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tjl

414 karma · joined February 19, 2014

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tjl··on William Gibson’s cyberpunk stories show why Apple is getting rid of cords
Ah. But, you could easy say it's 5 then. iPhone, AirPods, Apple Watch, iPad, and MacBook. But, it's no different than if the AirPods were another pair of Bluetooth headphones, except Apple has a nice charging solution (and carrying case) for them.
tjl··on Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' row escalates
Facebook wants to be a place for news as well, with things like their "Instant Articles". It's a historically significant photo and was actually on the front page of the NY Times when it came out. So, would they censor a post from the NY Times if it had the same photo?
tjl··on William Gibson’s cyberpunk stories show why Apple is getting rid of cords
Yep, 2.5mm was the standard on phones that had a jack. There were also phones that used an adapter that went into the micro USB (or was it mini USB) port.
tjl··on William Gibson’s cyberpunk stories show why Apple is getting rid of cords
The iPhone, the AirPods, and what? A laptop, an iPad? The AirPods charge in the battery case (which is good for 24 hours of playback). The AirPods charge quite quickly in the battery case. I've heard that it's several hours for just 3 minutes of charge.
tjl··on William Gibson’s cyberpunk stories show why Apple is getting rid of cords
No 3.5mm jack goes back for years. It was only around the time of the iPhone 3G that it was standard in smartphones (I'm not saying that Apple caused it to become standard, it's just it that time frame). Earlier models of phones either didn't have one, or you needed an adapter. I think the first Android phone required an adapter.
tjl··on William Gibson’s cyberpunk stories show why Apple is getting rid of cords
The basic Apple dock also has a headphone jack. So, if you have one at your desk you can charge and listen at the same time. It's been this way for years.
tjl··on William Gibson’s cyberpunk stories show why Apple is getting rid of cords
The AirPods headphones are actually Bluetooth. It's just that they have their own chip to manage the headphones. That said, I'm not sure if there's any way to pair the AirPods with anything other than an Apple device. It may be possible, but the pairing is done using the AirPod case. While there are many cheaper Bluetooth headphones, the popular earbuds with a comparable battery life (6 hours) is the Jaybird X2 which is $149. That's the same price. So, it really comes down to features.

The existing Apple dock has had a headphone jack (and has for several years), so anyone who has an Apple dock doesn't have to worry about the charge and listening problem (at least at their desk). There's also a Belkin cable that's a Y cable for charging and audio (but that's an additional cost).

tjl··on How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain
You might want to try Taskpaper. It's a just a text file so you can edit it however you like. There's an OS X app that's excellent, but the iOS app has been removed. However, a number of the better text editors on iOS support it.
tjl··on Why GitHub Finally Abandoned Its Bossless Workplace
When I worked at Bell-Northern Research (and Nortel) they had two tracks for advancement. One was the managerial track where you were promoted from a technical staff to a manager, the other was the independent technical adviser. If you did the latter, you basically became a manager without any staff and you worked with the managers at your level to direct the products. There weren't many in my division, but there were some. I was unofficially one because my department manager left (after the rest of the members left) so I reported directly to the manager the next level up and sat in on the department managers' meetings.
tjl··on Why GitHub Finally Abandoned Its Bossless Workplace
Co-ops still have boards and often employees that report to the board (or another employee). There's a structure there, but they also tend to be smaller so the structure has less impact.

I was treasurer of my housing co-op and we had one full-time employee who reported to me and the board. That employee (the coordinator) hired contractors for maintenance, bookkeeping, as well as things like the laundry machines.

Even large co-ops (like clothing stores) have the members vote a board in that sets up the structure.

tjl··on Ursula K. Le Guin, “the emissary from Orsinia,” challenges expectations
I love The Left Hand of Darkness. That said, I'm not really a big fan of her Earthsea books.
tjl··on Is Spelling Reform, Ten Years Old, a Success? (1916)
I think a bigger problem than spelling is people using the wrong words. They'll use defiantly instead of definitely, heal instead of heel, too instead of to, and a number of similar mistakes.
tjl··on The Paradox of Doping in Mountain Climbing
I love Gore-Tex as a material. It's one of the few materials that has a negative Poisson ratio (when you stretch it the material expands in all directions, it doesn't narrow). My Ph.D. supervisor keeps a small sample of it to use for demonstrations to his Mechanics of Deformable Solids course. Only man-made materials can exhibit this property.
tjl··on Apple Plans iPhone for Japan With Tap-to-Pay for Subways
My best guess is that the NFC chip is locked for security and that it's highly linked to the secure enclave. Maybe it's discussed in the iOS Security document? I haven't checked.

Apple has a habit of introducing something very locked down and slowly adding features and opening up. We've been seeing this particularly in extensions recently and we've finally got some Siri support, if only in specific domains.

tjl··on Instapaper is joining Pinterest
I know that traditionally Instapaper basically required you to load the page at least once first so you'd get all the ads then. But since then there's APIs that bookmark directly to it. My guess is that it isn't used enough for Web sites to bother.

