Sorry in advance for this but... Is there chance that this could be a hoax? It's not that it couldn't happen but I couldn't find the obituary or any other reference to this other than the same text reposted on another blog.
Also Buildstarted's account was just created to post this entry, which it is not helping me to sorting this out in my mind. I don't want to be skeptical but I take very serious these kind of news and it would be really sad that somebody would be joking with these matters.
Funny... but perl or python are not the only ones to make one-line print statements and about Lisp... what about (display "Hello world") or just "Hello World" ? :)
Lisp wasn't the right tool for the job because back when this was written (1997 or so, if I remember correctly) there were a lot of reasons Lisp was not the right tool for the job, the biggest reason being that chances were your Unix admin had made sure Python or Perl was available, but not Lisp (outside of Emacs).
at the command prompt? That works in every Unix or Linux shell I know of, and even MS-DOS. There's no need to fire up a separate full-blown interpreter or worry about it being installed. :-)
>"Free customers are higher maintenance than paying customers."
I would like to share my small experience with the freemium model. I have with a friend an online dominoes game where people can play for free but they have to be invited to play. Premium players are the ones who can create new games so in order to play free you need a premium user to start the game.
In my experience, all the author says is completely true. The free users require somehow more maintenance and they are by much the ones that complain more. However, in our case they are the ones that build the site. Without them, the site would be really desolate and premium users would be complaining about the lack of people to play. It would be indeed cheaper to maintain but I am completely sure that the income would be 80% lower.
I don't know if this experience would be helpful for the community here but I thought it would be interesting to share our case where free users are indeed troublesome but completely necessary.
Sorry but I still don't understand why deleting that picture is such big deal? Google has the right to build their community with the rules that they want and the people eager to accept those rules. Mr Sieger has also the right to complain and he did so that should close the case right?
I made an analogy yesterday between this site and reddit and the differences between the cultures on both sites. A lot of people downvote that post (not sure why because I wasn't say anything offensive) and that's the kind of things that you have to accept in social sites... There are rules.. You either accept them or just move on...
The "accept or move on" rule applies less when such sites are used by the majority of the population.
When it's used by the majority it becomes something you, in many cases, have to be part, that you like it, or not.
That even include "to be accepted at school", mind you. (just like you didn't have to smoke back in the days, but also you were gay if you did not, no matter how wrong that reasoning is).
Based on that new perspective, you may understand that restricting free speech on such services is actually "big" deal (yeah, the quotes are important here. i'd go for medium deal in the current state of affairs.)
I found your reasoning so wrong it left me momentarily at a loss for words. No, sites don't ever become subject to a different set of rules just because the majority of people use them. That kind of thinking leads down a very dangerous road.
And if you still care about "to be accepted at school", grow up. Speaking as a "four-eyes" and a nerd, some of us never bothered caring about that in the first place. Unfortunately, the people that did care grew up to form "the majority of the population", leading to quite a few of the social problems that currently plague us.
Free speech only applies to governments, and it applies there specifically because there you truly do have a "whether you like it or not" situation when it comes to governmental policies. It does not, and should not, extend to speech made on someone else's site. That remains entirely subject to the policies of the site owner, who may set them however they wish, keeping in mind that any choice they make may gain them some users and lose others.
Now, that said, I think better solutions existed for the particular issue at hand (so to speak) than immediate deletion without notification (such as hiding potentially offensive profile pictures for people who don't have that person circled), but that remains entirely up to Google's policy. I personally think that policy ought to change somewhat, but I'd never argue that anyone other than Google has the right to determine that policy.
> Different laws apply to companies in a monopoly position,
That doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as "used by the majority of people", since people can and do use many different sites rather than choosing one exclusively. Those laws also doesn't have anything to do with the absurd schoolyard notions suggested by the comment I responded to; monopoly laws exist primarily to keep monopolies from preventing others from entering the market and disrupting that monopoly.
> and that is right and proper.
In your opinion; I strongly disagree with the notion that such laws have any basis in morality.
>That even include "to be accepted at school", mind you. (just like you didn't have to smoke back in the days, but also you were gay if you did not, no matter how wrong that reasoning is).
Sorry for disagree, but I think people should have more personality and do not take decision affected by what the majority is doing.
Maybe I am being too naive, but if I can't find an online community that fixes with my way of think then I am going to build one... Isn't that what Internet is all about?
>The only platform you would need to re-implement for would be iOS but your going to hit that problem whatever you do (not sure what it's JS support is like though).
That is not the case for mono as Xamarin compiles Mono code into native IOS code which is Complain with Apple guidelines.
That is in theory.... In practice If you have a game that look pretty well on consoles you would have big challanges for mobile devices, and just reducing quality on art assets might not be enough.
Unreal iOS uses the same toolchain as the PC and console versions, including the same scripting system - that's the point of having a multi-targeting engine. Unless you modify the engine substantially you probably won't need to fork. In fact, if you use the UDK you can't modify the engine source anyway. In most cases you'd probably worry more about assets that work on multiple platforms rather than code.
But anyway, I think this exercise was to have the option of deploying to multiple targets, not every single target at once. The difference between the Flash, HTML5 and iOS versions of your game could be very small. For another game you could use the same toolchain to target PC, Mac, consoles, etc.
Well in the case of the game we were working on there was no choice other than fork our codebase. No considering the controllers (which is different enough from the consoles) the frame rate of our code base was awfully slow on IOS, so we had to rethink the whole project to target IOS properly. Actually I don't know any unreal game that sucessfuly have been launched on IOS and consoles with the same codebase, and after my experience with the engine I don't think you would like to do that in the sense that you always would like to exploit consoles capabilities. It's a tradeoff very hard to avoid.
I am completely agree with billybob here. After all that's why Hacker News community is so different to Reddit, because the rules of each community right?
I would prefer a standard byte-code VM inside of every browser so we could just make compilers targeting that VM. Then anyone could choose their preferred language :)
Also Buildstarted's account was just created to post this entry, which it is not helping me to sorting this out in my mind. I don't want to be skeptical but I take very serious these kind of news and it would be really sad that somebody would be joking with these matters.