You're talking about Salon.com - as Daschund says below. I used to read it regularly, and I did take a Premium subscription for a year when it put up the paywall, but after the first year I stopped and exactly as you say never really went back there again. Indeed I've only just discovered they took the paywall down thanks to your post!!! (how ironic is that?). I read Slate for a bit after that precisely because it didn't have the paywall/ad barrier.

It is remarkably easy for online media to mess up. Indeed at a far lower level I used to contribute to Slashdot far more than I do now. Except several years ago my mod status was removed for no apparent reason (my Karma then, as now, is excellent) and somehow I couldn't be bothered to chase it, I started looking at it less, and before long it's dropped down from a site I used to post a lot to to a sort of glorified news feed I still scan daily as it tends to find stuff I'm interested in (for some reason I never really got into digg). Oh and the current version of the interface (current as in the past few years) I find irritating compared to the classic layout.

I really like macs, even though most of my client development work is for PCs. I've been running a MacBook with Parallels and a couple of virtual PC installs for a while, and over the last couple of months I've been looking at replacing my desktop machine and going down the serious virtualization route (and I wanted a three screen setup too)

My choice - A Mac Pro, a PC with Windows 7 or a PC with Ubuntu. I've a couple of retiring desktops one running Vista SP2 and one Unbuntu 9.04

I really wanted to go with the Mac, I really did. But I priced the hardware up. My spec - a 2.6 Ghz I7, 6Gb Ram, 2 x 1Tb HD, two graphics cards and cables came to £2,527. I built the same spec (actually slightly better, and more esily upgradable) with PC hardware for £950 and then paid an extra £200 to renew my Microsoft MAPS license which gives me 1 copy of Win7 Ultimate and 10 of Win7 Professional (of which I'll use three, and I'm deploying the 64 bit version) so the total cost for the Windows machine is around £1,100.

Having been using Win7 for a couple of days now my opinion is that it's not as good as Snow Leopard, but it feels pretty snappy and is more than usable. Certainly it's a lot less intrusive than Vista. I would have paid the premium for Apple, but when that premium was a whole £1,400 - i.e. a whopping 127% - then it's just not feasible.

And why not Ubuntu instead of Windows? Well that's shear practicality - I've been running one of my main development machines under Ubuntu for over a year now, it's great when working on linux web servers as terminal mode just fits better and it's great to have around so it's not being retired (just moved to the end of the desk and dropped from two screen to one) but the lack of Cloudmark spam filter running on Thunderbird, reliable Dreamweaver under wine or anything else, and ditto Photoshop means it wasn't quite in the running.

So my opnion - Mac is still the best OS when you look at just the OS, but factor in the hardware and unless money is really no object then Win7 wins - unfortunatly.

Fine, except the EU now contains 150% more people than the USA, is more densly populated than the USA so making infrastructural improvements more cost effective (our mobile network is easily 10 years ahead of yours), has a total GDP of USD$16.5 trillion compared to the US's paltry USD$14 trillion with more room for growth as we modernise the old eastern block, and now we're progressively getting our joint political act together is shaping up to be one of the three major economic powerblocks of the 21st century - the others being India and China*.

Sure you'll stick around in 4th place, but no International company like Microsoft is going to want to be confined to a minority market place in the longer term. If the EU says jump, MS will jump.

*I guess we'll probably let you stick around and fight our wars for us for the forseeable though.

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OK OK, I'm pulling your string, but the facts are true and the conclusion equally valid.

Actually I live in the highlands. I have a 2700 ft mountain in my back yard, literally. And I have 14 munros (3000 ft hills) within a 30 minute drive.

I get broadband at 6.4mps. Indeed the raw connection to the exchange is 7.4mbs.

Trick is the Scottish Government, in conjunction with the EEC, upgraded all local exchanges to broadband a couple of years ago. Mine supports 120 odd people and I'm 3.1 miles from it - but the line has to run another 12 miles to the furthest connection so it's extremely good copper. So I have a broadband enabled exchange, very good telephone network, and a very low number of people on it.

Yeah, I know, drives my friends mad who live in the centre of glasgow/edinburgh and only get 2mbs

So come and live in the Highlands - just about the best connectivity in the UK :-)

Says it all, when I was in my early 30's I wasnt getting a straight nights sleep 9 times out of 10 and was constantly exhausted from juggling infants and work. I'd happily admit my IQ took a U dive of stellar proportions for the best part of a decade.
If you have a family - and for most graduates who do they start it in their late 20s/early 30s - this is the most godawfull time of your life as far as physical and mental exhaustion goes. Of Course it has other compensations - wouldn't have missed it for the world - but as far as intellectual performance goes, well it's survival.

Personally I find Objective C really rather neat. Of course it undoubtably helps that I grew up with C and can hack it upside down and backwards. I never really used C++ to anything like the same degree (having moved on to other things) and so when I started playing around with the iPhone recently this was my first taste of Objective C.

It's syntax really is weird I agree, but once you get past that - and it's no worse than many other languages - it's just hunky dory. Certainly the freedom of not having C++'s bondage style language features and ridiculous complexity really is rather refreshing. And no gabage-collection - well if you're just coding something the size of an iPhone app and you can't handle your own garbage then really you should go stick to visual basic in a nice safe environment.

So the jist of this article is several semi-permanent chatrooms have been identified where proto-terrorists gather to recruit and discuss strategy, and they want to take these down??!!!

That's perverse. Why on earth would you want to take out honeypots that your foes are kind enough to set up for you?