Scraps @ 138 - That's the book I've been trying to think of. The Dreamfields by Jeter. Involved shapeshifting lizards and a lot of paranoia. Crocodile thing on the cover, and a disembodied head with glowing eyes.
Didn't Laser number the books?
IDE == _Integrated_ Development Environment. So named because it integrated several disparate tools into one. Borland's Turbo line of products in the late 80's were one of the first widely used IDEs. Typically and IDE has an editor, a compiler a debugger, and a build management tool.
Popular IDEs today are Netbeans, Eclipse, and Visual Studio. On Unix there is a long standing tradition of using separate tools for each job, although programmers editors often provide ways of orchestrating the other tools.
Emacs, bringing things back to RMS, who wrote one of the most popular flavors of emacsen, is in a bit of a different class. Although nominally an editor, it's also a programming environment for lisp, and in fact most things in emacs are actually bound to lisp functions. Including things like the a key, which is usually bound to the function self-insert the character 'a'. More complicated functions might be things like, do a syntactic analysis of the highlighted text, and pop up a menu of all the function definitions.
xkcd on emacs
re: women in programming. I do interviewing and college recruiting for my company. And I'm afraid by that point, it's too late. Although our stats show that we're more likely to hire a female candidate than a male, and they tend to be more successful hires, there are nowhere near as many of them signing up for interviews.
Serge @ 73
Sod the unix servers. The programmable coffee machines aren't going 64 bit anytime soon. And do you know what kind of disaster is going to occur when programmers don't get their coffee that morning?
Tuesday, January 19th 2038, at 03:14:07 (UTC).
And it won't be like Y2K.
Things will actually break. All at once.
albatross @63
It's hard to say exactly, but there's still sellers for CDSs, against institutions like Goldman, AmEx, JPMorgan, UBS and CitiGroup. Cassano at AIG wasn't the only one who thought they were selling insurance against the impossible.
AmEx looks like they're thought to be in trouble. 2 years ago the fixed side of a CDS against AmEx was around 0.20 percent. Now it's over 6.00%.
AIG is an unusual case. The insurance company basically got taken for a ride by their new financial products group. The tail wagged the dog, and without the controls in place, and other professionally obnoxious jerks to call him out, the head of the group went ahead and bet the whole company.
@53 - The CDOs have been sliced and diced to high heaven. Those are the toxic assets. The CDSs are the mutually assured destruction provision that are squeezing the financial institutions from the other side. Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps.
Until we can get the CDSs unwound, another major institutional default would ripple through the industry as the floating side counterparties had to pay billions out, with no assets to sell to get back into compliance, causing more insolvent banks.
re: Banks and credit.
Banks are required to have capital that is a certain percentage of the amount they are lending out. The amount varies depending on the type of institution, but for illustrative purposes, lets say that it's 10%.
So if you have $1 million in capital, you can lend out $10 million.
Now, you don't just have a big pile of cash sitting in a vault. You have some, but most of it is invested in something. So, how do you decide how much your investments are worth for purposes of determining how much capital you have.
One method is to say your stuff is worth whatever you say its worth, as long as your accounting firm is willing to sign off on it. This method was very popular with bankers. Turned out to be not so good for everyone else during the thrift crisis in the 80s.
Current methods are usually based on a mark-to-market approach. That is, the asset is worth what you could sell it for today. Or, if there's no liquid market for an asset, a valuation of similar assets.
This is where the subprime mortgage market comes into play. Investments based on subprime loans are now worth next to zero. If you had invested 100,000 out of your million in these assets, your capital is now $900,000 rather than $1,000,000.
Which means you are only allowed to loan out $9 million rather than $10.
And you've already loaned out that other $1 million.
So you can't extend any more credit until you've collected back $1 million dollars from people you've loaned it to, or you raise another $100,000 in assets. Those additional required assets are why the government is pumping cash into the banks in an attempt to unfreeze the credit market.
I'm having Junior High School flashbacks. Sparkles and Rainbows and Unicorns, oh my!
Zeynef @ 2
Also there is the total concentration and peace that descends upon one when making something intricate and concrete---if you have one (1) item to completely focus on, and the stress and worries of the outside world may diminish in your mind. I know I actively seek that peace when I work on a calligraphy project.
