Recent submissions

Comment · 4 hours ago
With all the time and resources Google has put into their products, you can probably conclude that either a) they want it that way, or b) no one there wants it to be otherwise enough to take resources away from whatever they were doing, and put it into that.
Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Maybe watch the video. Artists have to eat, and they relied on patronage and commissions. The church and the nobles were the only ones with the free cash and the motivation to fund artists and their creations for much of the Christian age in Europe, regardless of their looks.

But also: something changed in the 16th century: do you contend that the monarchs suddenly got uglier to the point that artists didn't want to paint them anymore?

Comment · 4 years ago
Postponed to 1944, in 1943 it would have failed.
Comment · 4 years ago
Reading your comment made me feel like someone had been spying on me in my car. I go through this same thing in my Lexus every time I drive it as well. It is such a relief to know I am not the only one.
Comment · 6 years ago
I think SK's numbers are becoming more reliable by the day though. The new case rate has stabilised to a small number in the range of 50 to 150 per day and the active case count is dropping at a rate of over 200 per day. The daily death rate has been below 10 the whole time I believe. If that trend continues then SK's CFR will be well known soon and I would guess not dissimilar to current estimates. Though it's always possible a false sense of security will set in and people will relax their habits and send it higher again.

Compare to Germany: weeks behind SK but already more than three times as many cases, new case rate in the last few days of 2500-4500 (SK's max: 851), daily deaths in the last few days 10-29 and heading north. Actually the death rate must reflect an amazing health care system given 30k cases, but it's early days for Germany. Their pipeline is very full, agreed I wouldn't want to make a prediction there.

EDIT: sensitivity.

Comment · 7 years ago
s/Nullabor/Nullarbor/ (no trees).

The Nullarbor is a vast, arid, unpopulated plain over 1000km wide. I think the comment was meant to suggest that infrastructure projects like this are challenging in Australia, because the distances involved make them expensive, but the low population density makes them much less profitable than in places like the US and Europe with high population densities.

Many tourists from other parts of the world come to Australia thinking they can "just drive" from Melbourne to Cairns or Perth to Adelaide, not realizing how much of an undertaking that is because they don't have a good sense of the distances involved.

Comment · 7 years ago
I don't disagree with the general realpolitik you describe, but it's not clear that damaging Huawei isn't damaging the USA as well. American companies supply Huawei, and their business is being harmed; and American consumers buy Huawei equipment -- if Huawei is excluded from the US market then presumably that may have an inflationary impact on substitutes, so American consumers will be paying more for certain goods.

Wouldn't this also have been considered as part of the decision to ban Huawei? And yet the administration proceeded anyway.

Comment · 7 years ago
I agree.

Something that might be worth noting: two minutes of googling didn't turn up the author's age, but I recall seeing this photo on his website when I bought it some time after it was published in 2008: https://hcsw.org/contact.php

Here's a more up-to-date photo: https://hoytech.com/about

It's possible he was quite young when it was published. If that's the case, then I think the book is all the more a towering achievement. It's abrasive, and it smells a bit of 2000s forum fanboy discussions, but mature people should be able to read past the more opinionated parts and find the gems in the technical treatment.

Comment · 8 years ago
On your first point: I seem to remember plenty of companies that failed that were not telecom. In fact when I went looking just now I found a bunch of listicles about retail startups that failed.

The telecom bubble and crash was almost a side-effect. The telco executives saw the web taking off and used it to justify wildly over-inflated projections of traffic demand growth, and then began building out debt-financed networks to meet it. When the traffic didn't materialize (partly because the dotcom bubble burst), they had a bunch of overcapacity not generating revenue to service the debt that financed it, and that killed them.

Comment · 8 years ago
I was so hoping the guy's name would turn out to be Richard.
Comment · 8 years ago
Most residential customers don't have static IP addresses -- how does that work when a customer's IPv4 address changes?
Comment · 8 years ago
That's more a matter of experience and attitude -- even simple things like reference types are nice. Also, templates offer a lot of abstraction power that can be used to model the hardware nicely, without sacrificing efficiency.

Many embedded programmers come from a background that doesn't expose them to those sorts of ideas though.

Comment · 8 years ago
Nothing. I've worked on Cortex-M4 projects in C++. It's nice in many ways. The people working on the project had a much more diverse background than the typical EE who learned C as an undergrad mentioned in another thread.
Comment · 8 years ago
"Real engineering" also runs on a different (slower) cadence, in part due to the longer timescale between inception and realisation of ideas, and due to the costs involved in making physical things.

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