tonyblundell

Lots, I guess highlights would be...

Pavane by Keith Roberts

The Spire by William Golding

Running Man by Stephen King

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

> Why do we send postcards?

Because our mothers are scared of smart-phones :-)

Cool! Linux with Viruses :-)

This could be useful as a backup.

I don't know about BitBucket, but GitHub has suffered downtime before. If you have a second remote on Dropbox, you can also get to your files there and wherever it's automatically syncing them should your VCS go down.

I once started a job where whoever wrote the codebase I inherited had used variable names like MrString, MrsInteger, SirArrayOfArrays etc.

Was hilarious :-|

Which is exactly why we need a single new framework to rule them all!

Sounds more like $5 logos for programmers.

The technology behind it sounds really interesting - expecting programmers to chase bounties and work for nothing up-front with only the possibility of getting paid - not so much.

It definitely pre-dates the internet - I remember my mother and grandmother writing it in birthday cards at least 25 years ago.

Also, I know someone named Lol - apparently it used to be quite a common shortening of Lawrence.

True, but I don't think it necessarily follows that they'd pay for the same content digitally.

One thing the web has shown us is that people still value tangible things differently to non-tangible things.

You also have to consider the reason's people paid for newspapers... it might have been the only way to get reliable content... to purport a certain image, social status or political allegiance... to keep in-line with peers - did you see this? did you read that?.. simply to pass time.

If you have a smartphone and five minutes to waste, you can cover all those bases without paying for a news article. You can use Facebook, Reddit, Youtube and discussion forums for subjects that interest you, for example.

Remember in the 90s when online store catalogues were pretty much just uploads of print catalogues - designed with pages of content and no search functionality. Or when people tried to make 'online malls' - directories of stores people might want to use in one visit, like they would a brick and mortar mall? They didn't work because the analog to digital conversion isn't just a straight upload process. It's much more complicated than that.

People interact with and consume digital content different to paper content. Just uploading and charging a few pence to read isn't going to work IMHO.

The web is 20 years old. I think if this was going to happen, it would have happened by now.

Outside of a few niches, people just aren't willing to pay to read websites.

What I could see happening is premium content being bundled by ISPs. Pay for X package from Y ISP, get content from A, B and C websites. Kind-of like how TV channels are bundled.

In all likelihood though, I think advertising will continue as is. Advertisers will just come up with cleverer ways of presenting it.

It doesn't make sense mathematically because it isn't a mathematical notation, it's linguistic in nature.

In Europe, '4th May' is shortened to 4/5.

In the US, 'May 4th' is shortened to 5/4.

Neither is right, wrong or illogical.

I'm from the UK, but have spent a lot of time working with US based clients/colleagues. They only way I've found to avoid confusion and ambiguity is to use YYYY/MM/DD.

Yeah seems obvious, but I don't think it really makes sense to guess that it's a UK format date based on whether one of the numbers is bigger than 12. 4/5/2012 could be 4th May or 5th April and it would be impossible to tell programmatically.

People really need to start using yyyy/mm/dd :-)