forkandwait

What incompatibilities do you see? There is something with if conditions, but otherwise it has been spot on with me. I use matlab code all the time.

You would use Octave instead of Matlab because it is free as opposed to $1000 for a basic license plus additional $$ for every time you sneeze and need a toolbox.

You would use Octave/ Matlab instead of Julia, R or Python because Matlab syntax is the cleanest and most succinct way currently to articulate complex (in both senses) matrix algorithms. It isn't nearly as good for general programming, but it is much better than anything else for its niche. While some of that is obviously just fuzzy opinion, I am pretty sure you need fewer characters or LOC to say the same thing in Matlab than in the other scientific languages mentioned.

Matlab (and thus Octave) also has a HUGE installed base of engineers who don't really care that HN thinks the language du jour is X, Y, or Z and continue to use Matlab to get their work done (and will for the next 20 years). If you are working with them, you use Matlab. If you are working with them and don't have $1000 for a license, you use Octave.

Octave also has some syntactical improvements like "+=" that are missing in Matlab.

Postgresql has had a memcached extension for, um, 8 years. I haven't used it myself, but I think it is well respected.

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgmemcache/

While I am a confirmed Microsoft hater, the one place they shine is in providing an environment (.NET + SQL Server + whatever) for the building of medium sized (10 to 1000), internal, pointy-clicky applications. There is no equivalent in Unix or Mac, and this is a massive market -- all the lower level office workers who get some small data thing from somewhere (a customer order, a change order, whatever), enter the data after a little bit of thinking, and move on.

I am a data analyst forced to work on MS environments, and it sucks ass (I have a parallel Unix toolchain installed, plus we use SAS (which sucks ass, too, but that is a different story)). It would suck ass if I was building and deploying internet apps. But for pseudo custom form based applications designed for non-programmers to do glorified data entry, it rocks.

Also, there are probably 40 million "analysts" who don't even know what scripting is and are utterly dependent on Excel, even though they could probably increase their productivity 100-fold if they got a little bit of command line and R and SQL under their belt. However, they don't even know they have an alternative, so Microsoft is totally safe in this zone for at least a few years.

> ... of Skinner (who, as everyone also knows, was a total psycho)

Not so fast cowboy. Skinner's theories were far more limited than he or his disciples believed (ditto Chomsky and pretty much every psych or social theorist), but the behaviorists added a great deal to psychological understanding.

It is interesting to contrast the soft sciences (for lack of a better term) with the hard sciences and how they relate to their history. Nobody would say "Newton was an utter psycho" because his theories didn't account for thermodynamic behavior, or because his dynamics were proven to be approximate by Einstein, or because in his later years he spent a lot time analyzing word patterns in the bible. Rather, what he said that was true gets incorporated into the textbooks and we move on. Sometimes Skinnerian dynamics apply, and we should use them in those situations, and learn about them, and toss them when not appropriate. Duh.

I am not sure why the soft/social sciences are so dysfunctional in this respect.

In anthropology this is extremely evident, but they are all psychos there...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-perf...

I will start taking Microsoft seriously again when they stop using childish non-standard punctuation, and restart doing innovative work. ".Net"? "So.cl"? Are you serious?

I am personally a lot more likely to log on to Facebook than to EVER buy a Ford -- just saying.

I just think he was faking it by using "tonne" instead of "ton".

The clone costs nothing, uses open file formats, and is more friendly for certain things like editing CSV files in a spreadsheet.

In some cases (like the state office I work at), Libre Office track changes would be fine. We aren't all doing legal negotiating with counterparties (MS Office power users! I am super impressed!)

I think the (ignorant) right wing in the States assumes that Canada has its early 1990s fiscal problems because it is has lots of successful social programs that would considered leftist down here. Idiots.

I think this is the year that LibreOffice actually takes off as a widespread replacement. No offense to any devs that might be reading, but the last few times I used it (or Open Office), it was awful in a vague, this is just sucky, slow, ugly way. 3.4.6, however, is great; I know my office could move over with barely a hiccup (we are technical bureaucrats -- lots of SAS and Excel and GIS).

I think it is only if you have some complex workflow dependent on VBA and links and all that crap that you would have a problem, and I think most people tried that garbage in the late nineties and never did it again. Mail merge is the only stupid automated thing that sort of works, and Libre has that.

Re Matlab/ Octave:

I am an R to Octave convert. R has some great stuff, especially multi-type tables and a decent OO system for packaging complex analyses, but .... Octave rocks R when you have to come up with complex matrix oriented algorithms -- much, much more straightforward.

Also -- cell arrays are funky and necessary for string manipulation. I suggest not dwelling on their weirdness -- you may grow to like them.

Why not give everyone a simple test, but give A LOT of people a simple test (which SELECT statement is an inner join...)?

What I always here is that 90% can't write a for-loop or a basic regular expression, but look great on paper, and vice versa.

EDIT: Recruiters are probably too stupid (usually) to be able to either administer or evaluate such tests and so will always be more interested in the "crisper" resume which belongs to some MBA doofus.

