Indeed.

Interestingly one of my favorite Canadian programs ("Made in Canada") spoofed the TV/media industry and regularly made fun of how sub-par Canadian content was.

The CRTC is fighting an un-winnable battle using stupid means. Through population and economy, the US can produce more and better (or at least more popular) content than we can. This is just a reality. We've produced some good stuff, but we simply don't have the mass to compete and probably never will. Requiring broadcasters to dedicate certain amounts of time to content that no one will watch and that can't even pay for itself isn't going to fix this problem. Trying to make competing content less accessible in the hopes that people will break down and stop ignoring Canadian content is just gonna piss people off.

I love Canada, but sometimes you have to accept reality.

This is actually a major benefit of gentoo, and one of the reasons I run it on my servers (they are all hobby-ish, I get that gentoo in production is probably a bad idea).

Trying to run a Debian or similar server, you inevitable end up with a bunch of X packages because some random tool comes with a built in GUI and no one bothered to package a non-X version.

It extends even beyond X or no-X. You find yourself with database drivers for all the major (and some minor) databases regardless if you use any of them, and loads of other cruft.

This is obviously part of the tradeoff for a system that just works, but it's annoying when some gnome library breaks the update on a _server_.

As a side note, it's becoming increasingly frustrating to be a non-systemd user. I've had to re-arrange a tonne of packages as stuff switches. I know systemd is inevitable, but I'd like to hold out just a little longer :(

I generally agree that comments shouldn't be required to explain language mechanics unless they are obscure (which the bitset stuff isn't, I mean if you've never run into them they might be, but that would be the same for any language construct and as you said, you generally assume a developer is going to know the language they are working with).

What I personally would generally include would be a comment along the lines of "this struct represents the KillAllHumans message body as per <some specification;>" where the struct is defined, and then a comment along the lines of "overlay our message structure over the buffer to extract our data". This way even if someone wasn't familiar with the bitset notation, they could probably infer it.

Perl... easy to read... ok back to your room now ;p

I'll grant you that perl is very organic, probably the best "code as you think" language that I know of, but the vast collection of syntax and the functional density one can achieve (and some seem compelled to do so) makes it a pain to read if you didn't write it.

I've read the camel book cover to cover, and at one point I was fairly good with it, but after a few years of neglect that skillset has completely dissolved. I have a feeling if I tried to do anything with it now, I'd be hitting up google for things like "how do you iterate through an array of hashmap references".

In general I found it difficult to twist my brain into doing things the lua way.

It seems to go out of it's way to be slightly different.

* itworld (reading another post where they messed it up, so I messed it up!)

I don't even bother with infoworld links any more. It'll be a bunch of slides with a sentence of text, an unrelated image, and ads everywhere (ads on the slides, ads before the slides, an add in the middle of the slideshow, and an ad at the end). Content wise, usually they find one or two interesting things, then fill the rest of the slots with stupid shit everyone already knows.

So, uh, the basic business plan would be:

- Create small upstart service
- Grow it to be wildly popular with a huge user base
- Gradually figure out how to turn that into money
- Say "screw that shit", give up control and get rid of users as fast as possible
- Go into the soft drink industry instead?

Agree.

Even as a long time Linux user, I still enjoy his blog (and even bought a copy of his book). It's interesting, easily digestible, and well presented tidbits from someone who actually works with the stuff.

Probably doesn't belong on slashdot any more than his other posts though as you said, however I would have been ok with it if they'd linked directly to his post rather than linking to the dice article which is pretty much just a mirror of it.

Even as a long term Linux user who hasn't done much windows related since XP SP2 was news, I do still read and actually enjoy Raymond Chen's blog, and even bought his book.

The dice article is pretty pointless though as it just mirrors Raymond Chen's post.

I too enjoyed the earlier seasons much more than the later ones (I've only caught the occasional episode from the current season). Back when they had a limited budget and had to be clever (and thrifty) in testing the myths it added something to the show.

Most of the funding didn't go through (I'm guessing some jackass used a prepaid visa card and drained it before the funding period was over), so he actually only got like $76 or so.

I suspect most people funded the guy so they could poke fun at him in the comments, which I guess is one way of raising money.

Indeed.

Kickstarter recently(ish) stopped screening projects, so now there are even more completely ridiculous projects with no hope of producing anything viable.

Here's a really sad one from a guy who clearly has a mental disability: https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

Any startup is risky for sure. To get money from traditional funding sources, you need to have all your ducks in a row, a well developed plan, and convince a lender (who is usually pretty damn good at risk assessment) that you've got a shot. Even then, success is only moderately likely.

Kickstarter doesn't even have the barrier of convincing some suit that you might be able to make money. You have to convince regular people, who don't have the same skepticism as say a bank, although I think this has been and will continue to develop over time in the "crowd funding community" as people see more failures and understand why they failed/what the red flags are.

That said, imo kickstarter is all about the long shot. It's about backing stuff that would probably be too risky or too niche for traditional funding. I've backed some projects. Some have succeeded, some have not, but in general I've gone into it knowing what it is (a gamble).

Ah, awesome.

What happened with Metro? Last I heard/saw it was still kicking (legit question, I don't really follow what's going on in Windows anymore).