111 karma · joined September 2, 2013
If the story had been - 'Amazon to deploy motor bikes to deliver packages within 10 miles of their distribution centre' it'd have received a lot less attention.
Packages are routinely delivered quickly, accurately, securely and cheaply in urban areas. I do think Amazon are solving a problem that doesn't exist. Nice bit of PR though.
Can't wait to see one of these recreated next:
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/atomictoys/GilbertU238Lab...
As always it's about using the right tool for the job. Prolog is a great choice for many symbolic type problems. We use it as the basis of our knowledge representation and inference platform.
Prolog is often considered too slow for production use. Again this depends on how you're using it, use it for solving the right kind of problems and it's quick. Very quick. Using multithreaded SWI-Prolog and it's C++ foreign language interface we're able to reason over large data sets with hundreds of thousands of concepts very quickly indeed.
Another common misconception is that you need to be a logician with a background in formal logic to work with Prolog. You don't. You need to get your head round declarative programming, which can take a while if you're not used to it. It's worth the effort though, even just so you've got a new technique for your toolbox.
But in reality I'm sure this is just because I'm watching it more closely than I ever did before. I have no quantitive measure of how battery life has changed for me.
I suspect this is a common problem when you announce that an upgrade improves something like battery life. All of a sudden users start looking when they didn't really look before and report issues based on feelings.
Of course this doesn't apply so much for users who're now reporting 'service battery' warnings on new batteries...
I still see lots of developers writing documentation in things like Google Docs, especially business or customer focused documents - places where longer structured documentation is required.
There always seems to be more time than is necessary spent on style and layout when using these tools. Google docs doesn't even support creation of table of contents with page numbers.
Data managed in spreadsheets, layer upon layer of disconnected management, no engagement with users, very little willingness to understand software development. More spreadsheets...
Not sure how this would work in practise, or even if it'd be useful to be honest...
Other people want to come and do what we're doing? Well that's just great, it validates our market. We just need to make sure we're doing it better than you.
I think they'll be onto a winner when they've got their up coming Git access feature sorted out.