vampirechicken

If you can't determine that this word problem is a Pythagorean qaudratic, then you might ought not to be sitting a "Higher Maths" exam.

You mean aside from saving the HTML and CSS and reproducing them on their blog?

Mostly it was all the terrible code that got written in Perl by the first wave of non-programmers to start building web apps.

Perl golf is meant as a thought exercise. Code should be human readable. The compiler will cope with verbose code just as easily as terse code.

Okay, invoking Word vs LaTex automatically makes your argument a straw man. I would have compared word to e.g. Adobe InDesign.

It has been my experience that while almost everybody can create a passable document in Word, something technical/government-ish with 500 pages and all of the publishing accouterments that come with a document of size, purpose, and complexity, you're getting into specialist territory, and almost all of the DTP specialists I know start by importing Word files in to InDesign.

"It should be something that any clerk can handle and that doesn't become obsolete."

This is an important statement. in that it is a reasonable goal, but nearly impossible.

Even using word, once one gets past a simple document, and starts having TOC, index, etc. and is "four five-inch binders" full of pages, then not just ANY CLERK will be able to maintain the document.

I had a class called "Introduction to file processing" that was basically "here's how you manage your data files," and taought us about the evolution from sequential access, to ISAM, to VSAM. Ended up working in RDMBS/SQL but it was a fascinating class - despite the assignments being in FORTRAN.

The perception is that the COBOL jobs don't pay as well as Ruby, Node, etc.

It this is not the case, then the recruiters are doing a bad job winning the hearts and minds of job seekers and those try to follow hiring trends.

You appear to be assuming that the limit is applied while fetching tuples, rather than while filtering the tuple set after fetch.

It occurs to me that if you handle LIMIT during fetch, you'll add complexity the fetch, and might only see run time gains in the cases where the number of desired rows is small.

If a column contains unique data it should be marked as such in whatever way your RDBMS requires (e.g. UNIQUE constraint and/or UNIQUE index)

Probably not, but it might have an effect on compensation in eminent domain cases.

flash cookies are less well known to people. Even the casual "privacy conscious" web user tend to be unaware that flash drop its own flash cookies that don't clear with the browsers "clear cookies" function.

No. Without any indication that the value in that column is unique the query engine must read the entire table in order to insure that it has found every row that meets the search criteria.

bitbucket is free for tiny private repos...

It is for entrance to Oxford, not Random State University. Aren't Oxford students expected to be elite?

But you can already script vim...

A reasonable followup question why wouldn't one have an ad blocker installed?

a governing class with titles that sounded like "buttock" or "scrotum".

Titles of those who server in a bi-cameral legislature.

You can take advantage of the JVM (JIT compilation, etc) by deploying under JRuby, the Ruby runtime implemented in Java.

I'm not familiar with the volume of data that balance collected at signup. But I am familiar with the volume of info in the PCI's "Know Your Customer" initiative. I i'm going to speculate wildly that balanced got to know their customers during onboarding, rather than waiting until after they started processing payments.

Additionally, I think that a company's level of trust with their customers involves some 'coefficient of risk' regarding potential losses to chargebacks against a low or non-existent reserve. I find the topic interesting, especially the consequences at a federal level if you guess wrong and the "customer" turns out to be laundering money.

Probably by becoming a highly-trusted, low-risk customer. Payment balance float is all about holding some money in reserve in case of chargebacks. The better your stats are, the less money a processor will insist on holding in reserve.

How about GAE learns to recognize google web crawlers and does not penalize GAE users for that traffic?

Are you saying that misnomer might be a misnomer?

You wouldn't so much delete them, as deactivate them (mark them inactive but keep them in around for retrieval). The consuming service would react differently to an inactive person as an active person.

I'm always at a loss as to why people take such delight in the real or perceived decline of Perl.

Perl and Python are similar, excellent programming languages, and I don't imagine Larry and Guido argue like children about it when they meet at conferences.

I'll just quote Bjarne Stroustrop: There are two kinds of programming languages. The one's people complain about, and the one's people do not use.

The Blue/Red Ocean concept isn't about the size of the market, it's about the lack of competition in the market either by being first in a clearly new market, or by differentiating your offering from others to the extent that you're not competing for the same consumers. There's a book "Blue Ocean Strategy." It's worth a read for the explanation, and the case studies. There's worksheets and process too, but that didn't lend itself well to listening in the car.

"Blue Ocean Strategy" was an interesting, if repetitive, book. I enjoyed the examples/case studies.

So in business parlance, you're saying that it's easier to make money in a 'blue ocean', with little or no competition, than in a 'red ocean', with lots of competition.

Obliquely, the AOL/ Time-Warner merger...

whether we should be trusting so much of our infrastructure to one company that hasn't yet started to monetize the technology

We trusted free software for a long time before we needed to call it open source to make it sound palatable to less visionary business leaders.

We'll go on trusting the FOSS. The free and open nature of it means that we're never really trusting the company (the corporate entity) just the people they've amassed to work on the FOSS. Those people can continue to work on the FOSS after the company disolves, because the osftware is open/free.

I developed the habit of working at night due to time sharing on slow computers. I could timeshare a VAX 11/750 or 11/780 with 60 of my closest friends during the day, or with three of them at night, when everybody else had gone home.