coolestuk

The last artist listed (Desmond Henry) was one of the professors of philosophy when I was a student at Manchester University (actually his official status was Reader). I still have one of his original drawings he gave me some 40 odd years ago. He was one of nicest people (and certainly the most eccentric person) I've met in my entire life. His academic speciality was medieval philosophy.

I also donated to the Livecode open source project. I just had a look at the Kickstarter programme. I tallied up all the contributions of those who received at least a license to the commercial product in the days after the Kickstarter ended.

Of the £493,795 raised, fully £368,285 of that donated was returned as commercial licenses to those who donated.

Those who donated in return for no immediate reward (about 0.2% of the total sum donated) got 8 years of free enhancements to the open source version. And those who have that open source version installed still get to use it ad infinitum (even if they were not contributors to the Kickstarter). There's no need to pay for any license unless features added in future are things they feel meet some need.

I've funded other projects where I never even got a viable product, never mind one that was actively developed for nearly a decade.

On a thread reminiscing about Hypercard, the only comment down-voted is the one that points to a superset of Hypercard that runs on Windows, OSX and Linux and that can also produce apps that run on iOS and Android.

And it's free to use and GPL'd.

What a weird place HN is.

There's no pleasing some people.

Never mind that Livecode IDE runs on Linux, Mac and Windows it also can produce compiled apps that run on those 3 platforms and iOS and Androd and even as a webapp like PHP. And it can even compile to HTML5 (although that's more limited).

It works with version control and unicode, it has regex, cryptography, sockets, JSON, XML, OAuth2, SVG etc. It has database libraries for interacting with sqlite, postgresql, mysql, etc. It can incorporate a web browser and control that using Javascript and callbacks. It can be extended to integrate with Java, Objective-C, etc. You can create your own GUI widgets. And it's free.

But that's still too much like Hypercard, which only ran on an ancient Mac and nothing else. Hypercard could do about 10% of what Livecode can do. And Hypercard has been dead since before you touched an IDE.

I've had this experience with doctors so often it is chilling.

Elderly relatives writhing in pain, only to have doctors say it's indigestion (it was a perforated ulcer and an uncle had previously died from a wrongly diagnosed ulcer perforating). My partner was misdiagnosed with flu when it was pneumonia which then developed into pleurisy (I'd never seen either of the latter, but was telling the doctor that's what the symptoms looked like - 15 years later he still suffers pain from the pleurisy). I had an arm paralyzed through severe pain and the consultant doctor planned an operation "to cut the nerve" - I said I thought it was a frozen shoulder and that such a procedure was unnecessary; 6 months later the paralysis began to subside and the consultant agreed it was a frozen shoulder). Another relative died of bowel cancer that was said to be back pain (she died in the hospital where she worked). I know of several people who were telling the doctor they had cancer, only to have the doctors dismiss it as trivial, with most of these people dying because of their untreated cancer. As a child I had joint pains for years that were diagnosed as "growing pains" but turned out to a hip disease (younger cousins ended up with the same condition and because I'd already had it, they were more readily diagnosed by family members).

In both directions (treating trivial as serious and treating serious as trivial) I've seen so many mistakes. I'd be much happier to see a doctor google the symptoms rather than jump to a conclusion about what is wrong.

There's a famous anecdote where junior doctors are taught the importance of observation, by senior doctors tricking them into tasting urine. It doesn't seem to be a lesson they learn. Even when their own objective test results are contra-indicative of their pre-judgement I've seen doctors scratch their heads but stick with their incorrect pre-judgement.

When doctors I know have a family member go into hospital, you should see how attentive my doctor friends get concerning what is being said and done to their relatives. Some doctors will not even allow relatives to go into hospital for non-emergency treatment at certain times of year (because of timetabling there can be very inexperienced doctors on duty at certain times of the year).

"have an fsync that doesn't really flush to disk. OS X requires fcntl(F_FULLFSYNC) to flush to disk"

I remember highlighting this problem to the Firebird db developers maybe 13 years ago. AFAIR they were open to the problem I'd pointed out and went about fixing it on other platforms so that the db behaved everywhere as it did on OS X. I'm probably in the bottom 5% of IT professionals on this site. I'm rather amazed to find out that so late in the day Postgres has come round to fixing this.

I haven't used Firebird in years and can't find a link to the discussion (could have been via email).

"I'm a bit incredulous at the existence of these knuckle-draggers. "

I've met many people who will not watch any film - no matter how good its reputation -- if it's in black and white. The first time I heard someone say "I can't watch this - it's in black and white" I thought it was a joke. That was 22 years ago, and he was a post-grad student. He was utterly serious. Since then I've met others like that.

I guess SD is the new black (and white).

Actually, there are a variety of LaTex editors which I think must meet most people's standards. When I decided to write a book last year, I couldn't face doing it in Word (or anything which would not allow me to view the formatting codes). I was spoiled for choice when it came to LaTex editors. I settled for TexMaker, and within 6 months I had produced a 500 page book, complete with tables, charts and several thousand footnotes.

I'd never used LaTex before in my life. But I wanted the book output as PDF and it was important that the book looked professionally produced. I was really quite happy with the results. Before biting the bullet and using LaTex itself, I had looked at pandoc and other technologies which could output to PDF (e.g. python's ReST). But after some initial tests, I realised they were quite limited in their ability to output a complex PDF document.

TexMaker allows one to have the LaTex source and the PDF end result open in adjacent windows. MikTex/TexWorks was another editor which functioned in a similar fashion. With TexMaker I could jump from a line in the PDF to the originating line in the LaTex file (and vice versa). One can go to images.google.com and search for screenshots of LaTex editors to see the variety available.

The only major enhancement I would like, is if the LaTex editor would allow one to hide all the LaTex codes (perhaps colour-coding the text in the editor to indicate that a paragraph section contains hidden formatting codes). I do find the Latex markup distracting as I try to read the text. However, being able to read the PDF output and then jump to the LaTex source does mitigate this to some extent (I have a large monitor which permits me to have 2 A4 document windows open side by side).

25 years ago, I was a secretary. I used WordPerfect, Ami Pro, Word, DisplayWrite and other WP programs. Microsoft Word was just about the worst of the bunch. If it hadn't been for Microsoft's criminal monopolistic practices (OS + office suite), Word would never have become the de facto word processor in the world.

Even 15 years ago I was working as a systems administrator in a company which still insisted on using WordPerfect because of its superiority. A Microsoft fanboy became the IT Director, and WP was phased out for Word.

My experience is the reverse. My $5 DO server running almost identical software responds much faster than my Linode server. The Linode server is far, far closer to me geographically.

I have put this down to the DO SSDs. It will be interesting to see if this is true. I've been considering migrating from Lindoe to DO because they were faster and cheaper.

I've had 2 DO VPS for about 6 months, and never had a problem with them.