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I know about it, but I'm guessing it's quite expensive. The certainly make it difficult to figure out pricing (or even just get the trial).

It's hard to say. It's very much like a spreadsheet, but has additional features. One of the ideas from it is now in Excel as pivot tables, but it's done much better in Improv.

The product I miss most is Lotus Improv. I used it on NeXT all the time. There's no mainstream product that's quite like it.

I tried Pepper back then and found the same issues you had. In the end, I usually end up with BBEdit. It's fast, the developers are responsive and keep it up to date and it handles the languages I'm interested in fairly well (but they could be better). I keep Atom up to date and I've been looking at VS Code, but both are kind of slow. I have a TextMate license, but I stopped using it after the continued delays on 2.0. The 2.0 betas are actually decent, but I tend to stick with BBEdit. I tried Sublime Text, but got very put off by the need to configure preferences with a text file.

No, Eddie is software that actually is written by a former Be developer. I think he originally wrote it for BeOS and has since ported it to OS X and he has an older Linux port as well. It has nothing to do with Pepper.

There used to be an OS X editor called Pepper that was basically PE for OS X. I don't think it's still around. I can't find it except in very old references.

There is Eddie [1], which is based on a BeOS editor and is written by a former Be employee. He's very responsive to feedback. I worked with him in improving its LaTeX support.

[1] http://www.el34.com

It might be some time before it's abstracted enough. For example, there's software packages for Finite Element Analysis, but if you don't know the underlying math, you can't do anything more complicated than the basics. Plus, if there's a problem without that knowledge you can't really debug it. I'm guessing ML will be like that for a while. If you want to do something simple using a package is fine, but as soon as something goes wrong you'll need that knowledge to figure out what's happening.

For example, for a while there's been work on doing sentiment analysis using machine learning and they typically train them on a data set of movie reviews. It turns out that as soon as you apply that trained system to anything other than movie reviews the actual results are quite poor, but you might not catch it.

People are pretty happy with Alexa, but I've heard it's pretty strict in how you say things. The 3rd party extensions require you to ask things with specific phrases which makes things a lot easier to handle, but it's harder for the user.

The post about Apple's Photos I found linked on Six Colours, but it's on Macworld [1]. In it, he searches for a zebra and it gave his few photos that he took of zebras at the zoo. So, that worked well, but the search for dogs made the same mistake as you state Google Photos made (cats mistaken for dogs). So, I think that Apple's Photos is probably somewhat close to Google Photos, but maybe not quite as good. It's not exactly Google running circles around it.

[1] http://www.macworld.com/article/3122966/macs/6-photos-featur...

True, but in my co-op (one 6 story building and one 3 story building) we get a tax break because we handle our own garbage. It's far less than our garbage bill, but it helps. I know because a) I used to be the co-op treasurer and b) we actually list it as a line item on our budget so everybody in the co-op can see it if they look.

Not in CS, it was in Systems Design Engineering. My Ph.D. was more mechanical than anything. My Master's had a big CS component as I was affiliated with the computer graphics lab (my Master's co-supervisor was part of the lab until he retired to look after his wife). I did most of the numerical CS courses and all the CS computer graphics courses.

There's not much call for my particular skill set, unfortunately. I interviewed for a position in Google X, but it was a very strange interview and I didn't get past that, despite giving a very thorough answer for the pre-interview problem they posed.

Alexa is basically an audio command line. You have to say things specifically. Plus, Alexa is pretty restrictive in that it only needs to handle English (and American English at that). It also has a limited set of things it can do since it's only audio.

With Siri you can actually mix languages. So you can ask in French about an English film title. I don't know how good Alexa is about these kinds of things. Considering that it's only for the US, I can't know.

I don't know if Google Photos is running circles around Photos. I know a new version just came out with macOS Sierra. I just read an article today over on Six Colours that praised its search capabilities. I don't use Google Photos or Apple's. I haven't had a camera in years and only got my first cell phone this year (I was given an iPhone 5).

I completely rule Alexa out from these kinds of discussions until Amazon bothers to sell it elsewhere. It's been a consistent issue with Amazon. It took several years before we got the Kindle in Canada, we were promised Amazon's MP3 store, but we're still waiting. Our Amazon Prime only covers shipping, not any of the books or video.

Siri does what I need it to do on my phone, but I don't really ask for much. I mainly use it for timers and creating appointments. Those have all worked perfectly, even when I'm standing right next to my kitchen fan or the speakers of my stereo.

In Canada, it's generally the case that your taxes go to pick up the garbage. They might hire a company to do it, but it's usually the municipal government that pays. I'm living in a co-op and we get a tax break since we contract ours separately. Even if it's a commercial paid service, how many companies are going to do that in a dying community?

I do know. I've been trying to find a job and I have an Engineering Ph.D. from University of Waterloo which is considered one of the best in the country. Companies in the US often hire from UW (Microsoft has traditionally been a big hirer), but I'm overqualified in one sense, but I don't have the work experience people want.

I have a friend who suffered from Crohn's (he had surgery and he's better), but he managed it with diet. I have IBS and my GI specialist recommended specific diet changes (along with a referral to a dietician) as well as drugs.

