ramLlama

Yup, I can see it for computational experiments or "applied CS" fields. I realized this soon after I posted the comment, but I didn't bother to update my comment.

However, this still isn't clear in their website. I will give them the benefit of the doubt since they are early in their project, but I think it would behoove them to nail down their mission sooner rather than later.

This is probably what I get being in the CS bubble. =)

I like this idea, but I do not really understand who it is aimed at. The focus seems to be on reproducibility of scientific experiments and code, which is great! Many existing code artifacts are WOGSL (Works On Graduate Student's Laptop) which is the CS equivalent of "runs when parked".

So, let's break down the fields of CS for which this should be applicable:

* Systems: This won't work except for the few systems projects that are entirely in-RAM AND will work on tinycore's kernel version

* ML: This, I can see, especially with the seeming focus on dataset management. Much ML is compute-bound and the overhead of using the FUSE FS's is hopefully negligible.

So, is this focused on ML and ML-using code and experiments? If so, I think that should be clarified. I think a lot of systems folk will be (rightly or wrongly) turned away from it due to the seeming overhead of the various hyper* extensions. Not to mention that they are all written in Node/JS (Again, rightly or wrongly, many systems folk will not want to run their stuff on platforms written in JS)

I like the direction this project can go, but there seems to be a lack of focus or direction in your mission right now.

Yes, they do.

Microwave works on line-of-sight and weather patterns easily mess it up and drop the link.

That's why you usually also run your microwave data over a fiber link as backup. Of course, when microwave works, it gives you a decent improvement in latency, at the cost of bandwidth.

Another advantage of having the microphones (yes, there can be more than one!) near the ear itself is for DSP. Many hearing aids use multiple microphones to selectively amplify sounds from the direction you are facing. I think this would work best with microphones near the ear, or at least in a known position.

I too wear BTE's with glasses and most people are surprised when I tell them I wear hearing aids. They cannot see them.

This is especially true of modern "Receiver In The Ear" (RITE) models where instead of a tube carrying sound, you have a very thin wire going into your ear canal.

A bigger issue with separating the microphone and amplifier is cosmetic: hearing aids sadly have a stigma attached to them and people are more likely to wear them if they are invisible. There is a reason why hearing aids are produced in hair colors.

Also, I found that the best way to get rid of feedback was to get an ear mold rather than using an "open-fit" mold. This is a clear separation between the speaker and the microphone and pretty much solves the problem in my experience.

EDIT: I noticed late that you addressed the cosmetic issue in your post. I don't see the elderly changing but our generation just might.

http://www.benheck.com/controllers/

Ben Heckendorn is known for very clever console modifications and has forayed into accessible controllers in recent years. He sells a custom made one-handed controller for a few hundred dollars, and this may be worth a look!

This is exactly right. GNOME, KDE and other out-of-the-box solutions make sure to set the GTK and Qt themes so that everything looks pretty. When you use a WM (window manager) rather than a DE (desktop environment), it is up to you to setup all the ancillary things such as themes and daemons. This is why .xprofile exists!

Also, I find lxappearance an easy and quick way to set GTK themes via GUI rather than having to edit the .gtkrc files for every option.

Thanks! Spacemonkey looks terrific and is pretty much what I envision! I often feel that with the move to "cloud computing" over the last decade, we have essentially made a dichotomy between working "locally" and working "in the cloud". However, they really should be seamless! The cloud should extend your computational resources and make it more accessible, not replace it! With things like spacemonkey, Office 365 and other "seamless" apps, it seems that we are finally learning how to make things be location and device independent. Cloud computing is the vanishing mediator that is finally starting to vanish!

This is a very interesting problem, espeicially since consumer computing devices quickly shunted to small storage space when SSD's arrived. A few years ago, a laptop with 500GB of hard drive space was rather small! Nowadays, a 500GB SSD is top-tier. Granted, SSD capacity is quickly rising, but with the combination of small computing like phones and tablets, space is at a premium.

Funnily enough, this problem has been solved before! If you look at distributed file systems, especially something like Coda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coda_(file_system)), they are designed to make the local computer a "thin client for storage". Basically, local storage is used as a cache for the main copy on the server, and this behavior is transparent to user applications via the FS driver.

Dropbox uses a user-space program to sync the files and cannot intercept system calls. As such, they had no choice but to synchronize all of it rather than bringing things in "on-demand" and releasing local copies that are not used. Nowadays, this can easily be done via FUSE driver in Linux. I do not know if something like FUSE exists on other platforms though.

