gonewest

Just last week, some of us were reminiscing in Slack about reading mail and Usenet via emacs. It’s amusing and a little unsettling to find the emacs/vi debate has been abandoned because you’ve gotten to the age where your colleagues have never experienced either... :)

Sounds a little more like someone "threw a cinder block through a window" and then climbed in, wandered around the office until they found the records room, found a way to pry the locks open on the filing cabinets, and then stayed there for a few months to pass files out the window one at a time.

But nobody noticed the broken glass, no one saw any evidence that the records rooms were opened when they shouldn't have been, and nobody saw the hundred million files headed out the window?

I understand this could have happened to anyone, but I don't expect the sec ops at a credit reporting agency to be average.

Within the city limits alone, Houston population is 2.3 million people at a density of 3830 people per square mile. NYC is 8.5 million people at a density of 28356 people per square mile (ref [1]).

MTA New York City transit has an operating budget of $10.9 billion, annual ridership 2.4 billion rides, 6407 subway cars, 4451 buses (ref [2], second chart only, although technically I believe one could include other infrastructure).

NYC claims to achieve "four out of five" rush hour commuters on public transit (ref [2], 4th paragraph from the top).

So let me hand wave and suggest the annual cost for equivalent success in Houston can be calculated by scaling NYC costs based on population difference (ratio of overall trips) and density difference (ratio of infrastructure needed for dense enough coverage of routes and stops). I fully expect some debate whether this model is really appropriate but it's what I came up with on a single cup of coffee.

Which means annual cost for Houston transit just within the city limits would be:

C = $10.9 bn * (2.3 / 8.5 millions of people) * (28356 / 3830 people per sq mi)

C = $21.8 bn per year

That's 2x the cost of the NYC system supporting about 1/4 of the population, or roughly 8 times the cost per capita. Per capita cost for Houston residents is $21.8 bn / 2.3 million = $9,478. Impossible for a minimum wage worker.

I'm excluding the cost of establishing the infrastructure in the first place. There would need to be large bond measures to raise the cash to build out the stops, install rails, buy the buses and subway cars, and so forth. Paying back interest on those bonds would be an additional per capita cost whether levied as tax on individuals, on the fares, or on businesses.

Note I ignored the wider metro areas in both cities for the same reasons as given in ref [1]. Presumably the least dense and therefore most problematic costs occur in the outlying regions and are not captured here.

[1] http://www.newgeography.com/content/005538-visualizing-houst...

[2] http://web.mta.info/mta/network.htm

Well, for instance, for roughly a year on my Macbook (2014 Retina 13"). It gets in a state where the keyboard and trackpad are unresponsive but the laptop is clearly still running. USB devices are probably hosed too, because attaching an external keyboard at this point doesn't help either. Started with El Capitan, continues with Sierra, and Apple support finds all hardware diagnostics are okay. My only recourse is to power cycle the laptop.

Another example, once or twice a week when waking up from sleep the wifi adapter doesn't reattach, and hovering over the wifi status in the menu bar yields a beach ball. My only recourse is to power cycle the laptop.

About a year ago my Plantronics bluetooth headset stopped reliably pairing, or rather it does pair, but the audio quality is so horrible I gave up and went back to wired earbuds.

So yes, far from perfect. I would say the product team has been distracted with convenience frills like Handoff, AirDrop, auto-unlock via Apple Watch, and so on, when what I would prefer is reliable sleep/wake and i/o devices that work every time.

Nonetheless, this is still leaps and bounds ahead of the Windows 7 laptop the corporate office insists I use. And it's a reputable brand and everything, and not a fluke (they've swapped out the laptop multiple times but every one has some fatal flaw.)

So far 3 out of 3 reader comments at the bottom of that article somehow interpret the root cause as being the Navy's focus on diversity goals? Seriously?

I don't have much to add to @Spivak's comprehensive response, except this one thing:

IF we agree backend services should be freely developed in multiple languages with multiple frameworks or "middleware" as the needs of the problem dictate, THEN we pay for that flexibility through the total effort required to deploy, secure, operate, enhance and maintain the overall system.

Engineering teams need to weigh the benefits vs the costs in that tradeoff. The good news is that the current wave of tooling is converging in a place where the so-called "system administrator" can express platform constraints in configuration or code that is visible to development, and likewise the developers can express the software requirements in configuration and code that is visible to ops. That transparency means (in principle, albeit imperfectly in practice) that conflicting needs surface more quickly and the team has access to the complete picture; therefore possible for the full team to learn from that view.

In every startup I've run, the necessity to build and deliver quickly leads to a pragmatic choice of a subset of languages and frameworks. Narrowing assumptions allow the team to concentrate on optimizations (of staffing, of code, of process, of tooling) that tend to accelerate things overall.

Is "pragmatic choice" a euphemism for "too many layers of intermediary getting in the way of progress"? I don't believe so. Any artist will be familiar with the necessity of constraints, e.g. "The enemy of art is the absence of limitation" (Orson Welles), "Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom" (da Vinci), "Man built most nobly when limitations were at their greatest" (Frank Lloyd Wright).

I would submit - don't fight this tension as if it's an evil that needs to go away, but rather accept it as a necessary and even desirable limitation that you can use to your advantage.

Because no one looks at an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi and says, "I would pay top dollar for a version of this thing that has x86 instructions."

That hasn't been my experience -- the same physical devices work for a while and then fail usually after an OS update.

My iphone6 paired inconsistently with my car until iOS 10.2 then it failed completely. Then the dealer did a routine maintenance and it started pairing again. Until 10.3, and now it's hit and miss.

