widgetycrank

I'm not sure if anyone remembers the Microsoft Courier tablet demo, which came out before iPad's announcement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI

This video left me with a strong impression of future general computing usage patterns. It has also been my personal gold standard of a superb video demo.

Interestingly enough, they abandoned it right after iPad's release:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Courier#End_of_Courie...

I don't if it's me but the position:fixed layout makes the page scroll noticeably laggy. I'm using Chrome on a 2.0GHz Mac btw.

That was a nice read, though I wonder if there are legal issues with mining the web for content. For reddit they were just submitting links, so they probably wouldn't have gotten into much trouble.

I'm not sure which part about Maoism you are referring to.

No, the infanticide is not well-grounded, just reports.

I'm Chinese btw. I actually don't know anyone who buys these bags, I only see them on the streets occasionally. Giant wallets/strapless hand bags seem to be much more common among the middle-aged men. Most young people wear regular messenger bags.

>China did not permit women to own land until 1950.

After 1950 men were not permitted to own land either. :P

edit: In some ways China should really be looked at as two distinct demographics, urban and rural. They have vast different values that makes the country completely bipolar. The gender attitude among the urbanites are much more progressive, in some ways even more so than the west, while in the countryside they still practice infanticide.

It may have to do with the fact that the communist ideology campaigns mostly targeted the cities, because Mao feared a bourgeoisie counter-revolution, while he already had grass root support from the countryside, so he took it for granted.

Can you explain why "not from scratch" construction is a bad thing? AFAIK most houses these days are built from cookie-cutter plans.

I wonder why prefabs houses aren't more common.

A friend of my parents was building a house. I asked him if he considered prefab, he had no idea what I was talking about.

I wonder how designers fit into this development process. Most open source projects lack UI polish, yet GitHub looks like it's crafted by a professional.

Someone should make an alternative discussion site for videos, with a good comment system (eg. HN, reddit). I'm not sure if there are legal issues though.

I've always wondered what's the Chinese word for "hacker" in the its original context. 网客 sounds good, but it seems to implies web hackers only.

I like your layout, it stands out.

I think you are perhaps dimming the texts to make the highlights more skimmable? It's a good idea, but when I read it I spent about 1 or 2 seconds on the highlights and started skimming the rest on my own.

Perhaps you can make the main text colour static, but highlight with a bigger, bolder font, or a different colour. Maybe a significantly different-looking font face, or highlight the text background instead.

I really like your barber's web site btw. Very straight-forward, and the aesthetic choice seems to be sending the right message. I had a chuckle at the first-aid photo. :)

http://ivzhao.com/belmont/imgs/11.jpg

Maybe I'll check out the place, a bit pricey for me though.

I actually know a few "100% Han Chinese" people who have slightly brown/reddish hair. At first I thought they were dyed, but eventually I was convinced that they were not.

In retrospect, I'm not really that surprised, considering China being continental, and the amount of trade/migration over the centuries.

I think in the end it's how saturated the market is. If all your competitors have polished fronts, having one that's rough around the edges will certainly put you at a disadvantage, and vise versa.

I think people buy large SUVs under the false assumption of crashworthiness. For the price range they could have gotten sedans of similar prestige.

Keep in mind that if you decide to hire people later on, you may have to go through your site/app and change every instance of "I" to "we". :)

Like a monastery?

I think the archived versions may be missing some CSS files. Twitter's font doesn't look right compared to its own screenshot.

I also dig the app, but I think it could use a better name.

For something this cool, it deserves an original, less-descriptive, feel-good name.

TheSixtyOne is a fantastic name.

I ran a VMWare image of OS X a few years ago. I don't know what it's like now, but back then the lack of an OpenGL driver was the deal breaker. OS X's graphic shell uses Quartz Extreme on top of OpenGL, without GPU acceleration it was virtually unusable.

Isn't Flash 10.1 GPU-accelerated? Maybe that was just for videos. Though I recall the Mac version using one of the Core libraries for vector graphics.

There is a similar dislike of adjectives in William Zinsser's "On Writing Well".

>Impugning your opponent's motivations is the lowest form of rhetoric.

I tend to agree with you, then I thought Dr. Strangelove. This seems like a difficult line to draw.

Pre-Qing dynasty China was a major source of innovations btw.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions

It's interesting to note that almost all the inventions came before the Qing dynasty. Qing's Qianlong Emperor (1711-1799) is considered a "Confucian fundamentalist", who paved the way for the subsequent isolationist policies.

Confucianism is just one school of philosophy among many in China btw. Its influence tends to fluctuate from period to period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinegar_tasters

Nostrademons wrote one, but it's pretty old, and I think the site is down.

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=1629