Your experience is not atypical, and it's been a struggle to win over ThinkUp contributers who've been around for awhile to the idea of spending time in IRC because of it.
But just like the larger Internet, it all depends on where you go. There's been sort of an IRC revival in development communities and I've found them largely jerk-free.
Bluntly, I assume he's implying it's an appropriate parallel to the relationship between Oracle and its customers, as described in the post. (I may be reading into it too much.)
There is no reason for someone who has read your first book to buy the Guide, correct? This is a reduced and reformatted field guide that contains no information that isn't in the larger Git book?
(I'm almost finished reading your first book and as someone who is very capable with Subversion it has helped me tremendously with grokking Git. Thanks!)
I've been pondering how to solve this too. Bought a domain for it recently but haven't decided what form it should take.
The CRM angle is one I hadn't thought of, though it's kind of an obvious leap (in hindsight of course). I've been thinking more of a CMS plus address book.
Among other context splitting, I make regular use of virtual desktops. So there are rarely more than one or two browser windows on one desktop, and anything beyond the primary window has a short lifespan.
Read it Later looks perfect; thanks for the tip. Last I bothered to look, I couldn't find a thing.
"Worse, how many of us keep tabs open as reminders of something we want to do or read later?"
Indeed I do. One of these days I'll get around to adding an extension that allows me to queue links without opening them in tabs.
Anyway, I don't understand why Tab Candy is an improvement over simple window management. Since the introduction of tabs, I've grouped tabs by purpose into separate windows, and rather assumed that's how everyone did it. Especially now that you can easily drag tabs from one browser window to another, it's effortless. No new GUI to learn, to expensive extension to install.
Reminds me of finding out the hard way that "paste" is bound to Mouse3 by default in Gnome and that on some mice I'll occasionally scroll the wheel violently enough to trigger clicks.
Took a few times of finding random text in my code to realize what was happening, and even longer to figure out how.
Hilarious. I read bits of the letter to my wife this morning as she dashed about before work (she ordered her iPhone 4 a few days ago) and after the bit about bar display I said "the subtext here is that this is AT&T's fault!"
The blame-shifting approaches subliminal. If you aren't looking for the hidden message, you probably won't see it.
It really isn't enough that _why's legacy be restricted to the things he made. What he contributed was so much more than software. This is the most fitting tribute I've yet seen and I'm very glad someone thought of it.
Solving my own need is definitely the inspiration, though honestly I don't game much anymore (certainly not as much as I used to!)
The younger net-native generation is no doubt resistant to paying for a service of this kind. The obvious strategies for making (paid) membership attractive would be discount on games and gear and access to anything exclusive and/or pre-release (beta codes, demos, strategy guides). Making that happen has its own set of challenges, of course...
An idea I've been sitting on for awhile is social networking intended for the fabricated and fractured identities of online gamers, with or without divulging the player's true identity.
A social network of this kind would be a natural place to for organized playing groups (clans, guilds, etc.) to form, organize, recruit, schedule and so on. Individuals and groups alike could display their "home" or favorite servers/shards/whatever, affiliations, and so on.
There'd have to be some thought put into the mechanics of managing profiles, as a single player may wish to have several character profiles on the system without publicly linking them (FPS vs. MMO handles), and some games may not have proxy character identities but refer directly to the player instead (Plants vs. Zombies and other casual games).
I think there have been some moves in this general direction by gaming sites that have some kind of community aspect, but nothing that really came close to this more specific concept of users managing a collection of their virtual identities which each may have their own separate network of associated teammates or friends.
But just like the larger Internet, it all depends on where you go. There's been sort of an IRC revival in development communities and I've found them largely jerk-free.