Overall, I personally love the idea of a local machine being a "cache" for the server copy. However, the technical challenges are greater than a simple mirroring scheme, and there may be UX issues as well.

Thing is, userspace networking is a lot like the GPU business. Often times, the software is free or even OSS, but the hardware is proprietary.

I know Intel has software for their NIC's to enable userpace networking, but I don't think any HFT uses it. It may be all right for hobbyist experimentation. I left the industry about a year ago, so my information is a bit out-of-date, but my former employer used either Solarflare cards with the OpenOnload stack (very good cards and awesome software) or the Mellanox CX series with VMA stack (amazing hardware with mediocre software. VMA is now open-source, so perhaps that situation has improved).

Note that these cards are a few thousand dollars each, so out-of-reach for hobbyists.

I graduated in 2011 and my sequence used:

Alice/Java => "101"-type class

C/Perl/Shell => Intro to Systems

C => rest of the systems branch

Java => Data Structures

Standard ML => functional and logic classes.

Many of the more esoteric electives used their own thing. For example, I used Serpent in Computer Music Systems.

The curriculum changed in my final year. The new students now do:

Python => "101"-type classes and basic data structures and algorithms

Standard ML => parallel data structures and algorithms and other functional and logic classes

C0 transitioning to C => Systems courses.

I do think our distributed systems class was experimenting with Go at some point.

My understanding is that XFS is now default because it has far better support than ext4 for large (hundreds of TB to PB) volumes. In addition, RedHat employs many core XFS members.

With the quashing of the slow metadata performance (http://lwn.net/Articles/476263/), XFS seems to be all-round just as good as ext4 but with more future-proofiness for large volumes. Keep in mind that RHEL releases are supported for around a decade.

That's true, and I completely forgot that you can do that. In fact, that's how I last deposited a check!

Schwab has been the only bank I have ever dealt with, and I have no intention of moving away. They are a professionally run outfit with focus on all the right things.

As mentioned, the customer service is stellar. I have never had to be on hold much more than a few minutes and the person on the other end has always been engaged and knowledgeable, all the while remaining totally professional. I think this image of them was cemented for me when I found that their hold "music" was that Friday's jobs report!

The website is not great on the usability front and some things are placed in questionable locations. The search functionality is also frustrating and obtuse many times. The same is true of the mobile app. However, they are functionally more than sufficient and work perfectly fine. And, worst case, you can always just call them or do the online chat.

I think they are on the more expensive side as a brokerage, but their integration there is satisfactory (that being said, I am not an active investor)

They also don't nickel and dime you on things. I was amazed when I found out that other banks charge for getting extra checks and a checkbook. Admittedly, checks are in less and less use these days, but you still need them sometimes. Schwab offers unlimited checks for free. Spare debit cards may be charged, but I am not sure. I have not lost my debit card (yet!)

The bank side is located in Reno, NV, so any checks have to be mailed there. However, this isn't entirely true. Schwab does have physical locations to serve their brokerage clients and since the Checking account requires a brokerage account (although it doesn't require it to be funded), you can still use their physical locations to deposit and withdraw money, and then move it around online or on the app.

Agree, this seems like a prototype of Subsonic. Note that I am not knocking this project. It is a great first effort and seems to fit in fit in with the rest of Cozy very well. Speaking of, Cozy looks very nice, and I will explore it later!

Speaking about Subsonic, it has its warts, even the much better Madsonic fork. However, there is no denying it's featureset, which includes

  * Album art support
  * Fast search
  * Video support, although this isn't great...
  * Podcast support
  * Jukebox mode to play through the server's speakers
  * mobile app with real-time transcoding for mobile networks. 

When you start the list traversal, you would have something like

    Node** link = list_head

    link = &(entry->next)

    *link = entry->next

This way, you save on the conditional branch.

True, but as you get used to seeing the vehicle cross from your center mirror to your side mirror, you get a sense of where it is. Your point of reference just changes from your car in the side mirror to the combination of the location of the vehicle in the side mirror and the center mirror. You really just have to get used to it. I swear by this technique now.

I think this is because you are comparing the business laptop to the consumer edition. While I haven't actively shopped laptops for a few years, I have noticed that the business editions, while a tad more expensive and less "stylish", are usually much better built. My friends' consumer Dell laptops consistently fail within the first 1.5 years or so. My father's 6 year old Dell survived much abuse, and is doing fine.

The business versions of laptops are usually far better built, but you cannot buy them at Best Buy and the like.