That's one of the things that is so seductive about programming. Entering that state of flow for long periods of time is more than a bit addictive. It's what keeps me going, even when the project is going badly, and the bugs seem to be winning. As Fred Brooks said, "He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination."
And then one interruption at the wrong time, and the whole construct comes crashing down. Or you leave off a key part of the incantation, and you get eaten by a Grue.
Current making and learning to make things projects are:
new programming languages (Haskell and Erlang)
working through Turing's work with the help of Charles Petzold's book, The Annotated Turing.
learning Country Blues Guitar
braiding leather
sourdough (shoggoth) bread
cleaning and replacing stuff for brewing season, and designing a new scotch ale recipe
James D. Macdonald @ 27
He did manage to pick an excellent example of the state of American innovation in the wireless telecom market.
If you want to congratulate the makers of the Blackberry, here's their contact information:
Research In Motion
295 Phillip Street
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada N2L 3W8
Scraps @ 39
She helps bring in the Christian right vote. Her name has been floated a number of times from the evangelical base. And, since she's also a woman, she's a two-fer.
In addition, her lack of national exposure is an asset. At least once the decision was made to give the VP nomination to someone from the X-tian right, it became an asset. She doesn't have a record that actively scares people.
The Cheney wing of the party will return to their normal position of having an unelected advisor running things. Cheney's visibility is unusual.
R. M. Koske @97 / Caoline @96
There's an old joke, "Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are."
Also relevant is Neal Stephenson's _In the beginning ... was the command line_ ( http://adam.shand.net/iki/library/in_the_beginning_was_the_command_line/ or http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html ) which attempts to explain why some of the things that appear to be user experience bugs are actually features.
Fragano @ 145
What's terribly depressing is that budmilloors is technically very challenging. It's not easy to brew something that tasteless, and faults that are undetectable in real beer come through very clearly. Not only that, the brewers have to start with agricultural products that vary quite a bit in their characteristics from year to year and region to region, and still they must produce something that is excruciatingly consistent across time and space.
Such a waste of effort and talent. Not to mention 3800 years of western civilization.
My local pub does a good job with Guinness, so I tend to drink that there. Friends who don't drink draught stout think it's much heavier than it really is. A pint of Guinness is about 170 calories. More than a 'lite' beer, which would have about 130 to 150. But less than some other light colored beers, like Sam Adams.
:begin joke:
Auggie Busch, Peter Coors, and Arthur Guinness meet at a beer conference, and go to lunch together. When the waitress asks them what they're wanting to drink, Busch of course asks for a Budweiser, and Coors, of course has a Coors. Guinness asks for a Coke.
"Why aren't you having a pint of Guinness," they ask him?
"Well, I didn't want to be the only one having beer with lunch."
:end joke:
Jason B @ 109 - Yes, some breweries do use a different strain to bottle condition. Not so much for theft prevention, but because the strain they use isn't very alcohol tolerant. At least that's my understanding.
Hefeweizen's in particular seem to be dosed with a different yeast. But I've had friends who did brewery tours, and they came back with bottles of yeast slurry. Professional courtesy, to some extent. There's a long tradition of sharing yeasts between brewers. As a practical matter, before modern microbiological techniques, it was a good way of 'backing up' your yeast, in case your brewery got an infection or aggressive, unwanted, mutation.
At the turn of the 19th century, Belgium had a brewery for about every 2000 people. The population has gone up, and the number of breweries has gone down, and now they are at about 1/80,000. For comparison, the U.S. is 1/210,000. (Spain is 1/1,8000,000 - shudder)
Niel @ 59 - Wikipedia. Well. Champagne yeast is fairly alcohol tolerant, and used to be used by homebrewers when brewing high gravity beers, because there were very few alcohol tolerant brewing yeasts available. That's changed in the last, oh, 20 years.
The yeast used to make Chimay is quite alcohol tolerant, and can be cultured fairly easily from the sediment in the bottle. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the yeast isn't usable for anything other than Trappist style beers, as it throws off strong phenolic tastes.
Sierra Nevada's yeast is also very alcohol tolerant, and has a very neutral flavor profile. It's also very stable, and vigorous, and so it tends to take over a brewery. Before it was at SN, it was the yeast used to make the original Ballantine India Pale Ale.
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| 2009 | 10 |
| 2008 | 20 |
| 2007 | 27 |
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