... that all the work other programmers do in the IDE, I do by hand whilst my mind solves the next problem.

So far I haven't encountered an IDE that lets me habituate these tasks as easily as my plain old text editor does. That means no IDE so far lets me parallelize my efforts in the same way as my text editor. Though I would be the first to admit that habituation is also - but not exclusively - a question of how long one tries.

It's not that IDEs are bad, it's that in my experience they're in the way of my being effective. In part, it's because they rely on the use of a gesture device so heavily - anything that lets me use the keyboard tends to be better for me. Insert obligatory personal/anecdotal evidence warning here.

I think there is an argument to be made that IDEs with fairly complex UIs will resist habituation, and many IDEs fall into that trap. Whether or not that's true should be examined carefully rather than debated aimlessly, though - and even if it's found to be true, then an entirely different question would be whether better habituation *generally* leads people to parallelize tasks, as I described above.

... is considered to be rough at around 150dpi, ok at around 300dpi, good at around 600dpi, and anything at 1200dpi or higher is considered very fine print and is usually reserved for art prints, etc.

Of course, print dots and pixels aren't exactly the same, but comparison is hard - mostly because print dots are not as clearly part of a grid system as pixels are. Comparing print dots and subpixels would make more sense, but is even harder.

So assuming that pixels and print dots are equivalent 3200X1800 on a 13" 16:9 screen would mean the screen has something like a sqrt(3200*3200 + 1800*1800)/13 = 282ppi resolution (simplified maths).

So we're just about moving from "rough" into "ok" territory, by some 30+ year old standards. To me, that's not "good enough", but YMMV.

... is exactly what Mark Shuttleworth has been doing for almost a decade now. If that amount of effort hasn't helped the Ubuntu team initiate some drastic changes in otherwise community-run projects, then I very much understand why he's fed up and wants things to Just Work (TM).

This is irrespective of who did what, and whether they did the right thing, by the way. There's always multiple people at fault in any conflict. I'm talking purely about the desire to stop wasting time and money on something for which there is overwhelming evidence it doesn't work. If I had been in his position, I would have started my own Ubuntu-run competitor projects a lot earlier, but then I'm not a patient man.

So more power to him, I say.

The TL;DR version is the rather less spectacular "The problem with diets that are heavy in meat, fat or sugar is not solely that they pack a lot of calories into food; it is that they alter the biochemistry of fat storage and fat expenditure, tilting the body’s system in favour of fat storage."

Yes, we've known that for a while.

... I will post it again. This relates to the page views GoSquared measures, NOT to the entire internet.

GoSquared self-describes as "trusted by 30,000 businesses", which is not a small number, but also doesn't really compare to the number of businesses with websites out there. http://www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/ says there are about 150 mio domains (in the most popular gTLDs). Assuming domains is a decent measure for websites (which it isn't, but let's go with that for now), at best GoSquared measures 0.02% of the internet.

That means, we only know that 0.02% of 40% was affected, which is some 0.8% of the total internet.

But wait, we're talking page views, not websites. http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ estimates 3.76 billion pages (indexed, not existing). If we assume those 3.76 billion pages are spread evenly across those 150 mio domains, we have some 25 pages per domain.

It now depends on the type of businesses GoSquared represents: are they SMEs (often with no more than 1-5 pages on their domain) or large businesses (often with hundreds of pages)? With 30,000 customers, my guess would be that they represent more SMEs than large businesses, meaning the total number of pages they represent is actually less than 30,000 x 25. Which also means the 0.8% percentage of total page views would drop even further.

Lastly, page views does not mean traffic. Traffic is mostly generated from streaming media these days, not pages.

All the numbers to be taken with a grain of salt, of course, but they still seem to be in a better range than the ones GoSquared published. Never trust statistics you didn't forge yourself.

I notice that I subvocalize my thoughts about what to type next while I'm currently typing. If I have to speak, I can't do that.

Clearly if I had a bad case of RSI like he did, I would give it a shot. Better slow than nothing, right? But right now, I'm quite happy with typing.

Yes, Android is somewhat fragmented. No, that doesn't play much of a role here.

Android is no more fragmented than e.g. the Desktop, and provides better support for various screen sizes and aspect ratios than most other development environments.

The fragmentation of Android starts to matter once you want to support esoteric features, or use the latest APIs. For UI concerns, Google provides backwards compatibility libraries. For Audio/Video processing, Android's APIs haven't changed since about version 1.5. For what I can see in this case, it shouldn't matter much at all.

None of which means that supporting all these different device configurations is going to be *fast*, and time does have a cost. Development-wise, though, you can reduce the cost best by considering the different screen sizes right from the start. One sadly common mistake I see people repeat over and over is to design for one screen size first, and then try to adapt that design to different screen sizes or aspect ratios. If you go down that path, you're likely going to end up spending more than if you design with an adaptive layout in mind from the start.

If you need help with that, let me know :)

"it took him only 30 days to build and launch a basic open source office" and "The suite was released as an alpha version" mean's he's got the 80 (visible) percent done that take 20 percent of the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

I wish people wouldn't get headlines with this sort of claim. It helps push the entire profession towards cutting corner in order to under bid each other, which does not speak well for the quality of future software.

Speak instead of prototyping. That's much closer to the truth.

You're making the (IMO fallacious) assumption that morality can only be attained through moral teachings.

... time. And it is a good argument in many cases. Code reviews are great, but they make sense only if you provide good feedback from your review, and the original author has time to revisit their code and make changes according to the feedback. I've seen many work environments were such things were considered too expensive (in terms of time).

I mean, he ends up at reading the subject of every email (check), and scanning through his spam to see if there are false positives (check). My ham volume is about as large as his, and my spam volume is significantly lower (ca. 30%) because I've got a good spam filter.

I don't see what the big deal is.

And how does it relate to the topic that people have faith in some things, but take a scientific approach to trying to understand others? The two are not mutually exclusive. It's not even mutually exclusive that they apply both approaches to the same thing at different times.

Trying to understand science in relation to individual faith is non-sensical; science works at the scope of humanity as a whole. Many individuals being able to double-check many other individual's claims, not one individual proving their own.

Science is not about what individuals believe; it's about what the species as a whole knows. The scopes of faith and science are different; comparing them in this manner is non-sensical.

Let's make it simple why: Science is not what scientific disciplines have found out. Science is a set of methods to further human knowledge.

To confuse the two is to misunderstand science so thoroughly that it pains me.

More precisely, science is a set of tools to guard against our individual fallacies (such as blind faith) contaminating the species' body of knowledge, by enabling each and every person to apply these tools and validate or disprove every piece of knowledge in existence. In other words, it doesn't bloody matter if you, the individual, believe in the tooth fairy when you can prove P != NP. Nor does it matter when you, the individual, don't even know what there is to prove, what the problem is. What matters is that someone else can verify or disprove either your proof of P != NP, or your belief in the tooth fairy. Or both.

To be fair, it's terrifying how people will take on an "expert's opinion" on blind faith. The answer to that problem, though, is to teach scientific process, so that people can make better choices in what to believe. The answer most certainly is not to suggest that science is little more than faith in a different set of beliefs.