telent

George Bernard Shaw, iirc

On the general question: there is an obvious distinction to be made between someone asking you for advice on what they plan to spend the next three years doing, and what they're hacking together on a single pizza-fueled weekend. The latter is a learning experience and even without your advice they'll fail fast if they fail, so don't sweat it.

> My point is that Openness advocates seem to place Google on a pedestal

That may be your perception, but I don't think it's universally true. Ask anyone who's tried to build a project on AOSP ...

> there's no semantic distinction between code and data

I struggle to understand how this can be true, and I say that as a Lisper (spiritually if not currently), because 'this data does something meaningful when interpreted by a computer' is exactly a semantic distinction from 'this other data doesn't'

The article is from May 2012, perhaps the thread title could be updated to say so?

Indeed, the value of threading on usenet was that it provided data for the user-agent to decide in what order to present unread posts to the user - if the original topic A had drifted to subjects B C and D which were being discussed in parallel, when reading it three hours later I would get all the posts about B before the posts about C and then the posts about D. And if I grew tired of B I could hit 'k' and move immediately onto C. As long as I wanted to carry on reading, though, all I needed to do was hit SPACE (or in today's language, scroll down)

This is all a completely separate issue from the one of whether replies should be indented under their parent. For my money, this only makes sense if the reply is approximately as long as 'ME TOO!!!11!!!1!' and in the more interesting case that the reply is actually a reply and not just a comment, indenting is the wrong decision. But there is no need to conflate the two: ordering and indenting are independent decisions

Er, this is email we're talking about here, not http

So why is an article about the Metropolitan Police forensic lab in south London (UK) illustrated with a stock photo of what appears to be a US power socket? (It might be a Euro socket, but it's certainly not a UK one.) Do they not have electricity sockets anywhere at the BBC that they could have taken a picture of?

The continual references to how much easier it was "ten years ago" makes me wonder if the author was actually in the industry ten years ago, or is merely using it as a shorthand for "grandpa's stories of how it was in his day"

I'm pretty sure I could have written the same thing in 2002 except that the list of technologies would have looked different.

> The Linux kernel itself is a remarkably stable system as far as ABI/API is concerned

If we're talking about userland applications, the Linux kernel A[BP]Is have IME historically been more stable than the Glibc interfaces (which are supposedly the "supported" interfaces) layered atop them.

In-kernel interfaces for binary-only modules are a different kettle of fish altogether.

Their (Smile) online banking is "not bad for a financial institution", and if that sounds like damning with faint praise ...

Particular nits are: - pressing the browser 'back' button triggers an immediate logout - they don't use email for anything except to tell you they've sent you a "secure message" that you have to log in and read - no data export (though there are greasemonkey scripts)

Their customer service I've found to be fine unless you want anything usual, complicated, or to be done in a timely fashion. Much like any large company, really

Does anyone know of "friend discovery" services using OStatus? Most proprietary social networks have that "let me riffle through your addressbook" thing, which I imagine the privacy-conscious would eschew (I certainly do), but e.g. my Twitter "following" list is publically available, so it shouldn't be hard to go through that and find people I'm following who are also on an ostatus-compatible service somewhere

I'd question the assumption that ftp was ever the old ftp, if by "ftp" we mean "deployment channel to production services". As soon as your web site is complicated enough to need a database, you have database migrations or their moral equivalent to worry about as part of the upgrade process, an simply dumping files in a directory somewhere doesn't cut it