Why hadn't they had a video chat and let the two old friends see each other before they could meet in person? Their network speed looks good enough for FaceTime or Google Hangouts.
Who are GNU's competitors? I don't see one. If all you want to do is charity work, you may not need to borrow money from investors. But if you need to build something fast/good enough to compete with fierce competitors, you do need the money. If you don't, your competitors will.
"Go was designed to help write big programs, written and maintained by big teams."
If this is true, isn't it obvious why? Small projects do not need Go, while big teams with big projects will always be extremely slow to adopt anything new.
It's only 12 years into the 21st century and you already know what the sexiest job of the whole century is. What's your prediction in 1912? Journalism these days.
Why not? Unless you limit yourself to the domain of the set of rational numbers. Enlarge the domain by adding in the magic number "5^(1/2)", and from an algebra standpoint there is no difference between solving X(X+1)=6 and X(X+1)=1. Well technically there is indeed a slight difference: in the case of X^(X+1)=6 the roots live in the same domain with the coefficients, while in the case of X^(X+1)=1 the roots can only be find in a larger domain where new kinds of numbers are included.
You factor a complex polynomial to decompose it into the product of a set of simpler polynomials. You want to do this because a) you know all polynomials can be factored in this way, b) you already know how to find the roots of each of these simpler polynomials and c) surprisingly, any one of the roots of these simpler polynomials just "happens" to also be a root of the complex polynomial.
This works because just as in functional programming, where (in most cases) functions are just functions of functions, polynomials are really just (simpler) polynomials of (simpler) polynomials. It's a tower of turtles, all the way down to the simplest, linear polynomials. The factoring is just a simple way to reverse engineer the internal structure of a complex polynomial by going backward into its building process.
I'm trying to make things complicated here, in the hope of showing a tiny bit of the deeper theory behind high school algebra. There is a very beautiful theory called Galois theory behind all the polynomial stuff. Take some time to read and you'll love it.
LaTeX=TeX+some macroes+some fonts. Make a Web service backend for kpathsea, then you can ship a single native TeX binary, and download fonts, format, macroes and other support files from the Web service on demand, cache them on your iPhone/iPad. Over the years the whole TeX ecosystem has developed into a huge, bloated mess (ever noted the size of latest TeX Live release?) and most users only use (and understand) a tiny part of it, and there is always something broken unless you install the full distribution. I actually miss the simplicity of those old DOS ports such as EmTeX. I used to conciously choose to run a DOS TeX (compiled with Turbo Pascal from the Tangle'd original WEB source) in my OS's DOS emulator. It's simple, fast and beautiful, unlike those modern monstrosities. The whole post-Web2C TeX world is just an ugly hack. I wish someone could go back to the root of Knuth's original WEB distribution and make a minimal TeX, which could then be relatively easily ported to major mobile platforms. If you must stick with the bloat ware way, at least hide its ugly butt in the cloud.
It's 6AM here and I'm typing this longer than necessary comment when my girlfriend is sleeping besides me. It's OK because I'm typing this on my iPhone's touch screen with sounds turned off. If nothing else, that could be one excuse to port TeX to touch screen devices!
It would be easy to write a Web browser extension to automatically do the surveys with random choices in order to bypass the surveywall. And as the surveys are anonymous, what if some evil user or competitor deliberately cheat or manipulate the results over net?
This is off-topic, but have you considered adding a link to the actual Web site at the top of this blog? People who want to check out your product may not have the time to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the link.
Back to the topic:
Typing "bvckup.com" in the URL is troublesome, too, especially because the name itself is very counter-intuitive and difficult to type. I have to type "b", "v" and "c" with my left index finger. It's very easy to hit the wrong key, not to mention "bvc" is not in my fingers' muscle-memory for typing normal English words. Weird names like "xkcd" are weird but still easy to type. "bvckup" is just weird.
well i thought they were pathetic and you all need to get some lives and stop being fag little nerds with no life and too lazy to stop sitting on your asses...DO SOME WORK U FAGS