The Reddit front page is, quite literally, for sale - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/6makhi/the_front_page_is_quite_literally_for_sale/ <comment><AUTHOR> Reddit's /r/HailCorporate, which tracks attempts to influence (usually for commercial gain) the popular website, has turned up services claiming to sell front-page placement on Reddit and Imgur.

This is similar to other services which claimed similar results in the past for Facebook, Craigslist and other user-based collaborative submission/moderation sites. It wouldn't surprise me to find HN is subject to similar attacks.

[http://archive.is/rfXJ2](http://archive.is/rfXJ2)</comment>


The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris - <AUTHOR> http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2017/09/04/the-sudden-death-and-eternal-life-of-solaris/ <comment><USER3> There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article. Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay.

You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones. It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already.

As illumos is only the basic building block of the operating system (but unlike linux includes kernel + basic userland) one usually runs one of the distributions:

\- SmartOS, developed by Joyent as a cloud hypervisor. Supports zones, KVM and lx-branded linux containers. [1]

\- OmniOS CE, a minimal distribution targeted for bare metal server installations [2]

\- OpenIndiana, similar to the traditional opensolaris. If you care about GUI this is probably the one. [3]

\- Tribblix, modern components with retro style [4]

Sure, the user base is smaller than Linux. But that is also true for FreeBSD which is used by Netflix and Whatsapp. Running a different OS than most other people can give your company an advantage and I know that ZFS and zones have done that for mine.

[1] [https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS](https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS)

[2] [http://www.omniosce.org](http://www.omniosce.org)

[3] [https://www.openindiana.org](https://www.openindiana.org)

[4] [http://www.tribblix.org](http://www.tribblix.org)

<comment><USER4> How does running a different OS than most people can give a company an advantage? Can you elaborate this?

<comment><USER5> A different OS can solve some of the pain points of the mainstream options. Depending on your business, the features a different OS brings could have a large impact on performance or stability.

Potential areas for improvement could be anything from filesystem to process concurrency to virtualization.

<comment><USER6> I'd see only the pain of migrating applications and learning new administration tools. Solaris was dead long before oracle killed it -- to me.

<comment><USER7> "migrating applications" \-- you'd be shocked at how unix software tends to run on... unix OSes with few to no modifications.

Things like:

      * Java
      * PHP
      * Perl
      * Python
      * Ruby
      * Apache
      * Nginx
      * Varnish
      * MySqL
      * Postgres
      * Node.js
      * etc

all run just fine on a Solaris-clone. Unless your app is using very specific kernel features it will probably work fine.

<comment><USER8> Ugh. Unix is absolutely the worst development target. It's clunky, ad-hoc, it uses some horrible ancient programming language and an even more horrible ancient scripting language. Like democracy, it's definitely the worst example of its type ever to have been invented.

<comment><USER6> I'd suggest your experience|expertise is lacking. My first couple of months were bad but then I learned to appreciate the expressiveness and facility of even a bad shell language and the open horizon of how things were done. This comment seems to be classic troll or sour grapes.

<comment><USER8> It was a joke, actually. The quote I was referencing is, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." I actually wrote a (short) book on the ways of the Unix shell, which hopefully qualifies me to have an opinion on the matter. Although UHH is quite dated, there is and has been a great deal of legitimate criticism of Unix, and for that matter C and Bash as well. You have mistaken my opinion on the matter, but your eagerness in assigning negative qualities here is something you might want to examine. To be clear, I do consider Unix and Bash to be imperfect but essential tools for any programmer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries.

Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris? Nope of course you aren't - who is?! Pretty much nobody nowadays - w3techs.com shows Solaris at 0.0005% for webservers for example. Everyone talks about how great it is(to be sure there are some small bits that are pretty dang amazing) - yet for some reason nearly no one actually DOES use it! Perhaps there is a reason for that. Lord knows I have many battle scars from the many real world rough edges that never seemed to get less fundamentally shitty(for starters: path_to_inst and smf I'm looking right at you!)

I definitely respect the amazing work of some of the engineers on the Solaris team back in the day. ZFS and DTrace being two that have made the tech world by in large a better place either directly or thru inspiration. And Linux and the BSDs are definitely better for those selective code gifts! But nonetheless, the world voted with their feet, and Solaris didn't make the cut.

<comment><USER10> > At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from > Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries.

This is a crop out that you're giving on behalf of Oracle.

Oracle does this all the time. It's their modus operandi.

They buy companies/technologies out, milk them for license fees and let it trudge along until it stops making money anymore and either close shop or abandon it to Apache Foundation.

There are anecdotes out there ranging from technologies they've bought to sale representatives having their bonus taken away from selling licenses.

Your statement also just ignore their cowardly act of re proprietrating solaris. They did the same with Java not giving out TCK for Apache open source Java. There are many other instances of hostile actions toward the open source communities.

<comment><USER9> Yes Oracle did that to Solaris. You are right. But it was already pretty dead before Oracle bought Sun. Which was why Sun was for-sale in the first place.

That's not just Oracle's fault. Place blame where blame is due(java) - <USER2> blaming everything on Oracle is kinda silly here. Sun mis-stepped pretty hard in the years after the original .com bubble and what we are seeing now the the final result. I'm shocked it took this long.

<comment><USER11> Fujitsu was interested, US threatened to block any foreign sale. IBM was interested, a loud mouth blocked negotiations and pushed his golf buddy instead..

Sun made some strange moves toward the end, but there absolutely could have been a product line left if the developer market felt neutral about the buyer and the buyer tried to focus on upsells and professional services. The way Oracle tried to sneak this EOL in is very much evidence of there still being support licenses and professional services money for a few years more.

But it was worth it if the Sun curse took down Ellison. May your foot never leave your mouth again, cloud boy. Now go play golf with network's owner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bryan Cantrill give a great lecture. I saw him give an overview of DTrace a decade or more ago and remain impressed. Check him out.

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill)

It's sad that we live in a world where a company doing good , innovative and useful tech is gobbled up by a company like Oracle who should not exist and do largely on their ability to con ignorant senior management and even more ignorant boards of directors.

Is there ever a technical reason to use Oracle? If there is what percentage of Oracle sales does it account for? Ie if it really is non-zero I bet it's a single digit percentage. Woeful company from the top down is their reputation and they've earned it.

<comment><USER13> The Oracle rdbms was at least for a while unmatched. It had programmability, functionality, and tunability that no other database had. If you needed what it provided, and could afford it, there was no real substitute.

Today, Postgres has come a long way, and distributed databases are much more developed. There is probably much less technical justification for using Oracle than there was 10+ years ago.

Also many companies would pay for Oracle and just use it for CRUD operations. That was throwing money away, no doubt.

<comment><USER14> Uh, doesn't everything you do with a database reduce to CRUD?

I understand that sometimes you do the composition of many CRUD operations, but this is still CRUD.

<comment><USER15> Literally everything you do with memory and disks can also be reduced to CRUD, but that is an extreme example to show my point: a DB does a lot more. A well written DB, in this case a good RDBMS, gives you stronger guarantees that data is saved and accessed in certain ways. That by itself is worth using a better one that gives you better guarantees.

But they also provide stronger typing and checking of the data. They provide a programming language neutral way to access the data quickly and efficiently. They index data to make queries on it faster. They do much of this automatically so you think it's all simple CRUD operations, but they also provide ways to explain what they're doing if it isn't working as expected. I can count the number of programs (not DBs) on my hand that I know of that can explain themselves accurately without needing a debugger.

Edit: I don't mean to be annoying. Most people on HN knew this and I'm not assuming you didn't, but while most people just use RDBMS for simple CRUD operations they're losing out on the power that these databases have been designed with.

<comment><USER16> Amen to everything you and arnarbi wrote.

However, I've come to dislike building business rules using the proprietary languages of the RDBMS vendors. In particular, I use Oracle and have been making a case with my employer to stop creating ties to Oracle by using PL/SQL as our house language. While it provides some efficiencies and can sometimes make coding easier, it can stifle development as easily.

I'm all for expressing data relationships in the RDBMS and using efficiency mechanisms like indexes and cost-based optimization. However, I now prefer business rules to be expressed outside the database.

[EDIT: Corrected anarbi to arnarbi.]

<comment><USER17> As someone working at a company that decided to write most of their SQL code at the application layer, there are definite tradeoffs. Our application performance suffers because of the fear of vendor lock-in and the flexibility others thought that writing code at the application level would provide.

The question I pose to anyone consider this type of architecture is, how often do you switch database platforms?

<comment><USER16> The answer is almost never because the cost in time is too high for such a switch. It's the same question I posed 10 years ago. My view changed since coming to my current employer.

I work for a moderate-sized university. The applications I support require up- to-date information in order to test modifications. They are read-intensive with few writes within the database. We can afford only one test database for the entire university. We refresh the database from production only once a quarter, at most. My applications would benefit greatly by being able to switch URL's to the production database in order to test a mod. Since our code, written in PL/SQL, gets stored in the database that it runs on, we can't do such a thing without significant effort: dblinks or modifying package names to store in production for testing or a test schema or whatever else you can think up.