I believe double majors do not functionally require as much due to a greater chance of being able to double-count a class. Also, a double major typically means you get one diploma that lists your two majors. A double degree means that you get two physically separate diplomas. This may matter to someone.

Of course, I may be compeletely wrong with respect to the OP's university.

Agreed on DSL. I actually used Tiny Core at work recently, and was pleasantly surprised at the ease of use and customization. Although only power-users would seek to customize it, it is certainly far easier than modifying Arch Linux or the like. It is particularly excellent for netbooting.

I felt the exact way when I read "The Andromeda Strain". For me, it was the exhaustive statistics and bibliography that sealed the deal. Still one of my favorite Crichton works.

Ah, that was an unfortunate ordering of sentences. I was just giving an explanation for my consumption rate, not a reason for why I wasn't affected. I should have proofread that. I'm sorry.

Not necessarily. When I was in high school, I drank between 4 to 6 cups of coffee a day. It never affected me. The reason for this is twofold: It's just part of the culture in my family in India, and I really liked the taste.

Fast forward a couple years and I am in college. I hate, absolutely detest the taste of any american coffee. I don't know what's missing, but I only enjoy coffee in India. I went from 4-6 cups a day to about 1 cup a week in a couple weeks. Nowadays, I don't drink much coffee at all, probably 2 or 3 cups a month at the most. But when I am in India, I drink as much as I can. :)

While the parent commenter may indeed be addicted, it's also possible that he is simply unaffected by caffeine. I certainly find that true for me.

My sleep patterns are a lot like the parent commenter. I usually sleep about 7 to 8 hours, but occasionally sleep 9 or so. Do I feel like I've overslept? Sure in that I've "lost" an hour or two that I could have used. But my body doesn't feel like it's overslept. When it does, it tells me. With a half day of headaches.

That is true. I do minimal system administration, so that is not a concern for me.

I tend to use a shell for system interaction more than scripting. In that regard, I give more importance to interactivity enhancements. On the other hand, I have found myself using bash to automate simple things in our company testbed. As soon as I need a datastructure more than an array, or recursive functions, I jump to lua.

If your primary job is to be a sysadmin, then Bash is Required Reading.

Well, I did say "yes, you can" so technically I did answer his question.

However, the implication is that by buying a SIM (which can also be postpaid. It is not strictly prepaid only) and a phone, you get the choice of phone and service. This may be true in Europe. It is certainly true in India, where people routinely swap SIM's.

It is not true in the U.S. There is largely no benefit to buying service and a SIM separately. Yes, prepaid is cheaper, and I forgot about that. But if you look at an apples to apples comparison of plans, there is absolutely no reason to buy postpaid off-contract when you pay the same amount regardless.

Yes, I just use the builtin's. Basically os.execute, and io.popen.

Popen is not the greatest because you can't get exit statuses from it. But for a quick script that is too messy in shell, it suffices. I believe that there is an extension to lua that has a popen that returns exit statuses. That can be used too.

For pattern matching, I either pipe to perl and capture the output, or use the inbuilt pattern matching system. It's surprisingly powerful.

I have been using fish for several years now. It's community is a fraction of zsh, bash, and others, and I've tried to go back to them, mostly out of misplaced "everyone else is doing it" mindset

Fish is a great shell. It's a modern shell, that uses colors, UTF, and processing power that didn't exist when the others were designed. I feel the best thing about it is the sane defaults and large number of prebuilt completions. For any other shell, I have to dive into bashrc's and esoteric commands to get what I want. Fish just does what I want. It's made me far more productive, and for that, it gets my best shell award.

Its scripting support is good, very similar to other shells. Yes, the syntax is non-compatible, and not even POSIX. But, it makes more sense. Besides, for anything except the simplest of scripts, I use lua. I doubt you'd want to use bash to do something very complicated.

Some people want their shell scripts to be compatible and do a lot of cool things. I feel that the days of a shell being used for scripting are past. For me, a shell is a way of interacting with the system. Fish does this really well. Scripting is a slight afterthought, as it should be.

Yes, you can. But, it usually doesn't make sense, for one or more of several reasons:

1) Different technologies need different phones. For example, an iPhone won't get HSPA+ on T-Mobile because T-Mobile uses AWS. Similarly, you can't use a GSM phone on a CDMA network, and vice versa

2) Except for T-Mobile, you pay the same both off and on contract. This is probably the biggest reason that it doesn't make sense. Even T-Mobile only gives you a discounted price after you've been on the contract. If you are lucky enough to be in such a state, and like T-Mobile's phones (or don't mind living with EDGE data), then it's great! Else, it doesn't make much financial sense.