My dad (65yo) has a Pebble, and is pleased as punch with it. He uses it with an iPhone, but they supposedly work with Android, which would include all the (2) devices Samsung's Gear watch works with. So perhaps that's a better alternative for folks looking for a smartwatch.
And for those making the "look like a dork" cracks, he's a very succesfful lawyer and takes great care with his professional appearance. He did change the band out for a decortive one that looks much better in the circles he hangs out in. You can do that with a Pebble because it uses a standard watch band. The Gear?...nope.
I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this style can be captured by the phrase ``the right thing.'' To such a designer it is important to get all of the following characteristics right:
Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation.
Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. Incorrectness is simply not allowed.
Consistency-the design must not be inconsistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.
Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases must be covered. Simplicity is not allowed to overly reduce completeness.
I believe most people would agree that these are good characteristics. I will call the use of this philosophy of design the ``MIT approach.'' Common Lisp (with CLOS) and Scheme represent the MIT approach to design and implementation.
The worse-is-better philosophy is only slightly different:
Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design.
Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct.
Consistency-the design must not be overly inconsistent. Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either implementational complexity or inconsistency.
Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered. Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In fact, completeness must sacrificed whenever implementation simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is consistency of interface.
Early Unix and C are examples of the use of this school of design, and I will call the use of this design strategy the ``New Jersey approach.'' I have intentionally caricatured the worse-is-better philosophy to convince you that it is obviously a bad philosophy and that the New Jersey approach is a bad approach.
However, I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach.
Let me start out by retelling a story that shows that the MIT/New-Jersey distinction is valid and that proponents of each philosophy actually believe their philosophy is better.
Two famous people, one from MIT and another from Berkeley (but working on Unix) once met to discuss operating system issues. The person from MIT was knowledgeable about ITS (the MIT AI Lab operating system) and had been reading the Unix sources. He was interested in how Unix solved the PC loser-ing problem. The PC loser-ing problem occurs when a user program invokes a system routine to perform a lengthy operation that might have significant state, such as IO buffers. If an interrupt occurs during the operation, the state of the user program must be saved. Because the invocation of the system routine is usually a single instruction, the PC of the user program does not adequately capture the state of the process. The system routine must either back out or press forward. The r
Of course part of the continual mutual spying is that whenever one country screws up and gets caught spying on an ally, the government of the "victim" has to feign outrage. Public opinion demands it, and a politician either rides the wave, or gets smashed against the rocks by it.
So there's really no point in trying to point out that "everyone does it" to people expressing outrage about spying. Just let the kibuki theater proceed at its own pace. Its nature's way.
Umm, that's just talking about clubs (they called them lodges, but same thing) providing medical coverage. They still do that. Nothing's changed there. For example, I can get access to medical coverage by joining the ACM.
However, by the very defintion of a club, some people are not allowed in. If your "solution" leaves some folks out (sick) in the cold, I'm not all that interested.
He could use his power as commander-in-chief to open the cages and close Gitmo tomorrow
Actually, you're absolutely right about that. However, because of the laws Congress foisted on him, "opening the cages" is the entire limit of what he'd be able to do. He can't legally release them here in the USA, and to get them anywhere else out of Guantanamo would require another country to take them. He's spent the last 5 years begging other countries to do just that, with limited luck.
This problem is now entirely on Congress. If you want this embarassement to end, that's where change has to happen.
Actually, talking on the phone in a train where other passengers are forced to listen to your yammering rude. Overhearing such a conversation is meerly being a victim of a rude person.
On the other hand, the guy who posted this conversation should consider himself lucky. Most of Hayden's other victims got off a lot worse than meerly having to listen to a self-righteous evil asshole for half an hour.
I'm kinda missing your point here. Yeah, torture, extra-judicial killings, and extra-judicial kidnappings are all horrible, evil things. But guess what? Hayden and his buddies were in favor of all that evil stuff. Ideally the USA (heck, the whole world) wouldn't engage in any of them, but even getting rid of just one of them is a huge improvement over the Bush years.
We'd get rid of the indefinite detentions too, if the Congress would let us. Any time the current administration has tried to close Guantanimo, the Republicans make a huge political stink about it. Their excuse is that it is somehow is unsafe to keep dangerous prisoners on precious US soil. Their real reason is that they aren't comfortable with the evil done in our name during the Bush years being clearly exposed as such to US voters. Its a fig leaf.
Most of us really ought to wear a helmet. It makes sense for Rahm Emmanuel to ride without one, because there's nothing worth saving in his head anyway.
I used to commute by bike (only nearly died twice!), so I naturally started paying attention to such things.
