pedasmith

10 ms·

31.
by pedasmith 8y ago
Using source code control. Ever so many things become easier, and yet there are still teams that have never heard of it.
32.
by pedasmith 8y ago
If only my non-statistical peers would recognize that sampled=fast and fast=more checks and explorations. It's like they recognize that fast compile times are a great thing (I've had to wait in line with punchcards, and it sucks),
33.
by pedasmith 8y ago
I dipped my toe into the "online glasses" market -- and let me say it's a game-changer. The eyeglass store wanted about $300 per frame, meaning that I'd grudgingly get one pair. The online purchase was only $75 for high-
34.
by pedasmith 8y ago
Another ditto -- I now have one pair of regular glasses and four pairs of computer/reading glasses, all prescription (one for each computer I sit at!). The last 3 computer glasses cost $27 for all three. At those prices, I can triviall
35.
by pedasmith 8y ago
After reading his posts, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't much care to work with Norbert, either. Being a volunteer isn't free reign to be unpleasant and argumentative, and Debian, like any organization, is free to shut the door to
36.
by pedasmith 8y ago
I have to both agree and disagree here. I love the idea of a language that has the absolute fewest number of decisions between "I need a little program" and being able to share the program with a friend. The current trend where th
37.
by pedasmith 8y ago
Exactly. It's a perfectly reasonable concept with a completely outlandish syntax. I don't know of any current programming language where the RHS of an assignment will even know what the LHS is.
38.
by pedasmith 8y ago
New versions of BASIC are surprisingly common (heck, I even have one that's gotten some super-nice comments). Mind-blowing BASIC example from the 1970's: 100 A$="ABCDEF" 110 A$ = REP ("123", 4, 0)
39.
by pedasmith 8y ago
As long as we're arguing statistics with personal anecdotes: the dairy queen my younger kid worked at was about 80% teenager, with an attrition rate of wow!. The older kids' jobs at an upscale fast food is also easily 50%+ teenage
40.
by pedasmith 8y ago
OTOH: it's a high-profile company with exacting requirements for its pieces. If they can convert, companies that might have been on the fence ("it's too hard! our requirements are special! nobody else is doing it") might
41.
by pedasmith 8y ago
Maybe BCD because otherwise converting from binary to decimal is too painful? Lots of these were used in instrumentation with the classic 7-segment displays.
42.
by pedasmith 8y ago
Why one time? Why can't I get an "alternate" IDs from the IRS where the IRS knows the "real" number it's associated with, and provide the charity with that? Or heck, let me just tell the charity my email addres
43.
by pedasmith 8y ago
You might remember that Bush agreed to making a brand-new "Office of the President-Elect" just so that there could be a single plan of action.
44.
by pedasmith 8y ago
The title was disappointing: the researcher might well want to know why insurance companies don't ask about gun ownership, but if the companies answered, it's not the article. What the article does do is present a survey of what t
45.
by pedasmith 8y ago
Our vax cost $500,000. It's not something you just get more of :-)
46.
by pedasmith 8y ago
Twenty programmers on one vax and actually doing the simulations is CPU intensive. The VT240 is what our customers had (and they are expensive enough all by themselves; a single VT340 in 1991 was $3600.
47.
by pedasmith 8y ago
The advice i got from an observation for a big presentation was invaluable. I talk too fast and, somewhat weirdly, hardly move my jaw
48.
by pedasmith 8y ago
Where I worked (a digital electronics simulation company in the late 1980's), we said that PC's had "user interface MIPs" but not "CPU MIPs". A VAX 11/780 (size of a refrigerator) had more CPU power, but a
49.
by pedasmith 8y ago
A documented behavior which causes many security and crash issues is, almost be definition, effectively broken. Can you come up with an example of an API which you would consider to be effectively broken and yet is not actually broken? Pres
50.
by pedasmith 8y ago
And the link directly takes you to a "how to buy". There are multiple copies available. A bigger question is why we in the computer field let important histories of our profession go out of print so quickly.
51.
by pedasmith 8y ago
How about a different example entirely? Memory nowadays is either CPU (and the GPU can access it) or GPU (and the CPU has a window into it). It's terribly important to use the right one: if a chunk of memory is mostly used by the CPU,
52.
by pedasmith 8y ago
How about Σ Sigma notation for summation? It's often written with something like i=1 at the bottom and 1000 at the top to denote the summation from 1 to 1000. The Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
53.
by pedasmith 9y ago
I've owned a leaf for some time as the family second car. Except for long trips, it's the one car we always prefer. Any short drive will be done in the leaf (unless someone's already taken it). Its easily the best car I'
54.
by pedasmith 9y ago
I'm not surprised it's not the Air Force or NASA. As a civilian, there's no activity I undertake that any military person has any jurisdiction over at all (I suppose unless I go onto a military base). NASA, of course, is mor
55.
by pedasmith 9y ago
Thanks. My browser was acting up. Dups should be removed, and the one good comment saved.
56.
by pedasmith 9y ago
Project Gutenberg has a copy of the Victorian-era (The Municipal and Sanitary Engineer's Handbook)[ http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55935 ]. There's a good discussion on how to write a paving contract on about
57.
by pedasmith 9y ago
Or, the town engineer can simply add it in to the contracts. An example from the Project Gutenberg copy of [The Municipal and Sanitary Engineer's Handbook]( http://www.gutenberg.org/files/55935/55935-h/559
58.
by pedasmith 9y ago
Well, you can spend 5 months writing your software in C++, and a month fixing your bugs and doing a bit of optimization. Or you can spend 3 months writing C# or other modern language and have another 3 months to optimize, all the while enjo
59.
by pedasmith 9y ago
Indeed, I'm looking at my copy of "The C Program Language", second edition (ANSI C). Page 241: A text stream is a sequence of lines; each line has zero or more characters and is terminated by a \n. [\n was defined earlier as
60.
by pedasmith 9y ago
Because we're talking about how end-of-line is marked in a file, not in a terminal. DOS specifies the end-of-line in a file as CR/LF.

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