My parents live about a half hour from Belleville which itself has decent Internet. But, where they are they're basically stuck with cellular. They have a WiFi-Cellular modem that they use. Unfortunately, they have a tiny data cap for people who would use it as their main Internet service. I think they upped it to 10GB.

There's possibly a couple of other cities. Kitchener-Waterloo (which is close enough to Toronto) and maybe Calgary. KW has the University of Waterloo which has spawned a number of companies including Blackberry, although SF (and Microsoft in Seattle) have been luring people south. Google did start an office here, though.

I've lived in Ottawa and it's big selling point for me is the various national museums. I used to love going to the National Art Gallery simply because of its architecture, but I did see an excellent retrospective on Escher (including a presentation by a guy who tried to take picture of places where Escher did drawings of) and one on Renoir's portraits. Skating on the canal is pretty big in the winter in Ottawa. A friend of mine commutes to work by skating on it. You're right in that it's not as busy as London or DC, though. I consider that a plus, but that's just me.

Montreal is beautiful, but you'd better learn to at least attempt French as you'll be treated better by the shops and restaurants for it. Other pluses are: the jazz festival, the comedy festival, and the F1 race. My sister and her family moved there in January as their jobs in Toronto were being phased out.

Social services like health care, I'd assume.

Would you be seriously fine with the nearest grocery store being an hour away (over deteriorating roads) and it possibly being 3x as expensive? Plus, what are you going to do about garbage? People forget that is also a social service.

There's been other proposed notations, but they all have their own shortcomings. Any alternative would have to be much better than the standard one, otherwise nobody would bother to retrain to use it.

The problem with this blog post is that it's clear that there's a lot they don't understand but they still criticize without finding out the why (which many commenters here have provided those answers).

I think the blog post could be much better written without the uniformed commentary as there's some things that are good about it. It's just that the other parts puts some people off from recommending it.

But, they could have it encrypted except when you explicitly message the assistant. They can also get the full text of the conversation on-device and do the machine learning on it. After all, Apple is doing it for photos, so text should be easier.

The external examiner should allow that to happen, if they're doing their job. The whole point of the external examiner is so professors can't just collude to pass people.

I've seen a number of things happen during a defence, but not this. The worst was seeing two professors (one of whom was the candidate's supervisor) on the committee argue with each other while the candidate just had to watch. It took a lot of work for the chair to reign them in. I think it was difficult for the chair because they were arguing in German and the chair didn't speak it since he wasn't from the German department (my friend was getting her Ph.D. in German literature).

Most of my colleagues did this too. I know I've done it with my supervisor. It's just easier when you're trying to write out something complex and everyone who you're writing to knows how to read it without difficulty.

I've known students who defended their thesis and were told to do major revisions. Typically, it's because their thesis supervisor didn't do their job properly as they should know not to send that student to defend.

You're right in that they weed Ph.D. students out earlier, during their comprehensive exam. How it's done varies from department to department and university to university. My comprehensive was a lengthy oral exam by my committee with two rounds of questions. The first on background and the second on the written thesis proposal I submitted. I went for 3.5 hours straight, basically until the committee wanted lunch.

Equating a research group to a startup isn't a bad analogy. One of the professors in my department basically uses his students to do research for his company. He even makes them sign over the IP rights to him. Other professors have a continuing line of research across a number of students. Even my Ph.D. thesis was the latest in a number of theses on the same topic, each getting progressively more advanced. My thesis basically finished that line, with other related ones opening up as a result.

I don't use BT Sync because if I'm on my local university network they block BitTorrent. It's not a big deal since I've graduated, but I still go there and use the library and meet with people so it would be inconvenient.

Upgrading your privileges is against sandboxing rules, so no it can't be sandboxed.

It's a standard OS X authentication API. The overview of the authorization stuff is discussed in:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Securi...

If you look under "Authorization Services Tasks" you'll see there's details about calling a privileged installer.

I use it, but there's no iOS solution so I can't use it for a number of things.

The AirPods are independent of one another, but they fit into one case to charge. So, the case charges both the AirPods at the same time. If you want to charge the case, you use Lightning to charge it. But, the case is good for 24 hours of charge on the AirPods. Whether that is 24 hours total (so 12 hours each), or 24 hours for both I don't know.

Those have a pretty short battery life. They're 1.6 hours for "audio streaming" which I take to mean Bluetooth as the longer life is only for when you download songs to the earbuds. Then, the case recharges up to 2 times, so 4.8 hours total. Even if you assume Apple's 24 hours is a total charge split across both buds, you get 17 hours for Apple's (assuming the case is charged up while you're using the AirPods, possibly only 12 otherwise).

If you're just looking at fit, a few minutes is enough to test them. They were tested in the demo area after the event. Sound quality given the noise in the demo area is one thing you wouldn't really be able to know, however.

I'm unlikely to get a new phone any time soon as my iPhone 5 is fine (aside from battery life), but I am interested in the AirPods, if I could actually know how well they fit.

I hadn't heard about the pairing process for non-Apple hardware. To be honest, I wasn't interested because the EarPods don't fit in my ear well, but I've heard that the AirPods fit better. There was an article on Macworld's site (I think it was there) by someone who had issues with the EarPod fit, but couldn't dislodge the AirPods even when headbanging.