DeepDuh

A review with not much research is still a valid review - namely on what even somewhat technically savvy users aren't able to intuitively find out about Windows 8 usage. See also the inability to close metro/new-style/whatever apps. I didn't find that out myself when I tried Win8 for 10min or so. And it's not like killing those apps isn't necessary like on iOS, since the behavior changes when they are open, i.e. Windows button doesn't switch to Desktop anymore.

Not really a concern? I don't agree. Look at large C++ projects, and let's not speak about GPU frameworks like CUDA, OpenCL and OpenACC. If it weren't be a concern, software companies wouldn't invest in clusters just for compilation.

60% out of 200 studies is not all that good, really. It allows the experts to believe that if they're still in the top 25%, no machine can beat them (I know that this is not exactly what the studies say, but statistics are almost always being misinterpreted, so I do it here too).

The thing is: I expect Watson to perform significantly better than this. If it can beat Jeopardy grandmasters consistantly and if that technology is correctly being reapplied to the medical field, Watson should easily outperform anything we had before.

People don't seem to realize how huge this is. This venture could easily turn out to be the most profitable in IBM's history, and one of the most important inventions in health care.

Maybe the one who decided it has an Apple device with 'retina' screen? I was reading it on an rMBP and the font struck me as very pleasant, hence I couldn't understand the fuss here first. Helvetica Neue Light is quite popular on these newer Apple devices, it's good to know that it is a bad idea though.

[edit: sorry, I replied here, because it wouldn't let me reply to your other answer first and I thought it was because we've reached some kind of maximum depth]

Thanks, I see. Ok, if it's just string or binary based it will work from a correctness standpoint. I'd expect big performance problems with ad-hoc views (if they even exist here), but these shouldn't be used in production anyways. Also, I'd expect replication to take quite a bit longer because it needs to map every document with changes, so there's going to be a tradeoff between initialization time and replication time between the two approaches.

I'm thinking it's going to be beneficial for larger databases to have a TouchDB 'server' somewhere, which constantly replicates with CouchDB and sends the devices a complete snapshot sqlite file for the initial setup. After that, they can talk to CouchDB directly. Otherwise it could take like half an hour to initialize a 50MB DB on a device, which is not really feasible.

oh, so TouchDB maps to sqlite? Does that work generally? Let's say my documents have lists of maps of tuples of lists - will it create the appropriate table structure in sqlite?

The use cases I have in mind don't need the DB to scale to more than a few ten thousand users. Should be ok with a two or three replicated nodes I think, from my experience with Lotus Notes.

That's also my conclusion. However I'm not aware of a DBMS that

- is document based

- can easily replicate to laptops and embedded devices

- has all the security I want, e.g. encryption, per document security

- has the bindings I want and/or a new binding can easily be implemented ad-hoc

Given the advantages and disadvantages I'm leaning towards CouchDB and rolling my own security wrapper. IMO that's still better than going with an RDBMS and then implementing replication[1]. How do you see this?

[1]edit: and also giving up the document based approach, thus not having arbitrary mapping from the get go.

Great, thanks for the helpful info!

Oh, one more thing: Did you ever load multiple TouchDBs? I'm thinking the overhead per DB (not per server) should be pretty small, no?

Background: I'd like to build an application where I separate entities into multiple couchDBs, partly since it saves me view definition code, partly because it gives me more flexibility for per-document access permissions.

I'm very interested in those two solutions. Does anyone here have some experience about CouchDB/TouchDB on iOS/Android? Specifically: Does it replicate reliably to a CouchDB or Couchbase server? How are conflicts handled? Are there wrappers already available that map to ObjC/Java native data structures, similar to couchdbkit on python?

You're missing something big here: Software support. In the past it was completely reasonable to develop all your stuff Win-only. Hence the lock-in, hence the market share. Nowadays, even in forward looking big corps, when new software projects are planned, Android and iOS support is usually not only considered but a priority. That's why we see more and more software becoming POSIX compatible. And once this is all done, the OS becomes completely interchangable, at which point MS looses big time, they basically loose their long time business model of domination through Windows market share.

Once this transition has been completed, MS will become a Software company like all the others, they won't have any home turf advantage anymore.

For this reason I'm very skeptical whether MS will allow the Office port. It would basically show that they have accepted their fate (which would be a good sign for their management however).

I felt so too, although Portal 1 & 2 came pretty close in that regard. There's just something about the depth of the atmosphere in Valve games that makes them unique.

So? Just close those reports then. I thought the issue here is to filter out anything spammy while not loosing any potentially valuable reports. A human should be able to filter out at least 90% of the spammy stuff while not loosing any good ones, thus significantly reducing the workload of engineers in higher pay grades.

Google sometimes give me the impression they want to absolutely only hire the best engineers, but I'd argue that many non automatable tasks can be done more efficiently by having some reasonably trained lower rank staff. See also all the complaints about missing service when trying to use Google products commercially - if they do want to seriously enter that market, this stuff needs to change significantly.