Another issue is that PL/SQL is not a robust language for modern development. Its type-system was designed for strictness, which is great in life-critical systems. But, there is no notion of inheritance and no ability to write generic collections.

To mimic inheritance, you can create objects backed by tables and inherit one from the other. It has the feel of being bolted on and yet another tie to Oracle.

One final issue is that PL/SQL is highly subject to the resource management of the Oracle kernel. Often, the kernel is extremely efficient. But, there are times when you need code running in a separate address space, preferably on a separate server. For instance, one application I wrote is a batch system that has a lot of processing rules built into it. Our database is tuned for OLTP. My application is categorized by the DBA's as data warehouse-oriented. Yet my application has to run hourly throughout the day and compete with resources necessary for the OLTP stuff. Putting it onto a separate server, away from Oracle's kernel management, would more than likely help a performance issue we have.

So, the answer to your question is the one you were looking for. But, my concern isn't necessarily switching database vendors.

<comment><USER18> I understand the cost of switching now. Was Postgres never an option? Do the uptime requirements call for RAC etc.?

<comment><USER16> Our Banner student information system is tied to Oracle. My applications all go against Banner data. Given the licensing cost for Oracle and our current round of cost-cutting, if Postgres was an option, we'd probably take it.

<comment><USER19> Several years ago at an .edu I had to deal with an upgrade from our current system to Banner. I truly feel for you. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their > termination via a pre-recorded call — "robo-RIF'd"

Every single first person or second hand account I've heard about Oracle makes like a terrible place to work... is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible?

<comment><USER21> > is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible?

I'm on the outside looking in and don't have any special internal insight, but they didn't just pull this robo-RIF idea out of their ass spur-of-the-moment. _Oracle is the kind of place that maintains a robo-layoff system_ , which pretty much says all you need to know.

"What you think of Oracle is _even truer_ than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle."

[https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m](https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m)

<comment><USER22> Oh man, so many good quotes in that talk. "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison"

<comment><USER23> "There is no need to have an open mind about Oracle. That wastes the openness of your mind."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I always thought Solaris was a beautiful and memorable name for an operating system.

Any connection with the Stanislaw Lem novel (or Tarkovsky movie) was always a bit unclear to me... But I guess a book about futile interactions with a planet-sized alien brain that doesn't care about you other than mysteriously experimenting with your memories is a reasonable metaphor for the Unix user experience.

<comment><USER25> Soderberghs version is much more reflective of what happened with the emergence of OpenSolaris and Illumos (not to give away any spoilers but apparently forking is a real thing and it lives on). Tarkovskys movie was such a philosophical drivel that I feel asleep. How is the book - is it worth reading? As I understood it neither of films follow the novel very closely.

<comment><USER26> I didn't read the book, but being boring is Tarkovsky's touch, so it sounds pretty safe to say it comes from him.

Also people, please don't downvote parent. It's very fair to say this movie is boring and confusing, and I think it was the very point. Tarkovsky has this style of filming around supernatural / sf things but never actually showing them. Instead, he prefers to explore the anxiety they cause on humans, anxiety which he often represents through long waiting with deceptive conclusions, so I would say that feeling annoyed is quite what is expected from people watching them. It's art, not entertainment.

<comment><USER27> Tarkovsky's works are generally demanding works of art. They are definitely slow paced and almost boring, but I've always found myself in a much more thoughtful frame of mind after watching his films.

As for Solaris, it is worth reading the book as well as watching both versions of the film -- they ask and explore different questions. The book is about the nature of intelligence and life whereas the films are more about the human part of the equation -- what does it mean to be a human as opposed to be a "replicant"? Tarkovsky is slower paced, but IMHO encourages deep reflection. Soderbergh's version is definitely more watchable and is actually quite thoughtful by Hollywood standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wouldn't call illumos "thriving". Commit activity[1] is low for a project of this size (compared to e.g. BSDs) and its hardware support is poor.

Probably the biggest problem is the fact that all existing distributions are undermaintained and unpolished. SmartOS is the only exception, but it's _not_ a replacement for Solaris which was a general-purpose server OS. SmartOS is merely a bare-metal hypervisor.

I really hope that some of the laid-off developers will start contributing to the project. It really needs them.

[1] - [https://github.com/illumos/illumos- gate/commits/master](https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commits/master)

<comment><USER29> Hardware support is by far the _stupidest_ complaint that prevails when people talk about operating systems. Choose your hardware for your software, not the other way around. There are _so many_ better things operating system authors have to do than to implement thousands of competing proprietary hardware interfaces. Mature support for even 50% of consumer hardware would take a massive team of full time engineers _years_ to pull off, and would be wasted when that team could have been making huge strides and innovations in the parts of the OS that actually matter.

If your hardware isn't supported and you don't like it, get your ass into the code and build support for it.

<comment><USER30> When you say "choose your hardware for your software", you are assuming the software has already been chosen by the time the hardware is selected. That's not necessarily the case. I already have the hardware, it's been bought years ago, and it works with the software I use. Now if for instance I wanted to evaluate OpenSolaris, but it didn't run on the hardware I have, I would probably pass it up. I wouldn't invest hours and hours coding support for it to run on my hardware, before I were sure I would have a use for it. And that's assuming I could; I do happen to know how to write a low-level driver, but many people who would otherwise be interested on the software might not have that knowledge and/or ability.

Of course, once you already use the software, the situation inverts itself. I do choose only hardware which is known to work well with Linux, since that's the operating system I use, and I have even ported a device driver when that wasn't the case. But that can only happen because, many years ago when I first tried Linux, it worked perfectly with the hardware I had.

<comment><USER29> I think that this argument holds up, but fails to justify the huge engineering cost of supporting large amounts of proprietary consumer hardware.

If you want to evaluate it but don't have the hardware, try qemu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their > termination via a pre-recorded call — "robo-RIF'd"

This sounds awful, and very long from what would be the legal requirements demanded in the country I live in.

What would such a robot call say?

<comment><USER32> I'd imagine something like "shutdown -h now" or the solaris equivalent

<comment><USER33> Solaris would understand that, but Oracle's move was nowhere that gentle.

"uadmin 1 6" was more like it (Immediate poweroff, do not even sync disks)

<comment><USER34> More like:

lom> poweroff

As that is definitely something the os has no cability to block.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Just ran across this: Scott McNealy's answer to "why didn't Sun sell to IBM":

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_ope...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_open_source/?page=3)

"One of the issues I had with one of the other suitors was there was a complete overlap in what they did and what we did, and I could see 100 per cent of the Sun employees getting fired," McNealy told us. He didn't name names, but he was referring to IBM's bid for Sun. IBM had competed heavily with Sun for decades on processors, servers, Unix, Java tools, middleware, and open source. There weren't too many areas where they didn't overlap.

"At least with Oracle, they weren't in the hardware business, the operating systems business — the places and spaces where I saw chance for some Sun employees to keep their jobs, and that for me was an important consideration," McNealy said.

<comment><USER36> i.e., AIX and Power systems

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > _And, it turns out, illumos was born at exactly the right moment: shortly > after illumos was announced, Oracle — in what remains to me a singularly > loathsome and cowardly act — silently re-proprietarized Solaris on August > 13, 2010._

I was very curious about this, and stumbled on further details in [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cant...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cantrill.pdf) on page 15. But read the entire PDF anyway, it's interesting.

</comment><comment><USER38> An old, old Oracle joke:

Q: On what hardware does Oracle run best?

A: A 35mm slide projector.

</comment><comment><USER39> _Sudden_ death? Solaris has been dying for at least a decade. An entire company collapsed after not being able to monetize Solaris-based systems. Solaris wasn't killed by a company; it was killed by the market. A company just stopped trying to resuscitate it after years of CPR.

Cantrill blames "executive whims, shareholder demands, and a fickle public," but not even a little bit the product designers and engineers who are so attuned to the needs and desires of the market that they have somehow missed the collapse of a Fortune 500 company due to their products not selling and years later are still surprised that the product is being shut down?

</comment><comment><USER40> I hate to be facile, but if Sun and Solaris were so great and Oracle was this known _bad_ place, why did they let the Oracle people in the door in the first place?

Maybe sell to someone else?

<comment><USER41> Oracle paid $5.6 billion for Sun. If someone else wanted to pay that much they could have submitted an offer too. The board cares about maximizing shareholder value, not about the future of any ongoing technologies.

Sun had been in discussions with IBM for months about an acquisition, but I believe the offer was lower and there were antitrust concerns (they did compete directly in a lot of markets) [1]. I suspect they would have been a much better steward of the open-source efforts though

[1]: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/technology/business- comput...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/technology/business- computing/06blue.html)

<comment><USER40> Yeah, mine was little of a leading question certainly.

