The key point about this figure is that the rate of innovation in Linux is greater than the rate of increase of the lower limit of user expectations. Therefore it is inevitable that the Linux curve and the lower limit of user expectations curve intersect.
Dave Hyatt responds to John Gruber, who said that Safari shouldn’t anti-alias Geneva and Monaco. Hyatt rightly states that anti-aliasing is ultimately subjective. This is why Mac OS X should provide a way to turn it off—and render and space bitmapped fonts properly, so they don’t look like this.
Alan Griffiths writes about some of the problems with checked exceptions in Java.
This is the Apocalypse on Subroutines. In Perl culture the term
“subroutine” conveys the general notion of calling something that
returns control automatically when it’s done. This “something” that
you’re calling may go by a more specialized name such as “procedure”,
“function”, “closure”, or “method”. In Perl 5, all such subroutines
were declared using the keyword sub regardless of their specialty.
For readability, Perl 6 will use alternate keywords to declare special
subroutines, but they’re still essentially the same thing underneath.
Insofar as they all behave similarly, this Apocalypse will have
something to say about them.
Wow, there’s some good stuff in there—better static checking, multimethods, macros, slurping parameters, keywordless lambdas—but at what expense in complexity?
The Firefly Gag Reel has been circulating around the Net. It’s a 60 MB MPEG-4 file. Hi-larious if you’re a fan.