Other things that come to mind: Automated Youtube takedowns and Gmail account blocks. Do you really want to save those few million bucks a year for not hiring support staff, then have lots of disgruntled users blogging about how evil you are and then pouring those millions into PR campaigns?

Sometimes adding humans is the best option? How about just hire some student workers to sweep through bug reports remotely? Even some Mechanical Turk approach might work, if you can create some checklist of what a useful bug report must have (and if you got this, it could also be integrated into the bug tracker workflow).

Oh. Ok. 2 days is actually at the high end of what I do, and this is for a 50min presentation. Of course, the visuals are usually based on work I already did before - instead of designing stuff with pen and paper I usually begin drawing my ideas directly in a quick Keynote presentation, that way I can show it to other people / at internal meetings easily.

I'd be interested to see one of your presentations though, in case they're not all confidential. I think your approach might make sense for product launches for example - where it needs to look even more professional than the junk I do. If you're interested I could also send you an example Keynote file if you have a mac, just to see the quality difference.

Ahh finally I can have peace of mind. Thanks for that hint.

Please try the Episodes as well. I also thought HL2 to be weaker than its predecessor, but the Episodes blow everything out of the water IMO.

> console.error("Did you forget to run `make decrypt_conf`?");

> console.error("You need to run `make decrypt_conf` to update it.");

Couldn't you just make the decrypt_conf target depend on the encrypted configuration file and make the standard build command depend on the decrypted file? This way it would get enforced with every 'make'.

In case you don't use Makefiles for building at all (because you only use script languages for example) I don't get why you use a Makefile instead of just two shell scripts.

Interesting. May I ask you for a few estimates?

How much preparation did you put into your templates approximately?

How long does it take you to do a quick one-off?

How long for a professional looking presentation for public speaking?

One more thing Calc is better than Excel: It doesn't screw with your Microsoft Windows 7 windows. Multiwindow in Excel is just broken. Is Excel 2013 any better there?

Anyway, I agree with everything else you said, it matches exactly my experiences with Calc.

That being said I'd prefer Apple to push their iWorks applications over better OOffice - their technological basis is by far the best - the outcome of each click and each edit is completely predictable, the whole rendering engine works consistantly across all three products, so do hotkeys. They're just lacking a lot of sugar on top like the features you mention.

Writer is fine, Calc is somewhat ok for light spreadsheet users.

but

Presentations? That thing (whatever it's called) is just unusable IMO. Way too many clicks to do anything, crap looking standard templates, crap looking animations. Powerpoint completely blows it out of the water and let's beter not speak about Keynote.

So any manager / engineer / researcher probably won't be happy with LibreOffice, since presentations are just a fact of life and you need to be able to get them done quickly.

Isn't that just because their touchpads are so tiny? If you sit at a larger laptop with good touchpad, do you still feel that need?

> The excited defense of Apple, despite my having not really attacked Apple in the first place makes it seem like there's some sort of victim mentality going on with Apple fans.

With all due respect, now you seem to be extrapolating too ;).

As someone so experienced with DOS, may I ask you something: Which script interpreters do you run from it? Is it sane for doing python development for example? And how do you glue that stuff together, using batch files? Isn't that ugly as hell?

One thing that I've come so accustomed to in unix environments is the ease of creating CLI tools in a nice language like python and then glue it all together with bash scripts. I can't really imagine being so productive in DOS, but maybe I just don't know it enough, hence the question.

I'm actually more worried about flying than about individual transport. I'd argue that affordable intercontinental flights have had a tremendously positive effect on the world's society as a whole. The intensified relationships make war between industrialized nations very unlikely for the time being. Yet we don't really have any feasible alternative to fossil fuel there at the moment. The sooner we save it for those important matters the better, but unfortunately that's not how free market economy works. I expect we'll have a period where flying is a privilege again.

How about Flask+Flask+sqlite as an intro to (web)programming? It shows you much more of what's going on in the database backend. Plus, Flask is so small you can still look at it's program code in an afternoon and understand what it's doing.

Microsoft still seems to have a thing for saving struggling computer companies. Will this one bite them later too?

1) putting pure cleanup code into different functions is unwieldy. It doesn't make code readability, thus maintainability, better in any way, so why use it?

2) speed. sometimes, when it comes to optimizing hot loops, there is a point where one needs to manually inline code, in order to avoid potentially unnecessary scope cleanups. Ever looked at assembler? Seen how many instructions a typical function call causes?

Of course, (1) is usually only relevant in systems programming and (2) is only relevant in HPC, where going that extra mile can actually save more than a few 100k$. Nothing the average programmer needs to worry about - however that's also one huge problem of that field: Lack of people with said know how.

I like the model too and you got me thinking. Is there any standard licence model where you allow people to have and use the source but not to redistribute it "as is"?

Wait, so Muslims and Americans are mutually exclusive?