Oracle seems like bad guys, but it's really the board of Sun that had priorities other than the health of Solaris and the long term employment of the engineers. Oracle was a known snake [1].

Also, sale of the entire business of Sun was probably only one of many options on the table.

[1]: [http://www.gballard.net/lifes_lessons/girl_rattlesnake/](http://www.gballard.net/lifes_lessons/girl_rattlesnake/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Solaris, hell, I still mourn the death of SunOS (esp verison 4.1.3) at the hands of Solaris,

<comment><USER43> Ah... I loved SunOS! Fondly remember my Sun Station 3/80, nothing like that fancy SPARC processor in there, a good solid 68040 like real men used back then ;-)

Mind you, I still use the 'sun' font when booting my linux kernel on framebuffers, I always loved that font.

<comment><USER35> "Love your country but never trust its government."

[https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2016/01/24/why-the-sun- spar...](https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2016/01/24/why-the-sun-sparc2-has- the-message-love-your-country-but-never-trust-its-government/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10966571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10966571)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Twenty years ago, if you'd said that the surviving commercial *ixen would be AIX and HP/UX, you'd have been drummed out of the Unix Beard club.

<comment><USER45> HP/UX is dead too because HP despite apparently having an x86 port won't be porting it off itanium. Random link about it ([http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project_kinetic/)). Whether they do a 180 and port it to x86, the fact remains its probably to late, the damage has been done.

That leaves AIX, which at least has decent hardware to run on. But its got the OS/2 problem too, you can write your app for linux, and use the AIX toolbox for linux apps, and port your app. Although with power8 the move to LE linux, makes moving applications/data between linux on POWER and AIX on POWER more difficult.

<comment><USER44> I was at an IBM conf in 2014 where they were basically telling the AIX guys to get familiar with KVM as it would likely be replacing PowerVM sooner or later. The writing has been on the wall for a while, for better or worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm surprised he is surprised. Everybody knew Solaris was dead. I'm more surprised Oracle still had so many engineers working on it. I guess they where waiting out some SLAs.

Of course Oracle is a horrible company and all but Solaris has been dead for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER47> As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?

<comment><USER48> I know many people mentioned dtrace, ZFS, mdb.. in describing Solaris' merits but it was not a very good OS in 1997 when I first got my hands on it. It was slow - the SPARC hardware didn't help and ZFS/MDB/Dtrace did not exist back then. But I think back then for Enterprises Solaris was the most easily accessible platform SPARC hardware came with and it had a good run for a short while.

It was only when Linux started to seriously kick its ass that Sun engineers took it upon themselves to do some great work and make Solaris interesting again - I remember they had a policy - if something is slower than Linux it was a bug. I guess it all came in too late (including the Open Source part ) and people did not like being tied to SPARC hardware and CDDL was a buzz kill for whatever reasons.

<comment><USER49> Ha -- isn't that ever the truth! When I came to Sun in 1996, Solaris was really good at only two things: scaling on SMP machines and not crashing while doing it. Morale wasn't necessarily high (the early history of Solaris had been brutal, and it had only been due to the budding success of 2.5 and UltraSPARC that engineers were beginning to feel forward-looking), and it took us several more years just to get the house in order. MDB came out of this period, as well as important primordial tooling like lockstat(1M).

But as we were getting the OS to work as advertised, we had bigger ideas brewing. In Bonwick's case, it was ZFS, for me it was DTrace, for Tucker it was zones, for Casper it was least-priv, etc. I know that it looks like it was in response to Linux and/or as a result of the dot-com bust (and it's impossible to say to what degree these were contributing factors), but I can tell you that from the epicenter it felt much more like a natural evolution than a competitive response. That said, I know that the competition didn't hurt, and you're certainly right about Linux finally causing us to take small- systems performance and system call latency seriously!

<comment><USER48> > scaling on SMP machines and not crashing while doing it

Yep - Only ever had one time when it hosed on us (100 people team, many running JVM based applications and some doing load tests on it - IIRC it was 2.6 days.) And there wasn't a challenger in sight as far as SMP goes(h/w and s/w both).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> To quote the brilliant Jim Morrison:

"Waiting for the Sun" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0kypyGSKsE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0kypyGSKsE)

"The End" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FMGYycBAMU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FMGYycBAMU)

And to quote the also brilliant Jim Thompson (whose Levenshtein distance from Jim Morrison is 5):

        We had Joy, we had fun
        We ran Unix on a Sun,
        But the source and the song
        Of Solaris have all gone.

</comment><comment><USER50> Does the death of Solaris have any implications for the future of SPARC? Seemed like most of the SPARC hardware that Oracle sells/sold exclusively ran Solaris. I could be wrong about that, though.

<comment><USER51> Fujitsu as been the largest manufacturer of SPARC chips for a number of years now. They make super computers (and mainframes) with SPARC chips although for how much longer... Their latest major announcement along side Oracle was in May this year.

<comment><USER52> At least on the supercomputing side, they're switching to ARM: [http://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/post-k-supercomputer- ov...](http://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/post-k-supercomputer-overview.pdf)

(no idea about whether mainframes will continue using SPARC)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brian-armstrong My only experience with Solaris was on the campus computer lab. It was also one of the first UNIX experiences I had had.

I think what stood out most was the strongly 90s GUI and focus-follows-cursor, which seemed very strange at first. It seemed like an interesting OS with its own quirks

<comment><USER53> Probably olwm or olvwm. Either supported a -c switch for click to focus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Very sad. Solaris was my first commercial Unix. Technically it was SunOS 4.x, on a SparcStation 10. This was probably around the time they renamed SunOS 4.x to Solaris 1?

I still have an old Ultra 10 downstairs. It hasn't been turned on since 2004 or so. I think it had Solaris 8?

</comment><comment><USER25> RIP Solaris, it introduced UNIX to me and I will always remember it fondly.

</comment><comment><USER55> I remember playing around on a old Sun sparc. It was my first exposure to unix and curiosity got the better of me. I picked up a copy of freebsd and started to tinker with that and read more and more about the unix philosophy.

To this day I still think Solaris was really well thought out. It had a certain rock solidness to it that I can't really describe. Compare to even openbsd or freebsd I always thought or felt it was more stable (regardless of that was actually the case).

I'm sad that so much work went into such a great OS and now it is basically gone to die. These days if you're thinking about creating a piece of software and want it to last open source is probably the only option.

</comment><comment><USER56> Oracle should open source it back, probably donate it to Apache.

<comment><USER57> what's in it for Oracle?

<comment><USER58> some goodwill. Microsoft earned a lot of with all of the open sourcing they've been doing in the last few years.

<comment><USER59> To paraphrase Bryan Cantrill, don't fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. Your lawnmower doesn't care about community goodwill either.

<comment><USER58> What? I'm saying it matters in the community of developers - and it does.

<comment><USER59> My point is that "showing goodwill" is not something that makes sense within Oracle (at least that's what I've heard). I agree that acting correctly to a community is the right thing to do, but that doesn't mean it's something that Oracle will do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I'm curious where this leaves things like the ZFS appliances? They aren't going to use openzfs on oel are they?

</comment><comment><USER61> I know of a least one major company (fortune 30) that requires solaris for several safety critical systems products (think, for example, but not necessarily, commercial aircraft control systems) with thousands of active installations all over the world. Without it, they can't maintain these systems.

</comment><comment><USER62> This was the best OS hands down, so sad...

</comment><comment><USER63> Is there no chance of saving Solaris? If Oracle doesn't have a commercial interest in it, why don't they transfer it to Apache or other foundation? It's not an unusual thing to do, and Solaris devs could make a living by support and maintenance.

<comment><USER3> Oracle has been slowly killing Solaris for some time. At the same time the community has already saved it - this is what illumos is about. It exists and is open source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> If there is a one phrase takeaway from this excellent essay it would be Brian's terse and apt characterization of Oracle as a "remorseless corporate sociopath."

<comment><USER65> "Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison!"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Just wondering, at what point could the Solaris name be reused for another Unix distribution?

<comment><USER67> Without causing confusion? Probably when all current Solaris users are dead or don't care anymore.

Reusing names tends to be a terrible idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> just a question: was Solaris making any money? If not, then it should be shelved.

</comment><comment><USER69> It never seemed quite right that Solaris and all this awesome engineering tech from Sun ended up as personal playthings of someone like Larry Ellison.

Edit: grammar.</comment>


Instant sex change served up by video software  - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17226-instant-sex-change-served-up-by-video-software.html

<comment><USER2> Those FBI agents are gonna have a _field day._

<comment><USER3> Hmm, are you making a joke about Hoover, or am I not the only one who thought the title said "Instant sex _charge_ ", with the article going to be about the FBI's kiddie porn honeypot sites, where even an accidental click on one could get you brought up on child porn charges?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can see this being used by cam-girl sites.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention MMOs. Transformation to Cat-girl will be extremely popular with the furries. Sad to say, but this will make MMOs much more attractive. Or much less incongruous might be a better way to put it.</comment></comment>


Duck duck go banned in India? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/nimishdubey/status/1278289269648285696 <comment><USER2> The name is capitalized as Duck Duck Go. If OP or a mod can fix this my (fictious) OCD can relax.