I view it as a specialized browser view, although the cloud bookmarking doesn't fit with that. I use Safari's reading view on pages all the time as they're too visually busy for the screen on my iPhone 5.

tjl··on EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers
As others have said it's the drug company itself, not an insurance company. The patent they had on the injector has expired so others have tried and failed to bring alternatives to market. Unlike drugs, each medical device has to be vetted by the FDA. Generic drugs can get quicker to market just by showing that they're equivalent to the already approved drug. Devices can't do that.

One of the alternatives was potentially better as they had additional features, but there were problems with the injector itself and it was recalled. That's what other companies have to contend with. It's bad if the injector fails to deliver the dosage and a person dies.

So, people making a 3D printed alternative can't really ensure that the injector works reliably without a lot of work.

tjl··on How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools
I love DEVONthink Pro. I have the Pro Office version. I especially love the "See Also" feature as that will suggest other documents to look at when you're hunting through your references.
tjl··on How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools
For code samples I prefer to have them in separate files and include them so it's just one command that imports them and formats them.

I wrote both my Master's and Ph.D. theses in LaTeX and found it much better than the alternatives. With Markdown I'd be resorting to falling back on LaTeX anyway and many of the additional Markdown features weren't available when I wrote them.

I had a predefined document class for my Master's but the university changed the guidelines by the time of my Ph.D. so I used the Memoir document class and that had a lot of flexibility and I didn't have to include many other packages to format things. I basically set up the format once at the beginning, checked against the guidelines once at the end and that was it.

tjl··on NASA Systems Engineering Handbook (2008) [pdf]
Yes, I did. In fact, if you're a recent grad you probably had me as your TA at some point as I was a TA throughout most of my grad school and did core courses.
tjl··on NASA Systems Engineering Handbook (2008) [pdf]
I didn't know about INCOSE or IISE, so thanks. I've been a member of ASME since I was presenting at their conferences and submitting to their journals as a grad student given the material was focused on mechanical (and textile) engineering. I didn't look for any dedicated systems organizations.

Product Management is what most of our graduates end up doing, but they're usually doing it in software jobs. That said, we have a number of patent and IP lawyers come out of our program and a lot of people go into medicine or biomedical. The latter since we have a dedicated biomedical option as we have a number of faculty in that area.

tjl··on NASA Systems Engineering Handbook (2008) [pdf]
I'm a systems design engineer so there was no way I'd use Excel for ODE solving unless I had no other choice. Matlab and Maple are the two languages I know best, but I'd also consider Fortran, Octave, Python, or Scilab for something like that, with C++ probably last (C++ for numerics is a pain since you have to convert between different packages for basic types like matrices and vectors). I'd probably also consider Julia, but I'm not that familiar with it yet. I had hopes for Fortress, but that died a quick death.

I've been a part of the SymPy team for several years including mentoring GSoC for two of those years.

The problem with SageMath is that you still have to convince people who are familiar with Excel to learn a new environment. Part of the reason why Excel is taught to the undergrads in that civil engineering program is that they use it in their co-op jobs. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle since they don't learn any alternative as students so they go with what they know in their jobs.

tjl··on NASA Systems Engineering Handbook (2008) [pdf]
The civil engineering department at my university doesn't have any dedicated programming or numerical analysis course. So, they're taught to use Excel. I took a structural dynamics grad course from them and the instructor explained how to do an explicit ODE solution using Excel. I was horrified. I just asked if I could use Matlab and the prof said yes. The prof just used Excel because that's all the undergrads (and therefore the new grad students) knew.
tjl··on NASA Systems Engineering Handbook (2008) [pdf]
That's what most software people think my "systems design engineering" degrees are about, but my program fits the NASA definition much better. It's quite frustrating.
tjl··on NASA Systems Engineering Handbook (2008) [pdf]
I graduated from a "systems design engineering" program. In it, we had courses in human factors, mechanical engineering, electrical/computer engineering, graph theory, software development, and you could branch out from there as you wanted.

Unfortunately, people seem to think that it means I'm a software developer, in IT, or something along those lines. It's quite unfortunate as both my Master's and Ph.D. were more towards mechanical engineering.

tjl··on Being vegan isn’t as good for humanity as you think
Except you can use perennial sunflower which is an oilseed crop for crop rotation.
tjl··on “CPUs are optimized for video games”
That's great. It's been a while since I did a lot of simulations (which used double precision) so I didn't know that had changed.

I still wouldn't say that they're highly optimized, though.

tjl··on “CPUs are optimized for video games”
They're optimized for single-precision linear algebra. If you need double-precision all those optimizations go out the window and you're left on your own.
tjl··on Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum
It may be that Agile developed in reaction to Waterfall, but that just says to me that the creators didn't look at all the other methodologies out there.
tjl··on Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum
There's a lot of development methodologies and if you actually think this you probably haven't seen many of the others.

It regularly seems to me that people think that there's Agile/Scrum and there's Waterfall and that's it. The first year engineering design course (and the first year programming course) in my department cover a number of different approaches.

tjl··on De La Soul’s Legacy Is Trapped in Digital Limbo
I downloaded their albums when they gave them away. Some of the tracks are truly excellent.
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