They meant 'research' in the writer's sense - as in you read as much as you can to research a background to back up your fiction.

Research does not exclusively mean scientific or experimental research. E.g.: Plenty of scholarly research was done before the scientific method was even defined.

Though I wouldn't compare fiction writers' research to either, it is a perfectly valid use of the word.

Alternatively, you could just use a fake book cover to read something that really applies to your role.

For example: http://despair.com/manageredition.html

What kind of work were those 10K req/sec on your own custom server doing? Was it a standard db-backed web app, or something more specialized and computationally intensive?

Not that I doubt the difference you saw - but I'm still skeptical of the 10:1 factor as applied to Facebook servers, which seem relatively standard webapp cycle (request -> datastore lookup -> html), *just from the programming language*.

Admittedly, I don't do PHP, so the language could be as bad and impossible to scale as you claim. But from their architecture description, I really doubt the request spends enough time (>= 90%?) in PHP computation to make *any* change there translate into a 10X improvement.

At least on my own experience, once you get into the '~1K req/sec' scenario on that type of webapp, the middle-tier code is rarely your main perf headache. You spend more of your time ensuring your data sources (sql+cache + any other services) keep up, and your middle-tier code spends much of its time waiting for whatever went out the socket to come back. There is always some perf improvement to make on the middle-tier, but if the request spends 90% of its time on the presentation layer... well, that's usually a perf bug, not by design.

There are good reasons to justify the cost of switching away from PHP - and they seem to be aware of them. But order-of-magnitude perf improvements would more likely result from architectural and datastore improvements - and sensibly enough, that seems where their efforts have focused.

To be honest, I always thought the real problem with the paywall was Salon's extremely high opinion of itself.

Their failure doesn't prove people will not pay for content - it just proved people would not pay for Salon.com content. That fact was not surprising to anyone but Salon itself.

Back in ye olde days, they had *much* better content than they have now - at least it was on my own daily website-checking browsing habits (incidentally, right before slashdot).

But their site never made sense as Paid Content: 99% opinion, ranging from reviews and pop culture commentary to self-indulgent political rants passing for analysis - all entertaining and very well written, but nothing I could live without. It's not like there was a shortage on the web of narcissistic blogs providing biased commentary on current events.

Their absurd advertising for their Premium subscription didn't help: asking you to subscribe 'save democracy and independent journalism', etc. It came off as arrogant and pretty much forced the reader to ask themselves whether it was really important journalism, something that made the world better, or a simple luxury they could live without.

Most people realized they didn't care that much about what Salon.com wanted to say - not more than subscribing to your local paper, or many better uses for 40 bucks a year.

By that explanation it sounds like an even worse idea. Why not use a foundation or any other donation schemes to fund open source projects?

This is a bad analogy made into an absurdity of a mission statement: what is the causal relation? how does this address the problem it claims to address? If you're offsetting your "bad code" to fund creating *new* open source code, who buys the offsets for any bad code from there?

The metaphor is already broken because "bad code" is not as objectively quantifiable as CO2 metric tons, but even assuming you can average that out ('25% of all code is bad')...

The point of buying Carbon Offsets is that the funds can be invested on cleaning up the carbon problem. This is like investing the "Carbon Offset" from a black shoes factory into expanding a red shoes factory. As much as you like red shoes, you're just increasing the total Carbon.

that's not surprising since iterating over a linq expression is a function evaluation - but how does that relate to dynamic typing?

afaik, both var and linq expressions are as statically typed as any ML function. just because it saves you some typing the obvious (or the inferable), doesn't mean things are not resolved at compile time.

Then you better don't look at large Lisp codebases, because Javascript is Lisp with C syntax.

Do you mean Lisp without packages or any other language support for real modularity?

There are many neat things about javascript. Scaling to large codebases is not one of those things.

I guess I must be feeding a troll, but I can't help but be a bit impressed: each individual sentence in this paragraph is a non-sequitur...

- I'm not arguing *Dziuba's point* (fallacious or not). "His point is obvious enough..." should be, well, obvious enough.

- Even for his argument, you haven't pointed out any actual fallacy on Dziuba's point.
    There is no argument in neither his blog, nor on this thread, about schedules, task management, accountability or anything that could related to the supposed "assumption" you're talking about. It's an argument about work/life balance - life being, by definition, that which is outside of the schedule.

- *My* point was that if people are going to get that bothered by an argument, they should at least read it rather than rant against an strawman. So I don't know whether to be annoyed or validated by your reply.

This guy, though: He's like a professional, career-oriented brick mason, who sits around watching his 150-year-old red brick house crumble around him, while loudly proclaiming "I don't do masonry in my free time. So suck it, fellas!"

Not that I would disagree with the rest of your post otherwise, but I'm not sure which 'this guy' you're talking about... Dziuba's blog doesn't fit the description above by any stretch. His point is obvious enough to anyone who bothers to read the first two paragraphs: hiring *only* programmers who spent their free time coding is an absurd criteria - which may seem reasonable to kids right out of college, because they assume 'spare time' is and will be an abundant resource in their life.

This seems to be a more typical case of the Slashdot summary having nothing to do with the linked article - and the Slashdot editor not bothering to even click on the link before posting.

Seconded: both on the terminology and using short stories.

Almost everywhere else in the world it's really all called "speculative fiction" for good reason - it is both more descriptive and more general than 'sci-fi'. You're also likely to find useful academic material and references under that label - which helps to put the material in context and connection with other literature. E.g.: Aldous Huxley, Jorge Luis Borges, Orwell all wrote 'sci-fi', but because they were 'serious writers' you'll probably not find those works under that heading.

