maercsrats

Joined 17 years ago

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Member since

Dec 23

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Fuck'em. It was a dick move given all the opportunities he got in this country. I prefer rich people more like this: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/30/stephen-kin...

Comment · 14 years ago

In reference to your first paragraph, that's all your opinion. You are completely entitled to it and I respect it. My opinion is that this looks awesome and I really want to try it out. Especially since I know Ruby (and C) but I don't know any Obj-C.

As for your second paragraph, you can say that about any '-ists'. I've met java, python and .Net people who all love their respective languages and just want to code in that. To me, Rubyists aren't better or worse in that respect.

Comment · 14 years ago

Lies, damn lies and stats. "Apple sold 44% less iPhones last quarter" is technically correct. But last quarter saw around a 150% increase in sales because of pent up demand and the holiday quarter. If you compare this quarter from one a year ago you'll see that sales are actually up. http://www.macrumors.com/2012/04/24/iphone-activations-drop-...

Also, I call bullshit on the "razor thin margins" that carriers are making. They make plenty over the lifetime of the device contracts. Also, ask Sprint if it would like to get rid of it's iPhone deal. They are getting plenty of new subscribers thanks to the iPhone and are banking on making up their initial loss over time on their new contracts. http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/analyst-who-downg...

The problem comes in on their aggressive upgrade policies. In fact, I believe Verizon just added a $30 fee for upgrades on 2 year contracts.

Apple's stock is down because the market is full of idiots. Analysts have bet against Apple for years and every quarter Apple has come up on top. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that this quarter won't be any different and overall sales will be through the roof.

Comment · 14 years ago

If you think it's that possible then why not contact your congress person/senator and have them look into this? In fact, talk to them about drafting a law against not being able to install software of your choosing on a machine you buy. Or, at the very least, a law for being able to take your data with you when you decide to leave a platform. This wouldn't help China, Iran, Syria, etc. but it would at least give US citizens some protections.

Personally, I'm not very afraid of option 3 ever going away but I also am ready with a FreeBSD VM instance.

Comment · 15 years ago

I just moved to IN so I need to double check the school system here but I do know about the TN system. My knowledge will vary county to county but in general I think this is true. I also made a comment above but will reprint some of it here.

I'm sorry but, what the hell are you talking about? Many schools require students to have laptops in high school now. Teachers are constantly being told that then need to use more and more technology in their classrooms to better engage their students. If there aren't students who can afford machines then they are given one in class.

My mom is a 7th grade reading/writing teacher in a small (around 18K in the county) west-TN town. Her little school has an ipad cart. Every student does their writing (typing really) on an ipad. Both kids and teachers love it. The news today will probably thrill all of them.

Comment · 15 years ago

I'm probably going to get downvoted for this but I'll say it anyway: there isn't a tablet market, there is only an ipad market. Apple want to make it easier to make books for ipads because: 1. that's what they sell and 2. that's what people are buying.

A quick aside, my mom is a 7th grade reading/writing teacher in a small (around 18K in the county) west-TN town. Her little school has an ipad cart. Every student does their writing (typing really) on an ipad. Both kids and teachers love it. The news today will probably thrill all of them.

Comment · 15 years ago

I think part of the problem is that rails isn't really RESTful. Here is a good talk about it: http://confreaks.net/videos/699-rubyconf2011-resources-for-r...

Dropping the rails router, controllers and rack in favor of something like webmachine and resources could potentially speed up rails and reduce the conceptual complexity as well as the stack depth.

Comment · 15 years ago

bikeshed.js?

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

-- Phil Karlton

Comment · 15 years ago

I like child labor laws. I like food safety laws (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle). I like my bank being separate from investment institutions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Act). I also like education programs, fire departments, police, roads, etc. I pay a lot in taxes and want to keep all of these things (and really have stricter regulations in the banking system).

Our market isn't free enough, that's true, but having a totally free market tends to crush the lower class. A completely free market, after all, is like a force of nature and nature doesn't give a shit about people. I do give a shit about people and am happy to pay taxes to help those people.

Our system isn't perfect and there are a lot of problems with it, but I don't want it to go away completely.

Comment · 15 years ago

Chip stacking tends to be too expensive. Think of it this way: take the full output from a factory creating chips. Now if you stack just one chip on top of another, you have effectively cut your production in half. It also means that your chips will have to be at least twice as expensive (probably more since demand will be greater since the chips are now more scarce).

I think there is some interesting research work going into chip stacking but it wouldn't be accessible for public consumption until it's cost effective.

Comment · 15 years ago

Actually, I think diamond is getting much cheaper. It's becoming much more integral for satellites and extremely small electronics because of their susceptibility to radiation. http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2011/08/nanodiamond/

The first thing I'd wonder is what the susceptibility to radiation is for spintronics. The paper "Spintronics: a new paradigm for electronics for the new millennium" says that it is as hardened as the silicon. So then I'd question how hard the graphene is and found a couple of papers about that: Unzipping and folding of graphene by swift heavy ions, Effect of electron-beam irradiation on graphene field effect devices.

Researchers out there realize the problems popping up with silicon and are working to find the solutions. It's a really cool time to be in material sciences, physics and/or electrical engineering.

Comment · 15 years ago

Right, I was thinking it was more of a random walk algorithm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk

There was too much randomness in his evolving. When I was evolving agents for my M.S., I used tournament selection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_selection) with an 80% crossover rate for the top 2 winners and only a 5% mutation rate on the offspring. I also started off with a population of 500 individuals. This approach seemed to produce much better results.

Comment · 15 years ago

There is also releases and updates on genomic data. It stays pretty current as far as I know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_HapMap_Project

Comment · 15 years ago

A google engineer says that the security reason is bullshit: http://games.greggman.com/game/webgl-security-and-microsoft-...

Comment · 15 years ago

There is an anti-compete lawsuit going on between google and skyhook: http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/10/internal-emails-reveal-go...

There needs to be significant patent/ip reform in this country, there's no question about that. Google isn't necessarily a "good guy", though. There is a lot of money to be made out there and all of the big guys are using everything at their disposal to gain the upper hand.