Going out to the field and collecting data (or producing a complex piece of software) is very expensive -- but it is a one shot cost relative to distributing the dataset (or downloading software), which is the thing that a person buys/ downloads.

And nobody just "unlocks a stadium".

The marginal cost to produce a nights worth of stadium use is nonzero -- staff, performers, and depreciation if nothing else. So the users should pay that.

The marginal cost to produce data (or software) is almost nil -- hence the price should go to nil as well. THe only reason for a society to force the cost to be non-zero via licensing is to incentivize the creation of the data, but the government is going to do that anyway, since they need the data to function.

(The marginal cost thing is why we need copyright and patents -- we need to impose non-market controls, because otherwise price and profit go to nothing and there is no incentive to create things which have marginal costs of nothing like sheet music and new molecular compounds. Yes, there is some irony whenever a capitalist argues for intellectual property -- save my market by non-market rules!)

Kingsley Davis spoke of a "multiphasic response" that each society does to keep its population balanced (it doesn't always work, but it does happen). Right now, Japan and Europe don't feel they are so close to crisis that they are willing to really do what is necessary to increase fertility -- lots of government support for mothers, lots of propaganda, negative sanctions against those people who don't have families. "Traditional" (high mortality high fertility -- "pre-transition" -- societies have always had these pushes in place). Right now there is a little bit of govt support and a little bit of propaganada. But they will when they feel like they are in a crisis (esp Japan -- you watch...), and it may or may not be too late.

Low fertility is a dynamic that nobody has had widespread experience with, so we don't really know what to expect. We also still have plenty of people on the planet, so a population decrease of 50% might actually be a good thing at the bigger scale.

I am surprised at Rand, if it is as simplistic a report as the comments say (sorry, not reading -- I live and breathe this stuff). Demographers should start doing scenario work, besides trend extrapolation, especially at a place that is crawling with military types like Rand.

A pile of servers and a special algorithm. Now that the algorithm is published, rather than yet-to-be-invented, it would be very possible. So "Dad's credit card and a few late nights reading papers".

A really well made utilitarian thing -- a ladle, a drill, a car -- gives me the joy of discovering its excellence and the design behind it. If I have a really good ladle, that works noticeably better than any other ladle I have ever had, then each time I pour soup, I get to contemplate the many flashes of brilliance and care that went into designing and making this ladle. As I pour soup and contemplate the design of the ladle, I become a better engineer myself even, pondering how the makers thought to curve the side just so, etc.

And that is EASILY worth $20.00 and 15 minutes looking at reviews.

I can tell you why... most movies suck. Not only do they suck, but they suck expensively because they rely on production values to compensate for the lack of plot, premise, and acting. As I understand it, Woody Allen is a solid money making enterprise because he makes good films with good actors and good scripts, and which cost an order of magnitude less to produce than crappy films based on car chases, laser guns, and heavy-handed soundtracks.

Why not use 3-d printers to make blanks for castings and molds, and maybe streamline building jigs? I don't know anything about the field, really, so there may be a simple and obvious answer, but I would be curious about it.

Hehe. SourceSafe is still the standard at the state govt I work for... high tech for, say, mid 1990s, which makes it downright fancy for us.

It is interesting -- in a conspiracy sort of way -- that we knee jerk assume that participating in local government is boring and tedious. It can actually be quite fun: makes me wonder about why we try to convince everyone it is boring... maybe so they don't pay attention? ...

Sorry about lecturing you about being foolish. I should have been lecturing you about being foolish and pedantic.

I should have said "work well" instead of "possible". Forgive me.

Said router is probably as much a product of DARPA and other government subsidized research as whatever organization produces the actual machine itself. (Anybody who thinks a pure economic system is possible, whether libertarian or socialist, is a naive fool.)

I can grok the book, but I can't read it like it's a vampire novel and remember anything useful... hence the reason to sign up and have something of a schedule to follow.

I have the book, and it is fantastically well written and easy to follow. I just signed up -- does anyone know if they send an email or something?

Making everyone get through 2 semesters of calculus and a real probability class would help both their well roundedness and employee-ability. The lack of numeracy and scientific background among otherwise well educated people is shameful.

I have been charged with maintaining 5000 LOC of J at work, so I use it weekly or so (5-10 hours ... as little as possible...), and I have spent at least a hundred hours or so with it before that.

And my somewhat informed opinion is that J sucks ass. To start with, input/ output suck and it's hard to read and maintain -- it is the least pragmatic language I know. But what I really hate about it is the community -- full of true believers who think it's a cosmic language and "mathematical", even though you can't prove theorems in J (that's what would make it mathematical, duh), who babble about how they can calculate pi to 1000 digits in only 4 characters, as if that is remotely useful or profound (neither)

All developed nations are either right at replacement rates (USA) or well below (Japan, former Soviet nations etc). The developing nations (Thailand, Brazil, etc) are approaching replacement quickly. That leaves Africa and the poorer parts of large heterogeneous nations like India.

Some of us demographers think that as we continue to develop, population growth rates will go to under replacement and then sort of bounce around replacement after that due to social reasons.