<comment><USER3> It's actually DuckDuckGo, no spaces.

<comment><USER2> Thank you. (My ocd is fake indeed)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I heard India has been banning a lot of Chinese sites, which makes sense, since India and China have been fighting. It is normal to restrict trade with your enemies.

But what other motivations are there for India to ban things? Is there general censorship or something?

<comment><USER5> I worked on a site targeting an Indian user base for a bit, and in order to be allowed to operate in India, we had to partner with an Indian company that basically had veto power over any part of the process.

I think this is a smart strategy. Keep in mind, India gained independence in 1947--there are people alive (although not many) who remember India being a colony. Indians are very aware of the post-colonial activities of Western powers in Africa and South America, and have good reasons to be worried about cultural and economic imperialism. By maintaining tight control over what foreign businesses are allowed to operate in India, they can limit what power foreign nations have in India, keeping wealth and influence firmly within their borders.

Americans like to think that we're the benevolent leaders of the free world and that we've always been a great help to people in other countries, but this is not the case. From assassinations, funding coups, embargoes, and direct invasions, the US has not always been a positive influence on the third world. India is right to be suspicious of American businesses in India.

<comment><USER6> The US tried gunboat diplomacy in 1971 to deter India from stopping Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh. Just because our memories are short does not mean theirs are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've tried 4 ISP's in India, its loading on 3 of them, didn't load on jio. on one of the isp's, DUCK.com loaded but duckduckgo.com didn't.

</comment><comment><USER8> Didn't load on Jio.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not blocked here.

<comment><USER10> I'm from India as well. It's not blocked on Airtel broadband for me, but any requests to DuckDuckGo initially shows a DNS resolution failure (don't remember what the exact error was). And after 5-10 seconds, the page loads as expected.

<comment><USER11> I'm on Jio 4G. DDG has been inconsistent since yesterday. Now it's not working at all.

It's working with green-tunnel to bypass Jio's SNI based blocking.

So surely, it's blocked, not some server issues.

<comment><USER6> Facebook is a minority shareholder in Jio. Perhaps they object to DuckDuckGo's privacy-friendly stance. Scumbags.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Isle of Islay: 100% Tidal Power - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/aug/25/scottish-power-islay-tidal

<comment><USER2> How long until stories about the potential for danger from harnessing tidal power. Not serious problems such as coastal development impacting with the ecology on the coast. But far fetched worries such as how harnessing the ocean's power will result in global changes to the temperature of the ocean or dramatically affect plate tectonics by reducing currents.

New technologies always have a news cycle that goes from celebratory to fear- mongering within a matter of weeks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice to know that all that money I've spent on Laphroaig over the years is being put to good use.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I definitely think that traditional single-malts produced with renewable tidal power is a better marketing angle than traditional single-malts produced with nuclear power.

</comment><comment><USER4> Funny, I never heard of this island until yesterday evening when somebody was talking about all the whiskey made there.</comment>


Quantifying and canonicalizing the news - <AUTHOR> We've made a prototype web service that quantifies news events. It actually helps measure the importance and impact of news events numerically.
You can assign an impact to any event.
Events are treated as canonical. You can thus assign multiple news sources to news events.
Try it at http://newsgauge.com <comment><USER2> "Help" and "FAQ" links in footer are unreachable because of "infinite scroll" (newly loaded links push them further down before one could click them).</comment>


Google Pixel – Hardware Issues and Warranty Issues - <AUTHOR> https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/phone-by-google/3cxD5PF3rns;context-place=topicsearchin/phone-by-google/hardware$20issue
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topicsearchin/phone-by-google/hardware$20issue
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topicsearchin/phone-by-google/warranty$20issue
Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> Thoughts? Well I'm thinking I won't be buying a Google phone of any kind, that's what I'm thinking...</comment>


Ask HN: I have an idea for a mobile game, but where do I start? - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea for a web/mobile game, but I'm completely stuck on starting it. I'm an experienced software developer, but I've only worked on desktop and backend stuff so far, never got close to web or gaming or mobile in my career except for tweaking a thing or two here and there. It's a very simple puzzle game, but so many questions pop to my mind:
1) Should I use the DOM (like 2048 does) or canvas?
2) Should I use a framework like Phaser, Pixi, EaselJS, etc. for such a small game? If so, which one?
3) I want this to work both on the browser and as mobile apps. Is Apache Cordova what I need to use for this?
4) How do I deal with different screen resolutions? Every code sample I see uses hardcoded widths and heights.
As I said in the first paragraph, the game is very simple but I think (and the people I've told about the game agree) it has potential to be a good game. My initial thinking is to just use the DOM and go from there, but I have no idea if that's good practice.
I'm also not sure how to go about making other game screens (splash, difficulty and level selection, and the like). Can I just make those in HTML5 even for mobile platforms?
Any pointers are appreciated :) <comment><USER2> Heard good things about cocos2d-js</comment>


Show HN: Little Finger, a library to add a kill switch to your mobile apps - <AUTHOR> http://avi.im/little-finger/ <comment><USER2> How would this pass App Store review? According to their developer terms, Apple and Google reject apps that use an external server to lock or otherwise manage what _can_ or _cannot_ be done inside an app. You _have_ to use their in-app purchase APIs, according to their terms. Is this actually not the case, or am I just misunderstanding what this is?

(I'm the founder of a software licensing API and have been told by Apple and Google developer support that it's not usable for mobile iOS or Android apps because of the above mentioned App Store terms. So I'm curious as to how this could pass review and get in, as it's essentially the same thing--locking an app based on a server response.)

<comment><USER3> Creating a throwaway just in case. You don't have to follow Apple/Google terms as long as they don't catch you doing so, would not recommend doing this unless you want to risk being permanently banned by them.

I have worked as a mobile dev for few companies which they put some sort of switch API inside the mobile app. When the latest version is sent for review, the server will return a false flag thus not showing any third party payment UI. After it is approved on the App store, the switch will return true then the app will use third party payment to circumvent Apple/Google 30% cut.

I have seen more than a dozen app doing the same thing on App Store, I am not surprised that Apple doesn't have time to spot check these app in App store given there are millions of app in the app store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting and much needed (as far as my experience in freelancing goes).

1\. Are you aware of the legality issues that might arise because of this?

2\. Is there a working demo for that I can install and check it out?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Nope. Should I be worried?

2\. I don't have demos. I will link them here soon in few minutes.

EDIT: Demo apps:

1\. Android - [https://github.com/avinassh/LFDemo- Android](https://github.com/avinassh/LFDemo-Android)

2\. iOS - [https://github.com/avinassh/LFDemo- iOS](https://github.com/avinassh/LFDemo-iOS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "with a single line of code." Uh no, it's a library... I hate it when projects say that.</comment>


Reading the Lines, Not Between Them (PG & Coding Horror) - <AUTHOR> http://www.tonywright.com/2008/reading-the-lines-not-between-them-pg-coding-horror/

<comment><USER2> Exactly. From the absolutely hysterical reaction here and on Reddit, on codinghorror, and other blogs, you have to _know_ people are projecting absolutely _enormous_ insecurities onto PG's piece. Makes you realize just how defensive and demoralized and miserable the corporate workers really are.

<comment><USER3> Ironically, this is precisely the kind of conclusion people are drawing from PG's essay, and its not what he was saying.

I certainly don't _know_ that people are projecting "enormous" insecurities into Paul's piece. Nor does it make me realize "just how defensive and demoralized and miserable the corporate workers really are."

The essay does not claim that anyone who works in a corporate job is miserable. What is does say is that people would be happier if they were working for themselves (or in a small company). I don't have to be miserable to have potential to be happier.</comment></comment>


The illusion behind Vice Media's impressive numbers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@voshart/vice-media-kit-warning-for-advertisers-25ad0600f61d <comment><AUTHOR> Submission Note: There are some legitimate points in the article, but a lot of it is buried under poor phrasing and inconsistent goal of the article. I think if the author spent some time with an editor polishing this it would go viral. I changed the title to something more neutral that the original.

</comment><comment><USER2> This reads like a bad rant. It makes it difficult to take your investigation serious.</comment>


Theseus – An open-source iOS personal analytics tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lazerwalker/Theseus

<comment><USER2> While this is a crowded space filled with personal tracking apps, I quite like the approach you're taking. Open source enables me to completely trust the app.

My personal favorite app for this use case is Hey Day ([http://www.hey.co/](http://www.hey.co/)) – it has superior design and pulls in all of my photos. Even though Hey Day has a privacy option that doesn't save any data in the cloud (entirely on my phone), I'm always a bit concerned about what is shared and what may get leaked.

