Meanwhile, TSA has made getting on a plane as difficult as space flight

Admittedly I haven't delved into it very far yet, but this looks like a standard functional language. The ideas he talks about have been around for ages. That does mean I am confident that they work, more so than the usual "new paradigm".

Haskell that compiles is a lot closer to working than C would be; getting it to compile is a lot harder (debugging takes place before running) and getting that last few percent (correct output) can be a massive pain: not being able to crash doesn't always help to find problems, especially without a useful debugger. Does Bosque improve on that? Does it have a good FFI (a common failing)? Can it support UI's (huge pain with most functional languages; workarounds are mostly ill-fitting bandaids.)

I'm trying to find a reason to care here.

A story to warm Ned Ludd's heart!

My (camera department) cash register could be operated without power (stick a crank in the side.) The front registers were electronic, and we'd always walk out past a sad little line of teenaged cashiers when the power went off and the store had to close.

I could do sales tax faster in my head than by using the little card taped to the counter, too.

Soooo true. This could have been me (even the 40 or so years fits.)

I spent 4 years at a crappy little department store chain in the southeast, while in college. The music came on large reel to reel tapes, so no shuffle and the pops and cracks repeated exactly, and not nearly as many breakdowns as one would hope for. Oddly, I don't remember the rest of the year, just Christmas.

People who can afford European cars and keep them after the first 2 years/lease tend to spend what it takes to keep them running. They don't run that long without constant and horrendously expensive maintenance, unlike many Toyotas that routinely last that long with little or no work.

I have a BMW X5 commuter that is on the edge of that age range, and it's so unreliable that I won't drive it far from home, despite spending enough on it the last 2 years to buy a used Corolla (and doing most of the work myself.) BMW engineering has gone from great (my '83) to embarrassingly bad, and I've heard rumors about recent Mercedes. For all the jokes about Japanese plastic cars, they don't make cooling systems out of plastic, that self destruct every few years.

I look at CR for information, but don't put much faith in their "recommendations."

They like to rate things they don't understand. I recall a review of bicycles (no clue what made one better than another), and lawn mowers (rated by intuition, apparently never tried them to see what worked better.) Cars should be an exception, given CR's focus, which makes their ongoing treatment of Tesla even more... concerning.

I've seen nothing to suggest Tesla is worse than any other high end car. They're expensive but they also have good features, like performance, longevity, and a company that doesn't seem to see customers merely as wealthy prey. Very few German cars in Tesla's league have any appeal besides the mere fact of owning them, and cost as much or more to buy and much, much more to own. Japanese cars are better than European in pretty much every way, but don't outshine Tesla either.

In my day (submarines, 80's) it was a periodic check rather than real time (and definitely not wireless;-) ) It was considered valuable, because it really worked.

Motors, etc, all had little shiny disks glued on for the magnetic pickups; the sound guys got recordings and compared with previous ones (on paper.) They were working on a way to do it with reciprocating machines like compressors and maybe even diesels, which is probably possible now.

There was a short story (Asimov IIRC) about a future world where everyone had calculators, and then a man reverse engineered one and figured out that he could "simulate" its operations on paper. He finally convinced a skeptical general that it worked, who set in motion a plan to build a manned missile (suicide weapon) because a human pilot was cheaper than a computer.

The truly inventive part of this story is the new problem it found. Anyone could think of "No one knows how to use a table of logarithms anymore, or how to create one," after, e.g., an EMP war.

(Disclaimer: I'm an HP-41 fan myself, but I could create my own trig tables if I had to.)

You should have seen 'em in the 80's! The first PowerMac 8100/80 in '93 (IIRC) was built like a tank and I never heard of a problem with one (nor will I feed any trolls who did.)

The problems really started with Jobs' return. Those first iMacs sold like mad and helped save the company, but they weren't the machines Apple used to make. One rumor at the time was that Jobs decided to save money by slashing QA and expecting a few more warranty returns. The round mouse was Jobs too, and if any working device could be as bad as a nonfunctional keyboard, that thing was it.

Since then they've cared a little less every year, and it shows. The G5's were the last that really got built right (and mine wouldn't wake if it ever went to sleep...) That refurb G5 and a refurb laptop in 2008 were the last Apple gear I ever bought or ever will now.

>> average monthly rents increased by $398 between 2009 and 2016, of which $86, or 21.6 percent, was a result of Airbnb's presence

$400 / month over 6-7 years in NYC isn't that shocking (it wouldn't be in Seattle, $100 / year for apartments that only millionaires could afford in NYC is common in quick-growing areas.)

How do they attribute 21.6% of that to Airbnb again? TFA tried to make it sound all scientific, but really, guys? We need a doctor with a flashlight to explain it better.

I've been at several places that claimed they were Agile. A few even had a designated scrum master who'd been to training.

Not one really followed through: I've sat through hour long "standup" meetings, had a sprint's worth tasks assigned by managers and shifted around day by day, had constant interference ("Why aren't we under that line on the burndown chart?")

This plays right into the hands of the Agile inventors, who can point to any misstep and say we aren't doing Agile right, if/when it fails. Agile, like many other buzzwords, was at least partly invented to sell books, get tenure, and make gurus immune to outsourcing.

It actually can work, encapsulated at team level, with a lead who coordinates with other leads and excludes higher management as much as possible. The key is for velocity, etc., to never leave the team, only finished work.

I can relate! I had to learn to keypunch for several classes... I bet this snowflake would love to do his tests that way. I hope I get to give him his first whiteboard interview.

Writing everything out ahead of time was a great learning tool. I usually did the next day's assignment at home (no computer, not even embedded controllers in appliances) and it took forever, but I could make the most of my half hour or so on one of my college's 3 Apple II's the next day. It was a little better in BASIC (PDP-11, 8 or 10 terminals scattered around campus) but BASIC gets old.

OS X effectively keeps the empty title bar space he doesn't like (because Apple realized what a pain it would be without it.)

There was a thing a while back (Mozilla IIRC) to get rid of "unneeded" bars (title, URL, status) in web browsers. It didn't completely succeed, since most browsers are still usable, but it made life harder since you can't tell where the window ends and the next begins. The !@#$ translucent effect makes it hard too, that's one of the first things I turn off.

Title bars waste space, sure, but I can afford it. I often use more than a single window.

Assuming UFO's are aliens, why do we see so many? *We* can see enough from orbit that we don't need to fly through the atmosphere to look around. They're giving themselves away for nothing.

Declining to contact us makes sense: if they're advanced enough to get here, they're probably figured out the cultural problems that are destroying us; we'd look like a particularly poor, insane, and violent slum, and unlike us they'd know better than to try to "help." Most of our governments represent the absolute worst of us, so no mystery there.

I can't see how taking over and exploiting Earth makes sense either: if they can get here, they can get to our unexplored moons, plus the asteroid belt, which are much better for that purpose, assuming they're not after fossil fuels or agriculture. If they can get here so easily that colonization makes any sense at all they wouldn't need to wonder about us, they'd just use pesticide.

Maybe they're trying to help us survive by giving us hope? Let's hope it works, and also that they plan shoot down any armed ICBM's they see.

I don't really care about most of the new features. More speed is always nice.

But I can't live with multiple GB any time I leave a tab open more than an hour or two. It bogs down the whole computer until it takes forever to manually kill Firefox. And audio now comes and goes and crackles constantly.

Chrome isn't perfect either, but Quantum is unusable. Does it really work for anyone else?