I concur, there's nothing wrong with gradual progress of course. On the other hand, about your second point, there are a number of such models. The geocentric view of the universe got deprecated with Galilei's discovery of the Jupiter's moons. More recently, I could mention the Bohr model (electrons traveling in circular orbit around the nucleus). It was widely considered as correct at the time and it was in accordance with experimental observations. However, the Bohr model wasn't improved, it was completely dropped as it is simply wrong. It can be disproven by a number of different experiments.
Well, from this and another post, you seem to be concerned mainly with overlap between similar laws -- a natural result of a large and fragmented legal code. Why not prune it instead of scrapping it? Refactor instead of rewrite? Insert jwz quote.
There is one problem with this theory and it is that the US only issues patents that are valid for the US. China issues patents for China, Japan for Japan, etc. Thus, the Chinese are not really beholden to American IP owners in their own country unless they give those American IP owners Chinese patents.
So I am not sure how the US will benefit from issuing more patents.
(disclosure -- I am a real life patent attorney but nothing I write on hn is legal advice).
To be fair, I recently started a text based game (nothing but html, JS and a few minor icons - no flash) at the beginning of last month and I'm making reasonable money purely from ads - a single ad, in an unobtrusive place.
I haven't even introduced the premium features yet - people get very addicted to these games and are happy to pay for UI enhancements. Hell, I've ever had multiple people contribute designs, graphics and JS to the site wanting nothing in return.
It's been running less than a month in beta and has had 0 public advertising (this being the very first time) and has 150 active players purely from word-of-mouth. Admittedly its not making any worthwhile money currently despite me putting hours and hours of work into it but its been great fun and a great learning experience so its worth it never the less - so long as it breaks even I'm happy. - http://islandor.com
I'd like to talk to you more about your experience maintaining phone systems, but your contact info isn't in your profile :) Mind dropping me an email? nixme at stillhope dotcom. Thanks!
Counter example: nginx, which uses fork(), and seems to smoke Apache while offering features like binary reloading without dropping connections (not sure if Apache supports this but I seem to remember no - please correct me if I'm wrong).
Portability is not always necessary - when talking about fork() and friends you're talking about trade offs.
When I'm only ever deploying to Unix environments, I accept the lack of portability in exchange for features I value.
It's true, and I missed the part in the post about call volume. Onebox doesn't do much for you if your real problem is getting phones on 20 people's desks to make outbound calls with. But it did totally solve our inbound call problem.
What I hate most about this article is that they stress the "always". It is impossible that unittesting is faster and better in every possible software for every possible hardware in every possible situation in this universe and time, just plain impossible.
Certainly, it will make you faster in a lot of cases (and a lot of regular buiseness-programming is among these cases) but there are certainly cases where it is wrong. Think of a code emitter in a compiler, or handcrafted assembler for some micro controller, or especially a problem where you just know the solution, and it is simple. In these cases, it just is faster to just hack down the solution.
And try and convince a programmer that it's possible that their program's memory can be wrong.
They understand in theory but refuse to code for the possibility. Especialy when you get into HPC and there are clusters of 50-60 machines with 4Gb each, the chance of not having corrupt memory is almost 0.
We use Onebox as well. Simple to manage, forwards to our cell phones when we're not home. But it's not like we're getting lots of calls yet, so I can't speak to how it scales.
The way the article is titled (emphasizing that it was Brad Pitt's foundation) almost makes me think that they expected the foundation to fail. "Oh, an actor's foundation. What good could they do?". Or they were being sensationalist (anything with 'Brad Pitt' is highly clickable surely).
Benefit of hindsight or not, but I think predicting that the number of web sites would actually decrease is showing a total lack of common sense. If I were a shareholder, I'd want someone else at the helm.
There's a good reason most Ruby and Python projects don't rely heavily on system calls: portability. If you care at all about portability, it's just easier to not hit the system calls directly, otherwise you'll have to detect host OS and make sure you're using the system calls properly.
If threads are "out", then pre-fork is way out. Just look at the history of the Apache project. I realize this all happened before the RoR era, but Apache used to use a pre-fork MPM almost exclusively. In more recent years it has added the threaded MPM and the async MPM. They have also put in the work I mentioned above to achieve cross-platform compatibility.
I'm just using Apache as an example here; I'm not suggesting that we should all use Apache. It's just funny to me to see a post that basically says, "All the stuff we've been doing for the last 5 years is out. We should be doing the same stuff they were doing 15 years ago, but in Ruby this time around instead of C."
Maybe software trends are like music trends? Everything from 5 years ago is lame, but the stuff from 20 years ago is super groovy, man.
Just to give you one datapoint: I played forumwarz episodes 1 and 2 pretty much like an addicted fiend when they initially came out. But I am not sure if I have been to the site in between and since (if you made an episode 3 in the interim, I don't know about it). If your TOS allows it, perhaps you could notify your users when new episodes come out? I'd personally enjoy episodes with a much longer story arc--I think that would keep your users more active and for longer--but I realize that is easier said than done.
Finally, I just want to let you know that I have always been pretty impressed by the online chat functionality that you implemented for the INICIT game.
More recently, there was a writeup about me in the New Yorker. Just before publication, I got a similar call from a "fact-checker". The checking was detailed, and (as for jwecker) focused on hard-to-verify matters. I asked the fact-checker about the process, and she said that the job had gotten much easier, since they could now check most facts using the web.
Think of how difficult the New Yorker's fact checking was before the web! The process of fact-checking goes back to the early days of the New Yorker under editor Harold Ross. James Thurber wrote (in "The Years With Ross") of "Ross's later intense dedication to precision. He studied the New York Telephone Company's system of verifying names and numbers in its directories ... He found out about the Saturday Evening Post's checking department, which he said consisted of seven women who checked in turn every fact, name, and date. ... His checking department became famous, in the trade, for a precision that sometimes leaned over backward. ... Ross's checkers once informed Mencken that he couldn't have eaten dinner at a certain European restaurant he had mentioned in one of his New Yorker articles, because there wasn't any restaurant at the address he had given. Mencken brought home a menu with him to prove that he was right, but he was pleased rather than annoyed. 'Ross has the most astute goons of any editor in the country,' he said."
I actually wrote a significant program in NeWS. I ran screaming back to X. PostScript is a good page description language. It's a horrifyingly bad user interface implementation language.
