ralph

I think "vi foo" works just fine with vim-tiny. If it didn't, it would be vim-empty.

Mine too. You take a single sheet and fold it. No tape. No paperclips.

Don't think it is a dupe; it's the blog post that jeffbarr said he'd put up in response to a comment on that article you linked to that asked for the option to add a surcharge.

Using floats without need adds noise to the code, e.g. the ".0"s in foo = 0.0; bar += 1.0, and makes the reader wonder why floats are being used. "What am I missing?"

Sure, you can pick a job like that. But similarly, the voucher recipients could pick jobs that cripple the plumber financially.

Yes there is, depending on the type of job he's hired for with the vouchers, and whether the voucher covers parts as well.

Firefox 3 also doesn't clear what zoom setting you like for each site on Tools -> Clear Private Data. https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/288236

I don't get it. Is the $50 only against his labour charges? If the customer pays nothing for the parts too, then he can't subsidise the scheme for long enough to start being paid one the coupons run about by his, now loyal, customers.

Separate from the collective mind of Americans is the status of the US Dollar as a "reserve currency", i.e. one that people are happy to hold in times of trouble. If that goes then, given the USA is bankrupt, it'll be in trouble. It's only because it's a reserve currency that the USA can afford to chuck bills from helicopters; elsewhere, doing that has caused the currency to fall dramatically, e.g. that idiot Gordon Brown in the UK.

China holds quite a few dollars and is wary of the USA's plans on trying to spend its way out of this recession in case their value slumps. There's an argument that all these rescue plans are just prolonging the inevitable, just as the boom was stretched by Greenspan's actions making it a huge bust to mirror the huge boom. What's needed is a hard crash in asset prices, houses, stocks, commodities, etc., until buyers are convinced that a hard bottom has been found. Then they'll be interested in buying again. And companies going to the wall in that time is a good thing; it culls the weak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

There's still worried talk of deflation. I think they're over concerned. There's some things I must buy, even if they're a bit cheaper tomorrow, e.g. food, and if my TV breaks, I'll replace it. By over-compensating for fear of deflation, we're facing high double-digit inflation in a year or so.

Reminds me of that old matra: For deflation, hold cash. For inflation, hold gold. For hyper-inflation, hold guns.

That could have been put a little more politely. ;-)

Overall, I like it. Would be nice not to use Flash for multiple file upload though. Some folks just don't have it. Allow an alternative for one file at a time. Or unpack an uploaded .zip?

One where __ looks like two underscores and not a single line.

Here in Europe, we have Huf Haus, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huf_Haus

There's a Channel 4 programme called Grand Designs that featured a HH being built one week. Worth watching if you can find it somewhere.

"So does every PDF reader."

I don't think every PDF reader supports PostScript very well. Is that what you meant to say?

http://www.bytemark.co.uk/ Sterling's cheap at the moment! "Darling, why don't we sell up in the UK, move to France, and buy a croissant."

They've been doing virtual machines for years using User Mode Linux.

Have a look at pdftk, in an Ubuntu repository near you. It can do many things with PDF files.

Yes, I'd recommend Roundup. It has a good, easy, clean design.

Sophie Wilson, formerly Roger Wilson, designed the ARM's instruction set. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson

Also wrote the BBC BASIC ROMs used on Acorn computers in 6502, and later BBC BASIC V (five) in ARM. (ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine.) Being able to successfully run the 6502 BASIC ROM is considered a test of how good a 6502 emulator is; his 16KiB of machine code, generated from hand-written assembler, used every trick of the CPU to squeeze in the code. This meant that when the BBC Master 128 came along, with its slightly later 6502 deriative, he could re-write some of it to use the new op-codes, taking less space, and thereby getting in a few more BASIC commands.

It's a shame the CSP style of tackling parallel programming hasn't caught on more. The Bell Labs guys know how to do this, see their languages Alef and Limbo. Channels, message passing, etc. Also, a UK university used to have some nice slides about doing the same thing in Occam, including an O(1) "sort pump". They all inherit the concept from Hoare's CSP. Perhaps now some of them, rob, ken, etc., have moved to Google we'll see a resurgence with it.

I'll be more impressed when Gmail supports RFC'd headers like Resent-From and Resent-To. They were in RFC 822 (1982) and are still in RFC 2822 (2001). How can an email client be written that doesn't handle these basic headers? It suggests the RFCs weren't read.

Readability is improved by not having the else clause. It makes it clear that the return in the then-block is there and the code won't continue after the end-if.

It's interesting so far, but, my, isn't Jessica a pacer. I feel slightly nauseous, as if I'm watching a rolling horizon at sea. Thought I'd hit pause to put out the stabilisers and post. Hope you have hard floors at home, Jessica, and not carpets. Looking forward to listening to the rest of it. Think that's decision made over my Christmas reading.

Pedantically, Uncle Sid, not uncle Sid? Sid is my uncle, but to me, he's Uncle Sid. Or is that a Britishism?

Minor point: Consider the international audience and drop the "anyways"; it's slack.

Grow some self-controlling balls.

Alternatively, only read articles that look interesting in a once-every-24-hour RSS grab and don't otherwise visit the site. Works for me.

The right way to do concurrency for most applications is the CSP style. Look at Bell Labs' Limbo or Alef which have channels. And Stackless has picked up on this in some ways.

`my' is also an alternative, can make the code look less cluttered.

He explains when he talks about "heap". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_(data_structure)

You could trace the problems back beyond fractional reserve banking and say that axing the Gold Standard and having a fiat currency was the first con.

Certainly, if credit is too cheap, asset prices will rise as borrowers outbid one another to pay more. Greenspan has to shoulder a lot of the blame for the recent boom.

Here in the U.K., our great leader, Gordon Brown, proclaimed "an end to boom and bust" when he became chancellor in 1997. He was right. Instead we had boom-boom-boom lasting ten years and are now going to have a bust to mirror it.

Agreed. The pseudo-code had it in a more readable style. If it must be compressed onto one line then

    a = 0; b = (0, 0); c = float('infinity')

is preferable if a, b, and c are logically unrelated compared to

    a, b, c = 0, (0, 0), float('infinity')

especially as the list gets longer. Why should the reader first count to find where variable `foo' is on the left-hand side before then counting the same number of places on the right?