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cygwin98on A Miserable Debt-Free Life

I remember a few years ago the saving interests in Australia was around 8% plus. That was risk-free rate, if you take a bit more risk on other financial products, 10% might be achievable. Not feasible for 20 years though.

cygwin98on Basic MCMC and Bayesian Statistics in BASIC

Just to point out: these days you don't have to use the dosbox/qbasic combo in order to have a qbasic-compatible environment. There is an open-source implementation called qb64 that is both qbasic compatible and cross-platform (Windows, Linux and Mac).

Also, in qbasic, line number is optional. With SUB and FUNCTION, you can actually do structured programming like what other programming languages such as Pascal does.

cygwin98on What China Has Been Building in the South China Sea

Nuclear missles or "90000 tons of diplomacy" are both certain kinds of deterrence, nothing more, nothing less. If US does not have those carrier combat groups, China wouldn't care either.

cygwin98on What China Has Been Building in the South China Sea

Cuban missile crisis in 1962?

cygwin98on Python is the new BASIC

You can still do QBasic though. There is an open-sourced implementation called QB64 [1]. QB64 is also cross-platform that can run on Windows/Linux/Mac/Android.

[1] http://www.qb64.net

cygwin98on Yahoo in Talks to Buy Foursquare

It is funny to see that the total amount Yahoo gained from all her other acquisitions put together is less than a fraction of the Alibaba deal.

cygwin98on Boston Dynamics' New Robot – Spot

Wow, amazing! Though it does seem a bit creepy to me, as the stories in old sci-fi novels, where a big corporation X built and operated a robot army taking over the governments and ruling the world, tend to become reality at a increasingly fast pace.

cygwin98on The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession

The Philippines?

cygwin98on Java SE 8 Date and Time

I thought for coding tests implementations are supposed to be done from scratch on. Or at least the guy who wrote the working parser should be on top of the list.

cygwin98on Java SE 8 Date and Time

2 people wrote a proper state machine driven parser that didn't work. 1 person wrote a proper state machine driven parser that worked.

You probably missed three really good candidates here.

cygwin98on Samsung could have bought Android first

Palm's Treo series were pretty good smartphones back then. Though some braindead CEOs split the company into one hardware and one software company, while neither had the sufficient resources to put a new generation of smartphone OS through.

cygwin98on China's Jade Rabbit lunar rover dies on moon

I haven't seen any trend of bashing China, unless of course reporting honestly is bashing.

Well, this is a bit subjective, in my book selective reporting that focuses on negativity is bashing.

I am all for more budgets for NASA. Quite frankly, I don't follow NASA's missions very often. For the past decade I did hear from time to time that NASA sent rovers to some planets. Meanwhile, I kept hearing the flip-flop stories about the water on Mars. It gave me impression that NASA either went hugely under-budget on their Mars' missions or they spread themselves too thin. That was my point (admittedly I may need to soften my tone in my comment). Not sure if NASA had a vision problem, in my opinion, it may have made more impact and (hopefully) got more funding if they narrowed down their scope of missions and obtained more decisive results.

cygwin98on China's Jade Rabbit lunar rover dies on moon

Not surprised. He has been bashing China for a while, which is the trending topic in the mainstream media anyway. Though I do wish some of the media agencies strike out of the group-thinking, and examine what NASA has been up to for the past decade, and what needs to be improved in terms of space exploration.

cygwin98on China's Jade Rabbit lunar rover dies on moon

The team is still working on it. There is hope still.

http://gbtimes.com/opinion/jade-rabbit-still-fighting-despit...

cygwin98on IBM layoffs strike first in India; workers describe as 'slaughter' and 'massive'

Big corps like IBM share surprisingly similar traits as an military army. The general in charge of the army commonly only deals with the grand strategies and communicates with a few of his high-rank colonels. He has no idea who is the most skilled soldier or lieutenant, or captain. To him, they are only a number, a faceless expendable resource. Throughout the long history of wars, a lot of times low level heroic soldiers managed to win some battles but the army still lost the war simply due to the stupidity of the general.

cygwin98on Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

How exactly is Dart dangerous? It's open source, unlike C#.

One nit to pick here: C# is open sourced, though the .NET framework is not. Anyway, let's focus our discussion on Dart.

