ps2000's comments

Did you forget who developed git? So in this case it's fine ;)

But honestly, I also have a hard time finding a use case for this. The question I ask my self over and over again: why not mount an FTP share and point your origin to it? In fact I did something similar when I was still in university. My desktop computer had my central gip repo, I either pushed to it locally via the FS or remotely via SSH.

Anyways, good thing to have git over FTP but I predict that it will never get traction because it seems to be in part a reimplementation of git?! (At least that's what the github page suggests because every basic git cmd is explained but with some git-ftp prefix... ;))

Ha, what about history.stackexchange.com. IT History at its best...

I doubt it, probably I'll check at skeptics.stackexchange.com.

During this time I still went to school and half of my friends had self-build computers. The other half had computer from very small shops.

And this was also a time when none-Linux Unixes were still still popular, so I would expect some share from them. Linux got a lot of momentum around '98. (Yes, and Macs existed too.) Moreover there was OS/2, BeOS, Irix and whatever... Linux however lost a lot of momentum in the early 2000s when people realized it sucks as a Desktop OS for non-geeks.

90% is well possible I think, but 98%? Never ever.

If I didn't overlook something it only states something about hardware market shares. Which are much easier to measure than software market share. (Although even in the hw market shares there might be a significant uncertainty due to DYI built computers which were quite common during the 90s.)

98%? Even if you assume this only counts desktop OSs, I think that is an exaggeration...

Only one thing sucks more than pagination: a very long article, you accidentally scroll and forget which section you are reading.

Pagination is better than no navigation, this is why Google Image Search is weird to navigate. The absence of proper pagination may be even the reason Google Wave has found no friends beyond its believers.

Pagination sucks when text length per page is too short and even more when 50% of the content consists of advertisements. I avoid such websites.

Yeah agree, they know how to market their stuff. (Maybe Alpha is a marketing instrument after all? ;))

However I think for this problem, and many others, mastering a general purpose programming language is much more efficient. After all you can pipeline symbolic expressions to Mathematica - or Maple >:) - and you have the best of both worlds. Or you just use Ruby or another highly expressive language - the syntax of simple symbolic expressions is basically the same.

Yeah, the reality is that most game vendors ruined open desktop platforms. There was a time when Windows and PCs were still big and mobile gadgets were only used by business people. During that time the biggest hurdle for many people that wanted to leave Windows was that the cool games just worked on Windows.

I think nobody will feel sorry for the game industry loosing their last desktop platform. After all you need a lot of cash to make games experience on the desktop comparable to game experience on a top-notch game console.

This is genius, announcing registrations on Facebook. I have never seen such a thing.

After all there aren't many high quality opensource RDBMS GUIs available. The only one I know is pgAdmin and even pgAdmin has some serious bugs. (GUI freezes easily when you have many windows open and/or do large queries; import/export barely work)

The only code I would trust is the code I generate myself... ;)

Mirah? Anyone?

I remember myself creating cron jobs to free wasted /tmp space

Rare use case...

I remember CD burning softwares and torrent clients asking for special temp directories to be used for that.

Allowing every day applications to create GBs of tmp files would mean you would need to worry once your partition has less than 100 GB free.

However, nobody stops you from mounting /tmp anywhere else or even disable tmpfs.

I think you mean Debian.

I know lots of people who successfully installed Ubuntu that don't know what a boot sector is but are still happy with it. (After all most people use web apps anyway.)

Linux on the desktop suffered from weak developer and industry support. It was until some years ago, Linux sound system latency was as powerful as Windows 3.1's. Using proprietary drivers for X or even worse for the Kernel is a mess.

So obvious... Linus promised Linux on the desktop 2000 or so. The reality was different: influential groups just ignored the desktop. Now it's too late, web is becoming the predominant platform, Operating Systems are just commodity. For me it's no big difference whether I use Linux or OS X (with coreutils etc. installed). In fact I wouldn't even mind working on Windows, unfortunately I don't have the patience to setup a reasonable Unix-like dev environment.

The irony is: it has never been less painful to switch to Linux.

"While C itself is a relatively rigid language"

99th percentile of people who either don't care or are not able to care about privacy

I guess it's also a matter of taste. In any case, my taste is this:

RESTful APIs usually represent CRUD operations, each of these letter can be beautifully mapped to request types: - CREATE -> POST - READ -> GET - UPDATE -> PUT - DELETE -> DELETE

Second point: {error: false, value: actual_data} If we have an error variable, what is the HTTP error code then good for? Normal Web Servers use the HTTP error codes for a reason. Besides using standard webframework a json containing only "actual_data" means less code, less errors and so forth...

Third point: URLs should represent the hierarchy: GET /users/43/bookmarks/32442?... is much more beautiful and straight-forward to work with than /api_handler.exe?user_id=43&bookmark_id=32442&operation=get...

Regarding authentication: use a secret API key, that's simple and secure. Everybody does that, from small services to multi million user services like facebook.

As a hint: read the dissertation of Roy Fielding who "invented" REST. In my opinion REST means to exploit HTTP as far as possible instead of using any custom conventions.