The easiest way to prove the privacy controls of your app is with open source, so if you could improve the design & functionality of this app, it might be a worthy competitor in the space.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://blog.brackets.io/2013/08/28/theseus-javascript- debugg...](http://blog.brackets.io/2013/08/28/theseus-javascript-debugger-for- chrome-and-nodejs/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this just 5s or does it work on a 5 as well?

<comment><USER5> From the readme:

"Right now it will only work on an iPhone 5S, as it requires the M7 motion coprocessor."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some news about an Android version?</comment>


If P=NP, then mathematics as a field would be destroyed. - <AUTHOR> http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/Official_Problem_Description.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Stephen Cook writes:

 _For example, it would transform mathematics by allowing a computer to find a formal proof of any theorem which has a proof of reasonable length, since formal proofs can easily be recognized in polynomial time. Example theorems may well include all of the CMI prize problems. Although the formal proofs may not be initially intelligible to humans, the problem of finding intelligible proofs would be reduced to that of finding a recognition algorithm for intelligible proofs. Similar remarks apply to diverse creative human endeavors, such as designing airplane wings, creating physical theories, or even composing music. The question in each case is to what extent an efficient algorithm for recognizing a good result can be found. This is a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence, and one whose solution itself would be aided by the NP-solver by allowing easy testing of recognition theories._

<comment><USER2> That ignores the size of the polynomial, doesn't it? If the fastest polynomial-time proof finding algorithm is O(n^50), it's not going to do much good.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it would be so bad. There's be some constant factor or number where n^50 would always be less than, say n^n after that constant.

<comment><USER4> Yea, 51, but with n = 40 you are already at the number of atoms in the universe ~10^80. That would leave around 11^50 calculations per atoms in the universe, at 1,000,000 Ghz you are talking about 10^32 seconds which ~ 3 * 10^24 years. Or 10^15 = (1,000,000,000,000,000) times the current age of the universe.

For any calculable n, n^n is less than n^50. Ok, _if_ computing power doubled every year, for the next 200 years we would still not be able do 50^50 calculations. But in 250 years of doubling each year it would be easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Absolutely not, and for far more reasons than I enumerate below.

The language used to encode the search space will be under constant development and expansion.

The creation of the axioms of any proof system is not a search problem.

Recognition of "meaningful" proofs will be extremely hard to automate. The checking of statements does not create mathematical theory, but it is the collection of related statementswhich do.

The search space is likely to be still much too large for proof systems to exhaustly enumerate all meaningful statements in any person's lifetime.

If mathematical statements could be easily checked, it would make mathematical study quite different. But likely much more interesting and fast paced.

</comment><comment><USER6> No, no, no Computer Science would be destroyed, not Mathematics.

A large portion of Computer Science is the study of algorithms including their complexity.

How can you say something is going to be destroyed by something that isn't even a question in the field?

If anything Mathematics is going to be improved by getting rid of some grunt work and giving way for some more creativity. Not to mention the theorems that if P=NP would come about which could be used for even further results.

All-in-all it's a win-win for Mathematics.

<comment><USER7> Mathematics and computer science are intertwined. And they would not be destroyed --- but merely closed (to a large extent) as a solved problem.

Algorithms and proofs have many interconnections. (You can usually abstract one out of the other with a bit of creativity. I.e. the classic proof for infinity of primes gives a basic algorithm for creating new primes.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it would make things more interesting. So many problems that would then be solvable in polynomial time.

<comment><USER9> Recall that primality testing was proved to be in P, O(n^6) via the AKS primality test, but in practice it's much too slow. So if something interesting is in P, but it's O(n^100), what good is that?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKS_primality_test>

<comment><USER10> Isn't it O(log n)? I guess computationally it may blow up if you are doing a significant number of operations.

<comment><USER11> It depends on how you measure n. The O(log^{6+\epsilon}(n)) quote on Wikipedia is for n being the number to be tested. This is "cheating"; inputs to an algorithm need to be measured by their length, and numbers are exponential in their length (i.e., the length of the number n is order log n for "reasonable encodings").

As an example, the knapsack problem with n objects and weight W is solvable in O(n*W) time, but it's known to be NP-hard. This doesn't prove P=NP, because W is exponential in its length. This is called a pseudopolynomial algorithm.

<comment><USER10> Ah got it. Thanks for the clarification.

Coincidental too since I just read about the AKS algorithm on Terrence Tao's blog. [http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/the-aks- primality-t...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/the-aks-primality- test/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I didn't read the article because it's on scribd and I haven't installed flash on the new system yet.

But the headline sounds a bit too dramatic. We've been using and expanding applied mathematics for thousands of years. A proof of P=NP will not retro- actively make Roman aqueducts collapse, let alone destroy the infrastructure we're all using day-to-day. Which in turn means that whatever flawed assumptions have been made (and there's plenty of gray space to be found), the field of mathematics will not be destroyed.

QED. (Don't I feel smug).

[edit : I clicked on the scribd link initially but have now saved the PDF link for tomorrow's reading]

<comment><AUTHOR> Click the title for the pdf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Read a great short story by Charles Stross about this called 'Antibodies'. The notion was that a discovery like this would rapidly lead to strong AI. Never connected the two myself like that but now it seems obvious - AI is essentially an algorithms problem.

</comment><comment><USER14> There is a guy called 'Musatov' on Sci.Math that is doing this very thing. The idea of mathematics being a representation of our line and line liberties is interesting in this regard.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand. The link is just the problem statement.

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=756761></comment></comment>


PC-Retro Motherboard Kit: Build a faithful reproduction of the 1982 IBM PC 5150 - <AUTHOR> http://www.mtmscientific.com/pc-retro.html <comment><USER2> Related to IBM PC keyboards

Unicomp modern versions of the IBM Model M keyboard built iwth the same tooling that made the originals. When living in a flat share I had access to a IBM Model M keyboard the one made for the PS/2 computer. This is one of the best keyboards I have ever used they are built like tanks.

Unicomp keyboards [https://www.pckeyboard.com/](https://www.pckeyboard.com/)

<comment><USER3> I tried a "buckling spring" keyboard (I think from Unicomp) that was supposed to be the equivalent of one of those IBMs and I was severely disappointed in the electronics. It could not handle multiple keys properly the way a real one would. Basically they had focused completely on the selling point of the springs and neglected to make a usable product.

(I did have a real PS/2 Model M previously, so all I really wanted was a USB equivalent)

<comment><USER4> The USB HID standard has a limit of 4 keys pressed at once, unless you do fuckery like virtual USB hubs with additional virtual keyboards (which will cause some things to misbehave) there is no way around this restriction without custom drivers (which are also a nightmare).

<comment><USER5> TIL

By chance, do you know the limits on real PS/2?

<comment><USER6> Effectively none --- the keyboard only sends "key X is pressed" and "key X is released" messages.

On the other hand, the key matrix design can impose its own limits.

<comment><USER7> To expound on that: The matrix in most PS/2 keyboards only supports two-key rollover (reliable detection of two keys pressed at once). In the case of three+ keys there is a chance for missed presses and other artifacts.

<comment><USER5> Thanks as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember upgrading the RAM from a paltry 128KB (i think). See all of those empty sockets?

Notably missing, and fair warning:

\- Floppy controller

\- Floppy drive! 5 1/4"

\- Hard drive controller (RLL)

\- CGA or Monochrome Display Adapter

\- Serial port adapter if you want to modem (25-pin 16450 UART)

\- PC-DOS

Good luck. These are harder than you think, have no sound but a "beep", and can't even keep the time between reboots.

<comment><USER9> Even if you can find a CGA or MDA, good luck finding a surviving monitor to display it.

Honestly, you're probably better off finding an intact PC on ebay or Craigslist or such.

And for doing anything practical, much better off with a Raspberry Pi variant.

<comment><USER10> with regard to displays, gbs-8200 will help here.

<comment><USER11> Gonbes GBS-8200/8220 CGA/EGA/YUV to VGA Arcade HD-Converter PCB allows all types of RGB, EGA, VGA or YUV component signals to be up-converter and display on a 31KHz PC VGA monitor, TFT monitor, LCD display, or HD-TV with VGA connection. No need to set dip switches in order to figure out the specific input frequency as all inputs are detected automatically! A great alternative to purchasing a expensive, heavy CGA monitor.

[0]: [https://www.mikesarcade.com/cgi- bin/store.pl?sku=GBS-8200](https://www.mikesarcade.com/cgi- bin/store.pl?sku=GBS-8200)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The "anonymous BIOS" is just begging to be replaced with a copy of the actual IBM BIOS (whose source code is also available), but I guess they decided not to supply it for copyright reasons; on the other hand, they did clone the hardware... I bet it raises all sorts of difficult questions for the IP lawyers.