Plantronics headset used to be my foolproof solution for Google Hangout and Bluejeans meetings. Now it won't pair successfully with the MacBook at all. Nor with the iPhone 6.

It's the "moving target" aspect that is most infuriating for me.

In the source he says its command-click:

* - see if we can do anything to one-button-ise the multi-button * dependent puzzle UIs: * - Pattern is a _little_ unwieldy but not too bad (since * generally you never need the middle button unless you've * made a mistake, so it's just click versus command-click).

The irony on the "high quality code contributions" being that this partnership between Intel and Rackspace was supposed to be a substantial testbed for software development, and a sort of residence program for corporate developers to come up to speed on the code base.

Peter Shirley's "Raytracing in One Weekend" e-books are a nice resource for people who want to do this themselves from scratch.

I would add to that MIT taught me how to learn new topics very quickly without much handholding at all. That's the skill that makes one not so prone to obsess on one framework versus the other, because if necessary you can learn both.

Back in the day (perhaps still the case today?) there was not a single "learn to code" in some specific language anywhere in MIT's EECS department. There was Sussman's SICP class which taught scheme more or less in the first week. Barbara Liskov's class taught her research language named CLU more or less the same way. As a short diversion before getting to the meat of the course.

Totally agree. With GDrive you can share a folder with a group of collaborators and anyone can modify or add to the files therein.

Seems to me Intel is placing their bet on the compiler doing the lion's share of the work here -- and where hand optimization is needed, another bet that having a consistent instruction set across their big Xeon cores and these MIC devices will make things easier for developers?

Anybody know what's going on with the "HAL Project" screensaver? Looks cool but the site is down.

You could say Ruby, Python, Perl, C, Java, etc are really ALGOL-like languages whose data structures are generally mutable, and whose syntax is made for expressing how the state of the program is mutated in-place.

Whereas LISP-like languages have data structures that are generally immutable, and whose functional orientation results in expressing the computation of new data from old (mostly) without mutating in-place.

The thing about imperative programming languages is that the paradigm matches up to the mental model of "a computer" that most programmers would recognize and find comfortable. Without having any concrete evidence, I have a hunch that this paradigm difference is what deters new developers the most. And stacked on top of that you have the non-ALGOL syntax and the lack of libraries.

In my opinion, anyway.

Except, computer science is the study of algorithms, computation, and the design of computational systems.

Software development methodology is something else. Call it process engineering or workflow, and yes, it calls for measurable performance if one wants to improve performance. But it also should not apologize for having less concrete elements of sociology thrown in, because that's just the fact of it. Engineering is done in groups.

I'm not sure I'm following you, but in short I'm not trying to attack this piece of software. All I'm saying is that I have a particular point of view and it appears based on the description that this tool isn't the one for me.

Of the many password vault tools out there I still prefer ones that store the data locally, secure with published and and peer-reviewed crypto, sync directly across devices without uploading to a service. I just don't need the hassle of discovering belatedly that an online service has leaked any data. Especially if they are inclined to say it was by design.

I don't see the male stereotype as being all that great. In practice you have men declaring as fact things that are easily debatable. The inevitable response comes back as a challenge, an argument of semantics ensues, and at the end of the day you reach a mutual détente where nobody has lost face, but nobody is wiser for the argument either. The original point obliterated by the posture.

Whereas if the discussion had been framed as "Listen, I have a very strong opinion on this one but I respect that you may disagree, and I want to understand why," then presumably you reach an understanding and possible both parties emerge the wiser.

For convenience I ended up with two aliases: "dm" for "docker-machine", and "dmenv" for "eval $(docker-machine env dev)".

But before all that, I simply downloaded and used the docker toolbox installer for OS X. I opted to skip the Kitemaric install because why? Otherwise it did the right thing with existing virtualbox install, found and imported my existing boot2docker vmdk, etc.

Is the following information still relevant?

Basically it suggests a flashable device must be classified a "SDR", but FCC jurisdiction does not extend to independent software developers.

https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/fcc-sdr-white...

Phooey. The linked article that was supposed to substantiate minimum wage as a reason for so many closures explicitly says:

"Though none of our local departing/transitioning restaurateurs who announced their plans last month have mentioned [$15 minimum wage] as an issue", the wage increase is a factor to watch in the future.

I guess it doesn't matter that git itself was created for Linux kernel development. Oh well.

Not only that, but in my case frequent kernel patches have been triggering this bug over and over for months:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-dr...

To the point that I hesitate to update the kernel promptly because I don't want to spend the additional 5 minutes to reinstall the nvidia driver and doublecheck that everything is working.

That's a good answer. Here's one more example from the visual effects industry. This is for parallel evaluation of potentially complex dependency graphs in an interactive character engine.

http://www.multithreadingandvfx.org/course_notes/Paralleleva...

Not even Chomsky's interview can avoid being juxtaposed with the utter nonsense "sponsored by Taboola" links below it.

I read this article as

"STEM education to the exclusion of other liberal arts"

versus

"STEM in balance with liberal arts"

and I tend to agree the latter is more preferable for the overall well being of a society.

I think it's fair game to point a finger at Microsoft for this, they can't claim lack of involvement or interest in their device ecosystem. They could be putting all vendor drivers in the Windows Update repository, insisting that the drivers themselves be separate from any optional or value-add tools, cracking down on straight up advertising ploys such as installing URL links to websites on the desktop, etc.

More interesting question is why the JavaScript curve is decaying at the same rate as Perl (add it to the graph and see).