Viewing profile — jgfoot

OK, maybe writing arbitrary English as a program won't work; but, I can think of a lot of occasions where it would be useful for a computer program to be understandable by any Engl…

No, that list of steps is wrong. Google Wallet doesn't require you to unlock your phone or launch the Wallet app. You just hold your phone up to the reader and enter a PIN.

The old PalmOS also had a global find option. The OS would call every app that registered for this function and pass it the query. Problem was, this meant that having a single bugg…

Was the problem that they were "unable to adapt to the new world," or was the problem that they editorially went off the deep end? Readers abandoned Newsweek as Newsweek's quality …

You need to tell it that the source language is Russian; if you tell it the source language is English, it will try to recognize Cyrillic characters as Roman, which doesn't work. A…

I have been bike commuting for nine years. The biggest things that change since the initial rush of delight? First, as time goes on, you care a lot more about safety. Newbies may w…

I commute to work on bike every day, but I still am a happy member of my city's bike share program. Even though I have a bike locked in the garage under the building, I use bikesha…

Salon published in 2003 a great series of articles by John Sundman about the Loebner Prize. He describes a two-time winner, "ALICE," in a way that doesn't inspire awe for the creat…

The Stanford Prison Experiment still gets a lot of ink, but unfortunately the criticisms of it do not. I recommend this article: http://www.swans.com/library/art17/barker82.html ""…

But remember that War and Peace was not originally written in English, and the quality of translation matters a great deal. With Russian literature especially, the quality of trans…

You don't have to imagine a horse expert getting upset about unrealistic portrayals of horses. Check out this take on the Spielberg film _War Horse_ for a lack of "agricultural rea…

Perhaps darcs' most prominent user base is the guys who work on GHC, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. They still use it, but have not been completely happy: http://hackage.haskell.org…

This article is from 1998. A lot has changed since then: Ruby, alternate JVM languages like Clojure and Scala, C#, Perl 6... If I were to make a sweeping historical characterizatio…

This completely misses the point. The justice system is already crashing, from being underfunded. """ “cuts already imposed on the Los Angeles Superior Court, if unabated, will for…

Mike Maples talks more about Microsoft back then: ( http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107465/1/oh387mm.pdf ): """I can remember going to the first Microsoft Company picnic in 19…

An underappreciated benefit of computer programming "languages" is how human begins use them to communicate with other humans. Once you get two or more programmers working on a pro…

When travelling in Puerto Rico recently I tried to access Hulu, and got the message that it is available only "within the United States."

OK, copyright infringement isn't stealing. It's copyright infringement. And copyright infringement is illegal. I am sorry that some people are "frustrated" because they cannot see …

The article is useful because it repeats and glorifies this shibboleth: "So America's great 21st century contribution to fomenting freedom abroad was not imposing it militarily but…