dws

It's less than humorous. Once bogus data declaring you dead works its way into the system, credit cards get shut off, accounts get closed, and you're liable to have serious problems with your bank.

Lauren's credibility predates Google.

If you're competing in FIRST Robotics, yes.

And with those numbers gone, there's more room to mislead.

Interesting historically (particularly that the U.S. Secretary of War bowed to a British request to have the Red Cross charge), but the parallels between holding a grudge for the perception of being treated poorly coming out of combat, and being asked in peacetime to pay for a previously free service, are weak.

My Dad, a (peacetime) Marine Lieutenant, had a Sergeant who was livid about being asked by the Red Cross volunteers to pay for coffee on his return trip from the Korean war in the early 50s. That left a lasting impression my Dad, who's saying on that was, "A Marine Never forgets." He never supported the Red Cross, though he was hardly stingy when it came to paying for things he thought deserved to be paid for, and that included accepting raised prices.

There's an element of moral indignation in the story that's missing from "Oh, snap, this used to be free and now I have to pay for it. That sucks."

Yahoo! released Axis (with this very dumb mistake) at 5pm PST, and by 9pm PST their public key is posted, with a "I report this but have yet to hear back" note. How, exactly, is this responsible disclosure?

And a smack upside the head now could be what propels them to up their game.

You also have to consider the break in flow. A boot time of a minute, at the wrong time, can cost the mental context of the interrupted developers to get dumped on the floor. That costs a lot more than a minute to recover from.

A useful generalization is that tech business are divided into people who talk for a living, and people who think for a living. One side of that divide seems to have a lot of trouble understanding the legitimate needs of the other. The headphone issue is but one of many ways that lack of understanding manifests.

By 2029, and increasing number of humans will fail the Turing Test.

Whether the Kinect is a game changer or a distraction remains to be seen. A well-coded bot can do quite well already in autonomous mode, even when there's contention for a goal (in this case, the 3 point hoop).

Friends can find you more easily using your real name? Try that if you have a very common name. There are over 80 pages of G+ results to sort through if you have mine, and I have it easy. Friends with common Chinese or Indian names have it a lot worse.

You could as easily say that it's a poignant accusation of the misdirection of educators.

There's some pretty good legal analysis and discussion in the Groklaw comment threads, once you sort out who to follow.

Groklaw is an interesting model in how to manage community discussions. Having an explicit "Off Topic" section on each post does seem to quarantine a lot of dreck.

And he wrote one of the first JIT code generators for Smalltalk-80 while at ParcPlace.

For 'blow your mind' trivia points, who filmed the demo?

They took out the outlets after a laptop user pulled the plug on their cooler. Overkill, perhaps, but there was some fairly rude behavior there for a while, including people bringing in starbucks cups and camping for the wifi.

The key is to put things down where you'll think to look for them when you want to pick them up again. The same principle works when deciding how to structure code.

The interview with Udell theorizes a bit on why Khan's approach works. Key bits: he approaches subjects conversationally; he doesn't appear in the videos, which reduces distraction; most of his video segments last 10 minutes, which is at about the point where attention gives out; the technology lets people pause the lessons to look words up, something you can't do in a classroom.

It's a style of building that was very popular doing the boom in Silicon Valley during the 80's and early 90's. Construction crews would pour the walls into molds, let them dry, and then literally tilt them up and put a roof on them.

It was weird to drive through parts of the Silicon Valley (e.g., North 1st St.) finding buildings had been tilted up in what had been flat land the week before.

Quite a few of those buildings are empty now.

The title is a bit misleading. The author mentions in passing that he took an at-home ground school course and passed the FAA written exam before flying. Studying to pass that test, and studying to retain some knowledge that can be useful when actually flying, can take more than a week itself.

The other major omission is learning to fly in or through heavily controlled airspace. There are a lot of rules and procedures, especially radio procedures, to learn and practice, and they really need to be practiced with an instructor to get some of them to stick. An instructor can teach to you to communicate effectively with air-traffic control in ways that home-study courses won't. Expecting to learn that in a week and retain it is nuts.

Reid was no coding slouch. He won the 1982 Grace Murray Hopper award for Scribe. http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=5356574&srt=all...

An employment agreement is often an opening bid in a negotiation, but developers think of it as a "sign or no deal" thing and thereby miss an opportunity to ask for reasonable changes. I've routinely struck out parts of employment agreements that were overly broad (by crossing them out and initialing), and have only once had that even questioned. It also sends a signal that you're paying attention.

I'm in California, and have dealt mostly with startups. YMMV.

Collocated: A wall, some blue tape, sticky notes, index cards, and flip chart paper.

Distributed: Pivotal Tracker, IM, and "it depends" depending on what you mean by collaborative. Could be Google docs.

The first 25 minutes of Adam's talk apply amazingly well to becoming a great programmer. (The Q&A after 25 minutes is fun, too.)

Great takeaway quote: "Don't be the person who only has a hammer."

This is actually a two-part talk. At the 50 minute mark, there's a case study on optimizing a heavily-threaded Java app. It's partially about throwing heaps of RAM and cores at the problem (using the Azul platform), but it's also a general refresher on how to attack performance problems that involve lots of threads.

"... according to a report issued Monday by attorneys hired by the district."

This should have been tagged [NSFW], to avoid problems for those of us who work in restrictive environments.

It's a 1" thick table top, not the thicker butcher block you often see used in kitchens.