Somehow I had an impression that GOOG might have a plan B that would push Dart to replace JS on the web and Java on the mobile and a walled-garden that unifies current ChromeAppStore and PlayStore. JS would be totally marginalized and obsoleted. I'm not a fan of JS, but throwing away the enormous efforts done for the past decade is too much a churn and waste for me to swallow. I could hopefully be totally wrong though.

cygwin98on Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

I think Bing is a lost battle. The real question is what can they do on Azure, and can they move people to a cloud-based Office suite.

Bing is actually doing surprisingly well, considering the team competes with probably the most successful department and the foundation of GOOG. IMHO it's likely one of very few successful strategic moves of MSFT in competitive markets. Without Bing, GOOG would pretty much print money and pour money on whatever futuristic projects they feel like. Oh, well, they're already doing these stunts, it would only get worse without Bing. Azure and Office-in-the-cloud alone cannot compete with freebies backed by big pockets.

Creating another browser that everyone needs to optimize their websites for separately - not so great.

I agree on the pains caused by browser fragmentation, but I do think it's still a good thing to have IE especially the new versions around. The recent move of GOOG pushing for Dart is a dangerous sign that GOOG is starting to flex its muscle and do whatever they want. Mozilla alone stands no chance in such a challenge, in a same sense they couldn't in a battle against MSFT about 2 decades ago.

cygwin98on Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

I would prefer a strong Microsoft that keeps improving Bing and its web/mobile advertisement branch, which can counter-balance GOOG on web/mobile sphere. A GOOG with almost infinite cash flow from Ads would be as bad as MSFT in 90s. It's already the case that nowadays GOOG has become increasingly more arrogant.

cygwin98on Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

Adobe is the monopoly in the desktop graphics tool market. Not sure why no VC targets it at this moment, which does seem like a slow dinosaur to attack on.

cygwin98on Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

His tone sounds like a project manager, well, maybe CEO as a role in big corps like MSFT is a glorified PM on a larger scale.

cygwin98on Oxfam: 85 richest people as wealthy as poorest half of the world

I was talking about money. I read a few years ago that Buffet was able to raise a huge amount of fund (equivalent to about 1million in today's money) when he was very young from a few of his dad's friends. Cann't recall the source at this moment.

cygwin98on Oxfam: 85 richest people as wealthy as poorest half of the world

His mother was then a board member of IBM, which was one of big factors of IBM's decision making over the choice of PC operating system.

cygwin98on Oxfam: 85 richest people as wealthy as poorest half of the world

Warren Buffet's dad was a member of U.S. House of Representatives, which was a huge advantage to have as an investor.

cygwin98on HP to Re-Enter Smartphone Market With “Phablets” in India

HP has no vision, otherwise, TouchPad and WebOS could have been huge now. They were way ahead of the time on Node.js/Javascript stuff.

cygwin98on Report: 47% of U.S. Jobs At Risk of Being Automated Out of Existence

On the referenced pdf[1], there are two professions related to us:

130 0.042 Software Developers, Applications

293 0.48 Computer Programmer

The former has 4% probability to lose to automation, while the later is 48%. What is the difference between the two?

[1] http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/fil...

cygwin98on Kalzumeus Software Year In Review 2013

Maybe I significantly underestimated the workload to implement such a feature, especially with good UX. I personally consider it a good feature to differentiate BCC from its competitors. Though I am not sure if you can say such a feature won't increase sales. I guess you may have done some market research on it, such as doing survey among users.

cygwin98on Kalzumeus Software Year In Review 2013

I agree with your point: BCC is a niche market.

Though I wonder if BCC even has achieved its potential. I was surprised by patio11's statement:

I’m sorry, Bingo Card Creator does not support using clip art. Have a nice day.

Maybe he was joking. Clip art seems to be a feature straightforward to implement, IMHO should have been part of the feature set to begin with.

cygwin98on Kalzumeus Software Year In Review 2013

Found an interesting comment from a guy called Fildo on patio11's blog:

Hmm,

that makes me wonder. 2013 was the first year I started selling my (desktop) software and I made a little more than you – without doing all the A/B testing and marketing dance. Makes me wonder if I should follow your path (originally I intended to do so) or if I should keep improving my product (adding more features).

The thing is that my software is not trivial and does some pretty complex things. Maybe that’s the difference? The retail price is about the same.

I’m pretty confused now.

cygwin98on Water seems to flow freely on Mars

Thanks. A surprisingly fun read. It does get me interested in Venus, which is like a twin of Earth except the hellish atmosphere.

cygwin98on Water seems to flow freely on Mars

Thanks. Fixed.