Based mostly on fatalty rates, Orlando is typically rated the most unsafe city in the US for cyclists. When I started riding, I happened to be living there. This is actually no coincidence. The city has an ordinance requiring all new road construction to provide bike lanes. Biking to work was just not practical when I lived in the NE. When I moved to Oklahoma, I quit after a couple of years because it was just beyond unsafe (two lane roads with no shoulder and drainage ditches on the side. No bike lanes anywhere. Incensed drivers who honestly believe it is illegal for you to be on the road on a bike, etc.). So everybody who bikes here in Tulsa does it on special dedicated bike paths that cars can't get to, and they do it for recreation/exercise only. Nobody commutes on a bike.
The point is, the city I've been in that does the most to enable bike commuting is Orlando. People take them up on it too. Seeing a bicyclist there is nowhere near as uncommon as in a typical US city. So what does this extra ridership buy them? Why, it gives them a huge fatality rate, and a label as the most unsafe city in the US for cyclists.
So, more cyclists results in higher fatalaty rate. You do the math.
This must more of that "free market" behavior we keep hearing about.
Except it not. In fact the absolute last thing broadband internet / cable companies want is a free market. In a free market, nobody would offer "caps" on their service, because they'd lose all their customers to competitors. This is an idea that could not even be pictured in a real free market.
So here's an idea. Tell broadband providers that we will totally deregulate their billing practices: they can bill however they damn well please, in any market that has three or more viable broadband competitors. They can have a "free market" on the day their customers can have one too.
What nobody is mentioning here is that the reason Iceland defaulted was that back during the bubble, they somehow convinced themselves that the inflating prices for securities their banks were raking in was evidence not of an unhealthy bubble that should be watched, but rather that Icealndic men were naturally superior financeers due to their long heritage of commercial fishing. I shit you not. It sounds crazy now, but frankly its hardly much crazier than some of the other hubris that was floating around in financial circles right before the bubble burst.
When it did, these Icelandic "natural banking geniues" suddenly found themselves on the hook for way more money that their entire tiny economy could ever hope to pay off. Defaulting was really the only choice.
The reason I didn't mention their healthcare system anywhere above is quite simple: Healthcare had nothing to do with it. Anyone who tries to bring that up frankly is trying to trick you. Make note of their name so that you know never to listen to them again.
This is in fact the Right Answer. Scientific Computing folks have started to cast about for Fortran alternatives in the last few years, and most of the talk I have heard has centered on R. So I'd go with a newer Fortran compiler (for God's sake, not 77 or earlier) and/or R.
This is most definitely a field where you want to follow the herd, unless you happen to have an interest in esoteric CS things like code optimization, cross language binding generation, and mathematics library debugging, to go along with your interest in Scientific Computing. If you strike out on your own, that's the kind of stuff that will be consuming your time.
Congratulations! You have correctly absorbed the media's message on this fiasco:
Government shutdown
Democrats in Senate and Democrat President refuse to negotiate
OK. As someone who seems to honestly believe this story, perhaps you can answer a question for me. In a real negotiation, both sides agree to something they may not like much, in order to get something they do like. We know what Democrats compromised on: the CR they voted for is more austere than even Ryan's widely derided bugdet, but they just held their noses and voted for it to get the government running again. So what exactly were Republicans willing to compromise on? All I ever heard out of them were ideas for more Democratic compromises, on top of the huge compromises they already made. So what were the Republicans offering to "negotiate"?
Babbage wrote the first programs for his engine, which is a point even Lovelace's defenders acknowledge
Go back and read that link you provided again. It doesn't say what you think it says. The first half of the above sentence is a debatable opinion at best, and the second half is just flat out not true.
The one fact in there is that all the "programs" that were published were published under her name. Where there is dispute is that there are some folks who speculate that Babbage actually wrote all the algorithms and handed them to her to publish, and some other folks who say the first folks are full of shit.
I find this whole argument uncomfortablly reminiscent of the guys who use to show up at Heart concerts in the 70's and ask Nancy Wilson where they hid the guy who played lead guitar while she stood on stage pretending to play.
Slashdot Mirror
My dad (65yo) has a Pebble, and is pleased as punch with it. He uses it with an iPhone, but they supposedly work with Android, which would include all the (2) devices Samsung's Gear watch works with. So perhaps that's a better alternative for folks looking for a smartwatch.
And for those making the "look like a dork" cracks, he's a very succesfful lawyer and takes great care with his professional appearance. He did change the band out for a decortive one that looks much better in the circles he hangs out in. You can do that with a Pebble because it uses a standard watch band. The Gear?...nope.
I would venture to say newspapers like the Telegraph are for exceptionally dull weirdos. Everyone else uses twitter & the web.
