount of focus on education around what species are threatened, why, and what you can do about it. How to co-exist with wild animals locally, and how to support efforts around the world.
It's a lot easier to feel sympathy/empathy and DO something when you see a real live cute endangered animal, than if you read a paragraph in your paper.
It's definitely a mixed bag, but overall, I'm pro good-zoos.
> So type inference. You can do type inference. Except that it's lame, because it doesn't handle weird dynamic features like upconverting integers to Doubles when they overflow.
Pretty weak argument against type inference. Yegge has used OCaml so i expected better arguments.
And JavaScript 2 is getting type annotations, so the trend is more likely in the other direction to improve performance.
I think he just brought up the "int overflow into Double" thing so he could pimp out the double-dispatch type inference a little bit later:
> "... and so all this stuff about having a type-tag saying this is an int – which might not actually be technically correct, if you're going to overflow into a Double, right? Or maybe you're using an int but what you're really using is a byte's worth of it, you know. The runtime can actually figure things out around bounds that are undecidable at compile time."
I got the distinct impression that he wasn't arguing against type inference, merely said that the classic way to do it doesn't always work with dynamic languages, and there are better (newer) ideas regarding how to infer types without resorting to type tags.
I suspect that Steve Yegge would agree with me that introducing type annotations into JavaScript is a mistake - a cure for the wrong problem as his presentation strongly argued.
> When I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search
Google's search engine wasn't revolutionary either. It was only moderately better than AltaVista and others. Most of all the visual design was cleaner. Google's main accomplishment was imo the introduction of AdSense.
In the beginning, what was revolutionary about Google was the experience, not the search results. A lot of that has to do with visual design. But mostly, in Google's case, I think it has to do with the extreme focus they have on search.
The one reason I switched to google was because on the search engine I was using the search results and images took a really long time to load on a 56k modem, while google's results page loaded instantaneously.
