ashearer

16 ms·

91.
by ashearer 15y ago
That's certainly a good point. But I get the impression that people who feel that way aren't just talking about their employee performance reviews. We had impersonal, narrowly-defined performance metrics for low-level workers long before co
92.
by ashearer 15y ago
In the middle comes the refrain "But instead, the computers are controlling us ". Does anyone here have a good understanding of that belief? I wonder whether it's universal, or correlates with being a non-programmer, or with growing up w
93.
by ashearer 15y ago
It does sound like a non-answer to me, because it’s a yes-or-no question and you could read either one into the answer. (Try prefixing it with “Yes! In fact, …” or “No, but …”.) EDIT: Of the two replies before mine, one seems to have read t
94.
by ashearer 15y ago
Summary: Quicken 2007 is PowerPC code, which means that it won't run on the next OS X, but it's too difficult to port to Intel. So for the past few months they've been trying to embed Rosetta into it instead, and if it goes well they may re
95.
Banks lobby against business-method patents (goaded by one patent)(nytimes.com)
10 points by ashearer 15y ago|2 comments
96.
by ashearer 15y ago
Aren't iTunes gift cards Apple's big constraint? They pose a more difficult problem than developers abandoning paid apps in favor of in-app purchases (which could, as you say, be solved by Apple keeping in-app purchases at 30% outside a nar
97.
by ashearer 15y ago
Traditional resets require the CSS author to build styles for every element back up from nothing, or to remove the corresponding rules from the reset. In practice, you get into the situation where the designer doesn't encounter all those ta
98.
by ashearer 15y ago
Finding enough information-dense podcasts can be difficult, and programming books on tape may not exist at all, but my occasional long commutes got much more bearable after discovering that an iPhone can read technical books out loud with t
99.
by ashearer 15y ago
This is a peeve of mine too, but as long as attention is paid to this problem, jQuery-laden popup login forms can be built that work automatically with password managers. There a trick to it, though, which is to put the form in a nominally
100.
by ashearer 16y ago
More interesting to me than the article was a comment describing how iPads displaced PCs, one by one, in a law office: http://technologizer.com/2011/03/28/my-mom-reviews-the-ipad-... Edit: the link often doesn't bring up the comment. Whet
101.
by ashearer 16y ago
I highly recommend the sepia setting in iBooks and the Kindle reader, which brings the color temperature closer to paper. Just like f.lux, it looks strange at first, but soon the screen looks harsh without it. However, I'm guessing you're n
102.
by ashearer 16y ago
I thought Andrew Mason had said essentially the same thing in gentler terms within days of the Super Bowl, when he apologized for the ad and said that even though it was created by a professional agency, he shouldn't have approved it. The f
103.
by ashearer 16y ago
I'm sure there are many kinds of authors curious about entering the e-book market, and those with the most to learn would be traditionalists who don't themselves buy e-books. So I wouldn't entirely dismiss the idea of a printed book on writ
104.
by ashearer 16y ago
The key isn't so much that the configuration language is the source code language, but that both are a template language. As far as the parser is concerned all three are written interchangeably in an HTML superset that's sent down the wire
105.
by ashearer 16y ago
Waltham, MA and Providence, RI. Some non-remote time desired. We're an early-stage healthcare startup seeking web application developers (Python/Django) and UI/UX design talent. Contact: Andrew.Shearer, at myrozi.com.
106.
Technical Rent(blog.ashearer.com)
2 points by ashearer 16y ago|0 comments
107.
by ashearer 16y ago
I've come to view layers of abstraction as creating technical rent. This is not the same as technical debt. Each new abstraction layer has a manageable initial cost, but it needs to be paid again every time a programmer revisits the code, b
108.
by ashearer 16y ago
Interesting tidbit on the politics of succession: "As Mr. Cook delivered results, he earned more respect from Mr. Jobs. More important, because he was focused on areas that Mr. Jobs knew little about, he rarely butted heads with him, former
109.
by ashearer 16y ago
This is what I've found about programming as well. Computers are unforgiving of any gaps in your understanding, so explaining a process to a computer improves both you and the computer. Of course, not all ideas can be so neatly expressed in
110.
by ashearer 16y ago
The FSF is calling for a strategic direction that helps their ultimate goals, which you may respect and share. But if you slavishly followed their edicts, you wouldn't have an iPhone in the first place.
111.
by ashearer 16y ago
Google bought it in order to irrevocably release it as a free standard, and now it's baked into hardware where they can't change it further. That's less of a good way to exercise control over the video standard at everyone else's expense wh
112.
by ashearer 16y ago
I hope I can be forgiven for interpreting what you said as a statement, instead of as a true how-to question. My statement in reply was that this will take a few years to play out. Chrome's support doesn't make an immediate difference to yo
113.
by ashearer 16y ago
I'll throw that back at you. What makes you think I think that, or that it somehow affects what I said? Regular people don't care, nor do they need to. Browser makers (Apple, Google, Mozilla) and content publishers (YouTube, BBC) care inten
114.
by ashearer 16y ago
Graphics chips with built-in WebM support are slated to ship this quarter. It's not hard to imagine that the 2012 iPhone hardware will get this ability for free, even if it's only a side effect of using the same graphics chips as Android de
115.
by ashearer 16y ago
For the FSF, the medium-term risk of not eradicating Flash as quickly as possible is well worth the rare chance to achieve the only desirable outcome for open source in the long term: having the world's video encoded with a free standard. A
116.
by ashearer 16y ago
There are crucial differences between online privacy controls and DRM in not only in what kinds of information are covered, but how, and who is limited. DRM is about technological controls weaved into the information itself, applicable to a
117.
by ashearer 16y ago
If they hadn't seemed dangerous, Paul wouldn't have written the essay.
118.
by ashearer 16y ago
Nice idea and good implementation. It takes the complete opposite tack from task-focused references. Those may be more useful if you're starting out, but variety is good, and this gives you fast browsing and random discovery, as well as a w
119.
by ashearer 16y ago
It's not just a PDF—it's 34 PDFs! Each chapter, sidebar, and other section is separate. It makes for a kind of minimalist DRM. (I don't know for sure that the publisher meant it that way, though the way the copyright notice is written speci
120.
by ashearer 16y ago
John Gruber speculates that SEO-style titles don't work for SEO, and goes on to state that they're useless. This author reads a Google starter guide that says search engines read titles and that you should come up with good ones, and states

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