<comment><USER7> IBM themselves released the board schematics for the 5150.

<comment><AUTHOR> You wouldn't have a link, would you? I'd be interested in this...

<comment><USER12> [http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/IBM_5150_Technical_R...](http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/IBM_5150_Technical_Reference_6322507_APR84.pdf)

This is the technical manual for it

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much! Much obliged!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is so very tempting, yet I know well I don't have the time or patience to set one of these up. I hope we'll at least see some of these pop up on YouTube, I'd love to watch someone assemble and use one of these.

</comment><comment><USER14> And after you put it together, remember you need a power supply, a CGA? card and a keyboard to use it (and a DD or HD if you want to do anything besides looking at a screen)

<comment><USER15> I believe it was possible to use the original PC with cassette tapes instead of floppies, though you'd be limited to ROM BASIC in that case, and not PC- DOS.

<comment><USER16> There's a reason why DOS stands for Disk Operating System. :)

<comment><USER17> > There's a reason why DOS stands for Disk Operating System. :)

This is a retronym. Before purchased by Microsoft, DOS was developed by Seattle Computer Products under the name QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). This was changed by Microsoft to MS-DOS with a changed meaning of "DOS".

<comment><USER16> Sure, that's correct. But the new name of "Disk OS" was completely relevant to this specific PC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's a pretty kit and that was a very large amount of work, congratulations on seeing it through. I suspect there is a larger market for a more complete offering, so maybe tackle a graphics board next?

I believe this video is about this project:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCe0I3RJajY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCe0I3RJajY)

If you want to go the 'soft' route of emulation then there is this:

[http://www.hampa.ch/pce/download.html](http://www.hampa.ch/pce/download.html)

<comment><USER15> PCem is more accurate, supports more hardware and is easier to use.

[http://pcem-emulator.co.uk/](http://pcem-emulator.co.uk/)

<comment><USER19> Is this emulator ? [https://youtu.be/Vg2n8Fp7F2g](https://youtu.be/Vg2n8Fp7F2g)

<comment><USER15> Yes, though that seems to be a fork and not the official version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm amused by the timing of this article. I just watched the anime series "Steins;Gate", and a major plot element revolves around getting a working 5150.

<comment><USER21> Steins;Gate undoubtedly got it from the John Titor urban legend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm waiting for the full 3270 PC or the XT/370 kit.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why don't they stuff the board? It would probably cost less than packaging the parts and dealing with customer service issues.

<comment><USER24> perhaps the

> Obviously, this is a project for an advanced electronic hobbyist and > computer enthusiast.

is somewhat tongue-in-cheek: this could be the thing to get a kid who's already soldered together a bunch of (less expensive) analog hobby kits .. or the adult who's into that sort of thing.

it's pretty much the same thing as building model cars, airplanes, etc. although it doesn't teach you exactly how the thing works, the perceptual task of doing the soldering and checking out the traces gives some idea of how things piece together.

as far as vintage electronics go, IBM PCs (probably?) aren't that difficult to find for those who're essentially interested in abstracting away from the hardware.

</comment></comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h DIY and hacked together out of third-party pieces? Yep, that's an authentic PC _clone_ alright:)

<comment><AUTHOR> I use the word "reproduction" because "clone" in the context of the Original IBM PC is/was an ill-defined word which means different things to different people:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible)

When some people think "clone", they think "compatibility" which leads to the following differences:

Excerpt:

"In May 1983, Future Computing defined four levels of compatibility:[11]

Operationally Compatible. Can run "the top selling" IBM PC software, use PC expansion boards, and read and write PC disks. Has "complementary features" like portability or lower price that distinguish computer from the PC, which is sold in the same store. Examples: (Best) Columbia Data Products, Compaq; (Better) Corona; (Good) Eagle.

Functionally Compatible. Runs own version of popular PC software. Cannot use PC expansion boards but can read and write PC disks. Cannot become Operationally Compatible. Example: TI Professional.

Data Compatible. May not run top PC software. Can read and/or write PC disks. Can become Functionally Compatible. Examples: NCR Decision Mate, Olivetti M20, Wang PC, Zenith Z-100.

Incompatible. Cannot read PC disks. Can become Data Compatible. Examples: Altos 586, DEC Rainbow 100, Grid Compass, Victor 9000."

So what type of a "clone" are we talking about?

I don't work for the company that makes the kit, and as far as I can tell prima facie, their kit is a faithful reproduction of the reference IBM PC hardware design.

I may be wrong, however.

<comment><USER25> Very shortly after this article was published nobody was using the term in any way but the top one (nor were less than 100% compatible PCs even sold for much longer).

My parents bought our first "ibm compatible" in 1987 and even back then the degree of compatibility was already a complete non-issue.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which productivity tools do you use and why? - <AUTHOR> I'll start: - Calendar, Todos: Google Calendar -> I found that I do all my chores if I set aside time for them so Google calendar does the job because it's not too cluttered - Habits: Habitify -> it's not really satisfactory but after testing them all at least has the best UI - Notes: Paper notebook/ Notion -> Notion is just super flexible and gives me a feeling of progress <comment><USER2> The best thing about Google Calendar is that it plays well with other calendars. For example, I connected my Mac desktop calendar to it, and so now it doesn't matter if I use my phone, my tablet, my desktop, my Google login, etc, all my devices have the same info that I need to access and/or modify.

I installed a home cloud, and as of yet I don't have the calendar working with it the same way. Which is to say, that cloud's calendar is gaining a layer of dust until they fix it.

Something that I use a lot: mind mapping. It doesn't even matter what software you use to do it, as long as you can drag things to different branches of the mind map as things evolve.

Mind mapping is the one thing I won't give up when it comes to planning and productivity. There's a reason "napkin" meetings end up producing bare-bones mind maps. Digitizing those maps makes them so very powerful.

I'm starting to use Anki style retention methods, but haven't done so long enough to comment yet. I'll leave that one for someone who's used it longer than I have.

EDIT: One more for the road-- I really like using Dropbox to keep all my devices in sync. I'm clearly a stickler for all of my devices being "in the know." I believe if one device gets totally trashed, I should be able to boot up just about anything else and continue like nothing happened. I shouldn't have to modify my work flow just because I'm on my phone instead of my desktop, or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like Todoist. A friend recently leant me a book called "Getting Things Done," and what I got most out of it was using my todo lists better. I have several todo lists for things like house, study, and "I'll get to this one day, but it's not urgent." I use Todoist to review what I want to do, then I press a little button to mark them for today, then I just work off today's list. It lets me make long todo lists so it's off my mind, but then being able to move things to today easily makes me not get overwhelmed when I look at what I have to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting point you make regarding not feeling overwhelmed. In what other ways does it make you feel progress or control?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google calendar for scheduling daily tasks and future commitments. pomodoro- tracker dot com for actually doing the tasks on the day. Google Sheets for setting yearly, monthly goals, ideas, movies to watch later... I also use Sheets to track my workouts, meditation sessions, nb of times I've had coffee, etc.

I've found one Google Sheets document gives me the greatest visibility over the various aspects of my life and the most flexible as I can integrate complex formulas for stat generations, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Google Tasks & Keep for personal todos. They are simple, have Gmail integration and a standalone mobile apps.

Asana for business/project todos, gives you more structure and collaboration.</comment>


Want to be successful? Be inconsistent - <AUTHOR> http://joel.is/post/34043941681/want-to-be-successful-be-inconsistent

<comment><USER3> Unrelated to the article itself: OP, cut down on all the social-share-widget- scroll-js-be-my-friend nonsense on your blog. It's irritating, obnoxious and doesn't make me want to share or retweet or do anything except get the hell off your page.

I've read several of your blog posts and cringe each and every single time. Two scrolling widgets and a popup in the bottom corner as soon as you start to scroll down?

Huffington Post isn't even this bad.

Unfortunately, ranting aside, I'm sure this probably works great and converts much higher than tactfully placed icons. Such is the way of life on the internet I suppose.

<comment><USER4> I'd like it if the middle column were the only part of the page.

<comment><USER5> I agree perhaps it's too much.

Interestingly, it looks rather nice, clean and readable (IMO) without everything else (here's a screenshot: <http://joelg.cc/KJp5/o>). Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that have everything else there makes a big difference. I could probably remove the ad, but a lot of the rest definitely works, I have some data on it.

Thanks for the heads up though, I think maybe my incremental changes have meant I've gone too far on all this stuff without perhaps realising.

<comment><USER6> The one-column layout looks great.

I think you can improve things and keep the social integration, though. Right now, it's a three column layout, and the first column is basically empty. Which feels strange. If you move the left-hand icons somewhere else - to the right hand side, or to below the article, and centre the header on the content column, it will make a big difference. The fact that the header doesn't line up with the content really bugs me.

