On the other hand (and I'm slightly playing Devil's advocate here), books and other physical media go out of print eventually. It can become difficult to find a copy of some archaic technical manual that interests you. (Anyone selling any Symbolics manuals? :-))
There is no reason for a digital publishing to stop creating new copies of a digital work (once they finally develop an economic model that works.)
Emacs does not come with a lot of features built in, it comes with lots of loadable modules. If you don't need them then don't load them. The notion that Emacs is bloated has not really stood since around 1985.
The power to write a first person maze (which just blew my mind since it appears to be written as a character based hack, rather than an embedded widget) is the same power that allows you to write powerful libraries for modifying text.
Rendering a page as a semantically structured document won't remove the ability to globally disable a feature. (In fact, I would argue that it would make it easier.)
It's fair enough that pg does whatever he likes... no one can argue that point.
Why not stop rendering HN pages in tables with inline formatting and render the page as a semantically structured document with a default style sheet. This will allow others to come along and restyle the site as they see fit. Don't like comment points? hidden. Post score is less than -4? hidden.
I personally don't understand the reasoning behind using tables as formatting and inline styles on a site whose content generally includes articles about web development.
Actually, I'm wondering what Haskell has to do with any of this at all.
You're comparing the size of the current incarnation of a fairly modern functional programming runtime with the capacity of computers that existed 10 years before the first incarnation was realised...
The only message I can take from that is that programs today are quite big. That's only really interesting from a nostalgic point of view, I don't see what relevance it has to the discussion of mutability?
Of course, I could have missed something obviously significant here...
Mutable objects are there so that you don't have to create new instances whenever a field changes. The danger of shared mutable objects is that the ground can change beneath your feet.
Immutable objects enable safe sharing, however, if you have an immutable object and want to change it, you have to copy it and make the change during construction of the new object.
I guess the 'copy penalty' in either case depends on the size of your objects.
The 'us and them' mentality exists across many boundaries and I don't think it's going away any time soon. Most just learn to ignore it because whatever you decide is good, someone, somewhere, disagrees with you.
Testing a DB connection sounds more like integration than unit testing.
Mocks are used to fake things that add significant overhead but no value. If you have a suite of 1000 unit tests, you really don't want half of them making actual database requests.
Simply making 'safe copies' of the database data does not solve the problem that Mocks are intended to solve.
So, maybe IE isn't a great browser, but it still has actual people working on it. I bet at least one person on the IE team uses Firefox or Chrome in the office for regular browsing.
Think of it this way: The people who work on IE are probably well aware of the areas that need improvement. They might not get to make the decisions about where the work is focused. There may not even be enough effort available to put into major changes. Then there's the issue of backwards compatibility that plagues Microsoft products.
Microsoft is full of really nice people and talented developers. This is a gracious gesture.
I'm afraid I can't personally provide a detailed run down - I played the game for about 6 months near the end of university and after that I never really found enough free time to justify continuing the subscription.
I would take a look at the development section also. They use a Python variant called Stackless (http://www.stackless.com) which provides lightweight threads and message passing. I actually started using this as an alternative to regular CPython.
Actually, this response is directed towards shogunmike also. Just in case you haven't heard of Eve, it's a spaced themed MMO very much to the tune of Elite. You can make a living mining, trading, fighting. The factions are split onto two levels: Corporations (companies that employ/hire individual players) and Alliances (gropps of corporations with similar vision/goals)
The ecomony is almost entirely player driven.. the materials are mined by players, the equipment is built by players from those materials. You are free to engage in hostile activity even in controlled space, although the penalty is severe.
It's worth a look. The freedom of play has allowed some players to gain notoriety even in the mass media (Note: exchanging game money for real world currency is a violation of the rules):
2) the ``This sucks'' response lets you vent anger. Now there are two conflicting theories about controlling strong emotions... ;-)
I realise that this is intended for humour, but more seriously, I have experienced much better anger reduction when actually chatting amiably with someone and making a friendly recommendation. ``This sucks'' just passes on the negativity to others.
I would say a lot of Brits really do enjoy talking to people, not as an obligation of 'politeness'. The culture of politeness is more likely to be a cause than a symptom. (Speaking for myself) I find it hard to talk randomly to strangers because it's imposing on whatever they may be doing at the time.
Watch for Brits asking each other for directions, or for the time, even in plain view of a clock tower. It's sweet in a repressed kind of way.