I disagree, Telegraph readers aren't nearly interesting enough to qualify as "weirdos".
In fact, perhaps it is time to repost this on Slashdot for today's fresh audience of developers, lest our classics be forgotten:
The Rise of Worse is Better
I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this style can be captured by the phrase ``the right thing.'' To such a designer it is important to get all of the following characteristics right:
I believe most people would agree that these are good characteristics. I will call the use of this philosophy of design the ``MIT approach.'' Common Lisp (with CLOS) and Scheme represent the MIT approach to design and implementation.
The worse-is-better philosophy is only slightly different:
Early Unix and C are examples of the use of this school of design, and I will call the use of this design strategy the ``New Jersey approach.'' I have intentionally caricatured the worse-is-better philosophy to convince you that it is obviously a bad philosophy and that the New Jersey approach is a bad approach.
However, I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach.
Let me start out by retelling a story that shows that the MIT/New-Jersey distinction is valid and that proponents of each philosophy actually believe their philosophy is better.
Two famous people, one from MIT and another from Berkeley (but working on Unix) once met to discuss operating system issues. The person from MIT was knowledgeable about ITS (the MIT AI Lab operating system) and had been reading the Unix sources. He was interested in how Unix solved the PC loser-ing problem. The PC loser-ing problem occurs when a user program invokes a system routine to perform a lengthy operation that might have significant state, such as IO buffers. If an interrupt occurs during the operation, the state of the user program must be saved. Because the invocation of the system routine is usually a single instruction, the PC of the user program does not adequately capture the state of the process. The system routine must either back out or press forward. The r
This is actually a basic principle of what we today call iterative design, and back in days of yore called Worse is Better. Its not a new concept.
weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear
There's your answer right there.
This is exactly right.
Of course part of the continual mutual spying is that whenever one country screws up and gets caught spying on an ally, the government of the "victim" has to feign outrage. Public opinion demands it, and a politician either rides the wave, or gets smashed against the rocks by it.
So there's really no point in trying to point out that "everyone does it" to people expressing outrage about spying. Just let the kibuki theater proceed at its own pace. Its nature's way.
Umm, that's just talking about clubs (they called them lodges, but same thing) providing medical coverage. They still do that. Nothing's changed there. For example, I can get access to medical coverage by joining the ACM.
However, by the very defintion of a club, some people are not allowed in. If your "solution" leaves some folks out (sick) in the cold, I'm not all that interested.
Anywhere from 30 to 70% of large IT projects fail, depending on who you ask. Why would the US Government be immune?
He could use his power as commander-in-chief to open the cages and close Gitmo tomorrow
Actually, you're absolutely right about that. However, because of the laws Congress foisted on him, "opening the cages" is the entire limit of what he'd be able to do. He can't legally release them here in the USA, and to get them anywhere else out of Guantanamo would require another country to take them. He's spent the last 5 years begging other countries to do just that, with limited luck.
This problem is now entirely on Congress. If you want this embarassement to end, that's where change has to happen.
Actually, talking on the phone in a train where other passengers are forced to listen to your yammering rude. Overhearing such a conversation is meerly being a victim of a rude person.
On the other hand, the guy who posted this conversation should consider himself lucky. Most of Hayden's other victims got off a lot worse than meerly having to listen to a self-righteous evil asshole for half an hour.
I'm kinda missing your point here. Yeah, torture, extra-judicial killings, and extra-judicial kidnappings are all horrible, evil things. But guess what? Hayden and his buddies were in favor of all that evil stuff. Ideally the USA (heck, the whole world) wouldn't engage in any of them, but even getting rid of just one of them is a huge improvement over the Bush years.
We'd get rid of the indefinite detentions too, if the Congress would let us. Any time the current administration has tried to close Guantanimo, the Republicans make a huge political stink about it. Their excuse is that it is somehow is unsafe to keep dangerous prisoners on precious US soil. Their real reason is that they aren't comfortable with the evil done in our name during the Bush years being clearly exposed as such to US voters. Its a fig leaf.
Most of us really ought to wear a helmet. It makes sense for Rahm Emmanuel to ride without one, because there's nothing worth saving in his head anyway.
I used to commute by bike (only nearly died twice!), so I naturally started paying attention to such things.
Based mostly on fatalty rates, Orlando is typically rated the most unsafe city in the US for cyclists. When I started riding, I happened to be living there. This is actually no coincidence. The city has an ordinance requiring all new road construction to provide bike lanes. Biking to work was just not practical when I lived in the NE. When I moved to Oklahoma, I quit after a couple of years because it was just beyond unsafe (two lane roads with no shoulder and drainage ditches on the side. No bike lanes anywhere. Incensed drivers who honestly believe it is illegal for you to be on the road on a bike, etc.). So everybody who bikes here in Tulsa does it on special dedicated bike paths that cars can't get to, and they do it for recreation/exercise only. Nobody commutes on a bike.
