I'm not sure I agree. They are adding some significant new functionality, it's just not necessarily used by everyone, and it's not really that mature. But the new citation functionality, for example, is aiming much more towards an academic audience. Combine that with proper use of styles and referencing (also much improved as far as I can see), and you can see that they're now moving away from the fancy notepad model towards something that can be used more like Latex. You supply the content, mark up the heading, and it handles referencing, citation and style.

It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and you'd be hard pressed to get an old-school academic to switch from Latex, but the development in this area is certainly not stagnant.

I'm currently at the University of Waterloo doing a PhD in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. It's in Canada, so it's not a big 10 school, but it has a solid reputation as a pretty decent school, especially in engineering. For our program, it's expected that a grad student maintains at least a 78% average with 75% being a pass. This means that if you're running a grad course, and you think that a student should pass the course, you basically have to give them at least a 75%. The end result is that if you graduate from the program, you're almost guaranteed an A average.

The requirements are listed here: http://ece.uwaterloo.ca/Graduate/PhD/

Waterloo in general is a good place to look for engineering jobs. There's RIM, but there's also a bunch of other tech companies around there. My old company was hiring when I left, and the company that backed my master's work was also looking for VLSI people.

If we were all paid just for time, then everybody would be in at 8:30 and out the door promptly at 5 with exactly 30 minutes for a lunch break and no more. Nobody would have a blackberry and they could lock down the internet to their heart's content And that's one way to do it. Of course, locking down the internet also means employees don't necessarily have access to nice things that make their job easier, like the ability to quickly look up commands etc., but since we're just paying for time, efficiency doesn't matter one way or the other.

On the other hand, it's also possible to create a workplace where it's OK to check slashdot if you're running tests or compiling code or something, and sending an email to a friend isn't a fireable offense. Those sort of workplaces also tend to be the types of workplaces where people don't mind staying a little late to get extra work done or help out a client. They're also the type of workplaces where people don't wake up every morning loathing their existance and hating their jobs. Call me crazy, but I think that counts for something too.

For rings, if you lifed one ring in the third dimension, and then moved it over then projected that back into only 2 dimensions, then they would appear linked. In the demo, they say they are shifting back into the 3rd dimension, which I'm interpreting as a projection, in which case, the links would seem linked in the third, but not necessarily in the fourth. On the other hand, what they show is more like a star-trek style phase shift. Not that I can blame them really - they're simulating a 4D world, drawn with 3D drawing techniques on a 2D screen. Can't be super easy to get absolutely right.

I've done a bit of work in hearing aid development (master's), and there are a few issues that make them so expensive. Most decent (digital) hearing aids are not just simple audio gain. Aside from possible loss from occlusion (which can be fixed surgically) hearing loss normally doesn't happen in all frequencies equally. Sometimes you can get away with a simple gain hearing aid, but it's not really matching what your loss is. As mentioned above, the gain has to be adjusted in bands, which requires a dsp capable of performing banding and gaining in real time so the lip sync doens't get off. Now, this doesn't seem like a hard task, but have you ever seen the size of the chips they use in hearing aids? Compare the size of a simple BTE aid and the space it has for the hardware. The newer ones are fully hidden, making them less than the size of a finger. If you're ever seen the chips, they're maybe the size of a few pin heads, if that. And, they have no fans to help heat dissipation and the power comes from an unbelivably small battery. It is NOTHING like a computer. If you can fit a computer chip and board in your ear, more power to you, but most people can't.

Not only that, but many digital aids also include noise reduction, because background noise is a big problem - it's amplified directly into your ear. Plus, there's feedback. A hearing aid can be designed to be open, so you need to repress the feedback, or closed, which has it's own problems - ie, it's forming basically an echo chamber in your ear. For example, stick your finger in your ear. Sound strange? Same thing with a closed aid, only now imagine your finger is talking. So there's that, and the sofware development costs that go along with it.

Not only that, but you have to pay a trained audiologist to fit the device physically, and do the appropriate band gain settings and whatever else the hearing aid needs.

Anyway, to sum up, they're expensive because:
- hardware costs - very small size, low power, low heat
- software costs - banding, noise reduction, feedback comp
- audiologist costs
- possible licencing costs (wasn't too involved in that end, so I'm not sure)

I'm not sure I agree with your whole post, but I have to give you props for this quote here. I'm a women in computer engineering and honestly, the place I feel the most uncomfortable is around so-called feminists. In university I avoided the women's center like the plague because every time I went in there with my eng books or wearing an engineering sweater or anything I always got the LOOK and a lecture about how I was just as bad as all the rest of those engineers and why are our songs so disgusting and blah blah blah.

There's sort of a delicious irony about someone claiming they are this huge feminist and then going into women's studies, the MOST un-evenly gender balanced and stereotypically female subject available and then having the gall to give me shit for singing stupid songs and drinking too much beer. You want to fix the gender balance in computer engineering? Well, the computer is right over there, stop doing stupid sociology studies and learn to code.

Ditto. Not an HD, but one of the older ones. Totally decent MP3 player, doesn't even do a bad job on movies. Good in my books. I want for little.

movies are actually 24.

Minor: what's goatse?
/.er : (posts link)


Bam - you're a criminal.

Wow, what open source projects have YOU been working on? They sound magical.

Yes, spelling and grammar in comments are important for understanding, and proper spelling in variable names in particular makes it easier for developers after you to follow and track through code. However, I disagree with the generalization that long comments always mean you don't know what you are doing. Most of my code comments are 1-liners, but I always leave long comments for function headers so everyone is clear on what the inputs are. I also leave larger comments for equations that aren't immediately obvious, ESPECIALLY if the equations are coming from spec documents. A spec number, section number and explanation help developers FIND these things later and actually understand them. Spec documents in particular can be thick and it's not always easy to see at a glance how things are supposed to work. Plus, if there IS a mistake (let's face it, no one is perfect), it's way easier to track where something went wrong if you know what the start point is.

Actually both federal seats that were up for election went to Democrats including a seat in upstate New York that hadn't gone D since the Civil War. It was 2 Governorships that went to the R's.

Uh, no, that page describes how to rip a DVD to Matroksa in order to preserve the actual video content, audio channels, and subtitle streams. There's *nothing* in there about ripping the actual menu structure, and AFAIK, the Matroska menu spec a) is in it's infancy, b) has no tooling to make DVD -> MKV w/ menus actually doable, and c) isn't supported by any players out there.

'course, I'd *love* to be proven wrong. :)

You see porn is bad. Because it has naked people in it pretending to have sex. Which is bad because sex isn't fun, its a terrible thing that must be endured for the betterment of society. Or something. I dunno, don't ask me hard questions. Its in the bible, right after god said to go forth and multiply...

Sex = bad! Stop questioning things!