lylejohnson

I never wondered how much of my "unlimited" iPhone data plan I was using until AT&T introduced their tiered plans a year or so ago. When I at that time checked my usage history I was a little surprised to see that I was rarely using more than 200MB per month, so I actually dropped down to their $15/month plan and ended up saving some money.

Congrats to Fogus and Houser on their Jolt Finalist Award for The Joy of Clojure!

Someone else recommend the Khan Academy lectures [1], and I was thinking about using those.

[1] http://www.khanacademy.org/#linear-algebra

Not sure why you were down voted. This seems like it would be a legitimate concern to me if I were a "regular" Stanford student enrolled in (and paying for) this course.

Official registration hasn't opened yet, right? I haven't received any additional info since I initially submitted my name and email address a few weeks ago.

I appreciate the effort that you must have put into this, but it was a little depressing watching the last 41 years slowly count down as the screen faded to black!

I went with Moneydance (http://www.moneydance.com/) when I got fed up with the Quicken for Mac situation a few years back, and I've been mostly happy with the switch. It's a Java app, and as a result looks out of place amongst my mostly native apps, but it's pretty reliable and gets the job done.

From Wikipedia, in case this term was as unfamiliar to others as it was to me:

"In statistics, particularly in the design of sequential experiments, a multi-armed bandit takes its name from a traditional slot machine (one-armed bandit). Multiple levers are considered in the motivating applications in statistics. When pulled, each lever provides a reward drawn from a distribution associated with that specific lever. The objective of the gambler is to maximize the sum of rewards earned through a sequence of lever pulls.

In practice, multi-armed bandits have been used to model the problem of managing research projects in a large organization, like a science foundation or a pharmaceutical company. Given its fixed budget, the problem is to allocate resources among the competing projects, whose properties are only partially known now but may be better understood as time passes.

In the early versions of the multi-armed bandit problem, the gambler has no initial knowledge about the levers. The crucial tradeoff the gambler faces at each trial is between "exploitation" of the lever that has the highest expected payoff and "exploration" to get more information about the expected payoffs of the other levers."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit

According to Charity Navigator, "Save the Children" is a four-star charity, with about 90 percent of their budget going to program expenses. That seems pretty reasonable.

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...

I was trying to figure out how to navigate to the rest of the article, but then I realized that it's just those three paragraphs. I wish the author had developed this a bit more.

I was thinking much the same thing. If I ever find myself in the position of wanting to teach programming to a "mere mortal", I suspect I'd look to Chris Pine's Learn to Program, which I've always heard good things about.

http://pragprog.com/book/ltp2/learn-to-program

> The illiterate "I'm too cool for your TL;DR grammar-nazi wall-of-text" types have failed to prime they're Baysian neural networks by reading or doing homework, and generally have no idea their "doing it wrong".

I see what you did there.

I have noticed that I'm sometimes unable to connect to my VPN from, for example, the wireless network of a hotel I'm staying at. Has anyone else run into this issue and is there a straightforward workaround?

The other day there was some discussion about how some information on the Ruby home page is out of date or incomplete, so I guess this is a response to that. Well, good, you can't have too many "home" pages for a programming language. This should make things much less confusing for newcomers.

It's the same argument some people use when claiming Macs are more secure than Windows machines.

No, it's not (or shouldn't be) news to those of us who watched that part of the trial. But I bet there are a lot of people whose main information sources were cable TV talking heads who may have failed to point out this correction.

I'm pretty sure that dstone meant to write that Spotify was missing those bands (e.g. Arcade Fire et al), not Rdio. I've been listening to a good bit of Arcade Fire on Rdio lately, and just confirmed that they aren't available on Spotify.

I can tell you why I might give up Rdio for Spotify, depending on how this trial goes.

I have been a Rdio subscriber for about 3 months now, and I really only have two complaints. The first is that when I'm listening to Rdio at work (which is where I use the service most often) the stream tends to hang up and/or "stutter", to the point that I eventually get frustrated and turn it off. Now, we have pretty decent bandwidth at work, and other similar services (e.g. Pandora) don't seem to suffer from this problem, so I'm not sure what Rdio's problem is.

The other problem I've observed with Rdio is that a noticeable amount of time passes between the time I press "play" and the music actually starts. This one's not such a big problem, but it is a problem.

So, I've just signed up for a Spotify Unlimited plan and I'm going to see how it stacks up, especially with regards to the aforementioned problems. If it seems to perform more consistently than Rdio has, I'll probably switch.

It seems to me that if your employee doesn't want to make eye contact when answering this question, that you already have your answer.

If I were in your situation, I'd be speaking with my lawyer to get answers to those questions. Best of luck in getting paid!

A partial answer to your question, from the FAQ:

"What differs from other JavaScript Frameworks ?

Joshfire share the same will of easing Web Application development by introducing template engines, MVC coding style, magic UI binding to data and so on. However, until now, each framework had its own supported platforms: mobile webkit for some, recent desktop browsers for the others. Joshfire targets platforms ranging from IE6 to mobile devices, connected televisions and even headless devices."

I'm going out on a limb and guessing that kenjackson (grandparent post) was kidding about his new startup.

Forgot to say, also check out cschmidt's recommendation elsewhere in this thread for the Scott Adams adventure games. I played a bunch of those too, back in the day.

It's hard to go wrong with any of them, really. You should play through the original Zork trilogy. I really liked their mystery titles, especially "Deadline"; I seem to recall that you had a lot more interaction with the other characters in the game (i.e. the suspects). The "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" game was pretty good, too; even though I'd already read the books, some of the puzzles were tricky to figure out. I think I still have my "Don't Panic!" button that came in the box with that one.

I still remember bicycling over to the "L" building on Auburn's campus to play ADVENT and DND and DUNGEON on their PDP-11 (or whatever model of minicomputer it was at the time). Thanks to the OP for sharing this article. Now I have to will myself to do some actual work today instead of playing old IF games online.

I never could understand why people paid for IntelliJ licenses when Eclipse was available for free; and then I finally tried IntelliJ on my last project. Long story short, I'm now an IntelliJ user. The strong Maven support was a strong selling point, but really it's that strong built-in support you get for all of the libraries, frameworks and tools in the Java ecosystem.

So what word do we think he meant to go there? Partitioning?

For those of us who'd like to add this to our Squrl queues to watch later, the video is here:

http://www.vimeo.com/8057986

and the slide deck is here:

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dcbpz3ck_24f3v83ggz&...

In the next installment, the author will relate anecdotes about the times he repeatedly dropped by his doctor's office without an appointment and they couldn't see him.