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jufo

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I am Justin Forder.

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Nice presentation. In the description of back end modules, you mention payments as a future capability. What kind of payment service would you be able to work with? (I don't see how you could handle card details in the Hoodie architecture). Thanks.

A good solution should also minimise movement, to conserve energy and reduce mechanical wear. And part of the orbit is in darkness - the criteria would be different there (not optimising illumination, but needing to be ready for the return to daylight).

Thanks very much - that app shows me a quiet way from home (Raynes Park) to work (Leatherhead); 13.4 miles. It's far enough off the busy roads I know that I would never have discovered it unaided. On to Street View... then the forecast is good for New Year's day, so it's a good opportunity for a practice run.

In the video, Prof. Widom mentions that the platform they are using now, Class2Go, has been developed at Stanford and is open source. A quick look at http://class.stanford.edu/ shows that it depends on external components - YouTube for video, and Piazza for forums - but it's good to have an open platform, and one of the aims is to avoid lock-in of content.

Small 14 years ago

Maybe a bit more with the spacesuit glove on!

On Saturday Maplin's online stock check said there were two starter kits still in stock at Wimbledon - a little over a mile away from me. There had been five in stock a few days before. I walked there and was in time to get the last one. Now there seem to be none left in the London area, and the online site says new stock is due in 16 days. Let's hope the next batch will have 512MB Pis - the Pi in my kit is in an element14 box, but is not the latest board version (not made in UK, no mounting holes).

I worked for Decca Navigator in the 1970s. They had two ladies (not particularly little or old) who made read-only program memories for the Decca Omnitrac civil aircraft navigation computers. These had core arrays with the sense line hand-woven through the cores, going through a core or bypassing it depending on whether that bit should read as a 0 or a 1. They worked from printed charts referred to as 'knitting patterns'.

Vim as you IDE 14 years ago

It's a great article. Assuming English isn't your first language, I think @insertnickname is being unfair.

I have a six-year-old 15" MacBook Pro, which is now on its third battery. A year or so ago the original 120GB hard drive started making ticking sounds, and I replaced it with a 500GB drive (not SSD - at today's prices I would have gone for a 256GB SSD). It's still a perfectly capable machine - a bit constrained by being limited to 3GB of RAM, but otherwise fine.

This is a lesson we all have to learn. At least in Node it is easy to pick up with a tool like JSLint. In Java, you typically have some classes which have to be thread-safe (having no per-request state) and others which are instantiated per request. Developers have to be aware of the distinction, and to code accordingly. I fell into this trap when submitting a change to JBoss back in 2000; Rickard Oberg picked it up within hours (the diffs of all committed changes went out to everyone on the developer mailing list). I'm grateful to him for that, and I've done the same kind of review for many others since then.

The nice thing about node (or any other event-based platform) is that memoizing the Fibonacci function is trivial, whereas in a multi-threaded implementation it would be tricky and error-prone.