The point is, the city I've been in that does the most to enable bike commuting is Orlando. People take them up on it too. Seeing a bicyclist there is nowhere near as uncommon as in a typical US city. So what does this extra ridership buy them? Why, it gives them a huge fatality rate, and a label as the most unsafe city in the US for cyclists.
So, more cyclists results in higher fatalaty rate. You do the math.
This must more of that "free market" behavior we keep hearing about.
Except it not. In fact the absolute last thing broadband internet / cable companies want is a free market. In a free market, nobody would offer "caps" on their service, because they'd lose all their customers to competitors. This is an idea that could not even be pictured in a real free market.
So here's an idea. Tell broadband providers that we will totally deregulate their billing practices: they can bill however they damn well please, in any market that has three or more viable broadband competitors. They can have a "free market" on the day their customers can have one too.
Or better yet, they can bill however they want in any market that has three or more feasable broadband suppliers.
That'll bring out the crickets.
Perhaps your municipality just sucks.
Well, a municipality is only as good as its voters.
What nobody is mentioning here is that the reason Iceland defaulted was that back during the bubble, they somehow convinced themselves that the inflating prices for securities their banks were raking in was evidence not of an unhealthy bubble that should be watched, but rather that Icealndic men were naturally superior financeers due to their long heritage of commercial fishing. I shit you not. It sounds crazy now, but frankly its hardly much crazier than some of the other hubris that was floating around in financial circles right before the bubble burst.
When it did, these Icelandic "natural banking geniues" suddenly found themselves on the hook for way more money that their entire tiny economy could ever hope to pay off. Defaulting was really the only choice.
The reason I didn't mention their healthcare system anywhere above is quite simple: Healthcare had nothing to do with it. Anyone who tries to bring that up frankly is trying to trick you. Make note of their name so that you know never to listen to them again.
The Tea Party almost undermined the US dollar and any idiot who thinks that is a good idea needs to jump in front of a train.
Don't worry. That train will stop at the last minute and negotiate with you. Ted Cruz says so.
Dang, I had mod points this morning, but not now.
This is in fact the Right Answer. Scientific Computing folks have started to cast about for Fortran alternatives in the last few years, and most of the talk I have heard has centered on R. So I'd go with a newer Fortran compiler (for God's sake, not 77 or earlier) and/or R.
This is most definitely a field where you want to follow the herd, unless you happen to have an interest in esoteric CS things like code optimization, cross language binding generation, and mathematics library debugging, to go along with your interest in Scientific Computing. If you strike out on your own, that's the kind of stuff that will be consuming your time.
Congratulations! You have correctly absorbed the media's message on this fiasco: Government shutdown Democrats in Senate and Democrat President refuse to negotiate
OK. As someone who seems to honestly believe this story, perhaps you can answer a question for me. In a real negotiation, both sides agree to something they may not like much, in order to get something they do like. We know what Democrats compromised on: the CR they voted for is more austere than even Ryan's widely derided bugdet, but they just held their noses and voted for it to get the government running again. So what exactly were Republicans willing to compromise on? All I ever heard out of them were ideas for more Democratic compromises, on top of the huge compromises they already made. So what were the Republicans offering to "negotiate"?
Babbage wrote the first programs for his engine, which is a point even Lovelace's defenders acknowledge
Go back and read that link you provided again. It doesn't say what you think it says. The first half of the above sentence is a debatable opinion at best, and the second half is just flat out not true.
The one fact in there is that all the "programs" that were published were published under her name. Where there is dispute is that there are some folks who speculate that Babbage actually wrote all the algorithms and handed them to her to publish, and some other folks who say the first folks are full of shit.
I find this whole argument uncomfortablly reminiscent of the guys who use to show up at Heart concerts in the 70's and ask Nancy Wilson where they hid the guy who played lead guitar while she stood on stage pretending to play.
"The first 90% of the work takes the first 90% of the time; the last 10% of the work takes the second 90% of the time".
Right. And they still have 20% to go to hit that first 90%. Think on that one for a minute.
There's an old saying in software that the first 90% takes 90% of the time to develop, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time.
So if they are saying they are at 70% rather than 90%, then yeah, it looks like it will be quite a while.
I'm in IT myself, and I know how difficult it is to come up with good test-data for your testing...so what's better than production data?
...and fortunately for them, in Azerbaijan the "production data" for votes are available far in advance of election day, for easy testing.
He also did it using entirely British foul language. Color me confused.