While I like the idea of services (webbased or not) that are about quality and not speed, I don't think this service qualifies for "quality".
The world needs more great content, whether it is on the web, the television, the movie screen, on paper, or listened to. But as long as people refuse to pay for it and as long as people give things away for free or basically free, it won't happen.
Vinyl albums used to tell stories and create an epic range of ambience. They were often art, like The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. Like a meal at a sit down restaurant, you put it on and waited for the side to be done. It was a bit of a pain to have to go lift up the stylus and try to land it on the specific track. The 8-track and then cassette then had fast forward. So the CD with its awesome quality let you even more easily and cleanly jump songs, killing the continuity. The CD inevitably lead to cutting to wavs, mp2s, then mp3s, and then it was all over. The story was gone.
In the same way, we've allowed the news to be shared in pieces and the pieces are important. Blogs and tweets beat thought out articles. Although we subscribe to and enjoy the local paper and the Economist, I'm addicted to HN, Google News, and get my music thrown at me in pieces by Pandora. The stories in life are gone and replaced by pieces.
So slow web, you sound great. But what are you? Who can afford to sit down and spend a few weeks writing a great blog post? Who can afford to spend the time to read a book on a new technology? Whatever you write about becomes obsolete or old news so quickly.
Now I know this isn't telling the whole truth. There are a number of people out there that focus on quality. But web culture is not a quality obsessed culture, and I don't know how it can become so. And I don't know how to slow down.
Can't speak for GitHub, but the criticism of its 404 is wrong. When a repo moves, there is nothing currently in place there to indicate that it has moved from the user standpoint, and if there were, I imagine it could be abused to setup a bunch of accounts and have them all point to one for some lame attempt at SEO. You can't just have one point to another automatically because repo names are not unique and there are repos like "git-scripts" that could be really different from one implementation to another.
But seriously... I don't really see any changes that just scream "come check out Rails 4!". I mean... my God, they are competing with Node now which has an ecosystem that is growing at a nuts pace. The only reason I can see so far for it is that they want to really make those still on Ralis 2.x feel like shit and want to upgrade, because now they will be two major versions behind.
Don't get me wrong. I love Rails. But WTF. Tell me what I'm missing.
Very, very cool stuff. Haveband is also a good idea, but I think the interface could be improved by using a dropdown/select for the values- having each of those side by side with the grey background made me think they were tags.
Other than that and the Stallman reference, all is great. Stallman is a great guy (imo), but I think her work should be the central focus. The skills page also shows smart design.
The willingness to involve new contributors can be even more important than how they reject contributions.
On a few open source projects I used, the lead developers spent a lot of time on the mailing lists but weren't that open to bringing on new developers. I understand if a developer on a project doesn't have time to add a new feature for you, and I even understand if they spend more time than they should providing support while their development slows. But if after all that if they still are not open to new developers joining the team, or make them go through ridiculous hoops and excessive process for the size of the team, then they should understand when the project fails.
Awesome blog and story. I'm just wondering why there was no haggis or blood pudding in the pics I saw. That is what I'd be protesting. It is bloddy Scotland after all!
I agree with the OP about special interests misleading people into thinking that a claim is valid because there are studies backing it up.
However, I think the OP is wrong about Feynman. Feynman was not one to blindly believe in other people's studies. In fact, as he learned from his dad as a youth who used to make wrong interpretations of birds, etc., people are fallible, and so are their assumptions. What he was saying is that you can't argue with validly collected data and valid mathmatical proof. You can obviously argue with their interpretation.
I like this post, and I think it probably mirrors quite a number of businesses. That said, I know a business that is making substantial money off of Facebook advertisements... because they are selling them.
Why simulate Lambda? Couldn't they just have waited on Java 8? Or maybe just used JRuby, if Java was a requirement? Still- it's great that they shared this.
Unfortunately this graph primarily just shows that government handouts to citizens in the form of safety net programs, medicare, and medicaid have gone up in percentage, that defense has gone down in percentage, and that we don't spend enough (in my opinion) on public transportation- but it only looks at three years!
Low load S&P 500 index fund like Vanguard's. Put it all in there if you can stand the risk, with about 3 months salary in the bank for emergencies. Don't buy a fancy house, car, vacation home, boat, timeshare, or whatever. Be frugal. Then retire early.
The world needs more great content, whether it is on the web, the television, the movie screen, on paper, or listened to. But as long as people refuse to pay for it and as long as people give things away for free or basically free, it won't happen.
Vinyl albums used to tell stories and create an epic range of ambience. They were often art, like The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. Like a meal at a sit down restaurant, you put it on and waited for the side to be done. It was a bit of a pain to have to go lift up the stylus and try to land it on the specific track. The 8-track and then cassette then had fast forward. So the CD with its awesome quality let you even more easily and cleanly jump songs, killing the continuity. The CD inevitably lead to cutting to wavs, mp2s, then mp3s, and then it was all over. The story was gone.
In the same way, we've allowed the news to be shared in pieces and the pieces are important. Blogs and tweets beat thought out articles. Although we subscribe to and enjoy the local paper and the Economist, I'm addicted to HN, Google News, and get my music thrown at me in pieces by Pandora. The stories in life are gone and replaced by pieces.
So slow web, you sound great. But what are you? Who can afford to sit down and spend a few weeks writing a great blog post? Who can afford to spend the time to read a book on a new technology? Whatever you write about becomes obsolete or old news so quickly.
Now I know this isn't telling the whole truth. There are a number of people out there that focus on quality. But web culture is not a quality obsessed culture, and I don't know how it can become so. And I don't know how to slow down.