A veritable hero of our times boasts a mere 688 followers on his Twitter account: https://twitter.com/RobertMMetcalfe (as of the dispatch of this message).
Both of them remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]:
> all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel interfaces. To users and client programs, all these cases look alike.
And Rob Pike once said[2]:
> When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon.
Last year, I had a talk with Stephen Wolfram, he said that, for him, the most important secret helping him solve problems is "some version of confidence or arrogant". That make him never fear any difficulty, but this arrogant inevitably behave in some other aspects of his life, and affect people's impression of him.
This remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]:
> all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel interfaces. To users and client programs, all these cases look alike.
About two years ago, I had a chance to ask Eben Upton if there would be a new platform like Arduino and Raspberry PI, what characteristics the new platform should have? And he said:
> There's scope for something very powerful (almost PC-like) in the $70 price range. If I was starting a new venture today, this is where I'd aim.
There is very powerful project like Bunnie Huang's Novena [1], but just the board will cost $550.
Language is still a barrier for developers in China to understand and discuss the technical world, so we developed this application. The daily page view of this website is about 25k, and we add a few features we think important but HN is missing:
- Markdown support, even pictures could be added in comment
- Sub-forums, so one could follow (or ignore) particular topics
- Read comments without living the homepage
- Optimization for mobile device
- Social features, e.g. AT or FOLLOW particular ID
- New submissions will randomly appear in homepage, so we don't need to count on up-votes immediately after submit
The only future for journalism might be reader revenue. Without it, everyone in this field were in danger of becoming a public relations or advertising company disguised as journalism.
I'm an editor at Programmer Magazine in China (http://special.csdn.net/programmercovers/), as a coincidence, after 14 years operation, we just release the last print issue last week and withdrawal towards the electronic version only. I think we share the similar experience and feeling about how the tech medias evolved recently.
But media is still a very active field, if you have read the New York Times innovation report that leaked earlier this year, you may get a mixed feeling that with the risks, there are still opportunities to build an independent site with in-depth articles, code, algorithms, and reliable product reviews, which quality media should have.
But unfortunately, most decisions were not made by the ones who love this career, have ability and skill to lead the change, and do not fear to face the risks.
The biggest problem might be compatibility, old computers (common in China) only contain fonts that have low quality Roman parts like SimSun (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E6%98%93%E5%AE%8B%E4%...) but this font is default Chinese typeface in Windows.
The newly designed fonts in recent years for Chinese have much better Roman parts which are already distributed by operating system or could obtained for free:
Many Chinese websites have already using one of them as their default font. There are also a dozen of commercial Chinese fonts which contain higher quality Roman typeface (although could not catch up most classic ones).
And for professionals (like book publishers or designers) in China, they often combine one Chinese font and one Roman font in their product for better result. (e.g. FZNew ShuSong + Sabon for Serif).