Those are the biggest things to change, but there are some smaller tweaks that would improve it too. The sub-header ("Startups, life, learning and happiness") seems very similar to the little description in the right hand column ("I'm the founder of Buffer..."); so those could be combined (keep the subtitle, and either replace it with the description text or just lose that text). Then the nav bar would come down to be level with the start of the article.

Consistency throughout a design is key. That would be the next thing to tweak for. The Join/RSS/Follow/Subscribe have slightly different callouts - <USER2> should be the same. (Or you could go a step farther and lose the callouts all together, which would probably look better.) The necessity of the big blue box explaining about the email service seems dubious ("subscribe via email" effectively says what needs to be said). However, if it stays, it would be nice if it matched the colour scheme better - yes, it's the same blue as elsewhere, but that blue isn't used in the same way anywhere else - if the background was the grey from right above it might match better. Also, just so you know, in Firefox the email field/button is too wide for the column and it's wrapping to two lines. Once we're on colour schemes, the orange of the RSS icon stands out a bit too much in contrast to everything else on the sight. For me, the email box and the RSS icon pop out even more than the header or the content when I look at the page. If all the buttons matched in colour (that silver is good), it would be great.

Also, the social stuff at the bottom of the article feels redundant.

\----

Anyway, I don't know what data you have on it, but I think that if people are telling you that the design is pushing them away, you should think very carefully about that. IMO, those people are more important than whatever anonymous data points, because they're clearly people who are interested and engaged. If you have to lose one or two tweets in exchange for some loyal followers, that sounds worth it to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Be Inconsistent? No. Be able to admit you were wrong and make choices that contradict past believes after learning or observing something new? Yes.

<comment><USER8> second this. When a change involves breaking your promises to people who genuinely relied on them and will suffer as the result - then you have to make sure that they are at least ok with it by giving them alternative options / compensation.

Its not about to be / or not to be inconsistent. It's about making the right choice given new information as well as considering the net effect of the change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Accepting the other comments about how perhaps the title could be improved, the basic point is one that I wish would be more widely accepted in political discourse. It seems like whenever a politician changes his mind, he's accused of "flip-flopping", as though always sticking to exactly the same opinions is the most desirable option. But personally, I would not trust anyone who seems to think that they were right about everything the first time, and never needed to learn anything new.

</comment><comment><USER10> Don't like the title, should probably be more like "Be flexible with your consistency"

You can't be inconsistent and learn say a language (programming or otherwise), or even learn how to be a good entrepreneur, you got to be consistent and keep at it, just be flexible with the information that you receive and be willing to change your ways if you need to.

</comment><comment><USER11> "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" \-- John Maynard Keynes, also attributed to Winston Churchill

... that's the take-away from this. There is no way at all we can have opinion X about the future and then stick to it when the future doesn't turn out the way we expected.

</comment><comment><USER12> It seemed like Bezo's was trying to get at the idea that its okay to revise your thoughts, opinions, course of action, ect. and be open about it. I think he's trying to promote thoughtfulness and contemplation ahead of pure conviction.

I don't think being "inconsistent" in thought is what he's getting at.

</comment><comment><USER13> This feels like why doing the whole Agile thing is really useful especially for startups: the only thing you know for sure is you're not going to do it right at first so you have to be good about being able to pivot.

</comment><comment><USER14> What percentage of Buffer revenue is from the Carbon Ads on blog posts like this?

</comment><comment><USER15> Changing your mind and being inconsistent are not the same thing. Stupid article.

<comment><USER16> You obviously didn't read the same article that some of us did :S

<comment><USER15> Your comment obviously adds nothing to the discussion, having no explanation.

You obviously didn't get the same kind of education that some of us did.

:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Excellent post. Thanks for posting it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps a better way to put it is "be consistent in what you do, be inconsistent in where you go."

Being consistent in your actions is of paramount importance if you want to master anything. You have to practice day in and day out.

Being inconsistent in your movements matters because what is around us is in a constant state of motion, and we must learn to dance with it.</comment>


Attention Start Ups: Key Lessons in Email Marketing! - <AUTHOR> http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/05/31/driving-engagement-by-delivering-relevant-emails-attention-apple-itunes/ <comment><AUTHOR> Another lesson in email marketing that's not discussed in the article is around email frequency. One key to powerful emails is getting the timing right. Sending weekly emails is for some companies too much... and for others too little.

It's imperative to track your email campaigns:

views

clicks

activities / goals

session length

then return sessions

It's also important to give users the ability to set their own timing. Some users want emails with every update (ie on Facebook). Others want daily summaries.</comment>


Famo.us Demos - <AUTHOR> http://demo.famo.us/ <comment><USER2> This whole thing has been handled quite strangely. Let's compare with angularjs or threejs.

These frameworks have been developped openly from the very beginning and grew based on user's needs.

Here we have a project,that has received 2 million in funding,which is great,yet it's completely opaque,with a closed beta (I signed for it,never got anything but junk mail,no code to test whatsoever).

IMHO it qualifies as vaporware, an tech demo that looks great but with little practical use.

<comment><USER3> All these demos perform remarkably bad for 2 million.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, not even on high-end smartphone does this produce over 10fps (Tested on iPhone 5, Nexus 4, Samsung galaxy s4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 2 years ago, it was cool.

Today #GSAP is the state of art, if you want futuristic UX, spend a few minutes exploring this site UX: [http://intothearctic.gp](http://intothearctic.gp) (get past 'start exploring')

Today it is a solution looking for a problem and no market.

<comment><USER6> The animation on the site you linked to is very janky and that's part of the problem with building mobile apps using web tech, it's really hard to get a solid 60 fps. If these guys cracked the problem then there is definitely a huge market for it.

<comment><USER7> Some of their demos run really bad on my machine. If they cracked the problem, they aren't showing it yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Shrug. Yeah, some of this stuff looks great, but it's not doing anything that wasn't possible before. The really important part is how it's structured, what the code looks like, how you go about actually implementing any of these features.

And famo.us appears to be in some kind of silly closed beta, so I'm not sure what I can even evaluate here.

<comment><USER9> The public beta starts on April 9th (they sent an announcement yesterday).

<comment><USER10> I'll believe it when I see it. Signed up for the beta list a whole year ago and never heard back, other than very lengthy "developer updates" that had no relevance to me. I've been bitbucketing the mails ever since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was a huge fan of famo.us until just now. Testing in iPhone4S, most of these apps are super jittery (never continuously 60fps) and unresponsive to touch in the browser, especially Yahoo Weather, which looks to be the only one complex enough to resemble a full app.

At best, this is a very impressive "mobile web app" framework NOT a native replacement. I would never trade up obj-c for cordoba/js if this is the kind of inconsistent performance users will have to deal with... and btw I love javascript.

I think steve is a phenomenal entrepreneur but may have built this launch up way too much. Without their native wrapper and MVC this feels like it's going to be a few years before it can rival native development.

<comment><USER12> weather is just a blank black screen on my Mac...doesn't even seem worth pulling out a mobile to try

<comment><USER11> None of these demos are for desktop, famo.us was built mobile first

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How viable are "clever" ccTLDs outside .com and .org? I've always wondered how usable those domains are to people outside our small tech bubble.

Especially back when the .ly domains were all the rage, but also now that .io have the same SEO as .com domains.

<comment><USER14> I clever as this URL looks, I hate typing it. For some reason I always spell it wrong, like famou.us

<comment><USER13> Yeah, there's a mental tax to domains like that beyond merely understanding what they read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To be honest, their demo's seem confusing and don't feel "right" in an ux way.

</comment><comment><USER16> Famo.us is a sad company that doesn't know how to die. All their sessions and talk are just hype. I am guessing they built some fancy DSL at the end of the day.

It is simply not possible to revolutionize HTML without changing/updating the runtime. Sadly for us, the runtime WebView shipped as part of Android is super underperformant. The one shipped with iOS is stripped of features and JIT.

</comment><comment><USER17> This looked fun back when I first started learning web development...

...then I started building real apps.

I can't imagine the practical application for this framework? By the time you've built something, optimized it, and likely pulled your hair out getting it to play right with all the forgotten things in web app demos (Ajax, data persistence, security, etc), you probably could have done it native. Additionally, at least by doing it native you'd know that browsers aren't going to come along, update, and wipe out the framework.

Does anyone pay attention to user activity, experience stats? Trying yo habitualize your users into using a web app, ESPECIALLY MOBILE, is a losing battle. If social network giants can't get users on mobile web apps.............therefore picking this framework isn't just building with new tools. It's also trying to onboard users into something they typically avoid.

<comment><USER18> With [http://Clara.io](http://Clara.io), we couldn't have done it natively and have it run on Linux, Windows and OSX without a huge investments. Our target is not mobile though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't understand the mentality of some devs around who just complain and bitch.

Sorry to be blunt but I am fed up looking for updates of companies which ate least try to change something and then see a long string of lazy-azz comments from 'developers' who learn/know jquery and friends and world begins and ends with this.

Apologies to those who don't bitch but try to see the big picture here.