I'd also strongly recommend focusing on short stories over novels (although not exclusively) - because they tend to be more effective in literature courses and workshops. Short stories just provide more opportunity to read different plot ideas, styles and approaches and discuss and compare them.

They *also* level the field for students with different interests: literature is subjective, and short stories mean more chances you'll find the type of fiction you love and understand better than anyone, and soon enough to motivate you. I remember many a highschool classmate who decided they didn't like reading fiction because they happened to hate the first 1-2 novels they had to read in class - and didn't like the classes because they were monopolized by the few who were *really* into those novels.

In contrast, in college workshops we used mostly short stories, which anyone could be expected to read within a day - so if someone found a story insufferably boring, they'd still finish it and participate in informed discussions about *why* they hated it and how they compared to other fiction... instead of giving up and dozing in class waiting for it all to end.

More to the point, an electronic copy is a sale to a different demographic...

The price of the printed books precludes individuals establishing significant libraries - no such restriction necessarily hinders the digital realm... and, hence, the potential market size should be considered when the price is set.

I think you have a bigger point there outside of the textbooks scenario.

When I grew up my family had a decent-size personal library, so I got into the habit of picking up books for reading with some frequency. Once I was living by myself I quickly realized that, after a few dozen, books have a larger ongoing cost besides their price of acquisition: in terms of space and preventing deterioration they're quite expensive.

They're heavy, require special furniture for storage, take up a lot of room and are vulnerable to heat, humidity, bugs, animals and all sorts of other environmental factors. And they're few specific editions are commodatized enough to be truly disposable (well, unless they're really bad), or rare enough to amortize the overhead.

Textbooks and reference material at least have the virtue of being a quantifiable investment - i.e.: you usually only *need* a few of those around if you have a library around, and they're expensive (and resaleable) enough, and reused enough, to be worth the space and care. So I don't see those changing that much. But for most people most of their *reading* material, both by quantity of books and frequency of use, does not meet that description.

Over time, I suspect physical books will inevitably be moving back to their original social place as cultural collectibles or luxury items. That doesn't mean people wouldn't buy them for aesthetics or personal reasons, or that the prices will be unreasonable - but like music records, mechanical watches and fountain pens, they're vulnerable to be displaced by the raw efficiency of the alternatives.

The 'problem' will not be that people buying paperbacks at 10-20 bucks today will demand a better e-book value. It's that most of the people willing to buy and read each e-book - at whatever price the market bears - wouldn't have considered buying each of those physical books in the first place. Once your demographic changes that much, your old price differentation stops working and you need to price for the new market (or your competitors will).

the problem is that the waste of time is not a function of what *you* have nothing meaningful to say, but whether *everyone in simultaneous communication with you* does.

in traditional communication tools, physical constraints and built-in inefficiencies act as noise filters. only one person can waste your time at once.

If the bus service near where you live is a waste of time that might be because you live in a place that can't be well-served by public transit.

Or lives in a place that is *underserved* by public transit - as is the case for many US cities.

There is an issue of critical mass with public transportation - gradual adoption doesn't make sense. Most people don't use it because they *can't* use it, because the routes are too few, inconvenient and unreliable to depend on them. But once you reach critical coverage on an area, and you don't have to wait >=1 hour for the bus anymore - things are *qualitatively* different and you have a chance to scale.

I understand your point that some places are too sparsely populated to make it cost effective. But the argument that you need a focal downtown and high density frankly doesn't make sense - many places in this planet don't match that description, and yet 'public' transportation is both omnipresent and effective far into the suburbs and small towns.

I put 'public' in quotes because often it is a mix of private and government-funded mass transit. When there is no public monopoly, it's often easier for small entrepeneurs to extend the official transit network into underserved areas at a smaller scale, for a small profit margin - since they don't have to deal with the politics (or the guarantees of service).

You may just be the only one who still bothers to read the article hoping for useful info.

New video card tech reviews are, almost always, all about vicarious genital measurements. Benchmarks for FPS, raw computational capacity, shader support, etc. all abound - as if it were 1996 and the high-end was still competing for mere adequacy.

It's not that 'the 1337' have taken over the tech evolution, it's that they're the only readers left for those publications as their focus became less relevant for the normal market.

We were all there back then - building the machines, overclocking the cards, buying the extra cooling fans - because you needed to get those extra FPS to get an *adequate* gaming experience (and to admit to friends & family what you spend 300-400 bucks with a straight face). But for the last few years, any mid-range card can handle practically any new games and media tasks pretty well.

I still consider myself a PC gamer, but at this point I've probably changed my video card ~4 times without looking for a raw perf improvement. Today, my top 5 video card priorities are very different:

1) Is it relatively quiet? Is the background noise *not* comparable to a 747?
2) Is it small enough to fit on a case without having to design with a freaking airflow plan? Or does it come with a built-in ginormous fan, and take more space than the motherboard?
3) Is it *really* quiet? i.e.: Can I add the card without increasing the base noise level of a well ventilated PC?
4) Does the ratio of price vs qualitative difference not seem utterly ridiculous?
5) If it happens to be a bit faster than the current model - that'd be nice.

Is the 'pain' part really reflexology?

I've always been skeptical of the claims about curing diseases - which is what I really understood as reflexology - because I haven't seen any consistent evidence.

But the idea that applying localized pressure relieves pain seems sensible to me, and matches my own anecdotical experience (anecdotical by population size, but has been consistent). For that matter, so does a good movie or a deep conversation.

Focused sensation distracts from 'normal' sensation, and it is easier to focus on sharp, local stimuli over dull, distributed discomfort or pain. Never thought it had much to do with reflexology - although I could see how it could support its less ambitious claims.