Not sure how long you've lived there but the mall I think you're referring to (utc) was remodeled not long ago. The clientele in the area has gotten more upscale and the re-design and new stores (upscale restaurants, tesla, etc) reflects on this. Fwiw based on trying to go there for lunch, foot traffic has never been better.
Bay Trail atom is already competitive with tablet-focused ARM. I've got a Samsung 500T that runs "real" windows. It weighs as much as an iPad and has ~10 hour run time, same as the iPad. The whole microarchitecture thing is less of an issue for power consumption and performance than most people think.
Having actually worked with NSA programmers, I can tell you that while they tend to be absolutely brilliant, that doesn't necessarily make them any better at making things "easy to use", "intuitive" or even necessarily "good".
When it comes to algorithm design, reverse engineering, or crypto, I know exactly who to call when I need help. When it comes to a layout that works, or in many cases, even just coding up some fairly simple HTML with CSS, my NSA buddies aren't in the top 50 of people I'd call.
Yes, they're brilliant. The best of them though, produce websites (if they're capable of coding on the web) that look more like stallman.org than anything like healthcare.org.
Those are two things that don't have anything to do with each other. You seem to think that every single web service and database works the exact same way.
Not that I'd hire the NSA folks per se, but I'd imagine that the NSA's programmers are full time employees. One thing that might dramatically improve government IT in general is to shift more of it in-house rather than relying on contractors.
We don't hear much about it, but the NSA has had some stunning IT failures. Development (heck, they can't open their Utah site because of severe, ruin $100K of hardware each time, power glitches), something major above their collection system(s) failed hard once for more than a few days ... and since they're the No Such Agency, we only hear about some of the very worst ones, I'm sure.
Flip side is, doing this in the black budget does allow them to avoid some of the usual government contracting insanities. While that's no gaurentee of success, e.g. look at the NRO's recent expensive stumbles, from the dozen years I spent Inside the Beltway I've gotten a strong impression the intelligence community does a generally much better job than run of the mill open Federal IT.
Most NIMBYs don't want to see more development. Not to put words in potatolicious' mouth (err, keyboard), but I think we both want to see more affordable housing (and therefore more density) in Seattle's core.
Algorithms by S. Dasgupta, C.H. Papadimitriou, and U.V. Vazirani looks really promising as an introductory algorithms textbook. I wonder if anyone has experience using it in class?
We used this in our upper-division intro to algorithms course. Solid book, goes over important algorithms while remaining short and concise, A+ would read again.
Barely. IIRC it's 0 points if blank, -0.25 if wrong, so if you eliminate 1 choice it's worth it to guess. I'd like to see it be -5 points if wrong, since this is more reflective of the real world. When I entered the industry as an electrical engineer this was a difficult transition for me. In school, you're incentivized to guess and BS. But in the real world, the penalty for being wrong is HUGE.
> in the real world, the penalty for being wrong is HUGE
In some situations (committing an integrated circuit design to manufacture probably being one), the cost of being wrong is pretty big.
Other situations where there's a tight feedback loop and you can make/propagate changes quickly (say, most web app software development), it's less so.
True. But generally the cost of guessing and doing something wrong is much higher than saying "I don't know" and asking someone else or Googling the result. School, through homeworks and especially exams, trains us to do our best without outside help. I would argue that this behavior is maladaptive to engineering in the real world.