Oh, and I am not presenting famo.us and native Android is my bread and butter.

But it does not lock me up in my small world of know-all and all-else-is-sh __.

@ famo.us team Thank you guys, at least you are trying to change and expand boundaries, companies like your and CodenameOne are the real attempt of small shops to oppose these Google, Apple and Microsoft suckers who don't want to change and will never change if it depends on them.

Keep trying, there are many developers who will back you up!

</comment><comment><USER20> Not sure why all the complaints. Sure, on an iPhone 4 like some people seem to be using these are going to be slow; just running iOS7 is sluggish on that phone, but on my 5s the yahoo weather app was very impressive, indistinguishable from the highly rated native app.

<comment><USER17> I'm on iPhone 5 and they run "okay." If a 3 year old, 2 million dollar framework is already ruling out everything but the absolute newest devices, what do they expect devs to use it for? Pet projects pretty much seem like the only thing.

I can't imagine using this on something professional that targets a realistic target population.

<comment><USER18> > If a 3 year old, 2 million dollar framework is already ruling out everything > but the absolute newest devices, what do they expect devs to use it for?

While I am not a defender of famo.us, the jury is still out, I think that investing in a framework for the future, especially when the future comes so quickly in the mobile space is fine. No one supports four year old devices, not Android nor iOS, so no framework support is okay too. Frameworks need to have their head in the future, especially if they require significant investment to create.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is this really that BIG? They started this project back in 2011 if I remember correctly, and it never really took off. There are way better webgl alternatives performance wise.

And yeah they haven't released a SDK yet as some people have mentioned here.

</comment><comment><USER22> Rise is the most beautiful thing I've seen.

<comment><USER23> Here's the iPhone app. [https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/rise-alarm- clock/id577221529...](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/rise-alarm- clock/id577221529?mt=8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Lightbox looks pretty great, but the non-native scrolling is a no-go. Especially on mobile devices you expect the native inertia formula to be used and not some contrived approximation.

<comment><USER25> That's one of the main concerns I have with it. They're really hanging their hat on the fact that they implemented a physics engine so they don't have to rely on OS-native things like inertia, so it works the same everywhere. Problem is, even if it's consistent in famo.us, nobody likes random things to feel "off" in the manner you bring up. Seems like a lot of effort to do something that most people won't like anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I saw the link in the meteor tech talk but figured it was not for public distribution. However now that it is in the wild, for the curious I have been de-minifying the paper example to try and learn how to use famo.us.

[https://github.com/jperl/paper](https://github.com/jperl/paper)

Also I am not sure why there are all these haters. In the few days I have been using it, I can see it is going to change mobile web app development entirely. Really excited for the launch!

</comment><comment><USER27> I thought famo.us was about using the DOM and CSS matrix3d but these examples are just using a canvas element like you would expect. What is famo.us exactly?

<comment><USER28> I had the source open the whole time and only saw CSS 3d transforms. I'm on chrome 33

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Finally something that makes the fan go on my macbook 2GHz i7 Intel Iris Pro 1024 MB. I was starting to think this thing didn't even have a fan.

</comment><comment><USER29> I really _want_ to like Famo.us. There's some really nice effects being demonstrated, the fallbacks to older browser technologies are useful, and it seems to make it really easy to develop new things. But... it's not really anything that a combination of d3.js, three.js, rapheal.js, webaudiox, dancer.js, etc can't do for free and without all the "secrecy" nonsense.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think their idea tends to be to try and unify everything and provide a "toolbelt" for developing with it. At least that is the impression I get when I read their FAQ: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aC461kM855a66SzFT_TG8sHp...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aC461kM855a66SzFT_TG8sHpQxqDWy-4yH2XfLBxtTk/preview?sle=true)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Given the hype (from them), I was very underwhelmed with the demos. I then remembered that this stuff is supposed to run well on phones (not the WebGL stuff, obviously, at least for iPhones). So I ran it on my phone and several of the demos stuttered / jerked a lot if you tried to use it while loading. Though once they fully loaded, they ran really well (smoothly).

</comment><comment><USER31> This is pretty, and a nice framework - but it needs a LOT of optimization before it could be considered anywhere near usable.

</comment><comment><USER32> People keep mentioning funding etc. Anyone have a link to a quick backstory for these guys?

<comment><USER33> [http://www.crunchbase.com/company/famo- us](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/famo-us)

<comment><USER32> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> [http://famo.us](http://famo.us) Has a nice YouTube clip of someone's personal site that looks quite impressive.... why is _that_ not one of the demos? Is the video a fake?

<comment><USER11> if you research the history of famo.us that was the app they were originally funded to build, and took a ton of hacks and workarounds to achieve good HTML5 perf. Thats when they realised the opportunity for a famo.us-like framework was necessary.

<comment><USER34> So is that app (in the YouTube video) using famo.us or not?

<comment><USER35> Where is the Youtube video? I don't find it.

<comment><USER34> [http://famo.us](http://famo.us)

There are two embedded youtube videos, the one on the left.

<comment><USER35> Oh, this is weird. It serves a different page for Firefox (no WebGL? No WebKit?). There's a full page live demo of the periodic table (the another video) on Chrome and Safari.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> 2 seconds per frame on iPad.

</comment><comment><USER35> Yup, famo.us is like a 'rendering engine' for the web, not a traditional JS app framework. I expect seeing architecture similar to game engines, such as Unity.

</comment><comment><USER37> [http://demo.famo.us/tweetus/](http://demo.famo.us/tweetus/) doesn't work on my Android native browser

</comment><comment><USER38> I'd like to point out that famo.us recently announced a public beta release date of April 9th, with respect to the "secrecy" criticism.

</comment><comment><USER39> 0/10 - learn to loading screen, wtf is this 1994

</comment><comment><USER40> Is it just me, or is mouse wheel the ONLY way to scroll in those lists? Not even "page down" works.

</comment><comment><USER41> Buttons are nicked from Windows Phone yet this is totally broken in WP IE10.

</comment><comment><USER42> "CodePen Evaluation License" in each app.js ?

<comment><USER43> All of the demos on this page have been available on codepen for months: [http://codepen.io/befamous/](http://codepen.io/befamous/)

There's nothing new here.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Need advice for a senior lead - <AUTHOR> I work as a lead in an organization.I started my career as a back end dev with Java / JEE and for the last three years started working on Front end technologies like angular,React JS etc. I find the front end as interesting yet very challenging. As a lead I have this dilemma on how to handle junior developers who are smart and more experienced in front end than me. I try myself to keep updated but it becomes challenging when it comes to lower level details especially css etc. Please advice on how to cope up with this situation and be an effective lead <comment><USER2> First of all, being a lead is not you in competition with your juniors. Everyone of us have different experiences and different starting points.

IMO It is helpful to remove the "senior" or "junior" title when working with them.

Work with them. Provide guidance when needed. Learn from them. Trust them. Consider their opinions. Help them provide you with information on things you are not familiar with. Praise their accomplishments in public. Critisize mistakes in private. Provide useful feedback

Have fun :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.I agree on what you said I am actually following some of the ideas.I am not ashamed to learn from them. The real problem comes when it to clients or a third party who try to compare my overall experience with those less experienced and expect more

<comment><USER3> The fact that you say "I am not ashamed to learn from them" says you are always conscious of the fact about you not knowing more than every one else. I feel this seems to be problem with culture being frosted in your organization.

Team / Dev Lead does not mean you need to know every bit of code being written rather concentrate on bigger picture. You need to lead by providing guidance and make sure you are not trying to micro-manage people which may be landing you to compete with your team members. All projects have leads but there are developers who are very good in their work, the more you give credit to their work, the more you become trusted and lead status otherwise you will only be competing with your team members.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well said. Its very rare people recognize the 'culture' impact in working environments

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Treat the junior devs as peers and you'll be fine.</comment>


How to create CSS layouts without using Float - <AUTHOR> http://tjkdesign.com/articles/float-less_css_layouts.asp

<comment><USER2> I thought I'd have a go at this. The "no tables" crowd always seems to sound morally superior so I recoded a site using these techniques.

It's a lie. 90% of the secret is that he makes a DIV to be a TABLE and one to be a TR and some to be TDs using the display:table, display:table-row, display:table-cell. If you want a tabular layout, use a TABLE.

</comment><comment><USER3> Floats may be a pain the ass sometimes but percent and em widths make my tummy hurt. Not to mention all the display: table stuff in there and so many browser specific hacks.

and LOL "float:left;" in the CSS code, sure its not on layout but it could have been left out on principal

very cool to make a layout that looks good without floats, far more effort that I would have put in

<comment><AUTHOR> The float:left is only for IE Mac if I remmember correctly.

It's quite interesting how much can be done with CSS, even if it is turning lists into tables

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An article on CSS layout with overflowing text and a search box several ems too long?

(firefox 184.108.40.206 / linux)</comment>