me2i81

Adobe went through a period where they laid people off every November. They seemed quite addicted to it.

The most common error I've seen in this area is that most GIS systems use (Lat, Lng) but most systems written by non-GIS people use (Lng, Lat), which they think of as (x, y).

In my first job I used Ingres/Quel. Probably because of that, I still find SQL hideous. Quel was a lot more orthogonal and clean, but by now SQL has so many more features that they're not really comparable. The first version of Ingres ran on a PDP-11/70, and the different components (parser, query optimizer, query executor, etc.) ran in separate processes connected via pipes (this was pre-socket Berkeley Unix) because each process could only be 64K 16-bit words. It was hideously slow--ran a lot faster once it was ported to the VAX and everything could run in one process. INGRES originally stood for something like Interactive Graphics Retrieval System, IIRC because the original funding agency wanted a graphics database. Stonebraker wanted to build a relational DBMS so he just went ahead and did it, but gave it a grant-compliant name and wrote some bullshit about graphics to make the funding agency happy.

That used to be his house. The construction technique was interesting: make a pile of dirt, pour/spread concrete over it. When the concrete cures dig out the dirt.

Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals by John Day. There's not a lot of criticism of technology at this level.

I have been using 39dollarglasses for quite a few years, good service, and I've gotten quite a few unsolicited compliments on the frames.

The maximum Pell grant plus the maximum Stafford loan will not even cover UC tuition, let alone housing or other expenses.

An instructor told me around 1977 that there was not going to be much need for programmers in the future, because every piece of software that was needed had already been written.

Take a look at The Garbage Collection Handbook by Jones et. al. ISBN-13 is 978-1420082791.

Right, so you get an effective rate of 1.2% of FMV for class 1, 5.8% of FMV for class 2. So the rate is just a bit higher than California for class 1, which might explain why brownstones are so expensive in NYC relative to larger buildings.

I've had attempted scams at the Rome central train station at least three times. "Meter is broken."

I have Cree recessed modules in my kitchen, and they're fine when not dimmed. They don't change color temperature when they dim, which incandescents do.

Yeah, there are fluorescent lights with very high CRIs (for example those in professional light booths) but they cost more because of the phosphor sets.

Early lute music was mostly written in tablature FWIW. A lot of the renaissance repertoire is still published that way. It uses letters rather than numbers to represent the frets, which takes getting used to, and puts separate timing marks above the staff.

Most imaging for offset printing is done in PostScript, which can render EPS directly, so there's no format conversion. For web publishing that's not the case, and either is probably fine depending on the workflow.

I assume there are property taxes (and capital gain taxes?) in Boston...

This makes no sense as a comparison. All of the top 10 schools get many more applications than they have spaces, and that's true of many of the "party" schools as well.

Depends how you define "working", I guess. There are at least a couple of research prototypes, ProtoRINA and IRATI, neither of which are anywhere near production quality, but they do exist.

Six characters! Luxury. I worked on a system where we only had five.

Oberon is an already-built system designed by Niklaus Wirth, one of the giants of the field. The goal of Elements of Computing Systems is to have you build a more limited but still functional system yourself, so get busy!

The point is that water falls from the sky, in varying amounts, every year, and California has a huge amount of infrastructure to collect and use it, and a bunch of people who manage it. If agriculture and ranching stopped in California there would be nothing to do with 2/3s of that water (i.e. about twice annual domestic/commercial use), even in drought years, once the reservoirs and aquifers filled up again. It would end up in the ocean. If the western mega-drought that some people are talking about happens, then things would be different.

Sure, there is huge water infrastructure with dams, canals, pumps, etc., but the principle is the same: water that used to flow to the ocean gets diverted for other use. Is the allocation between ag and urban/commercial use the correct one? Hell if I know.

The battles over water rights have been going on in the west for at least a century, so I'm not all that optimistic that you're going to radically change how it works. But I still don't see what you're hoping to accomplish with this talk of "farming in the desert" as folly. What would you possibly do with the 30+ million acre feet that currently goes to agriculture? More golf courses?

It is helpful to look at how water is actually used in CA. I thought this blog post was a decent attempt: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-do...

Yeah, we have a common government that sometimes builds things, which is maybe more efficient than farmers shooting at each other over who diverted the river. Water rights are considered property, and you can't just go take them without recompense. But really, what are you after? California is going to use the collected water it has allocated for agriculture for that purpose, and the only thing you're going to accomplish by increasing what farmers pay for water is change the water usage patterns, so you'll replace a lot of alfalfa and rice with more almonds, pistachios, and wine grapes. Is that good or bad? I don't know.

People have been growing food in dry valleys with rivers that bring water down from the mountains since the dawn of civilization. California is no exception. Calling it "unsustainable" in the context of agriculture is a bit simplistic. When less snow falls in the mountains, water deliveries to agriculture gets reduced, and some acreage goes fallow. "Market rate" sounds easy but is a bit of a red herring in this context. If you're a farmer contracted to get a certain share of a water system (as farmers are, in byzantine agreements that were set up decades ago and could probably only be unwound via acts of U.S. Congress and probably years of litigation) you take what you get, and then you have to buy more at market rate. If you grow nut trees, that's what you do both because the crop can still be profitable and because it costs you tens of thousands/acre if the trees die. If you grow alfalfa, you might just wait until next year.

If the user enters the bottom of the ocean as their destination, it would be bad for a self-driving car to take them there. "The user is an idiot and so we killed him" is not going to be such a great defense in court...

I have a Gaggia full-auto and use it multiple times a day. The first one I bought lasted 10 years before I replaced it and pulled something like 30,000 shots. (Yes, that's an average of 8 shots/day, but I use two shots per cafe latte in the morning, and there are three coffee drinkers in the house). It makes pretty good espresso, which is to say, better than probably 7/8ths of the cafes in Seattle. I used to have a manual espresso machine, and used it about a week before giving up on it. Some of us are just lazy.

I used a Nespresso machine when I was staying in France. The supermarket has a surprisingly large selection of pods--dozens to choose from. Gets expensive, but much cheaper than getting France's usual nasty excuse for an espresso at a cafe.

Because out-of-town visitors don't vote in local elections, so they are easily soaked.