danio's comments

I would prefer the money to go to http://www.wikinfo.org at https://secure.ibiblio.org/gift/ because:

* Original Research - Wikipedia does not allow any. Wikinfo's solution: Allow original research with editor registration.

* Wikipedia only allows certain types of information, as it is purely an encyclopedia. Wikinfo's solution: All types of information are allowed

They state that they have 47 staff. 22 tech is fair enough as you say there is an operational overhead. However I don't see why they are paying for programming work required when the majority of that can be done by open source volunteers.

10 people are described as 'other program': I'm guessing this means "Support strategic volunteer work" and "Bootstrap community programs in key geographies". But why not just let the site grow organically? Why do they have to spend time encouraging people to be editors? The volunteer model has worked so well in the past that it seems to me that the motivation behind this is purely expansionism.

5 members of staff for fundraising: again why act like a corporation instead of letting people donate if they think the site is valuable.

There is also $1.8M spent on external contractors: what for?

$380,000 on travel works out at $8000 per person. That's a lot to get to wikimania and 3 nights in a hotel.

Overall it is a bit galling to me that they have built the site on data contributed by us, it is edited by us and now they want money from us at the same time becoming more and more dictatorial over the type of content that may be submitted and unresponsive to users complaints.

I think you need a link there to http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ : thought you just meant it wasn't readable! Readability is great: before that I was just copy & pasting to a text editor...

I predict a rise in crossbow sales in the near future

A lesson on logic from somebody who equates "It's often the foolhardy and the ignorant that tackle problems that are supposedly impossible. And sometimes end up succeeding" to "It is often the ignorant who succeeds" seems ironic to put it mildly.

It seems to me that data going over a publicly accessible network that is designed to let that data go by whatever route is necessary has been routed over a part of that network.

How is that a problem? You cannot expect your internet data to be private: the nature of the beast is that it will be public. Anything sensitive must be encrypted in such a way that by the time the encryption is broken by your enemy (considering the likely resources they have) the data is no longer useful.

Did I miss something?

That just shows an empty white box for me (FF 3.6).

The right arrow button to look at the different links has poor discoverability. The first link is shown twice on the main page, and there's no real indication that there are any more links. [edit: slowness was caused by twitter being open in another tab!]

Licorize is an interesting idea, but I feel needs more work before being unleashed on the general public.

unfortunately not on python 2.4, which is the version we have on our production servers (2 yr old Linux)

Is there much benefit to

    fact = lambda n: _if (n <= 1) (1) (lambda: n * fact(n-1))

over

    def fact(n):
        if (n <= 1):
            return 1
        else:
            return n * fact(n-1)

1 line vs 5 lines doesn't seem like an advantage to me when it takes pretty much the same amount of time to read and understand the complicated 1 liner.

Is there more optimisation possible?

"available to buy in over 30 countries" ... leads to ...

"The page you asked for does not exist You may have followed an out-dated link, or there may be an error in our service. We apologize for the inconvenience."

Whoops.

Why just restrict the search to buy-now items? In my experience more of the esoteric stuff seems to go on straight auctions and buy-now is used mainly by commerical retailers.

The problem with teaching CS like that is that there is a huge disconnect when joining the workforce.

Most employers expect a CS graduate to understand version control, bug tracking systems, IDEs and the like.

Most CS departments think that such things are beneath them.

The concept of a weekend extra-curricular course to bridge the gap seems ideal to me. The only problem I see is funding it.

Glad that he bothered to follow up but disappointingly short on the details.

When I read the original I thought it was all good, apart from:

1. <<Possess strong written, verbal and interpersonal communication skills. If you can't tell the difference between "you're" and "your", your never going to be able to get you're points across to me.>> There are plenty of people out there who have correct grammar but terrible communication skills.

2. he seems to think that people are unable to type their e-mail address correctly and that they have not yet figured out how to copy and paste their e-mail address on web forms.

These seemed very arrogant to me and the anonymous psychologists comments in the follow-up re-inforce that.

All the POS card readers that I've seen (UK maybe it's different in US?) don't display insert card until the cashier has finished scanning the items and pressed total. On the occasions that I have tried putting the card in before the machine asks for it, the transaction usually ends up having to be redone.

One queue adds an overhead for the time it takes for the person at the front of the queue to notice a cashier is free and walk to that cashier. I have watched this system in action at the Post Office, Rail stations, and one supermarket and this overhead can be significant. One supermarket actually employs somebody at the head of the queue just to tell them which cashier to go to and when.

jfb - It also doesn't have any negative effect on "the geegaws sold in line" as they just put the "geegaw" displays along the side of the one queue. In fact it is better for the store in that respect as they can show more variety.

The best way I can think of to get rid of this overhead is to have a rule where each cashier has a queue depth 2 that is fed from a single queue. But how would you get people to stick to just 2 people? And it would be very annoying to be just behind a slow person.

In theory people should naturaly start moving forward when they notice that somebody is finishing up but at least in the Rail station and Post office the counter staff have a tendency to shut their counter without warning or start processing some other task before they are ready to serve the next person.

One queue is fairest. From your example if there is only one server then there is no difference between one queue/one queue per server.

Maybe the web designer of http://www.nissenbaums.com/ would be interested in the re-use of their images.

At on-screen viewing sizes of web-shared photos (currently <1MP) you are going to struggle to see the better image quality that an SLR can provide. With prints of 10x8" or larger you will start to notice lack of sharpness and chroma noise.

Yes I was thinking the world ended for Lisa in 1984 when Steve's skunk works project came to fruition.

The eye hurting background doesn't help