This reminds me of how when Apple created the UI for the Lisa (and then the Mac), they thought that on the original Xerox Alto, windows could overlap, so Quickdraw had to handle overlapping windows [0]: “Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front.”
I thought I read somewhere that Jobs specifically asked for this, (mis)remembering having seen it at PARC, but I cannot find the quote at the moment.
There are a few stories that follow this pattern... my favorite is the one about Starcraft development. While Blizzard was making nothing more than "Warcraft in space", a competing studio showed a beautiful and fluid RTS at trade shows that got everyone's attention. The Starcraft team had a hard time getting their product to the same level, and had to scrap a lot of code. It turned out that the other studio was just showing prerecorded videos at trade shows, while employees mimed the appropriate button presses to make it look interactive.
TFA is an example of how to improve the quality of about any newspaper or magazine article: ignore the first and last sentence (or at worst paragraph.) Here, they both repeat that “money does grow on tree”, where the rest of the article describes how the gold is not grown by the tree, but extracted from the soil, thus contradicting the moronic introduction and conclusion.
I totally agree about the annoyingness of the intro/outro, but what is the difference in your opinion between things being "grown by the tree" and "extracted from the soil"?
Isn't that all trees (and, dare I say it, most other living organisms) do: extract atoms from the soil (and the surrounding air, of course), and grow themselves from those?
Well, gold is an element. By this standard, the only way to describe something as "growing" gold would be if it produced it by nuclear fusion.
There's an alternative perspective... the trees are growing gold in the same way that leaves, bark, hair, claws, etc. are grown. Anything a tree does could be described as "growing". The fact that they leave the gold in the same state they get it doesn't really bear on the fact that growing is what trees do.
If, hypothetically, I created a rose breed that naturally gilded its own petals, I guarantee that everyone would describe that as "growing". But they still wouldn't be synthesizing the gold, just moving it. Your intuitions have gone astray somewhere.
Now, the things I listed as examples of things that are grown are all somewhat discrete entities, which is also true of my hypothetical self-gilding roses and is not true of the gold in this article. But synthesizing gold doesn't come into it.
Well, first of all, bark doesn't just exist in free form in the ground and get moved to the tree, it's synthesized from the CO2 in the air (I'm no plantologist, so this may be overly simplified).
However, the difference isn't in the "grow" part, it's in the "gold" part. If you tell someone "I've found a plant that grows gold", their reaction won't be "wow, what an interesting mechanism", it will be "holy shit, we're rich!".
If you want apples, you plant an apple tree, then you grow apples for free. By that analogy, if you want gold, you plant one of these trees, and get gold for free, which doesn't hold, because you'll never get more gold than how much you put in.
> By that analogy, if you want gold, you plant one of these trees, and get gold for free, which doesn't hold, because you'll never get more gold than how much you put in.
This isn't true, in the same way that it's not true that a gold mine will never give you any more gold than you put into the mine in the first place. There's already gold in the ground.
Is there some sort of class at j-school where they teach prospective journalists how to use hackneyed phrases and horrible puns? Is it a signaling mechanism to show other journalists they're part of the club?
So I found 2 red letters (C at -28.30,-57.30; M at 34.61,135.73), as well as three red signs (- sign at 35.11,-75.98, 9 at 76.50,-24.01, and 1 at 68.92,40.64) so there’s probably a super secret location given by the red coordinates but I don’t know what the letters mean.
Apparently, all of the big red letters at the end of the trails spell out "APRIL FOOLS". The smaller red letters and numbers spell "MMC-900913", which is a reference to last year's 8-bit map.
I haven't seen the Formula One logo mentioned, and that's definitely worth looking at if people aren't familiar with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One
The Carrefour logo is an excellent example. I only noticed the C a couple of years ago; i had lived 20 and something years thinking the logo was just a weird arrow. But once you see it, you can't unsee it hehe.
Like many, I feel that the poster is throwing the baby with the bathwater. Yes, SOAP and XML Schema are horrible. Don't use them, then. Yes, XML is verbose, but that's exactly why Relax NG has a compact syntax. Use that if you don't like the XML syntax. Yes, data can be expressed as attributes or elements, but there are simple rules of thumb to decide between one or the other: if your data can have structure, or you may want to have multiple instances of the same thing, it's generally better to use an element; otherwise an attribute should do the trick.
There are also errors and approximations: XML did not introduce the bracket syntax, it inherited it from SGML. A DTD is not a schema (and if you want to criticize XML, you should point out that it should not have inherited DTDs from SGML.) He doesn't even mention the worst part about comments, which is that you can't have -- inside a comment (very annoying when commenting a large block of data...)
XML has many beautiful applications, like SVG, SMIL (which never took off but keeps getting rediscovered/reimplemented in an inconsistent manner [full disclosure: I participated in the SMIL and CDF W3C working groups]), XSLT, &c. XHTML was not perfect by a long stretch but the new HTML5 syntax is much, much worse.
Use XML, JSON, and whatever is necessary to get the job done. For the project that I am working on right now, I am using XML for serializing Web app descriptions; in this situation, XML is clearly better than JSON.
